A Couple Bachelor Farmers in the News

First, the Iowa farmer mentioned here.  He left the proceeds of the sale of his 1200 acres to 13 Catholic churches:

Drive Iowa Highway 191 north from Persia to Portsmouth in Shelby County, and the distinctive roof is easy to spot just west of the road.
Skalla painted his nickname there in giant red letters — B-U-D — across the barn’s southern-facing slope.
It’s not a professional paint job. Skalla was such a renowned miser that he wouldn’t have coughed up the cash for that. No, this “Bud” is scrawled in homespun script, similar to the faded white letters still discernible on both sides of the barn on the vacant farmstead several miles east where Skalla lived.
It’s just one of many quirky, enduring mysteries about Skalla, who was 92 when he died Nov. 26 in the hospital in Harlan. His name has been on everybody’s lips in western Iowa, thanks to last month’s shocker that he had willed some $10 million to 13 Catholic churches stretching from Council Bluffs to Denison....
St. Mary’s in Portsmouth — where Skalla grew up and attended Catholic school — receives its own 282.72-acre farm south of town, where the “Bud” barn stands vigil for passing motorists. It has been appraised at nearly $3 million.
All 13 churches will split the proceeds of another 858.28 acres to be auctioned off Saturday in five separate parcels. Each church could receive $500,000....
Local farmer Scott Gau harvested as much as 80 percent of Skalla’s land for 30 years. His grandparents had been neighbors with Skalla’s parents.
Gau, 52, was the rare person who was privy to Skalla’s irreverent sense of humor. He once asked Skalla why he nailed buckets and lids to his fence posts. The inscrutable farmer once affixed a chair to the roof of his house.
“Just something to make them talk, Scott,” Skalla told him. “Something to make them talk.”

The rest of the story is pretty depressing, at least to this currently bachelor farmer.  The other story is about the last farmer left in Silicon Valley:

Walter Cottle Lester, a third-generation California farmer who stubbornly refused to sell his family's 237-acre ranch to developers even as Silicon Valley rose up around it and made the land worth hundreds of millions of dollars, has died at age 88.
Lester died of natural causes on Friday, a day before a 4-mile perimeter trail representing the first piece of a future park and agricultural preserve that will occupy his family homestead opened to the public, The San Jose Mercury News reported ( http://bit.ly/1eivPNO).
Lester deeded the land, which had been in his family since the 1860s and where fruit and grains still are grown, to Santa Clara County and the state starting a decade ago on the condition that it remain as open space forever.
At his request, the future Martial Cottle Park will be named for his maternal grandfather, who bequeathed the ranch to Lester's mother, who in turn passed it on to her son and his sister, who died 15 years ago.
Lester, who never married or had children, died in the same 140-year-old farmhouse where he was born. He was the last surviving member of the Cottle family and Silicon Valley's last big farm owner, the Mercury News reported. He repeatedly turned down offers from developers eager to secure the prime south San Jose real estate and could have gotten as much as $500 million for the property, the newspaper said.
"People ask: Why didn't Walter sell and go buy an island? Well, his world was right here," said David Giordano, who managed Lester's farming operation for the past two decades. "His duty in life, as he perceived it, was to preserve the ranch in its entirety."

That isn't really a club I'm dying to join, but I haven't managed to avoid the fate yet.