Healthy Soil to Healthy Families: How the Unruhs Grow More Than Soybeans

On Sunday evenings, the Unruh family gathers in the living room to enjoy a bowl of popcorn after dinner. Both Anna and Jason grew up with this weekly tradition, and now they have passed it onto their four kids: Eliza, David, Ruth and Gideon.

Aside from the corn and salt, the most important ingredient for the popcorn is the vegetable oil, made from soybeans, that helps make the magic happen. Anna says this is her favorite use of soybeans and the most common use in her kitchen.

Anna and Jason Unruh own and operate County Line Farms LLC in Peabody, where they raise soybeans, wheat, corn and kids. As a Kansas Soybean Commissioner, Anna often helps address questions and misconceptions about the health of soy foods such as soybean oil.

As a mom and farm wife, Anna uses vegetable oil, which is primarily made from soybean oil, every day in her kitchen.

“It’s a sustainable and affordable option for many families, especially here in the U.S.,” she said.

As a nurse and soybean farmer, Anna knows that soybean oil is safe to eat and a healthy part of a balanced diet.

Soybean oil is the only seed oil with a heart-healthy claim from the FDA. It’s rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids, including two essential fatty acids — linoleic acid and alpha linolenic acid — which can only come from the diet. Linoleic acid lowers cholesterol levels associated with a decreased risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer and all-cause mortality.

In her role with the Kansas Soybean Commission, Anna has participated in agriculture immersion tours with dietetics students from Kansas State University and the University of Kansas Med. She’s been able to show them how their food is grown and how soy foods are part of a healthy diet.

“It was so exciting to see all the light-bulb moments for them to connect the dots between farmers and their food, between agriculture and consumers,” Anna said.

She sees connections between her experience in healthcare and her role on the farm everywhere. She also gets a lot of questions about seed treatments and chemicals.

“I’ve heard it said that the planting pass is the most important pass of the season because we want to set that little, tiny seed up for success,” Anna said. “You can kind of think of it like we are giving them that extra boost of nutrients and protection so they can emerge and be a healthy plant. Just like we try to set up babies with the best start they can have in life.”

She also compares pharmacy prescriptions to the precision agriculture technology that allows farmers to tailor exactly how much seed, fertilizer and other inputs to apply to each part of the field.

While Anna explains the connection between agriculture and human health, Jason focuses on another kind of health: soil health.

“We use variable rate seeding and variable rate fertilizer to maximize the areas that are capable of being pushed for higher yields,” Jason said. “Some the areas in the fields that have thinner soil we can back off and make sure that we’re not wasting inputs that the crop there isn’t going to use.”

To the Unruhs, precision agriculture is a part of the larger picture of sustainability. Using the right inputs protects the land, water and resources around them.

Another part of that picture are the conservation measures that have been in place for generations at County Line Farms.

“My grandpa built some of the first terraces in this area to stop the topsoil from eroding,” Jason said. “It continued with my dad transitioning to no-till and adding cover crops.”

Today, the farm is completely no-till, and cover crops are a critical part of their crop rotation.

“Just like you mulch your garden, we use cover crops to mulch our field,” Jason said. “We conserve moisture by stopping evaporation because that shield of residue is there, and we keep weeds from coming up.”

Ultimately, what sustainability really means to the Unruhs is having something to pass onto the next generation.

“We are here as stewards of the ground and the resources, the water, all the things that we have — to use it but not to use it up, to give back to it and to help keep it sustainable for the next generation,” Anna said.

That next generation is never far away.

Whether they're riding in the combine, helping with chores or simply running through what Jason jokingly calls their "100-acre backyard," the Unruhs’ four children are growing up surrounded by agriculture.

Their parents hope they’ll remember lessons that go beyond machinery.

They hope they'll learn where food comes from.

They hope they'll understand that worthwhile things require hard work.

Most of all, they hope they'll appreciate the responsibility that comes with caring for the land.

This story was written by Carissa Dalquest, an intern with the Kansas Soybean Association.