For Mark Brinkmann, being a farmer is more than just a job, or a profession.

Being a farmer is a lifestyle.

Being a farmer is an opportunity to be your own boss. It’s a way to open all sorts of opportunities for a family, he says.

Brinkmann and his father, Ken, along with a single employee, raise 2,500 acres of corn and soybeans in Eastern Kankakee County. Their address is Momence, but they are close to Indiana, too. Nearly Hoosiers.

There's a freedom in family farming. Ten-year-old Brody Brinkmann told his dad, Mark, and mom, Jamie, that he wanted to raise a little wheat, just as was done in Biblical times. That sounded like a lot of work to dad, but Brody got a patch of land to try. “Here you have that opportunity,” Mark says.

Mark is a fourth generation farmer. The Brinkmanns have farmed in Eastern Kankakee County for 105 years, making their farm a centennial farm. Brody and his sister, Amber, 7, are a fifth generation.

The Brinkmanns live in a house purchased from Mark’s parents. Even more steeped in history, the Brinkmann family purchased the first combine in Kankakee County a century ago. Brody’s 4-H project with the Chebanse Little Ducks was research into the family history.

While Mark has deep family farm roots, wife Jamie actually originally hailed from the urban area of Palos Heights. But Mark says that if she was going to marry a farmer, she absolutely wanted to live on a farm. Mark says she has helped many times on the family farm. Today the Brinkmann homestead is surrounded by more-than-shoulder-high corn.

Every day as a farmer is different, Brinkmann says. “You wear a lot of different hats.” One day he’s a mechanic. Another day he drives a truck. Another day he’s a gardener, helping with some sweet corn grown for the family. Sweet corn for the extended Brinkmann family has been picked since he was a child.

Up until some recent weekend rain, Brinkmann had to irrigate his land. So, at times he was a plumber on the irrigator, too. Other times, he was an electrician on the same equipment.

Brinkmann went to Valparaiso after high school at Illiana Christian in Lansing. At college, he earned his degree in business administration, thinking he might do something other than farming. But he kept coming back to agriculture. As he took a class, he would figure out how he could apply that knowledge to the farm.

Now he’s active not only on his farm, but in meeting with others in agriculture. He represents Ganeer Township on the Kankakee County Farm Bureau after his neighbor got him involved.“

It’s been a learning experience for me,” Brinkmann says. Farm Bureau, he says, is the place where farmers turn when they have an issue. He did not realize before what influence the Farm Bureau has. It’s a great resource and people listen to it, he adds.

He enjoys the Farm Bureau camaraderie of networking with other farmers. But as farms have gotten larger, he realizes the neighbors are farther and farther apart. He can point out five houses in an area when 10 used to be.

The end result of farming is to feed people, but Brinkmann says the public needs to do a better job understanding the farm. “When you say you’re a farmer,” he says, “some think of only growing vegetables.”

What he does is to grow corn and soybeans that go to feed pigs and cows that may wind up as meat in your freezer. When corn is turned into ethanol, the remaining grain goes into animal feed. There are a lot of nuances to farming that the general public is unaware of.

Brinkmann is also concerned that so many things are pulling farmland out of production. “And they are not making any more of it,” he says.

Personally, farming in 2021 for the Brinkmann family is going to be average, maybe a little bit above average. Expenses are high. Chemicals and diesel fuel are up. Fertilizer is way up. Yet the crop looks good. Two weekends of rain in mid-July helped, though the portion of the crop that sits on sandier soil felt the earlier dryness. Yield and prices are OK.

Farming may not make for a lot of free time, but the Brinkmanns are involved with their children’s school — St. Paul’s Lutheran. Mark is a member of the school board and is on a committee to help pick the next principal. Jamie teaches pre-school at St. Paul’s.

For recreation, they enjoy boating, hitting the water at Cedar Lake and the Kankakee River. The children ski atop the waves, using youth skis.