A chance to come back to the farm
By ANNE COOK
News-Gazette Staff Writer

   PARIS, Ill. – Driving down back roads of Edgar County, Jeff Moody reflects on his good fortune.
   After weighing several different career options, he settled down to study production agriculture at Lake Land Community College and then came back home to his Paris roots.
   He's 23 now, a full partner in the Moody farming business. At just the right time, his father and uncle, Don and Kent Moody, picked up more land to bring him into an operation that now covers 8,000 acres extending 23 miles in all directions from their Paris base.
   "Not many people my age have the chance to come back to farm," said Moody, the family's designated computer technology expert. "If we hadn't picked up ground when we did, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing."
   "Farmers are getting older," said Don Moody, a 47-year-old, third-generation farmer. "A lot of them are just getting by, and there's no room for anyone else in their operation. To survive and thrive, you have to be more competitive."
   "This is a family farm, but we run on a corporate scale," Jeff Moody said.
   Industry observers say one of farmers' biggest jobs these days is keeping pace with changes in their business.
   "I think we'll see as much technological change in the next decade as we have in the past 200 years," said William Kirk, senior vice president for agricultural products at DuPont.
   "The outlook continues to be great," said Warren Goetsch, acting chief of the Illinois Department of Agriculture's division of natural resources.
   "If advances in the past 100 years look significant, the next 100 years should be phenomenal."
   Kirk, who spoke recently at the University of Illinois about changes in the industry, said farmers and agricultural businesses face more difficulties and adjustments today than they have in 15 to 20 years.
   "But the environment creates a lot of energy for change," he said. "No one can stand still long and remain in business."
   Steve Sonka, head of the UI-based National Soybean Research Laboratory, believes technology is the key to future success in the field and in research laboratories.
   "In the past we've been saying to customers, 'Here's what we grow. Do something with it,'" Sonka said. "It's like the car industry in the '70s. Technology is offering us the chance to learn to accept new opportunities and figure out how to beat the competition."
   Diversification is the key to the Moodys' operation. They have tried just about everything that fits into their diverse schedules, focusing on physical operations rather than diversity in the field.
   Don and Kent Moody raised hogs until seven years ago, feeding out 7,000 head a year until the
   demands on their time grew too much. They bought their first semitrailer tractor truck in 1980 to haul coal. Now they use their five-truck fleet to haul grain to river terminals or to Danville processors.
   "We have raised specialty crops . . . when the market was profitable," said Don Moody, who's also been an Asgrow seed dealer for years.
   "White corn is a good market, but it's hard to get contracts," Jeff Moody said.
   The Moodys started hauling fertilizer, buying it in bulk and reselling it to neighbors and that led them to another new business, storing chemicals and custom applications for a company that's affiliated with supply giant Con Agra Inc.
   "We know which way we're heading, so we became our own dealer," said Don Moody, who bought his first farmland with his brother when they were 12 and 13.
   "If you stay where you are, it's the same as falling back," Jeff Moody said.
   DuPont's Kirk said two forces have put a new face on farming – mechanization and chemistry. He said biotechnology and information technology are now making changes as great or greater.
   "With biotech, things are happening in two or three years that took decades before," Kirk said. "Scientists have new tools to help plants do things they couldn't do before.
   "With infotech, learning cycles are so much shorter."
   Kirk listed four changes he expects to occur very quickly, and he challenged farmers and industry representatives to keep pace.
   He said:
   – Biotech is driving a systems approach to crop management and giving farmers opportunities to attack problems from several different directions.
   – Genetic advances will open up huge new opportunities to develop crops with value-added traits, like foods tailored to prevent disease or corn with properties to make a new, better polyester.
   "There are huge opportunities to improve our environment," Kirk said.
   – Special crops will be accompanied by fundamental changes in marketing systems.
   "Agriculture's becoming a consumer model, and there's a paradigm shift at the farm level," Kirk said. "Farmers will have to put as much energy into marketing as they do into growing."
   – Information technology will link the whole food supply system and products will be "identity-preserved" so consumers can trace food origins.
   "It's an exciting time because of the opportunities and the energy," Kirk said. "Farmers will grow custom crops – better food, fiber, medicine and industrial products, not better corn and soybeans.
   "Those who are on the cutting edge will prosper, but they will have to be on their toes and make changes."
   "We're a step beyond GPS," said Don Moody of the computerized field systems that form the foundation for prescription farming, a system that allows farmers to map exact soil types in their fields, plan fertilizer application according to those maps and monitor results.
   Donna Moody – Don's wife, Jeff's mother – still keeps farm financial records on paper although the family's planning to upgrade soon to computer record-keeping.
   But the Moodys invested their first computer dollars in equipment that will make them money in the field, most recently a 20-ton fertilizer spreader on tracks with scales, something rarely seen in central Illinois fields.
   Jeff's the expert on how it works. He said computers control the spreader, varying rates using information from soil maps and sophisticated satellite-based guidance technology in the cab.
   "It worked well considering we just started," said Jeff of the trial runs. "It runs off radar and all hydraulics run off electronics and I thought something would happen since there's no ground drive. But it didn't."
   Jeff is waiting for the laptop he's ordered to tie in another piece of the system.
   "I can take it to the field in fall to download yield cards from the combine," he said.
   The expensive machine has another feature. In a matter of minutes, the Moodys can take the spreader off the tracks and mount a 1,000-bushel grain cart on them to keep up with the three combines they run to harvest their crops in about a month.
   "This cart is too expensive to sit for nine months," Jeff said. "If you use it for two different things, you can make money with it."
   The family stores corn and soybeans in 55 bins at various locations on their farms – a total of 700,000 bushels of storage that gives them more marketing flexibility. Kent Moody is the storage monitor.
   "We're always looking for new options," said Don Moody who, with his brother and son, built grain legs, machine sheds and other components that keep their system running smoothly.
   Jeff, who committed himself to agriculture when he bought 88 acres of ground in high school, is interested in growing more specialty crops – and adding technology to make them work better.
   "Industry is coming out with systems that measure the content of grain, its characteristics, and that would be useful to specialty growers," he said.
   "There will be crops in the future that we don't even know about now," he said. "Our risks keep getting higher because profit margins are so tight so we have to be prepared to do different things."
   The UI College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences changed its name five years ago to better reflect its mission to what Sonka calls "a new connected world" in agriculture, and like farmers, faculty members find the changes a challenge.
   "The wiring is going to fray, and we're all going to be uncomfortable," says Steven Pueppke, ACES associate dean for research.
   "We're putting together multidisciplinary teams of researchers to solve complex problems, problems like corn rootworms changing habits and threatening rotation," Pueppke said.
   "We need to figure out how to meet the needs of people who have as much access to information on computers as we do. We now have competition."
   One role, Pueppke said, is to help constituents sort out the "oceans of data out there, rivers of information but only drops of knowledge."
   "We're in the business of helping farmers, and we have to help them capture value so they can share the profits with industry."
   "The idea of a customer never occurred to my Dad," said Sonka, whose roots go back to an Iowa farm. "Hogs were just hogs."
   He said farmers must now focus on how their products will be used, on adding value for their consumers – and putting premiums in their own pockets – because they can no longer count on consumers buying generic crops, Sonka said.
   He said genetics and biotechnology generated that shift from "low separability and low segregation to high separability and high segregation" in the marketplace.
   "The farmers who figure out how to link their products with their customers will be in good shape," Sonka said.

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