MANKATO — It’s a spot on Highway 22 that you may very well drive right by heading to Mapleton from Mankato, but on Tuesday, it was the site of an important celebration.
“We got a big day here out at the Mankato research station; we’re celebrating 100 years of being in the seed business with Pioneer Seeds, started back in 1926, and we’re kind of paying homage to our legacy,” Curt Hoffbeck, district sales lead at the Mankato research station, said.
Pioneer was founded by Henry Wallace all those years ago. Hoffbeck says it all began with a controversial idea: Bigger might not always be better.
“Back in the day, farmers just thought the prettiest biggest cobs were the ones to save back from their fields (for reproduction),” Hoffbeck said. “Wallace, he challenged that theory from the professors at Iowa State and other places. He said, ‘I don’t think it is a beauty contest.’ In fact, some of the uglier, poorer, smaller ears ended up being some of the highest yielders.”
That practice led to Pioneer’s hybrid seed practice, taking genetics from two different stands of corn and bringing them together into a new crop. They were the first to ever bring hybrid seeds to farmers, and it’s the kind of innovation that has kept farmers working with Pioneer for generations.
“They had corn from … 100 years ago, I wanted to see what they looked like,” Kevin Rohwer said. “They had some of them out there and it was nice to see some of the new products that they have coming along in the future.”
Rohwer is a farmer from Dodge Center who has been working with Pioneer Seeds for all his life, and just like so many other of the expected 500 attendees at Tuesday’s celebration, he didn’t just want to learn about the past but wanted a glimpse at the future too.
That glimpse came during a tour of various seed products Pioneer had been using across the last century, ending at a spot where they talked about what could be coming as soon as 2031, including higher-yield producing corn and corn that was shorter, so it was more likely to survive in adverse weather and strong winds. Those innovations should help protect farmers as they face challenging and uncertain times in the industry.
“We have a lot of money invested and yet don’t make any money, so it’s tough to keep doing that,” Rohwer said. “We have been basically breaking even or losing money, probably losing money, so it’s been really hard.”
Those at Pioneer see those challenges, and know how hard it can be, and they understand who’s really been responsible for their longevity over these last 100 years.
“If it wasn’t for the farmers we wouldn’t be here, right? So we kind of just want to show some appreciation back to the farmers themselves for believing in Pioneer and planting Pioneer,” Hoffbeck said. “We just want to say thank you to all the farmers out there for planting Pioneer and being lifelong customers.”