Wisconsin has few programs for matching young, starting farmers with established retiring ones, and what programs there are make relatively few matches each year.

It’s a reality that leaves most would-be farmers on their own as they start their chosen profession, often requiring a leap of faith, lots of help from friends and a little blind luck.

That’s what it took for 27-year-old Westby dairy farmer Michael Klinkner. He didn’t grow up on a farm, and the first time he ever worked on one was when he took a weekend job doing chores in high school, putting him well behind the curve compared to many farmers.

But something about the work called to him, and soon he had passed a one-year certificate program at the Wisconsin School for Beginning Dairy and Livestock Farmers and set out to find some land.

He had heard of Wisconsin’s Farm Link program, which seeks to hook up beginning farmers with retiring farmers. But he never sought help through the program because it only matches farmers looking to transfer their land, and he was set on renting at first.

Frank Friar, the program’s director, said Farm Link makes between two and 10 matches a year and could be improved.

“That was a tough thing for me,” Klinkner said. “From working for somebody ... to going and being that somebody — your own boss — and taking on the whole responsibility, that was a big step for me to take.”

And there were times when he worried he had taken that big step off a cliff.

With small farms increasingly difficult to come by in the state due to more retiring farmers selling or renting their land to larger operations, it took him much longer than he expected to find land to start a herd.

“Everybody’s going bigger or getting out,” he found. More than once he asked himself “‘Am I fighting the inevitable? Am I wasting my time even pursuing this dream?’”

Klinkner’s bad luck continued for more than a year until a cousin, another farmer, told him to try contacting a Westby landowner named John Nerison.

“It just so happened that when I talked to (Nerison) in December of 2003, the person who was actually here was leaving and going to buy his own farm,” he said. He scrambled to set up an arrangement with Nerison and by March he was on the farm with 36 head of cattle and some equipment.

Five years later, his farm has grown to about 80 head, and he and his wife, Erin, are raising three children on the farm.

“I don’t think I could have planned it any better,” he said. But, he added, “About 90 percent of it was just plain old luck ... finding the right place at the right time.”