15. The Pivot Years: Reinventing a Life After Dairy
More getting the king out of the garden
When a long chapter closes, a person can either stand still… or adjust. After the dairy farming years ended in 1993, I found myself facing a kind of crossroads I had never imagined. I’d known cows, crops, and chore schedules my whole life. Suddenly, I had to figure out who I was without a barn to report to twice a day.
What I discovered is that reinvention isn’t a midlife luxury it’s survival. And, surprisingly, the old life had prepared me for the new one far better than I realized.
Once the cows were gone, I had to take stock of what skills I had besides farming. Turns out, a person collects quite a few useful traits after decades on a farm: problem-solving, noticing details, fixing what’s broken, staying steady under pressure.
Those skills carried me directly into home inspections, well inspections, and septic evaluations. It wasn’t glamorous, but it fit quite well. It kept me outdoors, kept me thinking, and let me help people in ways they usually appreciate only when something goes wrong.
Back then, in 1993, home inspectors didn’t need to be registered by the state. I read a few books, took a two-week training from a La Crosse inspector, and at the end he said, “I think you’re ready to hang out your shingle.”
Well, hanging a shingle is the easy part. Getting the phone to ring — that’s the real trick.
Whenever I see ads suggesting someone can get their inspection license, keep their regular job, and just do inspections on the side… I want to tell them, run. It takes years to build this business unless you can work under someone established. I spent seven years struggling before the eighth year finally took off.
Realtors soon felt like family. I loved working with them. Most buyers were wonderful — about 99% of them, honestly. The other 1%… well, I sometimes wished they hadn’t dialed my number. But the conversations, the problem-solving, the steady improvement of each property — it all gave me a new sense of purpose.
You’d think that after dairy farming, anything else would feel easy. Not so. It wasn’t easier it was just different.
In this new line of work, I had to prove myself all over again. People didn’t know me as “the guy with the good herd.” They only knew me as the new inspector who better know what he’s talking about.
But farmers have one advantage: we’ve been trained since childhood to grind through the learning curve. You fix what breaks. You figure out what doesn’t make sense. You don’t quit until the job is done.
That mindset got me through every certification, every new tool, every unfamiliar job.
It also helped on the hard days — especially the nights the phone rang just before bedtime. Someone would say, “We opened a wall and found a problem, and you’re going to pay for it.” Then came the conversation: if it wasn’t visible, how could I possibly have reported it? Most people understood once we talked it through. Once in a while, I just paid the repair to keep peace.
In the beginning I couldn’t afford E&O insurance. That made for some stressful nights. Once business improved and I could finally carry it, my wife and I both slept better. There’s a saying among inspectors: there are those who have been sued, and those who haven’t been sued yet.
Shifting careers reshaped more than my work, it reshaped my marriage.
For decades, our life had a shared flow, chores, milking, bedding, crops, repeating day after day. After dairy, suddenly everything felt less synchronized. I was out on inspections instead of in the barn. My wife was adjusting in her own way, and for the first time in our married life, we had an “open schedule.”
She went back to nursing to help support us while the business grew. We had moments where we were like oil and water both with strong personalities, both stubborn. That darn ego gets in the way.
But we always made it back to each other.
When we were newly married, we had water fights in the barn that escalated to the point where I once dumped a bucket on her from the milk house roof. That one took a bit of cooling down, cold water or not.
We lived through high interest in the early ’80s, milk checks running out before bills did, and those long years of building a business from scratch. But the foundation laid in our early marriage carried us through.
When the girls came, we were filled with joy watching them grow. They joined the farm work when they were old enough. Before that, we hired a live-in sitter for a while that didn’t last long. I had to relearn doing things myself, hiring occasional help until the girls could be trusted to roam the barn or the house without needing to be watched every minute.
When they reached high school, they took turns helping milk and doing chores. Children today miss out much on that kind of responsibility. We learn by pushing ourselves, our limits are often only the ones we place on ourselves.
When I read stories of the pioneers, I realize even with all our struggles, we still lived in luxury compared to what they endured.
When dairy farming ended, I expected life to shrink. But instead, it expanded.
I met new people, learned new skills, and found myself stepping into roles I never expected: various church boards, home inspection boards, the town board “and after many years I am again back on the town board.” We began to find many joys: quiet suppers, time with the girls, non rushed conversations, and even flying my powered parachute on summer nights. You don’t realize how much life you’ve missed until you step out of the grind that’s been defining your days for decades.
We stayed active in our church and close with a group of friends called “100 & Under” — if your combined ages as a couple were under 100, you were in. We probably should’ve changed the name as we all got older, because once someone was in, we weren’t kicking anyone out.
Leaving dairy farming didn’t erase the farmer in me. It simply shifted the way I carried it.
The discipline, the resilience, the stubbornness (let’s be honest), and the work ethic those followed me into every chapter afterward.
The cows were gone, but the lessons stayed.
And the biggest surprise of all? You’re allowed more than one calling in life. Sometimes your second or third calling ends up being just as meaningful as the first.