FAIRMONT — The modern ag tour of Martin County on Wednesday drew about 30 people from diverse backgrounds.

Farmers, pork producers, media, economic development and several members of the Minnesota House of Representatives, urged to attend by their fellow representative, Bob Gunther of Fairmont, hopped on a chartered bus for a six-stop journey culminating at the “Ground Up” dinner at the Tumbleson farm north of Sherburn.

This is the second year for the ag tour, which was organized by Stephanie Busiahn, executive director of Visit Fairmont; Wanda Patsche, representing the pork industry; Joanne Schmidt, representing the crop industry; and Linsey Preuss, Fairmont economic development director.

CHS in Fairmont was the first stop on the tour, with the bus driving by a double line of semis waiting to pick up soybean meal from the plant. Participants did not go inside the massive plant, but Doug Probst, CHS production manager, joined the tour group as the bus traveled through the grounds.

Probst said CHS, now in its 15th year of operation, processed about 55 million bushels of soybeans last year. The majority of those beans were hauled in from a 60-mile radius of Fairmont, but Martin County farmers grew about 8 million of those bushels.

CHS employs 50 people and operates 24 hours per day, seven days per week. During the busy harvest season, 1,200 trucks a day travel through the property, unloading beans and loading soybean oil and meal.

The next stop was Kahler Automation, where Wayne Kahler, co-founder of the business, explained how the majority of the company’s business is related to agriculture. The company designs and makes control panels for truck scale management, bulk receiving and flow meters, among other things, and also provides the software to make these panels work.

Kahler’s 70 employees build systems that control everything from an unmanned 24-hour-a-day fertilizer facility in Brownton, to panels needed to operate a bean-processing plant in Belize. Although the company has a global reach, the United States and Canada are its main territories.

The tour bus headed to Ceylon to the farm of Joanne and Clair Schmidt Jr. The farm’s diversified production includes corn, soybeans and pork.

The Schmidts brought out a trio of large tractors that included a pair of Ziegler Cats and a John Deere, as well as a Bobcat loader, and the tour participants eagerly took advantage of the chance to drive the machines.

The fourth stop, Easy Automation Inc., a family-owned company in Welcome, opened its doors for the tour, and employees explained how they custom design and build software controls for the feed and grain industry. The company has about 3,000 customers in North America as well as Saudi Arabia, Guatemala, Canada, Sri Lanka and Australia.

Easy Automation paid more than $3.5 million in wages in 2017 to about 70 employees located in Welcome, Mankato, New York, Colorado and Arizona.

NuWay Cooperative in Welcome, the final business on the tour, supplies ag products and services as well as bulk energy to about 2,500 farm and non-farm customers in southern Minnesota and northern Iowa. The co-op is owned by more than 300 farmers and customers.

Using software and control panels developed by Kahler Automation, the 80 NuWay employees have been able to increase efficiency when loading or mixing herbicide or fertilizer.

Tour participants expressed surprise at the level of technology developed and manufactured in Martin County and the many ways that technology is used by farmers and ag-related businesses.

And they really liked driving the tractors.