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Creating and maintaining an efficient corporate farm is the best way to compete in a farm economy with perennially low commodity prices.

That's the thinking behind the nearly 30-year-old SanMarbo Farm Corp. in Lyon County south of Amiret.

"We are a commodity producer. Our bushel of corn is the same bushel of corn that you should be able to find anywhere else in the country. Hopefully ours is good quality. We don't produce anything extra special here," said Cal Ludeman during a recent tour of his farm.

The tour of the SanMarbo Farm Corp. was part of a Saturday field trip organized for students in a new course this fall called Introducing Southwest Minnesota. The class is taught by Joe Amato, founder of Southwest State University's Center for Rural and Regional Studies. Local historian Janet Timmerman organized two field trips and is assisting in class instruction.The farm also produces soybeans and hogs and it has a cow/calf herd.

SanMarbo Farms stands in stark contrast to the Buffalo Ridge farm of Richard VanderZiel who adheres to sustainable methods. The two views of farming provided students with a lesson on how different value systems survive in today's economy.

The SanMarbo Farms was incorporated in 1973 by brothers Cal, Brian and Sander Ludeman along with their parents. It consists of 2,750 contiguous acres in southern Lyon County and another 2,000 acres near the state line in Pipestone County.

Cal Ludeman's son, Ben, also joined the corporation six years ago and operates a hog confinement operation that produces 15,000-head annually.

"We've added acres. We've tried to make this our way of life, our living so it supplies enough income for my two brothers, myself and now my son Ben," Cal Ludeman said. "One of the advantages of incorporating back in 1973 is that even though there are four farmers on this farm we don't have to have four lines of equipment." The Ludeman brothers separate their management duties so they can each specialize as much as possible. They are all employees of the corporation and live in houses owned by the corporation.

"We try to integrate the whole thing. The main resource we have here is land. We own most of the land that we farm. We also try to use every resource the land will give us to make a living here," Ludeman said.

Operating efficiently is important to their success.

"What we try is not to hire anyone. We're both the owners, managers and the labor force here. We like it that way. If we wanted to expand much more we'd have to hire someone," he said.

The alternative to operating in a commodity market is to find a niche product. A niche product, like popcorn or raising Angus cattle, takes the business out of the commodity market, Ludeman said.

"We like to do things safer, faster and more economical every year. I guess you'd call us early adaptors. We're not innovators, we don't do anything particularly brand-spanking new but we adapt new technology fairly quickly."

They've adopted the use of 20-inch soybean rows compared with 30-inch, 38-inch and 40-inch rows.

"We don't cultivate any of our land but in return for that we do use a genetically altered soybean in the roundup ready bean which is very popular in all of America now. We don't hardly hear any concerns about it at all. People have accepted roundup ready beans.

"When I was 10 years old I spent most of my summers walking soybeans, pulling cockleburs, volunteer corn," Ludeman said. "This is what we did every summer."

When he started farming he hired kids to ride along and spot spray individual weeds.

Now the process is much different when Roundup Ready soybeans are planted. Once weeds have germinated, the herbicide Roundup or a generic version is sprayed over the entire field. The herbicide kills only the weeds.

"When you drive around, just notice how clean virtually every soybean field is and that was not true 10 years ago," Ludeman said. "We had what we call dirty fields, weedy fields."

"When my son came back to farm we decided we needed one more way to employ him full time," Ludeman said. Each week the operation gets a thousand 40-pound hogs from a Nebraska source. It takes 18 weeks to finish them to 255 pounds. The hogs are confined in fully automated barns for 18 weeks before slaughter.

Once a year 460,000 gallons of manure are pumped out of pits beneath the barns and land applied. The manure is enough to fertilize 500 of the 1,300 acres of corn planted by the farm.

The hog operation is a part-time job, requiring about four hours of work a day.

"My grandfather started in 1904. I probably wouldn't be a farmer if my father wasn't a farmer and my grandfather wasn't a farmer. I think that's kind of the nature of Lyon County farming and southwestern Minnesota farming. It's hard to start farming.

"Its a very capital-intensive business, especially these days. My father paid as little as $60 an acre for some of the land and we've paid as much as $1,900 an acre for some of the land so we believe in dollar cost averaging."

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