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Three-Year-Old Company Thrives

by Kristi Ruggles

In 2018, when Marcel Kringe was 30, the business he’d recently founded was selling exponentially more equipment than his best-case projections for its growth.

The German-born farmer had moved to Canada and launched a new product to help farmers more safely and accurately measure their grain loss during harvest. Bushel Plus was gaining international attention, and farmers in Australia wanted to adapt it for their use.

Kringe decided to make the trip. He wanted to see harvest in Australia, get acquainted with the equipment that called for a modification to his own, and pursue a relationship with a distributor.

It proved to be a life-altering decision.

A car accident that nearly killed him led him instead to people who would become his second family. Farmers who had spent minutes talking with Kringe in their fields, or who had not met him at all, assumed responsibilities for his care and assisted during his eight-month recovery. Kringe’s professional associates in Brandon, Manitoba, who easily could have fled amid the uncertainty, chose instead to push the business forward.

“The experience restored my faith in humanity,” Kringe said. “It was amazing.”

Born to Farm

Kringe, who is now 32, grew up on a family farm in the mountains of Germany. He describes the enterprise as “10 acres, five cows, 10 chickens and a goat.” Four generations lived together and worked the farm, which provided supplemental income, food, and an education.

“I stood beside my great-grandfather, grandfather, and father and learned a lot,” Kringe said. “They could fix anything, and they worked hard. Growing up like that, you gain a different perspective on life.”

Kringe knew from childhood he wanted to own or work on a farm, and he knew the family operation could never generate enough income to be his life’s work. He pursued an education in agriculture engineering and agronomy in a program that combined classroom theory with the American equivalent of a series of internships.

Pursuing a Dream

Kringe found a way to satisfy both his love for farming and his interest in seeing the world. His first internship in 2009 took him to Canada for harvest.

“That was a 3,000-acre farm, and I thought, ‘This is it; I’ve seen it all,’” he said. “It was what I had dreamed of.”

 Until …

“I went back to university and saw a job posting for a farm in Russia,” he said. “They were trying to build an 80,000-acre farm in three years. They were looking for combine drivers and supervisors for harvest and seeding. I thought, ‘Right on, this is right up my alley.’ Adventure. Different language. It was awesome.”

Kringe spent two summers in Russia, another fall in Canada, and three weeks in Brazil working on farms while also completing his university work.

An Idea Emerges

In every country, Kringe saw the same problem, and he set out to solve it.

“The farm in Russia was a great eye-opener. It triggered the idea for Bushel Plus,” he said. “We were throwing a tray under the combine while it was driving by to check for loss. It was dirty. It was dangerous. It was not accurate, and it took too long.”

Kringe earned a degree and settled in Canada with “nothing but a bag of clothes.” He worked on farms, then Cargill hired him to sell seed and serve as an agronomy consultant to farmers. Meanwhile, he and a friend in Germany worked on designing a drop tray that would measure waste from a combine more safely. They developed a prototype, which Kringe gave to farmers to try.

One of them called him after he had used the prototype for a week.

“He said, ‘Hey, we did the math on this, and it saved us $60,000 to $70,000 Canadian,’” Kringe remembers. 

Things started to happen quickly then. Kringe refined the prototype and produced enough to meet demand generated through farmer recommendations. He worked for Cargill by day and Bushel Plus at night.

In the winter of 2017, Kringe left Cargill to focus full-time on Bushel Plus. His goal was to sell 120 pieces of equipment in 2018. Sales exceeded that goal by many hundreds.

That same year, Kringe met Chris Sobchuk.

Sobchuk is an entrepreneur. He started a business in his basement building cameras for cow barns so farmers could stay inside during sub-zero temperatures to watch their cows calve. Sobchuk built the business into a 20-plus employee operation, then sold it. What he kept was his desire to make farming safer and more profitable, and he wanted to join Kringe and Bushel Plus.

That meeting proved fateful, because when Kringe suffered devastating injuries and could not return to Canada, Sobchuk, who was an employee then but would become a partner, assumed a key role in leading the business.

A Long, Long Trip to Australia

Things had just begun to “go bonkers” at Bushel Plus. Sobchuk and Kringe had exhibited at farm shows in June and July 2018, which led to an uptick in orders and interest from dealers. In August, a big order arrived from Australia, and in November, Kringe boarded a plane to make the 8,800-mile flight that would lead to an eight-month ordeal.

He was there for a week before his accident.

“For one week, I went from dealership to dealership, stopping to talk to farmers and talking about the product,” Kringe said. “I went around with an agronomist who showed me the Australian way of farming. I didn’t need to organize anything. One farmer would send me to the next farmer.”

That warmth he encountered before the accident would be on display in an extraordinary way after it.

Kringe was in a two-car collision. Among his injuries: his spine fractured in a dozen places, a shattered rib cage, an open pelvis break, a shoulder broken nearly in two, and internal bleeding.

“Angels were watching,” he said. “I survived, and the other driver survived. The doctor in the hospital said: ‘You have a lot of fractures. It is quite insane, but you have one thing going for you, nothing has dislocated. If we can get you into surgery without anything moving, we can get you back to walking.’”

Kringe was in intensive care in a hospital in Perth, which is about a seven-hour trip from the places he’d been visiting. His family was in Germany and his coworkers in Canada. It would have been a lonely situation if not for a network of compassionate people.

The agronomist Kringe had met the week before flew to Perth with his wife to sit at his bedside. Farmers whom he’d talked with over dinner stepped up to help meet needs around navigating health insurance, for example, getting an Australian phone, or simply visiting.

Kringe’s sister flew from Germany and stayed for weeks.

Then there was Melanie. She and her husband were scheduled to meet Kringe, but the accident happened before the meeting. A mutual connection in Canada alerted Melanie to Kringe’s situation.

“She got my full name from him, then she called every hospital in western Australia until she found me,” Kringe said. “She was seven hours away from Perth, and it was harvest at her family’s farm, but she came to Perth with a bag of toiletries, walked into my room and said, ‘Hi, I’m Melanie, how can I help you?’ I was high on morphine. I’d never met her. I didn’t even understand what was happening.”

Melanie and her family became central characters in Kringe’s recovery. She cared for him and his sister in the early critical days and ultimately provided Kringe a home when he transitioned to longer-term rehabilitation work and learned to walk again.

“She is like my second mum,” Kringe said. “Her husband calls me his second son. It has been an amazing experience.”

Beyond Recovery

Kringe returned home to Canada in July 2019. In his absence, Sobchuk had hired a salesperson, and the company set up a sizable distributor agreement in Australia. The growth that the company was experiencing before the car accident had not stalled.

Bushel Plus today sells its product on every continent and in more than a dozen countries. It also has relationships with combine manufacturers who are integrating the drop pan into their products. John Deere just released a marketing video of a new combine that shows the Bushel Plus product in its field testing.

The company also recently got a nod from the reality television show Corn Warriors, which follows high-yielding farmers in the United States.

Beyond partners Sobchuk and Kringe, Bushel Plus employs two salespeople, two administrative support professionals, and part-time staff who assist during trade shows. The company outsources its manufacturing and marketing.

As it continues to expand its distribution network and refine its product and app, Bushel Plus remains focused on its mission: “Farmer margins are tight,” Kringe said. “Our No. 1 priority will always be making farms more profitable.” 

What’s Bushel Plus?

An integrated system that helps a combine operator safely and efficiently check and quantify what is being lost during harvest. Operators press a button on a remote control from the cab or from a safe distance to drop a pan onto the ground to capture loss. 

This year Bushel Plus expanded the capabilities of an app it introduced in 2018. The app allows farmers to calculate their losses within seconds of dropping the pan. The calculations offer estimates on dollars lost per acre, and if a calculation shows a minimal loss, a farmer can save the combine settings specific to that crop to maintain that level of efficiency next time.

Knowing what is falling to the ground can signal a problem with combine settings, and of course capturing more of what falls means more grain to sell.