Co-op People

A group of people prepping chestnuts after harvest

Greg Miller’s father, Jay, planted his first bunch of trees on 100 acres in Carroll County back in the middle of the last century. 

At one point, Miller says, a local coal company took note of all those nuts and briefly entered the chestnut game as a side-gig. It soon went bankrupt, however; the folks who bought up the land were looking for deer hunting sites rather than an agricultural specialty crop. 

Chelsey Keiser, a 5-foot, 3-inch bundle of energy from western Ohio, is living her dream as a professional jockey and has accomplished more than 400 wins.

Chelsey Keiser vividly remembers growing up in western Ohio and helping her parents, Darke Rural Electric Cooperative members Mike and Debbie Keiser, raise thoroughbreds at their North Star-area farm. 

“I’ve loved horses forever,” she says, noting that she learned to ride even before she learned to walk.

As she got a little older, Keiser started helping out by galloping the family’s thoroughbreds as part of their training regimen. “I really enjoyed that aspect of working with horses,” she says. “The hard part was handing the reins off to a jockey at the track.” 

She also took up barrel racing — a fast-paced sport pitting horse and rider against the clock on a cloverleaf-shaped course, where the fastest finisher wins.

Volunteers from the Society of St. Andrew in Ohio.

It’s a good kind of problem for farmers to have: After an unexpectedly seasonable winter and growing season, the Champaign Berry Farm in Urbana produced an unexpected bumper crop of one of its mainstays this year. 

“We saved a certain section of the orchard for the gleaners,” she says. “I told the [professional] pickers not to pick those peaches. We like to give back to the community and to those in need. That’s one of our purposes in life.”

Monarch butterflies on a branch.

While beautiful orange-and-black monarch butterflies still flutter around area lawns and gardens between May and September each year, their numbers have declined over the years because of some combination of environmental conditions, herbicide and pesticide use, and loss of

“I remember seeing lots of butterflies in my younger days,” says 90-year-old Alvin Brown, a retired dairy farmer who resides near New Bremen. “There aren’t nearly so many nowadays, so we have to do what we can to help.”

Like Brown, Coldwater resident Norma “Skeet” Wolters became interested in helping the monarchs long before the Union for Conservation of Nature declared the species endangered in 2022. Having been involved in the Mercer County 4-H program for more than two decades, she often included butterflies in her nature presentations.

Harvesting hops plants

According to the Ohio Craft Brewers Association, there were 434 craft breweries in the state of Ohio at the end of 2023. More are opening all the time. 

Hops add bitterness to balance the sweetness of malt in beers. Different varieties of hops contain varying levels of oils and acids, and those are what give beers their distinct flavors. 

Brad and Joy Ryan pictured at a national park.

No one could have known when Brad Ryan’s parents divorced years ago that it would result in a long, record-breaking, heartwarming journey. 

Joy lives in Duncan Falls, a sleepy town nestled against the rolling hills along the Muskingum River southeast of Zanesville, where she’s a longtime member of New Concord-based Guernsey-Muskingum Electric Cooperative. When they finally reconnected, Brad noticed she was suffering some health issues, and clearly needed a change. 

Residents of Woodland Country Manor enjoying their garden.

Jerry Banks has a green thumb — something to which his family could always attest. Now, so can the residents and staff at Woodland Country Manor in Somerville.

Banks and his wife, Kathy, residents of Somerville and members of Oxford-based Butler Rural Electric Cooperative, always had a home garden but expanded their gardening activities when her parents (Homer and Phoebe Polser) moved to the retirement community not far from the “homeplace.”

“They used to tend a 1½- to 2-acre garden,” Banks says. “He was not one to sit around without getting some dirt on his hands, so Kathy and I thought a garden would help with the transition.”     

Co-op members posing in front of a pole barn built by the company their family owns and operates.

The pole barn — as familiar a fixture on modern farms as a pickup truck — is an architectural innovation born in the 1930s, the result of a marriage of necessity and opportunity.

For decades, the pole barn has reigned supreme on American farms. But the pole-frame structures of today have come a long way from the simple pole barns of the Depression, says Caleb Miller, owner and president of MQS Structures in Lancaster. Pole framing remains a popular design for farm outbuildings, but these days, Miller’s company, a member of Lancaster-based South Central Power Company, may just as likely be using pole-frame construction to build the shell for a far more complex structure.

About 30 of the 150 goats that live at Harrison Farm in Groveport are “Yoga Goats” that are free to roam among the students taking yoga classes there (photograph courtesy of Dana Bernstein).

On Katherine Harrison’s farm in Groveport, every animal has a job. The chickens offer eggs. The cats provide comfort. And the goats help teach yoga.

The idea for the program arose organically, says Harrison, owner and operator of Harrison Farm. (Her secondary title, she says, is “chief minion” to the goats.) She met yoga instructor Dana Bernstein in 2016 while she was planning Bernstein’s wedding, and the two hit it off. 

South Central Power member Beth Murray found a love of training herding dogs after adopting a border collie with natural herding instincts.

Beth Murray didn’t quite know what she was getting into when she adopted her first border collie, a rescue, from the Parkersburg (W.Va.) Humane Society.

Beth Murray didn’t quite know what she was getting into when she adopted her first border collie.