About Us
Our beginnings & Inspiration
CRF Consulting, LLC is an Iowa Corporation owned by John & Jayne Klein of Dunlap, Iowa. For the past 30 years John has been actively involved in all aspects of agriculture business consulting focusing on livestock production. Broadly this includes: feed sales, sales management, product management, facility management, department management, and research and development of new products. CRF Consulting is a business flexible enough to withstand the abrupt changes in the agricultural feed markets.
During the last five years of John's career at ADM, he was heavily involved in their Crop Residue Research. As product manager of ADM’s Second Crop Service, he developed an on-farm residue treatment system and maintained his licensee with ADM for 3 more years after leaving ADM. In his ADM role, John actively partnered with John Deere, Monsanto, Iowa Biofibers, Hillco, University of Nebraska, Kansas State University, Purdue, and a host of others in a variety of research projects. These leading-edge research successes inspired the formation of CRF Consulting, LLC in 2015.
CRF Consulting continues to provide the on-farm residue treatment recommendations that ADM was executing. CRF Consulting also uses this experience to improve the feeding value of various feeds, that go into the products that they manufacture.
Another portion of the business concentrated on custom formulating feeds for a dealer network. The feeds are toll-manufactured for CRF Consulting labeling and sold to the dealer network John consults for. Iowa Ag Biofibers, IABF, is a company John has worked with for over 15 years. IABF was one of the first companies that was pelleting crop residue for several years. Along with consulting for IABF, John has helped them build a line of feeds that incorporate crop residues into their feeds. CRF Consulting continues to develop new products for the livestock industry as well as non-ag industries. IABF allows CRF Consulting the ability to research and develop new products for field research. Our work with the Department of Energy, as well as other non-ag industries, provides us another avenue to grow.
CRF Consulting consists of product development. After extensive experimentation in their new facility, several new products were developed, field-tested and sold through their dealer network and retail customers over the last 8 years with great success. Due to this success, there is a need to commercialize these products on a moderate scale. The new facility offers the opportunity to build products on a large scale and allow the dealer network to retail the new products in their markets to start to build a base of business. Future plant locations are being considered and evaluated. These products are exclusive to the technology and will remain the intellectual property of CRF Consulting and IABF. These new products will create multiple jobs in the future from residue harvest, buildings for bale storage, processing plants, new equipment for feeders, and manufacturing. The plant also allows CRF Consulting to have a facility for warehousing feed inventory, in addition to providing a working lab.
