15 minutes with Indiana farmer Kevin Kalb

Recently confirmed as a 15-time winner of the National Corn Growers Association’s National Corn Yield Contest, the fifth-generation farmer has also become a farm influencer thanks to the Discovery Channel show “Live To Farm.”

Live to Farm star and Indiana farmer Kevin Kalb
Photo:

courtesy of Live To Farm

Kevin Kalb is one of the foremost farming names on the internet, having made waves for his Southern Indiana farm’s success in corn yields. 

Recently confirmed as a 15-time winner of the National Corn Growers Association’s (NCGA) National Corn Yield Contest, the fifth-generation farmer has also become a farm influencer thanks to the Discovery Channel show “Live To Farm.” The show follows Kalb and his wife, Shawn, as well as Brooks Cardinal’s family farm as they go about their lives and tend to their many crops.

Kalb won first place in the Conventional Non-Irrigated class of NCGA's 2023 corn yield contest with 425 bushels per acre using the DKC68-35RIB hybrid from Dekalb. Contest results were published on Dec. 15.

Kalb sat down with Successful Farming to talk about his journey to taking a large role on the family farm, working with his family, and branching out into consulting for other farmers.

SF: How early did you take a bigger role in the farm?

KK: My dad died when I was 14. Then I moved up with my grandparents, who actually farmed. My dad raised chickens or eggs from layers, and he had a manure hauling business. He cleaned out poultry buildings, and my grandpa and great uncle were the farmers. Well, when my dad died that's how I really got into the crop side. They passed away when I was 20, and that's when I took over.

We learned so much about farming from my grandpa and great uncle. We got into a yield contest in 2007, and that's when we really started learning how to manage the crop. There's so much more potential out there than just doing the normal stuff.

 Kevin Kalb of Dubois, IN filming Live To Farm, Season 2, with Josh Kelly, AGI Territory Sales Representative -- visiting on camera about how grain vacuums are used as a tool on the farm.
Kevin Kalb of Dubois, IN filming Live To Farm, Season 2, with Josh Kelly, AGI Territory Sales Representative -- visiting on camera about how grain vacuums are used as a tool on the farm.

Agi Schaefer/AGI

SF: You're a 15-time high corn yield champion, what goes into that?

KK: We base our yields off 100% of our tissue samples from corn. We've done this long enough now we know the general idea of what the levels of every nutrient needs to be in the plant. I guess year after year we fail, and then find what does make a difference in the yield. Then we implement that same stuff we do on our contest acres and move it over to all of our production acres. We're more proud about — even more than winning, however many times we're a national winner — that we farm in southern Indiana with no irrigation. We got a lot of hills, a lot of patches. We've had our farm average over 300 bushels two times. That takes a balance of nutrients.

SF: Are you proud of learning from those mistakes?

KK: Oh yeah. We have a consulting company, too. The neat thing about it is when we came up with the idea to help farmers, we knew how many years it took for us to get where we're at, how many mistakes that we've made, and we just try to help guys — instead of taking seven to 10 years, we help them change that in three or four years. They say farmers normally get only about 40 crops in their life. I wish I'd have done this when I was 20 years old instead of at 35, 40. It's been going really well. I mean, helping other farmers makes us feel really good when we get guys averaging 35, 40 bushels higher than they've ever done. It’s not like it had to take four or five years to see it. That's probably the neatest thing, when you get that phone call from other farmers saying, “Hey, you know, thank you for your program.” It's working out well.

SF: How many years has this program been going on?

KK: This is our fourth year. We wanted to make sure it worked across all the other acres. So we had a few guys that were from different parts of the country that we were helping for two or three years before that. It helped us learn that even though you're farming different soil types, the mentality you still have to have growing corn is, it's still a corn plant. It still takes X amount of nutrients of each — zinc, boron, manganese, all these. It doesn't really matter where you farm, it still takes the basic principles.

SF: Are all four of your children still working on the farm?

KK: The oldest one, Kia, she's actually a photographer. In the springtime, she'll come around, help move trailers or fertilizer, pick up trailers. Then in harvest she'll come by and help if we need rides or whatever here and there. The next girl, Rhylan, she's going to college. She's a freshman, but she still comes back and helps on the farm. Emmersen, the youngest daughter, is a junior in high school. She has no choice. She lives at home so she has to help. (Laughs). My boy, Kogen, is an eighth-grader, so he's gonna be 100% full-time farming. He’s taken to it.

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