At a time when the seed market is dominated by just a few big players, Lancaster County farmer Karl Dirks has set out on his own: by creating his own local wheat brand.

"We're small enough to do it ourselves, but big enough to move some volume and make it pay. We take stuff truly from the field the whole way to the finished product," says Dirks, owner of Lancaster Seed Sales.

This year, he sold five varieties of wheat under the Lancaster Seed Sales label. He started his own wheat label nine years ago.

For him, it’s all about finding something that will grow and perform locally.

"Some varieties work very well in specific locations, and that's more what we're after," Dirks says. “We're building a wheat program that fits a broad area, but it's very specific to here."

How he developed it

Dirks buys parent seed from one of the leading wheat seed brokers in the Northeast. He licenses genetics and pays a royalty to the company — a set amount based on the number of units he sells.

It’s all soft red wheat, the dominant variety grown east of the Mississippi River and southern Canada. He does no hybrid breeding.

Dirks selects seed that might be promising and places it into test plots either on his farm or on other farms he has contracted to grow seed. If he sees something he likes, he’ll buy the parent seed, grow it, produce it and sell it.

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"Sometimes we'll look at varieties and say, we know this is working, so we'll put it in plots for another year. Or there are times where the data looks that good, we've already tested it once, and we say, hey, this is it, this fits all our needs, we've seen it in the field, off we go,” he says.

"You've got to build the stocks up. You're talking going from one or two seeds, it needs to go to millions very quickly. It's painstaking," he says.

Dirks grows 300 acres of wheat seed on his farm; other farmers he contracts with grow 400 acres.

He currently sells five varieties — two early-seasons, one midseason and two late-seasons. His oldest variety was rolled out in 2021.

"We're keeping a line three years, four years max, and that’s because there is something that much better coming that we need to sell,” he says.

TEST PLOTS: Dirks says he tests about 16 potential wheat varieties a year, all in small block replications. It takes anywhere from two to four years for a variety to go from the test plot to market.

From field to bag

Just as important as building up the seed stocks is ensuring the seed itself is cleaned and treated.

While Dirks used to have custom cleaners take care of his seed, the past several years he and his employees have built their own seed cleaning and conditioning setup, putting used and refabricated machines together like Lego building blocks.

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"We're all in-house. Everything we do is us," he says. "The reason this works so well is we have built this thing for pennies on the dollar.”

Once seed is harvested, it goes into the farm’s bin system. Dirks says he puts air on the seeds to get them to optimal dryness, which is about 13.5%. The seed spends a week or two in the bin.

Then, the cleaning process starts. The seeds go through a machine called a de-bearder, which takes off beards and chaffes left from the plant. From there, the seeds go through an aspirator, which sucks the dirt off. It then goes into the cleaner, a vibrating screen that, using air and vibration, takes dirt and debris off.

The final stage is the gravity table, a 12-foot-by-5-foot machine with seven fans underneath that uses air and vibration to separate seed by weight.

The seeds are then treated and off to the final step — weighing and bagging. The seeds get bagged with the Lancaster Seed Sales label on them.

The cleaning system runs mostly from July through the end of September or early October.

"When we get going, we can do about 3,000 bags a day," Dirks says.

Up until a few years ago, he treated the seeds with just two to three modes of fungicide, nothing else. These days farmers want insecticide treatment, so he has added that.

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“And we’re now dealing with pythium, so all seed gets that now,” Dirks says. “It's called full-circle seed treatment.”

A little help from ‘Jorge’

The newest addition to the cleaning system is a refurbished robot Dirks bought on eBay from a seller in Michigan.

The robot once graced the floors of a defunct car factory stacking car bodies. The seller had 150 of these robots in a shed. Dirks says he reprogrammed the robot to stack labeled seed bags.

And it even has a name: “Jorge.”

“We bought it for 20 cents on the dollar for what a new one would be," Dirks says. "The robot stacked 15,000 bags this year, and it didn't complain once.”

HELP FROM JORGE: The newest addition to the cleaning system is a refurbished robot Dirks bought on eBay from a seller in Michigan. The robot once graced the floors of a defunct car factory stacking car bodies. The seller had 150 of these robots in a shed. Dirks says he reprogrammed the robot to stack labeled seed bags. And it even has a name: “Jorge.”

Building a brand for the Northeast

Dirks says he sold 2,000 50-pound bags of seed when he started. This past year, he sold 50,000 bags.

He is hoping to sell 60,000 bags next year.

So, what is selling well?

"Yield is always the most attractive factor. I think disease package has been right there at the top. Unmarketable wheat is worthless. So, we've always looked at that disease part right away with yield," Dirks says. "I ask, is there any chance it's going to fall apart in a bad way? Because I don't want to look at that. For us, standability has been a huge one. We are in a very high fertility environment, and sometimes these wheats that really yield have standability issues. So, we've really looked at the standability piece."

He's had his share of setbacks. One variety he developed, an early variety, headed early but matured too late. It didn’t work out. The variety was too susceptible to freeze and was scrapped.

Another variety that was supposed to be launched last year looked good in testing, but it produced less than another variety he was already selling. He scrapped that one, too.

He lost money and time in both cases.

"You don't want to bring a bad product to market,” Dirks says. “Sometimes you need to have a whole field to figure that out. It's a bit of an inconvenience to have, but it's part of the business."

Dirks says he tests about 16 potential wheat varieties a year, all in small block replications. It takes anywhere from two to four years for a variety to go from the test plot to market.

The local wheat market has been struggling. Low prices have many producers reconsidering how wheat can work in a crop rotation. On paper, Dirks still thinks the wheat and double-crop soybean rotation provides the best profit per acre in grain.

Time will tell how this homegrown seed brand will ultimately fare, but Dirks is optimistic.

"We're building a brand for the Northeast, which has been received really well,” he says. “We're not the cheapest, but we're not the most expensive, and I think we have a really good product.”