As the career and technical education director at Hastings High School, Ed Domke gets a lot of phone calls. People call about wanting to volunteer. They call about tractor restoration projects. They call about donations.
One day, nearly three years ago, he received a phone call about a farm in Delton from a man named Bob Gilmore.
Gilmore didn’t say much over the phone. He said he owned a farm. He said he was thinking about donating some farmland –– and that was about it. Domke didn’t think much of it.
“Can you come out?” Gilmore asked during the call. “I’d like to meet with you.”
So, one day after school, Domke visited Gilmore and the property in question.
For the next two to three hours, they hopped on Gilmore’s quad bikes and started cruising around the property. They passed by a pond, a lake with a campsite, a horse barn at the old fairgrounds, a wooded area maple trees, beef cattle and a creek.
That's when Domke realized this wasn’t just any farm.
“Looking at everything, it's just like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is beautiful. This is an awesome opportunity,’” he said.
Domke, who has taught at Hastings High School for 36 years, saw the possibility for learning. He envisioned agriculture students growing their own plants, taking care of their own cattle and maybe even making their own maple syrup. Science classes could run experiments back in the woods.
Hastings FFA Alumni had never owned a farm before. At Hastings High School, agriculture teacher and FFA Advisor Andria Mayack would bring horses, hogs and trailers to the parking lot behind the high school where the students would work with them.
If the FFA chapter wanted it, Gilmore told Domke, the farm was theirs. The farm was valued at $1.2 million and he didn’t want a dollar in return.
That was in 2018. And after three long years packed with back-and-forth discussion, the farm is now the property of Hastings FFA Alumni.
“I guess I still can’t believe this,” Domke said.
***
Three years after Domke toured Gilmore’s farm, I turned on to Lammers Road in Delton and drove down a gravel road. The path swerved through a tunnel of trees for about five minutes. And then the trees disappeared. Suddenly they were replaced by an ocean of greenery –– 276 acres of grass, lakes, hay, cattle, farmland.
I was at Gilmore's family farm, set to receive my own tour.
On this day, he took me in his side-by-side Gator to see the property. We cruised at 5 mph, enjoying the 70-degree weather and the bright blue skies.
This is Gilmore’s life now. He lives alone and still wakes up at 5 a.m. to drink coffee and watch the news. “The farmer thing,” he called it. But that’s about the only farmer thing he does on a regular basis now.
Gilmore, 60, is retired. Although he has a lifetime lease on his house, the farm now belongs to the Hastings FFA Alumni. He oversees the farm, but these days, all he really has to worry about is taking care of his dog and planning fishing trips to his new place in Inverness, Fla.
As we drive around the property, Gilmore points out all of the different nooks and crannies. It’s hard not to notice that Gilmore could have made more than a million if he had sold the farm. But he never wanted to sell it.
“Money don’t mean s--- to me,” he said. “If it did, I would’ve sold it and been a millionaire and moved on. But I didn’t want to do it.”
Instead, he wanted to donate it. He wanted the farm to remain in agricultural use, and that might not have been the case if he had sold it.
“People would split this off,” he said. “There would be houses all over the … place. And I don't want that. We need farms. You go up to Caledonia? That's prime farmland. Look at all those houses out there now. I don't want that. I want this all natural.”
When I asked why we need farms, he slowed the Gator to a crawl. Then he turned his head and looked me straight in the eye.
“Why do we need farms?” he asked. “What are you going to eat?”
Gilmore didn’t grow up on a farm, but farm life always was around him. He was raised in Corunna, just outside of Owosso. His father worked in a factory as a carpenter. His mother stayed at home and watched over their seven kids.
He spent his free time roaming nearby farms –– often helping his neighbor or grandmother with their dairy farms. At about 14 or 15, he started visiting his aunt and uncle at the Delton farm they had bought in the 1960s. Toward the end of high school, he moved in with them permanently, graduating from Hastings High School and working on their farm.
“I just love farming; it’s peaceful out there in the fields,” he said. “Just relaxing.”
After high school, Gilmore took a job in Arizona, worked with deep-well irrigation pumps and lived there for eight years. Then he returned to Delton and hasn’t left since.
“This is it, right here,” he said, driving through his farm. “This is it.”
He built a house on Cloverdale Road, just minutes away from his aunt and uncle, and lived there for 27 years. He worked an assortment of jobs in the area before the deaths of his uncle 16 years ago and his aunt three years ago.
When his aunt died, Gilmore sold his own house and moved to their farm.
But Gilmore didn’t want the daily grind of farming his own 276 acres. That’s when he thought about donating it.
Mayack first heard about the possible donation in the driveway at her house. She has known Gilmore for years –– her husband was a part owner of Bull Creek Veterinary Service, which Gilmore has used. In the driveway, Gilmore told her he was thinking about donating the farm to Michigan State University.
Mayack went into pitch mode: Gilmore should consider local kids. He should consider the FFA.
“I kind of pulled him and said: Think of us, you know, think of the opportunities,” she said. “And he got so excited.”
Call Ed Domke at the school, Mayack told him, and they would be off and running.
But there was nothing fast about the process.
After speaking with Gilmore, Domke took it to the executive board of the Hastings FFA Alumni.
“We were definitely shocked that someone was willing to do that,” Hastings FFA Alumni Secretary DeAnna Stanton said of her first reaction. “And we were a little scared about the amount of effort required to keep it up.”
Then they had to get approval from Hope Township for the property's nonprofit classification. On top of that, Hastings FFA Alumni had to secure insurance and work out the legal details of the agreement with Gilmore.
In addition to the lifetime lease, Gilmore, who serves as caretaker of the farm, still has the rights to the garage next to his house, the dead trees for firewood and full use of the lakes. (“No one owns the lakes. ... God owns the lakes –– that's my feelings,” he said.)
Most important to Gilmore, though, is that no one can break up the 276 acres. That property must remain in one piece.
The process to finalize the agreement required a multi-year roller coaster of legal discussions.
“There's so much back and forth with these kinds of large agreements that you're like, ‘Is it ever going to be done?’” Stanton said.
In October 2020, the two parties finally signed the insurance liability agreement, marking the end of a two-year-plus process. But that didn’t mean the deal took effect immediately.
Because of COVID-19, the FFA was unable to get many of its kids up to the farm for a few months.
“It was a little shaky putting it together this year, and maybe it would have been anyways, even without COVID, because this is all new to us,” Domke said.
It's starting to change, slowly. Students began visiting the farm in May, growing pumpkins, sweet corn, soybeans and hay. Just last week, they hosted an awards banquet for the Hastings FFA and Hastings FFA Alumni in the barn.
For many years, Hastings FFA members made do with what they had. Mayack would bring in cattle to the parking lots. Sometimes she would bring her students up to her own farm.
But there 's only so much that can be done with limited resources.
About six years ago, Edythe and Harold Marshall of Delton donated $330,000 for the construction of a barn right behind the high school. (The barn is currently under construction in hopes it will be finished before the 2021-22 school year.) Then came Gilmore's farm.
Combined, the two additions will provide a range of resources that just weren’t previously possible.
While the barn will provide a learning space right in the students' backyard, the farm presents a different world of opportunities.
“[The barn] doesn't incorporate any cropland,” Domke said. “It doesn't incorporate any hardwood forest. And it doesn't have a lake and a creek.”
But everything is not running perfectly just yet. They’re still trying to sort out how to use all of the different parts of the farm and determine who will manage what. They’re trying to figure out how and when to have students at the farm. They’re trying to decide which animals they want and what procedures they have to develop to keep kids safe.
Domke stressed that it will take time to figure out how to most effectively use the farm.
“I don't think we'll really see the full impact of this farm starting until this fall when the kids walk back in the door,” he said. “And it's probably going to be, I don't know, three to five years before everything is just kind of seamless.”
Gilmore’s in no rush himself. He’s just happy to have his farm safe for the future.
For years, Gilmore has watched mega-farming corporations tear through land around him. When he was growing up, a family farm, he said, could live off of a 40-cow operation. Now, a family farm needs 200 cows. The big corporations can milk out 1,000 cows.
“It kills us small farmers. … It's the small farmers that built this country,” he said. “But it's not going to change. It'll never go back to small farms.”
Gilmore knows there’s nothing he can do to stop that trend – but at least he can try.
Donating his land is his defense of choice. He can help to equip the younger generation with farming skills, and he can stop people from dividing up his family’s land. And if this doesn’t work, he has a backup plan for his backup plan for his backup plan.
He had it written up in the agreement that, if Hastings FFA Alumni doesn’t want the farm any more, it will go to the National FFA Alumni. And, if that national organization doesn't want it, it will go to Michigan State University.
By any means necessary, the purpose of that property will remain agricultural –– and that’s what matters to Gilmore.
Now that the donation is finalized, Gilmore can rest easy.
As he drives down a gravel path back to his house, finished with his tour, he looks at the farmland.
“You come back in 50 years –– it's gonna be just like this,” Gilmore said. “I won't be alive. So you come back in 50 years and check it.”