MORAN — For years enthusiastic attendants at Iola’s Farm-City Days parade, E.J. and Barbara Siefker are more than a little reluctant to be headlining this year’s event. While honored to have been selected 2015 farm marshals, the self-effacing couple is still coming to terms with their new duties.
“We’re not even sure what we’re supposed to be doing. Are we cutting a ribbon?” said Barbara.
“Mainly we just wave, isn’t it?” asked E.J. “See, I told them they should have got someone better than us.”
But if the Siefkers don’t qualify as farm royalty — a showy designation they would be the first to reject — then who could? The friendly, widely admired couple has land “scattered” across a 30-mile radius extending out from their rural Moran home. Wheat, corn and soybeans, mostly. Plus, the Siefkers run more than 1,500 head of cattle, 70 buffalo and a herd of Texas longhorns. “If you’re going to be a rancher in Kansas,” joked E.J., who has a loud, hoarse laugh and an infectious grin, “you got to have buffalo and longhorns. If you don’t, hey, you’re not a Kansas rancher.”
There was never any question but that E.J. would farm. His father, who was born in a log cabin in Indiana, spent most of his youth working for his own dad (E.J.’s grandfather) on a cotton farm in Oklahoma. “He lived there until he was 18,” said E.J., “and then I guess he didn’t like picking cotton and stuff, and so he moved to Iowa. That’s where he met mom.” And that’s where E.J. and his siblings — five boys, five girls total — were raised until E.J. was in his teens, at which point the family at last crossed into Kansas.
“I only started farming 67 years ago,” says the 82-year-old Siefker. “I was 15, going on 16, when I got some ground and started farming. My folks, my grandparents, they were all farmers. It’s what I was going to do. I wasn’t interested in going to high school.”
“But he did get his GED,” added Barbara. “He was just ready to go out to work.”
“I was ready to farm. When I get on a machine,” said E.J., “that’s my cup of tea.”
Barbara Siefker grew up in a farm family, too. In fact, it was Barbara’s father who facilitated the union between his daughter and the young Siefker.
In the early 1950s, remembers Barb, E.J. and his brother were “living over here off the highway. Well, my dad used to go to the seed house in Iola, over on Washington Street, and he’d go by [their place] every day, and at that time it was just E.J. and his brother out there, bachelors. So, he’d stop in and talk to them. Then he’d come home and tell us girls, ‘Those boys are just living on ice cream and eggs. You need to invite them over to supper.’ So I guess we did, and that’s how we started. (To complete the circle, Barbara’s sister went ahead and married E.J.’s brother.)
The Siefkers were married in 1956, when E.J. was on leave from the Army. “But then he left four days later,” recalls Barbara, “for Japan,” where he would remain until 1958.
“We’ve been married 59 years. Will be 60,” boasted E.J., “if she don’t get me killed off first.”
“I always said I would never marry a farmer,” said Barbara. “But I did. He got me roped into it.”
Running the farm has been a shared endeavor — but one aided by the help of a retinue of hired men down the years. Early Tuesday morning, Barbara sat with a pad of paper and pen and, with E.J., attempted to list the names of all the hired men the couple had employed over the years. There have been too many to recall. E.J. figures that — including the part-time, high school students he hires every summer — he’s employed nearly 60 farmhands across the more than half-century that Siefker Farm has been in operation.
The Siefkers have three children: Deb Tynon, a speech pathologist in Yates Center, whose husband and son both help farm the Siefkers’ land; Jamie Stodgell, a para with ANW Co-op; and Susan Siefker, a flight attendant for American Airlines.
Susan, who was in town for a family wedding, pointed the conversation Tuesday morning toward one of Barbara’s signal contributions to the farm. “Mom, be sure and tell him about all the meals you sent to the field over the years.”
“Oh, I don’t know how many I’ve done,” said Barbara. “With those guys, we’d feed them dinner. We’d cook for them. We always sent suppers to the field.”
“That’s what you call ‘meals on wheels,’” quipped E.J.
Barbara’s interests extend beyond the farm, though. For the last six years, she’s operated Back Forty, an antique shop in downtown Moran. While the store is hers, the idea for the venture grew out of a passion she shares with her husband.
“E.J. likes antiques, too,” said Barbara. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff he’s got in the basement.”
On Tuesday, while E.J. was getting ready to go cut beans, Barbara was preparing to head to Iola, with Susan, to shop for groceries. “She’s going to enter the pie contest this week,” said Barbara.
“This weekend?” asked E.J.
“Yep,” said Barbara.
“Do I get to be the sampler?”
“I don’t think so,” said Barbara.
“Dad,” Susan said, “you should probably take him to the basement now. Go ahead and show him.”
“He doesn’t want to go down there,” said E.J. “See that old junk.”
FARM LIFE for the Siefkers hasn’t just been one long bucolic dream, however. Years ago, E.J. fell from a grain bin and shattered his elbow, an injury that required five surgeries and has left him with abridged use of his left arm. (“I just kind of broke my elbow a little bit,” is how E.J. characterizes it.) In an incomparably worse turn of events, more recently, the Siefkers lost their 11-year-old grandson in an ATV accident. “He would have been 24 now,” said Barbara.
Of the harshnesses in life that can be avoided, however, the Siefkers long ago made the decision to ditch Kansas winters and instead spend those three bitter months every year in Tucson, Ariz. Such was their commitment to the more temperate schedule that the couple decided to purchase a six-bedroom bed and breakfast, called Desert Island Dream, which for more than 20 years they’ve operated in the foothills of the Catalina Mountains.
Despite the Tucson address, E.J. insists that the location of the B&B is far enough removed to be considered rural — and that’s no small thing for the Sieferts. “You know one winter we went to Australia,” said E.J. “Just to live with some ranchers in the outback. I stayed with a cattle rancher and stuff like that. Stayed a week with a sheep rancher in New Zealand. See, I try to skip town. I live in the country. And when I went over there, I was only interested in the country. All towns are the same to me. Pretty much. I don’t care whether you’re in the United States or over there, town life is town life and it’s not for me.”
The couple sat at the kitchen table, munching on squares of leftover wedding cake as the morning wore on. A clock chimed from somewhere in the living room. “I like my view out of this window,” said Barbara, glancing toward the wide sunny window above the sink. She smiled. “See, from here, I can watch the guys working, and see who’s working and who’s not.”
“Yeah, OK,” said E.J., putting down his fork. “So, you want to see the basement now? Maybe you don’t want to. It’s just a little private collection we have. It’s not much to see, you know. Junk.”
HERE IS a very partial inventory of the collection of antiques and collectibles meticulously arranged — the small items displayed in glass cabinets — in the Siefker’s low-ceilinged basement: a large railroad signal light, which, when switched on, pulses red beside a mounted buffalo head; a John Deere sign from the late-teens or early 1920s, worth more than most new cars; an oxen yoke; antique coffee tins and an RC bottle from the late-’20s; an old bus stop sign he bought in Canada; a glazed walking stick made from a bull’s penis (this item, actually, E.J. keeps in his upstairs office, near a shelf of German beer steins, and not far from a less generously endowed cane made from a buffalo’s anatomy); three turn-of-the-century ceramic beer bottles, rescued from the site of the old Cleveland Indians stadium; oxen shoes; railroad lanterns; old leather bank books; a dart board made from horse hair; a wooden John Deere potato planter; a green and yellow John Deere exercise bike; two Civil War cannon balls; a rope-making machine, made by a company in Marlboro, Ma., in the early 1890s; a pair of lamps brought back from Japan in the 1950s; a children’s church pew; a 19th century Norwegian grain cradle; and rows of model John Deere tractors arranged in glass cases.
“The first tractor I owned, I got when I was 7 years old. Still have it. Back there, that little tractor with the man on it. See there? OK — my father bought a new tractor in 1940, and the dealer gave me that tractor to play with. I kept that one. You see, that’s the very first tractor I started with.”
