Tankings put "Wholehearted" effort into raising beef

Joe and Kelsey Tanking of rural Wetmore are relatively new to raising and marketing farm-to-table beef, but whatever they do, they are committed to doing it wholeheartedly.

The Tankings — both 2009 graduates of Holton High School — are the proprietors of Wholehearted Farm L.L.C., which Joe said began as a bottle-feeding operation that sold cattle “quarters, halves and wholes,” expanding last October to offer customers individual cuts and beef bundles even though the farm is “a fairly small operation at this point.”

“Currently, we’re handling around 20 head a year,” said Joe of the Wholehearted Farm operation. “If the customers are there, we’ll try to grow it for sure, and being smaller, it’s kind of hard to grow, because there’s a lot of risk… But if the demand is there, I think we would certainly like to grow a lot.”

The farm’s name, Kelsey said, comes from Colossians 3:23 — “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord…”

But when the two of them were graduating from HHS, neither one of them saw raising cattle as something they wanted to do with their lives. Joe, son of Randy and Alice Tanking, had some experience with cattle, as his father ran a dairy operation for several years before switching to beef cattle, mostly Angus.

“I had a few head, just working with my dad and his cows,” said Joe, who completed an electrician’s course at Washburn Tech before going to work in 2010 for USC in Sabetha, where he works as the electrical engineering manager.

The former Kelsey Spalding, daughter of Brian and Amanda Spalding of Holton, also didn’t see a future with cattle in it — just one with Joe, and they were married in the summer of 2010, “right out of high school.”

In 2014, the Tankings started their bottle calf operation from their home, then about two miles east of Holton. Joe handled the cattle feeding, while Kelsey said she “was just cheering him on.”

“We’d started out just raising bottle calves, and then we were thinking, let’s go ahead and feed them out so we can put them in our freezer,” Joe said. “We started out doing just one or two, then it got to three or four, and it kind of stayed three to six a year.”

Then the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything. The Tankings decided to expand their operation, as Joe noted, because “everybody wanted beef because they were afraid they weren’t going to get it at the store,” while Kelsey and the Tanking children kept themselves busy with homeschooling, taking the Wholehearted name for their homeschooling operation.

“You’re supposed to register your homeschcool when your kids get to a certain age, and for some reason, I was kind of leaning toward why we do what we do,” Kelsey said. “‘Wholehearted’ was the one word that kept coming to mind… It just fits.”

It also became the name of the beef operation when they moved to their new home southeast of Wetmore in October of last year, and they began to sell individual cuts of beef as well as half and quarter-sections and whole cattle, processed at Holton Meat Processing.

For more on this and other stories, please log in to your holtonrecorder.net account and select “May 24, 2023” under “E-Editions.”