Part one of this special two part series features Aaron Flansburg of Palouse, Washington describing his transition from long-term no-till practices to organic management. The first episode is a recording of the June 2024 ‘Farmwalk’ live from Aaron’s farm, co-hosted by the WSU Food Systems program and the Tilth Alliance.
Join the Farmwalk experience as we tour Aaron’s organic grains in the field, as he describes his trials and observations with fertility, marketing organic heritage grain, and weed management. Follow-up with part two, where we hear more on his reflections and lessons-learned a year later, along with what’s new in 2025!
Aaron Flansburg
I am Aaron Flansburg and I grew up just south of here. So, this is some ground we took on in two-thousand and two. And when I got out of school at WSU. So, I came back to the farm kind of unexpectedly, quickly. And it was partly because this ground came up and it was available. And so, we’re not a huge farm by any stretch. We farm a couple thousand acres total between what we own and what we lease. But we are unique in that it all is contiguous. So, the ground from the shore up on the southern end of the farm, you only have to cross roads to get to all of our ground, which is unusual. So I don’t farm the road much. I feel really fortunate to be in that position. So yeah, I’m a fifth generation farmer. I farm with my mom and dad, and so my mom and dad are down having the kids try to learn how to work, which is difficult. But I’m here to talk to you about mainly our transition to organic farming. A different kind of agriculture here than I’ve really grown to know. And, you know, I guess I can kind of go through a little bit of the background as to why I got interested in doing this, and so that transition probably started with the idea and in about twenty-twenty. And so in twenty-twenty, I wanted to try something new, try a new crop. And I think that year we had maybe seven or eight different crops that we grew. So our typical crops here would be winter wheat, which we would sow in late September, and then we’d sometimes have spring, we’d sometimes have spring barley. And then canola has been more popular here lately as a management tool to deal with a weed problem, which is Italian rye grass, which you can look at your feet and probably see almost anywhere you go on, on this ground. And we have a little bit of a fall fair. We have peas, lentils, chickpeas in a given year. And so in twenty-twenty, I thought I’d make it more complicated and try to grow a crop I didn’t know much about, which was hemp. And so I got licensed to grow hemp. And we grew sixty-three acres of seed hemp on this ground. And so, it kind of spurred my interest in organic because it was a crop that I really couldn’t put any chemistries on. So I was able to use conventional fertilizer, but I couldn’t really spray it with anything afterwards. So, you know, it looked to me like something that if I could grow it for half the price and grow it conventionally or grow it for twice the price and get that premium for growing organic, it was a good way to go. And so that kind of started me on the journey. And, and I wouldn’t say that the hemp was a roaring success, but, you know, I probably made seven-hundred pounds plus per acre. And it was a very interesting crop. And, you know, presented new challenges, which, I kind of feel like, with the exception of some weed pressure that we’re running into continued resistance in whatever crops were growing. You know, we have a pretty good system. Most of our conventional ground is in, you know, a no till or at least a minimum till situation. And most years we don’t really do any particular tillage at all. And so, you’re really reliant on whatever chemistries, durability to make sure that you can grow a crop next year without massive weed pressure. And some of those chemistries are getting weaker and weaker as especially Italian rye develops resistance. But other, traditional weeds like wild oats develop resistance. And so, you know, across the way from us, we have a field of chickpeas that has resistant oats in it. And it was a real detriment to the barley crop we had last year because they just, there’s too much competition. And so considering that I’m always fighting weeds, I thought I’d try to fight them in a different way and probably do it in a harder way and try to grow organic. So that’s what you’re seeing now. And so and in some of my thinking is that the goal of this is to be somewhat minimalist. And so I feel like, you know, coming out of COVID and, and really twenty-twenty-one even, which was an unusual year due to the pandemic, due to a major drought that we had here. My thinking basically was shifting that I wanted to try to grow things where I had less reliance on sources of fertilizer that might come from overseas. I’d have more reliance on markets that were closer to where I am. And, you know, in that way I would have slightly more control over my operation. And so, you know, because that can change and it takes a lot of the control away from us as a farmer in terms of where we can sell our crop. And so I wanted to sell a crop with lower inputs and higher value was my goal. And to sacrifice yield was okay with me. To try to achieve that and to try to look at the bottom line more than what was the highest end yield I could achieve. And so I have definitely succeeded in reducing yields on this, on this ground. And, I would say that I’m, I am very much in, in the learning process here. So what you’re going to see is a lot of things that are adjustments that I’ve made to try to deal with problems that create new problems that I’ll try to adjust to. So that’s kind of where we’re at now. And, so I started the organic certification process. It’s a three year layoff basically. And so, I have to have no prohibited chemistries for, for three years before I can take a harvested crop off of that ground. So in this case, where we’re standing right now is in its second year, so this is transitional ground. So it’s in its second year away from having any chemicals applied that are prohibited. And really I haven’t applied any chemicals at all on any of this ground since I’ve been transitioning to organic, with the exception of, I had a seed treat on the chickpeas that you’ll see in the back that was organic certified for fighting fungus and was we’ll see how that’s worked out. And I’ll, I’ll get into that later. But that’s one way of controlling for inputs that might become scarce inputs. It might become more expensive based on world events that I can’t control. So, then I have to fight weeds in a different way. And, not all of the ground on the farm, by any stretch is going to go into organic production without having a system in place that’s better than what I have now and easier than what I have now. Because of the amount of work that it’s taken on this ground in terms of cultivation passages or passes ways to deal with the weeds, the amount of work is just incomparably high compared to what I’m doing conventionally. And I will fully admit that I bought a sprayer today, and it’s going to be a second sprayer for the farm. So, you know, hopefully, on the rest of this stuff, I’ll use it. But, I feel like there’s trade offs and there’s learning and, and whatever you’re doing in farming. And so the trade off to me, in conventional, is that you’re able to rely on the sprayer to do most of the heavy lifting on weed control. And the benefit you get from that is that for me, I don’t have to do any cultivation. So the structure of the soil stays intact. And, you know, there’s benefits to that. I like farming with straw. I’ve gotten pretty good at it for our region. I feel like I’m successful in no till, and you know, chemistries allow me to do that. As opposed to the organic ground where I rely pretty much on one tool for physical weed removal, which is iron. And, you know, then hopefully try to come to a rotation where I can figure out what weeds are going to give me less pressure after a given crop. And I’m definitely not there yet. And cultivation creates its own problems with spurring the growth of weeds that really like to be cultivated. So, you’ll see that as you continue to walk around. So my, my initial effort was I was hoping to do basically organic no till. And, you know, a lot of the reading I had been doing was about people who were doing what they would call regenerative or sustainable agriculture without tillage. And I’m finding and looking back on a lot of that reading that a lot of those people I don’t think are doing it organically. I think they’re doing it with minimal, traditional chemistries or prohibited chemistries from an organic standpoint so that they can stay in that rotation. And, and control some weeds. I’m sure farmers everywhere have trouble with different weeds and, and are finding ways to deal with them. I just haven’t quite skinned that cat yet, so that you’ll see that too. So I have a lot of questions. I hope you guys have questions and maybe even some answers for me, because I am, I am not the definitive source on what works, but I can tell you, I’ve been trying a lot of different things and I’ve put in a lot of effort. I don’t know if it’s all been rewarded with success, but I have put in the effort. So the actual certification process, if you want to hear just a little bit about that, you know, it’s not the most onerous paperwork I’ve done. It’s not the most expensive thing I’ve done. It’s and it’s also supported by, by USDA funding so that you can recoup some of the costs of, of getting certified, getting those inspections, getting that all set up. And, and who I went through for, for my process was Oregon Tilth. And they were good to work with. And, you know, they’ve kind of helped me to work through the process of getting to where we are now. And, you know, so I would say that another one of the things that I’m learning and farming and maybe some people learn earlier than me, but paperwork is where you make a lot of your money in farming, and that’s just the truth. And, otherwise the margins are pretty tight. But doing paperwork and finding ways to supplement the income from actual crop sales, I feel like is a pretty important part of it. And so I kind of see organic as tied to that, you know, because there’s a lot of ways that they want you to prove that you’re doing what you say you’re doing. You want to record all the things that you’re doing. There’s certain requirements for, saying, yes, I’ve checked with at least three different sources to make sure that there’s no way I can get a source for actual certified organic seed. And you know, saying that this is my last prohibitive chemistry, and there’s been none that I’ve used since then, and this is how I’ve I’ve dealt with the ground. And so, you know, there’s a lot of requirements just to take note of, even including, since we’re in conventional as well, making sure my truck is really well cleaned out if I’m transferring from, seed that’s not certified to seed that is certified, whether that’s, you know, a harvested crop or a seed that, I’m going to go out and put through my drills. So cleaning out the drills, I’ve gotten good at that, too. And recording all of that and just saying yes, I’ve, I’ve vacuumed out the drills. I’ve blown them out. I’ve done due diligence, you know. So I’m not cheating. Basically, you know, I have to prove that I’m not doing things that I shouldn’t be doing, and then we can go on and market and sell our crop as organic and so on. Total cost into it, I should have these numbers off the top of my head, but I don’t. But I would say it’s probably in the fifteen hundred dollar range to get started, something like that. And then just as you go through continuing to update your organic systems plan and, and check all the boxes, and there’s fraud prevention programs that are new, so you have to update things with that. So there is paperwork involved. I’m not going to say there’s not, but it’s not the worst paperwork I’ve ever done either. But a lot of it’s things that I would keep track of anyways, so. And that’s good because otherwise I’ll forget what I did and I can’t see what I’ve proved not to work or prove to work. And so, you know, I kind of did that last night in preparation for this, just to see all the operations that I’ve done on this ground this year. And I’ll take you through that and, and kind of see what those have been. And as far as crop sales go, my first sale was of a certified DNS crop last year. And so I grew that dark northern spring that I intercropped with Pardina lentils last year on, on the very back and and that’s what’s in chickpeas now this year. So you’ll see that I got that sold and I’ve been working with Ardent Mills and they’re based out of Pullman, but they’re a, you know, a large multinational group that trades in commodities. And they have sources for me to sell into organic markets. And so, you know, that was my first sale. So for reference, I don’t know what DNS is going for now. Seven bucks a bushel, maybe seven or eight bucks a bushel somewhere in there. I’m not sure if it’s even that high right now. And so what I sold was at sixteen bucks a bushel, but I also had to get it to Klamath Falls, Oregon, which cost about four bucks a bushel. And I didn’t have a very big crop. So, you know, it would have been, it would have been a lower cost If I’d have been able to fill the truck. I probably could have hauled it down there for about two bucks or about fifty a bushel if I could have filled the truck. But as it was, I had thirty acres of DNS that I grew and it was about four hundred bushels, so about fifteen bushels per acre is what I made. And, I know it wasn’t because I didn’t have a good stand. It was because I had heavy, heavy, heavy competition with weeds. And, that was particularly prickly lettuce and some winter annuals. But, the prickly lettuce was tough. And so, I can talk about one of my first mistakes was on that ground, and I did not actually harvest it until October seventeenth. And the reason for that was, well, I harvested some of it, but not all of it. October seventeenth was that, my last prohibited application was kind of my first mistake in organic, which was I had treated seed and fertilizer that went down on a cover crop, and I wasn’t really planning what I was going to do just then. I just knew I wanted to seed the cover crop. So I seeded, treated winter peas and treated winter wheat and ran that through the drills. And so I finished that on October seventeenth of twenty-twenty. So that’s why I couldn’t get in there and harvest until October seventeenth of last year. So I wrapped it up. But yeah. And it was, the wheat was a little wetter than I would have wanted. There was a little tiny bit of sprout, but I really didn’t get dinged for it. And, it also gave time for the prickly lettuce to dry down. So it thrashed pretty well. It cleaned pretty well, and I ran it through a rotary screen cleaner, and it really looked pretty clean. Remarkably clean. And that’s in opposition to the ground that you’re standing on now, which was, my, my biggest disaster in twenty-twenty-three. And that was a winter pea crop. And it really got hammered by a frost around February. And, and you might see winter peas this year that look phenomenal. And I’ve grown really good looking winter peas in the past. And these were by far the worst I’ve ever grown. And I, I should have probably just disked them all under, but I didn’t and I took them to harvest for about seventy-three of a hundred and ten acres, and I got ninety-four point four percent damage and defects on that crop. So I have, and that’s after cleaning. So I have a six hundred bushel amount of them in a bin that I think I’m probably just going to put out on the ground somewhere and try to spread out and let the deer eat them. Let the birds eat them. Kind of try to naturally compost them because unless you want a whole bunch of goat grass and prickly lettuce stuff, and peas full of weevils, you’re welcome to talk to me before I do that, but I don’t suspect that there is anyone. So, that’s the big loss from last year. I guess you could say. So, do you have any questions about the certification process and getting to the point I’m at now that you’d like to ask before I move on to kind of the fields and the different things I’m doing right here in the transitional ground and, and go through the details of that.
So what’s your have you had to put any storage infrastructure into, you know, since you are conventional? Also, it doesn’t sound like maybe you’re to the point where it’s too much harvest. But yeah. What’s that look like?
Aaron Flansburg
I would like to put more in, but I haven’t yet. And I have one bin that in twenty-twenty we adapted for the hemp. So the seed hemp, you cut it really wet and so you’re cutting it between eighteen and twenty-two percent moisture, which is, you know, wetter than anything else that we cut around here. It would you typically be in the twelve percent or below or thirteen percent and below range for your grains. And so we put in a drying floor and a big fan to dry that down. And so I’ve used that for crops other than hemp too. So sometimes we get laid and the chickpeas are wet. And you can put an eighteen percent chickpea in there and dry it down as long as you know it once did get to that point of being dry. And so, that infrastructure was put in. I’d like to have a few smaller bins, but I haven’t done it yet. We have five bins available of our own, and then another two and they’re all eight thousand bushel bins except for one that’s thirteen. And really, for the amount that I’m doing here, a four thousand bushel bin would be plenty. Two thousand bushels would be fine most of the time I think, too. So I guess that’s probably the change that I’ve made, other than buying a seed cleaner that I tried to use last year.
Carol McFarland
I’m really interested in how you’re kind of cross-pollinating between your systems, because I’m sure it’s a long term no till farmer. I’m sure there’s principles that you’re kind of crossing over into your organic management that might look different if you had just been an organic farmer.
Aaron Flansburg
I think it was twenty-nineteen. I think it was on this field. I had a vetch and triticale blend that I seeded for hay. And so that’s that’s actually what you’re looking at, that’s that’s standing there, is vetch and triticale that I haven’t rolled yet. And so I can I can show that to you if you want to see the roller crimper in action, and kind of see what it does. And so I did that as a, it was sort of like a cover crop that I took off for hay, and that was to deal with Italian rye grass because I wanted to try to reduce the seed bank by doing that. And in a typical year, it does a great job about competing other weeds and grasses as well. So I guess that worked out pretty well. I haven’t really used cover crops in my other stuff yet. It’s basically just been here and that was, you know, part of the goal of my cover crops was to, you know, bring more carbon, bring more nitrogen in the soil, that I don’t have to go out and purchase and ship in. And all the expenses that come with that. So, you know, and also to try not to have to buy expensive, organic certified fertilizer or manure, that’s also really expensive to bring in here. I did something slightly radical on my winter wheat this year in that we seeded it early and had such good crop competition and good canopying by April this year. And, you know, I looked at the wheat that was this tall and didn’t think I’d go out and track it up and really hit many weeds with my spray. And so I didn’t spray winter wheat this year. And, that’s unusual too. I did spray it in the sense that we put on the anthem flex in the fall, but I didn’t put a spring herbicide on. And so, you know, it’s not the cleanest wheat in the country. But then again, you see a lot of ryegrass in people who I guarantee sprayed more than I did. And, it’s just the way it is because we’re losing chemistries there. So, maybe I’m a little bit more prone to accept weed pressure, I guess I would say, because it’s nothing compared to what I see on this ground.
When you’re harvesting, do you set your combine to retain the weed seeds and clean them out later, or do you let them go out the back?
Aaron Flansburg
I’m basically letting them go out the back, and yeah, it’s always trying to find a balance there. I also don’t want to put a whole bunch of weed seed in the bin, because it can make it hard to unload, too. Plus you get dinged on it because then if I can’t clean it out post combining, then I have to pay to haul it, you know, and then you get discounts on that. So I, I guess I’m at this point I’m leaving it more in the field and I don’t have, like a hammer mill type attachment to the back of my combine, which some people are using, and I’d like to. But then again, I did put an updated chopper and spreader on my combine. And so I have a combine that might be worth thirty-five, forty thousand dollars at this point. And to, to put one of those there, probably in the ninety-five thousand dollars range at this point, and they’re high maintenance. And, my combine isn’t heavy powered enough to run one. So, I like the idea of a seed destroyer. I’m just not set up for it. And I really don’t want to buy a combine to put one on it and have to go to a higher powered combine that then I’d have to run in and I’m trying to avoid that. So all my stuff is older and I’m resisting.
Is the chaff liner on your radar?
Aaron Flansburg
As far as withdrawing it then basically. And I think some people will go back and even will burn those windrows and stuff. I don’t know that I can do that in, in an organic production. That might be a prohibited practice. I’m not sure. I haven’t tried it, but I haven’t done it either. I think I will do it with hemp because in the case of hemp, if I grow it again it might be that I grow some next year. I did buy a combine to cut hemp with, but it was an old, inexpensive combine, so, you really can’t run it through a chopper because it will just wrap its rope. You know, it’s the type of hemp that I grew is at least two uses. So seed and fiber, and it is literal rope and and so to plop it down on the ground in a windrow is, is your best bet. And so I’m hoping then with that line, then I could have it baled off and not have to deal with it because it is a bit of a challenge to deal with that fiber.
I just have an overview question of your whole marketing system. And if you can just explain, like your conventional marketing system, where your crops go and then how you’re seeing organics differently and maybe what some of your goals might be for, the way that you would achieve those higher prices.
Aaron Flansburg
Yeah. So my conventional system would typically be I’m hauling to Palouse. So it’s about three miles from here. So it’s an easy trip. And so, you know, whether it’s Palouse Grain Growers taking it, for them to sell the Central Ferry terminal down on the river or Palouse Grain Growers taking it as a put through where they’ve got a contract with a company that handles pulses, let’s say. So peas, lentils, chickpeas. You know, they’ll have bins that they can store it for until a truck hauls it out. And then off it goes to Colfax or Spokane or wherever they’re dealing with it. And so, you know, most of my stuff either goes to Palouse at harvest or goes to home storage at harvest. And so, some of my crops, like barley, if I’m growing, if I’m growing a malt barley, it’s priced already. So there’s no advantage to me to hold on to it. If I’m trying to play the market, which I’m terrible at and might as well just sell it out of the combine most of the time anyways, because I do better doing that, I think. But, you know, so, so in the case of barley, it’s going to Palouse it’s going to harvest. You know that’s typically how it works. With winter wheat it could be hauled to Palouse. It could be stored at home. It’s maybe fifty-fifty on that or something like that. And so then, I would say the rest, you know, the post crops typically go to Palouse and they’re kind of in a load out bin that gets sent to whoever’s handling that from there. Canola is a little bit different. So the canola processors are in Warden, and so it’s kind of moving in the direction of the organic stuff in the sense that it has to get to Warden. It’s a further distance. It’s a specific market that it’s going to. So, you know, it’s more than a couple hours to haul it there by truck, and I’m hiring a truck driver to do that. And so off it goes. And it gets sold there upon delivery. So, that’s my conventional stuff. Not counting hay, which I basically, just as far as alfalfa goes, I just have somebody that I’ve, I’ve had come in and do it for me and they do all the marketing and it’s just kind of a cash rent situation with, with the alfalfa. So with the organic now, with the DNS, it went to Klamath Falls. So that’s a pretty good haul and a pretty long trip. And I think the truck that I got, it cost about twenty-one, twenty-one hundred bucks to haul it. So, you know, the whole crop was worth a little over six-thousand. So, you know, that’s a pretty good chunk of what the crop was worth was to haul it. And as far as local facilities that can handle it, well, Hendrix and Arden Mills have a place up at Steptoe where I’ll haul my chickpeas. If I do get them to harvest. They’ll go up there. So not real far. That’s not too bad. There’s also groups out in Montana that I’ve dealt with. So the hemp went to Montana outside of Great Falls. Fort Benton. So that was through IND Hemp, which is also dealing in fiber now. And, if I grow seed for them again, I would probably, you know, try to harvest the seed, send it that way, probably try to bail the, the hay or the straw, the fiber, I should say. And, see if I could get it that way. Even if it’s a wash, I don’t think I’d make money on it. It’s too far. But to get it off the ground so I can work it with things that don’t snag on it. The next year might be worth it to me. So, yeah. And as far as that goes, there’s groups in Montana that buy organic lentils and I haven’t sold to them yet. But I’ve talked to them. And so at this point, my main market has been with Arden Mills.
What are the considerations for overspray, between your conventional and your organic fields?
Aaron Flansburg
Right. So this is something that I really didn’t know going into certification what they’d require. So I kind of didn’t know what the buffer would be. But they want you to have a buffer. And as it turns out, for me, it’s only a twenty foot buffer. And I can show that to you. And so it’s not horrible. And so my choice would be, well, do I want to seed it to something that’s going to stay in a buffer, that has some perennials in it, or do I want to seed it to just the same crop as I was doing otherwise and just not spray it and not harvest it with the rest? So this year I have a cover crop that I can show you in the buffer. If we, if we want to walk that far. But, it’s how I’ve dealt with it. You know, maybe three acres or something like that, that I actually have to have a buffer on the certified ground because on the north corner is CRP that I won’t spray up next to it. On the east border is a neighbor’s field. So I’ve got a twenty foot buffer there. On the south edge is twenty foot buffer. That’s next to my own conventional stuff. And then the other border is just next to the transitional ground, so it doesn’t have any pressure from spray in that area either. So, when this is certified, then next year, I would have to put a buffer all along this border all along the road of twenty feet at a minimum. So, yeah, it was kind of maybe a little less than I expected, they’d say, but twenty feet was all they needed in. Honestly, unless somebody is spraying in real windy conditions it’s fairly unusual to see chemical drift further than, you know, five feet or so into the crop. So, yeah, it would be really dilute if there were some fines that got on to it after twenty feet. But it’s possible. But, you know, I would be careful about it. And actually the prevailing wind here is just like it is today. And so I would generally be pretty safe from a neighbor spray in this ground just because of that.
Are you adjusting your seeding rate? I hear you say you didn’t spray your winter wheat. Are you looking at the seed rate for weed competition?
Aaron Flansburg
Yes, definitely. And so I’m buying more seed as a way to make up for less other inputs. So, I’ll tell you about the difficulties I’ve had in my organic chickpeas this year, but I’ve in total put three-hundred and fifty pounds of seed on that ground. So I’ll tell you why. Left you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m hoping I get three-hundred and fifty off of them. Really? We’ll see. Here, for seed rates, the vetch triticale, it was basically free because I harvested it last year. So I seeded vetch triticale and goat grass into this, and, so it was basically free. This was just standard untreated Lenetah barley seed. And I seed at about a hundred and five pounds per acre there. And, then some heritage barley that I have in the back was about the same. And I initially seeded the garbs at one hundred and fifty. Last year I think I seeded the spring wheat at something like one hundred and twenty, and that was interceded with protein. Is it thirty pounds? I think, so I seeded one hundred and fifty total, on that ground. And I kind of wish I had a really narrow spacing, conventional drill right now, and I don’t. So I have a seven and a half inch spaced Palouse zero till drill, which is a really heavy double disc opener. And, seven and a half inches is fine in most cases, but I’d probably do better cross seeding with it. Just to get even more canopy and better competition with that stand.
It sounds like you’ve tried quite a few different crops at this point in time. Have you developed, or are you still kind of working on, actual rotations anywhere that you may want to stick to? Or do you feel like you’re still trying to think about this sequence of it all?
Aaron Flansburg
I definitely haven’t figured out what works yet. So my rotation is at this point, I’m kind of having a cover crop year before, what would be a winter wheat year, and even the summer fallow you see, behind you there was a cover crop. And, so I’m trying to get grain manure into the system that way. And so I’m thinking then after that, you know, I might try to kind of follow somewhat of a conventional rotation, with maybe at least a year off, you know, to cover crop in there, and since I don’t really have, well, it’s maybe possible to get access to livestock, to graze a cover crop. I am busy enough that becoming a rancher isn’t in my future. And so, you know, if things were to work that way and I’d have some rotational grazing on cover crops and things like that as part of the rotation, you know, in, in a lot of the reading that I’ve done about, you know, people who are in, no till, regenerative farming, you know, animal agriculture is a big part of that. And honestly, I think probably they’re making almost all their money on that. I just just in what I’ve read, I think that’s where the money is, even if it’s not certified organic, they’re, they’re selling beef at a premium, or showing at a premium, whatever it is. And chicken eggs and these sorts of things. And so I think that that’s a system I don’t have. It’d be nice to develop. But I don’t have the means to do it from a time standpoint, or knowledge really. I’m not a rancher. So it would take somebody with that knowledge to, to really want to be part of the operation and change it that way. And it might take more ground than I’m willing to commit at this point to make that happen.
You mentioned doing intercropping, and we’re looking at right now the use of you’re actually harvesting multi-species at the same time and having to deal with separating, cleaning, and how that kind of fits into your plan for selling it, like that kind of stuff?
Aaron Flansburg
So I haven’t done that. So I just harvested over the pardinas last year. And so I, I didn’t, harvest pardinas with the DNS. Here, as far as the hay, yeah, it works for intercropping fine. What I found is the vetch does really well in the low ground, and the triticale does a little better in the high ground. But if I had to let this go, vetch essentially dominates everything, in the low ground, so. But I have hayed it, and I’ve had neighbors who fed it and think it’s great. So, so there’s an option for that, for, for cattle feed. I had really considered doing a flax interceding with my chickpeas this year, and I think they’re doing that a fair bit out in Montana. And I just ended up not coming up with a seed source for flax and I think it would be fairly easy to separate with, with my, rotary screen cleaner. I don’t think that would be that tough, but I didn’t do it and I haven’t done it. So what I did last fall was I seeded vetch and triticale on this ground, one hundred and ten acres of this transitional ground. So, I do have a cheat sheet here, and I’ll see if I can read it. So this was, this was called the Daily Bench. And so this part of the daily bench is, the daily bench, low ground. And so I’ve just been going through this. What I did first was last fall, I had a hundred and ten acres of of the peas. I probably harvested seventy-three. The other bit I kind of mowed to try to keep the weeds down and kept mowing and kept mowing and kept mowing because I didn’t want to till I hadn’t committed to tillage at that point. And so, you know, the worst weed pressure was goat grass up on the top and here and down there. And so I did seventy-three acres of that that I harvested to try to incorporate the goat grass, get it to grow, make sure that I had as much of it grow out during the winter as I could. And then I seeded into that. So some of it was no tilled, some of it was into disc ground. And at this point in the year, I couldn’t tell you which was which. I really don’t know. I couldn’t look at the stand and say, yes, I disked this or this was no tilled at all, pretty much looked the same and all looked pretty good. And so the ground that’s down here that is in, very traditional worked looking summer fallow, I’ll look at my cheat sheet. So I seeded that on the fourteenth of October and, you know, it started growing looked pretty good over winter and a whole lot of goat grass was involved, too. So, you know, it’s well blended in, so there’s, there’s pretty good biomass and so if you look behind the yellow challenger here and we can walk up to that on our way past if you want. That’s a sweep plow. And it’s, it’s something that a lot of the old timers would know about. And I’d never been around at all. We did have a rod weeder when I was a kid. But we cut off all the rod assembly and arms and and made a cultivator out of it. And so I didn’t have a rod weeder anymore. But, you know, I’d seen people using a sweep plow and a sweep plow is a pretty incredible tool in that it can get through almost anything, I think, and under certain conditions, it seems to work really well. And so I, of all the implements I’ve drug out of the Midwest in the past year, that’s the one that I like the best. It’s been the most useful. And so what I did on this ground was on the fourteenth of May I ran the sweep plow. And at that point I had a cover crop. That I’d say the vetch was probably a foot high. The triticale was a foot to eighteen inches high and same with the goat grass at that point. So, you know, I was going through stuff that looked like that. And, you know, I, I really the, the soil conditions were good enough that I didn’t hardly plug up with it. And, and unless there was a few spots that were really heavy, I plugged up a little bit, but it really worked well. And so things started drawing down. And, now I kind of watched it. So then, about eleven days later, I decided it looked too lumpy and it didn’t look like it was really doing a very good job of having a mat of straw to really retain moisture. And so I thought, well, I’ll get a rain. So we got fifty-five, fifty five-hundreths of rain before I sweep plowed it. And then I got sixty-five hundred after I did it. And so three days later I went out and hit it with a chisel. And I hit it with a disc and then I hit it with a Danish tine cultivator. And I think at that point I left it. So that was, that was, from the twenty-fifth through the twenty-sixth, I did that. And then, I don’t know that I have this down, but I think I might have harrowed it, too, and just knocked it flat because you wind up, it’s really sided in. So, you know, even after just one winter of growth, the goat grass, the triticale really had sidewalls. And so I wanted to knock the dirt off of them so that they would be less inclined to regrow and smooth it out. So I had a bit of a dust mulch to retain moisture because my plan is to seed wheat onto this, and probably a hard red winter, this fall. So I wanted it clean. Well, it was then the twenty third, so it was basically a month later, twenty third of June. So just this, this past week, I ran the sweep plow again because I was starting to get a little bit of stuff that had come through that I hadn’t quite killed before. Triticale, goat grass. Now I want to get rid of it. So I sweep plowed it, and I harrowed it again. And so that’s what you see now. So for context, in my conventional farming, in no till I literally have zero cultivation passes and one seeding pass. So in this I had one seeding pass and seven cultivation passes to get to this point. And remember that number because it’s going to be the second lowest one. You hear, here’s our dust mulch and here’s our our seed bed for next year. And you can see it is working. It’s getting drier but there is moisture there. That’s after two passes of this sweep plow, chiseling and a disking. And so I guess I’m generally happy with this. There’s no weeds, which feels like an accomplishment, but it’s definitely a very conventional looking type of cultivation system. So my apologies to the Conservation District. It kind of hurts me too. It kind of hurts me too. I did have some pretty amazing no till organic ground last year that, after some rains in October, underneath the spring wheat straw, I could literally stick my fingers into and grab out of the earth, you know, nice black, crumbly cake, and I don’t have that now.
So after having been grown up and it sounds like a no till system for so long, like, what do your parents think of this transition? Or, like, what is that dynamic like intergenerationally where they’ve seen something kind of maybe go backwards a little bit in some sense.
Aaron Flansburg
Sure. No till is actually sort of new to our farm. So I would say, you know, we’ve probably been more or less one hundred percent no till for ten years or so. And, you know, some no till for maybe up to fifteen. But it’s it’s sort of new. But, you know, my dad’s always been very, progressively minded as a farmer. And conservation has been important to him. And it’s important to me to it. It is despite what you’re standing on, it is important and, you know, so, so kind of to use some of the older practices here, in a sense, I’m kind of trying to do that with what I’ve got behind you in that you’re basically looking at an older type of practice that’s a divided slope. Right. And so contour farming is still what I would tend to do, even if I’m cultivating. But we also haven’t had a horrible hard rain event, at this point, so it’s still pretty intact. So we’ll see how that goes the rest of the year. But yeah, I don’t know. I definitely feel like this is, this is something that I’m, I’m guiding. I think my parents are to the point where they’re not really trying to learn to do something different than what they know works. And, even, even no, till was a big change. But, you know, we’re all on board for that. And, and they let me come out here and piddle around and do all my cultivations and try to manage things as I have. So yeah, there’s, there’s a little bit of a different mindset for that for sure. But then again, I also see this as a really traditional way of farming that has kind of been lost to knowledge, lost to modern knowledge through, you know, the Green Revolution and chemical agriculture and those sort of things. There’s a lot of things that people knew a hundred years ago that I that would just be taken for granted is something they grew up with as a farmer that I don’t know. And I’m trying to find that system out a little bit more and recreate it to some extent. The best line I heard last year in talking to somebody about what works and doesn’t work in farming was was from a French fellow that came out and, he said he was a, no till farmer through and through. And he looked at what I had going on and I think he said a good lesson in farming is don’t be dogmatic. And I’ve been trying to swallow that since he said it, because I thought it was pretty good advice. And so I’m trying to be flexible and trying to be open to new ideas, because I’m finding out a lot of things that don’t work. Carol.
Carol McFarland
Sorry I have so many questions. You’re doing such fun, like such a fun exploration out here. But, I heard you talking about classes of wheat. I’m not sure everybody’s on the same page as, like, around classes of wheat and what the implications are there, but, it sounds like you’re growing organically some of the highest nitrogen demanding crops. And so can you talk a little bit about how you’re managing your fertility to achieve some of the higher protein classes?
Aaron Flansburg
So, oddly enough, my DNS last year made fourteen point one percent.
Which stands for?
Aaron Flansburg
Yeah, sorry, my dark northern spring wheat. Alright. Which I commonly, it’s common to grow some around here. I virtually never grow it because I can’t hit protein conventionally. I just, and then they ding you by whatever percentage of protein that you didn’t hit below that fourteen percent threshold. So you know, it’s, it’s a, it’s a wheat that I’ve kind of given up on generally in my conventional systems. And granted, I only made fifteen bushels last year, but, there were areas that I cut, you know, watching the yield monitor, it was about forty, forty-five, fifty bushels. But those were areas where I wasn’t overwhelmed with the prickly lettuce. So it made protein, and that wheat crop also responds to stress to build protein. And so moisture stress will, you know, lead it to be a higher protein. And so in a drought year, you’ll have high protein wheat, and that can be a problem in your soft white wheats where low protein is desirable. Maybe under ten percent, if I remember right. So, I did make protein. I had no trouble with it. And maybe I will next time. But that’s one thing that worked. The crop preceding that, dark northern spring wheat, was a vetch crop, like only vetch. And I should have. I should have mentioned that. So that was my cover crop leading up to that, I seeded vetch and had an impressive stand of vetch. It really looked good. And so I roller crimped that. I think the timing was fairly good. I had a few vetch escapes, but not too many. And, what looked like an impenetrable mat in July of the twenty-second had broken down to the point where I seeded through it with just no trouble in the spring of twenty-three, and I thought I had it licked. I thought things were going to be pretty good, but the vetch broke down so much that I didn’t really have a straw mat left. And so weed escapes happened in part because of that. It looked really good to begin with. I had, you know, great emergence. I suppose one question somebody asked earlier was about how I would adapt things that I’m doing here into my conventional farming, and I haven’t completely yet, but I am in some crops at least, and probably mainly cereal grains. I’m much less of a believer in seed treats than I was before I started doing this, because I’ve seen no difference in terms of the stand establishment. Now, there may be disease pressure that’s keeping them down after the fact as they’re growing, but depending on the duration of those chemistries, I don’t know how long they’re holding through the growing season. And, you know, somebody who is a seller of seed treat could tell me that I’m completely wrong and I’m doing it wrong. And they might be right, but you can see the stand is there and that hasn’t affected that. Now, the chickpeas may be a different situation. Even with trea they may still be a situation where I can talk about this later, but I probably seeded too early and cold wet soils and more pressure from soil borne pathogens and little creatures to chew on seed. I’m not sure if that was what caused my stand reduction, but my stand was horrible the first time, and it should have been, it should have been looking better than that, because I seeded slightly less there than I did on my own organic ground in the back. So there is some soil sampling going on, and I haven’t, I haven’t got any numbers to give to you right now. And I did have some testing done this year that I haven’t got back yet, but it’s part of a project that’s, that’s testing. And I had some two years ago that, if I was familiar with it, I’d tell you, but I’m not. I don’t remember what it said.
Did you have any ideas for adapting the vetch so that it doesn’t break down too early?
I think, yeah, interceding would be a better answer. Just having more triticale or more grass that has a, you know, more durable carbon in the stock than the vetch does because, and it would honestly take a lot of grain relative to vetch seed to, to accomplish that. So I was seeding probably seventy pounds of triticale to eight pounds of vetch, and the vetch is still just crazy dominant. But I was also looking for nitrogen from the vetch too. And you know, to Ken’s question, I don’t know how much nitrogen it actually put down. And I don’t have that answer for him. But you know, a good crop of vetch can can fix up to a hundred and sixty pounds is what I’ve heard. And so I don’t know if I’m getting that, but the volume is incredible. And so it’s capturing something.
Could you plant in it, could you plant in it in the fall or did it not break down enough? I’m just kind of curious on that.
Aaron Flansburg
I’m going to try that here. So we’ll see. I think I’ll be able to. Yeah. If the straw is dry and, I can, you know, punch into ground that’s a little softer underneath. I think I’ll probably be able to.
It sounds like the triticale and goat grass are problematic from a wheat crop.
Aaron Flansburg
Well, and it shouldn’t be if I can get it killed before it goes to seed, as much. I also don’t know if I believe in really, truly depleting the seed bank in the soil. I don’t think it’s possible. I think there’s so much weed seed there that you could have four or five years of really clean fields, and depending on what your cultural practices are in that six year, you’re going to have unbelievable amounts of weeds that just were there. So I’ve seen that in the back. I can attest to not seeing lambs quarters for three years, and I probably had fifty lambs quarters per square foot in the chickpeas before I took them out.
About rolling the grasses before the seed. But then if you roll over the vetch too early, it seems like that’s kind of growing back a little bit.
Aaron Flansburg
It is. And I’ve waited a lot longer in the past to, to roller the vetch. But I had so much goat grass pressure here, and I was starting to fear that those were starting to fill. I just thought, oh, I got to go get it. And so I went and hit it earlier than I otherwise would. Because I’d like the vetch to be closing in on, full bloom and maybe just a touch past, and then it seems like it’s pretty effective. Same with the triticale. And it’s usually taken me two or three passes to get a really good kill. But I would say I’ve been getting ninety-nine plus percent kill on it in the past three years. This year I went out earlier than I like to because of the goat grass, and I’ve still made three passes on this and I still have vetch. And it did a pretty good job on the grass. It is not as good as if I could have waited still. But in those other fields I didn’t have this goat grass situation either, so I don’t know what’s going to happen here for sure. I’m probably going to go roll it another time or two and see if I can do anything with it. I might even try mowing it. And you know, I’ve I don’t have a lot of options at this point. I’m kind of on options on it. So I have to maybe it’s a sunk cost fallacy to keep rolling it, but that’s what I’m going to do. Yeah. So anybody wants to see this wheat plow up close and personal. This is it. And so it has these giant five and a half foot blades that go under the surface, and as it runs, they just dig, you know, maybe three inches deep or so is how I’ve got it set. And it just lifts the ground and sets it back down. And in the process of lifting the ground, it aerates it, of course, it breaks down some of the structure, but it also cuts off roots. And so that’s the goal is to cut off roots and, you know, except drying out the surface of the ground above it to try to hold on to moisture. And so these in the back, these are called shredders. And they just kind of the goal of them is to hit the ground and hit clods and try to break up any clods, knock soil off of, any root balls that are left as much as you can. It’s not sufficient to me as a stand alone in a heavily sided crop to do the full job. At least, you know, with my timing, I haven’t been able to do that. But, you know, as long as I’ve got standing crop, it probably doesn’t really make much difference how tall it is. I could go through it if it was this tall and it’d clear. So you can definitely use a sweep plow and some really big stuff and have it work. But I haven’t used it on this ground. I used it a little bit on that edge up there the other day, just to see how it looked. Yeah. And I probably disked that first, and then went through it with this sweep plow a month later. I think that’s kind of what, what that little border is. But so there’s, there’s, you know, in the neighborhood of forty acres, a little less of the traditional cultivated, worked summer fallow, there’s probably right about forty acres of this, vetch and triticale here. And so total passes I’ve done here was five. And I’m counting the disc path, which I was trying to incorporate, seed into the ground to try to get as much goat grass to germinate as I could. And I think I did a pretty good job. There’s a lot of goat grass here, so, and then I seeded it. So that’s the second pass. Then on the twelfth of June, I roller crimp it, which is probably two to three weeks before I typically would do it. In the past, I’ve probably done it, you know, somewhere around now, maybe around the first of July, somewhere in there, when I’d have triticale about this tall, vetch about this tall. And, you know, it’s kind of getting to the point where it’s right on the edge of full flower, but maybe on the tail end of full flower before it starting to set seed or set pods. And so, that is really more effective timing than I got here this year. I just, I jumped the gun a little bit because I wanted to get the goat grass hit, and, I can I can show you the roller crimper in action. I left a little patch, and I’ll probably run the tractor through that if you want to see that before we continue on our walk. Go ahead.
Sorry, I’m noticing that there’s more on the implement than just the sweeps themselves. Like, what’s up with the stuff in front and stuff in the back?
Aaron Flansburg
Yeah. The big sweeps in the front are the first contact point after the Colter. And so the Colter is just kind of cuts anything on the ground. So it gets cleaner penetration and it doesn’t have, you know, too much crop building up around the shank of the sweep. So, yeah, that would be the thing that you’re seeing there. And I put new Coulter’s on it. I think it works a little better, but.
And then in the back?
Aaron Flansburg
Yeah. So those were the shredders and they’re trying to hit clods and kind of pound the ground a little bit to break the root balls up. So that they’re not holding as much soil and try to dry things out a little better. So you guys want to see what happened down there. You can kind of take a look at the cover crop as it’s mashed down. The idea is that it’s not cutting right. And so if it’s cutting you worry about regrowth. And so you want to smash that stock so that it just kind of pinches off and dies there. And you can almost, I don’t know if you can do it here, but sometimes you can kind of feel where each blade has gone. Oh yeah. You can, you can kind of feel where each blade is gone. But if you pick up this grass, you can see that it’s been kinked here and crimped here and crimped here. So I’m pretty confident it’s done a good job on that grass you know. And that was two passes. And I might I might wind up needing one more. But this vetch is closer to full bloom now. So I think this patch I’ll do a better job overall, but I probably had some goat grass that filled here, so I probably missed it. That’s what I’m guessing here. Some of that goat grass escaped. Some of the Italian rye might have escaped too. I’m not sure, but it’s a little further along. So, but as far as a, you know, a cover for the ground, it’s pretty good. You know, you’ve got a little ways to go before you get through it. So it’s going to give it some shade. It’s going to do a good job of shading the ground after a rain comes. So you’re going to retain more moisture here in the long term. I feel like it’s in pretty good shape for that now. And, you know, I’m not sure what the moisture is like in the ground here. But, you know, it’s it’s pretty hard at this point. And so you’ve definitely sucked quite a bit of the moisture out into this cover crop. And so, I mean, I, I know a lot of the guys that are doing this in the Midwest and seeding into a cover crop, I saw some of it. I was just back in Illinois and I saw some of that, and, you know, I’m guessing they terminated it chemically from what I saw. But, you know, they’ve got little soybeans down amongst it. And, and the cover crop up here is still offering some shade to the ground in between rows and probably suppressing weeds and probably doing a pretty good job. But for me and the timing here now, I would say it’s too late for me to seed it into something that really is the right point for full maturity to kill, which is right about now. So I kind of feel like that system, the timing might not be very good for me right here. I think it would be too late in the year to get the crop that I really wanted off of this ground if I was going to try growing a spring crop following a fall seeded cover crop. So that’s what I’ve seen so far. I did try it in twenty-twenty-one, which is an unfair year for the sake of comparison to anything because it was so dry. But, I had seeded into standing, winter wheat and winter peas, and then I roller crimped, the roller crimper, that roller crimper to three different ways and got a good kill on it. And by the time those lentils, that’s what I had seeded, was lentils were trying to come up. It was a hundred and eight degrees and I think the soil temperature, even under cover crop was really high, right where those poor little lentils were trying to poke through. And I don’t think a single lentil survived in that field. And so that didn’t work. But I did try it. One of the reasons I made you walk to the top of the hill was because this is one of my favorite views on the farm. We’re standing on, the Palouse River divide right now. I just kind of like this spot. It’s a neat spot. So yeah all our ground that’s down that way will eventually end up in the South Fork of the river and, and then any ground up this way goes up to the river, the North Fork that runs through the town of Palouse, which is right there. And you can kind of see the tree line and the drainage up, up that way. But, here you get to see Steptoe Butte real clearly and, and Kamiak Butte real clearly. And the Blue Mountains and Angel Buttes and all that. So anyways, one of my favorite spots and this year we have, this transitional crop of barley is, is a traditional barley that we grow around here for our conventional programs. It’s called lenetah, it can be used for human consumption, for pearling or for animal feed. And so it’s it’s kind of been a decent barley. It’s a two year old barley. And, this, this field, I feel like, for whatever reason, of the three barley fields, you’ll see, the way I treated it was the most successful in weed suppression. And, I did a spreadsheet last night to try to figure out the differences and try to kind of talk about all the operations that I did. And what it’s really led me to understand is how much it has taken to get to this point in terms of time and cultivation passes and the investment and growing this just to see how it does. So, whereas, I said that, you know, in our no till stuff, it’s, it’s seeding and spraying. This is, cultivation and cultivation and cultivation and cultivation and cultivation and seeding and cultivation and cultivation and cultivation. So, what you see, though, I’m really happy with it. This is remarkably good crop competition I think, you know, relative to weed pressure. And so this was also in the winter peas last year, and I seeded it to vetch and triticale and terminated that this spring as, as one of the earlier operations I had. And so, I tested out a machine called a TerraMax, and it’s made by Great Plains. And so it’s kind of a hybrid between a speed disk and a vertical tillage tool. So it has cupped disks in the front and kind of flat wavy disks in the back. And, you can change the angle to make it more or less aggressive and so I use that on the outside two rounds and I virtually don’t see a difference. I just made two passes around the outside here and to see how it did come out. Excuse me a second. I’ll pull out my cheat sheet here. Okay, so the benchtop barley, I’m just going to go through my operation. So October twelfth, I did some of this field. In October fourteenth, I seeded it to a vetch and triticale blend that was from a field that I harvested down here where I, where I have, another barley crop that you’ll see next. Then in the spring, I used the TerraMax on two rounds. On the twelfth of April, I cultivated it with a Danish tine type cultivator on six inch spacing. Then we use the drag harrow to kind of knock down the side balls, because when I went into it, it was probably five, six, eight inches tall or something like that for the cover crop and the goat grass that I was feeding into. So I heralded on the thirteenth. On the sixteenth, I cross cultivated again. I was hoping for better weed, take out with the cultivator than I got. Wasn’t very good. So then I ran that sweep plow that you saw over every acre in this field on the twenty-second. On the twenty-fifth, I cultivated it again to knock down any more seed balls, root balls that had kind of gotten turned out. And after that, on the twenty-seventh of April, I seeded lenetah barley at a hundred and five pounds. Then I herald it back on the thirtieth. Then on the first I use the rotary hoe and so we haven’t seen that yet, but it’s this unit over here which also mounts behind that red tractor on the, three point hitch. So what that basically does is every three or three and a half inches or so, there’s a spiked spider wheel, it’s called, and it’s got a spoon on the end. And that just digs into the top layer of the ground with the idea of trying to dry out an area that first half inch on top, so that little weeds that are just in that layer, that has some moisture real close to the surface, get taken out or preemptively taken out before they really get established. And so you can kill weeds right before, I may be losing this. You can kill weeds right before they get to the surface. If they’re kind of in what they call a thread stage where they’re just a little white thread and they haven’t started to see the sun and and get that, toughening up at that point, and that’ll flip them out of the ground and take them out. Hopefully.
That’s after seeding?
Aaron Flansburg
So I did that after seeding it. Yeah. And so I did that after seeding on the first. I did it after seeding on the eighth. And I think that I didn’t have really much of anything up at that point, when I did that. So seven days after seeding.
How deep was it seeded?
Aaron Flansburg
I was trying for an inch and a half, I got some of it deeper than that. Because that big, heavy drill will push hard enough even if I don’t want it to, in well tilled ground. So some of may have been two inches some it may have been two and a half inches. Barley likes to be shallow, you know, I did what I could so it looks pretty good generally. So I, I think the second rotary hoeing it may have been up. I think it would have been up by then. I think it would have been little, two leaf stage by that second pass. By the third pass, I did it on the twenty-first. It was five inches tall and starting to fill in. The day after that I had six thousand five hundred to rain. I kind of dread rain and I welcome rain at the same time because rain brings weeds, but it also helps the crop. So I don’t know what’s best, but this field, it really worked. And I don’t know if the difference was that I didn’t over till it with the speed disc or the the TerraMax, I think maybe the cultivator did a better job, plus it’s higher ground. Plus it had a cover crop on it and it may have just been enough drier on the surface to compete with some of the earlier weeds. I don’t know, I don’t have the answer. I wish I did, but I’m pretty happy with this. You see a few triticale escapes sticking up. I can live with it. Other than that, you can see there just really isn’t weed pressure in between the rows that’s going to affect the yield of this crop, which I’m pleased, shocked, amazed and confused by.
You’re going over that multiple times.
Aaron Flansburg
Well, this is I did twice.
Oh, twice.
Aaron Flansburg
Once it’s up even.
Okay. And it can handle it because it’s deep rooted by then.
Aaron Flansburg
It can handle it pretty well. It does damage it a little bit. And it does take out a few. And you just kind of hope that you’ve seeded heavy enough that you lose those and it’s okay. Sometimes I think it actually helps with emergence where I had some crusting. And I think it probably buries a little bit of barley. like this one here. I bet it was too deep and you know probably got hit and buried and eventually it came, but it was weakened. But yeah, I’m pretty darn happy here. Okay. So keep this in mind how good it looks. This is the rotary hoe. And I dug this out of Nebraska, I think is where they had it. And it’s more common back there. A lot of this stuff is possible to acquire. Some of these, you know, nineteen-eighties era implements and you know, probably a lot of farmers have these in their fence rows and, and don’t use them. But this one was in pretty good shape. And so, it’s twenty-seven and a half feet and you’re, you’re going to do better driving fast with this from everything I’ve heard. So I probably was going at least ten miles an hour with it, sometimes fourteen or fifteen if I was smooth and flat enough. So it’s kind of fun because you’re just really going fast. But, it’s a great seat if you want to sit on it. It’s a great place to sit, and take a break for a minute. But I don’t exactly know the perfect timing to use this. Sometimes I think I did more harm than good with it. I’m not sure. In that field I’m really happy with it. And the other fields I’ll show you why I’m not. But the benchtop barley that we just left was a total of thirteen passes, including seeding. So, it’s not the most I’ve done, but it was a lot, a lot of time in the field. So you can see underneath here, these got these little arms and, they’re held on by a spring that pushes down on the ground. And these little spoons, they’re called and these are called spider wheels. And these are spoons on the end. Just flip the dirt up in the air and you just see kind of clods with, with sided in roots just flying all over behind you. This is just to keep it from hitting your back windshield all the time, because it’s going everywhere and it’s just a cloud of agitation. So when it’s working right, it looks like it’s really doing something, but it’s very shallow. It’s just working very shallow in the ground, and you may hit a few of your desirable crop plants and you may kill a few of your plants, but hopefully you’ve seeded heavy enough and most of the crop is resilient enough to handle it. And one of the alternatives to post emergent cultivation is a tined harrow. I think they’re used a lot more in Europe than they are here. Although I did see somebody running one in Illinois when I was driving, through the entire state to look at sprayers. So, it looked like it was doing a good job in the soybean field they were using it in, and I wouldn’t mind having one. It’s probably less aggressive in some ways than this is on crop damage and may be more effective depending on who you talk to on weed take out. But this was maybe seven thousand dollars, and I think you could maybe get one of those for forty or more, and it’s just a roll of the dice. And I would have to be fully committed to get ahold of one. Let’s go see some things that have some weeds and other challenges. We’re now to the most labor intensive of my crops for the year, which is, a sawyer chickpea. So this is, considered by insurance standards, a small chickpea, but it’s, it’s, also the type is a large, completely. So it’s a white, chickpea and, supposed to have a better disease package than some that we’ve raised— Sierras, which we always raised Sierras, and we’ve done really well with them, and I like them. But we’ve also raised these and supposedly should maybe be a little more resistant to some disease. An unbelievable amount has gone into this field. So, these are being grown for Ardent Mills. And so I got a contract for these to grow them, for seventy-five cents a pound. And relative to conventional, it would be somewhere in the forty-four cents a pound range for a contract this year for the first five hundred pounds is where I was at. I think the market’s down just a little bit from that now. This would be for full production. So, you know, if I was to be able to get a thousand pounds per acre, you know, I’d have somewhere in the neighborhood of seven hundred and fifty bucks gross, which I’d be real happy with. But as of right now, it’s taken a lot to get to this point. So last fall, there was what’s right behind me I tried the sweep plow on, and it was standing stubble that I went through. That was the DNS, the dark northern spring wheat stubble. And, you know, I, I managed to kind of get through it. It was a little too wet to work real well. I think I basically didn’t accomplish anything doing that because the roots were able to be wet enough to just hook back in and not get killed. And all that volunteer was pretty small, and I might have had to go too deep to really do a good job. But thirteen acres of this, I tried with that just to see how it worked, and so I ended up doing that, and then I followed that with some of it I disked and some of it I chiseled. And that was all last fall. And then on the eighteenth of March, I came in where this was disced and did two passes with a TerraMax and my goal at that point was to take out weeds with that implement. And it was it was just an implement that I was demoing. I’d never used it before. It didn’t work out well enough. It took out some weeds, but it didn’t take out enough. So it wasn’t a standalone weed control mechanism. I even went a third time with the TerraMax in this area right here where, where I’d sweep plowed it, and still it didn’t take out enough weeds. So then I harrowed it on the fourteenth of April. The fifteenth I ran the Danish tine cultivator on it. The sixteenth we cross cultivated it, and then I seeded it on the twenty-eighth of April. And I, apparently, one of the kind of fathers of growing chickpeas in this area, Sanford, had a sign in his shop that said, thou shalt not seed chickpeas before the first of May. And the truth of that is that I violated that tenant or the order, and I seeded them on the twenty-eighth and it had been a fairly warm spring until that point in pretty nice growing conditions. I thought, okay, well, the timing’s okay. Well, then it kind of got cool and wet. And even though these are the only ones that I had treated, the stand was just awful. And the stand of lamb’s quarter was just coming on strong, and I couldn’t see how I was going to get a crop off of it. And I kept watching it, kept watching it. And this is after before they came up, I rotary hoed it. Then again, before it came up, I rotary hoed it. And then after they were up on the twenty-first of, may I rotary hoed them. And on the sixth of June I ran the sweep plow through everything and took out the lamb’s quarter and what few chickpeas there were. But I would suspect that I had areas probably especially right in here. So this was heavily worked. So this was three passes with the TerraMax, you know, all the cultivation, all the rotary hoeing and Lamb’s quarter loves to be agitated and left in a fine soil. Lamb’s quarter thrives in that condition. So I was selecting for not having winter annuals come through. Not having prickly lettuce come through, which was my problem in this field last year. And selecting for Lamb’s quarter, which I hear is also bad in conventional ground this year. So it’s not just here, but it’s a lamb’s quarter kind of year. And there still is lamb’s quarter here. I still see some coming. And it will be worse along this edge because I’ve driven over it and I’ve worked it more than anything else. But I also do have chickpeas. And before the chickpeas just weren’t there. I don’t know what happened to them. I think the cold wet soil, whatever disease pressure hit them, whatever, little critters chewed on them while they were in the ground, there is just not enough left to think that I could take them to harvest and make something. So the choice was between, at that point, summer fallow and reseeding. So first time I seeded a hundred and fifty pounds per acre. Second time I seeded was two-hundred pounds per acre. I crossed them, so I seeded the kind of lighter, cross seeded them. So I tried to get as even a stand as I possibly could. And so I’ve got three-hundred and fifty pounds of seed in the ground, the only organic lentil crop I grew, I got about three-hundred pounds off of. So I’m hoping to get more than I put into the ground because the cost as much to see it as they as my contract is worth. And that doesn’t count my time, which apparently I don’t value because after that, you know, after sweep plowing at all, tine bar drag harrowing, cross harrowing it, seeding it again, cross seeded it, cross harrowed it. I have twenty passes in this field and you might question my sanity, but they do. If they come out to the field now they do I mean and it’s a small amount so I would definitely not recommend putting the whole farm into it because if you’re like me, you wouldn’t be able to get it done. But this is thirty acres here. So this is thirty acres of chickpeas. And, and I still have high hopes for him, but I think that probably with pulses, just just to try to get some of the early weeds to grow, it’s probably kind of critical to wait. I think I was just too early. I, I don’t know why else I would have had the problems I had, but I think that the seed treat probably has its place in cold, wet soils. And I, I think that’s where the conventional system works for a chickpeas, whereas I don’t think it’s as big a deal on what you see on emergence for the barley. The barley I’m just happy with, the vetch and triticale I’ve been happy with, the cover crops I’ve been happy with, but early seeded chickpeas, I think, just won’t work in a year that turns cool at the wrong time. So at first I planted them, but I didn’t adjust the drill. I just, I just put more down pressure on, and I had the packer wheel set to an inch and a half. I deepened them up to two and a half inches on my conventional stuff because I was going into harder, firmer ground, you know, and I was trying to shoot for two and a half inches there, here, an inch and a half. I put a little more pressure on them. I had some that were four inches deep, you know, so it was kind of a scattershot, I don’t really think the seed depth was a problem, because when I seed them, I could dig them and find them at a couple inches, inch and a half, two and a half inches, which all seemed pretty acceptable to me, I guess. Typically, I think that you want to get them somewhere close to the three inch depth, but maybe that’s not quite necessary. I don’t know the ground looked, I mean, I never really see it in the conventional tilled ground, you know, being in minimum till or no till, and this looked like a garden. I mean, it looked like a rooted tilled garden, especially after sweep plowing it again, seeding it again, and all those things that I did. And so to me it looked like there’s no way there wasn’t just about the best seed to soil contact you can have. I seeded them all into moisture both times. I was pretty happy with the seed placement, but I don’t know if you’re going deeper and you have cold soils, you might hurt yourself. I don’t know, you would have a lot better idea than I do on that, but.
Are you using an inoculant?
Aaron Flansburg
I did the first time, and the second time I didn’t use inoculate just because they didn’t have it at the plant and had already put it in, and I kind of figured if some of it would still be there, if it was living on roots that were still around, and I did use inoculant though. And there’s certified inoculate, like I would say half the inoculate we get in conventional is actually certified organic, so it’s not hard to get. And so with that, anything that I use that is a certified chemistry I, I also I also have to document that. Right? So I have a list of materials that I use that I’ll file with Oregon Tilth and say I used such and such inoculate, I use such and such seed treat. And both were certified organic, and here’s where they came from. And then any seeds that I use, I also have to have records to trace back to say this was a seed that was not treated. And I did try to get it from an organic source. And I did, but it’s really not available, at least from traditional sources, that I can get bulk seed from here. I haven’t been able to get it.
So how would you do this differently next time? Or what would anybody else say for ideas?
Aaron Flansburg
What should I do differently next time? Group question. Wait. Kan says wait, I think he’s right. I think waiting is definitely right. And I think probably even the twentieth of May, which is the cutoff for seeding for insurance purposes here in some years, would be too early. But this was the sixth of June, I think, seventh of June. I think I’ll have a crop here. I think it’ll be okay. I don’t know how good a crop it will be, but it’ll be better than if I hadn’t done what I did. I think it was the right choice to terminate the crop and the weeds. One of the problems was it was starting to warm up pretty nice by the twenty-eighth of April. And you know, being black dirt is warmer than what I seed into my, you know, standing barley stubble that’s this tall when I’m going through it in my conventional system. And it was pretty nice then. And then yeah, it wasn’t.
Would you consider a large scale flamer like a propane flame, behind the tractor? Just as a reduction in tillage. I don’t know how that works out on this scale.
Aaron Flansburg
Yeah, I’ve heard of them. I’ve never seen one and I’ve never been around one. It might be a good tool like this is more tillage than I like, but without something like that, the cost of an herbicide that’s certified is really high. And I think that that would kind of, you know, and it’s just for burn down, I don’t know if that would be economically feasible. Maybe a flamer would be, I don’t know. I think I’ve pretty much defaulted to knowing where the market is before I plan to crop. There’s some, some other specialty niche markets which involve this barley here that, that I’ll, I’ll talk about next. So, so I haven’t really tried to cast a wide net beyond those markets I know about. And I’m sure there’s resources out there to do that. I just haven’t done it. We talk about Italian rye a lot. And from what I’ve found, I think that we’re feeding Italian rye a lot of fertilizer that it really likes, and it strengthens the crop. Or the Italian rye resistance to herbicides we put on it makes it more durable and I actually feel like it’s not my biggest concern here. So I don’t know if I’d say it’s adapting, but I’d say I’m not promoting that weed as much as I might be in a conventional system. And the rest is it’s, it’s kind of selecting for through the use of iron as my tillage mechanism for weed removal, I haven’t seen new weeds come in that I didn’t have, except for maybe volunteer vetch or volunteer triticale, but those are things I brought on myself. In soils like the no tilled DNS that I had last year and, and that the attempt at a straw mat that kind of broke down and failed, you know, the goat grass liked it fairly well. The cheatgrass liked it fairly well. And the prickly lettuce was the main broadleaf that I came across. So I’m definitely selecting for different weed pressures culturally all the time, as well as probably rotationally. Right here we have, what’s called a Purple Egyptian Malt Barley. And so I got this from Palouse Heritage Farms, and, and I’ve been working with Don Scheuerman on this. And so this is, this is a barley that you can get, in liquid form in beer in Pullman now. It’s and it’s good. I’ve had some of it. Barm & Wallop, that’s it, yes. So I did go in there and check it out, and it’s good. So, this barley is ten acres that I’m growing for Don. And what you’ll see if you get out into this, this is a slower emerging barley than either the lenetah or its neighbor here, which is called Scott’s beer. And so I think one of the keys to success may be to have a real vigorous crop to compete with your weeds, and maybe the purple Egyptian isn’t as well suited to that, although it doesn’t entirely explain the difference in wheat pressure, which I’m sort of baffled by. And so even though this was smaller and didn’t emerge as well, I basically use the same tillage techniques on the Scots Bere, which is headed out down here, as I did the land store, which is on the hilltop, basically the same. Although I ran the TerraMax on this ground and I didn’t run it much on that ground. So I may find this ground up more early in the season and cause a little bit more beneficial soil conditions for Lamb’s Quarter here than I did up there. That’s perhaps the difference that makes that may have stayed coarser just by being worked less. But if you get out into this, you’ll find really a lot of Lamb’s quarter. This is is a heritage grain. It’s an ancient grain. All those things that make it have some different characteristics and what you saw up on the hill, it is susceptible to stripe rust. It’s not as susceptible as goat grass is, but it is susceptible. And so some of these lower leaves definitely were covered in stripe rust. It’s also not a very tall barley, but it also can be seeded in the fall. And it will also do well that way, according to what Don has told me. So that may be something I look at doing is growing ten acres of this in the fall and see if it does better. I will be selecting for different weed pressures, so I don’t know. I’ll have to cut it low and run most of the straw through it. I’ll probably basically have to harvest with my header on the ground, but that’s okay. It won’t be so much straw I’ll have trouble with it. You know, the only rocks I really find, I think, are from homesteads. And there’s a spot down in the corner, where it’s kind of on the border between my cover crop and this field, that there’s a few rocks I picked, but it’s not rocky. It’s possible I could seed it with lentils, let’s say, at the same time. And it might be good, I don’t know. I think I tilled this ground too much. Honestly, I think that TerraMax did me more harm than good. I think. And I’m guessing I’ll try this next year, I’ll probably try to wait a little bit to start my first cultivation. It’s a trade off between the winter volunteer and getting it too big and then getting the flushes of the weeds that I want, or taking out the flush of the weeds that I want. So I may start out with this wheat plow next year. I may harrow sweep plow it, and maybe then let it sit, hopefully dry down some of the bigger weeds that came through that there were the winter annuals or the volunteer and then, you know, go out with a couple of cultivations later and then see, you know. Maybe staggering cultivation might be the answer. I’m not sure because you might get a flush of weeds and then you might get another flush of weeds. And I, I’d kind of like to put, you know, that old rod weeder that I made into a cultivator. I might kind of like to turn that into a sweep cultivator, so I could put six inch sweeps on it. I may do that, you know, in the next year. Okay. So this is my last field to show you, and, well, you’ll just have to take my word for it that the cover crop buffer strips look really good. But this is, this is a barley variety called Scots Bere. And so this is also a heritage grain variety that that Don picked up out of Scotland. And maybe at one point, there was something like fifty acres of this left in the world and in production. But it’s a really traditional, Scottish barley that was used for distilling. And so, talking about markets that are kind of worldwide and outside of my normal range, Don had advertised that he was going to have this, and he was looking for an organic certified field that he could sell. You know, I just put a posting up online, somebody found it, happens to be a Japanese distillery. So he’s trying to get it in a Conex and ship it over to Japan. And, he’s kind of still in the proof of concept phase with this barley, too, in organic production. But I mean, this may be just about the only field of organic Scots Bere in the world, and he will have the corner on that market. So, you know, it’s worthwhile to me in the sense that it’s an option that’s a nearby market. I’ll have to haul this to, I guess, close to Thornton, but not too bad. And, the price is more than double what you know, a conventional malt contract would be. So I do have a contract for this, which is, you know, it’s assuring to me that there’s going to be a home for it, and it’s limited to ten acres. So, for whatever reason, I made one less rotary hoe pass with this because it was coming up and I made later rotary hoe passes with it. Once it was up, once it was at, you know, five inches tall, something like that. Starting to fill in. I buried some of it, and you can kind of see that on that little north slope where it’s not headed out as evenly, but it did come through eventually, and I did kind of cover it up with dirt, but it kind of did come through. So I set it back, but this is just a lot more vigorous barley than either of the other varieties, so it might be the best fit. I don’t know, but the weed pressure is just less for whatever reason, the weeds that are here are just kind of pathetic and weak, whereas those ones were just lush and full in the Purple Egyptian. So I don’t know really what the difference was here. It’s one of those questions I, I don’t have an answer to. You know, when I was a kid, I saw a variety of wheat that was this tall, and I had no idea what it was because it didn’t look like our semi-dwarf wheats that we’re used to. But I think that might be part of it. I think just to get over the weed canopy and out compete it in height is going to be critical, and I’m having to find the seed stock that really lends itself to that. This had vetch and triticale on it last year on this twenty acres and it went to barley and mostly vetch. It was really vetch dominant last year. And you know, upon termination I, I was planning to hay it all. I was planning to have it hayed, and it was so heavy that I think it made something like four and a half tons, but I couldn’t get it through the guy’s swather and it wouldn’t go through the conditioner. It was just too much volume. And so he did about six acres. And then the other fourteen I combined for seed, or I just couldn’t get through it and let it go. And so there was, there was a lot that went back in the ground from that vetch. And so yeah, no fertility on this has been applied, and at some point I might have to but I think it’s okay this year and I’m hoping to do it without having to bring off farm manure as much as possible and do that with rotation. Don has this seed and he’s kind of the only one that does. And so, he’s, he’s got totes of it that are available at his warehouse. And, so that’s where that came from. The seed source from up on the hill was just local, typical seed that wasn’t treated, so it came from PNW. And then the stuff that’s the garbs came from Ardent Mills, and, you know, I asked everybody if they did have an organic source for seed, and nobody did. So I’m, I’m kind of locked into whatever’s available, and I’ve done due diligence to check and I would use it if it’s my own and it’s certified, and then I can put it back. That’s a pretty good closed loop. Yeah, the cleaner’s okay, but it’s not good enough to get it cleaned to the point where I know I’m not seeding back weeds.
Does your contract with Don allow you to give seed back?
Aaron Flansburg
I don’t think it does, but I don’t think it matters much to me. I think if he set some aside for me, like, if he saved me enough to seed this fall, I’d be happy. And he’s really not charging me for seed either. That’s, so that’s kind of a unique thing. I’m not paying for what the seed was. It was part of the contract. And so he provided it. So I guess there’s no particular advantage to me to have to deal with the seed, because he can get it to the point where I can seed it, not seed a bunch of weeds. And I think I’d be better off.