Building Soil Carbon
We grow carbon — cover crops, reduced tillage, residue feeding the soil — and we add it, pairing humic acids and sugars with every pass we can. Better structure, more biology, less bought-in fertility.
A Steeke family farm · Est. 1914
Nineteen14 Farms is a small family grain farm in Otter Tail County, Minnesota — rooted in dairy heritage, refined by modern agronomy. Non-GMO corn, spring wheat, and food-grade beans, raised with cover crops on every acre, decisions made from real data, and software we built ourselves running the farm’s numbers around the clock.
Nothing here happens on a hunch. Every seed rate and every pound of fertilizer answers to the field’s own record — and underneath it all, one goal: soil that’s better next year than it was this one.
We grow carbon — cover crops, reduced tillage, residue feeding the soil — and we add it, pairing humic acids and sugars with every pass we can. Better structure, more biology, less bought-in fertility.
Yield maps, SWAT zones, in-season soil and tissue testing, and variable-rate seed and fertilizer — the field’s own record sets every rate, on every pass.
Living roots as long as the season allows, minimal disturbance, and split nutrient applications timed to what the crop is asking for. Build, don’t deplete.
Rotation years have also carried spring barley, field peas, soybeans, small red beans & cover-crop seed.
Every acre glyphosate-free — and the rotation only gets more diverse from here.
Spring around Perham doesn’t wait. When the frost is out, the planter rolls — into corn stubble and cover-crop residue, banding the first feeding right beside every seed, rates shifting zone by zone.
Watch a season’s work from the air, then dig into how each pass gets decided.
What We Do →
We built our own software to run the business side of the farm. Grain OS — our own grain-marketing desk, built right here — watches futures, tracks local bids, and checks every idea against hard farm rules before it ever becomes a recommendation.
Each weekday morning it issues one disciplined suggestion. It never trades on its own — that’s the rule it can’t break.
And Grain OS is just the flagship. Four systems built on this farm now work its data — seed maps from yield history, satellite scouting, an AI agronomist over every soil and tissue test — with a fifth, a field-intelligence platform, on the way.
Inside the AI Farm Office →AI recommends. The farmer decides. Always.
It shouldn’t take a thousand acres to provide for a family. The goal here isn’t more ground — it’s more life in the soil we already farm, and crops healthy enough to prove it, measured in carbon season over season. Next chapter: the cows come back to graze the covers, the first animals on this ground since the dairy days.
What Soil Health Really Means →