For CHS Rochester director, the office means Minnesota farms and a 2023 GMC Sierra

OSTRANDER, MINN. — On a sunny June afternoon, the first green shoots of corn and soybeans were just starting to color the fields surrounding a grain elevator in a small town south of Rochester.

But that future crop was in the back of Bryan Lewis’ mind. Instead, the director of operations for CHS Rochester was still contending with last year’s harvest, namely the 20,000 tons of corn scooped from a pile on the ground into a constant stream of trucks.

“We only have so much capacity, so we always use the ground pile as overfill‚” he said. “Every year, we cover that pile and save it for whenever we can get it to market.”

Lewis oversees the cooperative’s grain elevators and ag retail locations in southeastern Minnesota. Leading a team of about 110 people, Lewis conducts an orchestra of inputs, outputs, inventory and expertise that make the business of farming come to life.

Though the term “ag retail” might evoke images of a farm-and-feed store, there are no shopping carts where Lewis works.

“You think about the bag of fertilizer you could buy at Fleet Farm,” he said. “We’re that bag of fertilizer for a grower that covers a lot more ground.”

Through its ag retailers, Inver Grove Heights-based CHS sells seeds, crop protection, fertilizers and fuels; employs agronomists who advise farmers; and buys, stores and markets grain come harvest. CHS typically sells the corn at the Ostrander grain elevator to ethanol plants, while soybeans stored there mostly go to crush plants that make soybean oil.

With a broad territory to cover, Lewis said his 2023 GMC Sierra is his office. He drives hundreds of cumulative miles between CHS sites across the region, from Claremont to Grand Meadow to Wykoff and beyond.

“I’ll try to hit each location once a week,” said Lewis, 47, who lives between Hastings and Cannon Falls.

Before he became the ag retail senior director of operations in 2019, Lewis worked in asphalt, fertilizer, transportation, fuel safety and insurance at CHS.

In an interview edited for clarity and length — and as truck after truck took down the mound of corn — Lewis walked through his decades-long tenure with CHS and shared what it’s like in his shoes.

I grew up in west central Minnesota, dairy country. My dad had a dairy farm and sold it when I was really young. I worked on neighboring dairy farms for years. That’s kind of what got me interested in just spending time seeing the bigger picture, right? And I enjoyed the crop side of it as well, learning how plants grow.

I went to school, actually, to be a doctor. I started pre-med, got to medical school, got accepted, and I said, I don’t know if I want to deal with all that.

I started with CHS in 1998 at a pipeline terminal group that worked with hot asphalt. Doesn’t that sound exciting? Fun fact, I took the job to pay for a snowmobile I bought.

I still love agriculture. I have a friend that farms in the Red River Valley, and I help him every fall. So I get to touch it. My kid also works in agriculture. I’ve always been passionate about agriculture, about plant health, about the environment, about hunting, fishing and enjoying snow. I’m one of those weirdos who likes snow.

It’s a pretty broad name. The customer is a farmer or rancher operating these fields that surround us. We help them through that whole thing, whether it be fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide or fungicide applications for plant health.

We’re also helping them with recommendations to make sure they have soil fertility where it needs to be, pest management, weed management. Agronomists will do some soil samples and fly drones over the field to look at the colors of the plant, do stand counts, and we can even get yield estimates from drones.

We’re helping them be better nitrate stewards, so we’re not putting nitrogen down where it shouldn’t be. That’s been a big focus here. It’s all to make sure that when that crop comes up, it can have the nutrients it needs and the pressures relieved of it to be able to yield a good crop.

Then we get to harvest time, and we’ll help them buy the grain and market it. So we’ll bring it to an ethanol plant or get it to an export facility, connect them to something larger.

And all that equipment needs energy. So it’s propane to drive crops. It’s propane to heat your home. It’s diesel fuel to run your tractors. Gasoline to run your cars.

It’s a lot of people management, a lot of relationships, working directly with our growers as well as working with our teams that are doing all the hard work.

My role here is really around working with the entire retail business to be efficient operationally. We also have a producer board-member group that we work with that oversees some of the vision as well as some of the operations. And then it’s working to make sure that we’re doing the right thing all day long.

If we have some tough situations, let’s say we have a claim or an issue, I’ll attend that just to help. But also when we go out and talk next year’s crop, product prices, I offer to all the agronomists: I’ll go to at least one grower with you. Growers think that’s incredible. This supposedly important person spent time to listen to what they need, what they want.

This world works on a calendar. Dec. 15 to Jan. 15, that’s really that window for planning next year. That’s some of our busiest not-in-the-field time. We can set up a prepaid environment where growers can contract what they need and start to think about selling what’s going to come off that field.

And then April to May is probably the biggest time, planting. We need all the people we can get, all the equipment we can get, because it moves so fast. And then from there, it’s steady until about August. August slows down until we get to harvest, and then harvest is a big push to get some more fertilizer out, get the crop out and wrap the year up.

Once harvest is done, tillage will happen, where farmers will till the dirt or replant that cover crop. We go into winter mode. We slow down quite a bit. It’s getting things ready for spring. It’s preventive maintenance on all of our machinery. It’s planning for all that we do next year.

In Their Shoes is an occasional series highlighting Minnesotans at work. If there’s a type of job you want us to profile — or if you have someone who would be a good candidate — email us at InTheirShoes@startribune.com.