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From these fields, Kip Cullers produced 155 bushels of soybeans an acre in 2007 — a world record. *
Photo: Beth Perkins * They came over the prairie in their pickup trucks, in the cool, quiet hours before dawn. They rolled through the gentle foothills of the Ozarks in air-conditioned tour buses with paintings of stagecoaches airbrushed on the black-lacquered side panels. They came wearing mud-smudged 10-gallon hats and frayed John Deere baseball caps. And then they stepped down out of their vehicles, each one of these farmers, and set foot on holy ground.
It is here, on the rust-colored loam of Stark City, Missouri (population 156), that Kip Cullers became the soybean king of the world. In 2007, Cullers harvested 155 bushels of soybeans per acre from a small plot—eclipsing his own world record of 139. (The US average is 40.) It is also here, on another section of his 11,000-acre farm in 2007, that Cullers grew 329 bushels of corn per acre—not a world record but enough for a top prize at the National Corn Yield Contest.
Cullers is 44. He is a devout Baptist who named his two sons Noah and Naaman after people in the Old Testament. He is thin—rail thin—and carries the twitchy, antic vibe of an early David Byrne. He blinks constantly and has a habit of furrowing his brow. When he takes a dip of chewing tobacco, he taps his tin of Copenhagen twice, quickly. The farmers have come here from Nebraska and Minnesota and Arkansas to behold his work. Cullers' success has made him a celebrity in the farming world. At conferences and conventions across the US and Canada, he gives speeches to crowds of thousands. He has taken his road show to Argentina and Chile. Missouri governor Matt Blunt has sonorously proclaimed him "the Babe Ruth" of soybean production. Cullers calls himself "an ignorant hillbilly," but there's no doubt he's a genius in the science of yield—and, some argue, a frontline warrior in the burgeoning global food crisis.
With demand for corn-based ethanol mounting, and China's and India's hunger for corn-fed chicken and beef climbing, the cost of staple foods has never been higher. The price of yellow corn has doubled over the past two years, and poor people worldwide are struggling. Thirty-three nations are now at risk for social unrest due to rising food prices, according to World Bank president Robert Zoellick. In Thailand, rice farmers guard their paddies at night. Last spring, in Haiti, five people died in a weeklong food riot that culminated with protestors storming the presidential palace.
This upheaval represents an opportunity for companies like Iowa-based Pioneer Hi-Bred, Cullers' main sponsor. A DuPont subsidiary, Pioneer grossed $3.3 billion in 2007, primarily from the sale of bioengineered seeds; its chief rival, Monsanto, topped $11 billion in 2008. These businesses are based on the promise that science can help farmers boost yield. "We have to feed the world," says William Niebur, Pioneer's vice president of crop genetics R&D, "and we can, by increasing productivity per acre. And if we bring people food, there will be political stability, which leads to economic growth."
Cullers has positioned himself as a liaison between Big Biotech and the farming community. "Kip believes that high yield is his mission, his role," Niebur says, "and so he shares what he learns. He talks with us at Pioneer; he talks with other farmers. It's like he's trying to create a Linux users' group for corn and soybeans. He's open source."
So open that he's hosting some 1,800 farmers in Stark City for Kip Cullers' Record Breaking Field Day. Sponsored by Pioneer and German chemical conglomerate BASF, the event is meant as an opportunity for Cullers to pass on his wisdom—and sing the praises of Pioneer's products.
Cullers walks across the grounds and through the huge wedding-style tents, surrounded by a phalanx of Pioneer reps who confer with him soberly in their matching gold polo shirts. Even at his own party, he seems distant, inscrutable. He inspires wonder. "He's doing shit with soybeans that a lot of us aren't," says Jeff Mezera, a corn farmer from Bagley, Wisconsin.
Eventually, a crowd gathers in the tent dubbed Kip's Conference Room, and Cullers strides to the mic. He's chatty and casual. He jokes that one gold-shirted muckety-muck is "Pioneer's vice president for complaints." He spits a stream of chaw onto the grass and says, "If you got any complaints, you talk to him." Then things get down to the fine details of tending the land. One farmer asks Cullers, "What are your P and K levels?"
Signs identify the Pioneer seed varieties Cullers has planted.
Photo: Beth Perkins Cullers assiduously logs his phosphorus and potassium levels, and he seems to be combing his brain for the numbers. But then he opts for discretion, more Bill Gates than Linus Torvalds. "They're good," he says, jauntily. "My P and K levels are good."
Competitive corn growing dates to the middle of the 19th century, when America's civic leaders, seeking to instill discipline and industry in children, began hosting contests. A 1951 book titled The 4-H Story describes "young Franklin B. Spaulding" of East Otto, New York, as he stood by his collection of Dutton Yellow corn in 1856: "His pulse must have quickened with sudden, overwhelming triumph when the party of dignified judges, passing by the other exhibitors, walked up to him and handed him 50 dollars as first prize in the state corn contest."
Grown-ups got into the contests, too. Francis Childs, who died in 2008 at age 68, was the most controversial of the competitive corn growers. In 2002, he stunned the Farm Belt with a new world record, growing 442 bushels of corn per acre on his farm in Manchester, Iowa. Like Cullers, Childs lectured throughout the Midwest. He espoused growing techniques that were then revolutionary—super-deep plowing, for instance, and high-dosage fertilizing.
Source: US Department of Agriculture But in 2003, during a nasty divorce, Childs' wife charged that he had cheated earlier that year when the National Corn Growers Association came to weigh his crops. "He parked wagons out there that already had corn in them," Lois Childs testified, "and you're supposed to have empty wagons."
Once the province of a few fanatics, more cost-effective chemicals and seeds have led to a boom in competitive farming. In 2007, the number of entrants in the National Corn Yield Contest, steady at about 3,000 for years, soared to nearly 5,000. Last year, it was 6,700. Everyone still wonders: Is 442-bushel corn actually possible, or was Childs a fraud?
At Kip Cullers' Record Breaking Field Day, a solemn respect for the dead prevails. "Francis was a good man," says Dave Knau, a Pioneer sales administrator. "He was a personal friend." But the new king of corn is more cautious. "I ain't even gonna talk about Francis Childs," Cullers says. "I ain't even gonna mention Francis Childs' name."
The relationship between Cullers and Pioneer benefits both. The company provides him tiny batches of prototype seeds. "They'll just give me a handful," he tells me, cupping his palms together, "and maybe there'll only be 10 times that much in the whole world. It's not for any Joe Blow; they only give it to the cream of the crop—you know, the top farmers."
In exchange, Pioneer gets detailed field reports from an obsessed autodidact. Cullers never went to college, but he rises at 3:30 each morning to study plant genetics online. Right now, he's urging Pioneer to genetically weave a bit of stiffening fiber into soybean stalks. Cullers plants 300,000 soybeans per acre, double the national average. In these super-dense fields, he explains, soy plants grow taller, fighting for sunlight. "They fall down a lot," he says, "and you lose photosynthesis. The trifoliates don't pump nutrients to the beans. And you get disease, too. It's crowded and humid out there, down low."
Cullers learned farming as a kid. His stepfather was a dairy farmer who kept 50 cows on a 400-acre spread, but it was his small patches of corn that thrilled Cullers most. "Corn's my passion," he says with a rare flourish of lyricism. "Soybeans are my backup plan, but corn, it's a robust plant. It's something you gotta mature for a long time. It's a challenge: Basically, you have one week every year when you can't screw it up—mid-June, when it's tasseling and pollinating and everything counts. That week is exciting. It feels like the start of a race."
Cullers remembers hiking around his stepdad's farm to check on tasseling corn. At night, he would fall asleep dreaming of perfect corn—10 feet tall, with two ears on every plant and each ear sprouting a kingly 50 rings of 20 kernels.
Pioneer provides Cullers with tiny batches of prototype seeds; in exchange, he supplies the company with detailed field reports.
Photo: Beth Perkins In his twenties and thirties, Cullers farmed 5,000 acres of vegetables. Every field had to be hand hoed. He oversaw 150 seasonal workers until once, he told me, "we screwed up. We sent a live mouse down there to a baby food company along with our squash. They dumped like thousands of cases of baby food. They was scared they had rodent hairs in them."
Cullers tightened his operation. "I'm a micromanager," he says. "I'm a control freak. My wife thinks I'm stressed out. All I do every day now, all day long, is crisis management. With corn and soybeans, you've got your highest yield potential on the first day you plant. After that"—his tone grows wistful—"things start going wrong. I can walk through a field and find 5,000 things wrong with it. You're always dealing with something hypercritical, like an infestation of Japanese beetles. I work six days a week, right up until it gets dark, and when she's balls to the wall, I work Sundays, too."
Cullers adjusts his cap and stares off into the distance dolefully—trapped, it seems, by his own success. He has become the Grow Man, the superstar of bionic ag, and now he seems resolved to do whatever the role demands. When a BASF film crew approaches him later in the day seeking a sound bite, he dutifully plays along.
"We want employees to know you are pleased to be working with BASF," the producer tells him.
"You know," Cullers begins, "it's great to be working with BASF ..."
How does Kip do it? That's the question on everyone's mind at the field day, of course. Cullers doesn't just put seeds in the ground and hope for the best. Modern farming is science, awash in crazily capable machinery and in technicalities that can befuddle the average farmer of a few hundred acres. Cullers himself owns some 15 tractors, the fanciest of which costs $185,000 and steers itself with GPS tech. He burns up thousands of cell phone minutes each month talking to Pioneer and BASF technical advisers—chemistry PhDs who can expound on the relative merits of Respect insecticide, formulated from zeta-cypermethrin, and `, which is rich in pyraclostrobin.
Dozens of these experts are on hand for the field day. They set up little teaching stations and stand there—in the 90-degree heat, in stagnant air as humid as an athletic sock—explicating Cullers' strategies. At one station, BASF sales rep Dale Ashby extols Cullers' unusually high herbicide use. "What Kip does, to get early-season weed pressure out of the way," he says, "is spray an herbicide before he plants. Kip likes Extreme, and also Pursuit."
Then there are the seeds themselves. Leon Streit, a senior research scientist at Pioneer, touts the lab development of his company's new high-yield Y Series soybeans. Until recently, geneticists have focused on "defensive" genes such as rhg1, which resists soybean cyst nematodes. But in creating the Y beans, Pioneer scientists sought out "offensive" genes—the very material that makes soybeans sprout and grow.
They did so, in part, by employing an ancient agriculture tactic: They took crosses of elite soybean plants and inbred them with thousands of experimental varieties, each with a distinct genetic makeup. They calculated the yield from each progeny—and then they got fancy. Using DNA fingerprinting technology, Pioneer scanned the genes in each plant to determine which correlated with yield. "We were originally looking for a specific yield gene," Pioneer senior research scientist Scott Sebastian says, "but yield doesn't work that way. We learned that it's a complex interaction of many traits and the environment." Pioneer's promotional literature claims that Y Series beans will help farms increase yield by 40 percent over the next decade.
In 2007, on a section of his 11,000-acre farm Cullers grew 329 bushels of corn per acre — not a world record but enough for a top prize at the National Corn Yield Contest.
Photo: Beth Perkins Still, the Y beans aren't the most celebrated genetically modified product at the field day. Under one tent, guarded 24/7 by the Newton County police, is a small blue plastic tub containing four stalks of corn. The plants appear ordinary, but they sprouted from seeds that feature a patented, proprietary, and as yet unreleased Pioneer trait, Optimum GAT. It makes them resistant to not one but two types of pesticide—glyphosate, a popular weed killer that Monsanto sells as Roundup, as well as a whole family of chemicals known as ALS herbicides.
Pioneer created Optimum GAT in a Redwood City, Calfornia, lab by splicing a bacterium called Bacillus licheniformis into corn and soy genes. The company hails the trait as a deft response to a big problem in agriculture: the proliferation of weeds that, over years, have built up a resistance to herbicides.
Optimum GAT, with its "shuffled" genes, closely resembles bioengineered seeds that Monsanto has been creating for more than a decade. And its principal magic, it seems, is economic: Currently, Monsanto holds the patent to the sole glyphosate-resistant technology, Roundup Ready. Pioneer pays Monsanto tens of millions of dollars a year to license Roundup Ready—and as Cullers puts it, Optimum GAT "will free us all from a certain company in St. Louis."
But for all the wonders of Pioneer's laboratories, the real secret to Cullers' success might be more prosaic. Kendall Lamkey, the Pioneer distinguished chair in maize breeding and the agronomy department head at Iowa State University, doesn't dismiss chemicals, but he feels that technology is not the ultimate answer. "With Kip," he says, "it basically comes down to elbow grease. He walks his contest plots daily. He's checking his soy plants to avoid flower abortion. He keeps his plants cool by spraying a thin mist when it's hot. He pays close attention—that's what a good farmer does. The work hasn't really changed much over the decades."
On the last day, the heat breaks and rain comes gushing down out of the sky in torrents. It is almost biblical: Everywhere you walk, it seems, there is a raging stream with a soggy black Optimum GAT-branded baseball hat floating in it. The guests gather in "Kip's Cafeteria," where local Mennonite women, dressed in prim white aprons and hairnets, dish up lunch. The farmers are mostly gone by now, leaving the Pioneer reps and their BASF counterparts. They sit together, addressing their pork chops and blueberry pie, and speculate hopefully about the future of high-yield agriculture.
"I talked to Kip last night," murmurs Pioneer senior marketing manager Tracy Linbo, "and he said that 200-bushel soybeans are not outside the realm of possibility."
Later, Cullers sits alone in the cafeteria tent, wearing a BASF polo shirt and a pair of Big Smith overalls so baggy he practically disappears in them. The place is a mess, scattered with muddy paper plates and pork bones. "I'm wore out," he says. "At a thing like this, everyone's always tugging at you. I don't know if we ever want to do this again. I've got 5 million things to do." He cracks out his cell and begins making rapid-fire calls. The whole of one message is, "Hey Bruce, give me a holler."
I ask him if he has any qualms about using genetically modified seeds given the controversy surrounding them. "No," he says.
Cullers twists his legs up toward him awkwardly, so that the front feet of his chair are resting on the toes of his boots. He stares at me, waiting.
"You know that passage in Genesis," I say, "the one about taking 'dominion' over 'all the earth'? Does that inspire you?"
"No," he says. "I don't think about that." He looks out toward his corn now. "Corn is my hobby. Some people go fishing. Some people ride bicycles. I grow corn. All I ever wanted to do was grow stuff. I love making stuff grow. I love seeing how far you can push it." He's possessed of a rare simplicity, a purity of focus that exists, usually, only in athletes—in people who spend their whole life in pursuit of perfection and glory.
I say good-bye and drive off over a long, straight gravel road. Corn lines my path. It is high and green in its rows, and I can't even imagine what sort of strange magic these fields will sprout in the future.
Bill Donahue (billdonahue.net), a writer based in Portland, Oregon, has been nominated for two National Magazine Awards.
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