by Mike Orso
Five Quick Things to Know About Brandon Walter
1. Favorite Food: Steak
2. Favorite Movie: “Moneyball”
3. Favorite crop or livestock I raise: All of them.
4. If I wasn’t farming I’d be: This is all I ever really wanted to do.
5. The one thing people don’t know about me is: I read 5-10 books a year.
Whether it’s perfecting new crop varieties, expanding his agricultural supplies business or striving to keep Farm Bureau relevant, McHenry County farmer Brandon Walter sees great potential for each and works to make them happen.
“I want to be known as the best,” said Walter in the office of his new heated shop and warehouse outside of Harvard. “Not necessarily the biggest, but I want to continually try to do better.”
Walter, 39, represents the first in his immediate family to pursue farming full-time. He raises crops on the farm his father and mother purchased in the mid-1980s and has gradually expanded by purchasing an area dairy farm and starting an agricultural business. It includes growing and selling seed along with other agricultural supplies such as biological and fertilizer products.
“I see sides of agriculture that no one else sees and to me, that’s fun,” said Walter. “Once I really started going and I learned more about stuff, I realized how much I could actually help other farmers.”
While attending Harvard High School, Walter worked on an area dairy farm. Following high school, he worked for Scot Forge, a company based in Spring Grove, and then attended Illinois State University (ISU), graduating early with an agriculture business degree in 2010. While attending ISU, an opportunity to run an area dairy farm became available, which he enthusiastically embraced until the second of two bouts with herniated disks forced him to reexamine capabilities.
“One of my neighbors told me, ‘Brandon, you’re not really a little guy. The problem is, when you want to move something, you’re going to move it at the expense of your body,” said Walter. “I just tried to over-muscle everything which is stupid.”
After two back surgeries and recoveries over a span of seven years, Walter sold his dairy cows and set new goals.
“I had my second back surgery at 29. It’s miserable, but I’ve learned how to be smarter with my body than when I was 22,” he said. “When those cows left, I cried like a baby.”
Now, in addition to growing and selling his own soybean and wheat seed, Walter sells AgriGold corn seed and biological products that can replace some fertilizers and pesticides.
“In the soil we have microbe bacteria, we have fungi, we have nematodes, we have all these living organisms in the soil,” said Walter. “When we can help them, they help us in a very big way. If the biology works properly, we can cut back on the fertilizers we use and it can actually give us an increase in yields.”
Walter also conducts between 20-30 agronomic crop trials each year and has been transitioning 150 of his acres into organic production.
“We had some organic soybeans last year do 56 (bushels an acre), he said. “They did very well, I was excited about it. But, we made a lot of passes over that field for weeds. We had people come in to walk them to take care of the weeds, I mean, it’s very labor intensive.”
In one of his crop trials last year, Walter replaced starter fertilizer in his soybean planter with unpasteurized milk, achieving a 2-3 bushel per acre increase in production.
“Calcium is one of those products they don’t talk about, so you have calcium, zinc, iron, you have all these goodies in unpasteurized milk, so this actually had some biology in it as well,” said Walter. “So that was probably one of my favorites just because it made people talk.”
Walter also prioritizes leadership by serving on the McHenry County Farm Bureau board of directors for a decade, elected the last two years as its vice president. He’s a 2022 graduate of the Illinois Agricultural Leaders of Tomorrow program run by the Illinois Farm Bureau, and was also named in the inaugural class of “Top 20 Under 40 Farmers” coordinated by the Illinois Soybean Association. He has been an advocate of casting a wide net for Farm Bureau to represent all farmers.
“I don’t care if you’re a 10,000-acre grain farmer or five-acre vegetable producer, some of these regulations are going to come down the line and affect both of you,” he said. “That’s where, I feel, our county is strong where we can come together.”
He’s also enthused for a new growing season, even if it’s still a few months away.
“Oh, gosh yes,” he said. “If you’re not excited to farm then let me talk to you for a little bit, let me get you excited because there are things we can do.”
Harvard area farmer Brandon Walter examines some of his soybean seed being cleaned. “I run it through a fanning mill,” he said about his seed facility not far from unincorporated Chemung. “All the impurities, the cracked seed, the little seed, all of the bad stuff goes out.”
McHenry County farmer Brandon Walter shared what he loves and hates about farming. “I hate paperwork,” he said. “Put me out in a field, make me get dirty and greasy, I have no problem with that.”
Brandon Walter’s new shop and warehouse exterior includes protective bollards resembling ears of corn painted by a friend.