In this episode of the On-Farm Trials podcast, we hear from special guest Eero Kovero of Pekola, Finland- alongside his host and compatriot in direct seeding practices, Mark Sheffels, from his farm in Wilbur, WA. Eero shares his experience connecting with PNW direct seed farmers Mark Sheffels and Russ Zenner for the past 25 years. In this episode we hear about Eero’s experience on his farm in Finland, his conversion to direct seeding practices after his first adventures in the PNW, and his diversified enterprise. The conversation explores the relationship that has developed over the past 25 years between farmers, the respective challenges of farming regardless of location, the power of connecting farmers across the world, and how Eero has played a key role in direct seed adoption in Finland by being a conduit for the lessons-learned in the PNW.
Carol McFarland
We’re out here on Sheffels Farm outside of Wilbur, Washington with a special guest today. We have Mark Sheffels and his guest, Eero. Welcome to the podcast. Mark, do you want to reintroduce yourself? You’ve been a guest before.
Mark Sheffels
Sure, sure. Mark Sheffels, retired farmer from Wilbur, Washington. Came home from WSU in nineteen seventy-nine and farmed up until a couple years ago. Converted to direct seed back in about ninety-six. Did it exactly like we’re schooled not to, and that is I went from conventional to a hundred percent direct seed all in one year. It was a wet cycle. Worked out quite well, so the transition went well. And been doing it all the way up until two years ago when I retired.
Carol McFarland
For more on that, listen to your episode in season one.
Mark Sheffels
So along with what happened right on the farm, I was involved with the Washington Association of Wheat Growers, working on national legislation for them for a few years, and overlapped that with being an original board member on the Pacific Northwest Direct Seed Association. And then I went strictly, after about two years, went strictly to the Direct Seed Association. Then worked through the chairs of that, and in the process, met Eero Kovero.
Carol McFarland
Great. Thank you so much for that introduction. And very excited to have Eero here with us today, who has been nominated not only by you, Mark, but also by Russ Zenner and others who have met you over the course of your visits to the Inland Pacific Northwest. So with that, Eero, very happy to have you here. Thanks so much for working with us to be here today. Would you take a minute to introduce yourself?
Eero Kovero
Sure. First, I want to say that it is an honor to be able to be part of this.I highly respect all the producers and growers around here. It’s been a real adventure the last twenty-five years, traveling around here and doing all kinds of things. And it seems to be still going on. So I’m a very lucky one. The first thing that I would like to point out, well, I’m from Finland, obviously. This is very clear at this point. And a farmer. On other sideline on top of that is that I work as a CEO for a local grain marketing cooperation we started seven years ago. And then what I do here and how I ended up here is these farm tours that have actually expanded to a couple other countries, which is a very unique product, it’s based on these wonderful people around here.
Carol McFarland
Great. What other countries do you go to?
Eero Kovero
Switzerland, Estonia, Sweden, and Iceland.
Carol McFarland
Okay, great. So I’ll sign up for your Iceland tour next year.
Eero Kovero
Well, yeah, this year is sold out.
Carol McFarland
Okay. Do you visit the hot springs while you’re in Iceland?
Eero Kovero
We try to skip, on any of my tours, all the tourist stuff. So the answer would be yes, but not the one that normal people visit.
Carol McFarland
That sounds perfect. Farms and not super touristy hot springs. I’ll see you next year. That’s great. Could you, I know it’s rude to ask about acreage, but would you mind, because I suspect, would you give a bit more detail about where your farm is located and your farm size and more about your farming conditions, so your rainfall and your soil type, because I suspect it’s very different from here. And maybe your season length, too.
Eero Kovero
Well, yes, sure. It’s not rude to ask. I mean, since we have a high subsidy system, it’s all public information, how much subsidies I get paid and how many acres I have, so you can go online and look at it anyway. So that’s how it works there. A little over three-hundred acres, small grains, peas, and oilseed crops every now and then. Because of the scale of the farming, there isn’t really a long-term rotation. If I would have all the possible crops growing on every year,I would be cleaning and switching stuff most of the time. So I have to say that some years it’s just two crops to keep it simple for a simple guy. Fifteen years of no-till, and this is something that
Mark loves. I showed up here, he showed me around twenty-five years ago, talked about the no-till. I think I was in my second or third year of farming. Switching from moldboard plow to min till. And I said no-till will not work where I come from because it’s a short season and so cold and high moisture. Twenty-three inch rainfall normally. Fair share of that during the growing season. And very luckily, some of that during the harvest, so we dry all the grain. If it’s below twenty percent, I’m very happy. If it’s near thirty, it’s going to be hard on your combine. I’ve done some over thirty. Season, it’s really not much shorter than what it is right here in Wilburn, but the moisture in the harvest will. It’s going to be a big factor.
Carol McFarland
And you said you’re about seventy miles north of Helsinki?
Eero Kovero
Correct, that is the information, yes.
Carol McFarland
The latitude of like somewhere in southern Alaska?
Eero Kovero
Yes, that would be it. We do have a gulf current on the Norwegian coast that actually warms up the climate a little bit. So it is not as bad as you would think. The other thing is we have very long nights in the middle of the summer. The season is short that way. There’s less tillers, so our seed rates would be three times higher average what you have here.
Carol McFarland
Okay, and I’ve got to ask about your soil. What’s your soil type?
Eero Kovero
Oh, that’s wonderful. The variation of the soil types is very wide. So we got most of the fields have some ex-lake bottom, very good black soil, and the other end can be gravelly. Between those two, there is heavy clay. Mark’s comment when he saw that was that you can keep the soil, I want the rainfall. And Russ Zenner looked at the soil and says, good luck with that stuff. You can make bricks out of the really good places. And years and years of heavy tillage have not improved that soil, I’ll tell you that. You’ve got all the possible challenges you can ever come up with that stuff.
Carol McFarland
Wow, so Mark, you’ve actually been to Finland and seen his farming conditions?
Mark Sheffels
Yep, I’ve been there. Stayed with Eero and family for a few days. Even got involved in a short farm tour. I spoke to a few Finnish farmers, and one of the things I told them was from where I stood,I could hit more trees with a rock than I had on four thousand acres. So it’s very, very different there. Their farmlands are pretty much carved out of forest land. One of the things I did is set my camera for a timed exposure in the ground and got a picture of me standing on a dirt cloud that did not break.
Eero Kovero
I remember he was fascinated about that. Not that exciting for me.
Carol McFarland
Oh, man. So, Eero, how did you become a farmer?
Eero Kovero
Well, the farm, I’m the fourth generation on the farm, and quite can’t explain why I ended up being a farmer. I mean, obviously, we’re born on the farm. My father and mom always wanted me to study something else, but it was very clear for me that I actually wanted to study ag. When I was done with the school, there was a moment when I was thinking, well, why did I do this? I mean, I had more interest for mechanics and stuff like that, just like my son, who’s twenty-two years old right now. Obviously, I was born on the farm. I’ve had a bit of a passion for living with the nature. I wouldn’t call myself a hippie, but maybe some kind of entrepreneur that likes to live with nature, meaning this case long winters you don’t have to be that active.
Carol McFarland
And the sauna? The sauna.
Eero Kovero
Yeah that’s a very Finnish thing and a cold spell maybe almost every night. And we’ll get it, we’ll get it hot and we’ll throw some water on the rock so it’s not just a steamy box you get you know you get the temp up and get good heat, cold beer.
Carol McFarland
This is not at all related to, maybe it is related to on-farm trials, but I hear there’s like an airing of grievances with your family and then you can beat them with sticks. Is that real?
Eero Kovero
Not with sticks.I mean, some conditions your skin might get itchy. I guess this is really related on old harvest. I mean, of course, we run the modern stuff these days. But then it would be, the traditional thing would be some new growth branches from birch tree, and you would make like a brush out of them and gently beat yourself.
Carol McFarland
Oh, just yourself, not your family?
Eero Kovero
No, not really. But honestly, it is a place where you relax and you talk nicely, mellow talk, kind of rest. Maybe don’t even talk. I mean, just enjoy the moment.
Carol McFarland
No, that sounds like a great way to spend the winter resting season. Thank you for sharing. The sauna culture seems to be one of the really iconic things around.
Eero Kovero
Yeah, and just like Mark threw me under the bus right at the start with this no-till stuff, he has his own sauna these days.
Carol McFarland
So, Mark, when you were first telling Eero that it was possible- or encouraging him maybe that it was possible to adopt direct seed on his farm, what did you tell him?
Mark Sheffels
Well, actually, I wasn’t trying to sell him direct seed. He initiated the contact and came here to see what we were doing. And I’m not too brash. I’d known nothing about Finland or what the possibilities were, so there was no debate when he said it wouldn’t work here. It was in hindsight after he became a very strong and very recognized proponent of direct seed in Finland that I came back on him and had to remind him of his original comment.
Carol McFarland
Okay. Sounds like you had a lot of questions for Mark and Russ. What kind of actually equipment or what were some of your early questions and what equipment got you started?
Eero Kovero
Well, The first stop on northwest farming, related on farming, was Mark Scheffel’s. And of course the conditions, the rainfall, and the soil type and everything is very different. So I’m going to claim that it was quite a natural answer to say that, you know, this is very different and might not work in Finland. And he actually responds, so what is your rainfall? And I said twenty-three inches or something like that. And he told me that I know a guy who has similar conditions, which was Russ Zenner. Sent me down there, and I still remember that Russ was spraying at the moment. And we called him while we were there, and he was in his pickup driving on Genesee-Julietta Road, and I knew that it was a red one. And we were driving a Saab since my cousin was from Seattle. So we met the red pickup on that road. And Russ rolled down the window and says, you boys might be from Seattle. There isn’t very many Saabs around here. That was the first start with him. Both of these gentlemen have been extremely helpful and professional.I know that it doesn’t sound like that, but they were very helpful to kick me on the right way with my own brain. I mean they just, they just answered the questions that I asked. We had a fairly good subsidy system for as an environmental standing point, but we decided to try give a good no-till a good try. Meaning sell all the tillage tools. Sell most of the tractors. So you don’t have an option to use a tillage as a first solution to the problem. We bought one fourteen feet air drill, which was a problematic one. It came from the UK. We used it one year and it went back to the factory. Ever since I’ve worked with the Finnish company, it’s a fourteen feet box drill, double disc opener with side gauge wheel. A little bit like a John Deere setup or Bourgault, but double disc. Is it perfect? No. Pretty much the best for our conditions. And I know how to, how to play with that thing. So we still got the same drill. We keep on rebuilding it, maintaining it, and it does what needs to be done.
Carol McFarland
Great. Thanks for sharing. We got to make sure we know what drill you’re running these days. So what were some of your early questions for Mark and Russ after you found him with your Saab?
Eero Kovero
We already talked about the the fall burn down and the glyphosate usage, maybe some soil temperature things seeding depth. I did discover some people who were doing no-till in Finland later on and I really followed them. So I was for sure, I was not the first one. I was just making more noise later on maybe than some others because I saw that as a good solution for economical challenges and small scale farming, you have to understand that having a big line of tools is even more expensive per acre. And we had our challenges and there was some disappointing moments, but never really any bigger challenges that we had with the tillage system. So it was quite successful. And you have to remember that I stayed connected with these gentlemen every six months because I was visiting this country with the tour groups. And, you know, that was twenty-five years ago. Who remembers that stuff? We’ve talked a lot over the years.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, I’m sure. It seems like a lot of magic has been made in that time. Mark, you said you had over four hundred Finnish farmers on your farm because of this guy?
Mark Sheffels
Yeah. Erro and I were talking about it a few nights ago, and I think with the exception of the COVID years when he couldn’t travel, it’s been twice a year for those twenty-five years, about ten farmers each visit, so pretty simple math.
Eero Kovero
Yeah I would say, three hundred seventy-something Finnish, and the rest of those are Swedish. So let’s separate them. No Norwegian, though.
Carol McFarland
So I guess I’m interested in some of the questions you’ve gotten from some of the tour groups as well.
Mark Sheffels
Well, it’s a lot of repetitive questions, of course, because they’re new groups all the time, and they come up with the same questions. They’re very interested in economics, so they ask a lot of questions about the economics of it. As far as the agronomy goes, the seed rates are mind-blowing because of the seasons in Finland. The seed rates, the stooling is much lower and the seed rates are much higher. So I think I’m seeding roughly a fourth of the seed rate you might put on.
Eero Kovero
Yeah, fourth, third.
Mark Sheffels
And yet we maximize production. So as we know in this country, if you seed early, pretty much anything from fifty pounds to eighty pounds is going to get you the same yield. And that’s a hard concept for them to understand. Any acreage in the openness of what we do,I think there’s, Eero can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think they probably have a hard time understanding that we are very, very rich considering the acreage that we farm compared to the average Finnish farmers, but the economics are just totally different.
Eero Kovero
Well, you can imagine from people coming to this country from a country where the fields are a few acres and rounded with the trees and small fields. And you fly to Seattle twelve hours and ended up in a hotel. And then on the first day you drive over the Cascades and ended up somewhere close to water where you first see the big fields. Before that, you see the super dry canyon, and can’t believe there’s any farming around here. And where is this guy actually going to take us? This doesn’t look like a farm ground at all. We typically stop on the first big open farmland viewpoint, and they’ll just get out of the van and keep wondering. And all they see is the great soil. I mean, you do have wonderful soils. Grow valuable special crops on a soil like that, like carrots and onions and stuff like that, but then you’re a little short on water.
Mark Sheffels
A lot of agriculture in this country is just borderline. The fields were carved out of what was viable at the time, and you’d look at it now and say, maybe we pushed those borders a little too hard, what we farm. Soil’s anywhere from a foot deep to six feet deep, even on what I farm, so much less all the variable farms, different farms and ownerships.
Carol McFarland
Well, I’m amazed to hear, too, as you describe your soils, Eero, you described incredible variability across even just that farm size. And, you know,I think variability is one of the things I’m sure you’ve seen across this landscape as well. Now, I want to invite you, Mark, to kind of jump in as we move forward. But let’s jump into some of our questions here around starting out with, would you describe some of your management goals and how, yeah. Some of your management goals for your farm.
Eero Kovero
Yeah, well,I guess the big management thing was to decide to jump on a no-till. And I would claim that is the economical benefit. Later on, you’re starting to think about what that does for your soil. Like I said, it’s very heavy clay. It will compact a lot of moisture. It will crust. And we got so many earthworms and things back. It’s still difficult clay. It doesn’t turn out to be a wonderful black soil. It will maintain the history and the quality and some of the challenging things on it. A big part of the income, it has not as high as it was in early years, but the subsidy level is around two hundred dollars per acre. So a fair part of your income comes from somewhere else than actual production, which if you balance the numbers, then you might want to rethink how much energy and fuel and work you actually put on your farming. Rotation wise, the cooler climate and more moisture, the best export crop, most years, the best and kind of Scandinavian thing. There is such a thing as Scandinavian oats on the grain market. We grow a fair part of them. Then you need a good rotation with small acreage and a high moisture harvest. The peas are really challenging. Peas over thirty percent moisture, you just leave them. There’s no way to get them.I mean, it’s going to be hummus through your combine and a dryer. No go. It’s awful. You can’t do it. So there’s some challenges on that. The canola actually is one of the best weatherproof crops that you can have. A lot of spring canola, which have a lot of bug issues, a lot of spraying and sometimes even hopeless. Winter canola would be a good solution. Just won’t make it through the winter. Maybe seventy percent winter kill. And I’m not talking about having some bad spots. Seventy percent winter kill. So a bit challenging there.
Carol McFarland
Well, you get some pretty cold temperatures,I imagine. Or is it the snow?
Eero Kovero
Yeah, typically the cold is not the problem. It’s the frost late in the spring that will lift, break the roots with that heavy clay soil. Too wet in the fall. Standing water, just no matter what you do, there’s just too much moisture. Like the other side of the Cascade has some farming, which they all got some water there. As a management itself, it’s more like I just farm whatever, you know, a lot of years I just clean the seed for myself and for my partner for several different options. And as the spring goes, is it early or late? We just kind of go with the flow and see what the markets are and how you feel. And yes, very unprofessional, honestly.
Carol McFarland
You bring up a couple of things that I’m sure are dramatically different in terms of guiding your decision-making, too, in terms of your subsidy programs there, as well as your markets. I’m sure they’re quite different than what we experience here in the PNW.
Eero Kovero
Yeah, well, the subsidies came in when we joined the EU, and they were never tied down on any kind of index. So they’ve cut some off and they go down. The high level of subsidies kind of kills the good thinking. So, you know, because there’s a certain amount of money that just shows up no matter what you do. Not always beneficial. Also, the landlords and other sectors see that they get that much money, so we should get our share of that because they just get it. They don’t really have to you know, do this and that, so it might sound like a great idea, not that great idea. I mean it’s, I wouldn’t really promote the high subsidy level setup. The market itself, challenging grain market, we basically are out on an island and there’s a cost to get grain out, so the export is difficult. High moisture harvest, your falling number of wheat is always a challenge. As a CEO, how do I sell a vessel load of grain knowing if we can produce it? That would not be a good deal to end it up with the deal that you can’t fill up. So I understand that farming is challenging here. It’s also challenging in Finland.
Carol McFarland
So the takeaway here is that farming is challenging?
Eero Kovero
Always is,I would say. Always is. You might feel like that the guy who got plus ten thousand acres must be a millionaire before you landed in Seattle and see the truth but…
Carol McFarland
Or someone that has twenty-three inches of rain during the growing season
Eero Kovero
If you could combine all the best parts of all over the world I think you would do pretty well.
Carol McFarland
Well that’s true of most things.
Eero Kovero
The best market, best rainfall, best soil and…
Carol McFarland
Might actually be able to make a go of it.
Eero Kovero
Yeah, yeah. But I mean it’s still is one of them, I would say it’s a fun way to spend your life. A lot of benefits like pilots can land anywhere in the world and they can always connect around an airplane. Farmers can land anywhere on a planet and always get connected around the combine. It doesn’t matter where you are. It works. I mean, it’s conversation is always open.
Carol McFarland
I bet you’ve seen that time and again.
Eero Kovero
Yeah.
Eero Kovero
Very grateful of that. It’s fun.
Mark Sheffels
But Eero has three children, and his son is being educated right now as a mechanical engineer and working at the same time while he’s doing that. And I bring that up because I think we have another farmer in the making there. I’ve had many visitors on the farm, and kids always seem to gravitate toward the piano. They liked to hammer on the keys and make noise. Eero’s son is the only one that ever wanted to open the piano up and look inside and see how it worked rather than play it.
Carol McFarland
That’s a good story, Mark.I like that one.
Eero Kovero
I remember the second step on that. Obviously, they did not share the language. My son was maybe five years old when we visited first time. And some of his tractors, it was the rubber track CAT that you had those days parked on the yard with the drill, and my son just pointed out didn’t share the language just let’s go and start it up and every machine needed to be started up, and some did not because the battery was dead. My son was just shaking the head. Not good, not good.
Mark Sheffels
Yeah,I remember that. Yeah,I kind of forgot that. That’s probably why I have trickle charges on everything year-round now.
Carol McFarland
Yeah,I hear those are pretty good at that particular problem.
Mark Sheffels
Yep.
Carol McFarland
Okay, well, so would you actually, Eero, quick, you mentioned that you mouldboard plowed your farm previously, it sounds like you took a similar approach to Mark, where you just sold all the equipment and like, okay, we’re direct seed now. But would you talk a little bit about what your farm management looked like prior to that?
Eero Kovero
Well,I mean, it’s a short story.I started farming since my father quit. I think he was fifty-eight years, fifty-nine years old and have kind of lost interest for the farming. And I understand that because the economical situation kind of dropped down a lot since we went to EU and grain prices were less than half of what they were before that. They were, you know, some of the income was replaced with the subsidies, but it didn’t work for him that he had no really interest left anymore. So I started to farm and after the first harvest,I moldboard plowed everything. And I figured out after that,I mean, it was two and a half weeks of solid tractor driving, getting it all done in small fields and understanding the value of the actual crop, the part of the subsidies. I decided, I don’t know what, but something else in the future. This is stupid. It just takes too much fuel and time. Next year, fifty percent min-till, fifty percent moldboard plow. And then maybe two years of min-till. We had an Amazon disk that we were pulling. And after that, one hundred percent no-till. And I never went back. We sold everything: harrows, plows, some tractors. And this was combined with another farm.I mean, someone is thinking, how many tractors do you actually need for three hundred acres? Well, you need more than one.
Carol McFarland
Probably, especially when you’re pulling tillage equipment. Okay, so I imagine you’ve tried some other things on your farm over the years. It sounds like you’ve been hearing about other management goals around the world for quite a few years now. I bet you’ve got a couple inspirations from that that maybe you’ve tried on your farm.
Eero Kovero
I mean, we haven’t done anything extreme on crop -wise. I got some winter wheat growing now, and it looks like it’s going to make it through the winter this year. That’s been a challenge. Winter crops have higher yield potential, but just a challenge to get them through the winter. As for crop-wise, nothing really extreme. I mean, just small grains and canola and peas. A little bit different on the spraying technique. So earlier years I had a three -point sprayer behind the tractor. Then I wanted to have something that has a wider boom. And my Swedish friend said that anybody can buy a trailed sprayer, you know, from the store. You go and buy a self-propelled from UK. So I bought an old one and fixed it up with my son, which is kind of unusual to have one of those on four hundred acres. That has been a very good choice. I enjoy it. And then it was actually an economical choice. It was very cheap. I guess the better story is the combine,I would say. It’s a long story, but we were picking up the used car for my girlfriend from Sweden, and I ended up buying a combine with the thirty-five feet header, which is typical here but for four hundred acres and the previous one was thirteen feet header. So we jumped from thirteen to thirty-five, and I shared with another farmer. And I think we put fifty-two trashing hours on that machine last year. So most of the days, we run about two hours every good harvest day, and then everything is plugged up. So that’s a bit of an overkill, and a lot of local people think I’m crazy, which might be correct.
Carol McFarland
I’m still wondering if your girlfriend ever got her car.
Eero Kovero
She is still driving that car, and it’s going well.
Carol McFarland
Excellent. Okay, so when you’re trying things on your farm, there’s kind of some end-of -year decision-making to decide if it’s worth it, whether it’s no-till or a new combine or a self-propelled sprayer. What information do you use to know if it’s a success?
Eero Kovero
Well,I mean,I always need to see how it works several years. You can’t give up on one year. You look at the economics, you look at other options, then you’ve got that little rebel on you that you need to do it different than most of the people, and you like to keep the freedom. Part of that is that you want to have an economical freedom, I guess. It gives you an option to fail and not to lose your sleep. I’m not very good on making long-term notes and records for all the things I do.I like to use a phone to calculate a lot of things if it makes sense to do it. And I prefer,I respect myself that I don’t want to do the work that doesn’t pay. I see it that way. As a marketing wise, I’m a little disappointed how the Finnish farmers we’ve lost a lot of our own marketing power for Swedes and Danes who run most of the big business in Finland. And I’m a little bit disappointed that we’re not very good marketing people. Maybe it’s related on this high subsidy level. We’re getting lazy and, you know, if you don’t really have to, sometimes people won’t do much.
Carol McFarland
You wear all these different hats, and so I’m kind of like, oh, we could talk about farming, but also now I want to ask more about kind of your approach to your marketing business and your marketing company, and, you know, so I’m getting off script with that, but do you want to share a little bit more as you kind of are talking about the landscape of marketing in Finland? What made you try starting your own firm around that?
Eero Kovero
Well,I didn’t start it. It was some people who were on the tour, and we visited the local marketing options here, and they got the idea from there that maybe we should try something like that too.
Carol McFarland
Does this have something to do with the Shepherd’s Grain hat that Mark is currently wearing?
Eero Kovero
No, it’s, what’s that? Pacific Northwest warehouse, Genesee location.
Carol McFarland
Oh, the PNW co-op.
Eero Kovero
Yeah. Changes name every now and then when you live one hundred and thirty years. But people are pretty much the same. Some actually are retired. So anyway, we visited that place and some of the people decided we should try to start something like this. And in early years, nobody else really wanted to take the job to run it. So there was two of us and I was invited to do part of that job. That was seven years ago, and we’re pushing a thousand members soon. And it has been very challenging to pay the best market price for the farmers and find somebody who is actually willing to pay it from local or international markets. And I’ve learned a lot about booking ship freights and working with the ports and, you know, you play with the other people’s money, but it’s a very high risk game. Trying to deal with the buyers from different European countries.I guess the benefit interesting benefit has been that I’m not a salesperson, I’m a farmer. Others will show up with their on the meeting with their Audis and Mercedes cars and I have an old Chevy and jeans and they can tell that this guy is different, but it’s sometimes it is beneficial sometimes your resources are not quite enough so you can’t close the deal.
Mark Sheffels
I think it;s another quite interesting road. I think it’s an attempt to vertically integrate in Finland, probably because of the size of the farms, they don’t come out of the field with the grain and go to a commercial warehouse or a co-op. Most of it is stored on each individual farm.
Carol McFarland
So they can dry it?
Mark Sheffels
Yeah, exactly. It starts going through the dryer because it’s all harvested around twenty percent, maybe more. And the fact we harvest grain, if ours gets really wet, we’re taking it in at eight, O mean excuse me, twelve and and a really really bad year we’ll push to thirteen but for the most part it comes in at about eight percent and gets co-mingled. But it has to be handled a little more carefully in Finland because of that moisture, and Finnish farmers generally don’t even have big trucks because it puts them into a whole different tax on fuel to run trucks. So their grain is hauled around in wagons, pulled by tractors. And it’s commercial trucks that do take it to market. So that’s quite a step to try to set up a farmer-owned system to move grain up to the next level.
Eero Kovero
That is all correct information and a big difference. Most farms can store their own grain on their own dryer setups and silos. So that is a difference. And it’s all, well, ninety-nine percent of custom trucking. So we’ve got people who truck it to the port or to the mill. Farmers typically use a tractor and trailer behind it.
Carol McFarland
Where, like how far is the port from where you’re located or where you’re cooperative?
Eero Kovero
Well, it’s for me, it would be a hundred fifty miles.
Carol McFarland
And it’s trucked.? There’s not like rail or other?
Eero Kovero
No, no, no. Trail is not an option. It’s higher cost than trucks. Mark said that the farmers don’t have big trucks. Well, in this country, farmers don’t have big trucks. We got some big trucks in Finland. So we’re talking about a hundred seventy-eight pounds on a loaded truck plus the load. So they’re a bit bigger than yours. And it can be a challenge on some of the farm roads, especially on hills with the snow and ice.
Carol McFarland
That does sound like a trial.
Eero KOvero
Yeah. It is a challenge if they fail. To stop or getting up on a hill, it’s really tough to get them moving again.
Carol McFarland
I’m sure. Because here, if you get a stuck truck, a lot of times you just pull out the tractor. Can you do that there?
Eero Kover
Tractors won’t do any good on that situation. You normally need a full-size towing truck that can bury some steel on the ground and winch it up. That’s the way you do it.
Carol McFarland
Wow.
Eero Kover
Big cost.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. A lot of problem solving to that operation.
Eero Kovero
All over the planet, you’ve got your challenges.
Carol McFarland
Okay, well, how about the most interesting thing you’ve learned from a past trial?
Eero Kovero
There’s a lot of details like soil temperatures are not that different if you do tillage or no-till. You don’t really have to wait a month later to be able to no-till unless you do tillage. The chemicals offer you a really good control on the weeds. The weeds will change over the years when you get away from the tillage. A lot of details like that. I guess the major thing is that the more you know, you actually learn that you don’t know that much. It’s very interesting for a guy who has traveled in this country twenty-five years to get this inside information, how the people actually feel and what their life is.
Carol McFarland
Mark, I’m going to turn this to you just a little bit. So have you watched his trials, and have you asked him questions about, kind of done some cross-pollination?
Mark Sheffels
Well, a big part of our visits when he brings in groups of Finnish farmers is, well, they came here to learn what happens in America and about America. So it’s mostly centered on that. But I come back with questions about how things are in Finland. And there’s not so much in the field or trials, but there’s a lot of similarities between the expectations of the public. People live in urban areas versus rural areas. Not so much different in this country. As far as pragmatism it takes to actually be the person on the land making things work. Compared to those in the city who have an idealistic idea how things ought to be. One thing that’s fascinating, we’ve talked about the moisture level they have there, but what an American farmer might not think about is the fact how much moisture it takes to grow crops in clay. When I was there, there was a lot of background talk and real concern about how dry it was. And what I saw in the soil was abundant moisture. But keep in mind, there’s a certain moisture soil percentage that we can go well beyond and still draw moisture and be productive with crops, whereas in that clay soil, they simply quit growing because the soil becomes so stiff the roots can’t move. So that’s a dramatic difference.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. No,I imagine from what you’re describing, the high clay soils are their own challenge, especially with the level of moisture that you get. Whether it’s maybe driving in the field or root penetration or,I mean, even just if it is dry, the clays just hold the moisture.
Mark Sheffels
With direct seeding and slow adaptation,I think by the time Eero’s are ten thousand or twenty thousand years old, they’ll probably have better soil conditions. It takes a long time for geology to do that kind of thing.
Carol McFarland
What differences have you noticed in your soil since you started direct seeding?
Eero Kovero
I mean, you’ve got a lot more earthworms.I can’t say that the soil would be fluffier, but you can actually take a knife and dig a hole. It will be layers like roof tiles. A lot of earthworm holes will help the water to get in. It will carry your machines better. Because it’s not fluffy, it’s not a man-made tillage, but it’s still not dead, tight, no air kind of soil.
Mark Sheffels
I Imagine, I’m guessing the biggest change is right in that top inch or two with all that material on top.
Eero Kovero
You can’t seed little on little higher moisture and it doesn’t stick on your tires or your openers or anything like that because that used to be a massive problem. Even, I farm less than ten miles from the city that has fifty thousand people, so you get spraying get out from your field and if your tires are all covered with that clay and you turn on a paved road and get up on a speed, you probably will kill somebody with the motorcycle in the same day because they hit on that clay. So other benefits like that it doesn’t get sticky, the soil anymore. Your tires stay very clean. I don’t know the soil. We talked about the pH. We still do the liming. I do not incorporate the lime. Anyhow, I just spread it on the top of the field and leave it there. Does it do any good that way?I don’t know. The soil sample looks okay. Does it go down on deep enough? Maybe over the time. I didn’t mention about the fertilizer. It’s all dry. And most cases for spring crops, we put everything down with the seed on the same opener. And then the question is, don’t you separate it? Well, no, not really. With the heavy clay and plenty of moisture,I would claim that it will slow down the early growth, like when the crop shows up on a top day or two. Seed treatment can do that too. It’s not ideal, but we like to get this fertilizer on the ground, not on top of the ground. Some people do it even with the winter wheat. They run their drill through it in the spring and put most of the fertilizer down there that way.I don’t know. I just get by with the soil.
Carol McFarland
So can I ask about your soil pHs? If you’re liming and you have a liming program, what do you kind of manage for with your soil pH?
Carol McFarland
You’re talking about all these programs all the time. And we just lime it when we have it. It’s typically done in the fall. So you want to do it when it’s a dry fall. And then you need to contact the contractor that he has a time, and you get the lime there on time and the price is reasonable. So there is no program. There is a need for it and we’ll get it done in those years when the weather is there, the contractor is there, and the price of the lime is there and it’s available. So I apologize again. There really is no program. There’s always a need for it. You would want to be above the six on heavy clay. If it’s a really nice black dirt, something five and a half will do just fine. The higher the organic part of the soil is, the lower the pH can be and it still grows really good.
Carol McFarland
We call that buffering capacity in soil science. Yeah, when I say program,I don’t mean, you know, this is like a really official structured thing. But, you know, just some of the basic principles around how you make your decisions regarding like the need to lime, how much to lime, that sort of thing. What are you shooting for when you lime? So what’s your, you know, pH when you’re like, are you soil sampling? And then, you know how do you decide how much to put on? You know, some of the timing stuff. That’s always an interesting question. Particle size,I know, is a fun source.
Eero Kovero
And I guess my excuse not to have good programs would be like Mark is, well, retired now, but was up in a scale where you actually have to have a good planning for everything. I mean, it’s a big-scale thing. You have to look at the markets and lock some in and spread the risk. However, I’m down on plus three hundred acres, and if I really fail badly, I’ll just ask money from my girlfriend. That’s probably not true.
Carol McFarland
Is that part of the farm subsidies you were talking about just now?
Eero Kovero
It’s a family subsidy system, but it is a different scale, and it makes a difference. I don’t mind to do an investment. And honestly, it was economically a very good investment to buy a used big combine from Sweden. But it was not planned before I saw it. And yes, I was very lucky because it happened right before the COVID. But I don’t mind to pull a plug for an investment or liming or anything. But I have to feel that it’s a good deal. So if it’s not a good deal,I just won’t do it.
Mark Sheffels
Yeah, Eero’s been quite innovative in a lot of ways. So with three hundred acres, maybe you don’t spend all day figuring out how to manage an acre, but you start tour groups, equipment deals, and the green marketing effort. So he keeps quite busy, and he’s pretty innovative.
Carol McFarland
I’m hearing that for sure.
Mark Sheffels
He’s an outside-the-box guy.
Carol McFarland
I don’t think we’d be here if he wasn’t. So what’s the biggest barrier to trying new things on your farm, Eero?
Eero Kovero
I guess I’m going to claim that it’s a lack of time. You know, doing this in the Northwest, I’m two months out of the year away from the home and away from Finland. It’s always an excuse. Then you can say that maybe it’s the money and maybe it’s the energy. And honestly,I have to say that I kind of hope that, and my son talks about that he has an interest for farming, but the next generation would bring in more energy and ideas. And I don’t necessarily have to retire at age fifty-three. I’m sure I could find some stupid thing to do. But having the next generation there, and he’s still in the middle of school, so it’s not going to happen. But it’s another excuse. Maybe that would bring in some ideas. And I can see that he has picked up some of the things from his father. He’s kind of out of the box, too.
Carol McFarland
I hear that’s how that happens.
Mark Sheffels
So tell me if I’m wrong, but if I remember this right, this subsidy system would only allow a farmer to be involved up to a certain age, but that changed recently?
Eero Kovero
Yeah, they took that away because some people were claiming that you can’t limit the age. It used to be that it was somewhere in the retirement age was sixty-eight or something.
Carol McFarland
Being overly nosy, and I’m sorry for this, but do you own all the ground that you farm, Eero?
Eero Kover
I do not own all the ground. I own one third of it. A little more than one third of it. And some forest too, because we didn’t talk about it, but logging timber is a big part of being a farmer in Finland. Most of us will have some. And, you know, we grow the trees, we thin them, we plant them, we harvest them. And that’s another thing that is a long cycle price-wise. And, of course, the growth cycle is quite long, typically two generations.
Mark Sheffels
So Eero sells commercial timber, and all I can say is,I have a tree.
Carol McFarland
And how tall is that tree, Mark?
Mark Sheffels
Well, it’s quite large because my grandmother planted it. I don’t know that I’ve ever actually planted it. I did. I planted one tree.
Eero Kovero
To me, it looks like a full-size tree. You used to have two.
Mark Sheffels
Yeah, lightning blew up one tree right against my house, or one pine tree, sure. But we have a nice birch tree, nice maple tree, and a good evergreen.
Carol McFarland
Wow. So that’s your shelter belt.
Mark Sheffels
Yep.
Carol McFarland
Must have been quite an exciting night when you got a lightning strike right next to your house.
Mark Sheffels
I’m a little dense.I woke up for a moment and said that was close, and got up the next day and realized that large chunks of my tree had been blown over a five hundred-foot area and somehow never damaged any buildings.
Carol McFarland
I’m glad for that. So you got some nitrogen fixation. Maybe not in the place you wanted it. Have you seen some of the trees out here, Eero? They grow all like, you know, they get the wind and they just look like they’ve had a hard life. They’re all twisted.
Eero Kover
Well,I guess those trees are mostly at the coastal range,I would say. They really get the wind damage on them. And with my tour group, I mean, we visit some really big trees on the coastal range and locking sites and cable locking up on a hill and stuff like that. So that two-week tour covers, I would say, everything else than citrus fruit and hogs and chicken. Everything else we cover. So I’ve seen a lot of things around here.
Carol McFarland
That sounds really cool.
Mark Sheffels
One thing that’s humbling for me is the fact that every group of ten there’ll be three that speak English quite well and probably another three that understand most of what I say before Eero interprets. After our visit to Finland we went to Norway and it was humbling to most would figure out somehow maybe my dress, but they would know and speak English before I said anything. And if they didn’t figure it out before I spoke it only took one word, and I would say in Norway even a higher percentage than Finland spoke english so probably ninety percent.
Eero Kovero
I don’t know what’s the thing with Americans. You’re really worried about trying to speak another language if you make a mistake or two. I’m a good example. I mean, it happens all the time and you just keep on rolling. And if you don’t understand, you ask seven times and look the opposite on the eye and trying to get there. And sometimes it works better than, there is some painful moments on my memories trying to clear up some things somewhere over the years, but it’s just, you know, you just have to deal with the language barrier.
Carol McFarland
Well, and recognize that, yeah, like, communication is not an easy thing, even when you do speak the same language sometimes.
Eero Kovero
Well,I speak the same language with my spouse, and sometimes I don’t know what she’s saying.
Carol McFarland
Adjacently related to that, or at least the conversation prior to that,I know in my personal experience when I’ve been in other countries trying to learn the language, a little bit of liquid lubrication kind of can help with learning another language or just that willingness to give it a shot.
Mark Sheffels
Well,I won’t get into the story deep at all other than to say on the visit to Finland, one of the people had been on one of Eero’s tours, invited us over for a traditional Finnish sauna. Eero had helped this man a lot because Eero had the expertise on the farming, but this guy’s expertise was he’d been an Olympian and a professional hockey player. He offered to entertain us in the sauna, and I learned that you do not drink with a Finnish hockey player.
Eero Kovero
I was trying to slow down that process. That was not successful.
Mark Sheffels
To be clear, I’m not a heavy drinker.
Carol McFarland
You know, that actually does sound like it relates to trying new things on the farm, Mark. So we’ll not even have to circle back.
Mark Sheffels
That experiment was a big failure.
Carol McFarland
Well, sometimes that depends on your metrics, Mark, because you got a good story out of it.
Mark Sheffels
Yeah, it is a good story. One never to be repeated.
Carol McFarland
See, you learn things when you try new things.
Mark Sheffels
Yeah, I’m only so dumb.Idid learn from that.
Carol McFarland
So what’s the most fun thing about trying stuff on your farm, Eero?
Eero Kover
Well,IguessIlike to try things that are not commercially pushed. So when you find something that actually works it’s kind of enjoyable. Being successful in certain things, it’s fun. Meeting new people. It’s not very business-orientated, what I do, as you can tell. It’s more like an adventure. There’s always that, you’ve got to make a buck to be able to live in the Western world and pay the bills. But then there is a life quality issues and way of thinking. I mean, if you want to make the maximum amount of money out of farming, just sell the thing and move to something else. That’s the way I see it.
Mark Sheffels
Eero is very inquisitive. And those people that I know that I didn’t introduce him to just from his experimenting around on the internet. He’s always online and involved with different groups and agricultural forums and, well, Facebook. And before he ever got involved with these tours or anything else, he had a Ford Mustang in his shop that he’d acquired. So he’s always had a pretty big interest in American culture.
Carol McFarland
Well, I mean, what I heard is that you showed up in Genesee in the Saab, but you drive a Chevy in Finland.
Eero Kovero
Well, that would make another story. So I married a girl who had relatives up in Seattle, and that’s how I ended up there. And this is, I mean, we’re pushing like a hundred years ago. For the young man, you know, this was the country where all the dreams would come true, and it was only based on the information I didn’t know very much. And it still looked great.I mean northwest you go and travel around and see the landscape and a lot of friendly people especially when you get out of to Seattle. There’s some friendly people in Seattle, but you know any big city it’s a little different. You sit on the traffic three hours and get kind of pissed.
Carol McFarland
Anytime you have to pay for parking I automatically just want to leave.
Eero Kovero
So that Saab, I took it several times to visit Russ and Kathy Zenner. And there was a lot of times when Russ told me, so you just couldn’t drive an American car. And I said, I’ll drive anything that somebody gives me. Well, last seven years I’ve owned an American car. Mercury Grand Marquis, which is parked out here. And I’ve had it seven years and thirty-five thousand miles and I bought it for two thousand dollars from Seattle because nobody wants them there. One owner car. And Russ is driving a BMW these days.
Carol McFarland
Is he really?
Eero Kovero
Yeah, so he just couldn’t drive an American car! But yes, we got a collection of American cars in Finland.
Mark Sheffels
If you listen to this podcast, Russ.
Carol McFarland
He’s not here to defend himself, though. But I bet he will listen. Speaking of things that maybe are a little bit annoying, what’s the most annoying thing about trying new stuff on the farm?
Eero Kovero
Of course, the failure. Losing money.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, losing money is annoying, isn’t it?
Eero Kovero
Yeah, that’s really not the worst. I mean, you do a lot of work, you try something, and you come up with a solution that doesn’t work at all. That happens sometimes. I mean, you don’t get one acre done with whatever you thought was a good idea. Just frustrating. Maybe having a good crop and losing it because of the rain. I’ve lost one-third of the farm, one-third of the crop on bad year. It started to emerge on the head before the harvest. Nothing you can do. We just left it there. It sat until the next spring, and we seeded through it the next crop. That’s pretty frustrating.
Mark Sheffels
I mean, it’s well, in the university research first podcast, we did, Carol had mention a term that used at WSU for experiments that didn’t work out as the…
Carol McFarland
Journal of Null Results?
Mark Sheffels
And I had confessed I might have written a couple chapters in that book.
Eero Kovero
And I guess one thing that I would mention, I told you that I got a text message on my phone this morning that our wonderful subsidy system is not happy with standing stubble or the winter weed being qualified as a no-till system. There’s some problem that satellites are thinking my fields are not what I have informed, and they want me to go out on a field and take a picture so they can check. And it has to be an app on my phone and I have to sign in. And it’s a bit frustrating.
Carol McFarland
That sounds annoying too.
Eero Kovero
Yeah,I understand that they need to check when they’re sending out the money. It’s just a bit of frustrating. I’ll get it done when I get home. I’m old enough that I understand that if you wake up in a fairly good health in the morning, everything else will kind of pencil out. It is the truth. There’s good years and bad years and they’ll go by.
Carol McFarland
Well, that’s a good segue into what’s the most fun thing about being a farmer for you?
Eero Kovero
I guess, you know, a really nice harvest under the blue sky. I’ve told Mark like three days in a row, I’ll just go outside and enjoy the blue sky. It would be really fun to run a combine here at some point under the perfectly blue sky and eight percent rain. That will never happen in Finland. But harvesting a good crop, spraying a good crop, you see the crop and you’re enjoying the early morning while you’re spraying. On the farm, that would be it. And I have to mention the being able to connect with all the farmers around the world and share moments like this. I mean, I’m sure you noticed that I took a picture of this moment to save it on my memories. And for some people, it wouldn’t look that luxurious on this background here. But it is a great moment for me. I don’t need any more than this to be happy.
Carol McFarland
Well, it’s really an honor to be able to have the conversation and many conversations that have happened on this podcast. Thank you for being part of them. You as well, Mark, of course.
Mark Sheffels
You bet. It’s fun.
Carol McFarland
So we’ve got just a couple more questions as we enter the home stretch of the interview. That was a nice moment. Now I have to ask, what’s the most annoying part of living on the farm?
Eero Kovero
Having a nice collection of old cars and three miles of gravel road. Never get out of there. It’s either dusty or dirty or something like that. It’s a good life. There is times when you’re annoyed of little technical problems or your spouse or coffee. You run out of the coffee or whatever.
Carol McFarland
Dead batteries.
Eero Kovero
Yeah.
Carol McFarland
No more, though, for Mark.
Eero Kovero
Yeah. Yeah, we keep the little chargers in ours.
Carol McFarland
So did your son implement that at age six?
Eero Kovero
Well, he claims so, that he got those little chargers now and all these machines. My spouse would come up with the one option, what I don’t like, stupid people. And it doesn’t mean that you don’t figure out something, but you’re not willing to listen and you’re not willing to respect other people and their values and ideas. That’s stupid for me.
Mark Sheffels
That is a very good point, because part of this tour thing is built around Eero’s ability to not be judgmental. Things are different in ways here socially and other ways in this country, and he’s very open to being accepting of different cultures.
Carol McFarland
Like all of us saying your name wrong?
Eero Kovero
Just fine, just fine. I mean it’s, you can’t you can’t learn and see and be able to learn and understand the things on any other country or even on your country if you can’t be open, and listen. You have to listen what people say. You don’t have to agree, but you have to listen.I mean but my goal is when I travel is try not to look like a tourist because it’s the only way how you can really see the country.
Carol McFarland
I feel like you’re doing a good job with your PNW get-up right now.
Eero Kovero
At least these people who visit this country with me, they get the realistic picture, which is way different than the picture that you get from the news. There is nothing good on the news these days in Europe from the United States. And that is really not the case. There is some challenges. We all know that.
Carol McFarland
You know, one of the themes that I’m really hearing that’s very much threaded through the experience of your life, Eero, and your guys’ relationship over the last more than twenty-five years has been curiosity. I work with a lot of scientifically-minded colleagues who are also among the most curious people I know. So my question to you is, if you could ask a scientist a question, what would it be?
Eero Kovero
I guess at the moment, mine would be how far from the synthetic fertilizers we can get. I’m thinking there is a lot of learning that needs to be done in that sector. And I guess we sell fertilizer as a grain marketing cooperation, and they might not like this idea, but I think there is some research done on that sector. That would be,I guess, the top-of the-line thing for me.
Mark Sheffels
Yeah, he used the word curious, and that’s interesting. Good choice of words, because that’s the word that best describes Eero. And unlike most of us, he’s not just curious, but he follows up on that curiosity, and that’s what’s led him in a lot of different directions.
Carol McFarland
That’s high praise.
Mark Sheffels
Well, it’s sincere.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, I hear that.
Mark Sheffels
And accurate.
Carol McFarland
Well, I’m wondering if either of you have any kind of final thoughts to share on…you guys have had a very reciprocal relationship based on farming, but it sounds like it’s really translated into a lot of other spaces. So would you recommend having another country farmer pen pal?
Mark Sheffels
Well, you know, once Eero heads back, I’m not good at keeping up with email as Eero knows and things, butIalways look forward to when he’s back here and extended time when the tour group goes back and look forward to that many years to come. And when he is retired, being much younger than me, that’ll be a while, but I think he’s going to get to run that American combine. We’re going to find a place for him to run one.
Carol McFarland
Well, now that you’re retired, are you going to go visit him again?
Mark Sheffels
Could be, could be. We haven’t done a lot of international traveling, but that would be fun to do it again.
Carol McFarland
Try that sauna again?
Mark Sheffels
Nah, that’d be minus the sauna episode.
Carol McFarland
Well, no, you can do the sauna. Just maybe don’t try to keep up with the neighbor.
Mark Sheffels
Yeah, the other part of the sauna. The sauna’s fine.
Eero Kovero
I would absolutely say that it is a great thing to have international connections. I’ve been very lucky. I mean, I ended up here, so I have a good network in America, and it has been a very, very rich part of the life. Same thing happened through the no-till with the Swedish farmers, and that’s why one of the groups was a hundred percent Swedish. And, I mean, even my girlfriend’s car is from Sweden these days, and so is the combine. And we visit there every now and then with my son, and I would call them, some of those people, very good friends. And people from Iceland ended up connecting with me, which led to another thing. And we traveled there and spoke on farmer’s meeting and bought some llamas from which led to another adventure.
Carol McFarland
You have another venture? Why is this just coming up now?
Eero Kovero
Well, it’s…
Carol McFarland
A llama? With llamas too, Eero?
Eero Kovero
Yeah, we got those too. So it’s, I would advise anybody, just get over the possible problem that you are afraid to travel. A lot of Americans are kind of worried about things on the rest of the world. It is okay to travel in other countries.
Carol McFarland
But you have to leave the farm, and that’s hard.
Eero Kovero
Yeah, yeah. But there is a good test for that, I mean, if you can get away from the farm. You take the glass of water and you stick your finger on it, and you take it out. If there is a size of the hole in the water that your finger just made, then you can’t travel. If not, you’re okay to go away from the farm for a few days or weeks.
Carol McFarland
Sounds like a very accurately correlative test.
Eero Kovero
And everybody will have a testing device. So that’s not an excuse that I didn’t have it.
Carol McFarland
You have such a wealth of experiences, I think we’ve just barely skimmed the surface.
Eero Kovero
I would like to mention one thing. My father was a farmer and my mother was a teacher. And my mother always wanted me to travel. I had zero interest when I was young to travel. I didn’t want to learn any language. Then I ended up in this situation, spending at least two months out of the country every year. We had three small kids and stuff like that on the farm, and my mom was just disappointed because I’m never home. Sometimes the moms are hard to please.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. Okay, so when the listeners of this podcast are taking your advice and traveling, maybe some of them will choose to connect with you to go see cool farm tours in other places. We’ve established that Iceland might be for me as a starting point. Where would you recommend that people go?
Eero Kovero
I can’t choose the country for another person.
Carol McFarland
Would Estonia be kind of similar to here?
Eero Kovero
Yeah. On the last tour, we had a guy from Estonia farming twenty- five hundred acres. Started from zero. We can get you started there, too. I know a lot of people in different countries. You would have to trust me, which would be the scary thing to do. Or then we would have to work through what the expectations are, what you want to see, and then you just have to go somewhere and trust a lot of people. And sometimes you don’t see what you were hoping. Some stops are not successful, but hard answer to tell somebody where you should go and what you should do.
Carol McFarland
Do you take Americans?
Eero Kovero
Well, not really.
Carol McFarland
Oh, okay. Well, sorry, everyone.
Eero Kovero
We’ve had few people, just individuals visiting like Mark. Some of the people on the tour promoted the question that they should even tour the Northwest. So all these farms that we visit with get to know each other. Because there’s some, you know, apples, logging, hops, feedlots, all kinds of things.
Carol McFarland
That’s part of what we do on the podcast.
Eero Kovero
Yeah.
Carol McFarland
Here.
Eero Kovero
I haven’t done a tour for Americans, but there’s no reason why I would not. It can be done. That would be a new adventure.
Mark Sheffels
How about Finnish guys having a tour of America for Americans?
Eero Kovero
I would mention that Joanne and Lee Druffle needed to have me in the car to be able to visit the Palouse Falls.
Carol McFarland
So we’re not just throwing Russ under the bus on this episode.
Eero Kovero
Yeah, so there are things where I was needed to be around to show the area close by them.
Carol McFarland
You’re, you’re a good facilitator. Any kind of more like last words more final final closing thoughts?
Eero Kovero
Just keep on rocking, do what you love, and I guess I want to mention that I’m very grateful that I’ve been able to travel here and meet all the people, and that’s a wonderful thing. Thank you, everybody.
Carol McFarland
Well, thank you.Thank you so much, Mark, and Russ also for the nomination of this fine gentleman who is visiting us from a very different agroecosystem, a lot of different on-farm trials. It sounds like you’ve experienced where you’re at. So thank you very much for being on the podcast.
Mark Sheffels
You bet. Thanks for having us.
Eero Kovero
Thank you again.