Chelsea Schminke Grieder takes pride in being the ‘black sheep’ of the family. As the daughter of livestock legends Al and Kandy Schminke, she always wanted to return to their grain and show livestock operation in Van Horne, Iowa, consisting of about 375 wether dam ewes and 25 purebred Chester white sows.
Unlike her brother Cody who took a more traditional path back to their family’s farm, this fourth-generation farmer took a rather unique path into fashion design at Iowa State University first.
“I wanted to create my own way,” Grieder says. “I love design. I love art. I wanted to dip my toes into that passion, but that didn’t change my love for agriculture. I was still showing livestock very competitively and helping on the farm.”
Although she entered the fashion world with a black-and-white mindset, she quickly realized fashion was very subjective.
“After college, I went to work for a really cool company that designs Harley Davidson saddle bags. Never in my life did I think I would work with leather or motorcycles,” she says. “I worked with many brands while I was there from Adidas to Ryka. With each product, I found ways to make it more successful. I discovered ways to save money and hit our target market more. I took a lot of that back to the farm.”
Something Isn’t Right
Newly engaged to Paul, 2016 started off on a high note for Grieder who was in the thick of wedding planning. Her family’s show livestock operation was booming.
But in February, Kandy’s health “got a little funky,” Grieder explains. Sinus infection after sinus infection, something wasn’t right. She even remembers her mom’s nose changing color a little.
“It was so crazy,” she says. “I was trying to balance my job, the wedding and help on the farm. I also wanted to be there for my mom. She was up and down health-wise. She started having random nose bleeds and began seeing all these specialists.”
No one could tell them what was going on with her mom. Grieder vividly remembers going to the hospital for her own appointment in June.
“My mom met me there and I remember she sat down beside me and I said, ‘You smell weird. Did you shower?’” Grieder recalls. “She said ‘Yes, thanks Chelsea.’”
But she couldn’t let it go.
“She’s my mom – you just know how your mom smells, and something wasn’t right,” she says.
A few weeks later, Grieder lost her job.
“I had designed this full line and was ready to go to production with it,” she says. “I had no heads up, nothing. Not to mention I had a wedding in November. I was like, ‘Oh, my God, what do we do?’”
But she never lost faith that God had a plan.
A week later, Grieder was back at the doctor’s office with her mom who had received a GI scope the day before. The doctors wanted to make sure she didn’t have anything going on internally with her gastrointestinal system.
“One of the GI nurses recommended my mom go back to her family doctor for a full blood panel,” Grieder says. “Between that January to July 2016, nobody had pulled blood on her, which was shocking.”
They discovered her hemoglobin was really low – like “go get a blood transfusion now” low.
“My cousin, who worked at the doctor’s office, called us and said, ‘You need to take her to the ER. This is not good.’ At that point, you hear ‘not good’ and want to know exactly how not good,” Grieder says. “She said on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being bad, my mom was a 12.”
Answers at Last
When they arrived at St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, they rushed her mom upstairs.
“I remember hitting that kidney floor, and the smell hit me,” she says. “I said, ‘Mom, this is what you smelled like.’”
Her mom’s kidneys were failing.
“We found out she was in renal failure. They said mom should not have walked in – she should have been crawling in,” Grieder says. “But if you know her, she is as tough as nails and stubborn, too. She’s never going to tell you she hurts. She actually judged a livestock show the weekend before her diagnosis in Missouri. Hindsight is 20/20 – she should not have been doing any of those things, but she just had the mentality that you keep going.”
Doctors confirmed two autoimmune diseases were attacking her mom’s kidneys – Wegener’s disease and ANCA.
“ANCA is a very aggressive autoimmune disease,” Grieder explains. “They call it the silent killer for a reason. They gave her three more days if we hadn’t went in there.”
Within 24 hours, she had a stint placed into her heart and was put on dialysis. She needed a kidney transplant.
“The thing people don’t talk about is that you have to be sick enough to go on the kidney transplant list, but you have to be healthy enough to get one,” Grieder says. “We had an uphill battle from there.”
No One is Invincible
Their new reality was hard on everyone, especially her dad who was trying to figure out how to manage the day-to-day activities without her by his side.
“She’s his person – he thought she was invincible,” Grieder says. “We all had to realize, ‘Okay, no, she’s not invincible.’”
From July until October, Grieder did not find another job. Instead, she stayed home to help her mom get to the dialysis center every Tuesday and Thursday and pick up her work on the farm.
“There was a reason why I was not supposed to be working at that point,” Grieder adds. “But it was so hard to watch my mom suffer. It was hard to watch her battle this. We eventually were able to do dialysis at home, but it wasn’t easy. She had to be hooked up for 12 hours a day and stay away from dust, fungus, hay, straw, dirt – all the things that are part of farm life.”
She also couldn’t be around her new grandchild as doctors didn’t want her exposed to any extra germs. All of this made planning a November wedding especially challenging. Grieder says she is so grateful for the village of people who supported her family during this time.
“Our wedding was truly a celebration – and not just for us getting married – but for all of the people who helped us.”
Her mom finally got her kidney in January of 2018, about 1.5 years after she went on dialysis. Grieder says her already close relationship with her mom grew so much during this time when their roles switched.
“I remember brushing her hair one day after she had her shower,” Grieder says. “It hit her like a rock. I told her, ‘We’re going to get through this no matter what, that’s what we’re here for.’”
How Resiliency Grows
There’s no doubt Grieder has experienced a lot in the past 10 years. She and her husband now have two kids, Savannah, 6, and Beau, 4. She is also serving as the director of junior activities and events for Team Purebred, a national junior livestock organization for kids in the swine industry.
“She’s always looking out for others,” her mom says. “She works hard to make Team Purebred as strong as she can. She really digs in. We all go through ups and downs in life. Everybody has different things going on. I think that’s one strong thing that she does, is that she can handle it.”
Resiliency is important for everyone, but Grieder believes it’s essential for a livestock farming family.
“I think it’s built into you a little bit,” she adds. “You learn a lot from the circle of life on the farm and the ups and downs of showing livestock. I learned that my path isn’t going to be straight in life and no matter what, you have to get out of bed and keep going for the people around you.”
Grieder shares more about their family’s journey as well as her vision for Team Purebred and passion for connecting young people to agriculture on The PORK Podcast. You can watch it here on YouTube or listen anywhere podcasts are found.
