Eric and Andrea Miehlisch

Fillmore County, MN

As Andrea Miehlisch explains it, her English precise and beautifully inflected by a slight German accent, two countries and turkeys interweave the Miehlisch family in an unlikely way. In the 50's, Eric's father, originally from Germany, came to Sleepy Eye, Minnesota as an intern to learn about American agricultural practices. He learned plenty, and fell in love along the way. He took his knowledge and an American wife back to Germany, where Eric and his brother were born. But Lanesboro stuck in his heart, and by the time Eric was two years old, the family had bought a bankrupt turkey farm, sight unseen, and returned to Minnesota.

So it went until 1989 when Andrea, raised on her family's turkey farm in Germany and then studying agriculture in college, was matched for an internship on the Miehlisch farm in Lanesboro. "I needed a one year internship and I wanted to do it on a turkey farm. I got in touch with the Miehlisches and asked if they were interested." They were indeed. Andrea got to know Eric over the course of her internship, but she missed her life back in Germany. "Falling in love was not on my mind. I'm a somewhat practical person thus everything had to be just right before I would consider making a leap like that," Andrea says. She went home after the internship, but after three months, she says, "It was love at last sight!" She and Eric were married and she moved to Minnesota.

All these years later, turkeys are the sole focus on the Miehlisch farm. Their tillable acreage is rented to a nearby farmer for crops. "We think about diversifying," Andrea says, "but we feel that the animals will suffer from lack of attention at those times of the year when crops need intense focus, too. I grew up on a conventional turkey farm, but the farm right next door to ours was a classic diversified farm with a little bit of everything. In the mid-sixties when my parents started raising turkeys it was really revolutionary in Germany, because we don't have Thanksgiving there so there wasn't a big market for turkey."

Just a few miles down the road from Eric's dad's farm, Eric and Andrea Miehlisch big, airy turkey barns have numerous screen doors that are covered at night to keep the birds safe from predators. In the first six weeks of their lives, the chicks are kept inside under controlled heat lamps until they develop their protective feathers. Once they're old enough, they're free to cruise the large fenced pasture that abuts the barns. "Sometimes it gets so high we have to mow paths for them. When it rains they love to scratch for worms."