The 119-acre Donahue farm owned by Jim and Sharon O’Connor is so old it predates founding of the state of Iowa.
Iowa was incorporated Dec. 28, 1846, the same year the farm on 300th Street in Donahue started out with 88 acres. Jim O’Connor is the fourth generation of his family to farm (he’s owned it since the 1970s), and since 2020, has rented it out for corn and soybean production.
“I got a bug in my head, heart and soul from my grandfather,” he said, noting his father Jack started farming in 1966. “I always had a yen for agriculture.”
An Army veteran, Jim and his father farmed, including raising hogs for market. His father got out of the business in 1983, and Jim farmed with his brother Dennis for about five years, facing challenges of the national farm crisis that decade.
“It was pretty ugly in the ’80s, with the ag depression,” Jim said. “It was tough, but we managed through it.”
For 22 years, he worked for ag giant Caterpillar in quality control, until 1988.
“There’s all kinds of positive memories with my childhood,” growing up on the farm, Jim said. “After I came back from service, I wanted to get into livestock, so I got into the hog business.”
One of his innovations was cross-breeding Yorkshire and Hampshire pigs with a third breed (Duroc), which proved quite successful at show competitions. The O’Connors had a grand champion hog in a mid-’70s contest in Washington, Iowa, and beat many other Scott County hog producers at competitions.
“I’ve always been a student of genetics,” Jim said. “Each of the breeds carries different characteristics. I thought Duroc would be real good for that cross. We were producing about 400 hogs on an annual basis.”
A drawback of his childhood on the farm was milking and drinking milk from unvaccinated cows, and Jim later developed the bacterial infection brucellosis. He said that led to health complications he’s had to deal with, like emphysema and heart conditions.
Jim said his father always held back in farming, and “I was always more gung-ho, to get more land, upgrade machinery,” he recalled. “I bought a farm in Grand Mound in ’76, owned it for a short period and sold it for a gain. I pushed to buy ground next door, about 35 acres. I improved it quite a bit and it’s very productive.”
They got out of the hog business in the ’90s when pork prices dropped considerably.
Jim also got involved with raising homing pigeons, inspired in the mid-’90s by the wedding of former Chicago Bull Scottie Pippen, who released white doves at his ceremony.
“I converted a shed to a pigeon loft and had a lot of fun with that,” Jim said. “I went to swaps and meets and got a lot of birds everywhere.” He had his white pigeons at an average of a dozen weddings a year, until 2020.
Jim and Sharon have four children, including a daughter, Johnnie, who owns a 400-acre farm with her husband outside Charles City, Iowa, producing corn and soybeans.
Their son Patrick is a New York City police officer, stationed at the Freedom Tower (One World Trade Center), Kate lives in Nashville and sells medical equipment, and Kelly Lawrence lives in Colona, Ill., and is a special education teacher at Geneseo High School.
“I thought it was the greatest experience, growing up on the farm,” Kelly said recently. “I loved the animals we cared for. We had horses growing up and we rode all the time. We would pack a lunch and we would just ride all day long.
“The times were great back then – our parents trusted us,” she recalled, noting they helped care for sheep and pigs. “We were pretty mature, independent. The farm taught us responsibility, accountability, a really solid work ethic.”
“It was just an awesome experience to have. One of my favorite memories was playing hide and seek with the neighbor kids and our cousins visiting us,” Kelly said. “Farming, you gotta love it. It teaches you humility, being humble. It can kick you in the teeth.”
“One of the hardest lessons was death,” she said. “Death of horses; we had one horse struck by lightning, baby pigs that got crippled. Seeing them hurt and suffer was always sad to me. It taught you how to grieve. I loved the farm so much, it saddens me that nobody’s going to take it over.”
Kelly said it’s a very proud moment for the family to be recognized as an Iowa Heritage Farm.
“It’s been in our family for such a long time. A lot of farms didn’t make it in the early ‘80s,” she said. “It shows the grit and determination my Dad and Grandpa had to make it successful. I’m just very proud of our history, the good and the bad.”