Meet the farmer who helped Mayo strengthen its understanding of rural health care

Jim Checkel always planned to be a farmer. Growing up on his parents’ farm in the small town of Kasson, Minn., he figured he’d work on the farm full-time once he graduated high school. But his parents wanted him to go to college, so he earned a two-year associate’s degree in auto mechanics and started looking for work.

Some 40 years ago, he applied at the prestigious Mayo Clinic about 15 miles east of his farm, hoping to work on its fleet of vehicles. There were no mechanic positions available, so Checkel accepted an entry-level position in one of Mayo’s research labs.

“I didn't know anything,” Checkel, who is now 66, recalled. “I came into the lab and they're like, ‘Take this test tube and put it in that centrifuge.’ And I'm like, ‘Okay, well, which one's the centrifuge?’"

But Checkel threw himself into the work and launched what turned out to be an unlikely research career, climbing up the ranks and eventually getting hired by Mayo Clinic’s allergy department. Part of the reason he was hired was his background on the farm.

Checkel’s 160-acre plot of land has been in the family since the 1940s. He grew up raising livestock, including sheep, goats, chickens, cattle and even Texas longhorns. More recently, he’s stuck to raising crops like soybeans and corn. After he’d get home from his day job at the hospital, he’d work the land and in the barn late into the night.

As a farmer, he was constantly experimenting and testing out processes and equipment, and he took that mindset into his research work in the allergy department. His colleagues and supervisors noticed and began bringing him onto new projects, like one of Mayo’s first cell culturing labs.

He recalled his boss’s frequent refrain: “You’re a farmer. Farmers grow stuff. Figure it out.”

With just that two-year associate’s degree in auto mechanics, Checkel advanced from an entry-level lab tech to a senior research position in the hospital’s allergy department, authoring dozens of papers and running labs.

The health care needs of people living in rural areas, particularly for those who work in agriculture, are often overlooked or misunderstood. Checkel and his colleagues found that he could help medical professionals at the prestigious hospital gain a deeper understanding of the health care needs of the southeast Minnesota farmers they treated.

Checkel’s agriculture background helped him advance in his science career, but it also gave him a window into some blind spots within the world-renowned hospital. Although Mayo Clinic is surrounded by rural areas and farmland, many of its medical staff — recruited from urban areas and countries around the world — aren’t familiar with common injuries or illnesses typical with farm life.

“I worked with people from 32 or 33 different countries,” Checkel said. “Somebody from South Africa, have they ever seen ragweed? No. Mayo would be wanting tests for these different things that farmers were being exposed to, and a lot of people didn't know what that was.”

Taking stock of this knowledge gap, Checkel looked for ways to share his knowledge with his colleagues. His first step: inviting them to his farm.

He started hosting groups of his colleagues at his farm for what he called Farm Days. He'd show them common allergens firsthand and explore the plant. He’d teach Mayo staff about the different types of mold that can grow in humid grain silos and the various illnesses it can cause. He'd run coveralls stuffed with newspapers or straw through different farm equipment to show how farmers could sustain injuries.

“He wanted to kind of point out to these emergency room doctors, just how dangerous this equipment is and the kind of injury you might run into,” said Guy Griesmann, Checkel’s friend and former coworker at Mayo Clinic.

Checkel continued hosting these events at his farm for decades until his retirement in 2022. Mayo Clinic said the impact is long-lasting.

Even after his retirement, Checkel has continued to contribute to training the medical community about farm life and rural health issues. In 2024, the Zumbro Valley Medical Society, a local medical association, launched a new rural medicine elective at Mayo Clinic’s medical school. The elective later expanded with the help of the Minnesota Foundation for Agriculture and the Minnesota Farm Bureau.

Checkel helped design the curriculum, which includes discussions of persistent rural health issues, including the mental health crisis in agricultural communities. The program includes visits with rural ambulance teams to discuss common calls they receive and the constraints around emergency medicine in rural areas. And, of course, Checkel invites students to his farm for a version of Farm Days like he did with his colleagues at Mayo.

“Jim Checkel reflects Mayo Clinic’s spirit of service and innovation,” a Mayo Clinic spokesperson said. “His multifaceted background and dedication to patients strengthened our understanding of rural health and enriched the training of future physicians. His contributions continue to be felt across the organization.”

Beth Kangas, executive director of Zumbro Valley Medical Society, said partnering with Checkel was vital in getting the elective ramped up quickly.

"It would take so long to even be able to think about what we'd want to include, and then sort of track down somebody and start building relationships with them,” Kangas said. “It could be a year-long project just to get things going, instead of the four months that it took."

The elective course and Checkel’s other work to strengthen the medical community’s understanding of rural medical needs is all the more urgent at a time when rural health care is in a state of crisis nationwide, driven in part by a shortage of medical professionals willing to live and work in small towns and rural areas.

Checkel hopes sharing his passion for both farming and health care could lead to a small measure of change. Maybe his students will approach rural patients differently. Maybe they’ll ask different questions. Maybe they’ll notice things they haven’t noticed before.

“If I can show one doctor — when he's in an emergency room and a farmer comes in and he's got some issue — [and he knows to ask], ‘You wouldn't happen to raise sheep, would you?’ because he's been out here [at the farm] and he's seen these things,” Checkel said. “Maybe [this doctor or med student] had no passion to work in a rural hospital or a rural clinic, but maybe now he does.”

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