Burks named Farm Family of Year at Lexington chamber banquet

Burks is no stranger to the school of hard knocks, starting at the tender age of 2½ with an accident that sent him to a Denver hospital for 10 days in intensive care, through rodeo mishaps to yet another hard knock on the head working cattle. Fortunately, those hard knocks didn’t dim his enthusiasm for cattle and ranching.

Don Burks was born April 26, 1952, to John and Clara Burks at Stratton, Neb., one of five siblings. The family grew wheat and milo in a summer fallow rotation, and they had a cow/calf herd.

He and his siblings were in the Hitchcock County Go-Getters 4-H Club, and Don did everything from welding, the rope project and an electricity board, to showing dairy and beef.

He attended Stratton Public Schools, graduating with the Class of 1970, and went on to attend the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he majored in animal science. When his dad died in January of his senior year, Don spent a lot of time on the road between Lincoln and Stratton trying to keep the ranch going. He ended up two hours short of getting his degree and his adviser wouldn’t work with him to allow him to graduate.

“After that I called my roommate’s adviser and he managed to transfer all my credits and told me if I took the teaching block I could graduate that December. I hadn’t been in FFA in high school and I didn’t know what the FFA Creed was or what the chapter concept was,” he said.

In the meantime, Joan Bonenberger was growing up in Atkinson. She was born July 2, 1953, to Mike and Velma Bonenberger. Joan’s father operated the Cooper Feed Store and she worked for him. Joan attended St. Joseph’s Catholic School through her junior year in high school. Her senior year was spent at Atkinson West Holt, where she graduated with the Class of 1971.

Following graduation, she went to Lincoln and got a job at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. That is where she met Don, who was working as a nighttime security guard for a detective agency in Lincoln. Part of the security guard’s duties was walking female employees to their cars, and they walked right into each other’s hearts. On Jan. 4, 1975, Joan and Don were married at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Atkinson.

Don had graduated with his teaching degree in December but had no intention of entering the profession. His intent all along had been to head back to the ranch. But the school superintendent in Atwood, Kansas, had seen an article in the local paper back in September that Don was pursuing an ag education degree and started bugging him through regular phone calls to become the ag teacher in Atwood. Don kept turning him down, but the superintendent persisted.

On way back from their honeymoon the newlyweds stopped in Atwood, and Don told Joan he was going to stop by the school and give them a piece of his mind after having been hounded for almost four months to come teach. In one of those wacky twists in life, Don came out having signed a teaching contract. The man who was never going to teach was the Atwood FFA adviser and vocational ag instructor for 7½ years from January 1975 to July 1982.

He learned about FFA along with his students and developed a strong welding and mechanics program at Atwood. Students and instructor traveled to competitions and in the FFA spirit gave back to their community as well.

Their family grew during that time with the arrival of son John on Oct. 9, 1980. It was a busy time with teaching, ranching and then adding emergency services to the list.

After moving to Atwood, the Burkses ran the ambulance service in town with another couple. The four passed the EMT training offered in Kansas, which Don and Joan both note was tough.

“Joan or Rosalie were on call during day and Keith and I took the night calls,” Don said. “Not only were there local calls, on occasion we would be required to transport patients to Denver, too.”

In 1982. Don was approached by the Lexington school administration to fill the vacancy in their vocational agriculture program.

“I flew up to Lexington from Atwood and did an interview in person with then-principal Dave Schley. Superintendent Roger Miller then hired me to work at Lexington over the phone,” he said.

While Don fell into a routine at the school, Joan was busy at home with John, who was joined on Oct. 11, 1982, by a sister, Janee. The young family was able to move onto a farm south of Lexington through a contact Roger Miller had. Joan and Don noted it was a tough time to start a new operation as the farm crisis was sweeping the country.

“I started babysitting the neighbor kids to help make ends meet,” said Joan.

In addition to his teaching and FFA duties, Don began doing crisis intervention, enterprise analysis and teaching record keeping for farmers and ranchers.

“The first night we met at the ag shop it was standing room only,” he said.”So many producers were finding they needed to present cash flows to their bankers to be able to operate and many had little to no training in that field.”

One of the first projects Burks had at Lexington was to add a horticulture class to the curriculum. He used his ag and FFA youth to build the greenhouse, and he notes they were able to complete the construction with no contractors involved.

He worked with local businesses to develop hands-on career training. Fairbanks International had the students assemble machinery and brought them all the tools they needed.

“They would drop crates off at the shop and the ag machinery class would assemble the implements, then take them and field-test them before taking them back to the dealership,” said Don.

Some of the other popular FFA projects included a Baby Animal Day in the spring and the FFA Barnyard every summer during the county fair.

“That project required a lot of cooperation with people lending animals to be at the fair for a week, and it took lots of volunteers to pull off,” he said.

Cultivating teamwork and leadership takes creativity and planning. During his 25 years at Lexington Burks organized an annual FFA Trail Ride, held blue rock shoots and often took the officers team to his family’s ranch near Stratton for a retreat after school got out.

Another area business that contributed to the program’s success was Orthman Manufacturing.

“Orthman’s was awesome as they donated scrap metal for the welding classes, which saved lots of money on metal purchases,” Don said. “There was a lot of cooperation from other businesses that helped students practice for meats, welding and machinery contests. I had an ag advisory committee with local businesspeople that met monthly.”

During those years he served as state president of Nebraska Vocational Agriculture Teachers Association and was also on the board of directors for the FFA Leadership Center in Aurora.

In 1986 Don and Joan bought the whole Fowler farmstead. They worked on renovating the brick house on the property, and when it was finished Joan’s folks would come to spend the winters in the couple’s first house. Together as a family they developed the cattle pens, pasture and fencing, and working facilities.

Among his other community ventures, Don served as a Farmedic from the early 1990s on doing safety training. He also taught welding classes for Central Community College, and he and Joan revived the Southside 4-H Club when they moved to Dawson County.

When the Burkses moved to Lexington, they rented pastures and brought their cows up to the Platte Valley.

“We’d run the ranch cows up here on cornstalks in the winter and then take them back to ranch to calve out there,” said Don. “We kept growing the herd here by keeping heifers back and selling the steers.”

To help grow the operation, the Burkses would take in heifers for others and develop them, as well as take in outside cows and run them on cornstalks. For a while they raised bulls for Power Genetics from Arapahoe and for J.D. Anderson. A cooperator raised the calf and the Burkses would develop them.

While still teaching, Don Burks had another hard knock on the head working cattle. He barely recalls the incident, coming to when the ambulance arrived to take him to the hospital.

“My basic job now with cattle is bringing them up the alley when we’re working them,” he quipped.

With son John back in the picture, the family will calve up to 270 cows and heifers this spring. Fifty replacement heifers will be part of the herd, bringing the total to over 300. In addition, this winter they have been backgrounding about 600 calves and close to 200 of those are their own.

Both John and Janee attended District 15 rural school south of Lexington. John is a 1999 graduate of Lexington High School and Janee graduated in 2001. When they entered ninth grade they attended Lexington High School.

John went on to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he had a dual major in ag economics and agribusiness, graduating in December 2003. His career has taken him from jobs with ADM, Orscheln’s, Eastside Animal Center in Gothenburg and the Grand Island Diocese as a youth and young adult minister.

In 2018 Don’s health helped John decide to move home to calve out the cows. Since then he has continued to improve the family cattle operation with advancements in technology and diversification.

That was an eventful year as on Sept. 29, 2018, John married Megan Wortmann. They have moved into the yellow house at the farm and welcomed Ryker Samuel Burks on Oct. 24, 2019, and Kenzley Marie Burks on Sept. 30, 2021, much to the delight of Grandma and Grandpa Burks who live right next door.

Janee graduated from Lexington High School in 2001 and went to UNL where she studied biochemistry. Since graduation she has worked her entire career for Leprino Foods. On July 15, 2006, she married Mike Hamilton. and they then moved to Denver where Janee took a job with Leprino Foods. They are the parents of three children, Ashlyn, born Nov. 14, 2010, and now in the seventh grade; Jace, born Nov. 25, 2013, a fourth grader; and Beckett, born Jan. 1, 2017, a first grader.

Expressing the family’s appreciation, John concluded, “I just want to thank the many, many helpers we have had, and still do, for getting us to the place we are today. I know we could not make it without the community we have supporting each other. It is humbling.”