Saturday, July 15, 2023 | Country Acres • Page 1
Country Acres Saturday, July 15, 2023 3
Focusing on Today’s Rural Environment
Volume 10, Edition 10
Agriculture
Above Benrud Aviation: A bird’s-eye view on aerial application BY HANS LAMMEMAN STAFF WRITER
STAPLES – During peak growing season, Brad Benrud often flies over central Minnesota crops for up to 15 hours a day as music echoes within the cockpit of his Thrush 510 airplane. For Benrud, a career treating crops from the sky is a profession foreshadowed by an early childhood memory from growing up on a farm near Goodhue. “My earliest memory is from a scar that I have on my hand,” Benrud said, running fingers over a mark on his right hand. “I was 4 years old at daycare, running around with my arms out, pretending I was flying. I fell and landed where a pipe was cut off in the ground and cut my hand open.” While his memory on the playground ended with a crash landing, Benrud’s career with aerial application tells a more uplifting story of helping
PHOTO SUBMITTED
Brad Benrud makes a sharp turn while flying above farmland. He said ideal application height from the top of the crop canopy is about 8 feet.
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farmers from his Staples-based business. When he’s not lending a hand on his 1,200-acre soybean and corn family farm in Goodhue, he spends seven days a week during the spring and summer spraying fields with fertilizer, fungicide and insecticides. “For a couple of months of the year, this job takes the work-life balance right out of the equation – there is no balance; it is just work,” Benrud said. “The last two weeks in July and the first two weeks in August, the plan is to be in the airplane every hour that it is even remotely bright outside.” After graduating from high school, Benrud temporarily put his pilot aspirations aside for a warehouse job to save money for flight training. Complications in receiving his medical certificate to be cleared for flying, due to a medication he was once prescribed as a child, delayed him from getting his pilot’s license for several years. Although he
Benrud page 2
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