THE DOWSON FAMILY FARM

My four daughters, along with their husbands and I operate a family farm together. In today's markets it takes more acres per family to make a living. Therefore, all of our management decisions have to be thought through very thoroughly. Each of my son-in-laws bring a different strength to the table, and by putting them all together it makes for a very strong team. We all realize that farming is becoming more and more of an agribusiness, and to stay in business you must be competitive in the market. Farming several thousand acres per family allows us to buy in larger volumes, which gives us an advantage of lower input costs.


GRAIN

We are able to store about one half of our crop in our own storage facilities. This allows us to better market our grain. We market our grain through Cargill, ADM, and numerous local elevators. We also grow several thousand acres of yellow food grade corn for Frito-Lay. This allows us the marketing flexibility of commercial corn with the added premiums of specialty markets.

FERTILIZER

We have our dry fertilizer custom applied by Lemon Ag Service. Again we do have an advantage because of our volume. As far as our nitrogen, we apply anhydrous ammonia with our own tractors. We are very big believers in using plenty of fertilizer. This is one of the only areas a farmer has complete control, so we try to capture the full benefit. We make all of our fertilizer recommendations off of soil samples taken from every farm. These recommendation are done on a per farm basis each year.

EQUIPMENT

I have personally done business with Tom Sloan for more than thirty years. As you will see from the equipment list we are very loyal John Deere customers. Sloan Implement provides the products we need and also provides the service to back up the product. We all realize down time cost the farmer money.

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