View From The Cab

By David Tollefson, Columnist

An interesting story by Chris Bennett of Farm Journal in the January 2023 issue caught my eye.

I have heard of Ken Ferrie for many years, mainly in Farm Journal articles. He is well-known in the field of agriculture for his test plots through the years.

Here is the article, edited for length:

Gripping a wood club, 18-year-old Ken Ferrie descended into the bowels of a grain elevator leg pit containing a fetid soup of 1-foot deep rotting soybeans.

Atop putrid grain, Ferrie and a co-worker shoveled foul beans into a roped, 5-gallon bucket, stopping only to club rats that skittered across their boots, before calling to another worker to haul up the bucket. Wash, rinse, repeat until the pit was clean.

“I though I knew all about life before I went in that leg pit,” Ferrie recalls. “Reality hit me: The guy shoveling beside me had been there 10 years, and the bucket guy had been there 15. I knew I was these guys in 10 years unless I made a change.” Thus, an unlikely spark lit Ferrie’s fire and steered him toward life as a national agriculture resource and the first Farm Journal Field Agronomist. He walks a wire between infectious optimism and painful plain speak.

“Across my whole career, I’ve tried to speak on the good, bad and ugly,” Ferrie says.  “Even though it can get brutal, it’s my job to shoot straight.”

TEACHER AT HEART

Ferrie is a teacher at heart: Throw him the tiniest bone of a question, and he makes a meal.

“If I wasn’t in farming, I’d be teaching history or agriculture,” he says. “Then again, I couldn’t stand not being around farmers.”

In 1991, in tandem with his wife, Jeanenne, Ferrie founded Crop-Tech Consulting. The outfit’s footprint reaches farmers across the U.S. with soil testing, recommendations and services, along with 150-plus tale-of-the-tape test plots every year.

CRESCO TO HEYWORTH

Born in a large Catholic family of 12 kids, Ferrie’s childhood was spent on a 160-acre farm in northeast Iowa, just outside Cresco. These are the boyhood stomping grounds of Norman Borlaug, an agricultural titan who served as a seminal influence in Ferrie’s life.

“My parents had a small livestock and dairy farm, with some poultry and farrow-to-finish hogs,” he says. “Picking rocks, feeding pigs, baling hay and milking cows was all normal life. Twelve kids are a heck of a labor pool.”

Upon high school graduation, Ferrie worked at the local co-op, intent on a career there, but the leg pit rats cured him of such aspirations. He jumped tracks and went to junior college.

Debt, even to 18-year-old Ferrie, was garlic to a vampire. He took college courses in the morning and drove a fertilizer truck until dark, then walked across the road to an elevator to run a corn dryer all night.

Two years later, agriculture business degree in hand, Ferrie’s plans collapsed due to the 1980’s anemic farm economy. (Ferrie later earned a four-year degree in ag business and ag science from Illinois State University.) The boy from Cresco received seven job offers across the Midwest.

Ferrie grabbed the offer that was furthest away and paid the least – in Clinton, Illinois – but offered the most for him to learn.

Ferrie took on the role as production specialist at a wholesale company with retail facilities.

“It was a unique job because I was a salesman, but I was also an applicator, crop scout and soil tester,” he says. “It was immersion in production agriculture.”

INFORMATION BROKER

In a nutshell, Ferrie served as an information broker, observing what worked on one farm versus another. He rose quickly through the ranks, weathering buyouts and consistently gaining new farmer customers.

In one closeout, Ferrie gained a crucial lesson when 90% of his customers followed him to a new facility.

“It was a lightbulb moment, he recalls.  “They were buying from me because of consultation on fertilizer, herbicide, insects and more.”

Ferrie’s climb continued until he slammed into the brick wall of new management. Farmers were adopting soil testing, he says, and the results often resulted in a drop in fertilizer applications. Company management frowned on the mathematics: less fertilizer, less sales.

“They said, ‘we can’t have widespread diminishment of fertilizer use,’ and the they tried to rein me in,” Ferrie recalls. “There was no way I was going to be part of that.  I was through.”

BARE BONES

Reputation intact, he shook the dust off his shoes. Living in a 600-sq. foot rental house at 29, with Jeanenne and their two children, Ferrie was within arm’s length of his own business, big on ambition but skinny on resources.

“I wanted to start my own company,” he says, “but I had little net worth.”

Backed by a steady job in Bloomington, Jeanenne responded to her husband’s conundrum with a fastball down the middle. “You can do this so go for it,” she said. “I’ll cover the bills and you fire up the engine.” (Vital in the company growth, Jeanenne later dropped her city job to become Crop-Tech controller.)

Running lean, Ferrie placed dual pillars beneath the foundation of Crop-Tech. The first: sell nothing.

“We don’t push a product or sell anything,” he says. “There are no commissions. We’ll test and show you the results, and the rest is up to you. Once farmers understood the system, it became part of our reputation.”

The second bare bones. “We tell farmers the truth, even if they don’t want to hear it,” Ferrie says.

SHORTY OLSON

In spring of 1992, Lawrence “Shorty” Olson knocked on Crop-Tech’s door. By mid-summer, roughly at July tassel, Ferrie stood in Olson’s Dewitt County corn, staring at odd gaps and the glaring absence of a “picket fence.”

Olson had just bought a brand-new planter. “I’ll never forget his words,” Olson says. “Ken looked at me and said, ‘Shorty, you need a new planter.’”

Frustrated, Olson declined, despite the planter placing inconsistent spacing between seeds and sometimes dropping multiple seeds together. Ferrie contacted the dealer and obtained a specialized drum to improve function – a band-aid.

The next season, Olson ran the planter and saw improved, but sub-par, results. Once again, Ferrie spoke up, “Shorty, you need a new planter.”

Olson bit into reality and traded for a Kinze planter. Boom.

“I was flabbergasted,” Olson says. “My yields jumped 20 bushels per acre the first year I used it. Equidistant spacing made all the difference. Ken made money for me, and I stuck with him until the day I retired.”

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Please contact David Tollefson with thoughts or comments on this or future columns at: adtollef@hcinet.net