Kron’s farm story didn’t take the usual route

EVANSVILLE, Ind. — For Randy Kron, the president of Indiana Farm Bureau, the path to farming didn’t take the usual route. Instead, like the rural roads in southwest Indiana that lead to Kron’s farm, there were twists and turns, hills and valleys.

Kron and his family hosted the 2021 Purdue Farm Management Tour, a two-day tour of farms in Vanderburgh and Posey counties.

James Mintert, director of the Center for Commercial Agriculture, talked to the Krons about their early days in farming.

This was an unusual situation because you didn’t grow up farming, you launched a farming operation upon graduation from college. Tell us about that?

Randy: “My dad farmed in his younger years. He went to work for the Soil Conservation Service and he worked there for 25 years and he had quit farming for 20-plus years. The DC Case, the orange tractor out there, was the only tractor that was here when I had this crazy idea that I wanted to farm.

“I started my junior year of high school, started farming 66 acres. I pulled the planter with that tractor. I started with 66 acres and did that for a few years. I left and went to Purdue in 1979. I was able to grow the farm to about 400 acres when I graduated Purdue. Joyce and I married in November of 1983. I say 1983 is when I really started farming because you’re married and you have to pay bills, so things got pretty serious.

“If you remember 1983, it was a drought year. It was a terrible year to get started because yields around here were terrible. Joyce worked in town for health insurance and literally put food on the table because any dollars we made on the farm, we rolled back in.

“I remember thinking, when I graduated from Purdue, if I make it to 1,000 acres, life will be good. We’re more than double that and we’re still trying to figure out how do we do this.”

Starting farming in the early to mid 1980s was a challenging time, but it actually did create some opportunities in terms of your ability to rent land and acquire machinery.

Randy: “It did. It was a tough time and I think it did give us opportunities. I honestly think it made us better managers because the pennies mattered. When you don’t have many pennies, you are paying attention to every penny and I am confident it made us keep our books a lot closer and watch them. We tracked everything. We tracked every farm and every expense.

“We don’t do it quite as detailed as we did then, but when the pennies mattered, we wanted to know. We tracked every piece of equipment and the expenses of what we were doing repairs on so you could look and see. Sometimes you get a surprise when you look back and realize how much you spent on one piece of equipment over a year, so we tracked every single thing.”

One component of your strategy was to buy all used equipment, preferably at auction, and hopefully at some bargain prices.

Randy: “We went to auctions. There were a lot of auctions during that time. We bought the cheapest horsepower we could find anywhere, just to get horsepower. We had a Massey tractor, we had several orange tractors, but it was whatever we could get a low cost, just trying to cash flow and make things go.”

One of the things we heard before we got here — and it becomes more and more true every day — is that the glue that holds this operation together is named Joyce. Joyce, elaborate a little bit about your role.

Joyce: “Things were really tight when we first got married and I worked full time, then I would help on the farm in the evenings when I could. Like Randy said, everything we made on the farm went back to the farm so we could build it up to what we have. I do whatever needs to be done.

“In the spring I pull anhydrous tanks, I work ground, I plant beans. In the fall, I have the honor of running the auger wagon. Whenever Randy was doing other things, I ran the combine for a long time, but when somebody came back from college, I got demoted. I take care of all of the books and any paperwork that needs to be done.”

One of your goals from day one was to increase the size of the farm because you knew it wasn’t big enough. You had a pretty explicit financial management strategy for how to do that. Can you elaborate on that?

Randy: “My dad instilled many things, but two of them I remember are — you always want to leave things better than you found them and there’s always room for improvement. No matter how good you are doing, what you are doing, there is always room for improvement.

“Because of Joyce’s dad and the Ohio River bottoms, that area is a big white corn area. This area was not, but we figured out we could grow white corn. The ground over there where we were at is probably No. 2 ground at best and we figured out, yield wise, that we had very little yield drag, but we could get fairly good premiums for white corn, but it took some management. We did things like that.

“We grew non-GMO beans. We grew non-GMO corn. We grew mums for about 10 years and sold them until we picked up some more ground.

“We’ve done a lot of different things trying to figure out how to make those pennies come together. No special recipe. A lot of hard work. Being blessed, we were very fortunate. The good Lord has taken care of us very well. We’ve been lucky.”