In this episode of the On-Farm Trials podcast, we hear from the farm team of Starvation Farms outside of Lexington, OR. Join the conversation with Chris and Andre Rauch and Leon Luna as they share their experiences with soil health and 22 years of no-till practices and overcoming a legacy of blowing and crusting soil, trying alternative crops and rotations that include camelina and safflower, and adding market value to sustain expanded rotations. Listen to the history of Starvation Farms – like how it was named, as well as the many trials in the course of the farm’s legacy.
Carol McFarland
Today, we’re on starvation farms outside of Lexington, Oregon with Chris Rauch.
Chris Rauch
Hello.
Carol McFarland
Andre Rauch
Andre Rauch
Hello
Carol McFarland
And Leon Luna.
Leon Luna
Howdy.
Carol McFarland
Great. Would you guys share a little bit about yourselves, your farm, and I think this is most of your farm team, but anyone else you farm with?
Chris Rauch
So it’s a family farm. Started by my great grandfather, Chris Moehnke, and then it went down to my grandfather, Julian Rauch, and my father, Irvin Rauch. And then, he retired and died on the same day. So then I took over.
Carol McFarland
Oh, man.
Chris Rauch
And so I farm with my son Andre, my son in law, Leon, my daughter is also involved—Natalie, and my wife, Kathy, are all involved. And that’s pretty much the farm partnership.
Carol McFarland
Okay. Thanks for a little bit of the history there, too. Sounds like quite the farmer retirement though. Well, I see you have a good, good succession plan. Would you describe a little bit more about your farming conditions down here in the Lexington area?
Chris Rauch
So in Morrow County, we’re mainly Ridgeville and Willis Morton soils. Nine inch rainfall. We also farm in Umatilla County. About twelve inch rainfall. Mainly from Rue elevator up to Pendleton Airport in that area. So it’s— three inches makes a lot of difference. I grew up with a Ph.D. and stop sand blows, so I got pretty dry and windy down here.I’d be— it’s a PhD. I was glad to give up when we went into no till, so we did that about twenty-two years ago.
Carol McFarland
Great. Thanks for sharing a little bit about that history. And it sounds like there’s some embedded farm management goals which we’ll get into in just a minute. Will you guys talk about if you, if you have a standard crop rotation and what that looks like.
Andre Rauch
Sure. Wheat fallow primarily. Being a nine inch rainfall, it’s hard to do much else. We’ve tried to intensify that somewhat. And we re-crop spring wheat here and there or re-crop spring barley, and recently we’ve tried out camelina and safflower, and there’s some promise to camelina. So, we’re continuing to expand that and possibly in the future going with the rotation of camelina or winter wheat, camelina, summer fallow. So you get four crops in a six year cycle versus three. But primarily today, we’re winter wheat, summer fallow.
Carol McFarland
Great. And it sounds like you have sandy soil, so maybe you’re not storing, storing as much.
Chris Rauch
They’re pretty sandy down this way.Umatilla is a bit more clay. But, yeah, they’re pretty light. You have to watch how you work them.
Carol McFarland
Thanks for sharing a little bit about that. It seems like your terrain is a little bit different than some of the Palouse-ier stuff.
Chris Rauch
We’re not hill farmers. We’re flatlanders. Yeah. And we have a few canyons, but there’s nothing like up there.
Carol McFarland
Okay. Okay. So you can skip that extra premium hillside leveling.
Andre Rauch
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It gets a little hairy in a few places, but we can manage.
Carol McFarland
Alright. Great. Well, let’s dive into talking a little bit about some of your management goals. And you know how they might be different across the whole farm or by year or by field and how that plays into some of the things we’ll talk about with your trials.
Chris Rauch
Well, we’re mainly no till, like I said before, and we’re in a chem-fallow rotation, and we’ve been doing that since we started, twenty-two years ago. Twenty-three years ago. And we’ve gone into more of split— as far as fertilization we’re splitting that more and more all the time so that it’s all upfront. That’s one of the things we’ve changed over the years. We’ve changed over like what we’re looking at in the soil as far as micronutrients. We’re getting a lot more of those. We’re getting more in depth on those. Our rotations from as far as crops. So we’ve got basically about seventy percent white, thirty percent red, sometimes forty percent as far as that goes. We’ve added a lot of technology over the years as far as what to do things with and map things. Like my son said, we’re starting to add more diversity to it a little bit. Some of it is cereal. I’ve done oats in the past too. Triticale. I used to do my own things when he was a little boy— he doesn’t remember all the work I went to, but I had my own test plots and of a whole bunch of different alternative crops, from lentils to millet to different cereal grains. Barley. I’m trying to remember the one over there in Australia. Lupines. Sunflowers. I’ve tried all those, but I wish I had kept all the notes I had on those because I want to help bring that up, because what we’re doing now.
Carol McFarland
So what, what’s been driving your interest in trying these things?
Chris Rauch
Couple of things. The soil health issue, looking at that. I’ve seen how things have changed in our soils over the years with how we used to do things. I remember putting on a hundred pounds of anhydrous per acre. Now we’re down into liquid. We use one filter to drive the liquid. Instead of doing that much for down into twenty to thirty pounds of liquid fertilizer. So that’s changed. The economics is another big one. Pretty much everything is driven by economics. It’s like, how do we either cut our cost and still grow the same, or how do we get more per acre? It’s a return on investment when you get down to it. Now it’s either, you know, we’re looking so we’re trying to look at how do we get more on a per acre? Can we add more on a nine inch rainfall? Can we increase that rotation and what fits? And that’s been an off and on struggle to figure that out because we’ve cut two bushel wheat and I’ve cut eighty bushel wheat off of this place. So it’s a big, big variance. Trying to figure out what works economically on that gets to be a little fun.
Carol McFarland
Two bushel wheat?
Chris Rauch
Yeah.
Carol McFarland
I bet that wasn’t a very nice day.
Chris Rauch
I didn’t want to cut it, but dad said cut it. So we cut it.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. How about, how do you see some of the management goals that are underlying your trials, Andre?
Andre Rauch
I think getting away from fallow in any way would be a good goal. It’s really hard to do in our area, but anything that can help intensify that rotation and actually creating a real rotation that, I mean, winter wheat summer fallow is— are not really a rotation, that it’s the same crop over and over again. But finding something that does provide some more diversity. But also pencils out, and there’s a reason everyone grows winter wheat summer fallow because they have to buy a five-hundred thousand dollar combine and put a hundred thousand header in front of that. So, you gotta you gotta buy it and grow what is going to keep you going. But I do think that there’s other ways, and more diversity that we could add and still make ends meet.
Carol McFarland
Leon, what what’s your— I know you’re new to the farm team. Did you grow up on a farm, Leon?
Leon Luna
No. I grew up in a trucking family. So as far as hauling all the wheat down to the river, I’m pretty good doing that. I, I let these guys kind of decide as far as diversity goes, and I’m just— I’ll give some of my input, but it’s mostly up to them right now because I’m still learning everything from scratch. Basically.
Carol McFarland
It sounds like you do still play an incredibly important role, just that the transportation. Without that, it doesn’t make it out of the field, does it?
Leon Luna
Well, sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t. Especially when we have a truck burn up in the field, fully loaded.
Carol McFarland
Oh, no.
Leon Luna
We had that happen a couple of years ago.
Carol McFarland
I’m sorry.
Leon Luna
Well, it’s part of it, I guess.
Chris Rauch
He does a— I’ll interject here— he has some really good questions. And are there things maybe we’ve already had this, Andre and I’ve had this discussion years ago over the same thing. So he’s learning. So he’s asking the right question. But that’s a plus.
Carol McFarland
That’s great.
Leon Luna
A lot of the questions that I’ve been asking are like, can we do this? Can we do that? He’s like, already done it. It doesn’t work like, well, I, I’m trying.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. Andre, I probably should have put this in a little bit earlier, but how was it to grow up on the farm watching your dad do some different stuff, maybe?
Andre Rauch
It was good. It. You know, it’s the only thing you know, it’s normal. Everything’s normal to you as you’re growing up. You don’t realize that. It’s kind of a hassle to grow, to drive thirty miles to the grocery store because you’ve always had to do that. And then when you have the convenience of being able to walk to a grocery store, it’s like mind blowing. So it gives you a different perspective, and I’m glad that I have that growing up. I always loved raising animals. Having cows and chickens are my favorite animals. And being able to have those just run around out front are great. And, I don’t think you really appreciate what it is to farm until you’re actually doing it. So growing up on a farm and farming are vastly different things, and there was a lot that I didn’t know until I actually came back and started doing it firsthand.
Carol McFarland
Okay. Now, when did you come back?
Andre Rauch
Twenty-nineteen, twenty-twenty that cropping year. So this has been my fifth or sixth harvest.
Carol McFarland
I bet that was a really interesting time to be coming back to the farm. Did you guys get some drought conditions and kind of subsequently?
Chris Rauch
Well, that’s kind of normal.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. It’s true. Right. I feel like twenty one…
Andre Rauch
Yeah. It was my first complete full year. It was the worst year ever that the farm ever had to at least economically.
Carol McFarland
Maybe that two bushel wheat year. I don’t know, that sounded pretty grim.
Andre Rauch
Yeah. We used to re-crop more and yeah, there were some— I remember cutting all day as a kid one day and never dumping. I just went to dump for fun. The combine never got full.
Carol McFarland
So do you have cows and chickens now?
Andre Rauch
No. I live in, I live in town now.
Carol McFarland
I gotta just be, like, a little bit nosy into the background. But what did you do before you came back to the farm?
Andre Rauch
I worked in IT for Daimler, the trucking company, the largest commercial vehicle manufacturer in the world. And so I worked in the Daimler Trucks North America division of Daimler, on their website.
Carol McFarland
Oh, cool. Okay, so now anything that goes wrong with anything computer on the farm of.
Andre Rauch
I’m the IT expert.
Leon Luna
Any sort of new technology he’s also.
Andre Rauch
And there’s a lot there’s a no there’s a ton. And it’s constantly evolving on the farm.
Carol McFarland
Oh that’s great. I mean, it sounds like you really add a valuable contribution in that space. And actually, as you repeated, the farm name, it makes me really want to know a little bit about the history of the farm name Starvation Farms.
Chris Rauch
So my father came up with the name, back in the seventies, kind of when it was. He made it official in the eighties, but he you know, there were times it was really starvation. And there was a ridge out here at one time was kind of called Poverty Flat and it kind of used that. And I remember him telling the story. I was much younger. I didn’t realize how broke we were and how close we were to losing the place in the sixties and stuff.
Carol McFarland
It sounds like that’s the difference between being a farm kid and actually farming.
Chris Rauch
Yeah, yeah. And so I kind of grew out of that. I mean, he had one bank, First International Bank— no First National Bank of what it was called at the time. There are no more. But it basically told him, you either get out or get bigger. And they told him, we suggest you get out, and said he won’t look at any got in with it’s now AgWest Credit. At that time it was Federal Land Bank or something like that. And they fathered him and he had crop failure. But they said, we’ll stick with you. He had another crop failure. They said we’ll stick with you. And then things started to turn around. And in nineteen-seventy-three, seventy-two, seventy-three, we actually started getting bigger farm life. Things turn around. And over the four year period before that, and my aunt, my cousin, we had and almost doubled the size of the farm in that one year, about seventy, eighty percent. And things have been kind of going okay since then.
Carol McFarland
I’m glad you’re not quite as flirting with starvation. And true to the name, hopefully not too much these days. You know, one of the things that I noticed in you talking about some of the things that you tried, maybe a little while ago, we were talking about exploring diverse crops. What crops did you like? What really stands out? And if you think anything about the farming conditions are different now, that might change what could or make something maybe worth trying again?
Chris Rauch
Well, what pushed that in the first place was clear back in the two thousand or whatever it was when the first direct seed conference happened and we were looking to kind of head that direction. And I remember the conversation with all the growers is one, can we grow different things and what kind of drill do you use? And nobody knew. We were all new to this. And dad was always kind of forward thinking. I mean, pretty much encouraged it. We went out and bought a drill. He wasn’t ready to go a whole hog yet.
Carol McFarland
What drill did he buy?
Chris Rauch
We bought a thirty foot John Deere seven thirty seven drill with a seven-seventy air card. I might have the number wrong. I can’t remember what we bought. And then we turned around, used it that fall and turned around and spent all winter redoing it. Something totally different so it’d be thirty-three feet. Really big. And, we weren’t one hundred percent no till then, but we were still trying to figure out how to do chem fallow. So one of the things that caught my eye though was can we do different crops? And so I started setting up my, they might have been two acre plots at that time with a thirty-three foot drill, which was a lot easier to do plots for that size. And I started trying different crops and I listened to Dave Shell was one I talked to a lot on things they were trying. I forgot who he was working for at the time, works for Albile now, but he was kind of a cropping specialist guy. And so we worked on it. I tried using some of the stuff he came up with and we tried different crops on re-crop during drought years. Needless to say, none of it worked very well. But we learned and then we also learned how to do chem fallow through all that. Because at the same time we’re trying to figure out chem fallow. And we’re spending seventy, eighty bucks an acre just on chemicals. And I remember dad complaining about the chemical bill in that he said, look at grow jugs and you just try to grow jugs out there. But through all that process, we learned how to cut our cost what— how to grow things. It took a few years, but that’s what kind of drove that. Economic wise, eventually it just got better and better as we learned more, get better at it. We were still in the transition after a few years. Part of the ground was still conventional fallow and a part wasn’t. And it was an interesting shop conversation one time. I’ll just put it that way— between family members. Do we go whole hog? No-till or not. And it was split and it was rather heated split.
Carol McFarland
Hopefully no wrenches were thrown.
Chris Rauch
It was close. It was very close. Anyway, we just kept progressing along and eventually we got to a hundred percent. And even the part of the family that wasn’t happy about it came around. And this is pretty nice.
Carol McFarland
What do they like about it? What did they see?
Chris Rauch
Iit was a lot less time to farm, a lot less repair work, yard on the rod weeder we were twenty-four seven trying to fix that dang thing. That’s not fun. The seeding was a lot better. We could do our fertilizing and seeding at the same time. Spraying was much easier, and by that time we were getting the costs somewhat down. We’ve gotten better since then even so, it was kind of a time thing, but also the money we were putting less out. So and then no sand blows, and the soil was changing. You could kind of see it.
Carol McFarland
Can you tell me more about that? Especially since you have a sandy soil. I’m interested to know if accumulation of organic matter has kind of happened?
Chris Rauch
It has gone up to some of— now we don’t check it very often, I probably should, and the correct way, but it was going down and, or pH was going up. And then when we started switching things, it took a few years, but the pH started to come down some, and the organic matter came up some. It wasn’t a lot. I mean, we’re in a low organic matter area anyway. You know, one percent it’s kind of where it’s at.
Carol McFarland
That’s where you can, you know, if you get a little bit feels like a big gain.
Chris Rauch
Yeah, yeah. But what you saw in the soil, you could walk across the soil and you feel it just walking across it. And that’s not a true measurement. But it was getting softer. What I really noticed in conventional fallow there’s two things that really stand out is the top moisture. Now in chem fallow it dries out more, but it takes a lot less rain to wet that up so you can seed it. In conventional fallow you might have a four to six inches of fluff, but a quarter inch rain ain’t going to do it. It’s not going to get soaked up. The other issue was, crusting. This is a very crusting soil, so you could go out there and seed, stuff might be coming up, but then you get a rain on it.
On conventional fallow, you have an eighth to a quarter inch crusting on top. It’s like concrete. That stuff can’t come through. It’ll just row right up like an accordion or go sideways. And I’ve had experience where I seeded out there after and we’d been in five or six years maybe at least maybe a little longer than that, and we got a like a half inch to an inch of rain that night and I’d seeded. Oh, crap, we’re gonna have to redo this. But I watched it, I dug around, I could kind of tell by digging like, this might be all right. And sure enough it comes a few days later and stuff this pops through. No problem at all. So I don’t worry about crusting any more on wheat. In fact, in this area, on this part of the farm in Morrow County, probably seven out of ten years we’re just dustier than that. We’ll wait as long as we can, but we’re dusted in October, usually by October tenth. And when the rain comes, I don’t have to worry about crusting really. And it’s going to come.
Carol McFarland
So, Andre, do you remember this heated conversation in the shop?
Chris Rauch
Oh, no, he wasn’t there.
Andre Rauch
As long as I can remember, it’s been no till, I have a faint memory of being on a rod weeder when I was very, very young. But, yeah, it’s pretty much been my entire life.
Carol McFarland
I asked you about your first no till drill. What do you, what are you guys running now?
Chris Rauch
So we’ve got two. We’ve got— in Morrow county we run a John Deere eighteen-thirty hoe drill, ten inch base with, like, a paired row, like a circular three inch paired row, a four inch paired row. And it puts the seed down each side, then the fertilizers below that. Then in Umatilla County, we have a pillar drill, ten inch spacing. They call it a— trying to get the right name.
Andre Rauch
Disc-hoe, it’s forty feet, ten inch spacing disc-hoe drill.
Chris Rauch
So what it is it’s it’s like a deep furrow disk drill. It doesn’t disturb as much, the hoe drill, but it’s more than just like a single or two double disk drill. And it’ll still put the seed down below. Or I mean, the fertilizer down below and then the seeds up on a shelf above it, off to the side. And it’ll handle a hundred bushel stubble. No problem. I mean, the noise didn’t start out that way. We had to make some, found out there were some adjustments we had to do to it, but it’ll handle a hundred bushel stubble. Well, and that’s it’s pretty good. I wish it was fifty foot up there, but yeah.
Andre Rauch
The pillar drill works a lot better if there’s a little bit of moisture. If there’s a like a light fludd on top of the soil, which is kind of our conditions a lot of the times in September, it can kind of mound the back row. And so it’s, it’s kind of condition dependent. But if you have the right condition to the pillar drill can go through any stubble and it just makes a great— it does really well.
Carol McFarland
Can I ask a little bit more about the modifications that you did to make it go through that stubble?
Chris Rauch
There was actually an update there if you got a lot of residue— I forgot what the term was residue, like a residue rubber flap in front. And apparently it made an adjustment to that. It’s pretty minor. And we had the wrong one. And the owner of the company talked to us and we brought this in during Covid. And so they weren’t able to give us all the owner sales help.
Andre Rauch
They needed to teach us how to use it really quickly. We kind of learned on our own and we didn’t learn everything properly.
Chris Rauch
And so we put those on. They sent us a whole bunch of new ones. It was like nine days old, a whole new drill. Right?
Andre Rauch
Yeah. It was a tiny change. It just changed the angle of this guard that protected the disc. But that made all the difference in the world. And we were plugging up occasionally before in like sixty bushel stubble. And then we put these guards at a different angle, and it you wouldn’t think it would make much of a difference. But that year we see it through. I mean, parts of that were probably twenty inch stubble, a hundred and twenty bushel wheat that we seeded through and no problem and no plugging it. It made a huge difference.
Carol McFarland
Sometimes the little things are the big things.
Andre Rauch
Yeah, like a twenty degree change on a shield. That’s all it was.
Carol McFarland
Well, thanks for sharing that guys. Well, let’s dive into a little bit more of the experiments that you have going on on the farm right now for this season. What are you looking forward to watching?
Chris Rauch
You wanna talk about the AEA?
Andre Rauch
We have a few things. One of them is, and we’ve worked on this before that, advancing Eco Agriculture. John Kemp’s company, using some of their products in lieu of conventional products. And, we had really good results in twenty-twenty two when we did a field in AEA, then we never did it again because I don’t know why. It was too good. So this year we took one field and we split it in half. It’s a five hundred acre field, and, half of it, we didn’t have any seed treat on. We use their non-conventional, non pesticide seed treat.
Chris Rauch
One’s a biological benefit of, one’s a biological and one isn’t.
Andre Rauch
Yeah. There was a liquid and a dry that we applied to the seed. And, and going forward, we’re going to continue, using non-conventional products, as foliar applications. And, yeah, we’re going to, we’ll be able to see on a large scale of what difference it makes. Yeah. Other than the seed treat and the fertilizer and the foliar applications, everything else will be the same. It’s the same variety in the same field, side by side.
Carol McFarland
Okay. So it’s a split field sort of design?
Andre Rauch
Yeah, it’s a big square field and half of it’s two-hundred fifty acres on one side, and two-hundred and fifty acres on the other. Split between the two practices.
Carol McFarland
Great. And then, I guess when you have something like that, just I don’t know if you have a general plan that you kind of follow or what do you watch throughout the year? How— where’s your report card? What data matters to you?
Chris Rauch
Well, in that we’ll, we’ll kind of go with their recommendations as we’ll follow what they’re doing. One of the things— and this is one of the reasons we didn’t come back to it right away— was the sap sampling you have to do, and the management. And when we started this, I wasn’t much help because I just got out of heart surgery. So the sap sampling takes a lot of time. And it’s, we weren’t quite ready. Developed to spend too much time on it. But we’re going to try it again. So we’ll just take the sap samples and we’ll take their recommendations for what to put on it. And it’s the regenerative ag practices. And the other part, we’ll just use our conventional things we’ve been doing and see what happens from there. We’ll keep track of all of them, see if there’s a difference in the older protein or how it works out. And then cost. He’s a numbers guy, so he’s got a spreadsheet for everything. So.
Andre Rauch
Yeah. So we’ll look at the cost for sure. But then also the yield maps probably the, you know, the biggest measuring stick we have at the end of the year is will it, can we see it on the yield map? And and that’ll drive everything.
Carol McFarland
So one of the things if you guys are flatlanders here, it seems like you might have an easier time with consistent or relatively consistent field conditions. I know doing research on the Palouse especially, you know, when you have to look kind of lean into the blocking in order to get like statistically valid results because you just could never find one flat, homogeneous space for repeatable results.
Andre Rauch
Yeah, I wouldn’t say ours are homogeneous either. There’s definitely differences in soil depth, but probably more so than in the Palouse.
Chris Rauch
There isn’t a lot, a lot of difference between the soil types. So one of the programs I signed up for was grid sampling, but sampling by soil types and stuff, you know, just over the years when I did it, there wasn’t a lot of difference. There’s some difference in parts of the field. There’s not really shallow soils. But as far as Ridgeville and Willis Morton and stuff, the depths are pretty much mostly the same. The differences are minor. There are differences. You’ll see it on your map, but they’re not huge for the whole field. So we can make minor adjustments instead of having to go grid sampling stuff.
Carol McFarland
So you’re able— I mean it seems like that kind of paired comparison again you’re representing pretty comparable field conditions.
Andre Rauch
Yeah. Yeah more or less. And I think we have a large enough area where we’re not going to get certain anomalies because there’s a tiny. And I think we’ve had that in the past or we’ve done a test since like may have looked really well, but then you could have put it on just that one spot of ground that was actually a little higher producing and so there are, there are maybe ten or fifteen percent differences. And even in a flat homogeneous field, and so spreading that over two-hundred and fifty acres, we’re going to kind of, law of averages is going to work its magic on that.
Carol McFarland
Now when you put out a trial, do you put it on your best ground or your lake somewhere in the middle? What do you?
Chris Rauch
Well, we don’t put it on the worst ground, but we know it’s probably in the middle to pick a spot that works.
Andre Rauch
Yeah, yeah we would, we don’t, we don’t want to use our worst ground because almost nothing grows there. So. But, yeah.
Carol McFarland
It’s only the stuff you really want to test it’s resilience.
Andre Rauch
Yeah. That’ll be a real good test.
Carol McFarland
You put your camelina out there.
Chris Rauch
We’re going to this year.
Andre Rauch
Yeah. We are. We’re doing some in this area.
Carol McFarland
Okay. So that’s another trial that you’ve got going on this year is some camelina.
Andre Rauch
Yeah it’s our second year with it. We’re expanding. So last year we only did twenty acres or fifteen. We were intending to do more, but we did a soil assay before we seeded and camelina is especially sensitive to carfentrazone, and we had residual cargentrazone from spring two years earlier. And the so the soil assay made it look like the camelina wouldn’t grow at all, but after we seeded it actually did just fine. So this year we’re, we’re expanding. We’re doing a hundred and twenty acres. We’re doing on a re-crop primarily. And that’s where we think it might fit into our rotation. It might even work or not in it’s rainfall and re-crop area, and the economics of it are pretty good compared to wheat at the moment. But we’re also trying it on fallow, just where the wheat market was earlier— I mean, it’s gone up somewhat recently, but the economics of camelina, even in fallow, looked better than the winter wheat. So if it can work on fallow, that’s another opportunity just for diversity. And as long as, you know, if the Yukon’s economics look good on fallow, then I would even do it on fallow. But so we’re trying both both ways
Chris Rauch
Then we’re trying two different varieties this year. So side by side on both sides of that to kind of get on the gauge and what’s the difference in the varieties. Yeah.
Carolo McFarland
Oh do you have the duct tape ready for your combine?
Andre Rauch
Yeah. We got through that last year there were a lot of holes in our combine by the end of the year last year, but luckily we cut the camelina early before the holes developed. That is a challenge, was cutting it. It was very slow. We were actually able to get it decent in the clean. We have it, we were on the John Deere SA seven eighty and, we had to play with it a lot, but we got it under eight percent, we’re on seven to eight percent foreign material. And anything under ten percent is acceptable to them with no dockage. So yeah, we’re pretty happy with that.
Chris Rauch
It looked like fifty when you looked at it.
Andre Rauch
It doesn’t look clean in the bulk tank, but it was, and you’re going about one and a half miles an hour, which is a challenge if we ever did get to scale up camelina. And that’s something, you know, in our area is everything’s done at a very large scale because we’re at nine inch rainfall. You have to have a lot of acres. And so anything we do has to be scalable, you know, over thousands of acres. And that’s one of the logistic problems with the camelina is the speed at which we would cut it would take an extremely long time to harvest.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, some of the, like did you need to do— it sounds like maybe you did a little bit of playing with the adjustments. I imagine some of the air and like what else did you have to kind of mess around with?
Chris Rauch
That started at seeding time. So I was trying to figure out the drill because it’s smaller than canola. So we were playing with the seeding depth, and then we played with the air. You know we didn’t, we didn’t have a clue. We talked around. We asked some people but we just kind of hit by miss. And then we didn’t exactly have the right roller feed roller in the drill. We’ve got hopefully the correct one now. And we had some problems with the air blowing the seed around in the tank because it was so small.
Carol McFarland
It’s so small
Chris Rauch
Yeah, but I mean, the Stanwick ended up being pretty good. I can’t complain.
Andre Rauch
For being in our first time and not really know what we’re doing I think we got a decent stand and we know what we’re doing better now.
Chris Rauch
We think.
Andre Rauch
We got the appropriate feed roller, which should help. It was hard to get a kind of an even distribution to get it to feed and seed. We were targeting seven pounds to the acre, and I think we had some place that had twelve and some places had three. And maybe if you averaged it out, we had seven, but I don’t know if anywhere had seven exactly. But I think next year we can get there.
Carol McFarland
Gotta love averages though. Yeah. No, small-seeded stuff can be kind of tricky. Leon, did you get to play with the camelina adventure?
Leon Luna
So I hauled it. I didn’t, I didn’t cut it or anything. I hauled it to Pendleton.
Chris Rauch
You got to play with the safflower
Leon Luna
Yeah. So we did some safflower this year and the combine plugged up and I got to help unplug it.while the combine driver was out spraying. So he got to miss out on all those adventures that we took place.
Chris Rauch
I’m the one that plugged it up though.
Carol McFarland
Did you have some nice like those elbow length leather gloves for that?
Leon Luna
No, that didn’t even know that it was pokey.
Andre Rauch
Just to walk in the field it took a hazmat suit.
Leon Luna
So we would have to check it to see if it was ready to cut. And just started walking out there. And it’s just poking.
Andre Rauch
Walking through a field of cactus.
Leon Luna
It was not ideal. So I don’t know if we’ll end up growing that again, but we had our adventures with it. I’m excited about camelina, just to potentially add that extra crop rotation in. And I mean, I think it’ll possibly help the farm in the long run if we can continue adding it into a crop rotation. And if, if the market’s good, it’ll benefit us all.
Andre Rauch
I think one of the biggest challenges with the camelina is going to be weed suppression or keeping it clean enough to cut, because there isn’t a broadleaf herbicide that we can use after it’s come out of the ground. And so the only real you’re only real herbicide is just getting the plant big enough to canopy over before you get a flush of broadleaf weeds, which is difficult to do.
Carol McFarland
I think at Lind— so this is all spring planted camelina? I think at the Lind research station, they’re working on like a winter…
Andre Rauch
Yeah, yeah. And Don he’s helped a lot because he’s done a lot of research with Camelina in Pendleton.
Carol McFarland
Yeah.
Andre Rauch
And, he had trials and he had pictures. They showed side by side. If he planted it in January, February, March. And it’s extremely resilient to cold. It’ll come up in thirty-three degree temperature soils. The problem is if you plant it in February or March— orJanuary, his end pictures where the January was a field of weeds. The February was like half weeds, half camelina. In March it was just camelina because, he can’t, you’re not able to spray the weeds before they emerge. And so they’re anything he planted in January, you know, the camelina grew but also all the weeds grew. And by the time it came harvest time, you couldn’t even see the camelina because there was tumble mustard, and, you know, every other weed imaginable growing amongst it.
Carol McFarland
Did you guys have any issues with shatter or have they were you able to get some of the variety development?
Chris Rauch
If we’d waited much longer, it would have been a problem. We got in there just enough before it became a problem.
Andre Rauch
Yeah, it did happen quick. There was, you know, it looked all fine. And then a couple of days later, like almost ninety percent of the leaves were on the ground and the pods were probably going to shatter any day. So we had to like, jump on it, which could be a problem if you had a lot of acres. We had a thousand acres of it, and you have to cut it at one mile an hour. You know, shattering might become an issue.
Leon Luna
But if it works out, we might be able to get that second combine at the time. I keep pushing. I keep pushing that we should get a second combine because we’re kind of at that borderline with acres. But then we’d have to get another truck, get another driver. But I’m still going to push it. I’ll keep putting the bug in their ear. Eventually we’ll get a second.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, maybe Andre needs to make a spreadsheet.
Leon Luna
Oh, he’s got it. He’s got it already. It’s just going to take a little bit better, wheat prices.
Chris Rauch
I’ve been there done that though.
Carol McFarland
Awesome. So, do you want to talk abou, so I know you guys have more experiments going on this farm this year. What else you got going on?
Chris Rauch
So we’ve we’ve done a cover crop one, well it’s still in effect. So we did a twenty acre one and then seeded over it. And then we had drought didn’t grow anything but was around eight bushels, I think. Probably not even that much. That was the spring cover crops. We put it in the spring, sprayed it out, and then, we’ve come back on that field again. We expanded that to forty acres. We overlaid it and that and that and some more. And then we did that in the fall. And then terminated it and seeded into it this last fall. And so we’ll see what that does. It looks better than last time. So we’ll see. We’ve done that. We’ve done some intercropping a couple of different things on that. We’ve done wheat with peas. Didn’t take them to harvest the peas, but we did that a few times. Worked really good the first time and then cheatgrass got in the way the next time. I’ve done a mix. Actually Doug Pool did it. I got the idea from Doug Pool of seeding a dormant cash crop with cover crops. Let it go. One year, and then the cover crop supposedly dies out, and then the cash crop comes. Well it didn’t quite work that way. Everything came even after it was supposed to freeze out. And it didn’t, even though it did freeze. But, we tried that. Actually, the spring crop after were pretty good.
Andre Rauch
Yeah. I have to say, I think the crops— that experiment didn’t work but the crops on that area, subsequent crops have all been significantly better than I think they would have been otherwise. They’re better than the other part of the field that didn’t have that.
Carol McFarland
Can you describe what you mean by better? What do you see?
Chris Rauch
Yield.
Andtre Rauch
Yeah. Yield.
Carol McFarland
No sometimes better can be like it looked, you know it came up in a different way or you know looked lusher and early in the season, you know, there’s a lot of different ways that better can can look so.
Andre Rauch
Better on the yield map. The yield map showed it’s shown better yield and it’s cleaner too. It’s been— and it might be why it’s better. But there’s no cheatgrass there. The last year we used that field was all winter wheat. And we didn’t put a grass herbicide or we just put the metribuzine on, but the side that had that experiment had no, no grassy weeds at all, the better yield. And then the other side, some grassy weeds, a little bit lower yield.
Carol McFarland
This was— this another like kind of this split field where you had it kind of paired.
Chris Rauch
Kind of was it was a particular part of the field or the ditch, the field it was this forty acres.The rest of the field was what we normally do now.
Carol McFarland
Was that part of any it was a like part of the Flourish project or was that?
Chris Rauch
Just tried it.
Carol McFarland
Nice. Oh, I think that that guy, just because of the acreage, I think that’s kind of within the scope of what the Flourish project works with. But I don’t know the exact geographic bounds of the participation of the Flourish at this point, but I think we’ll have a podcast episode on that soon. But, okay, you have also mentioned maybe some other bio stimulants too.
Chris Rauch
Yeah, we did with, Pivot Bio done that a couple times. I’ll let Andre talk about that one.
Andre Rauch
We’ve done Pivot Bio twice. And the first time we had a, we had a plot we did on a spring barley and we had a, we had a plot where we did not apply the Pivot Bio as our control. And, and we did see it was extremely dry years. Twenty-twenty three.
Chris Rauch
And it was re-crop.
Andre Rauch
And it was re-crop spring barley in the Pendleton area. And so it wasn’t it didn’t yield very well anywhere. But from our, from our control to the five acres right next to it, there was about a five to ten percent increase in yield. So it looked promising. So we tried it again last year on spring DNS and it was a really wet spring. And we saw the pretty much exact opposite. So everywhere that we used— and we don’t know why this happened, but everywhere where we used Pivot Bio we had worse yield, worse protein, worse test weight, pretty much worse in every way you could quantify it. I don’t we have no idea why everything was the same. We fertilized everything the same. The only difference was we put Pivot Bio on, I’m not sure. This time we did Pivot Bio with, with a seed treat, that they said was compatible. That’s the only difference I can think of that we did with the spring barley is we didn’t have a seed treat on the spring barley, but, yeah, it’s it’s kind of a mystery. But yeah, we did. It was a three-hundred and sixty acre field and a hundred fifty approximately half was an Pivot Bio. And we did our we didn’t do like just one chunk of the field as a Pivot Bio. We separated it out.
Carol McFarland
So like a strip.
Andre Rauch
Yeah. There were there were several different sections that had Pivot Bio and that didn’t. And I could see it on the yield map. As soon as I got one pass, I’d be in the Pivot Bio pass, and then I’d turn around in the next pass and be onto the non Pivot Bio and then immediately I would see a difference in yield. You could see it visually too, and I don’t know what happened there, but something there was something that didn’t like the Pivot Bio.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. No, that’s well that’s why the research community believes in replication. Yeah. How many years we do this? Doesn’t give you super quick turnaround on answers, but I think allows for a little bit of control consistency. So it’s interesting though that you got good results with it the first time and that it helped maybe with some climactic. Is that right?
Andre Rauch
Yeah. And under an extremely dry year it helped and at an extremely wet year it did not, so I don’t know if the climate was the reason for that.
Carol McFarland
So Pivot Bio they kind of offer like a it’s a synthetic biology kind of community.
Chris Rauch
It’s like it’s got a living organism. And you have to be careful how you treat it. Somehow it works for the other organisms. It’s supposedly makes those organisms work to make more fertilizer, more nitrogen.
Andre Rauch
Yeah. They claim like twenty pounds of…
Chris Rauch
Forty actually.
Andre Rauch
Yeah. And maybe it’s because we weren’t short on the field that had the, the DNS where we saw negative results from the biosolids had or from the Pivot Bio had biosolids applied year before. And so there was probably adequate N in the field. And so the bacteria may not have helped. I don’t know how it hurt that’s what I’m wondering or what what it did that negatively affected it, but I could see how it wouldn’t have had a positive impact. Because they say if you’re not deficient on N, then you may not see a yield bumper and an increase in protein or something from the Pivot Bio.
Carol McFarland
Interesting, Okay. That’s okay. So you did mention biosolids. So you guys work with biosolids here on the farm. Do you want to talk a little bit about your trials with that?
Chris Rauch
Oh it’s not really a trial. They said let’s do it, but it’s good.
Carol McFarland
When did you start applying?
Chris Rauch
Oh it’s been for three years. Four years
Andre Rauch
Twenty-twenty one? I think four years. Pretty much every acre has been applied at least once on our farm..
Chris Rauch
There’s a few that we’re just started on a couple fields this year for the second time, we got in our second application that had three crops, or one of them was three crops cause it was re-crop, but it’s all out of Portland. They truck it up here and they spread it. Do it all. They even do some soil testing to check on everything before and after. Make sure we’re not over applying or things are bad. Things are going on out there. So it’s helped with some things. So I’m starting to see it in the soil tests. You know, some of our microbes are coming up. We’re not. I think we’re cutting our fertilizer a little bit. I haven’t checked the organic matter.
Andre Rauch
Yeah. It has. I’ve seen about a tenth of improvement immediately after spreading the biosolids. Every time. So if we’re at one point one then we’re at one point two. The pH always drops a tiny bit. So we’re pretty high pH of seven two normal. And after the biosolids it might drop two tenths. So seven two to seven which isn’t really a bad thing in our area. The micros, we did a sap analysis in twenty-twenty two on a field that had Pivot Bio, and then one that did not. Sorry, getting getting my bios confused. One that had biosolids, one that did not, and all the microbes were significantly higher on the on the crop, the field that had the biosolids. And then last year we spread the three hundred and sixty acre, half section had biosolids and half did not. And there was almost a ten bushel yield increase on the side with the biosolids. It was clear as day on the yield map, this one’s green and one’s yellow in the big square. So it’s definitely made a huge improvement. And it’s allowed us to cut down a lot on the synthetic. We hardly have to put any in through the drill because we’re getting it all through the biosolids.
Carol McFarland
Great. Yeah. I was wondering in your split field there, like how you calibrated if you did synthetic and like regular rate on one side and then how you calculated the nitrogen from the biosolids. Sounds like that’s part of what they offer.
Andre Rauch
Yeah. So when they, they can’t spread it without taking a sample first because they can’t over apply nitrogen. And they use like the OSU’s calculation of bushels per how many on our target yield is and then how many nitrogen pounds of nitrogen it would take to grow that. And so that’s how they calculate their amount they’re allowed to put on. And they contact us and say how much do you want to put on. So every fall they sample all of our suit fields that we’re going to spread that fall. And then we adjust based on how much nitrogen is. And it’s constantly changing based on the composition of the biosolids, so they’ll adjust the rate based on what’s in it.
Carol McFarland
Fascinating.
Leon Luna
Make sure you don’t stand down wind though, from the field. I know it’s pretty bad sometimes.
Andre Rauch
Yeah, yeah. Smelly on a rainy day.
Leon luna
Yeah. And then if you got the pile built up and then you go next to the pile, you can definitely smell it. So.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, there’s some pretty, interesting smelling soil amendments in general. I think that is, that’s in some cases.
Andre Rauch
Yeah the Pivot Bio is a really nice smell actually we had it in the shop. It smells like baking bread kind of like it’s a real yeasty.
Carol McFarland
Now is that a liquid? Do you like, run that through a sprayer or what? How do you apply that on?
Chris Rauch
You put that on your treatment for seed. It goes in a seed treat.
Carol Mcfarland
So, Leon, do you like I imagine like this is totally why you have all the questions for these guys.
Leon Luna
Yes. I would say there’s a lot to learn being like, I guess my first full year into farming, I’ve got lots of questions and I’m, I’m learning almost every day as I do stuff or work on stuff, and I ask a lot of questions. They probably are annoyed because of some of the questions I get or ask them sometimes, but I mean, if I’m doing something I want to know why it is I’m doing it. Not just, okay, I’m doing it because you told me to I kind of want to know why we’re doing it, to see where it’s helping the farm in the long run, how it’s improving, yield or soil, everything like that.
Carol McFarland
So what did you ask the first time the biosolids showed up right.
Leon Luna
Well, I asked them, what is that smelly stuff you’re putting on the field. And then he had to explain it a little, or you explained it to us, and then he’s like, yeah. I was like, oh, okay, well, I won’t touch it.
Carol McFarland
It’s called nutrient cycling. Closing the loop. That’s the why. Ddid you ask why? What’s the why he gave you? It just improved the nitrogen levels in the field, which made sense.
Carol McFarland
You guys are also working a little bit with the research community, too. I know you mentioned Don, WSU.
Chris Rauch
So we got the, I’m gonna get the name wrong, but the Dryland Sustainable Research project is on our place, and it’s replicated up by Pendleton Research Station, but not on the station. It’s another farm up near it. So two different, broadly different rainfall areas. Can’t tell you everything they’re doing because they’re doing a lot. Because they’ve done they work— well on that project they’re doing different like cropping rotations, or alternative crops or doing stuff in soil biology fertility trials. They’ve done one on straw heights, a measuring straw height. And then what it does for evaporation on the soil, chem fallow. Some of the results there. But if God found out about my own a little surprising. And we talked about it in a meeting with them not too long ago.
Well maybe we need to change some things, I don’t know.
Carol McFarland
Tell me more.
Chris Rauch
Well, so they did one where they took it all the straw off, one about average height, and then they tried to mimic a stripper header, and then run it through the chem fallow period and stuff. And for the longest time, the one with all the tall straw had more moisture. But in the end, after May, June, somewhere in that area or some time, that period— they ended up being basically the same no matter what the straw height was. And part of it is like the heat from the sun and the direction it’s coming down, may be an issue. They’re gaining a lot of that. Same if you’re on a tall straw, and I put out there about well, maybe you need to mow the tall straw later in the year. Maybe after first spraying or something. Try that.
Carol McFarland
Yeah that might mulch it up and kind of keep more of the moisture in.
Andre Rauch
It was surprising to me to see that the temperature differences in the, in the tall straw that they showed is significantly warmer all summer. And like in the stripper header straw versus— which I thought would be the opposite because it shaded it. But I guess the mowed or the really short stubble had a cover on it because it was kind of mulched and covering the ground completely. So that’s why the difference is by the time you were to seed your next crop, the differences in moisture were equal. There wasn’t a difference, at least in their studies.
Carol McFarland
I think that’s similar to what Bill Schillinger actually found when he was looking at tall stubble at Lind as well. But, you know, there’s the agro ecologist in me wants to really think about, like, maybe there’s some other advantages of having tall straw, too.
Chris Rauch
And theirs, their study only went like three years, so I thought that was too short. It needed to go a little longer. I think it would help you, because you get wet and dry years and see what the average.
Andre Rauch
How much snow you have in that. Yeah it makes a big difference.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, I imagine so, one of the things too again like agri ecologist hat— do you guys have a lot of the kind of tumbling leaves like Russian thistle in this area?
Chris Rauch
Oh yeah.
Chris Rauch
He has a job doing that.
Leon Luna
So I got the contract to remove them from the fence line of the solar farm here. There’s a lot.
Carol McFarland
That’s— so you get paid for that? That’s cool. Too bad there’s not, like a market for them.
Leon Luna
Well, we’ve been discussing trying to figure out a way to utilize them and create some sort of market, maybe fire starters or something to where we can kind of double dip as removing them and then get paid to sell them.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. Sounds like great farmer logic too. Yeah I mean, I guess I just I’m so really curious, the tall straw and how much that maybe would stop.
Andre Rauch
The spreading of weeds.
Carol McFarland
The rolling weeds in particular.
Andre Rauch
Yeah. Weed suppression is another— I don’t think their study looked at that too much. But if you could quantify the weed suppression in tall straw versus small straw.
Chris Rauch
Because I’ve, we’ve talked to several people or, or one of them is a really good friend of ours, but that runs those and we’ve asked that. And they said, yeah, we— they do see they see a difference, but it’s not quantified. It’s a but it’s not that big. They, they think there’s a smaller difference of like weed suppression. And then the other thing was the moisture thing. And, and they all claim they get more moisture from it, which I believe they do. And the study kind of indicated their moisture was better up to a point, and then it all just leveled out. Same.
Carol McFarland
You guys also mentioned the solar farm. Are these part of your farm for alternative energy?
Chris Rauch
So we have wind and solar on the place. And it was recently the biggest one in North America of combined wind, solar and battery storage. I think there’s another project bigger now.
Carol McFarland
Wow. Has that been its own on farm trial?
Chris Rauch
Kind of. How to farm around the dang thing.
Andre Rauch
Hiit a lot of fences.
Carol McFarland
Well, the Russian thistle— maybe you should leave the Russian thistle that’ll provide like a little buffer or something.
Chris Rauch
So for the first year and a half, the thistles got pretty big by them. We thought they were going to blow the fence. They do a good job of catching it. Not on ours. I had Leon in mind, I said, here’s a job for you. Get a contract with him, and it’s worked out. So. But yeah, they catch a lot of Russian thistle and it’s been a challenge. It doesn’t mean we have nice fields that are really economic to farm, you know. I mean just straight from boom boom you’re done. You know a square, a rectangle. Well now it’s a dang jigsaw puzzle and you got to watch out for an eight foot fence. And I know I hit one seeding this year for the first time and took out three posts. Andre’s hit one with the sprayer.
Andre Rauch
Yeah, I’ve had some fun there.
Carol McFarland
It’s part of what happens with sprayers, though. Kind of, isn’t it?
Andre Rauch
Yeah. Oh we have I don’t know how many miles of fence to spray around now with the solar panels. So it’s inevitable you’re probably going to hit one at some point or you come back and you have to leave a big gap, and then you come back with a four wheeler. So any efficiencies of farming around them are not very great.
Carol McFarland
Hopefully it pays off in other ways.
Chris Rauch
It does. Yeah.
Carol McFarland
So you got fence there. You have to farm around anyway. Can you put cows in there?
Chris Rauch
No.
Andre Rauch
Inside?
Carol McFarland
Yeah.
Andre Rauch
No. They would tear up. I know they’ve done it with sheep but even they’ve torn it up too much. They’ve eaten some of the wiring, but I’m sure cows would probably just destroy everything as they leave them.
Carol McFarland
So farming around the solar fencing or the fencing around the solar, solar field. But then you’re also farming around windmills, too?
Chris Rauch
Yeah, those are a lot easier. But even they take out some of the efficiencies. I’ve learned that the first time spraying the field, I had a rectangle field. Now you got the road through the middle of it. And even with, you know, suction control and stuff, shutting that off, you’re still end up with more turning and stuff eventually.
Andre Rauch
Yeah, it’s way less efficient to see there’s way more overlap. We’ve probably added two to three percent overlap in some field, just because of how you have to seed it.
Chris Rauch
But they are easier than solar to farm.
Andre Rauch
And we have nice roads when it comes harvest time. Your trucks have nice roads. There’s definitely some benefits. The solar farms are much, or winter farms are much easier to work with.
Carol McFarland
Nice. So you mentioned the sectional control on your sprayer. Are you doing a lot with precision application?
Chris Rauch
Yes. In fact, we just, we’ve got a Weed-It and a See & Spray. We’ve got a Weed-It on a miller sprayer and a See & Spray on actually two different John Deeres. Or no, one See & Sprayer and one’s an older John Deere with a Weed-It too. So we’ve got those, we’ve got suction control. We’ve upgraded some of those to be more sections. We’ve taken our air drill. Actually Andre’s probably the one that should talk about this. But this I used to be the tech guy until he came along, so it’s yours. So I’ll let him go from there.
Carol McFarland
Okay. What’s the difference between the See & Spray and the Weed-It for you?
Andre Rauch
Well we haven’t, we’ve only demoed the See & Spray, so I haven’t really experienced it too much. Just the technology and how they do them is completely different. One is using a laser to detect chlorophyll, and one’s using an actual RGB camera to see a weed and then spray it. I was kind of hesitant to go with the sand spray because of dust. You have to have a visual line of sight where the Weed-It you don’t. And we’re so dry in that time of year when we’re using it in July and August. But other people that are from the area have the See & Spray haven’t seen too many issues with the dust, so I’m hoping that won’t be an issue. Just the way it integrates is much easier with the See & Spray, and the upfront cost was really the biggest thing that got us to buy a— you can you can install a, we got a puck, which is a precision upgrade kit John Deere offered. And the cost of installing that on your sprayers, maybe one tenth or not, one eighth. Well, you know, it’s about thirty thousand dollars versus one-hundred and seventy dollars. But it’s quite a bit cheaper to install it. There’s a cost to run it, John Deere costs you charges you a dollar an acre to run the machine. But we did the math and we could run it for like fifteen years before we would break even with the Weed-It. So, that was the big thing that pushed us to getting a See & Spray was the cost. And then just the way it integrates is much easier to use and friendlier than the Weed-It because it’s all in one system. It’s a lot more streamlined. It looks a lot cleaner. If you went and looked at our See & Sprayer you may not even notice that it has that technology on. It just looks like a normal sprayer, but has cameras that are embedded you hardly even see, which are pretty cool. But, we’ll, we’ll see when we actually run both side by side, the efficacy of one compared to the other. We we only demoed a See & Spray a few years ago and it it seemed to work great. But that was also in May when it wasn’t really dusty. So we’re going to find out.
Chris Rauch
It worked great till we got to the airport. I started having issues with it and I was out fixing nozzles and trying to get it back up. And finally in the last hour, I called up and said, you come get this damn thing. I hate it. Well, it turns out the radar was screwing up the See & Spray.
Carol McFarland
What
Chris Rauch
And was— yeah, it was the radar was screwed up, the electronics on it, because we ran it in a field a long ways away. And then we ran at the airport, Pendleton airport. They said they spent two weeks and finally found a patch and build a patch to fix up. So we found something they didn’t know.
Carol McFarland
Well, look at you. Innovative.
Andre Rauch
Good beta testers. Yeah, good, good at finding defects.
Carol McFarland
Oh, man. How long have you guys been running your Weed-It?
Chris Rauch
Oh, gosh. How long?
Andre Rauch
Twenty twenty one. So four years.
Chris Rauch
Before that, I had a Weed Seeker, years before, and it worked. Did really well. And that’s how I knew this would work out, but it wasn’t very reliable in the end. It had a lot of issues electronically. It backed up, and so I finally gave up on it after about three years.
Carol McFarland
There’s too many gremlins.
Chris Rauch
Yeah. They’ve come up with a new one. I think it’s a lot better now. And then we kind of ran in the desert for a while until the weed seeker showed up, until our Weed-It showed up and then we went that route.
Carol McFarland
There’s mixed feelings sometimes about the Weed-It. Do you have any best practices with it?
Andre Rauch
Yeah, I think it depends, so the man hours are going to be way higher if you’re running a Weed-It and I guess it’s how much are you are going to tolerate. How many passes are you willing to tolerate is a question I’d ask. But we found our kind of special mixes to do two broadcast sprays in the spring and then go with the Weed-It. The first year we ran it with one broadcast spray and then just straight Weed-It, and we did four to five passes with the Weed-It after that first one. And we’d do four to five thousand acres of fallow. So trying to manage that is a lot of man hours. So if you’re able to tolerate that, it’s still cheaper in the long run. You’re using a lot less chemical, less water. It’s more hours on your sprayer and more hours for a man to be on the sprayer so.
Carol McFarland
You can drive faster.
Andre Rauch
We can’t drive very fast with the Weed-It because of dust. At least in our area where we’re going about seven miles an hour usually. So it’s kind of slow. You don’t have to stop to refill. So you’re you’re still pretty efficient. You’re still getting a lot done in a day. But yeah, I think it’s a question of how much are you willing to sit on your sprayer and you know with two passes, two broadcast passes, you might only need two Weed-It passes after that. Maybe three, sometimes more, but you’re two to three, so you’re saving time. But the Weed-It passed we found cost two to three dollars an acre to run. So you can do a lot of Weed-It spraying before you do one broadcast spray for it to pencil out.
Carol McFarland
Now do you do the thing where you mix up your chemical rotation because you’re using less of the herbicide?
Chris Rauch
Somewhat. We’ve tried different a whole bunch of different mixes. And I’ve, we’ve talked to several farmers. They’ll do the same thing. I don’t think anybody’s got a one hundred percent correct one. We’ve got one we kind of use for the most part. And it’s, especially later in the season. We put Reviton in with Roundup. Mainly those two. Maybe MSO and sometimes some broadleaf. We’ve tried that on and off and I don’t know if it burns it down quicker. Makes it look better, but the Reviton Roundups work pretty well.
Andre Rauch
Yeah. Reviton or Sharpen if we get our hands on. Those are what have been really effective, and it’s chemicals that I don’t think we’d use without a Weed-It. They’re just too expensive and you’d have to use too high a rate to be effective. So.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, I hear that’s like another kind of bonus cool thing about the precision.
Chris Rauch
Because if we were doing that by acre.
Andre Rauch
Yeah it’d be very expensive at nine hundred dollars a gallon. It’d add up quick.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, and especially with quite a lot of fallow it sounds like.
Chris Rauch
We’ve I mean, we’ve gone, you know, if we were broadcast spraying, we’d be doing like ten gallons an acre. But now we’re up there, we’re putting on anywhere from eighteen to twenty-two, twenty-four gallons an acre, one that nozzles on. But per acre we’ve put down to like three quarters of a gallon at least.
Andre Rauch
Yeah.
Chris Rauch
Normal is like one and a half per acre. So.
Carol McFarland
That sounds like a win. Good reduction.
Andre Rauch
Yeah. Yeah. It’s just the time.
Chris Rauch
And it’s less water, and water’s a big thing around here because dad always said whiskey’s cheaper than water and he’s right. Because there ain’t a lot of water that’s really under the ground either.
Carol McFarland
I’ve heard the most expensive fluid on the planet is printer ink. Not sure if that’s accurate or not, but this is an interesting bit of trivia.
Andre Rauch
There’s some chemical that gotta be pushing that.
Carol McFarland
I know there’s some RNA free water that we got for our microbial analysis in the lab. That stuff was not cheap. So what’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned from a past trial?
Chris Rauch
The most interesting thing…
Leon Luna (1 hour 5 minutes)
I don’t like walking in safflower.
Carol McFarland
Safflower chaff is like you. I think you really have to have some very significant incentive to want to grow safflower.
Andre Rauch
Wheat looks pretty for a little bit.
Carol McFarland
Yeah they use it in the floral industry actually.
Chris Rauch
Some of the things we’ve probably had, some of the bigger impacts are things we actually did ourselves. They’re things I had we had done on the farm through our extension agent. One was a zinc trial, and we’ve actually added zinc to— and that’s how we got down this road, kind of the first step we took on the soil health thing was looking at the micronutrients, zinc. And through some of his work, we started on that. And Ellen was one I got through reading The Oregon Farmer Stockman and I read about this Colorado wheat that’s red wheat. And so I told my extension agent, can you get some of the seed? He managed to wrangle some out from Colorado, and it was brawl red what. It was a Clearfield variety. And he got one or two others and they put them in plots only in our place in other places. And that actually had a big impact. That was a pretty big wheat growing area for quite a while. Its died up some because of stripe rust, but well, we’ve got several hundred acres of it left here. But because of those trials, a lot of farmers switched to that red wheat. There was a lot of it grown here, and there’s still some. It’s not near what it was cause of stripe rust, but we’re back to growing again because the kolaches and red wheats aren’t quite what we— doing what we want them to. So went back to the brawl. But that had a big impact countywide.
Carol McFarland
That’s cool. That definitely sounds like an interesting trial and like an adventure in innovation.
Chris Rauch
Yeah. On the others, I don’t know, probably the ones that fall flat in your face. I don’t know, I don’t know.
Carol McFarland
Oh that, that brings me to this question here. Can you tell me about the most memorable time when you experienced unintended consequences from a trial, and how you moved on with the information from that experience?
Chris Rauch
Well, one was one where we did the cash crop with the cover crop together and what it did afterwards. No, we didn’t really follow up on that, but the year we did it and stuff was a failure from what we thought it would do. But the year after we put another crop in, that was a surprise. The cover crop thing, because everybody’s pushing that. I still don’t know if it’s going to work here. It’s interesting to try some of the crops we’ve grown for cover crops of, you know, kind of pretty and they grow. And some of them I’ve actually grown for cash and some of them I haven’t. It it’s interesting. It makes you think outside the box. What can we do with this? I’m still debating that. We could do maybe two cash crops together and spread them, separate them out. We haven’t done that yet. It might be interesting but it’s a lot of labor and expense to get into that. But it does make you think outside the box workable scope.
Carol McFarland
I don’t believe in a box.
Chris Rauch
Yeah, well circle. I don’t know.
Carol McFarland
There’s no no limits. So I know you mentioned, you’ve done some interseeding if you want to piggyback on that, Andre.
Andre Rauch
Sure. So we’ve done— I’m sure my dad’s done more than this, but recently what we’ve done is, interseeded peas with wheat. We’ve done that three different years. And then we also tried, last year we had radish with winter wheat. The peas with wheat were just to add diversity. It was kind of and maybe sequester nitrogen, with winter wheat. So we put in, Austrian winter pea with winter wheat at a couple pounds to the acre. And the first year it did seem to, and we did this over the entire field. I don’t have a way to perfectly say if it impacted the yield, but it did seem to benefit it. That field was a little bit higher than the fields near it. There wasn’t any negative impact, I guess we could see. And in a nine inch rainfall, if we get two crops growing at the same time without a negative impact, that’s pretty cool. The peas, because we’re spraying a broadleaf herbicide most of them are dead. We’re not harvesting ninety-nine percent of them. A few make it through. But it did seem to have an impact the first year. The second year, my dad had mentioned we had a lot of cheatgrass and we had to put down, we put down Olympus, I believe it was in the fall, and that killed a lot of the peas before they really got established. And that field just never looked that great through the rest of the year. So we didn’t get good data the second time. And the third time we did it in Pendleton, and it was kind of the same story as the first year where I didn’t see— you couldn’t tell in the yield map where I had the peas and where I didn’t have the peas. So we got a crop growing the entire year. That year we seeded a little higher rate. It’s maybe three to four pounds. I don’t remember exactly, but we had three to four pounds of peas growing with our winter wheat, and you couldn’t tell where the peas were on the yield map. So there’s something we’re getting some diversity without a yield drag. And also I think there is, it’s hard to quantify if that’s going to pencil out in the long run, but I do think there’s some promise there, though.
Carol McFarland
It sounds like something you might try again.
Andre Rauch
Yeah, possibly.
Chris Rauch
Possibly.
Andre Rauch
And then the radish. We were trying to break up compaction, which in theory I think is something I would try again, but it didn’t really work as what we were intending it to do didn’t really happen. Most of the radishes died over the winter, and then a lot of them, most of them died when we sprayed as well in the spring, and so very few got large enough to actually break up compaction. So I would see the little pockets where I’d find four or five radishes and they’d have a little bit of a tuber and maybe that had an impact. But, I think we’d have to maybe seed earlier or have better conditions when we’re seeding to make that payoff.
Carol McFarland
How do you decide where to put your trials?
Chris Rauch
Probably just wherever it’s easy to get to or whatever looks like a nice spot.
Carol McFarland
Right outside your front front door.
Andre Rauch
Yeah, we have flags right in front of the window.
Chris Rauch
I do have a bunch right out the door.
Andre Rauch
So you can see them every day really easily.
Chris Rauch
It’s just kind of what’s going to fit to farm around it. It’s kind of what it is.
Andre Rauch
Yeah.
Chris Rauch
Yeah.
Carol McFarland
So do you, how do you Mark and like kind of keep track of where you’re putting these different trials because it sounds like you have a lot going on in the farm kind of at any given time. How do you keep track of it?
Chris Rauch
Yeah. You know, because we’ve got Oregon State University’s got their variety trial right outside the door. And then we’ve got our own little one acre plots of different crops I’ll let Andre ta;l about that, but I just flag them out.
Andre Rauch
Yeah, I mean, most of it’s just gone through the John Deere in my operations center. We’re not always a hundred percent perfect with that, but usually at the person doing it is paying attention they can label everything on my apps, on the on the tractor or on the sprayer or whatever they’re doing, and then it will be uploaded to the My Operation Center, and we can track it that way, and then you can take it back to the yield map and overlay the two maps and see.
Carol McFarland
Okay, nice. So no like archive of written notebooks.
Chris Rauch
No I had that like twenty-five years ago, I did that. I wish I kept the lot because I did a whole bunch of notes on different crops and what I seeded when I sprayed what the yield that which and you know, and I threw them all away. They sat there for ten years or better, taking up space like that. Chuck it. Should’ve kept them.
Andre Rauch
It’s very— we’ve recently got every piece of equipment with the MTG, so telematics unit. So everything we do is automatically, instantly in the cloud. So it’s very convenient. There’s no having to keep track of paperwork or anything. Any operation we do is automatically in the operation center and stays there.
Carol McFar;and
Sounds like you get a gold star as the tech guy.
Andre Rauch
It wasn’t too bad, just money.
Carol McFarland
There’s that part, isn’t there? Well, hopefully in the long run it saves. So how do you determine the ROI on a new practice and determining whether it’s worth, something’s worth doing? Sounds like spreadsheets are part of that.
Chris Rauch
Pretty much it. Yeah. I let him make a spreadsheet on it and then I look at like, oh, crap. Or oh, that was good.
Carol McFarland
Well, what do you track on the spreadsheet? Is it just dollars or do you track, like, the person hours or what?
Andre Rauch
It’s direct and indirect costs usually. Trying to get a cost per acre and then the revenue and, you know, it’s the basic it’s not too complex. It’s all direct. I tried to break it down by direct and indirect cost is the main thing. I put every cost in there and then which, which are incremental to that acre and which are just distributed amongst the farm, like, you know, equipment insurance, is it indirect costs. It’s distributed amongst all of the ground. So it’s a way that you can measure if a ground piece of ground is profitable because a piece of ground might look not profitable but if you’re covering some of your indirect costs, if you’re distributing that now over a larger acre, it’s actually, you know, you have to look at it a different way to determine if it’s one piece of ground is profitable compared to everything else.
Carol McFar;and
Some finesse of dryland farming. I might have kind of already asked this, but how do you decide whether you’re going to try something again?
Chris Rauch
Some of that stuff he comes up with out of the air, I don’t know. So it’s just reading research stuff. One of them, one I just got off. Where the heck did I run into it? Fava beans. I might try some fava beans at least in a cover crop or something. I was just reading about it on TV, I thought, and they could grow in the winter, take down to ten degrees temperature, and, like, okay, there’s probably not a market for them here. But first, can I grow it? It doesn’t matter, let’s see if I can grow it and we’ll figure out a market later. But it’s like that’s something maybe it’s a huge nitrogen fixer. It’s something totally different. And on top of that, there are several chemicals, a few of them that we already use we can use on it. Weed management. Cause that’s a, cereals is one thing, but you’re going to broad leaves these other crops. Weed management is probably the driving factor to keep you from growing. And then right when you get down to it, so it’s trying to figure out what fits that we can do, that we know how to do. And so that’s one of the things I look at. And then I, you know, I just find things from reading or talking to other farmers about what they’re doing or go to, to to conferences like the Direct Seed Conference or things like that.
Carol McFarland
Let’s say with podcasts.
Chris Rauch
Yeah. That’s actually right. I’ve listened to Doug Poole and what some of the things he’s done on your podcasts, it’s like, I, we’ve tried them or we’ve gotta try them. So.
Carol McFarland
I appreciate that little shout out. I was being a little tongue in cheek, but thank you. So, what’s the most fun thing about trying stuff on the farm?
Andre Rauch
I it’s just something different, I guess. Growing winter what over and over again on summer fallow can get a little boring.
Chris Rauch
I’ll agree with that.
Andre Rauch
So it’s, it’s fun. Just it’s fun to grow a different crop and learn about a different crop and see, you know, learn the intricacies of every different thing. And, and I also like, last year I bought a seed, a mill.cI don’t know what you call it, an oil press. Then we grew safflower and camelina. So I got to try making some. You can see a jar of it over there. Our own camelina oil. And I also have a mill, so we grew durham last year and then got to make pasta, and getting to use the end products at home and having more than just soft white winter wheat over and over again is a lot of fun. That’s kind of what drew, pushed me to want to do durum last year. I had Ryan Grabner gave me the from OSU, gave me a bag of durum seed, and I made pasta at home and I really loved it. And then I looked up how much it cost to buy durum and I’m like, holy cow, extremely expensive.
Carol McFarland
Because you got a farm, right? Like right here.
Andre Rauch
Yeah. So we bought a couple buckets off of Amazon and grew one acre of durum and ended up with more durum than I could use in ten lifetimes. So we sold a lot of it through Facebook. And then I have enough that I can make pasta every day for years. But it’s fun to get to use different products at home that we grew on the farm.
Chris Rauch
So I kind of took that and how can we add that value to the farm and make money out of it? So we’re kind of looking at that. Where I’ve talked to some different people, done some reading. We’ve talked about what products we’re going to we’re working on. It’s like looking at cost. You know, if we go a little bigger mill, if we do this for it, you know, we’re kind of researching and it’s like, I think it might be a way to— it’s not gonna be all over the whole farm if it’s ten acres hey, it’s ten acres. And then different types of crops. If you’ve got einkorn, an ancient grain, put it out here. And actually there’s some markets for that, and it’s totally different. We’ve got some perennial wheat. We started out with twelve ounces. Helped build up the seed forest and we’ve got one acre of it this year. Maybe that’s something you know, we don’t have to replant the wheat. I don’t know how well it’s going to work. We’ll see. But we can, it’s good for three to five years. Just like an annual crop. So we’ll see.
Carol McFarland
Have you guys seen— so, the- I think the Land Institute partnered with, like, Patagonia or something to make this, like, carbon farmer beer.
Andre Rauch
Oh, kernza? Yeah. From Ashland. Yeah. I’ve tried that.
Carol McFarland
Have you had it?
Andre Rauch
Yeah. It’s good.
Carol McFarland
I haven’t had it, but man, if I, if I see it, I want to snap it right up. But it’s, it’s kind of that’s, it’s kind of fun to see that kind of market too where, you know, even just the name of the beer it’s carbon farmer, isn’t it?
Andre Rauch
I think it’s called Kerns, are the one that I’m thinking of. It’s Caldera Brewing. And there’s probably more than one. The one I know of is made by Caldera Brewing. It’s a blue can.
Carol McFarland
Maybe it’s the same one. But anyway, I, I just it’s fun to get the, you know, when there is space to be made for that kind of value.Oh, it’s fun to hear about Andre’s special pasta too.
Andre Rauch
It tastes better when you grow it yourself.
Carol Mcfarland
Yeah.
Chris Rauch
It does pancake mix, too. So.
Andre Rauch
Yeah. But, mainly what I’ve, when I, we had too much durum. We got three thousand pounds or so. \
Chris Rauch
It yielded really well.
Andre Rauch
Yeah. That was a big surprise.
Chris Rauch
I grew it several years ago. It didn’t yield anything like that. I mean, the varieties. But then the mill quit taking durum after two years. So chop. But yeah, we were over forty, it was one acre like one point two acres, but it was over forty bushels an acre, had fifty some bushels of durum, which I can’t use myself. But you don’t realize how much a bushel of wheat is until you’re milling it and using it yourself.
Carol McFarland
Yeah it’s a different equation when it kind of moves from commodity to food.
Andre Rauch
Right? Right.
Carol McFarland
Especially that you’re using in your kitchen.
Andre Rauch
Yeah. So I was selling the durum online, and I think there is definitely a market for there’s a lot of people that wanted it and just up in Pendleton. And I think there’s a big market for that of selling grains directly to consumer. And there’s a lot more consumers that are milling in their own home. And I think whole milled grains are amazing, but they’re not shelf stable. And this is kind of maybe a solution of that is if you mill it in your own home. And so you buy the grain and, and, and grain in itself, if stored correctly, is shelf stable. I think they say it’s five years, but that’s because they can’t say longer than five years. But it’s really, you know, it’s like, honey, it can store forever. And so I think that’s a really good market and something that we can do pretty easily and sell whole grains to consumers. And so that’s why we have all these plots in front of our house with hard white wheat. We come out perennial wheat and a bunch of different durum.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. It’s neat to see, different farmers around different parts of the region that are really exploring the cropping diversification and then seeking the markets for the value add, especially when, you know, soil health is such a priority on the farm and the stewardship aspect, and trying to grow more nutritious crops and maybe have more micronutrients in them and, and that sort of thing. So it’s fun to see maybe more momentum growing in that space. So hopefully the consumer side can can match with that. But yeah, no, it’s a totally different experience when you have like really freshly milled grain. So, no that’s great. So what’s the most annoying thing about trying stuff on the farm?
Chris Rauch
Time.
Andre Rauch
Yeah. Filling it, filling up the drill to seed one acre with a sixty foot drill. You climb up there and dump the seed out, and then in twenty seconds, you’re empty and you got to do it again. And, yeah, it definitely takes a lot more time. That one acre of durum was our most profitable acre, but I guarantee I spent way more time on that one acre than I did ten and if any other ten acres.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. What is the biggest barrier to trying things on the farm?
Chris Rauch
Education and money can be. And the time commitment. It’s when you’re trying to get over all the other acres and you want to spend the time for that, but then it’s going to take a little bit more money, actually, maybe a lot more money, I don’t know, on some of these things. And then you got to spend time learning, which I don’t have a problem. I mean, that’s good thing. I like that. But it does take time, you know, I don’t know if we call it a barrier, but you do have to learn it. So those are probably the three things I can figure.
Andre Rauch
Yeah. Agree. Time and money. I think we have equipment. We have, you know, rent to pay. We have equipment payments to make. We can’t afford to fail too much. And so we have to keep a certain amount of acres where we know we’re going to make some money. And then just the time, you know, for nine inch rainfall, which I said, which means we have a lot of acres, which means time is short for certain parts of the year. So.
Carol McFarland
Well then you have, do you have kids Andre?
Andre Rauch
Yeah I have one. Three year old.
Carol McFarland
Do they like to the farm?
Andre Rauch
I don’t know she’s three.
Chris Rauch
She likes to come to the farm.
Andre Racuh
She likes to watch Gabby’s dollhouse and read books.
Carol McFarland
But does she ride with you on the tractor? Are you doing that?
Andre Rauch
Yeah.
Carol McFarland
It’s part of growing up a farm kid. Nice.
Chris Rauch
Leon’s got two, a three and a one year old one and a half year old. They’re the same way. I mean, they and they live on the farm, and they like the same thing. They like to ride. They like to look at— especially the one year old. It’s like you see a tractor and he’s like, “oh!” But all kids do that.
Carol McFarland
Chris, how did you get into kind of becoming interested in on farm trials in general? Like do you come from the legacy of people who try things on the farm?
Chris Rauch
We didn’t grow up with a lot of that. I mean, to be honest, but my dad was always encouraging. At that time we were trashing fallow and stuff, and they just kind of encourage, you know, look at different varieties and never put all your eggs in one basket. That’s what he said. And so that kind of got it started. And then, you know, when technology started coming along, he was all for just giving it a shot. He just told me, he says remember, if you put crap in, that’s what you’re going to get out. And he just kind of ran with it, and started trying not only new technologies, but new crops. Wanted to stay on the cutting edge. And just be ahead of the ball game. That’s kind of what I’ve always wanted to be. Well, I find it fascinating I like to learn stuff that’s kind of cool. So.
Carol McFarland
Do you have any perspective to add to that Andre?
Andre Rauch
I agree that it’s fun to learn things and it’s fun to try new things and yeah. I think it’d be boring to do the same thing over and over again, even if it worked. Even if I made more money, I’d still want to try something. I’d still experiment in some way.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. What would you guys try if you had, like, no limits? Is there, like, one thing that you’re like man,I really want to try that thing.
Chris Rauch
Different drills, like, even a less disturbance drill would be one. Trying to think of crops or something. Well, we’re looking at the biologicals aspect and there are some biologicals and what I want to get more into that and figure that out a little bit more for the soil health thing, but also,crop wise, you know. I don’t know if it’s going to make them, you know, boom different. We grow ten more bushels an acre. I’m hoping there’s some increase. And those are not cheap. So it’s like, I want to try some of those things. Andre, what do you think?
Andre Rauch
Maybe annual cropping with several different— if I have no limits, which means I have no limits on manpower. Annual cropping everything on the farm with different crops, you know, and mix of barley and wheat and camelina and oats and things that we know that do work, that there’s there’s a mix that I think could work in an annual crop here. It’s just one, it’s not as stable, but we’ve seen annual cropping you get way larger variance and yield, and it can be two or it could be fifty. And then the time if I was going to seed every acre and harvest every acre every year, I don’t we don’t have the equipment or the manpower to do so. So if you give me unlimited resources, that’s something I think would be triable.
Carol McFarland
That was the question. So if you could ask, like a scientist a question right now, like you’re kind of one of your core research questions for your farm, what would that be for each of you? I mean, you kind of already get the chance to do that. It sounds like you work with the research community already pretty closely. So maybe you already have. But like, what’s your kind of core research?
Chris Rauch
You know, I don’t know if I have a question. We listened to Joe Williams on the soil health day of the Tri-Cities here recently, or I do, and I, I was always an earth science person, I took a lot of. And I was really amazed at all the studies and what they know about a plant and the soil and how they interact. And it was kind of like I was like, I was never into biology and stuff like that, but it’s like pretty cool. I mean, it’s pretty amazing what they’ve learned. What, how those microbes. And when you feed that plant, when it comes down to that root and what that root is still in the soil around it, and the world around all that and how they interact, that’s pretty amazing that they I was like, how do they learn that?
Carol McFarland
Oh, yeah, it’s fascinating.
Chris Rauch
Because it’s micro, something microscopic. So it’s like, I’m just amazed people could figure that out.
Andre Rauch
And there’s, it’s hard to answer, right? The thing that comes to mind is nutrient density and different varieties of lead and different type. What impacts the, our farming practices have on the nutrient density of the crop. And it’s one of the things that really surprised me when I first came back to the farm and was learning about how they conduct the grain trials is that nutrient density doesn’t, isn’t measured at all. You know, you just, you’re measuring protein and yield and disease tolerance and other things. And I’m not saying they’re not doing a great job. It would be extremely hard to do. But I, we’re growing food. Like nutrients should be a core value that’s looked at in all variety trials, in my opinion. And farmers can be incentivized to grow higher nutrient density varieties. And so I’d, I’d want to know what differences there are between the varieties and then what differences are farming practices have on the density of nutrients between the varieties.
Chris Rauch
See he comes in with a much younger, fresher perspective. Cause I’m stuck in some of the old school yields and stuff. I know where he’s coming from, he’s right. And that’s kind of what this regenerative ag movement is. It’s feeding that plant, feeding that soil, and even that I learned that feeding that soil and stuff isn’t necessarily looking just doing stuff in the soil, it’s feeding that plant through the roots. And I kind of, you know, an aha moment I guess. So it’s like, oh okay, I’ve been looking at only half the story and what he’s talking about. It’s gotta be easier for him to make that transition. And guys like me, because we’re kind of stuck in the past, maybe a little too much, even though we’re trying not to be. We still are.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. I don’t know if that’s what I’m hearing from this conversation.
Chris Rauch
But I know where my roots came from, and I know where I’ve been stuck. So.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. Well, do you guys have any final thoughts here as we wrap up? Any, like, pearls of wisdom for cropping systems innovation for the region?
Chris Rauch
Don’t go broke.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, no, that is a good one.
Chris Rauch
Don’t be afraid to learn, and don’t be afraid to talk to your neighbors or read a book and research things and try them out. You know, you might be one acre in one acre. Do something, plant something bizarre. Plants, do some fertility thing. Do something, and try to keep track of what you did and maybe expand on it.But I mean that’s kind of how I got going.
Andre Rauch
Yeah. Just try something new every year. Try something you haven’t done before. It can be really small, but it’s easy to do and you’re going to learn something every time.
Carol McFarland
Great. This has been a really wonderful conversation. Thank you both so much for participating in the On-Farm Trials podcast and sharing your experience and your journey along the way.
Chris Rauch
We’ve got one more question to ask.
Carol McFarland
Oh what’s that?
Chris Rauch
Who do I gotta throw under the tractor in the next podcast?
Carol McFarland
Oh of course.
Chris Rauch
So I got two for you.
Carol McFarland
Thank you. So one is and maybe you’ve already talked about Larry Lutcher, county extension agent. You’ve done a lot of on farm stuff with farmers. He’s had an impact in this county. But things he’s done as far as varieties, fertility. And we and we’ve met we’ve actually incorporated several things. One he’s working on right now of weed management stuff in fallow. Andre Herman’s actually kind of run with the ball. We’re starting to implement some of the changes. And the other one, it’s not really a person, but I would take the drive down and go do one at the Wheat Marketing Center, because that’s funded by dollars, all from growers from all the Pacific Northwest and several other states. It may not be on farm research per se, but it’s where a lot of our dollars go on. I think people would find that an interesting story.
Carol McFarland
Oh, well, thank you for the inspiration.Do you want to nominate anyone, Andre?
Andre Rauch
Nope. You got your hands full.
Carol McFarland
Awesome. Well thank you guys again.
Chris Rauch
Thank you.
Andre Rauch
Thank you, Carol.