NEVER TOO BUSY TO LEND A HAND

Between their cattle operation, crops, and off-farm jobs, Dean and Tillie Thompson have plenty to do, but they still find time to serve their community.

- Lisa Foust Prater

When I met Dean Thompson in Baudette, Minnesota, on the Canadian border, he had just dropped off cattle at the Lake of the Woods County Fairgrounds. The fair was to begin the next day.

I followed Dean’s truck and empty cattle trailer to the family farm outside town, stopping briefly to let his 17-year-old son, Zach, drive a combine onto the gravel road in front of us. Towering birches and pines surrounded a lush pasture, filled with sleek black Angus cattle (and one Simmental!). Then, we turned down the lane at the Thompson Farms sign toward home, where his wife, Tillie, was waiting.

Evolving enterprises

While growing up on his parents’ farm, just over a mile away, Dean began raising chickens. “When I was a kid,” he recalls, “I started with rabbits, then I traded them to someone for chickens, and then it just went, ‘Boom!’ ” By the time he was 16, he had a 13,000-egg incubator. “One year,” he remembers, “I brought 60 pens of poultry to the county fair.”

Tillie was raised in Warroad, Minnesota, about 35 miles west and north of Baudette, and was involved in 4-H, preparing her for Zach’s 4-H years.

In 1998, when they were newly married, Dean and Tillie bought a 160-acre farm and started a hatchery. Their 32,000-egg incubator supplied birds to many other hatcheries and farm stores, in addition to local clients. “We would basically drop-ship our chicks to their customers,” Dean recalls.

In 2004 they moved to the farm across the road; it’s where they reside today.  “We had been hatching chicks for quite awhile, and we were to the point where we could either grow the hatchery or do something else and start a family,” Dean says. A few years later, Zach was born and they transitioned to a registered black Angus seed stock operation.