Somebody once asked Steve Strickler if he was going to follow in his father’s footsteps.
Not likely, he joked. “He wears size 13, and I wear 9 ½.”
But Steve eventually did follow — and indeed fill — the footsteps of his father, Ivan Strickler, to continue the family’s storied legacy in the dairy business.
“Dad was president of virtually every dairy organization in the country,” Strickler said. “In fact, still, when I travel internationally, they’ll ask — especially the older ones — if I knew Ivan Strickler.
“Yeah, I kinda did.”
Today, the younger Strickler, 72, is ready to hang up those size 9 ½ boots, bringing to an end one of Iola’s enduring farming legacies in the process.
An agreement is in place to sell off the cattle herd at Strickler Holstein Farm to a dairy in Springfield, Mo. One hundred thirty Holsteins are set to be shipped out next week.
Strickler isn’t completely retiring. Enough business partners have convinced him to continue raising breeding bulls.
“I’ll probably keep them for a few months here, but I’ll probably have to find someplace else to raise them after that,” he said.
Strickler is nearing a separate arrangement to lease his dairy barns and equipment to another producer.
By the end of next week, there will be no milk produced under the Strickler Dairy umbrella for the first time in 85 years.
“People have asked me, ‘Do you have an exit strategy,’” Strickler said. “Not really. I’ve never really tried to look too far ahead. Maybe that’s my problem.”
But before he calls it quits, Strickler notched another milestone last weekend, when the Kansas Dairy Association Board recognized him as a Kansas Dairy Leader, the same designation given to his father in 1974, the year Steve graduated from college.
It marks the first time in the 73 years the organization has given the award that the honor has gone to a father and son from the same family.
“It’s a nice honor,” Strickler said.
As an aside, former Kansas Gov. John Carlin, a long-time family friend, received the same honor in 1979, even though as Strickler points out, he still mispronounces “Holstein.”
“It’s pronounced ‘Hol-STINE,’” Steve chided, a nod to the way the breed originally was pronounced in Europe.
STRICKLER DAIRY came to Iola in 1939, when Ivan Strickler was just getting out of high school. His father, Elmer E. Strickler, had moved his operation from Colony to the outskirts of Iola.
