This episode of the On-Farm Trials podcast features Clint Zenner of Zenner Family
Farms in Genesse, ID and his collaboration as a PI on the PNW cover crops project
alongside Kendall Kahl of the University of Idaho. A conversation with them highlights
years of working together that has resulted in a wealth of knowledge on cover crops,
cows, and even earth worms! Listen to their conversation about how they are working
together to ask and answer important soil health and cropping systems innovation for
the farm and region with their on-farm trials.
Carol McFarland
Today we’re outside of Genesee on the Zenner family farm, and we’re excited to be talking with Mr. Clint Zenner and PhD candidate from the University of Idaho, Kendall Kahl. Welcome to the podcast.
Clint Zenner
Thank you. Thanks for having us.
Carol McFarland
We’re excited to be with you guys today for our conversation and talking more about on farm trials as research collaborations and answering all of these questions that are important to our region’s cropping systems. So with that, it would be great to hear a little bit more, Clint, about your farm, who you farm with, maybe. I know there’s some stories of who you took over the farming operation from, and what your farming conditions are here outside of Genesee.
Clint Zenner
Yeah. So, Iām a fourth generation farmer. I grew up farming with my dad and grandpa on the Camas Prairie. Our farm back then wasn’t big enough to sustain three full time incomes with me, my dad and my brother, and I had the opportunity to move to Genesee and start farming Russ Zennerās place with my wife, Alishaā¦ sheesh, back in 2011 and it’s been a pretty neat rollercoaster of a ride since we were a pretty predominant livestock operation before I started farming with Russ full time, and I always had kind of a passion and a desire to make the ground better, even though I didn’t have any idea how to do it. I just didn’t think that the way we were farming was the best for the land. And the opportunity that we were given to be able to steward this land, for generations. Russ kind of had a lot of the same philosophies as well as my dad and grandpa, so yeah, it’s been quite a ride.
Carol McFarland
Thanks for that. Yeah. We had the opportunity to hear a little bit from Russ as well. It sounds like he’s pretty excited about the arrangement and that you guys have some really fun conversations.
Clint Zenner
Yeah, he definitely has a lot of questions. I always laugh, and the joke is he never asked me a question he doesn’t already know the answer to. He’s definitely forgotten more about farming than I know. So he’s been a good mentor, and it’s been a lot of fun. A lot of creative thinking goes on because of the questions that he asks that I think has made me a better farmer because of it.
Carol McFarland
Those engaged landlords, though,
Clint Zenner
I got some engaged landlords, that’s for sure.
Carol McFarland
Weāll hear maybe a little bit more about your soil and climate here in just a minute. But, Kendall, why don’t we hear a little bit about your research interests over at University of Idaho and your background? What brings you out here to collaborate with Clint?
Kendall Kahl
I guess I’ve been in the Palouse since 2011. Also have been working in ag and doing soils research since then, and what got me into this is just wanting to know more about how farming practices affect our soil and how we can kind of farm better to preserve our soil. So a lot of my research has been looking at those interactions. And how do we think of soil as an ecosystem? And take that into consideration with how we think about how we manage it.
Carol McFarland
You got your master’s in soils from University of Idaho as well, and you’re currently working on your PhD. I know you spent a lot of your career working with the renowned Jodi Johnson-Maynard, and have done a lot of the on the ground work as part of those projects.
Clint Zenner
I don’t think there’s a soul on the planet that has poked more holes on my farm than Kendall. She probably knows my soil ten times better than anyone that has ever farmed any of it. Yeah.
Kendall Kahl
That’s funny. I mean, it’s a beautiful place to get to go work. Yeah.
Carol McFarland
Awesome. Well, so we talk a little bit more about the soil conditions, and everybody wants to know probably the moisture regime that you get out here in Genesee. So you want to talk a little bit about your landscape farming conditions and your standard crop rotations.
Clint Zenner
We are pretty blessed where we farm. Our earliest grounds, the stuff out on the bridge in the Clearwater River, we call it our rim ground. And it’s pretty forgiving topography. Not a lot of hills. Pretty uniform field type and shape and not a lot of rocks, but a few rocks. And it’s probably in that 20 toā¦I don’t know if it’s over 20 inch rainfall, might be 22.
And then as we work our way north from the rim ground it, you know, turns into the more traditional Palouse soils, steeper, more rolling hills, a little more clay, a little more rainfall, cooler. But the nice thing about that is, as I typically start the week to ten days before most of the growers in the area, just because it’s that earlier south facing slope that heats up quick, and I just kind of work my way north throughout the season and yeah, definitely a variety of different soils on the farm, that’s for sure.
Carol McFarland
There’s a lot of geology that’s happened in this part of the world, and that results in interesting pedology. Could you talk a little bit aboutā¦what’s your cropping system look like at this point?
Clint Zenner
Okay, so my cropping systems, you know, kind of a, a 3 to 4 year rotation. We have perennials as well. mainly alfalfa right now. Would like to start trying some clovers and other type perennial crops. but we typically have a winter wheat crop followed by a spring wheat or spring barley, and then typically a pulse crop or a brassica crop following the spring cereal crop. There’s a lot of years Iāll raise winter wheat seed.
And then I’ll, I’ll re-crop winter wheat on that seed ground and then I’ll go to a cover crop to try to break up, you know, any disease cycle and then go to a spring wheat and then into a pulse crop or a brassica crop. So myā¦I have a really weird rotation that is always evolving and moving.
One of the neatest things that I’m working on right now is with the Palouse Conservation District. Ryan Boylanon, it’s FLOURISH. What do you call itā¦a project? We’re doing integrated livestock grazing on these cover crops, I don’t want to move my cover crop all around the field all the time.
I want to leave it in one spot for, like, five years and graze covers on the same piece of ground for five years. And see if we can regenerate and improve soil conditions quicker than just having within a rotation a cover crop somewhere on the farm once every 5 to 6 years.
Carol McFarland
To do more of an intensiveā¦?
Clint Zenner
Yeah. You know, much more intensive cover. Very diverse. mix of species, you know, warm season grasses, cool seasons, brassicas, clovers, alfalfa. The radishes. turnip all that stuff. flax. I think it’s an 8 or 9 species mix. And then, usually oats or beardless barley seeded in with it. But yeah, I’m trying to jumpstart the soil biology and the regenerate process by keeping it on the same piece of ground for multiple years in a row.
We’re testing the soil adjacent to it. You know, the business as usual cropping system and just going to analyze that and see ifā¦. Hey, why don’t we just put a cover on a piece of dirt for five years and simplify it, you know, simplifies, you know, we put up a perimeter fence once in five years, which is kind of nice.
There is a creek that runs through the middle of the field, so it’s pretty handy for watering. Other than that, I’m just kind of a traditional farmer that does a pretty standard rotation. And trying to figure out how to farm with less synthetic inputs is kind of my goal and my motivation. I want to sign the backs of checks and not the fronts of checks, thatās my goal. No more signing the front of them.
Carol McFarland
That is a good goal. And there’s a few different ways to get at that, too. And so it sounds like coming at it from a few different directions might really tip the scales, hopefully in your favor.
So you’re talking a little bit about your participation in the FLOURISH project, it sounds like you have your cows integrated into that as well.
Clint Zenner
Yeah. We’ve ran cow, calf herd for my entire life. And, we’re kind of phasing out of the, running the pears, and I want to do more stockers or year runs. That way we can get a better rate again and do a better job of putting a dollar value to grazing a cover crop.
I just think that long term, to regenerate soil we’re going to have to do it- we’re going to have that livestock integrated. I’m not quite brave enough to go buy a bunch of goats and pigs and, and get that wild with the livestock yet. We do a lot of collaboration. Kendall and I, I don’t know that there’s a year that she, since I’ve been farming up here, that she hasn’t done something on the farm somewhere and done some form of research. You know, everybody’s like, oh, you collaborate with U of I . And I’m like, well, yeah. How did you get started? I don’t know, it’s just what we do. And yeah, I’m lucky to have Kendall, for sure helping me figure out if what we’re doing is helpful. She hasn’t been bit by a snake yet and hasnāt been ran off by a mountain lion. So she keeps coming back.
Carol McFarland
Youāre hard core. Well, so I feel like maybe part of your farming legacy that you’re, you know, taking over this, that family farms, maybe you also inherited, like the University of Idaho collaboration, like research interests. But that’s part of that thing. That’s part of the lineage.
Clint Zenner
Yeah, most definitely, because Russ always had you know, we always had the, the and pea and lentil, research plots, and the spring wheat plots. And we’ve always farmed around plots, so that’s just. Yeah, but if you’re not doing the research and collaborating with the universities, how are you going to learn and how are you going to do any better? So it’s just what we have to do.
Carol McFarland
Oh, it’ll be fun to hear a little bit about some of the legacy, maybe as we unpack a little bit more about your current collaboration, Let’s have Kendall share a little bit more about the PNW Cover Crops project.
Kendall Kahl
That project we’ve got, replicated plots out on eight different farms, one up here at Clint’s place, and we’ve got two different cover crop mixes that are out on all those farms. And then each grower gets it put together with their own mix. So we’ve got three different, three different mixes, replicated three times at each farm.
And then in addition to looking at how the different mixes work, weāre terminating them at different times, to try to see how that affects moisture and, potentially nutrient availability. And then, everybody’s following up the cover crops with winter wheat in the next year. So we have a sort of common crop to evaluate what we’d see the cover crop doing. There’s a fun and interesting sort of timing component to it. And it’s also really interesting to see how different these different mixes perform across the region. It feels like every farm is a different beast.
Carol McFarland
It’s true. It’s part of, I think, the exploration of the on-farm trials idea because as fun as it is, I love that you guys collaborate and have for a long time, and that really supports your own kind of on-farm trial learning, so it’s interesting to be able to hear and learn from each other as well as, you know, what does it look like to try this idea on your farm? Sometimes we can get at what’s transferable more with statistics and by doing a study that is conducted across eight different farms, like, can you talk a little bit more about your reasoning too, and how you’re representing different parts of the ag ecosystem in the region?
Kendall Kahl
Yeah. So we’ve got four farms- or, we’re working with, four farms that are in sort of that, annual crop, fallow transition area. and then four in the, in the annual cropping area. and so obviously managing moisture is different in those two regions, right? One you’re trying to conserve, conserve moisture, the other, you’re trying to use it, so you don’t end up with too much water in your profile going into the winter. So even though we’re growing the same crops, what we’re trying to do with them is different.
Carol McFarland
From what I understand, in this project, each of the growers is a co-PI and actually really a key cornerstone in driving how these treatments come together, what questions are asked and what data is collected. Do you want to talk a little bit more about your experience with that, Clint, and what some of your management questions are and how that might be different from some of the other people in the study?
Clint Zenner
Yeah, I guess a lot of my motivation is, is I’m always eager to learn if what we are doing is working to improve soil health, soil structure, increased biology,
The hard part for Kendall is putting it in layman’s terms for a farmer and like, yeah, you know, thumbs up, you’re doing good or we haven’t really seen anything yet. So I feel bad for the university trying to do all this research and then having to convey it to farmers and keep us motivated on: yes, this is working. We are doing good. We are seeing benefits I guess just basic questions, you know, are we doing better? Are we improving our soil health, our soil structure and, and I always have to remind myself that it’s taken us 50, 60, 70 years to screw our soils up as bad as we have.
It’s going to take us a little while to fix them. And Iā¦I like immediate gratification, and that’s a challenge because it’s going to take my entire career to try to undo some of the wrongs we’ve done the last several generations of farming. So it’sā¦it’s a challenge, but it’s yeah, that’s what motivates me to keep doing it.
Carol McFarland
It seems like a āthe more you knowā sort of situation though.
Clint Zenner
Yeah, the more you know farming, the lessā¦ or the more you think you knowā¦yeah, it’s- I know less about farming every year. That is for sure.
Carol McFarland
That’s what keeps it interesting though. Isn’t that why we’re all here? Thanks for sharing that. I’m interested inā¦What is your grower’s choice treatment? Does it have cows on it?
Clint Zenner
I would have loved to have had cows on it. The logistics of the last project. We’ve done other projects with cows on it. I don’t know how many projects Kendall has worked on on the farm, but I bet there’s a half a dozen to maybe more multi-year projects.
Kendall Kahl
Yeah. No I wasnātā¦ I also kind of caught the tail end of reach so I don’t know, thatās maybe one we didn’t collaborate on. But everything since thenā¦.
Clint Zenner
Right.
Kendall Kahl
But yeah, the The Landscapes and Transition project, because we had a field scale component to it, we actually could do the grazing. That’s one of the challenges, especially with wider livestock, is actually, it’s just you have to have really large plots. I don’t know if you’re going to be fencing in some cattle on them. And then that’s a big management component.
Clint Zenner
Yeah, that was cool. And there was, there was I don’t know if anybody’s seen it, but there’s like three mini cellphone towers in the field. It was really cool. And then all the underground stuff that Kendall hand dug in soil moisture probes, that was a fun one. I really enjoyed that one.
Carol McFarland
Were there some takeaways from that? Do you like, are you guys in a position where you would share some of the lit takeaways before we dig into what you’re really doing right now?
Clint Zenner
Picking the correct cover crop and just theā¦mother Nature in the weather. I mean, kind of determinesā¦that’s what’s so hard about grazing everybody else. Well, how many cows per acre do you put on? Well, it depends on the week. I mean, it changes so drastically. There’s three weeks you can’t put enough cows on. And then there’s the rest of the season. You’re trying to move cows as fast as you can, and you don’t get rain. And it gets hot and dry. Deer and elk run through and tear your fence down. And cows are spread all over the country.
Kendall Kahl
The Landscapes and Transition project was interesting in a lot of ways. That project is looking at integrating cover crops really managed more as a forage crop. and then also winter peas as a cash crop. And, we did we did livestock grazing on large field scale plots that Clint was describing and then we sort of mimicked hay and our smaller replicated plots of those same crop rotations. And then there’s some interesting entomological results that have come out of that and sort of, economic analysis, that others have been doing. Iām still wading through a lot of my own data, which was more focused around the nitrogen and water use and trying to look at, do we gain any efficiencies by incorporating these crops into rotations. And what was interesting is that we had such extremely different weather years during that project from, very sort of idyllic wet, warm spring that produced like a, you know, record breaking high yield followed by an extreme drought with a record breaking low yield here. And so watching how these crops perform under these extremes, one makes it hard in the short term to say, you know, what are these crops actually doing?
But part of the other point of introducing these crops, you know, do they provide any kind of resilience to these more extreme scenarios that we expect to see? So it’s in some ways it’s sort of the perfect set of years to be trying to look at how they perform. But it’s hard in the short term to make fairly decisive conclusions about how it’s going to affect different aspects of the system.
Carol McFarland
It’s interesting how you evaluate the crop performance. Is it, you know, what is it doing on average, is that where we’re kind of looking for statistics but- or instead,what would it be doing if the weather weren’t at this extreme point, But what is an average year? And this is totally why we, you know, run trials for multiple years, and even do long term agro ecosystems research. That is when we’re doing cropping systems research. Those long term studies really show up to give us the information.
Clint Zenner
Definitely the interesting thing for me, watching all of, you know, the decade’s worth of research we’ve done is that the climate is changing. Like, I don’t know ifā¦I don’t have an educated stance on climate change one way or the other, but how can you not know that the climate is changing? We’re getting these severe weather events that maybe they’ve happened forever, but I think the climate’s always changing. That’s just one of the neat things about farming. It keeps you on your toes as you, you know, even as a researcher, you you never know what Mother Nature is going to do from month to month. And, it’s just- it’s going to be interesting 20 years from now when we’re sitting down looking at all of the data on this farm from when we started doing all this, just to see how we did do compared to the traditional cropping system.
Carol McFarland
I hear you talking about some of your soil health goals, and I think those areā¦.and maybe Kendall, you can also add to what we know about when our soils are more resilient, they have a higher capacity to buffer changes in conditions. When we build soil carbon, we can often hold more moisture and or the moisture patterns in the soil change, whether that’s infiltration or actually ability to retain water or the rootsā ability to harvest water. There’s a lot of pieces of resilience that I hear some of these innovations just go hand in hand with. So whether that’s acute weather changes from year to year or a more fluctuating climate longer term, these resilience pieces around our innovations seem to be worth exploring.
Clint Zenner
Definitely. One of the key factors that I look at year to year is the nitrogen use efficiency. I try to take really good records of all nutrients applied and really good yield records. And even though we’re doing variable rate on the entire farm, it’s interesting to run the nitrogen use efficiency across the farm from what I was at when we first started farming it back in 2011, compared to what we are now. You know, that’s my usual key indicator, is my soil working better for me because every year I apply less and less traditional synthetic inputsā¦but our yields arenāt suffering. So we must be doing something right with the covers and maybe Kendallās poked so many holes you just aerated the soil so good it can breathe.
Carol McFarland
Theyāre not soil cores, they’re giant Palouse earthworm channels!
Clint Zenner
Made by Kendall Kahl.
Kendall Kahl
Just working with the worms.
Kendall Kahl
But yeah, I feel I mean, that’s, I think what we’re trying to do, right, with a lot of these different crops is sort of growth in their own fertility, so that you don’t have to bring in other nutrients.
Carol McFarland
Or cycle it with cows or through livestock.
Kendall Kahl
Right. Helping to speed up that cycling process. Certainly. Yeah. And I mean, from the research side that weā¦that’s what we would expect. But one of the things that’s been a challenge in studying these systems, we’re adding diversity and we’re growing these multi-species crops as we were introducing a lot of heterogeneity to the system. So then it’s hard to capture that in our measurements because it’s so variable across the field. And so, like, in general, we think we’re moving in the right direction. But it’s a messy, complicated data set to make sense of.
Carol McFarland
Something that intrigues me in on-farm trials, Clint, I know you were talking about one of your management goals is to improve your soil health.
So is that compared to when you started farming? Is that compared to like your neighbor’s field? Is it comparing your best ground versus your worst ground, or is it bringing your worst ground up so it’s more like even across the farm or, what are you comparing it to when you’re trying to improve it? And how does that drive the data collection process in some of these research projects?
Clint Zenner
I guess with the wild weather that we’re having, you know, we have these extreme heats, extreme droughts and then we boom, we get blessed with a perfect growing year. just trying to keep consistency on raising a healthy crop that has, you know, the right protein content, the right you know, we all want the best deal possible.
But as long as I’m staying at or above, you know, my ten year proven yield and continually, slowly reducing inputs. And…if yes, I reduce some inputs. But I’m also adding carbon sources like molasses in the spring. Some of the things we’re going to try is, you know, biochar and compost teas. And we got a lot of things that we’re going to try just on aā¦we went to a conference and somebodyās trying something really cool, and I’m like, hey, I think I can make that work. I’m going to try that on the farm and see what happens. And- but yeah, I guess my metric and my measurement I look at is I just want to make sure, you know, like in 2020 when we had the really great year, we had not the highest yields in the area.
But then in ā21 when we had that super severe drought, we had some of the higher yields in the entire area. And just keeping that average up is kind of what I try to look for, for a metric. I don’t know if there’s anything scientific about it at all whatsoever other than average yield. But that’s kind of my motivation is I have to sell the crop to continue farming. So I need a pretty sustainable income of crop.
Carol McFarland
I’ve heard that’s part of farming, itās an important one.
Clint Zenner
Yeah, it’s kind of important. I do have landlords that need to be paid.
Carol McFarland
And some kids to feed.
Clint Zenner
Yeah. Several kids to feed.
Carol McFarland
Hunting trips to take.
Clint Zenner
Yeah.
Carol McFarland
I’m really struck, though,by, you know, yeah, we have like average yields during, like, a good year, you know, comparatively. But then on the real downswing we were better. Kendall, do you want to speak to that? Has the soil told you anything about that and all those cores you pulled out?
Kendall Kahl
Did those cores speak to me? I can’t remember specifically.
Carol McFarland
Maybe the spreadsheets afterwards.
Kendall Kahl
Yeah. I will say, though, from all of the digging we have done on Clint’s farm. Especially in some of that, that one field that I’ve done a lot of the work in, that’s been in really long term no-till that you’ve done a lot of this work to regenerate that soil. There’s a beautiful, earthworm population there. Not that I always see the worms, but just the evidence of their burrows in the channeling. And just you can, really see that it’s a vibrant ecosystem down there, at least from the evidence of those larger soil organisms.
Carol McFarland
Can we pause and actually go down that rabbit trail just a little bit more? Because I feel like now that Jody is not part of our research landscape on the Palouse as much, are you the region’s leading expert on earthworms?
Clint Zenner
She’s the new worm queen.
Kendall Kahl
Is that what I get to call myself?
Clint Zenner
Got worms.
Carol McFarland
Can you just talk a little bit about your knowledge around when you’re seeing all those channels? What-you know, we know earthworms are good. Can you talk a little bit about why? What are those worms doing when you’re seeing all those channels? Like, why is that a management goal or why should it be?
Kendall Kahl
Right. Well, so earthworms are great for a lot of reasons, right? They help us decompose, that crop material and get our crop residues down into the soil and recycled back into a form that can be taken up by plants. And they’re also aerating the soil while they’re doing that. Right? So they’re affecting our nutrient cycling and also our physical structure of the soil in ways that are beneficial to the plants. And the way we farm obviously impacts the earthworms because there’s some physical interaction between our equipment and the soil and the worms themselves. And we’ve started to, I guess the two big categories of plants that I think about are like deep burrowing worms that tend to do better, in lower disturbance systems. And those are the ones that are going to really have a more drastic impact, in theory, on your infiltration, because they’re going to create the big burrows and allows a lot of water to come in.
But then we also have these horizontal burrowing worms that live closer to the surface. And, also do a lot for infiltration and nutrient cycling. And those ones tend to be less negatively affected by tillage. They seem to just be more resilient to disturbance. And I think some of that is because they’re a smaller worm and they reproduce rapidly. So their populations can rebound if they get knocked around by some equipment.
Carol McFraland
So hearing those, those like big, crazy, gnarly up and down guys, those are really the sign of big nutrient cycling, big infiltration. And that’s maybe, if you’re in a long term no-till ,those are the guys you’re going to see coming in.
Kendall Kahl
When you reduce the disturbance, we tend to see more of those worms. Although we actually don’t see those as much, they’re harder to collect, but we can see evidence that they exist.
Carol McFarland
How do you know that, Kendall? Iām teasing, carry on.
Clint Zenner
Didn’t you do a bunch of DNA testing of different worms?
Kendall Kahl
Or, like, we didn’t, but I didn’t specifically. But Jodiās lab group has, Or, like, the E-DNA or something, but for worms, there are folks that have done that, and we haven’t explored that as much in our research group, but yeah, there’s but certainly a way to try to try to characterize who’s out there. We don’t have a lot of diversity that we’ve been able to identify anyway, in species that we find in our ag fields. But the ones that we have out there, are helpful for, for just, the way that they interact. but I guess back to your sort of point earlier, I think really having both types of species are beneficial. They both provide different services, similar but different. as in most I mean, the way we think about most ecosystems, right? It’s always kind of better to have a little bit of diversity. Or often we think that that’s the way to go.
Carol McFarland
For a more resilient system. One more question about worms before we transition back. It’s exciting to be sitting here with the worm Queen and one of her two collaborators.
Clint Zenner
It is fun, like in the spring when you go out and you’re, you know, it’s just about dry enough to start seeding, and you’re, you’re digging around on the ground and you’re looking at stuff and you swipe away the residue on the stubble from the previous year’s crop and you’re like, hey there are the worms. Swipe again. There’s another worm! Swipe again, there’s another worm. Yeah, that’s always fun.
Carol McFarland
I hear that, you know, worms are something that people really look for is the, like, how is my soil doing as an indicator of especially moving toward lower disturbance. How about fertility as well? I hear some people kind of having some different questions around fertilizer use. Has that been something that you guys have looked at or noticed?
Kendall Kahl
In terms of how it impacts worms?
Carol McFarland
Yes. Thanks for clarifying.
Clint Zenner
I’m always trying to reduce the salt content of whatever fertilizer it is that I’m using. We used to apply a lot of thiosol, and now we’re trying to fly more gypsum, for the sulfur source.
And it’s kind of a soil conditioning agent as well. What do you think, Kendall? Is itā¦the higher salt loads are hard on the worms?
Kendall Kahl
That’s a good question. I think in theory, probably. I don’t know that the salt content that we’re adding with our fertilizers is necessarily a problem. The things the worms need is carbon, right? They need material to it or, leaf litter, right? To decompose primarily, or roots. And so by- for adding this fertilizer and it’s growing bigger crops and returning more biomass, there’s sort of that secondary feedback from the fertilizer. We have another project going on that surprisingly isn’t involving Clint. But, we were actually looking at the interaction between different levels of tillage and carbon and also how that impacts a lot of aspects of the soil. But one of them is worms. Anyway, if you were to add a fertilizer that was more carbon based, like a manure that’s going to directly feed your earthworm population.
The two different types of fertilizer, whether it’s an organic material based fertilizer versus a synthetic fertilizer, fertilizer that’s going to help grow bigger crops. Either way, you’re eventually building up the food supply for the worm population.
Carol McFarland
Okay. Well, I promised I would not spend too long on the worms, I guess you probably took over a long term no-till. So how long has your farm been in?
Clint Zenner
I think Russ started in the late 80s experimenting with no till. And I want to say it was 2000 ish. He had completely converted to all No-till, I’ve never actually pulled a moldboard plow other than moving it down the road to sell it. I’ve just. Yeah, I’ve been super fortunate. I haven’t had to or was raised in a high tillage farm, so I don’t know how to do it any other way. So it just seems normal. Maybe. Yeah. I’m sure a lot of people think I’m very un-normal at times, but yeah, that’s it’s no-tilling the soil is normal to me for sure. I guess you look at the calendar and that’s a couple decades of no-till that I think is paying off.
Carol McFarland
Sounds like you got some big worms out there. So that’s a good start. Yeah, and a good indicator for what I’m hearing. okay. Just another segue for Clint. What drill do you run or do you run a few? Whatās your favorite no-till drill?
Clint Zenner
No, unfortunately, no. I only have one. I wish I had two. I wish I had a hoe drill and a disc drill. So I could do more stuff. But yeah, I run a John Deere 1870 no-till drill with a 1910 commodity card. The reason why I went with that hoe drill over a traditional single shank hoe drill isā¦my drill has a leading fertilizer knife that is a very narrow fertilizer point that slices in the dry starter fertilizer and the deep band fertilizer. And then I have independent depth control on my seed boot opener. And I really like the variability that I have with dry or liquid products for fertilizer and that individual opener seed depth control in the Palouse, it’s, you know, it’s not flat. We’re not in Kansas and seed placement is very important. So, that’s why I went with that drill. We had a single disc John Deere drill for like 15 years. And some of the things that we were struggling with was oh, 0 to 6 inch soil compaction, like we had a real hard layer in that 0 to 6 inch zone. And we dug soil pits and you know, looked the soil over and did everything we could try to figure out what was going on and tested the soil and did all this.
And we kind of went back to the basics. We just grabbed a spade shovel and stuck it in the ground and pulled up a dirt clod and looked at it, and we could see these compaction layers. It just looked like it was almost flaky when it fell apart. It wasn’t that porous dreadlock looking root structure.
It was just, you know, the biggest a-ha moment was we dug a garb plant up, and the roots were growing away from the smeared sidewalls of that disc drill. And we were like, oh my gosh, like… We’ve been doing super low disturbance no-till. But with our cropping system, two thirds of the crop every year, two thirds of the farm is put in in the spring and the ground’s wet and it’s fragile and it’s sensitive to compaction because it is so wet.
And you always want to get your crop on the ground as soon as absolute possible. And we were really, really good at putting a crop in when the ground depth and all, it was too wet and that. So we’ve been trying to remediate that problem since, you know, we were having some anaerobic type conditions and high aluminum levels and like, what are we doing wrong? Weāre no-tilling, this is supposed to be the ticket to freedom. And yeah, come to find out, we, once again, know less about what we’re doing than we thought.
Carol McFarlanr
It turns out there’s more once you open that door.
Clint Zenner
Yeah, it’s a little Pandora’s box. We had redtail fescue issues and grassy weed issues, and we were definitely humbled.
Kendall Kahl
So are you trying to grow more fall-seeded crops and to avoid that, or are you hoping to do that with your cover crops or grazing?
Clint Zenner
So it’s a, it’s kind of a whole different management philosophy shift. Yes. I want to graze as many fall seeded crops as I possibly can. We do a fair amount of winter peas. Unfortunately, I’ve struggled getting fall seeded cover crops to really take off, get the biomass that we would like. we just have an odd climate where, you know, most of our moisture comes in the winter. The rain shuts off usually after June, and crops go into reproductive mode. You know, we get frost in the fall by usually the end of October, we don’t have enough growing degree days in summer moisture to really pump these cover crops.
But I’ve been pleased with fall seeded cool season crops. and we’ve grazed them. And I do definitely like grazing the covers. I think that’s going to help. Adding alfalfa into the rotation. The, you know, you just seed it once every seven years and you just essentially let it sit. And I am trying to graze my alfalfa instead of taking multiple cuttings a year.
I try to get at least 1 or 2 good cuttings of hay, and then the rest of the time graze that crop to add the diversity of the livestock along those alfalfa fields. And I think it’s improved the longevity of the alfalfa stems and hopefully benefiting, you know, soil structure and just adding of all the neat biology of that. The cash crop, you know, it is our winter wheat always, we spring crops to try to diversify and clean the ground up and control winter annuals. So it’s a tough balancing act to do absolutely nothing wrong to the soil and never be on it too wet when the earliest you can get your spring wheat in is your biggest potential for yields. So we’re always pushing it, but we’re trying not to push it on every acre.
Carol McFarland
As part of the PNW cover crops project you work in collaboration with the researchers and do more of the seeding, you use your drill, your time, equipment, all of that, the depth control. Does that help when you’re seeding cover crops?
Clint Zenner
Yeah, it will help seeding every crop. but it does. the neat thing about the drill is, is I have two compartments that I can put seed in, and I can meter them each depending on, you know, pounds per acre that I want, you know, if I put like the ocean temperatures, barley in one tank and then my eight way blend in another tank that’s maybe a lot smaller.
So I put the all the big seeds in the front and the little seeds in the back, and it works pretty good for seeding. I seems like I, I feel like I get a decent mix of the stand doing it that way. It’s not all the small seeded stuff falls to the bottom, seeds out first, and then everything that’s left is all the big seeded stuff that, dominate, you know, later in the seeding.
But there again, you know, it’s every time I see the crop, I learn how to do it differently and better and what not to do. That’s why I’m hoping someday I have a disc drill and a hoe drill that way, you know, there’s so many other types of covers and things I would try if I had a disc drill, but the hoe drill if the residue is not perfect and set to the right conditions, I just can’t get through it with the hoe drill. It turns into it like a hay rake. So if I had a disc drill some day, that would expand my ability to diversify even more crazy stuff.
Kendall Kahl
Oh, that sounds like a fun can of worms to open. I was curious. When you bring your cows in and you have them graze. You feel like that helps with the weed situation more so than when you’re just going in cover? Or have you noticed them having an impact on weeds?
Clint Zenner
I do, I’ve hayed several covers before, we’ve mowed covers. It seems like when the cows graze the covers, you try to typically graze these covers before everything goes into their reproductive part. And I think that really helps with weed control. And I don’t know why and what happens, but if you have, you know, a decent diversity in a cover and you just don’t have weeds, I mean, you might get a little, pigweed or a little lamb’s quarter here and there. And it’s nothing like our mono- crops of wheat or barley, garbanzo beans just yet. I don’t know what’s going on. Hopefully. Kendall can explain that to us someday with all the research she does.
Carol McFarland
So you’ve got quite a suite of collaborators. Hearing from Subodh and Frank, Frank is very much not cows, I think, but it’s nice to get that contrast. Subodh, his focus is more on pollinators and maybe some of that weeds component versus you more have a soils component.
So, can you just talk a little bit more about your role in the PNW cover crops project and, and how it’s going?
Kendall Kahl
We’re trying to look at how these cover crops in the different termination dates affect soil moisture. And then eventually how they’re going to affect nitrogen. So we have in one rep at each of the farms, we’ve got soil moisture and temperature sensors that are buried, out in the fields, at eight inches, maybe around a foot and two feet. So we’re trying to look at the moisture recedes throughout the growing season as the crop takes it up. And how the different termination dates might use or store water. And then we’re coming in with, at each termination date, to take soil samples and measure some moisture manually so that we can look at it, in the nine plots and not just the three with the automated sensors. So we’ve taken several measurements for moisture throughout the growing season to kind of track how that’s changing over the season. And then we’ll be looking at nitrogen in the beginning before we planted the crops versus the cover crops. And then again at the end of the season after the cover crops have all been taken out. And we’ll also be looking at nitrogen now within this next year going into winter wheat to see if we see a difference in organic nitrogen. And then we also wereā¦at each termination date we’re measuring, we take crop biomass samples. So we looked at the growth of all the different species or the individual species in each of the mix, and then also weeds, and at those moments Subodh and Sanford’s crew were looking at pollinators, and just sort of that above ground insect population.
To what you were saying earlier about weeds, I don’t think I have any answers necessarily at this point, but it’s interesting to see how the different species within the mixes perform differently at all the different farms. Yeah, It’s different. And maybe it’s a soil type, maybe it’s a climate thing, but I wonder if that’s sort of where we get some of this competitive advantage with the mixes. And since there’s just more plants out there that we want to cultivate, that can sort of take advantage of whatever those local conditions are and outcompete the weeds.
It was- and that was justā¦from a management side. We were trying to, you know, control all these plots to have them similar and that became nearly impossible just because each farm was, the plants were just growing at different rates at all the different farms.