In part two of this special two-part series we hear more from Aaron Flansburg of Palouse, Washington and his transition from long-term no-till practices to organic management. Listen in as we hear Aaron’s reflections and lessons-learned with fertility, marketing, weed management, and what’s new in 2025- a year after the ‘Farmwalk’ tour of his organic practices live from the field featured in part one!
Carol McFarland
Aaron, it’s really great to have you back to follow up a little bit on the farm walk last year in twenty-twenty-four that was out on your farm and officially recording some follow up reflections for the On Farm Trials podcast. Welcome.
Aaron Flansburg
It’s good to be back. And there’s been a year of, you know, kind of the harvest experience last year and then the fall work. Spring plantings and a winter full of reading about what I did wrong and trying to fix it, so it’s good to talk with you again and we’ll pick up where we left off.
Carol McFarland
Great. Well, it sounds like you’ve been doing a lot of thinking and learning and you’ve got, you’re just about to wrap up another season in the field. So how has your thinking been influenced by last year and how are you translating that into this year’s crop?
Aaron Flansburg
So in listening back to last year’s podcast a lot of what I was talking about involved kind of trying to do some organic no-till, and I think I was maybe holding on to the possibility that could have been something I could succeed with. I was wrapping up a whole lot of tillage operations in the spring when I was talking to the group last year. And I think in the time since, my thinking is that I need to try to find ways to reduce tillage to the extent possible, but not view tillage as something that’s necessarily a negative. You know, I’ve kind of come from a no-till perspective in my conventional farming operation, so weed management through tillage and even moisture management through tillage is something that I haven’t been thinking of much in the last fifteen years, probably, I would say. And this year is kind of bringing that to the forefront again, because we basically had one rain from April through the end of July, and so it showed the weak points in some of my systems. Especially in the conventional because the organic system didn’t suffer that way.
Carol McFarland
Can I just ask if you like your crop mix? Did you have more spring or winter or which way were you skewed crop wise?
Aaron Flansburg
It was actually pretty average for me. So in our conventional rotation we’d be in a three-year rotation with a winter wheat followed by a spring grain, whether canola or barley or spring wheat, then in the third year followed by a pulse crop. So you know we’re kind of in that rotation on the organic side of things too so really kind of average I guess I’d say.
Carol McFarland
Okay, thanks for that. So you notice differences in your conventional no-till versus your organic systems and how they were performing?
Aaron Flansburg
Yeah, so what I think I’ve found at this point, and maybe this isn’t true of every year because in years where you have timely rains following planting, all can be forgiven. In this case, we didn’t have those. Our last rains were probably May fifth through the tenth or something like that. We got a substantial amount of rain during that planting time, and you know, so if you seeded into the dry, you were going to still have some emergence then. But, you know, what I’ve decided is, and I think this applies to both no-till and conventional tillage, is that you have to choose: do I want to have a straw mulch or do I want to have a dust mulch? And if I don’t have either, I’m going to be in trouble, especially in a year like this. So, where I had a good straw mulch, which, you know, I was seeding into a hundred fifty, a hundred sixty bushel wheat stubble with my canola this spring. So standing wheat stubble, no-tilled at eighteen to twenty-two inch high stubble right, and it looked like just a sea of stubble which could be a mess but I went through it with my no-till drill— canola looks great. Where I had canola last year I no-tilled chickpeas into it in my conventional rotation and I had volunteer canola that was you know twelve to eighteen inches tall in April before I could get on the ground to spray it and it was in full bolt and blooming in April. Well I had to go spray that out and then I sprayed out you know grassy weeds after that, and between the two it sucked all the moisture out of that ground. And so I have garbs that just plain didn’t come up even though I hit the place I wanted, but the ground was dry and cracked in April, no-tilling into it. So that rain actually softened the ground up so I could seed it. And then I had beans that got stuck in kind of a two and a half inch seeding depth with no moisture left above them because it all evaporated, and you know, I didn’t really have a dust mulch over them and then no moisture below them because it had been sucked dry by the volunteer canola and whatever grassy weeds came through before I could spray. Yeah, I mean, some of them are okay, but the high ground and the dry areas of ridges, there’s really nothing there. And no weeds there, no beans there. And the canola looks really good that I no-tilled into heavy, heavy wheat stubble. So it was fine. But then on the organic ground, you know, my goal this spring was to try to kill the winter annuals that came through. And so that was done with initial tillage passes, and then let the ground sit and dry out a little bit on top. But, you know, spur any germination that came from spring broadleafs, let’s say, which was my main pressure. And then go take those out and start with a, you know, essentially a sterile seed bed. And then, you know, that mostly worked. It kind of depended on the timing of everything. So I got more lamb’s quarter came through on my spring barley and spring wheat crop on the organic ground than I would have liked because, you know, it rained somewhere near an inch, I suppose, after I seeded but it was dry before that. And so, but that was the only rain we got. I was going in with the rotary hoe afterwards with two passes trying to dry the ground up, take out as many weeds in the thread stage as I could and it didn’t do a great job. I wasn’t real happy with it, but it did a good enough job that the vigorous growth of those older varieties of grains basically outgrew the lamb’s quarter and so it doesn’t look too bad now. It’s tolerable
Carol McFarland
There is one kind of obligatory question if you are a no-tiller and you’re on the On-Farm Trials podcast we got to hear about your drill, your no-till drill.
Aaron Flansburg
Yeah, it’s a Palouse zero till. It’s a thirty foot double disc drill. So it has a front gang of fifteen inch spacing that puts down the bulk fertilizer. And then the rear gang has a starter fertilizer kit on it and seven and a half inch seed spacing.
Carol McFarland
Do you also use that to seed your organic?
Aaron Flansburg
I did last fall. This year’s been busy because I’ve been digging up more antiquated farm equipment. And one was I traded a twenty-six-foot chisel to a friend of mine for a thirty-foot Great Plains solid stand drill that probably hadn’t been used in twenty years. And so I had to rehab that kind of before and during spring work and put it to work. So I used that on my organic ground this year. And I wanted a lighter drill so I’d get less compaction. One of the things I was reading about amongst the many ways to try to reduce weed growth after seeding and during the seeding pass was to seed without packer wheels. So I’ve been trying this spring to seed without packer wheels, kind of set my seed depth mostly with the depth of cultivation. Wherever I’m trying to set the drills at as far as how much pressure they’re pushing down. So it’s a different system entirely than a Palouse zero-till drill, which you can seed through really hard ground with. So the idea being that you don’t pack over the top of the seed and kind of make more seed-to-soil contact for the weed seeds in that layer of one to two inches deep. Yeah, those are my two drills. And I seeded all the organic ground with the old solid stand drill.
Carol McFarland
And have you been pretty happy with that? How’s that going?
Aaron Flansburg
Yeah, actually, I was generally pretty happy with it. There’s always a learning curve with a new drill. Some of my seeding rates weren’t quite where I wanted them to be, and I need to change some gearing on the drives, or sprocket sizes on the drives to speed up or slow down and make it fit better for whichever crop I’m seeding. But yeah, in general, I was pretty happy with it. It was not a failure, at least. Celebrate the wins we get, right?
Carol McFarland
Yeah, trying stuff can go a lot of different directions for sure.
Aaron Flansburg
Yeah. Yeah.
Carol McFarland
That’s great.
Aaron Flansburg
So I guess it was one of three old pieces of iron that I brought back to the farm like right before or during spring work, and the other was a thirty-two foot Wil-Rich cultivator on four inch spacing, so an s-tine or danish tine cultivator. It has a rolling basket harrow behind it, so I wanted something with a rolling basket to kind of knock dirt off of root balls that I’ve turned up in a prior cultivation pass so that, you know, weeds would dry out and smooth the ground a little bit with it. I’ve got four inch sweep points on it so it’s hopefully kind of a weeding pass. It worked reasonably well for that. It’s not perfect as a standalone, but so yeah for one thousand nine-hundred and fifty bucks I got that cultivator and I got a Calkins Culta-Weeder that’s in reasonably good shape, and I fixed it up and I ended up on eleven inch spacing. I put twelve inch sweeps on it so I have full coverage with it and the weeder bar behind it. And so that was kind of a last pass before seeding operation that I did with the Culta-Weeder, and so you know I’m kind of trying to dial it in to how I like it too but yeah. Twenty five hundred bucks for that. So, you know, in the talking about reducing chemical inputs, I took five gallons of sharpened back that I ended up not using on my conventional garb ground, and that was worth more than those two cultivators.
Carol McFarland
Wow. Okay, so one of my other questions and you maybe talked a little bit about this previously, but it’s really amazing to hear about your journey exploring all of these different tillage equipment types and how to use them because it seems like, you know, just driving speed and timing, there’s so much more like finesse that is kind of part of that. Especially if you’re going for this like holy grail of how to not use chemicals, but also be really intentional with your tillage operations to make sure that it’s really as effective as possible to reduce maybe the number of operations necessary. Maybe that’s still part of your management goal. I’ve heard that’s like the holy grail. But how are you learning about all of these? Of course, it sounds like many trials have went into that, but it sounds like you had some resources that you’ve been leaning into as well.
Aaron Flansburg
Yeah, there’s been a whole bunch of reading that I’ve done over the winter. And so, you know, trying to find what equipment is available and how to adapt that to fit my operation and what I can afford to buy, because it’s all— like if it’s kind of trial and error, I don’t want to bet the farm on it. Right. So, yeah, a lot of it’s been reading. There’s there’s a couple of books. You know, some I’ve got from Acres USA that I’ve read and some from USDA pamphlets. One’s called Steel in the Field. I think it came out in ninety-five, something like that. And it’s really good, you know, and so you can find hard copies of it on eBay, which is what I did. There’s another. What’s that?
Carol McFarland
I think Western SARE might have done that one.
Aaron Flansburg
I think they did. Yeah. That might be right. And it’s interesting to hear the thinking from that era, too, where cultivation was viewed more as a conservation practice, right? Cultivation’s kind of become a dirty word in the conservation circles, I think. And in my own experience so far, I think that that’s misguided. And, you know, this is not based on research trials other than what’s happening on my farm. But in looking at my ground, I am really satisfied with the soil structure I’m maintaining and the biological activity I’m maintaining while cultivating. But I think a lot of that’s a result of not using artificial fertilizer or chemicals. And so I’m not suppressing earthworms and bacteria and fungus with chemical applications or with, you know, acidification of the soil through adding nitrogen fertilizer, right? And, you know, if you were on that tour last year, I was pretty apologetic about my conventional summer fallow. And, you know, It looked like areas that we were in. I had really damaged the ground in terms of breaking down soil structure, powdering the surface, all those things. And I came through the winter worried about it. And I came out of the winter with incredibly stable soil, considering what I’d done to it. So, you know, I had a winter barley that I seeded into it, right? Probably this, let’s see, September twenty-second, I seeded the winter barley. And so it got established. It hit that moisture. It got established. It grew up. I also grew a heck of a good crop of goat grass with it, but that’s beside the point. But the point is the soil didn’t move. I didn’t have soil runoff in the way that I would have expected over the winter. I don’t have ditches. I don’t have small erosion areas in that field. And there were some pretty major erosion events around our area last winter.
Carol McFarland
I was actually just going to bring that up because we actually looked into it from the research side of things, and the water monitoring on the South Fork of the Palouse River was like one of the it was like the seventh highest rain event in more than a hundred years of being measured. It was the end of February and you saw an incredible amount of erosion around the Palouse. And I was wondering if you had any thoughts about that erosion event and how that impacted your farm.
Aaron Flansburg
Yeah, the short answer is that it didn’t. It impacted my farm in that it washed out our roads. It washed over my folks’ driveway, you know, took all the gravel off the top of the culvert, chunks of concrete down the river with it and we had to repair their driveway before it became passable. But I drove around the fields after that and conventional winter wheat fields— not my own— but conventional winter wheat fields that weren’t no-till looked rough coming out of that and there were you know, areas where all the straw that was kind of loose in the soil and suspension in the soil kind of washed out into flats and buried the crops. That didn’t happen on our farm. And so it didn’t happen on my no-till ground. And my organic ground looked just as good as that, which doesn’t make sense because you think the tillage that I’d done should have showed up, right? It didn’t. It just didn’t. And I don’t know if it was purely that the barley was big and hooked in and, you know, that it really wasn’t hitting bare ground that much when it was raining. It was hitting barley for the most part that it, you know, stooled out and gotten pretty big in the fall. But also, you know, and this is what Craig Kincaid told me, too. He had gone out and he’d had a winter pea crop and a clover crop that he disked in and then he cultivated it and he cultivated and then he seeded an organic winter red wheat crop. And he says, it doesn’t make sense, but the soil just healed itself and erosion wasn’t a problem. And I’ll say the same thing. It doesn’t make sense, but the soil healed itself and erosion wasn’t a problem. I think it’s just, it showed up on the ground that I chiseled last year. I had organic barley ground that I chiseled and I had conventional spring wheat ground that I chiseled. And I could compare the two. The conventional spring wheat ground had been in no-till for probably ten years before I chiseled it. And I could compare the way that that soil ran compared to the organic ground and just in chiseled ground and it was visibly different. The ground felt different underfoot. The organic ground was softer underfoot. It was more tilthy, to use a term that kind of made sense after walking across it. It was more fluffy and light. The soil structure was still decent, even though some of it I disked then chiseled. And then I went over to the organic spring wheat ground or the conventional spring wheat ground and it was firm underfoot. I left the the chisel shanks open I didn’t I didn’t harrow those back, and so I left that open and those had run in and filled in more with with small soil particulate, and the ground was harder and firmer underfoot and the other crazy thing is that you know, I’d grown Ryan’s spring wheat, which is kind of a stiff straw, and it’s durable over winter. Let’s say it typically wouldn’t break down that much. And on my conventional ground, the straw was enough that I had trouble getting through it with that Danish tine cultivator I was talking about. It was plugging up on my organic ground. The straw has, just in the course of a winter and part of a spring, it’s gone into solution in a way that the other straw hasn’t. So it’s breaking down faster. And there’s just a lot of stuff going on out there that I can observe. I can’t quantify. I can’t give a particular reason that this is why. But I think it’s just the practices in just five years have changed. It’s showing up and it’s shocking, and, you know, one crop that’s been in conventional, I’ve got twenty-seven acres of winter barley that’s been in conventional growth, that’s transitioning to organic. And then across the road, I have organic certified barley. It’s only been organic for this will be the first year it’s certified, right? The ground’s already different. It’s in that short of amount of time. Weed pressure is different. The barley plants look healthier on the ground that was summer fallowed. The wheat plants looked healthier too, but it’s even a different wheat population already. And things are changing out there quicker than you would think.
Carol McFarland
Wow. When you lean into some of these natural processes, I wonder.
Aaron Flansburg
Yeah, I really think so. Yeah, I really think so. I mean, a lot of those, those biological activities, creatures, whatever you want to say, I think are suppressed and they’re reduced in conventional farming, but they’re still there. And, you know, everything’s— everything you do, it’s full of trade-offs, right? So, yeah, no-till does make a nice soil structure and, you know, it does work. But it’s within a conventional system. And tillage makes a different soil structure. But I think it does work, especially in a system like I’m going to with the organic ground. It’s it’s hard to just put my finger on what particularly is going on, but things are going on and and they’re they’re for the better
Carol McFarland
That’s cool. Can you talk a little bit more about like your management goals that have been driving this transition for you?
Aaron Flansburg
Yeah one of the things that kind of was interesting management wise this this spring that I started to realize is that you know I’ve known for a long time that growing with no-till and farming with straw, it certainly puts you in the field later than if you’ve kind of had a more conventional tillage system. So, you know, if my neighbors were farming two weeks to two and a half to three weeks before me, if they were in kind of conventional tillage situations, that would be kind of standard. So I’d probably be seeding two to three weeks later often. You know, in the past year, a couple of years, I’ve gone to my mom and dad and I all farm together and so I’ve been doing all the seeding for a while, but my mom and dad have kind of been the spray crew. And so, you know, that takes pressure off of me not to have to seed at the same time I’m spraying. But this year I had to seed and spray at the same time. We got a new sprayer and so I’m the spray guy now. And so I’m doing the seeding and the spraying so if everything’s ready at the same time that means it’s ready to spray it’s ready to seed all those things are happening at the same time and we farm in one piece. Which is good but it also means that everything’s ready at once and I can’t farm from west to east as things dry out right, which some farmers in our area do who farm in different areas. So I’m able to stagger the workload then if I have cultivation as part of my practice because then I have you know the organic ground if I’m let’s say going to put in two-hundred and fifty, three-hundred acres or or whatever in the spring then that ground’s going to be ready earlier you know my dad can go out and start cultivating while I’m doing other operations for the conventional ground like spring, let’s say. So I think management wise, that’s part of the reason I’m expanding it is so that, you know, I can free up my dad to do that. He can go cultivate and I can go spray or I can go seed. And I think it’s actually a more efficient use of our time and more timely for some of the operations.
Carol McFarland
Okay. I also feel like I heard during the farm walk, you talking a little bit about one of your goals is just reducing synthetic inputs for a number of reasons. Would you like to expand on that a little bit?
Aarin Flansburg
Well, there’s no doubt that dragging a machine across the ground has an expense associated with it. Right. So there’s a fuel cost and there’s a maintenance cost and there’s a cost in terms of the time involved which I shouldn’t discount because it is substantial. Right? I’m doing a lot more passes on the organic ground than I am on the conventional no-till.
Carol McFarland
We definitely heard that on the farm walk.
Aaron Flansburg
Yeah. Yeah and I’ve tried to reduce it and be more intentional I guess about the timing, and I think I mostly succeeded in that I still don’t have quite the complete package of all the tillage equipment that I want, which I’m still going to have to make a few more investments that way. But you know the nice thing about those investments is yeah there’s some upkeep, yeah you might have to replace points every now and then, but for the most part when you have that equipment it’s paid for and you’re done with it. Chemicals, you buy chemicals every year and honestly some of the chemistries are so dependent on the timing of their application post-plant pre-emerge herbicides. In your pulse crops for instance if you don’t incorporate them somehow and get a rain and a timely rain, you know, you’re hoping for half an inch of rain after you put them down you may as well have not spent the money. And in the case of the cultivation tools that I’m still looking at getting, I think they can even act as a replacement or at least a complement for some of the chemistries on my conventional ground as well. So that’s kind of part of how I justify those expenses is that, yeah, you buy them once, but this is a thirty-year-old machine that I might be able to use for another thirty years or upgrade and have something similar. But it’s not a cost that just is tied to that one crop. It’s spaced out over the life of the machine instead of the cost of chemicals, which is tied to that one crop, and they may work, they may not work. You know, again, I have winter wheat in transition, right? There’s about a hundred and seventy acres that I’m transitioning into organic across the road from our farm walk last year, and you know so I had my last prohibited application at the start of October last year and so I didn’t spray any of that with fertilizer or herbicide or fungicide this year and it looks remarkably clean and good. Again this is the second year I’ve not sprayed winter wheat and on my conventional stuff and so far I haven’t suffered from it. So, you know, I’m becoming less of a believer in some of the chemistries that I just grew up using. And, you know, that was the solution, but they cause their own problems. And some of them are financial and some of them are environmental. And, you know, so I’m still moving toward less chemistries overall as part of the farming operation, even somewhat on the conventional ground.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, it sounds like you’re, one of the things I’m hearing is that you’re only going in the direction of more organic, not less, based on your experiences.
Aaron Flansburg
Yeah, I am. You’re definitely hearing that. And the tough part about it is that I’m kind of in a limbo period with my on-farm workforce, right? My folks are eighty and seventy-five, and maybe I’ll be working when I’m seventy-five or eighty, but I’m not sure that I really want to be doing as much as they are.
Carol McFarland
Aren’t your kids old enough to be on a tractor?
Aaron Flansburg
Well, they’re starting to get to that age, so I’ve got seventeen, fourteen, and twelve now. But you know, they’re also really busy. And, you know, I want them to be kids, too. And I kind of feel like you’ve got the rest of your life to work and you’ve only got a certain amount of time to be a kid, too. So, you know, I want to train them to have a good work ethic and have a skill set and all those things, but I don’t want to rely on them for, you know, big workloads outside of harvest because they got spring sports and they got school activities. You know, I really want them to have that time, too. So, yeah, I mean, they’re not driving tractor. Let’s put it that way.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, no, that makes sense too. It’s always about finding the balance in like that ecological balance for everything. It’s always kind of very dynamic, too. So that’s great. Let’s see. I really wanted to ask, one of the things that is really stuck in my mind that I saw on your farm walk last year was your roller crimper and the fact that it was on the three point hitch and that you said you were able to control the down pressure more with the roller crimper. And I wanted to ask you about, are you growing more cover crops this year? And how is your roller crimper? And also just maybe a little bit more on your nutrient management in organics.
Aaron Flansburg
You know, I haven’t used the roller crimper since you last saw it used. So that was my last pass with the roller crimper. And, you know, after that, I did a bunch of mowing over the top of what I had because I had. Yeah, so I was trying to do some organic no-till with that machine, right? And what I have in that field is heavy goat grass pressure. So, you know, it kind of is a field that I don’t think I’m going to do much winter crop on again for at least another five, six years. I’m thinking just to try to sort of deplete the seed bank of the goat grass to the extent that I possibly can. And you know it was kind of set up to fail that way, but I wound up with some untilled ground that I put into a winter crop. So it was untilled cover crop summer fallow I guess you’d say. And I would call that a complete disaster. Basically because I didn’t get rid of enough goat grass, and I feel like the tillage helped the crop to get a better start on the weed competition. I have a little bit of winter wheat on the organic ground, and I’ve got about a thirty foot pass where it was no-tilled into that cover crop. It doesn’t look good. The stuff that I tilled saved more moisture and looks a lot better. So I’m probably going to mostly abandon that. Not to say that I’m abandoning cover crops and green manure because I’m not. That’s definitely going to be part of my nutrient management strategy just to grow my own nitrogen and grow my own, you know, soil organic matter biomass to cultivate in for green manure. But no, cultivating it in makes the the worms pretty happy and and they’re up there in in the top several inches eating that, and so you know I just I don’t see cultivation as a bad word the way that I probably have over the past ten to fifteen years
Carol McFarland
Yeah that sounds like a big change. In that, I’m also hearing that you have a pretty big toolkit, you know, as part of your strategic weed management plan. And it sounds like you’re looking to expand it even more and really finding some effective strategies around when to use which tool.
Aaron Flansburg
Yeah. Yeah, there’s several items on the wish list. One starts at harvest, and I talked about it a little bit on the podcast. But I am still interested in getting a seed terminator, you know, a Hammer Mill seed destructor type unit for the back of a combine. And, you know, that was kind of one of the strategies. The other is to harvest more of the weeds and then clean them out of the field, which. I’m kind of doing that too. That was, I think that was a suggestion Pryor had. So Pryor was on the tour with me last year and, and he actually came up from the Willamette Valley and became a mentor to me through the transition to organic partnership program. So, I mean, that was really a good contact for me coming out of that farm walk. That’s, you know, he’s become a good friend and a good mentor and all those things. So, you know, that’s a strategy, but yeah. So, so anyways, back to equipment. Seed destructors on the wishlist, a tine weeder is on the wishlist and there’s a unit made by Treffler, which I’m really interested in. I went and saw one down in Walla Walla that I’ve thought about buying, but it’s really narrower than what I’d like. I’d like to get probably a sixty foot unit so that, you know, that pass can happen in a more efficient way. So I have to put less tracks in the field because I still feel like tracks are contributing to enough compaction over the seed just to encourage weed germination. I don’t think it’s entirely bad for the crop either, the way I’m doing it. But a sixty-foot unit would be a lot more efficient for my time than a thirty-foot unit would be. And I think I’d use it on conventional ground as well as a post-plant, sometimes pre-emerge, and as a post-plant, post-emerge pass. It would, in a lot of instances, take the place of the rotary hoe. And I used the rotary hoe some this spring, and it’s okay and I think it has its place but I don’t think it’s the only tool that will work. I think there’s other tools that will work better in certain situations, so that’s another one. Those are pretty expensive so it would be one of my most expensive tillage tool purchases. And then you know, I’m still kind of, a flail mower might not be a bad thing. They’re not terribly expensive. So I could get one of those and use it strategically. And the next might be just to upgrade my row crop tractor. And upgrading it wouldn’t necessarily mean more power or size. I think actually lighter and smaller would handle a lot of this equipment. I kind of think those are all on my wish list right now.
Carol McFarland
Great. Thanks so much for sharing. So one more thread I’d like to pull at in your experience of organic that you mentioned is some of the different varieties that you’ve been trying in your organic management. You mentioned some older varieties and how those are performing maybe differently than more modern varieties. Can you expand on that?
Aaron Flansburg
Yeah, so I think one of the keys to having success in this system where I’m not growing a crop that’s dependent on supplemental fertilizer, protection from chemicals, protection with fungicides, all those things is to have the older varieties that were bred and existed prior to these modern farming techniques. So that may be that seed is certified organic seed. It may be that it’s a heritage variety. And what I get from those is a crop that doesn’t need that extra nutrition to put on good vegetative growth. So the vegetative growth and the shading out of competitive weeds, getting a jump on weed problems just by providing shade and suppressing them under the canopy, I think that’s one of the keys to this system. It’s especially showing up in the barley varieties I’m growing. It’s showing up in the winter wheat varieties I’ve grown and the spring wheat varieties seem to be performing the same way. So at least in those grains, I think that’s all going to be really critical. The other thing I didn’t really talk about is timing. And so I also think a later seeding date is going to be beneficial for most of this stuff, because then I can start with getting rid of those early flushes of weeds. And then when those grains go into the ground or the beans go into the ground, they’re going to grow fast. And so getting fast vegetative growth, I think, is really important. And a lot of that’s determined by varieties that just came about before chemical fertilizer was the standard management practice.
Carol McFarland
I think we could probably keep having this conversation for quite a bit longer. But in the interest of time, I want to offer or I want to ask you if you have any final thoughts that you would like to share in your reflection of the farm walk and what you’re doing now and how you plan to move forward?
Aaron Flansburg
Yeah, I mean, I feel like every year I do this, I’m learning more. And, you know, that I’m moving in a certain direction now, but maybe ask me in five years, I will change direction again. So, you know, I’m learning all these things that I can use. And, and the farm walk was a good part of that because I could, I could meet with people with some ideas that I hadn’t thought of, I hadn’t come across before. And, and some of them I’ve actually put into practice already. So, you know, the farm walk was, was a lot of me saying, I don’t know what I’m doing and being accurate in that, but, but also, also, you know, seeing what was working in person was really a good deal. And seeing what was not working was a good deal. And talking to other people about why it might not be working or how I could make changes to improve that was really helpful. And my own thinking has continued to evolve even since then. And in listening back, it was kind of fun to hear where I was at then and the things that I was predicting at that time. I think a lot of them came through even in this year with more drought. The drying of that top layer of the ground was something that I was seeing last year and thinking maybe was a cause for cleaner field up on top. I had a really clean field of barley last year up on top. And I thought that cover crop that I took out, I think had taken some of the moisture from that top layer and kept the weeds out. And I think that really happened. I think that was really the case. And I think I saw it even multiplied this year in what I did, you know, in the conventional ground where I had problems with volunteer canola, let’s say. So that same principle is going on, whether it’s organic or transitional or in my conventional ground. But yeah, there were a lot of things to talk about and kind of hash through in person during that tour. And, you know, it’d be fun to follow up with other people in the area who are doing kind of similar things or their own things that are completely different. But, you know, it’s good to get off the farm for me and to see what somebody else is doing and try to learn from that. I hope to do more stuff like that in the future, even where I’m not the host.
Carol McFarland
All right. Well, we really appreciated you hosting and for sharing all of your knowledge and experience and the things you’re trying, sharing all your trials on both the farm walk and again with this follow up. It’s always fun to chat with you. You have such a wealth of knowledge and perspective. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Aaron Flansburg
Well, thank you. I’m glad to be a part of it. And thanks for all the work you’ve done to put this together. And I really do appreciate it.
Carol McFarland
Thanks, Aaron.