By ANN ALLEN
Indiana Correspondent

LEESBURG, Ind. – Tom Farms, LLC, the second stop on this year’s Indiana Farm Management Tour, serves as an umbrella for five entities: Tom Farms Partners, CereServ, Inc., Latin America Seed, S.A., Harvest Transportation, Inc. and GrowServ Partners.

Each serves a particular market sector. For example, Tom Farms Partners is the 12,000-acre family farming operation.

CereServ, Inc. provides custom services on 28,000 additional acres, including pesticide application, crop scouting, GPS mapping, custom tillage and planting, hand and mechanical detasseling, male corn removal, seed corn and commercial corn harvesting.

Latin America Seed, S.A. is 4,000 acres of leased land in Argentina to help Monsanto with seed production in the Southern Hemisphere. Currently, 2,000 acres are in seed production, with the remainder in commercial crops.

Harvest Transportation, Inc. includes about 20 Tom-owned trucks and a national freight brokerage business.

GrowServ Partners develops partnerships with non-family businesses. Tom Farms works with other producers and businesses to find solutions to increase value in their operations. These non-family entities bring their unique sets of resources and Tom Farms develops flexible arrangements in their partnering arrangements.
Ted Crosbie, vice president of global plant breeding for Monsanto, will discuss the future of crop genetics during the tour, followed by a 7 p.m. reception. During the hour-long reception, Andy Miller of the Indiana State Department of Agriculture will speak.

This farm news was published in the June 13, 2007 issue of Farm World, serving Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee.