First-generation farmers and business partners: Pat Reisinger and Sam Schwartz

On this week’s Uplevel Dairy Podcast, we talk about using robotic technology as a business accelerator at Rolinda Dairy in Waterville, Iowa, but what’s really cool about the partnership between Pat Reisinger and Sam Schwartz is the story that brought them together in the first place.

 You, too, may be surprised to learn that these two farmers did not actually grow up on farms. In fact, after high school, Pat worked in the heating and air conditioning business. When he met his wife Tara, he began spending his weekends on her family’s dairy farm, with her parents Robert and Linda Thompson.

 “I didn’t know a cow from a heifer,” Pat recalls. Yet, those weekends, side-by-side with Robert, were all it took for Pat to fall in love with farming. So twenty years ago, he and Tara got married on a Saturday, and the next day, Pat officially began his farming career.

 In Robert, Pat found not just a father-in-law, but an incredible mentor in the operations and business of farming. Perhaps that’s why when an inquisitive little 7-year-old neighbor boy pulled into the farm driveway on his bike, Pat welcomed him with open arms too.

 That neighbor kid was Sam Schwartz. His parents had moved into the house at the end of the dusty dead-end lane, just down the road from Rolinda Dairy. His dad was the local doctor, and his mom a school teacher. But just like Pat, one visit to the farm marked only the beginning of Sam’s love and career in the industry. From tractor rides and tag-alongs, to milking cows and becoming the dairy herd manager, Sam grew with the growing dairy, which now milks 900 cows with robots. 

 But this isn’t just a job for Sam. He now officially holds ownership shares in the business. 

 Pat also has another farming partnership with a non-farm business partner. Years back, he and a like-minded local banker got into the pigs. Together, they run five nursery barns. 

 As Pat and I talked about these partnerships, I couldn’t help but admire his open-minded approach to farming as a business. We all know farm families who struggle with defining and deciding on transition plans of the both the assets and the management of their operations. Unfortunately, it can be at a true detriment to the future of both the family and the farm. Yet, for Pat, these decisions were critical to his vision of success: Being a profitable and efficient farm.

 And as first-generation farmers, he knows his partners value that too.

“We don’t take any of it for granted. We’ve lived other lives, but we know that farming is what makes us happy,” Pat says.