Halfway between Denver, Colo., and Kansas City, Mo., lies Plainville, Kan.

Since 1878, this land of limestone, oil and rolling hills has been the home of five generations (raising the sixth generation now) of the Keas family — each living within a mile of the original homestead settled by Hiram Keas.

Looking after the family farming and ranching legacy is now the responsibility of Doug and Stacey Keas, one of the Class of 2023 Kansas Master Farm Families.

Starting out

It was 1974, and Doug was looking for a summer adventure. Joining a custom wheat harvesting crew owned by one of his schoolteachers seemed to fit the bill.

“I graduated high school on Friday and left on Monday with a harvest crew to go to Oklahoma,” Doug says with a grin. The crew took him down U.S. Highway 183, south to Snyder, Okla., then north all the way to the Canadian line, chasing ripening wheat.

“I absolutely loved custom harvesting,” Doug says. So much so that for two summers, in between semesters at Colby Community College getting his associate degree in farm and ranch management, he could be found on the harvest trail.

He worked in the pork business for four years, before returning to the wheat run, this time joining his former crew with a combine that his father and uncle purchased together. They could buy the newer combine, have Doug run it on the harvest trail and earn enough to pay off the machine for the farm back home.

“I’d rather sit in a combine than any other piece of equipment,” Doug says. It was that time on the harvest trail and working for others that helped shape Doug’s plan for his farming future in Rooks County.

Then, in 1984, a Minnesota transplant, Stacey, caught his eye. In 1986, they married and began the next generation of Keases in Rooks County, as sons Seth and Jared and then daughter Amy came along.

Stacey has a bachelor’s degree in psychology. For 29 years, she taught preschool while adding to her licensing and education, earning master’s degrees in counseling psychology from KU and in early childhood education from Walden University.

She specialized in special education, at-risk and regular education settings, running two preschools on her own — all while raising three children and helping Doug farm.

Expansion

Wheat and livestock have always had their place on the Keas homestead, but Doug and his father expanded into a cow-calf herd as Doug joined the family business full time. On their acres, Doug and Stacey added sorghum, feed and sunflowers to their wheat crop rotation, and then later corn and soybeans.

Doug pioneered the use of no-till in the area, finding that using summer fallow and crop rotation. along with no-till, helps him conserve valuable water and replenish nutrients in the soil.

Wheat is still a favorite crop for the Keases, and over the years, Doug’s fine-tuned his management to improve his wheat yields. He uses fungicides to protect yield potential, which is an important factor in the drier climate of Rooks County, where drought and stress are never far away.

His work paid off in 2014 when he won the Kansas Wheat Yield Contest’s Central Kansas Division with a 78-bushel yield. And in 2016, he broke the 100-bushel mark for his farm with a contest-winning 109-bushel yield.

“We put more seed treatments on today,” Doug says of his wheat. “Our stripper headers are so much more beneficial in this part of the world, now that wheat is so much shorter than it was back in the ‘70s and ‘80s.”

With the stripper, he’s able to just take the top of the wheat off and leave more residue in the field.

Stacey says Doug’s never been shy from trying something on the farm if it makes sense in their production cycle. For example, he was an early adopter of pushing his calving cycle from the earlier January-February time frame to later March and early April. It made sense to have cows calving when the weather was warmer, and there was new grass growth for them to graze, he says.

Commitment

“When you commit to something, you follow through to the end,” is one of the values Doug and Stacey worked to instill in their children over the years. It’s a point of pride for them that Seth, Jared and Amy grew up working together in the house and on the farm.

Stacey made sure all three knew how to cook and clean and run a household, and Doug made sure all three could run any piece of equipment on the farm, even his combines.

“It wasn’t easy,” Stacey says of those years juggling young children, teaching preschool and farm work, especially while Doug was in the field working late on their farming dream.

“We had this big old Business Band radio, and it sat at the farmhouse right next to the computer desk,” Stacey recalls. “And at night, the kids would go get on it, and they’d say, ‘Good night, Daddy,’ and he’d tell them ‘good night’ back. And you know other people were listening in and thought it was cute. But you know, that was hard.”

Still, she says it was worth it to give their children a love of farming and a respect for the work it takes to make a dream come true.

Today, Seth and his wife, Catherine — along with their children Dawson, Audra and Brenden — are in the process of working with Doug and Stacey to take on more of the farming and ranching. They’ve purchased some farm ground and pasture nearby and have started their own cow-calf herd.

Jared runs a combine during harvest, alongside his dad. Amy and her husband, Jesse Arbogast, and their daughter, Oakleigh, have bought some ground nearby and are building their cow herd too.

Seth says that the impact their parents had on the community has been inspiring to him.

“The things they’ve done for the community, whenever they had anything extra, they put it back into the community,” he says.

“Even when times were tough, they’ve given us everything we could have ever needed,” Amy adds. “We always knew that we were treasured, and that is a huge thing and a huge testament to who they are as people, and who we are as adults with our own families now.”

And for Doug and Stacey, that’s a family legacy they’re proud to pass down.