This wasn’t part of the plan.
Brittany (Krehbiel) Hukill was born into a farm family that runs five-generations deep. As an only child in the unforgiving geography of west-central Oklahoma, grit wasn’t just something she learned, it was something she witnessed every day.
That grit, however, was tested at a very young age. At just 13 years old, Hukill’s dad, Jeff Krehbiel, received a shocking diagnosis: brain cancer.
“When Jeff was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2009, I went back to farming,” says Karen (Krehbiel) Dodson, Hukill’s mom. “His dad had retired on paper, but most farmers don’t really retire — they’re still there. So, his dad came back and helped while Jeff was sick.”
An accountant by trade, Dodson juggled farming, motherhood and fueling the farm family through meals — something her mother-in-law had done for decades before her. But running the farm wasn’t part of her plan, either.
After a two-year battle with brain cancer, Jeff passed away in 2011. Buried on his 48th birthday, Dodson lost her husband of more than 20 years and Hukill lost her dad at just 15 years old.
A Defining Moment
A month before he passed away, Hukill and her mom had gone to visit Jeff in a care facility. Jeff could hardly speak due to several strokes. But there’s one late-night visit after a high school game she vividly remembers.
“He looked at me and asked, ‘Are you coming back?’ I knew he didn’t mean coming back to visit him. He meant, ‘Are you going back to the farm?’” Hukill says. “There was this massive elephant in the room for him. We’d worked for four generations to have this farm. I said, ‘Yeah, I plan to come home and farm.’ At that point, I had made my decision of what my plan was.”
Deciding to come back as the fifth-generation to a farm she says only has a 6" layer of topsoil was the moment that defined her future.
“Mom’s only requirement was that I go and learn something and bring it back,” Hukill says. “She wanted me to go see more than just our few sections right here and get off the farm for a time.”
That wisdom set her on a path to Oklahoma State University (OSU). Majoring in agricultural economics, she thought that would be the most valuable degree to use when she ventured back to the farm. Hukill says she had plenty of teachers in high school, and even an adviser at OSU, who encouraged her not to go back to the family farm. She decided to forgo any internships or summer jobs to spend every opportunity helping at home.
But when Hukill was about halfway through college, her plans changed again.
“My father-in-law passed away in December 2016,” Dodson says. “My mother-in-law owned part of the farm, I owned the operating portion and Brittany was heir to all of that.”
Another Generation’s Knowledge Gone
Healthy up until the day he fell on the farm, Dodson lost her father-in-law and business partner, and Hukill lost her grandpa — the only individual left who held the Krehbiel name and had decades of farming experience and knowledge.
“At that point, I was a year and a half from graduating college, but Logan [her now husband] and I said, ‘We’re going to have to get home, so both of us pushed the gas harder and graduated a semester early in December 2017 then got married in April 2018.”
Logan then started an accelerated nursing program, living nearly 40 miles away for about a year.
“As he finished nursing school, we moved into the farmhouse and have been here since,” Hukill says.
Today, Logan still has his off-farm nursing job, and as of last fall, he is an equal partner of the farm.
It’s split three ways, with Dodson managing the financials, Hukill managing the irrigation business and her husband as the farm manager.
You Don’t Know What Questions to Ask When Your Dad Dies at 15
Losing her dad and grandpa all before graduating college wasn’t part of Hukill’s plan.
“There are a lot of questions you would have asked if you would have known you should have asked them, but I was 13,” Hukill says. “When I had my dad around, to me, he was dad. To everybody else, he was the boss man. He was the guy on the Wheat Commission. He knew his stuff. I didn’t realize how much I was going to miss and the knowledge he had in his absence.”
She also expected to have plenty of time to glean knowledge from her grandpa.
“You have this illusion that you have time to ask questions and learn from those previous generations, but once people start dying out of order and once people are gone, there’s no way to get that knowledge back.”
While she wasn’t able to capture that priceless knowledge from her dad and grandpa, she’s learned through trial and error and looks to neighbors who have been a reliable source of knowledge.
Establish a Plan Early
Though death isn’t part of anyone’s ideal plan, it’s a reality. The unexpected farm transition her family experienced sparked Hukill and her husband to create an estate plan before either of them turned 30.
“Before we had kids, we had estate plans set up,” Hukill says. “If we died today, what’s the plan? Because the kids aren’t going to take it over. How do we liquidate everything to take care of the kids we leave behind? We’ve been able to have those conversations about succession planning, even when our kids are little, because we have seen what works and what was a struggle to overcome because of how things were left.”
Hey @shanferrell -
— Brittany Hukill (@bvhukill) June 9, 2022
We got it in writing! BEFORE we needed it! Aren’t you proud?! pic.twitter.com/mmgAvQj1ti
She credits her mom for helping with that vision and the willingness to pass the farm to Hukill and her husband in a strategic manner that will continue the farm’s legacy.
“I think we would all agree it’s all hands on deck to keep it alive — whatever that looks like,” she adds.
Navigating $5 Wheat by Faith
Poor margins paint a grim outlook this year. But instead of focusing on what she can’t change, Hukill is putting her energy into what she can — while not taking for granted the opportunity she has to raise her family on the same land farmed by generations before her.
“It’s not about me. It really isn’t. I truly feel like, yes, this is my family’s farm, but this was a gift given by God, so I’m going to do the best I can to take care of it, and we’re going make the best decisions we can with the information we have,” Hukill says. “If I would not have had the start I did, I don’t know that we would have made it this far. I don’t know how people get started in agriculture right now. But I am very thankful for the foundation set before me by the generations who came before.”’
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