Taking Care: Craig Holm and His Minnesota Farm

Craig Holm likes to mix things up on his farm in Southern Minnesota. Raising corn and beans on about 2,500 acres, he also runs a custom application business—last year spraying about 10,000 acres—and finishes about 9,000 hogs each year on contract.

Holm, 45, says he’s diversified in part because he saw opportunities, but also because he figured commodity prices would eventually soften. “It’s just the cycle,” he says, a lesson, along with many others, he learned from his father, who was also a farmer, as well as his mother, Sally, who still works with him on a semi-retired basis.

Those lessons have served as a foundation, Holm says, upon which he’s added new technologies and practices. For instance, he injects into the soil some 1 million gallons of hog manure from his finishing operation. As a result, he says he gets about 15 to 20 bushels more of corn per acre than if he’d used conventional fertilizer.

Holm has also re-introduced an older method of planting beans—with a grain drill. With the beans planted closer together, he says, “we get the canopy on, so weeds can’t push through, they don’t come up … and 99% of the fields are picture-perfect clean.” He got some 5 bushels more per acre this past harvest as compared to recent years not using the grain drill.

Holm is always looking for an edge, some new practice or technology that can help on his farm, but only those that offer a solid return. Another such leg up has been his Massey Ferguson® and other AGCO equipment.

“They’re second to nothing, that’s for sure,” says Holm, who runs a variety of Massey Ferguson machines, including a combine and three tractors. He also owns Sunflower, White Planters™ and a RoGator® from AGCO.

“The fuel efficiencies are amazing on these new machines,” he says, but without compromising on power and capacity. “These new engines are set up to use the power that they need, but the computers back them down,” says Holm, allowing the engine to run at optimum rpm and thereby reduce fuel consumption.

Speaking of his MF9560 combine, Holm says, “I couldn’t believe how fast we went through harvest last fall … for that combine to do a 300-acre day is really not even a hard day. It was so impressive.”

So much so that his two agronomy consultants, both of whom rode with him, as well as farmers who run other brands, declared it the best of the lot. “They said the other brands out there don’t compare.”

Holm is a willing but cautious adaptor of innovative machinery and other solutions. “I will use the technology if I think I can make it pay,” he says.

For more, see http://www.myfarmlife.com/features/taking-care-craig-holm-and-his-minnesota-farm/.