Washington County family celebrates 150-year-old farm

WASHINGTON — About halfway between Washington and Riverside, as the crow flies, sits 80 acres of farmland purchased by a man named Michael Hora at 9 a.m. Sept. 2, 1873, for the then-reasonable price of $25 an acre. The hilly piece of ground wasn’t much, but it was enough to later buy the adjacent lot years down the line, and raise a family of farmers who went out and bought their own land.

Now, the lot is among the thousands of acres across Washington County owned by the Hora family or Hora Farms Inc., a business current landowner Keith Hora and his father started in 1975. Keith is now the company’s president and CEO.

The farmland that started it all isn’t part of the corporation, however. It’s still owned by Keith.

“I’ll never sell it,” he said. “Someone said ‘Gosh, this land is $10,000 an acre,’ I said, ‘I don’t care what price it is, I’m never selling it.’”

After being recognized by the Iowa Department of Agriculture for the farm’s sesquicentennial (150th) year at the most recent Iowa State Fair, Hora said the ownership helped preserve a piece of family history.

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“For a family to own a piece of land and look back at that, it’s one way for a family to honor their ancestors who came here,” he said. “If I had any advice to my grandchildren, it’d be to maybe start talking to your parents, or to me, because I failed to do that with my grandparents. I was worried about the future, I didn’t care about how they got here or who their parents were, or how they had to struggle to hang onto the land.”

It’s also a nod to more recent ancestors.

“My dad would be honored to see what’s going on today and see a couple of his grandsons out here, still farming this land,” Hora said.

Keith pays his son, Kurt Hora, to custom farm the heritage soil.

The family rotated crops between corn, oats and pasture for most of the ground’s history. But eventually, with the rise of no-till farming and more recently cover crops, they’ve managed to make it work for beans.

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Darren Hora, another son of Keith’s, said it was a more sustainable approach, environmentally and economically.

“It’s more profitable too, because you’re not going to make hardly anything on oats and obviously if you have it just grass,” he said.

That’s a growing priority for many farmers. Attention to sustainability is growing since, in Keith’s words, “as far as land goes, they’re not making any more of it.”

Kurt Hora said he hoped the practice would keep the longtime farmland usable for another 150 years to come.

“The next generation will be able to keep the legacy,” he said. In addition to cover cropping and no-tilling, it takes “good management and timeliness of the operation, and hopefully we can make a little money along the way.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com