Ben Voss, an agricultural engineer, former CEO of Morris Industries, and now inventor of a swath aerator called The Arrow, joins Dan to talk about running a profitable 1,000 acre farm without chasing scale. He covers the economics of staying small on purpose, his experiments intercropping sweet clover with canola, and the frustrated-hay-producer origin story behind The Arrow. The tension is that most of the industry has decided bigger is the only path to survival, while Voss has built a career, and a farm, proving margin matters more than acres. Producers walk away with a different way to think about the tools and crops worth trying at a smaller scale.
A thousand acres is small by today's standards, and Ben Voss built his operation around that fact instead of fighting it. An agricultural engineer, former CEO of Morris Industries, and now inventor of a swath aerator called The Arrow, Voss runs his farm on margin, not scale, with no hired labor and a full career happening at the same time.
What's Inside
- How a 1,000 acre farm stays profitable without chasing more land or more iron
- Why intercropping sweet clover with canola cuts disease pressure and fertilizer cost at the same time
- The story behind The Arrow, a swath aerator built from a frustrated hay producer's welding shop fix
- How lifting tough barley swaths let three combines start three hours earlier in the same harvest
- What running a public company as CEO taught him about risk that farming alone never could
Resources Mentioned:
The Aerow
Morris Industries
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