Finally, he spots what he is looking for: A white tour bus has turned off the road and is moving toward his house. As it pulls to a stop, the door opens and out steps the first of 43 men and women from France, all coming to this Scott County farm to see how professional agriculture is practiced in America.
How did Maxwell, 50, carve out this niche?
and hired a cook so he can provide meals as a tour option.
sweet corn and tomatoes in season.
meal,” Gleason said. Even some alcohol is available upon request.
crisis of the 1980s, when land values plummeted, he was in a position to buy.
That is how he got his strong start.
“It was dumb luck,” he says.
But luck doesn’t account for everything.
finished up in that academic area.
he said of his choice of majors.
Maxwell is divorced, with two daughters.
farm to run the new robotic milking operation.
John Maxwell calls his farm Cinnamon Ridge.
River, before a glacier changed its path.
cheddar cheese and curds for local sale.
the nitrogen. The remainder of the nitrogen is applied as anhydrous ammonia.
to provide fresh eggs for his visitors. He sells the excess.
they eat weeds, including prickly thistles and multi-flora rose.
Employees: 14; that number will drop to eight when the robotic milk barn comes online.
Maxwell has educated himself so he can speak in hectares as well as acres, and he is widely traveled, having visited farms in more than a dozen countries, including China, as well as in Africa and South America.
He is a fourth-generation farmer who can explain the transformations that have occurred in American agriculture since the days of horses and since he began farming in the 1980s.
His personality includes the “gift for gab,” an essential trait for putting people at ease, McInnis says.
The French tour lasts about three hours, and begins — as they all do — with an orientation session in the home’s great room, set up with rows of chairs.
A flat-screen TV is mounted on the floor-to-ceiling fireplace where Maxwell delivers a PowerPoint overview of his operation, pausing every few sentences for translation by tour director Patrick Gourcuff. He talks about his livestock and reveals that he is building a 200- by 200-foot milk barn plus a manure reservoir to be completed in November that will be totally robotic. It will cost $2.5 million.
Ears perk up again when he explains that all of the seeds he plants are genetically modified organisms, or GMO, to give them various desirable traits such as insect or herbicide resistance. This prompts several questions because GMO are controversial and not so widely accepted in Europe. Most of the farmers, however, have no problem with it, Gourcuff said later.
With the talk over, the guests begin to file out, lingering to look over the house with its carved wood moldings, numerous large windows and the Disklavier in the second-floor loft that plays background music while meals are served.
“Very nice,” one man says in English.
Outside, the guests begin clicking their cameras to capture images of Maxwell on his 8420 John Deere tractor with a 40-foot planter that he can lift off the ground and collapse like a giant robot. The tractor is equipped with GPS and can steer itself. The planter is 40 feet wide and can plant 16 rows of corn or 32 rows of soybeans at a time.
The visitors then stroll across the farmstead, past the original 1870s farmhouse that is used now for storage to pens of Jersey calves. Behind one of the silos, a calf lies dead on its side.
animals die. The calf collapsed when an injection of penicillin hit a vein and went to its heart.
Several women stoop to make friends with three kittens wandering the grounds.
Also drawing interest: A storage building that houses the semi-tractor Maxwell uses to transport his grain and a combine with an auger cart that allows the grain to flow into the semi-trailer while the combine keeps rolling.
Then it’s on to Donahue, a community of 350 dominated by the soaring River Valley Co-op elevator. Some internationals are interested in how the co-op system works.
The final stop is at a hog confinement barn that Maxwell built and leases to Tom Dittmer of Grandview Farms, west of Eldridge. As the tourists walk up the steps to the barn, one of the women holds her nose. It smells, even though the hogs are behind a glass-enclosed viewing area.
Inside, 20 to 26 hogs lie or stand in pens that are 10 by 20 feet where they can drink from spouts and eat from self-feeders.
Waste falls through slits in the floor, so the floor is clean.
“It’s the ideal environment,” Maxwell says.
“Very interesting, very efficient,” one of the tourists says as he settles back into his seat.
$20 per person ($25 more with a meal), with a $200 minimum.
As the bus rolls back to the farm, Maxwell walks the aisle, shaking everyone’s hand and thanking them for coming. That is part of his tour, too.