New Hamburg farm chosen for filming national television ad

NEW HAMBURG, Mo. -- With the engine idle, Tim Essner sat in his pickup truck and waited for his cue.

"Truck ready to roll ... and action!" the director yelled through a walkie-talkie radio.

Essner sped down the dirt road in his pickup truck, leaving a cloud of dust for the camera to capture. He repeated the drive about 10 times.

Essner isn't an actor, but for one day, the Scott County farmer briefly took part in filming on the field he and his brother, Andrew, farm.

Essner Farms LLC in New Hamburg was recently selected from about 25 farms throughout the Midwest to be featured in a national television advertisement for Mycogen Seeds, a retail seed company of Dow AgroSciences LLC.

The ad, which was taped Sunday, will feature three armored cars sitting at the edge of the cornfield off Route A in New Hamburg. The purpose of the ad campaign is to highlight insect protection products through Mycogen Seeds, said Dave Schumacher, senior marketing specialist for Mycogen Seeds.

"So that's the tie-in of the armored cars," Schumacher said. "The security and protection of the investment as well as a reward message of higher yields and greater profits."

Mike Fredrick, associate creative director for Bader Rutter, a marketing communications agency in Brookfield, Wis., said the production crew looked at farms in four states -- Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois and Missouri -- during two days of scouting for the location.

"We were looking for great-looking corn, obviously, and just something that would work with the setup of the trucks -- so that narrowed it down when we got to each farm," Fredrick said about the selection process.

The team then picked three fields -- two in Missouri and one in Kentucky. In the end, the field off Route A was the best choice, Fredrick said.

Andrew Essner, who also drove a truck during a scene for the ad, said he was first approached about using the land for the ad a few weeks ago when an area Mycogen Seeds representative contacted him. Soon after, Fredrick and others visited to scout the area.

The only preparation done before the film crew arrived late Friday was mowing and weed-eating around the area to be shot and loading dirt (to be used for the shoot) on a dump truck, Andrew Essner said.

Around sunrise Saturday, the 15-member production crew visited the fields to prepare for shooting Sunday.

"We came out and figured the locations and how the shots would work out. From there, we created a long shot list and what time to make those shots," Fredrick said.

From start to finish, the nine-shot ad took about 10 hours to complete Sunday. Shots included a farmer (portrayed by a real farmer from Wisconsin) examining the area around his truck, a close-up of his boots hitting the ground, him getting out of a truck, his hands on the steering wheel, the truck backing up and a dust kickup shot.

Air dates and locations of the ad are still in negotiation.

Andrew Essner said the weekend shoot generated some buzz around the small town of a few hundred.

"When they saw all the trucks and people on the field, somebody said they thought the gas pipeline had broke. And somebody said they thought it looked like they were making a movie," Essner said about comments overheard from the town's residents.

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