Feb 13, 2026
By Sedgwick County Harvest Hub
Heidi Wells of rural Cheney has a special attachment to their milk cows at Lucky W Dairy.
“The fun part is watching the new babies,” Heidi says. “We see the baby heifer being born and can follow her throughout her whole life until she one day becomes a milk cow that we see twice a day come through our parlor. They become like family to us.”
Heidi did not set out to be a dairy farmer; she wanted to be physical therapist for a National Football League team. She grew up on a farm near St. Marys and attended Kansas State University first to be a physical therapist, then decided to switch to nutrition and become a dietitian.
“I went to work at Wesley Hospital as a dietitian and had some great friends, but I wanted to move back home,” she says. “My friends didn’t want me to leave so they set me up on a blind date. I had sworn off blind dates, but they were desperate to keep me around. That date became my husband, Byron.”
Byron Wells comes from a long line of dairy farmers near Cheney. Heidi and Byron soon discovered they had attended K-State at the same time.
“We were talking one night about the time in 2000 when K-State beat Nebraska in football in a snowstorm,” she says. “I commented that I had made it on the jumbotron that night at the end of the game doing snow angels in the end zone and Byron said, ‘That was you?’ As they say, the rest is history.
“I took Byron home to meet my parents,” she continues. “Dad saw that it was becoming serious and that I’d most likely move to the dairy farm. He pulled me aside and said, ‘You know, that’s a whole different lifestyle.’ I had grown up on a farm and we raised cattle, but dairy is different because we have 120 cows that we milk twice daily, seven days a week.”
Heidi and Bryon now have five children. Breanna is at Fort Hays State University, while Hailey, Bridget, Heath and Bethany are still at home.
“The kids love being in the barn,” Heidi says. “They also bring their friends over and some of them have ended up working for us. The best part of this is doing it as family.”
There are numerous pressures that impact family farms. Rising costs of almost everything it takes to farm, increasing regulations, competition from larger operations and volatile national and international markets make it difficult for a farm to operate in the black.
Family farms make up almost 97 percent of all farms in America. However, they are disappearing at an alarming rate. In the span of five years between the 2017 and 2022 agricultural census, there were 141,733 fewer farms.
“We work hard to sustain it,” she says. “We don’t want to be the generation that tanks the farm. It helps that I have an off-farm job. I’m the school dietitian for both the Cheney and Renwick school districts. I work in the foodservice department and plan menus, do my best to include as many local foods as my budget allows and do my part to help educate the kids where their food comes from.”
For a period of time she worked for the Kansas State Department of Education (KSDE) in making school districts healthier, and in the private practice sector of nutrition.
“We discovered the My Plate concept was one of the most effective tools for helping people understand what kinds of food they should be eating,” she says. “My time with KSDE and as a private practice dietitian was helpful in preparing me to work at district level in schools.”
Heidi also serves on the Sedgwick County Farm Bureau board.
“One of my favorite things is to go into a classroom and read a book or talk to them,” she says. “We also love to give dairy tours and have people out to the farm. People don’t fully understand the working of a farm but when they come out, we get the opportunity to show them how it works.”
Their Facebook page, Lucky W Dairy, shows the various activities on the farm. A post from Dec. 25, 2025 is of two calves born on Christmas Day. She was looking for names and some of the suggestions were quite funny.
You can also see a short clip on YouTube when they were selected as a Kansas Farm Bureau Farm Family of the Year for 2024.
Note: Heidi is part of our series of celebrating the International Year of the Woman Farmer and Rancher, 2026.