ABOVE: Premier Ag Partners Co-Owner Dan Stensland grabs a seed pallet as he goes about his daily work. During their slowest periods, he said they get a load of seed a week.

FAIRMONT – With new threats and circumstances ever-changing, the yearly offerings for farmers’ crop seeds change and diversify for the occasion.

Premier Ag Partners was started by Dan Stensland in 2014 in a shed on the Martin County-Faribault County line, providing Channel seeds. In 2019 he brought on Jayden Garlick as their operation expanded. Around the same time, they outgrew their original location, and set their sights on Fairmont.

“For our territory, it was centrally located,” he said. “We got customers that go, we gotta go west, we gotta go east, north, south. Stensland’s got farms right around here. I farm right around here,” Garlick said.

They were not able to fully set up and sell from Fairmont until fall of 2023. For their third spring season in the new location, Co-Owner Jayden Garlick said they carry two varieties of soybeans, XtendFlex and Enlist. Depending on farmer location, he said Enlist can be much more popular than XtendFlex because XtendFlex spray treatment has more regulations and moves around in the wind.

“There’s rules and regulations within the state of Minnesota,” Garlick said. “Don’t even spray it after June 12. A lot of co-ops around here won’t spray it as a post because it does tend to drift. They’ll spray it as a pre, but they won’t spray it as a post.”

Pre and post refer to before and after the soybean pokes out of the ground.

This year, they chose to stock four different varieties of corn, all of which have different modifications for yield and protection. Garlick said they can provide conventional, but with the amounts of hog and feed in this area, plus pressure from factors like disease, farmers pick from one of the four varieties.

“Based on this area, we know what guys are gonna plant,” he said. “We know our customer base pretty good. Some guys prefer that late 90-day corn, or that early 100, 102-day corn, because we got enough hog barns, and guys want to get corn off and get manure spread. For the most part, around here, your 105, 110-day corn is probably that biggest book of business.”

As for how the varieties of corn differ from each other, Garlick said each one offers different layers of protection.

“A VT4’s got above-ground traits, and it’s got root worm control,” he said. “It does not have anything below ground. For any pest or insect below ground, it’s susceptible to those. SmartStax PRO costs a little bit more, but in that package, you’re getting a lot more protection. You have above-ground control for pests, below-ground control, and then you have root worm control.”

Their other two options, Trecepta and VT2, only offer above-ground protection, and not below-ground or rootworm. Garlick said rootworm has become a problem for some area farmers.

“It’s been a concern, but a bigger concern the last four or five years,” he said. “You go out to a field that’s got rootworm feeding going on. He pulls roots out; it’s half gone.”

As implied in the name, the corn rootworm bug feeds on the roots of growing corn, particularly as larvae. Corn seeds that are designed against this with a molecule that disrupts the rootworm and kills it with a naturally occurring process.

This year, Garlick said Enlist is most popular for soybeans in their coverage area, which radiates outward from Fairmont. For corn, SmartStax PRO has been very popular since it became commercially available last year, and it is their number one corn seed this year.

Right now, 99.9 percent of farmers have bought their seeds for this year, according to Stensland. He said most of the seeds, 85 to 90 percent, are bought from October to December. When things get “slow” after that period, it shifts to a different type of busy season.

“We get into all our computer stuff, and making sure invoices are right,” Stensland said. “We’re actually planning for 2027 already. In January and February 26 we’re already planning and trying to figure out what we’re going to sell for the 2027 growing season.”

The plan is to get a few new products and do test plots, follow up with farmers and scout in the summer to see the performance of this year’s seeds. While they’ll still be looking over all of their data before choosing which seeds to provide, Garlick said they could spill the beans about a new seed coming in a few years.

“The new soybean lineup that we have coming in would be called Vyconic,” he said. “It’s the first bean in the market that you’re able to spray five different herbicides on. That one we’ll have in plots next year, then fully commercial 2028.”