A farm family’s emerging business is already red-hot, in a sense.
The Kadelbachs — Glen, Stephanie, Kendra, and Conrad — make “flame weeders” at their 360-acre organic farm outside Hutchinson, where they raise sweet corn, black beans, hay, small grain, and food-grade soybeans. A replacement for the herbicides used on conventional farms, the Kadelbachs’ weeders are tractor attachments that remove meddlesome plants with jets of propane-fueled fire. As the tractor trundles through a field, small spigots of flame, arranged in a downward-facing row, follow behind it.
“You have to be a little bit pyro to run one of these things,” says Glen Kadelbach, the family patriarch and owner of Kadelbach Flame Weeders.
The family’s weeders don’t simply torch unwanted weeds, though. Instead, they’re designed to flash-boil the moisture in a weed’s cells, which causes the cells to burst and prevents the weed from photosynthesizing. That, in turn, causes the weed to wilt and die — all the way down to its roots.
But how can a farmer run a series of small flamethrowers over a field without destroying the crop they actually want to grow there?
In short: “We don’t hit what we don’t want to burn,” Kadelbach says.
The family generally tells their customers to make three passes over their crop with a flame weeder. The first: before the crop has grown out of the ground, when it’s safe from the weeder’s heat. The second: a “broadcast” burn over the entire field when the crop is three to four inches tall but is still growing from its seed. This pass can give a false impression that the farmer has destroyed his or her crop. Kadelbach tells customers to take five to seven days off afterward and to avoid looking at the field.
“Because they’re going to hate themselves,” he says. “It looks like you killed it.”
And the third pass: when the crop is about 10 to 12 inches high. The Kadelbachs recommend angling the weeder’s torches to make a series of criss-cross patterns, an adjustment meant to avoid the plant’s leaves and stalk but still destroy the weeds underneath it.
Richard and Carol Kadelbach — Glen’s parents — purchased the farm in the late 1960s. The family ran it conventionally until 2008, the same year Richard died after a yearslong battle with cancer. Richard had been splashed with an herbicide sometime in the 1980s, and the family suspects that’s at least partly to blame for his diagnosis and death years later.
Glen says his father’s death, and a neighbor who was raising “phenomenal” crops organically, prompted him to switch to organic farming. The Minnesota Crop Improvement Association certified the Kadelbachs’ farm as an organic one in 2011, and Glen built the family’s first flame weeder after that. Neighbors took notice, and he started selling flame weeders on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist.
“I turned 50, and it was like either make something or stop thinking about it,” Glen says. He bought a 140-ton press brake, a CNC plasma table, CAD software, and so on, then got to work designing and building the company’s flame weeders. He estimates the company has sold 15 to 20 so far.
Even after a consumer has purchased them, many products are deliberately linked to their original manufacturers — think about repairing an iPhone outside the aegis of Apple, or refilling the ink in a printer with a generic cartridge. The same is true in agriculture, where increasingly common software is copyright protected, and where replacement parts can be proprietary and thus are sometimes hard to get ahold of quickly or easily.
The Kadelbachs’ flame weeders are designed to be repaired with parts from a local hardware store rather than a far-flung distributor.
“Something that is easy for a farmer to fix,” Kadelbach says. “You don’t have to go looking for sprayer tips or parts, order them in and wait two, three days… If you’ve got a Hardware Hank or Ace Hardware, or a big box store, the parts are there for most stuff.”
Helping Glen are his wife Stephanie, who handles the company’s finances, and his daughter Kendra, Glen’s “right-hand man” and a senior at Hutchinson High School who found a knack for welding after her father showed her how to do it several years ago. Kendra is the company’s lead welder, and she’s considering learning more about welding, and perhaps agriculture, after she graduates high school. She’s already taken all the welding classes her high school offers.
“I just like watching metal fuse together,” Kendra says. “That sounds kind of dorky, but it’s the truth.”
Glen says he is building the business for Kendra and his son Conrad, who is studying mechatronics at Alexandria Technical & Community College. Kendra says she’s considered taking over the business at some point but isn’t sure yet.
Return to the Winter 2024 issue of Enterprise Minnesota® magazine.
