How much do you have to work to accumulate wealth? A lot of people think that a 40-hour work week is all that a company should be able to require of anyone to be a full-time occupation and that is fine.

My young son works a four-day, 10-hour shift at a company and then takes the opportunity when offered to work another eight-hour shift at time and a half. He still has two days off to do something else. He details boats and vehicles. No one is going to do more than maybe pay the bills working a 40-hour week, and given affordability issues today, the bills will exceed most paychecks. I came home from college to farm in 1973. My dad told me that it was the shock of his life and he had not expected it. He accepted it though and was a great partner from then on.

The first 10 years or longer I learned what I didn’t know I needed to learn. I got no regular paycheck, but my wife did, teaching grade school.

I had three career-shaping mentors in my life, all now deceased … my landlord Stan Schoelerman, my father-in-law who was also a farmer and my father. I chose coming home to farm over finishing college. Never found that to be a problem or hindrance. I have never stopped becoming educated. I now have a couple PHDs, compliments of my YouTube analog. The opportunity to rent an available farm could not be passed up. We rented a farm from Stan near Spencer and grew corn, oats and alfalfa along with soybeans when I had too. That and a few other parcels of land totaled about 400 acres. Stan bought another farm and feedlot for me to operate. I fed hogs and cattle. The first thing that happened is that when we restarted use of the Spencer feedlot, the house yard driveway turned into a quagmire in a wet spring when the frost went out. Stan then taught me how to solve a problem. He brought out an engineer, gravel trucks with rock showed up along with a grader and they rebuilt the yard with a grade for drainage after which it never gave us a problem. He treated us like family, moved a house out to the farm from Spencer that was updated and eventually sold us the acreage and then the farm in three parcels over the course of the years so that we own it today.

My father-in-law was a lot of the reason I became a farmer. I had dated his daughter since we were 15, the age of one of my granddaughters today, which I find a little unsettling. He was inspiration. He had drive and vision. He was the working epitome of someone who knew how to work. Early in his life he would get up at 5 a.m. and feed 400 head of cattle by hand before coming in to eat breakfast, then devouring a dozen eggs. He worked off every calorie. He said he would think in the middle of the night how to solve his problems … and guess what … so do I. A lot of problems get solved, and many Commstock reports were written,in my head at 3 a.m. The body rests while the mind thinks. The solutions sometimes changed a bit when I woke up in the morning. He was a cattleman who farrowed sows on pasture and if you sent a letter to Royal, Iowa to “Pig Farmer” … he got it. He was inducted into the Iowa Cattlemen’s Association Hall of Fame. He created something that the family could build on. No better legacy could be left.

My father could be best described as a man of character. He was a good farmer, fourth generation, who didn’t see me until after I was one year old after serving with the 4th Infantry Division in Germany. Stan and my father-in-law were both Republicans and my family were Independents. That was back when Democrats and Republicans enjoyed each other’s company at “card club.” My grandfather explained our political affiliation to me by gruffly saying, “Democrats get you in a war and Republicans break you!” Understood … but times have changed so that either can do either these days. His having been born in 1900, seeing two world wars and a Great Depression, explains his perspective. The best way to describe my dad’s character was if you took every character trait of our current president and fully reversed them … that would be my dad. He did the right thing in his mind, even when he didn’t have to, at expense to himself, that others would never have done. When I was a freshman in high school, dad rented another 120 acres that he needed fall-plowed about basketball season time. I was put on the 560 Farmall plowing. That was not unusual for kids of farm families at that time. The farm work came first. I would have been a sub anyway. My son-in-law now uses that 560 to move snow on his acreage. My wife played college basketball for the Universiry of South Dakota and two of my children played in state high school basketball tournaments.

Let’s get to the work ethic and how to accumulate wealth. When I came home from college to farm, I had a negative net worth and a wife with a job. She is still my wife and life partner. You need one of those to succeed today, and vice versa. I supported her in the household while she was working and also while getting her master’s in education and becoming a community college administrator. She eventually assumed a similar role managing me in the company. When farming, I would get up and out around 6 a.m. We had chores … feeding cattle … bedding hogs. During planting and growing seasons, each lasting several weeks, I would not get in before 9 p.m. That is a 15-hour day, six days per week with chores yet and church on Sunday … a 90-plus hour work week. I needed at least seven hours sleep back then but with youth would wake up refreshed. Those were the good-old days. Do you need to work 90-hour weeks to be successful and save wealth … yes … something like that. Work had better be something that you really enjoy doing. When the crop was planted or the harvest completed, the workload would ease. Work includes thinking, managing in the office and not just physical labor. I was one of the first farmers to have a commodity quote screen in his farm office. You also need to work smart, solve problems in your head at 3 a.m. The more entities the better. The more family the better. At my peak work load, I was a commodity broker, then getting up at 4 a.m, I wrote every word of our daily report –although abbreviated in length from what it is today — produced a daily radio report and this weekly column, ran the company with my wife, jumped on the planter after the market close to plant fields that my dad had prepared, started a crop insurance and property casualty company, AgriVantage, with a high school classmate operating today. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to family, partners, employees, subscribers and clients who have been friends of the Commstock Report.

In my spare time I put together the Winchester Hardware Store Museum in Spirit Lake. The internet suggests that it is the third most extensive collection of Winchester Store items open to the public behind the Cody, Wyoming, Museum and Winchester House in San Jose, California. After moving the collection from storage into the new building, I began the daunting task of staging it. I was still working fulltime but would find an hour per day, longer on the weekend, and found that if you were disciplined staying at it, in a few months it was amazing what you could accomplish. I give personal guided tours almost daily during the summer. I gave one to farmers from Illinois on their way to the Black Hills last week. Now you know me. I get up late at 6 a.m. now, often take a nap and retire in the evening to read earlier. Link to museum website is thewinchesterstore.com