Episode 01
Gary Wickham travels to Huron, South Dakota to sit down with Dustin Hofer, a sixth-generation corn and soybean grower who did what most farmers only talk about: he ran MagrowTec on two sprayers and kept a third as a control, side by side, for three seasons. This is what the data showed him — and why all three sprayers are getting it now.
Today we’re in Huron, South Dakota, on a farm that’s been in the Hofer family for roughly 120 years. Dustin Hofer runs it as a sixth-generation operation alongside his two sisters and his father — corn and soybeans in rotation, with a little sunflower thrown in to mix things up. Over the last four or five years, Dustin and his sisters have stepped up to lead the innovation on the farm, and innovation is exactly why we’re here.
Dustin is a data guy. When Joel and Kirsten from Nicholson Tech first brought him MagrowTec, he didn’t just take their word for it — he ran three sprayers, put MagrowTec on two of them, and deliberately kept the third as a control so he’d have something honest to measure against. Three seasons later, the numbers are clear enough that all three machines are getting the system.
Here’s what he found. On corn, a 10 to 15% reduction in chemistry costs and about 30% less carrier — that’s water — to get a better kill than he was getting before. On soybeans, roughly the same: 10% off the chemistry and 30% off the carrier, turning a 20-gallon pass into 14 or 15. Fewer trips back to the tender truck. More acres an hour. And the compounding effect Dustin calls “pennies to millions” — every cent saved per acre stacking up across every pass, every plant that has to metabolize less product, every load of water he doesn’t have to haul.
“On corn we see about a 10 to 15% reduction in chemistry costs, and about a 30% reduction in carrier — for a better kill than we’d have otherwise had.””
Dustin Hofer
Grower, Huron, SD
But the moments that stick are the ones he could see with his own eyes. The day they installed the first unit, he was standing 30 or 40 feet behind the boom running a test on concrete, getting mist all over his sunglasses. Two hours later, system installed, same test — and his sunglasses stayed dry. The water was pulling straight down into a puddle instead of bouncing up into a fine drifting cloud. He talks about kochia and pigweed with their thousands of growing points, where a single escape can throw a two-foot sucker and a seed head of 800,000 seeds — and how the control sprayer left exactly those escapes while the MagrowTec machine gave him full-plant coverage and a clean kill. Night and day, he calls it. There’s even a rescue story: a high-canopy corn field his agronomist told him he’d never penetrate late-season, where the MagrowTec sprayer drove coverage down through the canopy and shut the weeds down before they could go to seed.
Along the way Gary gets into the science and the standards — why 60 to 90% of what’s sprayed worldwide is wasted to drift and poor coverage, the 97.5% drift accreditation from Europe’s top institutions, the EPA registration in progress, and why a technology built on the same magnetic principles as an MRI machine spent years being called snake oil before growers proved it out. Notably, MagrowTec makes no yield claims — Dustin’s the one collecting that data himself, and he’s holding it until he has three clean years of it. What MagrowTec does claim is coverage and drift control, and on that front Dustin hasn’t had a single drift-complaint phone call in three years across a lot of acres. His first installed system, for the record, has seen 200,000 acres with zero problems.
We also get into the new rodless L Series launching this fall — the version going on Dustin’s third sprayer — with its two-to-four-hour install and five-year warranty, and why that matters to a farmer who rolls equipment every few years. And we close where these conversations always seem to land: succession, the disappearing family farm, price-takers versus price-makers, and the disconnect between the grocery cart and the ground it came from. Dustin’s take is worth the listen on its own.
His advice to a skeptical grower is eight words long: every day without it is a dollar lost. Don’t walk — run. Let’s get into it.
Grower, Huron, SD
Dustin Hofer is a sixth-generation grower who farms corn and soybeans with his father and two sisters on the family’s 120-year-old operation outside Huron, South Dakota. A data-driven farmer and early technology adopter, he’s known for testing everything on his own ground before he commits — which is exactly how he approached MagrowTec.
CEO & Founder, MagrowTec
An entrepreneur with a passion for innovation and agriculture, Gary has built his career around turning ideas and emerging technologies into real-world solutions. Through conversations with growers, researchers and industry leaders, he explores entrepreneurship, innovation and the people and ideas shaping the future of agriculture. Connect with Gary on LinkedIn
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