Askeland Farm maintains same home, acreage

Clifford Askeland (pictured here in 1944), owned and worked on the farm from 1949 to 2006.
NEW ULM – The Askeland Farm was settled by Christian and Minnie Askeland on March 2, 1917, who emigrated from Norway. Elaine Askeland, now 95, said the family had lived in Illinois before moving.
“My father-in-law came to visit and somebody said this farm was available,” she said. “He went home to Illinois and told my mother-in-law. She didn’t see the place or anything. She says, ‘All I want is a nice new house, a place that’s close to the road, and close to the schoolhouse.’ It was all three of those things.”
When the Askelands first settled, the local schoolhouse sat close to their property. Elaine Askeland said she remembers Christian and Minnie Askeland as really good people, with Christian Askeland running the business and Minnie Askeland having an affinity for baking.
“She was real Norwegian, and they like the sweets,” Askeland said. “I’m German and I wasn’t raised that way. It was quite a change when I moved here because I wasn’t used to having the cookie jar full all the time. They were hard workers. They were religious people. They went to church regularly and they had all good friends.”
Elaine Askeland’s husband Clifford bought the farm from his parents in 1949 and married Elaine Askeland in 1952. She said the farm life was different from her experience growing up. She was raised in the great depression, bouncing around from town to town as her father worked odd jobs.

Submitted photos Clifford Askeland stands with his 4-H calf Tubby, which won first in class at the 1945 Junior Livestock Show.
“My folks had a way of wallpapering and fixing the windows and stuff,” Askeland said. “By the time we had them looking pretty nice. Somebody wanted to buy it. We had to move.”
By the time Elaine Askeland had moved into the farm, she was 21 years old. She said when she first arrived, the kitchen used a cistern pump for water, had a wood-burning range, and no plumbing.
“Six months later we had running water in the house, a bathroom put in, and a gas stove,” Askeland said. “That was an experience.”
The Askeland farm used horses until a few years after Elaine Askeland arrived. She said they also threshed without machinery, which involved a large crew of people.
“Being a new bride, I didn’t know how to handle a big crew where they had a before noon lunch, a noon meal, an afternoon lunch,” Askeland said “A whole cake or cookies in the morning with sandwiches, and then it was the meal with mashed potatoes and gravy and the whole works with dessert. Three o’clock in the afternoon, we were all hungry again. More sandwiches that time.”

Clifford Askeland takes a local boy on a buggy ride.
Machinery came later on in the decade and continued to advance with plenty of animals and crops to take care of. As technology grew, Askeland said she found fewer people were needed.
“They worked together, helping each other,” she said. “One would haul out, another one would shovel up. It was a lot of together, working with people. As the years went by, each farmer got more individual. They didn’t need to thresh anymore, everybody got a combine.”
During those days, Askeland said the biggest challenges were weather and crop prices. She said corn silos and grain bins added on the property helped alleviate this challenge. During times of strife, the chicken house was an item of vital importance.
“With chickens you get eggs,” Askeland said. “We’d take eggs to town and sell them, that was our grocery money. The roosters you butchered and ate. It was part of our food supply.”
Askeland had two kids. While they grew up and the oldest elected not to take over the farm, she and her husband continued to tend to the farm until 2006.

Elaine and Kim Askeland sit on the front steps of the original Askeland home with their Century Farm certificate.
“When Stanley was interested in moving to the farm, my husband got so happy it was going to stay an Askeland farm,” Askeland said. “It was very important to him to keep it that way.”
By the time Stanley and Kim Askeland took ownership, 160 acres were no longer enough to support a family.
“The small family farm is almost non-existent,” she said. “You need to have a lot of land to make it profitable because you have to buy the bigger equipment. If you buy the bigger equipment, then you need to have more land to pay for the equipment to get enough money. Farms keep getting bigger and bigger, my boys aren’t going to
farm.”
The farm became a
hobby farm while Stanley
Askeland worked a
full-time job as a regional
sales manager for a
hydraulic filtration company.
Kim Askeland said
the biggest problem they
had was with equipment.
“You have to buy smaller,
older equipment,” she
said. “You can’t afford the
new equipment, and so
you have a lot of breakdowns,
things to fix all
the time. That’s what you
can afford when farming
on a smaller farm.”
Cows were a staple of
the farm during Stanley
and Kim Askeland’s
ownership. Kim Askeland
said some of the
more special moments
came when their granddaughters
came to visit
“They just loved the
cows and their grandfather,”
she said. “It was a
big deal. He would take
them out into the barn,
and they’d stand in the
feed bunk. The cows
could come up to them,
and they would pet the
cows. He loved the cattle.
He loved sharing that
with his granddaughters.”
After a 10-month battle with cancer, Stanley Askeland died Sept. 19, 2023. Without Stanley, Kim Askeland set to work closing up the farm business. This included selling cattle and equipment, unloading corn from the silo, and cleaning the cattle yard.
“I did all of this with the help of good friends and good family members,” she said. “I couldn’t have done it alone and was blessed with help from many good people. God has blessed me with so much support from family and friends, and that is how I got through this first year without my husband.”
Currently, the farm is being rented out, with corn and soybeans being the current crops. Kim Askeland said she wants to keep the farm in the Askeland family.
“When I’m not able to live in this farmhouse anymore, maybe one of my kids will purchase the farm site and live here,” she said. “That would be special. Someday the kids will inherit the land. What they do with it I don’t know, because they’re not in any position to start farming 160 acres. It’s just not feasible.”
- Clifford Askeland (pictured here in 1944), owned and worked on the farm from 1949 to 2006.
- Submitted photos Clifford Askeland stands with his 4-H calf Tubby, which won first in class at the 1945 Junior Livestock Show.
- Clifford Askeland takes a local boy on a buggy ride.
- Elaine and Kim Askeland sit on the front steps of the original Askeland home with their Century Farm certificate.