A Year in the Life of a Farmer: Ropp pays it forward

AgriNews will follow Ken Ropp throughout the entire year. Each month, look for updates about the farmer and the decisions he makes on his farm.

NORMAL, Ill. — Students from a program that is near and dear to his heart were working Sept. 12 at Ropp Jersey Cheese.

The two students helping Ken Ropp clean up some landscape on this day are part of the Baby Fold’s Hammitt School vocational educational program in Normal in central Illinois.

“Job coach Scott Perry and two young men from the school come out on Fridays normally for about two to three hours in the morning, and we’ll do odds and ends outside if the weather’s fit and then we’ll go from there. If the weather’s not fit, we try and get the boys involved inside the store and go from there,” Ropp said.

The Ropp Jersey Cheese-Hammitt School partnership started in about 2011.

“We’ve been able to do quite a bit out here with Ken for many years up until 2020 when COVID hit and everything came to a standstill. Basically our program was decimated by COVID. We were able to start building in back up in about 2024,” Perry said.

“At the school, we primarily deal with students on the spectrum and also students with behavior and emotional issues. They come to us from their public schools and we do what we can to assist them through being able to learn a little bit better and we also work from a standpoint of trauma and trying to help them through basically getting past some of that trauma and learning how to cope a little bit better.

“Basically, what we do in this program is we have many different jobsites that we work with. Ken being one of them. We primarily work with our seniors and juniors for this off-campus program.

“What we do with our students off campus is we’ll take them to a jobsite, whatever it may be, whether it be the library, the food bank, Custom Touch Woodworking, Mid-State Transmission and Auto Repair, the museum downtown and others.

“We’ll bring the students out for a couple hours each day, once a week to each jobsite. They get to work with the employees or the owners of the businesses, and they actually get to learn what it’s about to work in that field to do those jobs.

“We definitely rely upon our job partners, our business partners to be able to keep this program running, and it’s a great thing for our students. They really learn a lot.”

Full Circle

“When it comes to service work and what we can do here with Ropp Jersey Cheese, and Mr. Perry and the boys or whoever the students are that Mr. Perry brings out for each semester, it’s been a great fit,” Ropp said.

“But I think it’s a full circle thing, too, and it’s my story, my background, it’s an open book. Fifty-four years ago I was adopted through the Baby Fold.

“It’s the least we can do is to provide something back to the Baby Fold that we can offer. It’s been a good fit.”

Farm Update

Dry weather continues across McLean County and most of Illinois as harvest quickly approaches.

“Soybeans have taken a little time, but the corn really, really has fired up in the last 10 days,” Ropp said.

“We’re done with four cuttings of hay now and ready to lay down our fifth cutting. We usually do five to six cuttings a year, depending on when that frost date will be.”

Nearby Rader Family Farms’ season opened Sept. 12, and Ropp expected a busy weekend.

“It’s season pass night and the neat part about that is not only do we see our regular customers coming in, but we get a lot of good overflow, too, from the pumpkin patch. I’m expecting, as long as the weather’s decent, and it’s supposed to be blazing hot, we’ll see good crowd out here Saturday for sure,” he said.