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MARK AND DEB CORE
Back then, Lloyd Core baled hay with his brother, Harold, as a side hustle. They produced small, square bales — thousands upon thousands a year. But what Lloyd saw earlier that day mesmerized him. He had to show his family. Lloyd Core drove them about a mile north of their central Iowa home. And there it was — a Vermeer round baler out working in the field. A man nearby, Pella’s Gary Vermeer, invented the first one in 1971. “I don’t remember a lot at that age, truthfully. But I remember getting in that car,” Mark Core said
Mark and Deb Core met through their background in livestock judging. They’ve since made a life of it. The year was 1972. Mark Core was a young boy then. But the memory of this day sticks with him like the sweaty Iowa weather that afternoon. His father, Lloyd Core, had arrived at the family’s farmhouse in Pleasantville, Iowa. You’ve got to see this, his father told the family. They piled in their old Mercury, windows cranked down. “Because we had no air conditioning,” Mark Core recalls.
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