In those before-and-after moments in life, time warps. Some days slide by unnoticed, while others drag in a haze; blurs of activity mark the days in between. For the Goodman family, today marks six months since they lost their farming patriarch, Kevin “Goody” Goodman.
Since Jan. 7, the day everything changed for this Haverhill, Iowa, farm family, a lot has happened. Here are a few of the headlines: The farm equipment was auctioned off; the 2026 crop was planted (thanks to Farm Rescue and close friends and neighbors); family members started publicly advocating for rural mental health; and the farming son went on his first volunteer gig with Farm Rescue. Also, the farm corporation settled a lawsuit with a non-farming sibling, ending the court battles among the surviving children of Don and Alice Goodman.
The tally at midyear: court wins for three non-farming siblings, one brother still helping on the business side of the farm and one life lost. The corn and soybeans are growing. Christian Goodman, the farming son, is trucking again and also serving as county supervisor, one of his dad’s former jobs.
“We’re doing OK,” Christian said. But that kind of depends on the day, maybe the moment. “You get busy living and then you slow down and it just kind of grabs you. You think ‘Things are never going to be the way they were.’ And that just kind of jolts you.”
Some events trigger a jolt that drives people to their knees, and yet when they rise, they discover that they have dropped a weight. Farm Rescue’s arrival was one of those events. Somebody called Farm Rescue early in the Goodman family crisis. The Goodmans had the choice of either calling on them to help with planting or with harvest. Given the timing, planting was the more urgent need.
Christian remembers the day they showed up. “You could just kind of feel the stress going away,” he recalled recently, his words halting as he revisited the uncertainty of the difficult weeks leading up to spring planting. “The amount of stress and knowing that it was going to get taken care of. ... I sometimes have a hard time putting into words just how that felt.”
For Farm Rescue, a nonprofit that provides free agricultural services to farm families in crisis, their help is standard operating procedure. They mobilized volunteers who brought their own equipment — a tractor, planter and tender — to the Goodman farm. Working alongside borrowed tillage equipment from neighbors, the team planted about 800 acres in just five days, threading their work between rain systems.
“There were days we’d be out there at 6 a.m. to start right at dawn and finish up at 10 p.m. that night,” explained Ben Smith, Farm Rescue field operations manager for the Corn Belt region. The team planted 540 acres of corn and 280 acres of soybeans, working within Farm Rescue’s typical range of up to 1,000 acres, depending on the situation.
The operation’s success extended beyond acreage. For Christian, who was juggling a new job as Marshall County supervisor while trying to maintain the family farm, the help went way beyond hours in the field.
“It’s amazing what this organization does for farmers and farm families,” Christian said. “There really is a symbiotic relationship between just getting the work done and also taking care of yourself from a mental health aspect, too.”
And now, the Goodman family has one more season to farm before they have to figure out what happens next.
“To go from not even thinking you’re going to get a crop and then knowing that there’s people out there willing to step up and help you get through it — it was just cool to see it all come together,” Christian said.
From recipient to volunteer
A month later, Christian was doing an interview while riding with Smith to a farm in South Dakota where a young farmer had taken his own life. Different generation. Similar story to his Iowa family’s.
It was a first in Farm Rescue history. Smith said many farmers who receive help from the organization become volunteers themselves. But never this quickly.
“A lot of times farmers that we’ve helped in the past year or two will reach out and be interested in volunteering, but I don’t know that we’ve ever had somebody volunteer just a month after we helped them in the same season,” Smith said. “This is a pretty quick turnaround."
For Christian, the text from Farm Rescue asking whether he wanted to go help wasn’t really a question.
“I got the text, and I said: ‘Holy cow, like, I gotta do this,’” Christian said. “There was no doubt in my mind. I didn’t care what was going on. It’s one of those things where you just kind of drop everything and you just go and do it. Because you know how it feels to get that help on the receiving end.”
Because not doing, whether it’s a dreaded task or one to embrace, just isn’t an option, he said. In some ways, avoiding unpleasantness is a part of the family’s story.
No farm transition plan was put in place before Kevin Goodman’s parents died. Within a few months of his mother’s death, Kevin and his four siblings were only speaking through lawyers. His widow, Dana, believes the stress of farm transition drove him to decide this world was better off without him. As she said, “Life just got too heavy.”
So, the Goodmans tell their story, participate in mental health and farm transition conversations publicly, and continue to honor Kevin at every turn. Mostly, they just keep moving forward.
“As long as you’re willing to go through it, you’re going to be OK,” Christian said. “There are ways to go around it. But if you’ll go through it, you’ll get through it.”
Somehow that sounds like a mantra for survival.