Albin family involved in rural wellness
By ANNE COOK
News-Gazette Staff Writer

   NEWMAN – When John Albin started farming, the formula for efficiency was pretty straightforward.
   "In those days, the experts told you corn, soybeans and hogs were the way to success," said Albin of his start in 1951 near Newman where his great-grandfather, Robert Albin, had homesteaded 110 years earlier.
   "That was the Extension gospel," said Marge Albin, her husband's partner at home and in business for more than 50 years, of the best advice at the time from the University of Illinois.
   "When the kids came home from college to farm, you built a hog house and had enough income to support two families," said Albin.
   Albin has been named The News-Gazette's 1999 Farm Leader by his peers, farmers who have shared that honor.
   The business of farming is no longer that simple, but Albin, 71, faces challenges of biotechnology, computer technology, specialized farming and complicated marketing as part of a team that includes his wife and sons, Perry and David.
   "Dave, Perry, Marge and John are four integral parts of what the Albin family's doing," John Albin said.
   The family's enterprises include a chain of banks. Marge Albin, the family accounting expert, says the banks were the first step to accomplishing one overriding family goal – to help rural communities and the people who live in them prosper.
   "We opened our first bank at Longview in 1978 because we were agriculture people and we weren't being served," she said.
   John Albin is chairman of Longview Capital Corp., a holding company that now includes four banks – First National Bank, Ogden; First National Bank in Georgetown; Longview State Bank; and the State Bank of Chrisman – and six branches.
   "Between Rantoul and Marshall, you can bank at one of our 10 locations," Albin said. "We promise to keep these banks. They are not for sale."
   The family put another piece of its master plan in place in 1990, starting the Illini Community Development Corp. to give a boost to rural business.
   "We want to enhance economic activity in the communities we serve, and we hope these businesses do well enough so someone driving into one of these communities can tell it's a town where our bank is located," Albin said.
   He traces his local roots back to his great-grandfather, Robert Albin, who homesteaded 40 acres of land in the Newman area in the 1840s.
   "He came from Indiana," Albin said. "Every generation or so would move west. His son and my grandfather, Sanford Albin, built the house three miles southwest of Newman where we lived for 40 years and Dave has lived for about 10 years."
   Sanford Albin wanted his children to attend Winkler School, which still stands on Albin property, so he literally moved the family home into the Winkler district – while living in it.
   "He had horses, a winch and a cable, and he moved the house 50 yards a day diagonally across a field in the 1890s," Albin said.
   The Albins have maintained the exterior of that school, but one family dream is to restore the interior and start an old-time country school there with about 20 students of all ages.
   Albin's father, Leonard "Pete" Albin, married his mother, Grace Herrington Albin, in 1925. When John Albin returned home from the UI, after graduating with Bronze Tablet honors, his father reduced the size of his own operation by 160 acres to give his son and his wife a start.
   Leonard Albin died in 1981, and Grace Albin died last year.
   John Albin met Marge Martin, daughter of a Newman grain elevator operator, at Newman High School. She attended Eastern Illinois University, and they were married before he came home to farm.
   They built their farming business gradually. Albin, one of the first Douglas County members of the UI Farm Business Farm Management record keeping system, tells a story that illustrates their progressive spirit.
   "In 1964, FBFM held a tour at our house because we were among the first to go to 30-inch rows," Albin said. "Everyone else was planting 38- or 40-inch rows. I thought you were supposed to improve your practices to get better yields, and they were about 10 percent better. It didn't take long to catch on."
   In the early 1970s, former U.S. Agriculture Secretary Clifford Hardin stopped at the Albin farm during an event that went down in agricultural history.
   "He came to the area to announce that the Southern corn leaf blight had destroyed the corn crop," Albin recalled. "He stopped at the farm to see the blight before he went to Champaign-Urbana.
   "That was a real milestone in commodity price history because corn prices doubled overnight," he said. "Until last year, they stayed at $2 to $3."
   The Albins expanded their acreage gradually as the years passed and the family grew. Today Albin and his sons farm about 5,000 acres, and they work together although they each have their own acreage.
   They have cultivated relationships with investors – people who buy farmland to avoid paying capital gains taxes – in the fast-growing Chicago area.
   Albin also bought land from time to time.
   "It was always my ambition to own land, and my first purchase was 20 acres of the original Albin land for $250 per acre," he said. "Since then I've paid up to $3,000 per acre."
   Albin said few farmers can afford to own enough land to make a living farming it, so he follows a practical rule of thumb.
   "A young man starting farming can expect to own about 10 percent of the land he farms when he retires," he said. "If he's farming 2,000 acres and owns 200, he can sell it for $600,000, and that's his retirement and his estate."
   Albin believes in family farming and in reasonable investment in land – a stable, hard asset – because he values highly the life it supports.
   "We need to nurture and support agriculture," he said. "The government needs to support it, and food production is only half the value. The other half is the people with values, work ethics and integrity who grow up in rural areas and go on to become leaders."
   Albin has nurtured those values and those future leaders as a Newman school board member, a 4-H and FFA leader and, for 31 years, as a member of the Parkland College Board of Trustees.
   He joined the board a year after it started and retired last year after 10 years as chairman.
   "I thought it was time for younger people to be included, to develop the board," Albin said.
   "I didn't know much about community colleges when I started. I thought the UI was the only thing to do. But I've learned to respect the system. Community colleges now do a lot of things land grant colleges used to do. They've served us well."
   Albin's proud of what the college has accomplished during his tenure, and he praises President Zelema Harris for helping it to become recognized nationally for excellence.
   "Zelema brought diversity to the college and developed it to the advantage of the students and the community," he said. "We want Parkland to be nationally known so grants flow in."
   His retirement didn't end the family's connection with Parkland. Albin takes a computer class there now; Dave's wife, Julie, is finishing studies for a degree in nursing; and Perry's wife, Cathy, teaches there.
   Family members all make rural community welfare a priority. Perry, a lawyer, is president of the development corporation, which has participated so far in about 20 projects and is poised to expand its scope.
   Dave is a farm community leader, active in Farm Bureau business. He spoke of the increasing diversity and shifting directions of the family operation.
   "We're raising corn for Frito-Lay, and this year, half our beans will be seed beans for Stine," he said. "We're moving more to contracts, to value-added production."
   He makes one promise. "If we rent a farm, we leave it in better shape than we found it," Dave said.
   The Albins will grow only 50 acres of genetically modified crops this year, and that's on a new farm to clean up a weed problem.
   They believe non-GMO crops out-yield the varieties that have caused such a stir in the European market.
   "We want to raise what our customers want," Dave Albin said.
   "The easiest way is not always the best way," John Albin said. "But if farm managers say raise it, we do."
   During agriculture's troubled times in the 1980s, Marge Albin became a champion for farmers' welfare in Springfield and a spokesman in Washington, D.C., for Midwestern agriculture.
   She was appointed by Gov. James Thompson in 1982 to serve on the Illinois Farm Development Authority board to help farmers secure low-interest loans. She resigned in 1986 so family bank customers could take advantage of the program.
   She served on the state's Task Force on Rural Illinois in 1987, and went to Washington from 1988 to 1991 to participate in the National Commission for Agriculture Policy and Rural Development to help the administration make farm policy decisions.
   John Albin is a drainage commissioner for the 5,000-acre Brushy Fork district, one that's required frequent maintenance to improve flow.
   He's a member of the UI Foundation, the President's Council and the Alumni Association and of Farm House Fraternity on campus. He's also a director of the Illinois Student Assistance Commission.
   The Albin family attends tiny Wesley Chapel, a nondenominational church that's stood for more than 100 years on land carved out of fields originally cultivated by Robert Albin.
   John Albin has retired from the Parkland board, but that doesn't mean he's going to take it easy now.
   "I'm never going to retire," Albin said. "The boys will have to take it away from me."
   His dream is to see a small industry employing 10 to 50 people in all the communities where family banks are located. That business activity would give residents jobs close to home and enhance community environment and leadership, he said.
   Albin summarized family activities and philosophy simply.
   "We want to do positive things," he said. "We're trying to do a lot of little things that make a difference in the lives of rural residents and family farmers."

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