Editorial Bios: Oscar H. Will, Editor
Contact:
Brandy Ernzen 785.274.4304 dir / bernzen@ogdenpubs.com
Ty Fowler 785.274.4387 dir / tfowler@ogdenpubs.com
Power Equipment Background:
Hank Will has an unending love of most things mechanical. He is the author of three books and hundreds of magazine articles on the birth, care and feeding of vintage machinery. His books include Payline: International Harvester’s Construction Equipment Division, Cub Cadet: the first 45 Years and the Farmall Regular and F-Series Collector’s Originality Guide. He is especially fond of 1970s vintage single-cylinder Kohler engines (because they were built to be used hard and then rebuilt), Cub Cadet garden tractors (because they were designed by IH and he always wanted one as a kid) and International Harvester equipment of all kinds (because the earthmovers he watched on a highway construction project as a kid were IH Payscrapers and Payhaulers). With rare exceptions, Hank’s agricultural operations relied on decent used equipment that he picked up cheap and kept alive.
Gardening, Farming and Direct Marketing Experience:
Will started his career in agriculture while working toward advanced scientific degrees in Chicago. Inspired by an article he saw in Mother Earth News, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Hank and his wife grew and sold several hundred pounds of alfalfa sprouts weekly to individuals, stores and food buying coops from their south side apartment. Hank was also a partner in a small food-purchasing and trucking company that served neighborhood coops, several coffee shops and restaurants in the Hyde Park area.
Several years after leaving Chicago, Hank and his family put their rural Harrisburg, South Dakota farm to work with four acres of native perennials, a nursery containing thousands of trees and shrubs, cut flower gardens, berries and rhubarb. The Wills marketed the bulk of their production through the Downtown Sioux Falls Farmers Market. During their final years in South Dakota, Hank and his wife co-chaired that entire enterprise.
Hank also grew and direct marketed several thousand free-range broilers annually from that South Dakota location. The family’s substantial laying flock supplied the Banquet and other local food charities with hundreds of dozens of donated eggs year round and another of their poultry projects supplied hundreds of pounds of donated free-range turkey to the Banquet and Sioux Falls Food Pantry during the holiday season.
Management Intensive Grazing Background:
Will is an experienced grazier with a passion for low stress, intensive management of animals, pastures and hay meadows. He is a firm believer in improving soils and the pasture matrix by carefully timing the frequency and duration of animal grazing. Will’s Ohio cattle farm was recognized for exemplary herd and forage management and clean water. The farm was on the Heart of Ohio Tour in the late 1990s.
Personal History:
Will was born in Bismarck, N.D., where his family operated a seed company and nursery founded by his great-grandfather and namesake in the early 1880s.