Loren Van Wyk’s earliest farming memories are of working in the fields surrounding Pella, a modest-sized town in south central Iowa, with his father Dan. Dan operated a large farm for those days, and loved machinery. When Dan wasn’t in the field, Loren knew he could be found in the farm shop with a torch in hand, modifying equipment.

“I learned at an early age that if you wanted something and couldn’t find it, you made it,” says Loren.

During Loren’s teenage years, he got the opportunity to work for Gary Vermeer, founder of Pella-based Vermeer Manufacturing, who owned farm ground that was custom farmed by Dan.

“One summer, Gary gave me a prototype of a round baler and told me to bale all I could and let him know how it ran,” Loren recalls. “I spent a lot of time in the factory, which was an eye-opener for a farm kid like me. That’s when I learned how to build things and how things work – from then on I was intrigued by how things work.”

Over the next two decades, Loren’s farm, LDJ Farms, provided for his growing family. In the mid-1990’s, when faced with the decision to get big or get out of livestock, Loren put his farm shop to work under the name LDJ Manufacturing and started building things for other farmers and local companies.

In the beginning LDJ Manufacturing operated as a side business to LDJ Farms. True to Loren’s roots, they would find new ways of building things and improving existing products. That spirit of innovation increased demand to the point that the manufacturing business became a full-time endeavor.