Solon Feed Mill changes with its hometown

Solon has more than tripled in population since 1978, when Frank and Shelly Kuennen bought Solon Feed Mill. The business has grown and changed with the town, as many of today’s 3,300 residents live subdivisions that were once the mill’s farm customers.

“Where we live between two growing cities, this area is urbanizing much more rapidly than other rural parts of the state,” Greg Kuennen said one recent morning. “Some of the bigger challenges have been trying to shift product focus where we need to. Years ago, there were hog confinements everywhere. Now there’s no more in this immediate area, so my dad had to shift his focus: what else can we do? It was dairy, and now dairy has gone away in a sense. You’ve got to adapt to change. Adapting to what’s going on in the ag world is what you have to do to stay in business.”

Fortunately, many of those newer homes house dogs and cats, and many of their human owners like feeding the local songbirds.

“We’re doing a lot more of the pet food and small-animal feeds as the town grows,” Kuenen said, and a large corner of the feed mill’s retail shop is devoted to sunflower seeds and other bird food. “It has grown over the years.”

Frank Kuennen died in August 2021 and his son, 42, took over the business.

“I grew up here, sweeping as a young lad,” he said.

Kuennen found another market niche closer to the traditional family farm amidst the consolidation into industrial-scale agriculture: smaller farm-to-table and community-supported agriculture (CSAs) operations that eschew feed additives and genetically-modified organisms (GMO).

“We manufacture and sell non-GMO brand feeds,” Kuennen said. “We’re buying locally-sourced non-GMO grains from local farmers and we’re using that to blend these non-GMO products. The non-GMO part is I think really important for customers who feel non-GMO is the route they want to go. We bought some equipment so we could test the non-GMO strands to make sure they are what they are supposed to be.”

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Market uncertainties and the cost of milling organic feeds to government standards ruled out that option.

“We looked into doing it, but the organic market is kind of up and down,” Kuennen said. “We will bring in some organic-certified feeds we will sell to anybody who wants it.”

While developing new products for new markets, the mill continues to serve its older customers.

“We’re still servicing the smaller to mid-size family farms,” Kuennen said. “We’re also doing quite a bit of bagged product, whether it’s chicken feed, cattle feed, pig feed, goat feed. Any specie you can think of, we either make feed for it or have a way to find the product to sell to them.”

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That includes its own brand, Acorn II, delivered by bulk truck or in bags. Kuennen’s parents tweaked the formula for what had been the mill’s own Acorn-brand feeds.

“They wanted to keep the brand around, since people knew what it was, so they changed it to Acorn II Feeds,” he said. “We do sell our products at a few other dealerships in the state, and some of our stuff is purchased from distributors across the country.”

The mill employs eight full-time and five part-time employees in Solon and at its Fairfax branch, purchased in 2013.

“We sell feed out the door there, along with bird seed, just like here,” Kuennen said. “We primarily package over there, so we’re not milling feed there.”

Working with smaller farms has allowed Solon Feed Mill to weather downturns in the larger ag market.

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“We’re not ones to do huge contracts,” Kuennen said. “You’ve got to make sure you’ve got good customer service. It can be difficult to sequence (production) at times. Some animals require different micro-ingredients that others don’t. It’s a lot of planning.”

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