Kansas Profile – Now That’s Rural: Kelly Coover, CVR Manufacturing
At a glance: Living in the forested part of eastern Kansas, Kelly Coover designed and improved a tree chopper to clear trees from fields. He and his brother formed a manufacturing company to make tree choppers and market outdoor furnaces, which are sold across the nation.
More information: Ron Wilson, rwilson@ksu.edu, 785-532-7690
Photos: Ron Wilson | Kelly and Kyle Coover
Website: Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development
Jan. 24, 2024
By Ron Wilson, director of the Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development at Kansas State University
Clearing trees and brush. That’s one of the challenges in far eastern Kansas, where woods will naturally encroach upon open fields and sometimes need to be removed. Today we’ll meet a rural-preneur who has designed better equipment to cut trees and clear fields.
Kelly Coover is the co-owner of CVR Manufacturing in Galesburg, Kansas. Coover grew up in Galesburg where his brothers were involved with a feed mill. He went to school in Erie where he was active in agricultural education classes. In 1976, he became the state champion in the FFA Structures and Environment competition.
At right: Kelly and Kyle Coover | Download photo
Coover earned a degree in agricultural engineering from K-State and returned to southeast Kansas. For a time, he worked as an engineer for the Army ammunition plant in Parsons.
Coover was always looking for a better way to do things. He joined his brother in creating a company called CVR Manufacturing to do research and development of new and improved agriculture-related products. The company was named CVR, which is a contraction of the family name, and was also the cattle brand that Kelly’s father had acquired years ago.
CVR Manufacturing explored making different kinds of projects. One was a biodegradable injection-moldable plastic material made from wheat straw and starch. That made it useful for making animal feed containers, for example.
Another product was an outdoor furnace called Heatsource 1 that uses wood, corn or pellets for heating.
Then they came across tree-choppers, which are a real need in forested southeast Kansas. They licensed a product called the tree chopper, designed to be mounted on a four wheeler.
As the business expanded, Coover brought on board his son Kyle, also a K-State engineering graduate. “We saw cutting trees was a good market,” Coover said.
The Sawfish line uses an appropriately named long narrow blade. The Coovers designed another tree cutting device of their own with overlapping circular disk blades. “If the blades overlap, it only takes half the energy to cut a tree,” Coover said. They continued to upgrade and improve their design over time.
Their first redesigned model included ten-inch disks to cut four-inch diameter trees and was made with a mount plate to go on four-wheelers. Next, they upscaled the device to include 16-inch disks with bucket clamps that could go on the front-end loader of a tractor.
Kyle suggested another improvement on the product line: The Sawtilus trimmer, which uses a spiral-shaped blade to cut smaller trees in one revolution. This can be mounted on a string trimmer.
“It keeps torque constant and minimizes hydraulics,” Coover said. CVR Manufacturing earned a patent on that product in May 2023.
Kyle says of his father: “There was nothing he couldn’t fix.”
It runs in the family. Kelly Coover has three sisters and three brothers: Don, a veterinarian; Brian, an ag engineer; and Dave, an ag education major who is back on the Coover family farm.
Coover continues to look for better ways to get things done. “I can see alternate uses and other ways to do things,” he said. “I take a notebook and when I have an idea, I write it down. I have 25 or 30 notebooks with ideas in them. I just need the time and money to get them done.”
The disk tree cutter has proven especially popular for cutting trees and clearing brush. “In Texas, they are using them to cut mesquite,” Coover said. “Our small model is used on yucca in the west.”
CVR products have gone as far away as Georgia, Oregon and West Virginia.
It's an impressive record for a business located in the rural community of Galesburg, population 149 people. Now, that’s rural.
For more information on the company’s outdoor furnaces, go to www.heatsource1.com. For information on other products, go to www.cvrmanufacturing.com.
Clearing trees and brush is a real need in certain parts of the country, and Kansas-based CVR Manufacturing is finding better ways to make this possible. We salute Kelly and Kyle Coover and all those involved with CVR Manufacturing for making a difference with ingenuity and engineering.
The benefits are clear.
Audio and text files of Kansas Profiles are available at http://www.kansasprofile.com. For more information about the Huck Boyd Institute, interested persons can visit http://www.huckboydinstitute.org.
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K‑State Research and Extension is a short name for the Kansas State University Agricultural Experiment Station and Cooperative Extension Service, a program designed to generate and distribute useful knowledge for the well‑being of Kansans. Supported by county, state, federal and private funds, the program has county extension offices, experiment fields, area extension offices and regional research centers statewide. Its headquarters is on the K‑State campus in Manhattan. For more information, visit www.ksre.ksu.edu. K-State Research and Extension is an equal opportunity provider and employer.