Food for farmers

Farmers may feed the world, but someone needs to feed those farmers first.

That is what the Ashby FFA set out to do with their first annual Bin-side Breakfast last year, making sure their local farmers started their harvest day with a breakfast sandwich and some orange juice. Now that the first run is complete, they are looking ahead to the next breakfast and how they can improve the idea.

“The FFA motto says, ‘Learning to do, doing to learn, earning to live and living to serve,’” said Eleora Mathiowetz, Ashby Public Schools agriculture teacher and facilitator for the Ashby FFA. “To be able to see these FFA members really live out that last part of living to serve is so crucial for us, from experiential learning all the way to just how to be a good citizen and agriculturalist in our community. For us, that type of experience is completely invaluable.”

The idea traces back to FFA Day at the Twins, July 13, 2025, at Target Field in Minneapolis. According to Mathiowetz, the Ashby FFA members in attendance talked about their schedule of activities for the upcoming school year and, in particular, how they wanted to emphasize service to their community as they did so.

From there, some of the Ashby FFA members came up with the Bin-side Breakfast idea; one of them was sophomore Aiden Jeppesen, an officer at large for the Ashby FFA.

“We are a very agricultural community here in Ashby,” Jeppesen said. “Farming is kind of this town’s whole thing. A couple of other friends and I thought of this idea … to give back to our farmers who work really hard in the fields every season of the year. They also support us in FFA, (and) we thought making a breakfast for them at the bin-side would be a good idea to give back to them.”

Jeppesen is a third-generation farmer; his family farms about 1,000 acres and raises 70 head of cattle, so he has seen how a good breakfast, or a lack thereof, can affect the day.

“Having the breakfast really sets (farmers) in the mentality to have a good workday and to drive yourself to get stuff done, so you actually get it done on time and are not scrambling in the dead of winter to go harvest some corn,” he said.

The Ashby FFA set the breakfast date for Oct. 11, 2025, a Saturday morning.

“That’s the harvest time of year, and that’s when farmers are really busy,” Jeppesen said.

Students then spread the news mostly by word of mouth, and they secured most of the breakfast ingredients from JC’s Grocery in Ashby.

“We made something easy we could warm up,” said sophomore Noah Anderson, Ashby FFA secretary.

The day of the breakfast, about 10 Ashby FFA members — under the supervision of Mathiowetz and fellow Ashby agriculture teacher Bonita Oestreich — split up between the Elbow Lake Co-op Grain locations in Elbow Lake and Wendell, arriving at 6 a.m. to prepare the orange juice and warm up the eggs, sausage and English muffins for breakfast sandwiches. Each location had three stations set up where students would deliver the breakfasts to farmers.

By Jeppesen’s estimation, the Ashby FFA chapter served about 75 farmers between their two locations.

“We were awfully early,” said sophomore Jessie Olson, Ashby FFA treasurer. “Most people were coming after we left, but the people we were able to serve really appreciated it and were kind of surprised.”

With their first breakfast complete, the Ashby FFA chapter plans to continue offering it annually, but they might make some tweaks to the idea. First, they will likely hold it later in the day so there will be more farmers to serve — with the added benefit for students to not have to get up so early. The menu might also expand to include pancakes and French toast; the event may also be changed to a lunch or supper. The meal’s date might also be adjusted.

“We never know what harvest is going to be like based on the weather,” Mathiowetz said. “For planning purposes, we just have to communicate quite a bit with the co-op and figure out how we’re going to be able to anticipate how many people we’re going to feed. … I (also) think we might try to do it a week later”

Ultimately, the Ashby FFA chapter — by learning, doing, living and serving — aim for this annual breakfast to become part of their system of support between them and their local agricultural community.

“It’s good for us to get our chapter out in the community,” Olson said. “If we need help with something or donations, whatever it may be, people are more willing to help because they see we’re active in the community. … We (also) had fun doing it for the farmers. It was a fun time.”