Stan Mehmen started as a dairyman. The Plainfield farmer was only 16 when he began milking 25 cows and sharecropping 160 acres after his father died in a 1973 farm accident.
He kept this up after graduating high school and marrying his high school sweetheart, Karmen, in 1976. They built bigger facilities as they expanded to milking 70 cows.
In 1986, however, they did an about-face by selling their dairy cows in the Whole Herd Buyout Program that was designed to stabilize prices by reducing milk production.
Head over heart
At that time, Stan’s heart said yes but his head said no. He’d been around dairy all his life. Still, Karmen brought a specialized skill set to the farm.
“She is really good with the books,” Stan says. “She knows where every penny goes. She’ll spend hours looking for it if she doesn’t find it. Everything we looked at told us it was the right move to make financially.”
That’s typical, says Kendra Gilbert, Karmen’s sister, who farms with her husband Kevin near Ionia.
“Both Stan and Karmen have always been people looking to the future,” she says. “When the whole herd dairy buyout became an option, they investigated it, perceived how they could change and grow if they did it, and went for it.”
Almost 40 years later, this change-and-grow philosophy remains in full force as Stan and Karmen turn over the reins to their son Kyle, who is the farm’s general manager. He returned to the farm in 2005 after being an agricultural chemical company sales representative.
MBS Family Farms — which stands for more, better, sooner — now has more than 25 employees across a large grain-farming enterprise in Iowa and Minnesota.
“More means we have to do more than expected,” Karmen explains. “Better means continuous improvement. And sooner means we probably will have to change things sooner than we want to.”
This motto reflects other farm businesses, including:
- MBS Farms Trucking
- Schmadeke Feed Mill in Clarksville and Allison
- MBS Ag Services (seed chemicals and fertilizer sales)
- Roach Farm Management and Real Estate
- hog-finishing buildings
Farming, however, is just one phase of Stan and Karmen’s life. Bettering the lives of others is another, whether it’s done locally or internationally.
It’s this devotion to farming and serving others that has made Stan and Karmen 2025 Iowa Master Farmers.
Now what?
It didn’t take Stan and Karmen long to determine what to do after they sold their dairy cows.
Landlords who had lost tenants due to economic difficulties soon asked the Mehmens to farm their land. “The next spring, we rented over 500 acres that way,” Stan says.
This move also coincided with a shift to no-till. “One of the biggest reasons we went to no-till is we didn’t need as much equipment and labor,” Stan says.
No-tilling in the late 1980s and early 1990s meant swimming alone in a surrounding sea of tillage, as it was the first time anyone did it in the area, Stan says.
Support from family members helped. Karmen’s parents and brother-in-law, Kevin Gilbert, accompanied Stan and Karmen to no-till workshops and seminars.
Still, skepticism existed, even with Stan’s mother, who had always supported him.
“I hope it works out,” she deadpanned.
Fortunately, any initial anxiety melted when a strong stand dwarfed the cornstalks into which the Mehmens had planted soybeans. Curious neighbors soon hired them to no-till 50 to 100 acres, just to see what it was like. “This led to us doing a lot of custom work over the next five years,” Stan says.
They teamed this with a fledgling livestock enterprise of raising dairy calves and feeding Holstein cattle, he says. They later added hogs. The Mehmens supplemented production knowledge with financial management training conducted by Iowa State University Extension specialists.
Although livestock kept the farm humming, Stan discovered his passion was growing crops. “Livestock kept us going,” Stan says, “but it also got us into more grain farming. You just had to be patient for land to open up.”
Toss the losers
In the early 2000s, though, something was amiss. The Mehmens didn’t know if each enterprise was making or losing money, as revenues from each one flowed into a single checking account.
This changed when Alan Lash and his consulting firm AgriSolutions introduced them to the firm’s AgManager managerial accounting software.
Managerial accounting created profit centers for each enterprise into which all revenues and costs flowed. This enabled them to determine which businesses to keep and which to toss.
The couple learned that they invested too much time in beef cattle. Although they spent 20% of their time on beef cattle, it only accounted for 5% of their income.
So, they slashed their 80-cow beef herd down to a hobby size of about 20 cows. They used beef herd sales to buy a semitruck to haul their corn to elevators and ethanol plants.
“Other farmers asked us if we could haul grain for them,” Karmen says. “We bought another semi and hired another driver, and it became the trucking company that we have today.”
Benchmarking results comparing their operations to other farms spurred them to nix outdoor hog production. Instead, they partnered with three other parties in 2000 to erect confinement buildings across their land to raise hogs. Ten years later, however, the partnership dissolved.
Remaining investors still glean income from renting the facilities to hog producers. Meanwhile, the Mehmens use the resulting manure to apply to their crop ground and reduce commercial fertilizer costs.
These changes allowed them to spend more time growing crops. Herbicide-tolerant technology — such as the glyphosate tolerance featured in Roundup Ready technology — helped to spur increased yields and acreage expansion.
“Before Roundup Ready, you were limited as to the amount of acres of soybeans you could raise because of the time and expense it took to control weeds,” Stan says. “With Roundup Ready, you just had to spray them.”
As the farm grew, membership in the UnCommon Farms Foundation (formerly FamilyFarms Charities) served as a valuable resource. “They showed us things we would need as we grew, such as a safety program, an employee handbook and an organizational chart,” Karmen says.
Service to others
There’s more to the Mehmens than farming. In 2009, Karmen headed FamilyFarms Charities.
One charity it funded was a South African AIDS orphanage that foundation members visited to build a garden. While overseas, Stan and Karmen also looked up a sales representative Kyle knew from his chemical industry stint who volunteered to drill wells in Kenya.
“Women were having to walk 10 miles to get to fresh water,” Karmen says. The FamilyFarms group provided money for drilling supplies.
“I remember when the first borehole was drilled, a 90-year-old lady said, ‘We’ve been praying for a well like this for five generations.’ Someone asked her, ‘How could you keep on praying all that time?’ ” Karmen says. “She turned to him and said, ‘You’re here, aren’t you?’ ”
Back home, community involvement also ranks high for Stan and Karmen.
“We’ve been on school boards, we’ve been on fair boards, we’ve been in town celebrations that we help sponsor because we believe in community,” Stan says. “One of the reasons we continue to grow our business is to provide jobs so our youth can come home.”
Looking back
The Mehmans are starting to wind down their careers, as Karmen retired in 2023. Kyle continues as the farm’s general manager. Daughter Kelsi Hosch, who lives in Cascade, is an accountant for MBS Ag Services. Kerri, Kyle’s wife, handles all business finances. Daughter Kerryann Kocher shares vision and innovation talents with the farm.
Stan and Karmen still stay active on the farm, but they have more time to travel.
“We found out at Christmastime we had been chosen as Master Farmers,” Karmen says. “I was just so happy, because Stan has given his whole life — starting with his teen years — to agriculture. It’s a team effort, but I always knew that Stan was the big thinker and the smartest man I know.”
Stellar records
Steve Willemsen has seen plenty of farm records during his banking career. Still, Stan and Karmen Mehmen stand out.
“They have the absolute best financial records of any of our agricultural customers,” says Willemsen, president of First Bank. “Stan and Karmen have a thorough understanding of their financial position and consider this when making major decisions affecting their farming operation.”
Conservis farm business management software is a tool MBS Family Farms recently uses to better track inventory and field operations.
“We’ve even made a verb out of it: Conservis it,” Karmen says. “Every single process and field operation is recorded. There are errors in everyone’s business, as everyone’s human. But we have a system that catches them. We’ve found we were accidentally billed for anhydrous ammonia, or bean loads that were accidentally documented at the elevator as corn that were not ours.”
MBS Family Farms uses information gleaned by the Conservis software to plan for future farm investments.
“By keeping track of how much time we spend planting and harvesting, we can see if we need a bigger planter or combine,” Karmen says. “We need the right amount of machinery, but we don’t want to have any more than necessary.”
Masters at a glance
Name: Stan and Karmen Mehmen
Family: Kyle Mehmen, Kerryann Kocher and Kelsi Hosch
Location: Plainfield, Iowa
Operation: Corn and soybean production, with enterprises that include feed milling, trucking, agricultural input sales, real estate and hog-finishing buildings
Leadership: UnCommon Farms board of directors, Plainfield school board (Stan); UnCommon Farms Foundation chairperson, Sunday school director (Karmen); church youth group leaders, started MBS Family Farms “Next Generation of Agriculture” scholarship program (both)
Nominator: Daryl Pohlman, member coach at UnCommon Farms Foundation