Host Carol McFarland visits with Amy McKay from McKay Farm and Ranch in LaCrosse, WA sharing her experience with full, two pass and no-till production across their operation, precision spray application strategies, trying intercropping, and running cows on her cover crop trial. Listeners can hear how she navigates the moisture limitations in her area. What happened when she mowed the cover crop to seed wheat into? Check out the episode to find out!
Carol McFarland
Today we’re here with Amy McKay on McKay Farm and Ranch outside of La Crosse, Washington. Very excited to be visiting with you today, Amy. Welcome to the podcast.
Amy McKay
Thanks, Carol.
Carol McFarland
Would you share a bit about yourself, your farm and who you farm with?
Amy McKay
Absolutely. My husband and I are wheat and cattle producers in this southwestern portion of Whitman County. we’re in the boot of Whitman County .As the crow flies, if you know where Palouse Falls is, the southwestern part of our farm is about, I want to say maybe five miles from Palouse Falls. And then the northern part of our farm, we farm along Highway in between the Adams County line, right at the Palouse River and La Crosse.
I farm with my husband, Mark. He is a fifth generation farmer. So it was his great, great, great, great grandpa that came out here and settled in the area and started a wheat farm. And of course they ran cattle back then too. Actually, they ran sheep as well.
Carol McFarland
Excellent. There was generally a lot more livestock during that time.
Amy McKay
They farmed with horses. And my husband’s a little miffed because we don’t get the moisture that the Dayton area gets to grow the weeks. And apparently his grandpa went, great, great grandpa, went down there because it was easier to farm, but then came back up here because it was- the winters weren’t as hard. And so it was easier on his animals.
Amy McKay
So he’s a little upset that he left really good wheat grown country to move to where we can’t grow very good wheat, not as good.
Carol McFarland
Well, you are still growing wheat here. Could you tell me a little bit more about your farming conditions, your crop rotation, what that looks like?
Amy McKay
we have a two year rotation and we basically just grow wheat here where winter wheat or spring wheat. And we generally do soft white. It grows best in our area. We have anywhere from 11 inches of rainfall to about maybe 14 inches of rainfall from one end of the farm to the other end of the farm where we farm. We started getting into no-till in maybe 2017. We purchased some ground that had previously been no-tilled. It had been in CRP for years, years. The guy, the producer or the owner then pulled it out and leased it to a guy that no tilled. So it went right from CRP into no till. And then the owner decided to sell and we ended up purchasing it and continued with the no-till. And so that was our first no-till experience. And it was very exciting to me because I’d been attending different grower meetings about no-till and that kind of thing. And I had asked my husband about why don’t we no-till? And he said, well, in the 80s, him and his dad watched people go broke no-tilling. And so it was hard for him to fathom that it could actually work. In those years, the technology has come a long way between the drills that they use the types of seed that we have that they utilize now.
Carol McFarland
Maybe even just the type of knowledge we can share.
Amy McKay
Yes, exactly. Because if I hadn’t been going to some of the grower meetings about this, I never would have brought it back to my husband saying, this can work. This can work. And it works. It works. But we’re not putting all of our eggs in one basket. So we still do some conventional farming, but we also do reduce tillage too, like a two-pass farming. So we go anywhere from no-till to a two-pass to conventional.
Carol McFarland
Well, it’s interesting because from what I understand, it sounds like you farm a pretty good range of different conditions as well. And so maybe there are different parts of your farm that lend itself more to that management. I would like to ask when you did take over that first piece of no till ground, how was the soil? How did it look compared to maybe what you were used to?
Amy McKay
Well, let me tell you. So we have a thing called cereal rye on our ground.
Carol McFarland
Oh, maybe I’ve heard of that.
Amy McKay
Maybe? Yeah.
We do a lot of roguing and it is so much easier to rogue rye on ground that’s been no-tilled because you don’t have the deep furrows and you aren’t walking on the sides of hill trying to stand on a deep furrow and breaking your ankles. I like it for that because it’s much easier to walk on when you’re rouging rye.
Carol McFarland
Oh, and here I was getting ready for something about, you know, the beautiful earthworms.
Amy McKay
Those two shall come. We still utilize ammonia in the ground, of course, you know, anhydrous or whatever he’s putting in the ground. So I don’t think that’s quite conducive to a lot of earthworms. But the soil particulates are beat to death. I think our ground clumps together better. I do know that in some of the cover cropping that I’ve done, it actually will hold the moisture better. So I think no-tilling lends to much better soil health.
Carol McFarland
So that clumping together is called aggregate stability. They actually like all the soil health people measure that. There’s all the different conversations about how best to do it. It’s one of the top three indicators of soil health based on the soil health testing metrics. So just a little fun soil science for you.
Amy McKay
Thank you.
Carol McFarland
Actually, you know, before we get too far into this, you have got an interesting story about how you came in to be a farm…You call yourself a “farm-her”, right?
Amy McKay
Farm-her, yes.
Carol McFarland
And do you want to tell just the quick story about how you came to be on this farm?
Amy McKay
I lived in the Spokane area and I had met this guy gathering cattle on a ranch because I did horse cutting. But so I had met him gathering cattle and I was a hairdresser. but I had also grown up on a farm. I mean, we were dairy farmers when I was a kid. My dad is an agronomist or was an agronomist. He’s retired now. So I’d known about farming. We had a small alfalfa farm. We raised some cattle, pigs. But when I got invited to go gather cattle down here in the La Crosse area because I was my trainer was in Dusty and this guy he thought, hairdresser, she might have some cute friends or clients that she could introduce me to. So he started coming to me to get his hair done. Actually I was going to set him up with one of my friends. Yeah, but at that point I was not single. So but then I ended up being single and he jumped on that. So I got asked out for a date. That was the end of the story. You just have been together ever since and got married like, I don’t know, a year and a half later or something.
Carol McFarland
He pulled the farm charm on you.
Amy McKay
He pulled the farm charm for all of those women out there that are listening: if you’re dating a producer or farmer, don’t show them what you can do or what you’re willing to do because you will end up doing it all.
They just expect it.
Just good advice.
Honey, I can do the laundry and I can mop the floors. I can even cut your hair. I can’t drive a tractor. No, not going to drive one of those grain trucks.
Carol McFarland
How about the cows, the roping of the cows?
Amy McKay
Yeah, so that’s a lot of fun. I love doing that. Going to brandings and dragging calves and that’s a lot of fun. But I’m left handed. So being a left handed roper is different. So I had to learn left handed roping from right handed people.
Carol McFarland
I imagine that’s the experience of a lot of different left handed tasks. Of learning it from right handed people.
Amy McKay
Just watching them do it backwards. Yeah.
Carol McFarland
So you run cows on your operation. Are you into all that soil health integrated grazing? Do you use the cows on the farm in that way?
Amy McKay
I’ve done a couple of cover crops in actually one year and very small, small acres. He allowed me seven acres the first year.
Carol McFarland
And I think you told me that this is called your granola patch.
Amy McKay
He calls it my granola patch. Yes, it is my granola patch.
Carol McFarland
So you run your cows on the granola patch?
Amy McKay
I did run my cows on the granola patch. So I did intercropping the very first year because Mike…
Carol McFarland
Is it Mike Nestor?
Amy McKay
Mike Nestor. Yes, Mike Nestor. Listen to him talk. He is so awesome. So he’s been kind of a mentor of mine. I just really, really appreciate it. And my husband really, really likes it too. So he’s really listened to Mike talk about what Mike knows. He does have a lot of fun stuff to say. Anyhow, so, I tried intercropping. Let me just tell you, you don’t put the cattle out on your crop until the wheat is big enough to tolerate the cattle being on it and pulling it up by the roots. Because we ended up having to seed it twice because they ate all the wheat first before they ate the rest of my cover crop.
Carol McFarland
Okay. So you intercropped wheat. So what stage would you recommend getting the cows out there?
Amy McKay
Whatever stage the wheat would be less palatable. Like it was young little tiny shoots that maybe five leaves. It was little yummy, like lettuce that’s the baby lettuce that’s so tasty compared to lettuce that’s big and has maybe more milky taste to it. I don’t know. But I’d probably wait longer than a month before I put them out.
Carol McFarland
And then what did you have planted in between your wheat? You said it was intercropped.
Amy McKay
So yeah. So in addition to my wheat, I had a variety called Mela, which is a very drought tolerant the variety of wheat I plant is called Mela. M-E-L-A. And it’s a very drought tolerant wheat. They planted more in the maybe seven to nine inch rainfall. And I thought, I’m going to plant something out there that’s more drought tolerant because I am planting it with things that are going to take some of the moisture, right? Just in case. So that was an experiment. I would do that again. I would still plant something that maybe was more of a drought tolerant wheat. But I also planted fava beans, forage corn, sorghum, sunflowers, millet, mung bean, okra, war, and turnips, purple top turnips. And out of all of those, only, I think I only had two things that did not grow. I was really surprised. The okra grew really well. The turnips were awesome. I actually pulled some up and we ate them for meals, you know, like I’d serve them for a side dish. But the sunflowers were spectacular and they came on a lot later in the season. And I have beautiful pictures of my sunflowers. And when it was time for my husband to reseed the patch because my cattle ate all the wheat in it and I had to mow down my cover crop, I thought I was going to cry because I’m on my tractor and I’m mowing down these beautiful sunflowers. So I honestly wish that I would have found somebody that had a sunflower header and could have come in and harvested the sunflowers because I definitely had plenty. I would have had a good crop of sunflowers.
Carol McFarland
So it sounds like you mowed those down pretty late stage.
Amy McKay
I did.
Carol McFarland
When, like about when in the year did you do that?
Amy McKay
In the September maybe, beginning of October.
Carol McFarland
Okay. Did you get some good pollinators out there in that cover crop?
Amy McKay
There were lots of butterflies, lots of birds. You don’t normally see that many birds out in our area like that, but there were a lot of birds, a lot of flying insects. Yes.
Carol McFarland
I hear cows like turnips too. Did you end up running the livestock out there a couple times?
Amy McKay
I just left them on it. so we have a trough out there that actually our conservation district helped pay for part of our troughing system. So we pipe water. So the NRCS and the conservation district helped pay for these troughing system on some pasture we have and in through some of our crops so that we can raise them on the stubble too.
Carol McFarland
And that’s the Whitman Conservation District?
Amy McKay
Whitman Conservation District and the NRCSwe have like a mile and a half of buried pipe to reach the furthest corner of a pasture we have so that the cattle will actually spread out and graze further away and not just graze near where the water is when we only have one spot to water.
Carol McFarland
where do you go to learn more about a topic before trying it?
Amy McKay
The internet. Yeah, I go to the internet and see what other people are doing. I’ve been to the Direct Seed conference and they do it in the Tri-Cities generally. They have some wonderful speakers, wonderful speakers, and it’s not just about direct seeding. It’s about trying all different types of cropping systems.
Love it.
So that’s where I go. Our conservation district will help. The NRCS will help. Neighbors, like I have some neighbors around me that are doing all kinds of cover cropping and I don’t know if they’re doing any interseeding. And I only tried that once. I know Justin Aune is doing some different types of best management practices, BMPs.
Carol McFarland
Those are all really great resources. Do you have a favorite place on the internet that you go to? Podcasts perhaps?
Amy McKay
I’m just getting introduced to podcasting. So I haven’t listened to a lot of podcasts, but I will be because I didn’t really realize that they were out there.
Carol McFarland
Might I recommend the On-Farm Trials podcast?
Amy McKay
I’ve listened to that one.
Carol McFarland
I hear there’s some great interviews there.
Amy McKay
There are.
Carol McFarland
Lots to learn.
Amy McKay
Yeah. I’ve gotten on and looked at maybe some of the extension maybe in the Midwest because it seems like they have a lot of different, a lot more, they’ve been doing it longer than we have been out here.
Carol McFarland
The cover cropping.
Amy McKay
Cover cropping. Yep. Or even the no-tilling, that kind of thing. But what they do doesn’t always work for us.
Carol McFarland
No. Well, and that, I think that is part of cropping systems innovation, not just discovering new things within, you know, that are applicable to the cropping system, being profitable while attaining stewardship goals, but really being able to translate that, especially to the very heterogeneous region that we exist in here in the iPNW. That’s always the question. How is that going to work? Great. Well, thanks! So would you tell me about your end of year decision making for some of the things that you’ve tried? What information do you use to know if it’s a success and what do you compare it to?
Amy McKay
Well, I really don’t have much to compare it to because I haven’t done enough to be able to compare it. So I do know like my second cover crop that I did. So we signed up for, I think it’s under, it’s an NRCS EQUIP program and I’m doing a cover cropping, part of a cover crop under that. And the seed mix that they picked out was way different than the seed mix I had done the first time. And so it’s like, oh, I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s going to, I want to try it out. So I decided I’m going to try it out before they have me slated to do it.
Carol McFarland
Do you have things you’ve tried in the recent past that you’re trying again this year to see if it has a similar outcome?
Amy McKay
We’ve incorporated more no tilling on some ground, especially ground that has been, the soil has been, It’s been very degraded. We took over a piece of ground that was, it’s been conventionally farmed forever. And so we’re trying to build soil particulates back up, maybe eventually we’ll have some aggregates in there.
Carol McFarland
Soil carbon.
Amy McKay
Yes, soil carbon. Keep it in the ground, right?
Carol McFarland
So with that, you’re doing more no-till.
Amy McKay
More no tilling. Yep. We started out doing maybe about a third of our ground no till, which started with some of the ground that we purchased that had been being no-tilled. And the guy had been no tilling it, like I said, it was pulled out of CRP and had been CRP for 20 or 25 years. Pulled out, they put it right into no till. And no till down here, it’s a beautiful crop when we get moisture at the right time. Not so good a crop when we don’t get some of the moisture, the timely moisture we deep furrow down here in our conventionally farmed ground and we know we can reach the moisture. Problem being, you have to worry about more rains coming after you seed and it crusting the ground and you don’t get your crop up. So you have to reseed again costs a lot of money. Personally I’d rather take the hit in maybe lack of bushels than pay that much more for that much more seed wheat.
Carol McFarland
And they do say as you build your soil organic carbon that it tends to hold more moisture in the soil.
Amy McKay
That’s right.
Carol McFarland
So theoretically somewhere there’s a gain in there.
Amy McKay
You know, I saw that. So the year I did the cover crop, the first year when I was talking about my sunflowers and growing that. I know one of the questions you might ask has to do with what did you learn maybe from an unintended consequence. And so I was mowing down my sunflowers and at this point in time we had not purchased our Ag Pro drill yet. We were still renting it, which meant we had to wait in line to be able to get it. So Mark thought that he was getting it on a certain day and he said you need to get that crop mowed down so that I can drill through it. Got mowed down. We didn’t get the drill when we were supposed to.
We’ll back up a little bit. So when I went out into that soil and right across, we have a little farm road in between a conventionally farmed field and this no till farm field. The conventionally farmed field, you could dig down and try to compact the soil. No moisture.
Okay?
I had this cover crop on during the summer. I planted it like the middle of July.
Okay?
Had cattle on it, grew beautiful cover crop with all these lovely sunflowers. I mowed it down and my husband said we’re getting the drill like tomorrow. It needs to be mowed. So once I mowed, I dug down into the soil. I could compact the soil and it stayed compacted. I had moisture in my ground after having this cover crop. All right. Proof in the pudding. Okay. We had not gotten any moisture. Are you kidding me? That cover crop created such a beautiful, well, I like to call it like a crowning glory, like having a beautiful head of hair. Right?
Carol McFarland
I thought you were going to talk about unintended consequences.
Carol McFarland
That sounds like a win.
Amy McKay
It was a win. It was totally a win. If we would have got the drill for the next day. So this is what happens. You don’t have that cover on there. Right? You lose your moisture. Okay?
Warm days in the fall, maybe a little bit of a breeze. I didn’t have the cover crop. I didn’t have the cover crop covering that soil anymore. My moisture disappeared. We didn’t get the drill for two weeks. No moisture.
Carol McFarland
What were you seeding into that ground?
Amy McKay
We were putting winter wheat in the ground. Okay. With the AgPro drill. But we had to wait for the drill. We were supposed to get it like the next day. It had all kinds of moisture to seed into. All kinds. Would have got the crop up. Guess what? By the time it was like middle October or something and hadn’t gotten any moisture. No moisture. That was it. It ended up being, you know.
Carol McFarland
Money in seed weed.
Amy McKay
Yeah. It just, I mean, it came up, but it wasn’t very good because it wasn’t hardly any moisture. It was very spotty.
Carol McFarland
It does seem like that’s one of the things with no-till is it is pretty sensitive for timing. There’s definitely some kinds of farming operations that when you try, a lot of them are sensitive to timing. Some of them may be more so than others. And so it sounds like you’re not renting your drill anymore.
Amy McKay
We are not. We ended up purchasing that drill last year. So this is the first year the crops we seeded with that drill. It was our drill that we were seeding with.
Carol McFarland
Do you have some of the details about your drill you want to share?
Amy McKay
I do. It’s an Ag Pro hoe drill. It’s a 2019-14 SL. It has an auger and it has inch spacings and five inch paired rows. And it’s a hoe drill. And it does a great job reaching, trying to reach some of the moisture that maybe a disc drill wouldn’t or cross slot wouldn’t, especially in our dry part of the woods. My husband really likes it. The nice thing about no till is you don’t need as much help, right? You, you don’t have to have somebody go out and rod wheat for you during harvest, right? When you’re, you may have, you may have to go spray it, but you can do that much quicker than you can rod wheat.
Carol McFarland
Are you guys on team Weed-It?
Amy McKay
So we tried the Weed-It one year and actually our conservation district, our Whitman conservation district helped two producers in our area buy Weed It sprayers. And I am so loving the Weed-It. we weren’t ready to step up and buy the technology for a sprayer to do the Weed-It sprayers. So instead we are now doing a CSP contract through the NRCS that we’re upgrading the technology on our, we have a John Deere self propelled 120 foot sprayer. We’re putting a technology on it that will allow a drone to go out and photograph our fields like, and show us where all the green is. And it won’t be nozzled, you know, each nozzle, but it’s like a five foot section or something it’ll be a sectional sprayer, more of a, even a smaller sectional control than what we have now. I think we have four sections now that he can turn on or off, but now it’ll be like 10 or something.
Carol McFarland
And so you did more than that.
Amy McKay
So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to incorporate like drone type. Yes. Drone mapping where they go out like two days before we’re going to spray and they will map all of the little green weeds and they put it in the thumb drive and our sprayer and it will mark just drive the sprayer and it’ll spray where those weeds are. So we’re going halfway in between a weeded sprayer and normal, you know, conventional spraying.
Carol McFarland
Well, it’s still more of that precision approach as opposed to the full broadcast application on that fallow. So you’re still saving money.
Amy McKay
We are. Yes, we are. And so we’re looking forward to trying that out and seeing how it works. But we learned that. My husband learned about that technology at the direct seed convention. So I think going to those conventions, you don’t just learn about direct seeding. You learn about all kinds of other technology that’s out there, conservation measures.
Carol McFarland
That’s great. Thanks for sharing. So what’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned from a past trial?
Amy McKay
Not putting the cattle out too soon. If you’re interseeding, you know, if you’re interseeding some type of yummy wheat variety that they’re going to like better than your cover crop plants, make sure that that plant is big enough to withstand the cattle grazing on it. And the loss of moisture. When you lose that glorious cover, you lose your moisture quickly. So those are probably two big things. I’ve also found that some calves just tolerate hot wire very, very well. Like it doesn’t shock them, wouldn’t shock you, but it won’t shock them. Yeah. So make sure your wires, your hot wires are hot enough to keep them out of what you don’t want them in. Yeah.
Carol McFarland
Maybe there’s a herd genetics component in there too that kind of gets weeded out.
Amy McKay
I think you’re probably right. Our bull guy said he’s noticed that there are some calves that just, for some reason, the electricity doesn’t bug them.
Carol McFarland
So those are the ones that go to market, aren’t they?
How do you decide where to put your trials? I think I heard something about your granola patch. We talked a little bit about that. So tell me a bit more about where you’re trying things on your farm.
Amy McKay
Basically it’s a compromise situation between my husband and I of where he’ll let me put them. We have a trough system set up where I can put the cattle in. And those are small little areas where they can, the cow can go from like a little tiny cover crop area into the stubble and back and forth. So they aren’t just eating on the cover crop, but they can also eat some of the stubble that’s there too. So I have to incorporate them where I have water because I don’t want to haul water. That’s pretty time consuming trying to make it work smarter, not harder. It’s too many other things in your day that you’d rather be doing than hauling water.
Carol McFarland
How long have you been running your, have you had that infrastructure to be able to do some more of that integrated grazing and the cover cropping? How long have you been doing that?
Amy McKay
I’m trying to think of what year we did that. This might be the fourth year. This is like the fourth year, I think. So maybe four years.
Carol McFarland
And what kind of things have you seen along the way that have been really remarkable? I know you’ve talked about the moisture and talked about the butterflies and the birds, but you know, especially as a soil scientist, like what’s going on in that soil?
Amy McKay
The ground is maybe a little bit squishier to walk on. It’s not so firm and hard. You got the organic matter in there that makes it not compact so much.
Carol McFarland
How are the yields? I mean, are they comparable to the rest of the farm? Are you able to run those comparisons?
Amy McKay
Oh, yeah! So this year, we haven’t gotten much moisture and our yields are down probably 25% or more all around on all of our ground. And the area where we have our direct seeded ground right next to a conventionally farmed piece, we got five bushels more on the direct seeded ground than we did on the conventionally farmed ground right next to each other. So Mark has decided that instead of having to haul equipment from a different part of our farm over to another piece, he’s going to start direct seeding that ground that’s right next to the direct seed ground. that’s a big move to do that. But I think he’s going to appreciate that it’s not going to take him as much time to manage that ground as it did before to do this.
Carol McFarland
That’s one of the things you hear about direct seed, I think, is that it’s just less time on tractor.
Amy McKay
Sprayers much quicker, it gets over the ground a lot faster than a rod weeder. But we do have to watch out for herbicide resistance. So that’s where the Weed-it sprayer comes in, right?
Carol McFarland
I’ve heard one of the things with that is you can actually use different mixes because the price because the cost is reduced so much it makes a whole different set of chemistries available.
Amy McKay
You can afford them better because you’re spraying. We have a friend that has a Weed-It sprayer that they have decreased the amount of chemical they buy by over 90 percent. That is a whole lot of money to save. Even those Weed-It sprayers cost you not considering what the sprayer itself costs, but just the system to put on your sprayer is like fifteen hundred bucks a foot. When you have even that hundred foot sprayer, that’s one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, they’re not cheap. It’s nice that the conservation program seemed to be able to help offset some of those costs.
Amy McKay
It’s very helpful that they do offset the cost of new technology. And it’s not just that technology. I’m sure that our district would help somebody pay for a drone sprayer or a drone mapper and set up a system like we’re doing, but we’re doing it through the NRCS instead.
Carol McFarland
You do really save a lot of money with that Weed-It sprayer. On the chemistry.
Amy McKay
If you think about how much you spend in your spray bill, your chemistry bill for weed spraying when you don’t need to spray every single inch of your ground. 95 percent, say your spray bill is three hundred thousand dollars a year.
Carol McFarland
It’s a big number.
Amy McKay
That’s a lot of money to save. Lot of money to save and you can put it towards something else like paying the ground off.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, well, there’s definitely plenty of things to pay for in farming isn’t there?
Amy McKay
Upgrading equipment, I don’t know, buying more technology that helps you work smarter, not harder.
Carol McFarland
Taking your wife on vacation.
Amy McKay
Well, that’s helpful, too.
Carol McFarland
I think I heard Mark say that.
Amy McKay
Did you hear? Yeah, I think I did, too. I think he said, Belize. Go Mark, go Mark. Anniversary. January. January, honey.
Carol McFarland
That sounds like a farmer anniversary.
Amy McKay
Yes.
Carol McFarland
how about the weeds in your in your cover crop patch and also the yields in your cover crop patch weeds?
Amy McKay
The very first cover crop that I planted, I literally could walk through my cover crop and handpick all the weeds that grew in it. That’s how few weeds were in it. How few weeds were in it. Yeah. The second cover crop. Mark wasn’t very happy about it, but he him and the hired guy had to pull some weeds in it because I was too busy doing other stuff. So yeah.
Carol McFarland
How about the type of weeds? Were they the same as what you see in the fields or were they a little different because your mix was different?
Amy McKay
Very few Russians, probably some kochia. I don’t know what the little low lying ones that kind of like rosette.
How about how about your yields in your cover crop? Like following your cover crop planting? It sounds like it’s with the moisture. You kind of had a little bit of a debacle, so maybe you don’t have a good comparison from that year.
Amy McKay
2020, we had a pretty good year for moisture. 2021 was a disaster for everybody. So it didn’t it wouldn’t have mattered. It was just a disaster. I do know that part of where I have my cover crop, the person that farmed it prior to us. There was an area there where he always brought his equipment in. So it was very compacted. He probably dumped some of his chemical out there. I mean, like on accident kind of stuff. And it just doesn’t grow very well. This year we had a spring crop on it and it actually grew pretty well. I mean, it was my husband said that it was probably the prettiest looking spring wheat we had until we didn’t get any moisture. Yeah, so there plays that moisture again.
Carol McFarland
You know, I think Whitman County, I heard some some pretty pretty staggering numbers compared to average precipitation that we’ve gotten in Whitman County this year.
Amy McKay
Not much. I couldn’t tell you how much we have not gotten, but it was a beautiful crop. And it was really nice to hear that it was probably our prettiest spring crop until the no moisture thing.
Carol McFarland
Well, if it was the university, you’d have to get like biomass data and like leaf area index and then you would know even if it didn’t yield out. But I know on working farms that matters less. But that’s one of the ways you can kind of guess what it could potentially do. So when you replicated over a couple of years.
Carol McFarland
OK, Amy, what is one thing you would really like to try but can’t right now because of some sort of limitation whether it is equipment, precipitation, some sort of lease agreements. What’s your pie in the sky thing to try?
Amy McKay
I really, really, really would love to have a Weed-It sprayer. So the next best thing is the drone mapping. So for now, we will try that and maybe we’ll save enough money that we can afford to weed it.
Carol McFarland
I hope so. And then I’ll come back and ask you about how your Weed-It’s going.
Amy McKay
We did use a Weed-It sprayer one year. We rented it because when the Whitman Conservation District purchased the Weed-It sprayers, helped purchase the Weed-It sprayers for two of our producers in our area, And it wasn’t for some reason it came from another producer and it wasn’t calibrated right. And so there were some issues with them and didn’t spray the way it should have. I don’t remember exactly what it was, So the Weed-It sprayer, I really would love to have a weed sprayer. And I know there’s some other technologies out there like maybe in the Midwest there have more moisture. They don’t have to worry about burning the place down that they use like electrodes or something to zap the weeds and that might not be very good here. But I know there’s other things out there that they’re coming up with. Weed-It sprayer.
Carol McFarland
I’m excited for you. I like your solution to it though. I mean that there’s innovation there too, right? Like well this is the first point and maybe that’ll help us save enough money to go to the next level. All right. What’s the most annoying part about living on a farm?
Amy McKay
Let’s see. Oh, that would be when people ask how much ground we farm.
Carol McFarland
I didn’t do that.
Amy McKay
Or how much ground do we have?
Carol McFarland
I asked about the cows?
Amy McKay
I don’t think I have any cows. And then I said, and then I was going to say, and how many cattle we have?
Carol McFarland
Which I did do. I’m sorry.
Amy McKay
It’s okay. Some people don’t care and some people do.
Carol McFarland
Everybody has their own feelings about that, which is okay. It’s their farm.
Amy McKay
I have to think the normal person has no idea what we do out here. They have no idea even probably what an acre is, like how actually big an acre is. So quite honestly, to tell somebody that’s a non-farming person, they just wouldn’t understand or grasp the concept
Carol McFarland
But probably not in terms of workload or profitability or anything.
Amy McKay
So it probably shouldn’t be something that annoys me, but…
Carol McFarland
Hey, I asked the question. Well, it’s been really great to have this conversation with you, Amy. I love that just the way you’ve so fearlessly come into this chapter of your life. You weren’t born into this farm and the way it’s just, it’s beautiful. This space that you’ve, how you’ve made it your own and how that space has been created to have a farm partnership. And then I just, I really appreciate your perspective on it and yeah, thanks for sharing.
Amy McKay
Well, thank you for having me. I really appreciate you choosing me.
Carol McFarland
Well, yes.
Amy McKay
That was, like, pretty cool.
Carol McFarland
You got some pretty legendary on-farm trials. Do you know anyone else with some legendary on-farm trials that you’d like to nominate?
Amy McKay
I do. Justin Aune. Considering we get a lot of our dollars from the districts and from the federal government and from the state government for carbon, basically call it carbon farming. It’s going to be the wave of the future and they’re doing some great carbon farming.
Carol McFarland
That’s great. Thank you so much for having me out to visit your farm right here in the middle of harvest. You brave soul. I really appreciate it. We’ve gotten interrupted a couple of times with some very natural farming occurrences during harvest. It’s been a really great experience. Thank you.
Amy McKay
Thank you very much.