Most 11-year-old boys spend their summers riding a bike, playing baseball or swimming at the local pool.
When Jim Harbach was 11, he got a job at a local dairy picking rocks out of fields. It turned out to be the biggest decision of his life.
More than 50 years later, he’s more than made his mark at Schrack Farms in Loganton, Pa., helping turn it into a model of circular, regenerative farming. Now, he’s guiding the next generation to many more years of success.
“For me to be in a position I am in is only because of a lot of wonderful people. I am very blessed,” Harbach said.
From 80 cows to progressive powerhouse
Although he grew up on a nearby beef farm, Harbach always had an interest in dairy farming. So, at just 11 years old, he got a job working for Dan Schrack, the ninth-generation owner of Schrack Farms (and a 1972 Mid-Atlantic Master Farmer).
“So, at that point, [Schrack] was only milking 80 cows at the time. I was here with this farm, watched it grow, and then Dan became my mentor,” Harbach said.
Harbach stayed, and he eventually met and married one of Dan’s four children, Lisa. In 1993, he, Lisa and Kevin Schrack, Dan’s son, became partners in the business.
It was a tumultuous time. With more families taking a stake in the farm, big decisions had to be made about its future and how it could support multiple families.
“We had to decide to jump in with both feet or get out,” Harbach said. “Her father was progressive. He had a double-six herringbone parlor in the 1950s. And that parlor's still there, and we're still using it as a hospital parlor. But we outgrew it at that point in the early 1990s. We were milking 350 cows, and we didn't milk three times a day, and we didn't milk two. It was something in the middle. We just never stopped.”
The trio developed a 20-year plan to expand and transform the business.
The first step was building a new freestall barn with a connecting walkway to the old parlor. Later, a second freestall barn was built, and then a third. In 1999, a double-16 milking parlor was added. These additions allowed the farm to grow to more than 1,000 animals.
The final piece of the transformation, a 500,000-gallon manure digester, was installed in 2006, giving the farm a way to generate its own power. The digester sits on a hill behind one of the barns, but its location is important, Harbach said, because gas coming from the digester must be cooled and dried to prevent condensation and damage to the engine.
“You can say it was forethought, and maybe you can say it wasn't, but when you put methane gas in a 6-inch pipe and run it for 400 or 500 feet or 600 feet to an engine room, if it's sloping downhill then it's underground; you're putting 100-degree gas in 55-degree dirt,” Harbach said. “So, it's an automatic chiller. It drops water right out of it. So, we've never had any water in our gas at the engine just based off the design.”
Champion of soil health
As the farm grew, Harbach, who led the cropping side of the business, became instrumental in the farm adopting soil health practices.
“It kind of all goes back to the reason I got employment here from my future father-in-law,” he said. “It was to pick stones. I was a young kid, and everything was tilled back in the early 1970s. It was tilled every year, every time. And this is a limestone valley, and there's rocks everywhere. Stone picking was something that everybody despised, but it was because of the tillage that we did it.”
He led the farm’s adoption of no-till and cover cropping. In fact, it wasn’t even called cover cropping back when he started it.
“It was double-cropping; it wasn’t cover cropping,” Harbach said. “It turned into cover cropping. And we did that because we needed the extra feed. So, we did everything for the wrong reasons.”
But he eventually saw the benefits of doing both. The soils held more water, organic matter increased and crop yields went up. In many ways, Harbach was ahead of his time. While researchers and farmers are still catching up to what no-till and cover crops can do, Harbach has seen his soil transform with his own eyes.
“These ridges down here, the clay, when you would plow them and you'd run over them with the roller harrow, you might plow a little deeper than you should and you plow some clay up, but you'd hit those ridges like five, six times with the roller harrow and try to bust basketball lumps of clay up,” he said.
“But you still had softball-size lumps that you had to plant in, and you had very poor seed emergence because you had poor soil-seed contact. Now, after 50 years of not tilling those fields and planting cover crops, you can go down there with a shoe, and I can dig a 3- or 4-inch hole in that soft turf.”
The farm became a showcase for farmers and soil health advocates. The farm has hosted many tours, attracting people from around the country and the world. Harbach became active in state and local conservation programs.
In 2014. he was invited to testify in front of a House subcommittee on the benefits of soil conservation and how the government could help farmers adopt more soil health practices.
“I used to be part of the group of traditional thinking farmers, but by attending national conferences, field days and visiting open-minded farmers around the country, I now have an understanding of the important symbiotic relationships that are achieved when you farm in nature’s image. Our farm is part of a like-minded nationwide soil health community, which believes that soil health holds the answer to so many problems,” he wrote in his testimony.
Harbach has dabbled with many cover crop mixes and combinations over the years. But he’s settled on triticale as his prime cover crop. It’s a great dairy feed, and it’s become well-adapted to the farm’s soils.
The farm’s cropping system is corn on corn with triticale planted in fall and harvested in spring. He describes it as a monoculture cover crop, but it’s a system that’s well adapted because of the many years of conservation practices.
“We have a lot of tours here, and I tell people that our goal is to have, no matter what time of year, everything to be green,” Harbach said.
Continuing the legacy
In many ways, Schrack Farms is the epitome of a true circular and regenerative farm: Crops are grown, the crops are fed to the cows, manure is fed back to the crops as fertilizer, and the cycle starts again. Manure solids are separated and used for bedding; liquid manure is dribbled in the fields and used by the crops.
Now, the 11th and 12th generations are taking over. Doug and Andy Harbach, two of Harbach’s sons, and two of his grandsons, Aaron and Lane, run most of the operation. Nathan Schrack, Kevin’s son, is also involved in the farm.
While Harbach has taken a step back, he still involves himself with the farm’s day-to-day operations and continues being a leader in his local conservation district, and his county and state farm bureau.
“We need farmer leaders, that's for sure,” he said. “If we're going have farming in the future, we need leaders in the farming community.”
His goal remains the same: He wants to see the farm live on for many generations to come. It was something he promised his late father-in-law who died in 2007.
“His goal was to never have an auction at this farm,” Harbach said. “It was important for the legacy to go on, you know, so the kids that want to be here, they'll have a legacy to uphold.”
Jim Harbach at a glance
Operation: Co-owner of Schrack Farms; 2,000 acres of cropland, 2,800 head of dairy and young stock
Family: Wife, Lisa; three sons Matt, Doug and Andy; daughter, Angela.
Ag and community involvement: President and vice president of Clinton County Farm Bureau; member of the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau dairy committee; member of the state’s Nutrient Management Board; board member of Pennsylvania No-Till Alliance; board member of Clinton County Conservation District; board member of the Sugar Valley Watershed Association; member of the advisory board of First Citizens Community Bank; president and vice president of local chapter of Jaycees.
Public offices and awards: 2014 Outstanding Director and Soil Health Advocate; 2018 Innovative Dairy Farm of the Year from International Dairy Foods Association and Dairy Herd Management.
What his friends say
Eric Masters, ag relationship manager, Horizon Farm Credit. “Jim runs his farm in an effective manner. He is always striving to use the best techniques available to maximize crop yields and quality, which in turn allows him to ship the highest volume of quality milk. He works closely with our consulting team to manage the dairy herd as effectively as possible. Cow comfort improvements are always part of the conversation, and Jim has always proven eager to improve efficiency and sustainability so his operation can last many generations into the future.”
Lisa Blazure, Pennsylvania Soil Health Coalition. “Jim is well respected in the farming community. Schrack Farms were early adopters of no-till and cover crop practices. Leading by example, his county saw the increased adoption of these practices on the neighboring Amish farms. Jim was an early advocate for improving soil health and recognizing that farms should be managed by following natural principles. He is single-handedly responsible for the Clinton County Conservation District having the reputation of a leader in soil health education and was my earliest mentor. With Jim’s guidance and support, I continued to advance my knowledge, broaden my network and now serve as the Pennsylvania soil health coordinator.”
Robert Cloninger, veterinarian. “I have known Jim for over three decades as I am the herd veterinarian for Schrack Farms of Loganton, Pa. Under Jim’s guidance, the herd has grown from 200 cows to over 1,500 cows today. The herd serves as a model for what a family farm can accomplish in today’s market. The success the farm has accomplished is a result of excellent leadership and embracing technology to increase efficiency. The farm and their management team were awarded an award for herd reproductive performance by the Dairy Cattle Reproduction Council.”