Winning with New Holland

For several years, Indiana farmer Ben Kron has been participating in the National Corn Yield Contest conducted by the National Corn Growers Association. Considered the premier event for U.S. corn growers, the contest offers farmers good-natured competition along with bragging rights for producing the best yields. 

The growers who enter the competition work with small plots of 10 contiguous acres. Harvest is overseen by a supervisor where yields are measured in increments of 1/10,000th bushel. Competition is fierce, and there have been times when the difference between contestants is less than a bushel.

Ben now has two first-place wins in his pocket, both in the “Strip, Min, Mulch, Ridge-Till Irrigated” category. In 2020, his winning yield was 367.3214 bu/acre; and in 2021 it was 390.7846 bu/acre, more than 42 bushels higher than his closest competitor. These results are pretty impressive when you consider the average national corn yield in 2021 was 177 bu/acre.

In addition to tweaks to fertilizers and seeding rates, Ben sees his New Holland CR8.90 combine as contributing to his wins in a contest where kernels can make all the difference.

“We’re getting the highest yields we can because we’re not leaving anything on the ground,” he says. “Nothing’s coming out of the back of the combine. When I make a pass, I feel like every kernel that’s on a cornstalk and every pod that’s on a bean is in the tank of my combine. I’m not leaving anything behind.”

Family recognition
As a second-generation farmer, Ben produces white and yellow dent corn, soybeans and wheat on 2,000-plus acres he manages in Evansville and Griffin, Indiana, with help from his dad, Randy, his mom, Joyce, and their New Holland CR8.90 combine. 

In a sense, Ben learned from the best. 
Randy has served as the Indiana Farm Bureau president since 2015. In 2021, Randy and Joyce Kron received the Indiana Master Farmer Award, which honors farmers who have contributed significantly to Indiana agriculture and demonstrated success in farming efficiency, stewardship of natural resources and community service.

What makes these achievements so remarkable is that Randy did not grow up farming. Randy’s father farmed as a young man but then spent 25 years working for the Soil Conservation Service. Nonetheless, Randy had a heart for farming, graduating from Purdue University in 1983 with  a bachelor’s degree in agricultural economics.

That same year he married Joyce, and together they knuckled down and started to grow their farm. Randy had already enlarged the farm from 66 acres of family-owned land to 400 acres, beginning in his junior year of high school. 

The early- to mid-1980s were challenging times to start farming. Yields were down due to drought, and as newlyweds, pennies were already tight. Conditions forced Randy and Joyce to work hard and manage carefully. The disciplined habits they learned in their early farming days have served them well.

Along comes Ben
By the time their son Ben was born in the early 1990s, the Krons were running an established farm.

Although Ben considered other careers, even training as a diesel mechanic, by the time he started college, he knew he would be back on the farm. And the timing could not have been better. His father’s increasing role in the farming community over the years, including 14 years as vice president of the Indiana Farm Bureau before becoming president in 2015 meant he had to spend chunks of time away from the farm, sometimes for days at a time.

These days, Ben manages all the day-to-day operations on Kron Farms, ranging from making crop production decisions to setting the day’s priorities for himself and longtime employee Steve Glaser. He taps his dad for  input when it’s time to make a big equipment purchase.  And his mom, Joyce, does whatever needs to be done  from bookkeeping and paperwork to running errands and equipment. 

In the fall, Ben runs the combine. Joyce is his full-time grain cart operator, a difficult job because it’s fast-paced and non-stop. However, after years of working together, they have a tight rhythm. 

“When I pull the combine into a field, she knows where I’m going and how I’m going to open it up and where I’m going to start, which helps a lot,” Ben says. “You never stop moving, unloading on the go, getting it dumped on the truck and back before the combine gets full again. That’s what makes it so tough.” 

The New Holland advantage
The Krons have had New Holland combines going back to the TR™85 model. Currently they’re running a CR8.90 Revelation combine with IntelliSense™. For Ben, IntelliSense has been a game changer.

“It’s fully automated. I just jump in and run. That’s nice! There are obstacles in fields I’ve got to watch out for. We’ve got irrigation and some standpipes and then there are some tree lines. I’m able to watch what I’m doing more than staring at the monitor and making sure I’m not losing any grain,” Ben says. “But honestly, I’ve never had issues with losing grain out of a New Holland combine. I’ve had so many compliments from random people driving by that stopped to say, ‘I just want to let you know that we drive by your fields and they’re the cleanest ones we’ve ever seen,’ and I completely attribute that to the New Holland combine.” 

The IntelliSense system continuously and automatically optimizes threshing, separation and cleaning shoe settings. It offers four automatic driving modes to match given harvesting strategies and requirements: Limited Loss, Best Grain Quality, Maximum Capacity and Fixed Throughput. These operating modes can be further refined to meet specific harvesting conditions. Once the system has been activated, it will remain on and continue to learn throughout the season.

Ben mainly runs his CR8.90 on Best Grain Quality mode, but adds, “We’ve never had grain quality issues or anything that I would call dirty grain where you get things in a tank that you shouldn’t. We don’t have issues with splitting beans or cracking corn, even in wet or real dry crops.”

Other features in the combine that have increased the Krons’ productivity including yield mapping, a powerful lighting package and the comfort of the Harvest Suite™ Ultra cab. 

“We thought mapping was the greatest thing ever when it came out. Now we can physically see the yields in different spots and go back to the spots that had lower yields to figure out if it was a water issue, or a drought issue, or something else and figure out how we can start bringing up the low spots in the field,” says Ben. 

Harvesting on Kron Farms requires 12- to 14-hour days, from late September to November. It is a lot of harvesting before the sun comes up and after it goes down. Ben says that the new light packages are a must-have on combines and tractors because in his words, “When it’s dark, you’re pretty much done.”

Ben estimates he spends 300 to 400 hours a year in his combine, making cab comfort critical. New Holland’s best-in-class seat offering provides outstanding comfort whatever the terrain. Seat comfort, along with ample room in the cab, allows Ben to stretch out his legs on the go and skip some of those 15-minute breaks, adding to his overall productivity.

The Krons’ philosophy of farming has always been one of year-over-year improvement. To that end, their longtime partnership with New Holland combines has been and will continue to be part of their winning strategy.