In this episode of the On-Farm Trials podcast, we’re on Esser Farms outside of Moscow, ID. Long-time innovator Garry Esser shares his experience with many soil-health focused trials starting with the transition to direct seed and being part of Shepherd’s Grain. Listen as Garry describes more recent trials such as alternative crop rotations, including intercropping with pulses and underseeding clovers, compost tea, and how ‘unintended consequences’ led to integrated grazing on the farm. The conversation explores getting your feet on the ground and seeing what you’re looking at – and how it can be more fun to try new things with friends.
Carol McFarland
Today we’re with Mr. Gary Esser on Esser Farms outside of Moscow, Idaho. Thank you so much for having me out. Welcome to the podcast.
Gary Esser
Good to see you.
Carol McFarland
Gary, would you start out by talking a bit about yourself, your farm, and who you farm with?
Gary Esser
I farm with my son, John, currently. When I was very young, five years old, my dad farmed. Then he farmed my grandpa’s place. The family sold the farm and my dad ended up buying a hardware store in Uniontown, Washington. I grew up with my dad running a hardware store and I had five sisters, so I was out of the house first thing in the morning always with my dad. We went everywhere together, and my dad wanted to farm, so he’d go on long drives and look at farms and talk about how someday maybe we’d get to farm. And I think probably my heart for farming came from my dad, just driving around with dad and talking about farming. So when I was a sophomore in high school, my dad, who was forty-five years old, sold the hardware store and bought a hundred and thirty acres here in the Lenville area and packed six kids at the time in a forty-seven GMC truck and started over. It’s just a very courageous move and so then when I got out of high school dad needed help, so I came straight home to the farm and then over time it grew and we’ve managed to stay in it, mostly on rented ground, obviously, because we started from scratch. But we’ve gone from then till now, and I got married. You know, I got out of high school and met the woman of my dreams, the woman I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. And unfortunately, it took me ten years to find a woman who felt the same way about me. So I was a little late getting married. But we have two children, and my daughter is in Seattle, and my son John is home here farming with me and couldn’t be here today because they’re I don’t know, they might be on their way to the hospital. They’re having a baby right here somewhere soon. So that’s how we got where we are.
Carol McFarland
So you got those grandkids to ride on the tractor with, huh?
Gary Esser
Yes, very much so.
Carol McFarland
That’s great. Give them the heart for farming. Would you talk a little bit about your farming conditions here in the Lenville area, outside of Moscow?
Gary Esser
Yeah, we’re cut over timber soil, so it’s not high-yielding soil. Our average farm average of wheat is probably just under eighty bushel, and it’s colder here. WSU has had test plots here on our farm and told us that we had forty-three less growing degree days here than Pullman. So, of course, growing degree days, you know is, I don’t know exactly how it’s calculated,but it’s not as bad as it sounds, but it is colder. And probably a twenty inch rainfall, a little less than probably some of the similar areas around us because we have a little bit of a rain shadow effect from that ridge that you came over coming out here. That’s the divide from the Palouse to Clearwater drainage. And so it’s kind of a little continental divide and we’re just on this side of it, so we get summer storms that will split. Sometimes they go around us, but it’s a high clay content soil, so it’s not very forgiving, but it’s a beautiful country. And we have to be very cognizant of erosion. It’s fairly steep and has a lot of springs, natural springs, in places where you wouldn’t think a spring should be. We have one field where it was amusing. I was counting the drill swaths and it was fourteen drill swaths from the forty foot drill from the bottom to the top of the hill. And on the top of that hill there’s water running out of the ground. Some of the old timers think that the water table from Moscow Mountain pushes up in this area. So you get pretty good at dodging mud holes in the spring. And we’ve tiled some, but you just can’t get to some of those, so it’s an interesting place to farm. It’s challenging.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, it sounds interesting. I know- what I understand about this area and some of just the pedology is that as some of the soils blew in from south central Washington, one of the principles in soil science is based in physics is Stokes Law. So some of the heavier soil particles settled out closer to that origin source of the windblown dust. And so you all over here got more of the really light, finer clays and silts. So you have heavier soils, I guess.
Gary Esser
Yeah, they are heavy.
Carol McFarland
I mean, the particles aren’t heavy because that’s the whole point of the principle.
Gary Esser
You would know that. I don’t.
Carol McFarland
There’s my soil science segue for the moment. But what is your kind of standard crop rotation based on some of your samples here in your shop? Do you have a standard crop rotation?
Gary Esser
We do. We’ve been in a standard three -year crop rotation with winter grain, spring grain, legume. We’re starting to slide away from that because of Italian Ryegrass. It’s just a brutal pest. And with all of these springs that we have scattered around high on hills and places where you just can’t get to them with tile, it loves that. It can sit in those wet spots and just proliferate, right? So we’re switching our rotation a little now because of the spring grain leg, there is just nothing out there that you can use for ryegrass. But we have been in a three-year rotation. We’ve started out in no -till, probably got our first drill with our farm group that four of us got together in the late nineties, and bought a drill together so that we could try it because none of us could afford to buy one on our own. And that’s what got me started in no-till. What got me started towards no-till was a severe rain event in nineteen-eighty, April thirtieth, a hundred-year storm, inches of water in half an hour. I mean, there were homes washed away, cars washed away, boulders on the road as big as cars. It was just it was a catastrophe and I will never forget because the next morning I was out driving around and we had just finished spring seeding— and back then we were plowing and cultivating and doing you know we weren’t doing any type of no-till tillage in nineteen-eighty yet, and so our wheat fields were just flat just sheared flat. But the ground was still there. And so I came over the hill to a field that we had just planted to peas two days before that. And when I came over the hill, I looked at this field and I thought, well, it held up better than I thought because I could see the rills from a distance. And then I realized that, when I got closer, that those rills were in the wrong places. And when I got there it was actually rills of dirt that was left. And the whole rest of the field was gone. It had taken it right to the plow pan. And there were just little ridges of dirt coming off of that hill. And that area of the farm that got hit like that was probably fifteen years before it started to produce. I mean, it was just devastating. And I knew then this just wasn’t going to work. And so we started changing towards conservation tillage and have been going that direction ever since.
Carol McFarland
Wow, that sounds downright catastrophic.
Gary Esser
Yeah, we had another one actually in nineteen eighty-six on April thirtieth. By then, we had changed things enough that we didn’t lose all the soil. So, yeah.
Carol McFarland
Well, that must have felt like a small victory at least, or maybe a big one.
Gary Esser
Or maybe lucky. A lot of life is luck, right?
Carol McFarland
Actually, I caught in your how I got into no-till story was that the VICO group that we heard about from Russ Zenner earlier?
Gary Esser
Yes, it is. Yes.
Carol McFarland
What was your group’s first no -till drill that you shared?
Gary Esser
The John Deere eighteen-sixty.
Carol McFarland
Okay. Yeah. And now what drill do you run now?
Gary Esser
Same drill. It’s eighteen-ninety now. Same drill. Just little updates, but for the most part, same concept.
Carol McFarland
Okay. Can you go a little bit more into the drillspecs of what you like in a no-till drill since you’ve been?
Gary Esser
Well, we try and go out here because we’re cold, a cold climate, tight soils, we try and stay with a seven and a half inch base drill because ten— we don’t get enough heat units on the north sides, and we don’t get the competition for weeds and stuff that we would like. So we stayed with a narrow row spacing. It’s a single-disc drill. Very, very low disturbance. Too low in some instances. I feel like our soil goes anaerobic if we don’t stir it somewhere in the system. You know, the hoe drill guys are chiseling their ground with their drill. We’re trying to do one leg of the rotation, the winter wheat leg for sure. Something to get some soil showing so that ground warms up. But it’s a low disturbance drill. Because we’re full level and learning and long, steep hills, and you have to turn around and go the other way because there’s a spring up there, we’ve stayed pretty light. We have the seed box on the drill, so we’re nimble. Not loaded heavy with fertilizer and all the other stuff. So we strictly seed and we have another pass where we put our fertilizer down.
Carol McFarland
Would you describe some of your management goals and how they might be different? And that may be on a farm level, a field level, year to year.
Gary Esser
Well, obviously, to survive financially is the first step, right? I feel like we know our land as well as anybody knows the land that we farm, and so it does behoove us to stay on it. We think we can take care of it correctly. So we want to farm in a way that…that we can survive financially. And having started from scratch, that’s always been an issue, right? You have to pay attention to the finances. But also in trying to branch out, we’ve sort of taken a chunk of our farm and it’s our main rotation so that we’re sure we’re paying the bills, and then we have four smaller farms where we’re breaking away and starting to try new things. So and stretching our horizons as far as what we might be able to grow and rotations that we might be able to use. And so we know we’ve got the major part of our farm paying the bills. And then we kind of treat our farm as if there’s a hundred acres less than there actually is. And then that hundred acres is where we try stuff. And years like this where finances are tough, it’s very tempting to put that hundred acres in a crop that pays bills, you know.
Carol McFarland
I’m sure. You were part of Shepherd’s Grain?
Gary Esser
Yes.
Carol McFarland
Do you want to share a little bit about that and what got you into Shepherd’s Grain?
Gary Esser
I like the concept of being able to know your customer. You know, I had a friend ask me one time for some hard red spring wheat because they had a little flour grinder and they wanted to make some bread. And so we’re harvesting and we get to the part of the day where we’re going to load a bag for them, and all of a sudden I’m looking in the tank and making sure it’s cut and clean and really paying attention and I realized that all morning I was growing a commodity and all of a sudden I was growing food. And it was like, wow, you know, I’m growing food all day long. And I should have been paying attention to the bulk tank because somebody’s going to eat all this, right? And so I like the concept of Shepherd’s Grain where you could identity preserve and try and get it and know who your customers were. That’s what got me into that.
Carol McFarland
One of the things that’s interesting is that some of the conversations that seem to be emergent lately is this interest in a little bit more closer, shortened supply chains. And the Shepherd’s Grain model really strikes me as not just putting the onus on the farmer to take the crop from the field to the fork by themselves. It’s more of an opportunity for multiple farmers to come together and meet larger consumer demands, that sort of thing. I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that concept about, you know, vertically integrating just as one farm versus more of coming together in that more Shepherd’s Grain model.
Gary Esser
Well, we’ve always been able to do things more cooperatively, right? Local co-ops, because you as one individual farm don’t have either the wherewithal or the influence to go out and get into those markets. So I do think that the concept of working together with other farmers, it’s like our VICO group. I mean, it’s so blessed us over the years to share wisdom and share equipment and ideas. I just think it’s where we need to go if we really want to get what we want to be.
Carol McFarland
Working together.
Gary Esser
Yes.
Carol McFarland
Well, thanks for sharing a little bit about that. You’ve had a pretty long farming career at this point, and it sounds like you’ve tried a lot of things over the course of your career. Do you want to talk a little bit about the experiments that you currently have going on on your farm?
Gary Esser
Well, yeah, we’ve currently have, we’ve struggled to get yellow blossom, sweet clover, and clovers growing in our traditional underneath garbs. And I’ll get into that later on some other questions, but we like to grow alfalfa under a garbanzo bean crop. Clovers have not functioned so well under that. This year, we had a mix of yellow blossom, sweet clover, and red clover that did survive under the garbanzo beans and grazing. Half of the field was grazed. And we have a fairly decent yellow blossom sweet clover crop out there. And I’m pretty excited about that because I had one way back shortly after nineteen-eighty. I planted one and it got as tall as the lights on our D-six tractor. I mean, it just got really big. And so I’m excited about seeing how big it gets, you know, if it gets big like it did back then or not. Yeah.
Carol McFarland
That’s exciting. Is that more of a cover crop or are you growing for seed?
Gary Esser
No, it’s a cover crop. We’ve grown red clover for seed, white Dutch clover for seed. Red clover is the most robust and grows the best here. Very, very difficult to get bee growers to pollinate it. They don’t like it. Apparently their snouts can’t, they get in there far enough to trip it. And so it pollinates the clover but they don’t get any honey. White dutch they love but we’ve struggled to get white dutch to grow like red clover will. So clovers are really good for the ground but you have to lose a year of production in order to get them established and so that’s why our alfalfa is working because we can get it established under garbanzo beans.
Carol McFarland
That’s a fun idea, kind of an intercropping.
Gary Esser
Yes.
Carol McFarland
Now, just to clarify, red clover and crimson clover are different.
Gary Esser
I believe so.
Carol McFarland
Yeah?
Gary Esser
Yeah. I’m not a clover expert. We grow it, but I’m not an expert. I’m actually not an expert at anything.
Carol McFarland
I’m struggling to believe that, but I appreciate the humility. So now where did you get the cows?
Gary Esser
Can I tell you the story about how we decided we wanted to try cows?
Carol McFarland
Sure, please do.
Gary Esser
When we visited before this started, I told you that most of our trials happened because of something that we didn’t plan. They were just something that happened. We planted a winter canola crop on a farm. We talked to Jack Brown. He said, you can plant it early. We struggle out here because these tight soils dry out really fast in the summer. So you’re supposed to plant canola first of August. By then it’s so dry, you can’t get it established. So Jack said, oh no, you can plant canola early. It’s very determ+inate. It won’t bolt. So we planted it, oh, first, second week of July. And this canola got huge, just huge. It was just beautiful, just massive. And so we had put thirty pounds of nitrogen down on that field before we planted it because we weren’t sure what was going to happen. And then we went into winter and the elk came. And because we’re cut over timber soil, we’re close to the canyons. I mean, hundreds, hundreds of elk. And they just demolished it. Just totally demolished it. The McGregor field rep was out in the spring and he called it our elk feedlot. It was gone. They had pulled it out by the roots. And so we weren’t quite sure what to do, but we went and we sprayed the grasses out. Which was interesting because a friend of mine, Wayne Jensen, had said one time he thinks canola stimulates grasses. And it certainly did. There were grasses everywhere. So we sprayed them out. We took a soil sample. And the soil sample said that we had a hundred and seventy units of N, plenty of phosphate. And we’re going, well, this can’t be. We didn’t put that out there. And so we decided- we took another soil sample, said the same thing. So we trusted it and planted a barley crop. And the barley crop was way above average. Interestingly enough, rather than lodging in the corners, it lodged in odd places; we’re not sure if the canola brought the phosphate up and deposited it through the leaves. We’re not sure, and we don’t know where the nitrogen all came from. It couldn’t, the elk manure, I don’t think would have converted that fast. Anyway, a great barley crop. The next year, the garbanzo bean crop was four hundred pounds above any of our other fields. And this is not one of our best fields. It’s just an average field. Same way on the following wheat crop, way above anything else around it. And this continued on for… five, six, seven years on that field, still today. And another thing, we never have had to put another grass herbicide on there. It’s like it stirred up all the grasses and we killed them and we didn’t start using a grass herbicide until last year. And that was six, seven years ago.
Carol McFarland
Wow.
Gary Esser
So something really good happened in that. And you could just tell the crops just look good. So we thought, well, this grazing thing. This manure thing might be something that we want to get into. And that’s what got us into looking to do cows. I sat in on a grazing conference and realized that you need to be passionate to raise cows. And you need to be. I’m passionate about growing crops, about growing food. And so we decided we needed to partner up with a cattleman, someone who was passionate about cows.
Carol McFarland
Likes to chase them on Sundays so you don’t have to.
Gary Esser
That’s right. And it’s a wonderful system because when we work with Carson Egland, he’s really good. And when his cows are out, we just text him, say, Carson, your cows are out. We keep doing whatever we’re doing. We don’t even worry about it. So he’s been bringing cows in and grazing for us. And It’s working really good for him. He’s getting good gain. We can’t do massive acres of it because there’s, again, we haven’t figured out how to make that profitable in the short term. Long term, we think we’re seeing results.
Carol McFarland
So you’ve just made me have a lot of questions. Not the ones I sent you ahead of time. I’m really interested because, you know, everybody’s like people that are interested in, you know, the integrated grazing. One of the things I hear is, oh, now I want to do cows. I just tore all my fences out a couple of years ago. So how about some of the infrastructure? Maybe water isn’t as much of an issue if you’ve got springs all over the place anyway?
Gary Esser
No, water is huge. It’s huge. We’re blessed. For whatever reason, we had springs and mud holes, and we turned them into ponds on five different farms, four different farms, I guess it is. And so we have these ponds. So all of our grazing has gone on on those four farms where they have access to a pond. The one year when Carson was first here, he had one hundred heads of cows. It was beardless barley and forage oats together, and the cows were up to their chest in it. And we didn’t have a pond there, but we had some springs that were running pretty hard. And I told Carson, I said, well, if you run out of water, it won’t be a problem. We have a three thousand-gallon water tank on our truck, and we’ll bring that down. And he said, well, that’ll last a day. I was stunned. I said, are you kidding me? And he said, no, they’ll drink twenty-seven gallons a day when it’s hot per cow. And I was just stunned. It takes an incredible amount of water. So we have these four farms that have ponds, and all of our grazing is going on on those because of water.
Carol McFarland
It sounds like you’ve been doing this for a few years and the relationship you have with your cattlemen. What are some of the best practices that you’ve learned? I mean, do you guys do any kind of isolation of the cows before? So, you know, they’re not bringing in new weed seeds? Is there anything that, yeah, any best practices? Is there stuff that maybe you put into a mix that they shouldn’t eat? Hopefully that’s…
Gary Esser
Well we haven’t done that we we’ve kind of tried to stick to things that we know the cows will eat we haven’t gotten too prolific with the mixes like in some grain manure mixes because, in the past Carson’s cows he said they’ve they eat it and they they don’t do well on it. You might have a great mix of different varieties of crops, but it isn’t really what the cows want. This year, we had clover under barley and the beardless barley and forage oats get big and lots of food. And so that’s been where we’ve been going. I’m not an expert on this, right? We’re just practicing.The only thing that we have requested is no dewormers and that sort of stuff because we don’t want that on our land. We’re trying to stay away from fungicides and things. We’re trying to get the biology going, not pound it.
Carol McFarland
Great. Is there any other definite must do’s when you have that kind of relationship with a cowboy or definitely don’t dos? As you kind of form that relationship or sustain that relationship.
Gary Esser
You have to be careful when you have them graze the field right around your house. And then Carson came in and pulled some yearlings out. And didn’t realize that he had pulled one from a mama that was still there, and she bawled all night. And Connie told me that either the cows were going to go or something. She was pretty frustrated because we couldn’t sleep because it stood right outside our bedroom window. But it was kind of funny. It was kind of funny. But no. So far, working with Carson has been great. He works so hard. I mean, the guy. He can come in and fence a hundred acres in a day. He’s just a phenomenal worker and takes good care of his cows, and so we don’t even worry about it. We just come back and then focus on what we can do with it after he’s gone.
Carol McFarland
Awesome. That sounds like a good thing you’ve got going on.
Gary Esser
Yes, it is very much so, yeah.
Carol McFarland
What do the landlords think about your investments in the longer-term gains with the soil health?
Gary Esser
You know, most of them are, well, all of them actually. Some of them are not here, so they can’t see it, but we send them pictures. And most of them are all on board. They’re excited about it. They want to see their assets taken care of also. But you also have to remember that, you know, probably the year where you’re running cows, you’re paying rent and not getting a lot of income. It’s just that balance, that trade-off.
Carol McFarland
Okay. Great. Well, thanks for sharing that. Is that maybe a good segue into how do you determine ROI on a new practice? Then we’ll get into a little bit more about the details of some of your other trials.
Gary Esser
It’s difficult, right? Because return on investment is easy. You know, this is how much money you made. This is how much you spent. And so you could go, well, that didn’t work. But as in the elk field, we grazed a field down below Russ Zenner’s house. And we grazed a hundred acres. And we usually on our research so to speak, we leave a portion of the field and do something different. And that on that field we raised garbs and flax mixed together on the other side and so we had cows going on one side and then garbs and flax across the ditch. And so we grazed the one field and then we harvested the garbs and flax which was, it was kinda exciting because I think the yield was there, but we couldn’t find any place to put it. So we ended up with it all in trucks. And then Uniontown was willing to do it in the winter when they got done with their other responsibilities. And so they cleaned it for us, but they, you know, when they cleaned the garbs, the garbs came out clean, but all the garb trash went in with the flax. And so then they had to clean the flax. And so the cleaning charges wiped out any gains that you may have gotten in yield from the synergy from the two crops. But it was fun to try. And so we haven’t quite decided. We would need some on-farm storage if we were going to try very much of that. Anyway, back to the return on investment. Both fields went in wheat. And were just good, but average for the year. Then the next year, the garbs were, no, it was spring barley. Because we were in a three -year rotation. Spring barley was phenomenal. And both sides of the ditch were phenomenal. And so then we went to garbs. It was surprising because the garb flax field, the garbs were much taller, beautiful. As a matter of fact, on our group tour, we went down there and looked at it, and we’re just going, man, that side, you could just see it visually. And the grazed side didn’t look as good. But the grazed side at harvest time was five hundred pounds over the other side. There’s a phenomenal yield of garbs for this year. And that’s typically what we’ve seen when we’ve run cows three or four years down the road. The change starts to happen, not the first. So back to return on investment, how do you look ahead and know the value that you’re getting down the road? And so it’s difficult to… You’ve got to survive now, but maybe we’re sacrificing now so that there can be profit in the future, right?
Carol McFarland
Mm -hmm. Oh, you said a lot just now. I really appreciate your talking about the garbs and flax intercropping. I mean, even just the cleaning charges kind of wiped out maybe any gains you would have gotten from a yield bump, the land equivalency ratio and all that.
Gary Esser
Right, all that stuff, yes.
Carol McFarland
So, yeah, no, that’s, it sounds like, well, and then there, you know, I know one thing many people talk about also is time, you know, and how that calculates. So it’s hard to put that on the spreadsheet sometimes as well.
Gary Esser
It is, yes.
Carol McFarland
Great. Well, so how do you get inspiration for new trials?
Gary Esser
You know, most of the time it’s been through observation of something that we’ve seen. When we moved here back in, my dad sold the hardware store in nineteen-sixty-eight,and we moved over here in sixty-eight, sixty-nine, a cold, cold winter. But the little place that Dad bought there was a three-corner that went up in the neighbor’s field, just jogged up and back downto the ditch. It was miserable. So he told the neighbors, why don’t you just farm across? It was like two or three acres. You guys just farm that because we don’t want to cross a ditch and go up there and farm that, and it fit right into their hillside. When we moved to the farm that Dad bought, it was in vetch. It had been planted to vetch, and we had to plow it down. Interestingly enough, two or three years ago, we were standing on a hill in our field and looking over at the neighbor’s field. And they’ve been farming that since nineteen-seventy. And that three-corner was stood out like a triangular patch in the middle of their field. Looked totally different. And you’re going, something that happened prior to nineteen-sixty-eight or maybe that vetch crop is still visible today. So the things we’re doing today could be impactful years down the road. So observation. I would say trying to observe things is the key to it. You know, Confucius says… The best fertilizer for the soil is the footsteps of the owner. And I feel like in agriculture today, you know, five hundred horse tractors, stereo, heat, we get disconnected from the land. And so we don’t spend enough time just quietly out there walking on it, paying attention and listening and seeing what’s actually going on out there. You know, when our grandpa ran a foot burner, he knew every acre intimately, right? Because he could feel it. Even when I was young in the cat tractors with a plow, youknow, every field has its own personality. And you knew them. And now, you know, these tractors don’t even flinch when they hit a hard spot. But anyway, most of our trials have come from observing something. And so our look for green manure started with that triangular patch. And then we were seeding alfalfa because it was good for the ground. And we hay it for a couple years. We’ve seen great results for reduced fertilizer and herbicide use after alfalfa. And have been pretty profitable on hay. We have to keep it at a level where we can we just have some good growers that buy and we just try and keep where we have our market and stay there. But one year I was planting alfalfa and I finished seeding the garbs and I was seeding my alfalfa and I got down to the end of the field and I thought, wow, this would sure farm better if I just curved this mark up around here. So I probably seeded two acres of alfalfa across the garb field thatI had seeded. I told John, when you put the sharpened sandcore down on the garbs, don’t spray that corner because I’m going to put alfalfa out there. I think I told him that. Either I forgot to tell him that or he forgot that I told him to do that, and he went ahead and put the herbicide on it. So it was only two acres. But we got a lot of rain and I thought that would be just a goner. And I went out there in the summer, I was walking out there and the alfalfa was growing under the garbs just fine. And I was going, wow. I asked my field man, he said, well, that’s risky, but it worked this time. So because that happened, the next year I planted twenty-five acres of garbs with alfalfa under it.
Carol McFarland
On purpose.
Gary Esser
On purpose. And we got lots of rain and we got a great alfalfa crop. And so we’re probably, so we’ve been doing that now for five or six years. And this year we had a beautiful stand of alfalfa. When we cut the garbs, you’d swear it was an alfalfa field. We’re probably sacrificing a couple hundred pounds of garbs because of the extra crop growing in there. But we aren’t losing that year of production to get a green manure crop started. And then we can hay that a couple years. And so we don’t get a break in the income stream, right? So observing. I would say that’s been the biggest. The elk thing on my dad’s. Just paying attention. I was at a conference just last week. The young man at the end of one day said, try to see what you’re looking at. And I thought, well, that’s interesting. I was driving back and forth because John and I were expecting a baby and I wasn’t sure I would need it at home. And if you think about that, see what you’re looking at. That’s pretty profound, really, because that’s really living in the moment, because how often do we really see what our eyes are looking at? I mean, our heads are always somewhere else, right?
Carol McFarland
There’s a lot to buzz up in there these days, for sure.
Gary Esser
Yes.
Carol McFarland
A lot of noise.
Gary Esser
A lot of noise, yeah.
Carol McFarland
But yeah, I mean, even just like hear what you’re listening too, you know. There’s a lot of, was that the Soil Craft Conference?
Gary Esser
It was.
Carol McFarland
Nice. Did You like it?
Gary Esser
I did.
Carol McFarland
Nice. Thank you. So where do you go to learn more about the topic before trying something new?
Gary Esser
Conferences like that. I read a lot. I’ve always liked to read. I had a metanoia moment in the early eighties and quit watching TV. I decided it was a waste of my life, and so I have a lot of free time in the evenings, and so I like to read. One of the biggest has been our VICO group. We transitioned somewhere along the line. We all were working for no-till, and then we realized that no-till is the answer for saving soil, but it’s not necessarily the answer for making the soil healthier because our product use was going up trying to control weeds and stuff. And so then we all started focusing on well how can we move this towards something that actually makes the soil healthier? That we can save it, yes. But we also got to keep it healthy right so we, that group being able to bounce ideas off of each other and we would have meetings about it in the winter, and we’d all try something different and go on a tour, and it’s been a great educational experience. Other farmers, best thing you can do.
Carol McFarland
I mean, you’re not going to hear different from me. So what do you monitor in your trials throughout the season? What do you look at when you’re trying to see what you look at?
Gary Esser
Well, a lot of that depends on what your trials, what it’s for. You know, if we’re trying some lime and some products like that, trying to deal with pH. If I’m trying a lime trial, probably I’m going to be watchingfor pH very closely. If it’s reduced nutrients, we really would like to try and grow some of our fertilizer so that’s what we tried. And we’re trying the alfalfa under garb idea and then leaving the alfalfa grow in the subsequent wheat crop, just seed and wheat into that and let them grow together over winter and then take them out with a herbicide in the wheat. Hoping that we could get some nitrogen boost out of that alfalfa. This year because of the long, cold spring, and we couldn’t spray wheat because it was freezing every night. By the time we got to spray the wheat, the alfalfa was as tall as the wheat was. And so there was a yield drag from that. So anyway, I guess in answer to your question, we monitor whatever it is we do, which is frustrating. We do Haney tests, soil tests, especially in the soil health side where we’re trying to monitor. And I’m just telling you, we had a field here above my house. When we went out to do the Haney test, the guy came in and said, I don’t know what’s going on out there, but he said, I haven’t been on any ground like that this year. And so we could see it. And when we harvested it, it was phenomenal. And when we got our yield maps back, this piece on top of the hill, specifically where we had grazed, we actually grazed a graze crop, and we had canola under it. So it went from graze to winter canola. Then the elk came in and pounded the smithereens out of it. And then it had been the garbs. And then, but that wheat crop on the yield monitor showed up right to the line where that graze crop was and and it was forty-seven bushel above the field around it. It was huge
Carol McFarland
Well especially like your relative numbers, I mean.
Gary Esser
That’s huge. Yeah it was yeah it was it was it was incredible and the combines were just filling up just every pass. You’re getting full. And we took soil tests and Haney tests, and none of that showed up. So there’s a, and this is the most frustrating thing when you talk about monitoring things, right? There is no test that picks up. Every farmer knows this. Every farmer will go out, and they’re going to have one field that just grows. You don’t know why it grows good, it looks good, it’s happier than all the rest of your fields and you can soil test them, and you can Haney test them, and you can send them to Elaine Ingram and Soil Food web, and they all say oh nope they’re both the same. But they are not both the same because there’s an energy component, a life right? There’s a and we don’t know how to measure that. And it’s frustrating because you don’t know whether it worked or not. Like the cows, if I measured the next year, I’d go, that didn’t work. But then four years down the road, here comes the bump up in yield, right? Things start getting better. So, yeah.
Carol McFarland
There’s still room for more questions.
Gary Esser
Oh, my goodness. Yeah.
Carol McFarland
It’s just unbelievable. I mean, the field of microbiology is just bursting at this point. The way technology enables the different tools, genetic analyses, that sort of thing. I mean, maybe there will be a tool. Maybe not the energetic component tool. That might be a little different.
Gary Esser
I was at a conference one time, and Arden Anderson said he’s a medical doctor and a soil agronomist. And he said, if you blood test a human being that just died, they test exactly the same as someone who’s alive. And there’s a substantial difference between those two people, right?
Carol McFarland
Wow.
Gary Esser
And so I think that’s what we run into, you know ,where that energy component, we can see it happening our fields and doggone if we can figure out what’s, I wish we could figure out a way to measure it and go, oh, well, that’s a, if we could apply some gypsum it’d fix this you know. But it’s not the way it works.
Carol McFarland
Oh, Iheard you said you tried some lime on your fields. You want to talk a little bit about that?
Gary Esser
Well yeah. pH is like everyone else’s are going down. So we have switched to— I’m trying to travel off of the concept of your credit card, right? You get a month where you go well, I didn’t do much this month. I bought a few little things. And then you get your stupid credit card bill and it’s six-hundred bucks and you’re going, where’d that all come from? And so we’re hoping that rather than have to go out and put on tons of lime, we can do a bunch of little things that will add up to more than we had intended in the first place. So we’ve switched more to a soft white winter wheat, barley rotation because it uses a lot less fertilizer than hard red winter, dark northern spring, right? And so rather than pour lime out there and then pour fertilizer out there which— and then we’ve also switched to gypsum for our sulfur source— which was another trial. We tried it on a couple fields for a couple years and it worked good, so now all of our sulfur goes down as gypsum so it’s soil neutral. So we’re trying to make little decisions that will help our pH, and then also put lime out. And so far, we haven’t really seen a yield bump from the lime, but we haven’t done enough of it. I’m hoping again that that will show up down the road.
Carol McFarland
Well, it sounds like you’ve been taking some really big steps to not accelerate the decline more than necessary, so that’s a big deal. And yeah of course the rate makes a big difference I expect in you know how much you see the needle move on your actual pH number. So I look forward to maybe hearing more about the direction of that in the future.
Gary Esser
We did a lime trial right out here where I can see it out the front window of my house in strips. And one particular strip had heavy lime.
Carol McFarland
What sort of rate was that?
Gary Esser
Oh, I think it was three ton or something like that. Something that, you know, we try not to even try practices that we don’t think we can scale up to the farm. I’m sure we can get lots of things to work on an acre, but what good did that really do? So we try and try things on our farm that we think we could do on every acre, because then it’s going to have an impact. But we did this lime trial, and every year that strip shows up. For a short time, sometime in the spring, I’ll be able to see that lime strip. We’ve never picked it up on a yield monitor. But you can see it.
Carol McFarland
So I mentioned your guys’ kind of heavier soils and the bit about Stokes Law and the windblown loss and all of that. Part of my master’s research was in soil pH and buffer testing to determine how much lime to apply. I remember collecting soils out in your neighborhood, and they were some of the highest recommended lime rates in the region because your cation exchange capacity out here is just bonkers.
Gary Esser
It is.
Carol McFarland
And so that’s great when you’re trying to, you know, to camouflage the decline because you’ve got all those sites to absorb all the acidity. It’s maybe less nice when you’re having to replace them all with calcium carbonate and neutralize it. So, yeah, having a really high cation exchange capacity really drives up how much lime you need.
Gary Esser
Well, there are people that are getting pH changes, and there are researchers who say that if you can gradually balance your soil out, the pH will correct itself. And so we’re hoping that we can do it. We think lime is going to be a part of it, but we’re hoping we can farm in such a way also. We haven’t found that yet. That’s what we’re hunting for.
Carol McFarland
Well,I mean, I’m going to give you a big nod for, you know, you’re thinking about it and like, how do we put down less nitrogen and still get our cash crop? And yeah, just trying to not accelerate it, like changing the sulfur source makes a lot of sense from what I can see. Great. So what’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned from a past trial?
Gary Esser
You know, the winter canola has been one that’s been unintended consequences, and we’re not sure what it is. Unfortunately, that field that performed the way we grazed it, it had winter canola. It also had white Dutch clover in its history. And so here you are with this great result, and you have no idea which one of those things did it. But this is what makes it all fun, right?
Carol McFarland
We call that confounding factors.
Gary Esser
Yes, and we’re just totally confounded. We’re good at that. We don’t have a lot of answers. In all of our years of trying stuff, we have multitudes of questions, not a lot of answers. But there are things that the garbs under, or the, excuse me, the alfalfa underneath garbs has been big on our farm because it allows us to bring a green manure crop into our system without losing a year of production. And we have tended to, our philosophy here over the years, to try and grow things that the Creator intended to grow in this environment. We’ve tried Sudangrass. We’ve done standalone Sudangrass. It froze on the third of August, black as coal.
Carol McFarland
The third of August?
Gary Esser
Third of August.
Carol McFarland
That is a few fewer growing degree days than Pullman, isn’t it?
Gary Esser
The university had Sudangrass in their test plots on our farm, on that research plot. And it died on about the twenty-sixth of June, froze. Our garbs in the field right around it were just fine. And so those crops— and we’ve seeded them in the cover mixes in the past. And in these clay soils,they just don’t grow. They just struggle. So we try to stick to alfalfas and clovers and things that are, you know, the alfalfa will be growing in February and March when nothing else is growing. So it brings life into the soil. This past year we tried sorghum. Again, unintended consequences. We were going to try and harvest it to see if we could get sorghum seed.
Carol McFarland
Like grain sorghum?
Gary Esser
Yes. And so, man, it took forever. It just wouldn’t get going. But when it did, it did. And it got big. And it was beautiful, but we couldn’t get it right. We harvested it. We pulled the combine out of the shed late October and went and cut it. But we couldn’t keep it. Just would not get right. But it was huge, and it looked like great food. And so when we’re grazing, the cows can’t keep up with our grazing mix. Carson does a really good job of putting them in a section, keeping them there until they eat it down, then moving them. But it starts out growing them. So we’ve had to go in and swath. half of the grazing mix and put it in windrows, and then they just eat the windrows. And we stop the protein. We hold the protein and stuff by doing that. But we thought, well, so next year we’re going to try our barley-oat-clover mix for the cows, but we’re goin to plant the other half to sorghum because we’re thinking about the time the barley-oat mix is wearing out, the sorghum is finally going to get going. And we might not have to, we might get rid of that swathing trip. And Carson kept, he wanted to put his cows on it because he could see it. And he’s going, boy, there’s a lot of food out there. So, yeah, that’s next year’s, that’s not the result we were looking for in sorghum, but that’s probably where we’re going to go with it.
Carol McFarland
You have to let us know how it went.
Gary Esser
Yeah. We have a bone pile full of failures.
Carol McFarland
Unintended consequences.
Gary Esser
Unintended consequences.
Carol McFarland
Since you are a seasoned veteran of on-farm trials, how do you decide where to put your trials? Do you put them out for the neighbors to see? I’ve heard you like to put stuff near your house, including falling cows.
Gary Esser
That’s the downside. One of your questions I saw on the paper was what annoys you, and it’s having, not enough fields away from the county road. So you can do this stuff.
Carol McFarland
Oh, you’re a back forty?
Gary Esser
Yeah, we need more of those. It depends on what, again, depends on what we’re trying. But we have fields that we try and look for fields where we can split and have long runs where yield monitors will pick it up. Because we tried the weigh wagon thing. We built a little weigh wagon. And boy, in the middle of harvest, you know, rain’s coming, you’re pushing hard. It just didn’t want to stop and dink around with dumping in a weigh wagon. And it just drove me crazy. So now we try and pick fields where either we can, we know they’re fairly comparable side to side, or if we split the field, it’s in such a way that we can, we tried some compost tea this year. I mean, we’ve done it a couple times, but this year we actually split a field and did it, and then we can pick it up on our yield monitors. And so that’s sort of how we, and again, it depends on what we’re trying to do.
Carol McFarland
Wait, okay, hold on, back up. Now,did you pick it up on your yield monitor, the compost tea?
Gary Esser
No.
Carol McFarland
Okay.
Gary Esser
We did not. But we also put less fertilizer on that side. And we didn’t pick up a yield drop either. But again, bad planning. Bad planning. Should have put the compost tea on with no other changes.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, confounding factors. Got to isolate the variable.
Gary Esser
That’s right. That’s right. But we’re farmers, right? We just want to do this stuff.
Carol McFarland
Hey, fair enough.
Gary Esser
We don’t want to. But we got to get better at isolating. We’re not very good at that.
Carol McFarland
That’s okay. I mean, asking and answering questions on a working farm is a whole different thing than doing it in a lab or a research farm, for sure. Did you brew your own compost tea?
Gary Esser
We did.
Carol McFarland
Yeah? Do you want to talk a little bit about it? See, you’ve been trying so many things. We’re going to be here for a little while still. Would you be up for sharing a little bit about your experience brewing compost tea?
Gary Esser
Sure. It’s logistically kind of difficult because it takes twelve to, well,it depends on the temperature, and we’re not professionals at this, but they wanted to brew at least twelve hours. And so the Jensen’s and us, Eric and Wayne and us own this tea brewer together, and it’s their place. So we take a load of water over, we put it in in the evening, we get it brewing, and then we come home, and we go about our business. And the first time we did it, John came back in the morning with two hundred acres worth of compost tea that we were going to put down as a starter fertilizer. And it’s got a shelf life, right? It’s not going to last forever.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, how much sugar did you put in it?
Gary Esser
We didn’t have a lot of sugar in it. We had the worm casings and the other stuff in it. So it had molasses in it, bags of molasses and other stuff. So John says, well, this will do two hundred acres and we need to get it out today. And it’s a starter fertilizer in my drill, right? The old guy’s going, wow, I gotta work pretty hard to get rid of this today, you know? And so then, then the next time we got it, you know, it’s water. And so the drill froze up and I couldn’t get the drill going and couldn’t get it thawed out and we’re on a time schedule. And so it’s had its issues. But we did half a field and then we did not do the other half. And the biggest observation I had was the local co-ops’ field man called me and said, what’d you do on half of that field, that barley field? It’s just different than the other half. See, and that’s—
Carol McFarland
That’s somebody who’s paying attention.
Gary Esser
And it’s where, you know, it’s something’s happening because you’re, you know, we’re biased. We want to see it work. So we’re going to be looking for any little thing. He didn’t know anything about it. And you’re going, oh, so what we see is probably real. You know, so, yeah.
Carol McFarland
Oh, that’s intriguing.
Gary Esser
Yeah. But again, logistically, it’s kind of rough because you got to make it and you gotta do it and you got to. So we switched towards more now spraying it out so you can put two hundred acres out in a hurry.
Carol McFarland
Fair enough. Well, I mean, really,that’s a big part of making a practice work is making it work logistically.
Gary Esser
That’s correct.
Carol McFarland
That’s at least my understanding of it. You were talking about how you split that field and did a nice kind of paired comparison. And you even did a blind study in terms of getting some feedback on that from the field man. How do you mark your trials or keep track of them?
Gary Esser
Again, like if we’ve got a field like I did with the garb flax and the grazing, it was split by a ditch. We’re trying to go with bigger stuff we can pick up on yield monitors now. If we split a field, like with the compost tea and that sort of thing, GPS. We mark them with the GPS, and so we can keep an eye on them. No, we’re not doing flags. Well, we’ve done a little bit of flag strip trials, long ones, with the weighwagons, and we learned some things on nutrient management, but it was too time-consuming.
Carol McFarland
Great. What’s The biggest barrier to trying new things on the farm?
Gary Esser
Oh, probably money, right? I mean, you want to try things that you can scale up to the whole farm. And so that, I would say, and just the idea process of pretty much just a farmer, right? So I don’t really understand this ion ties up that ion and this does this and this chelates that product. And you go to all these things and you hear all this stuff and you go, wow, this is pretty much over my head. But I do know what I see out there. And so it’s a struggle to know how to go about trying it because we know so little. And man, I’m just telling you, every year I get older, I know less.
Carol McFarland
I’m going to discourage the use of “just a farmer” on this podcast. Really, because there’s a lot of different ways to know things. And all of us curious people, I think, always have more questions. There is a lot to know, especially in complex systems.
Gary Esser
It’s so complex.
Carol McFarland
Oh my gosh, the rabbit hole that is soil chemistry is, but I think that’s why there’s, there’s room for collaborations too. And asking and answering some of these questions, like you said before, when we work in a community, we can learn things better together. So what’s one thing you would really like to try, but can’t right now because of some, some sort of limitation, whether it’s equipment, time, lease agreement, precip, what’s something that you’d just really like to try, but haven’t been able to?
Gary Esser
We would really like to try the— I don’t even know what you call it. I’m not really interested in organic, but I’m very interested in getting away from using so many products. So I would love to figure out a way to try the more natural system of growing your fertilizer and reducing herbicide use. Not organic, but with a leaning in that direction so that you could not be, I guess what I’m trying to say is I don’t want to be an organic food grower. Because I don’t want to grow food that only rich people can afford. I want to grow food that everybody can afford. But I want to farm in that manner where we’re not pounding the ground so hard with all of these products. There’s so much information and so little knowledge on what the truth is. So many products that will turn bedrock into horse manure mulch overnight you know and you’re just going oh mercy you know and so want to go there but don’t even know where to go.
Carol McFarland
It sounds like you’ve gotten a good system over the years for being able to try things to be able to understand what works from those things and understand what works for your operation on your place.
Gary Esser
Yes.
Carol McFarland
What’s the most fun thing about trying stuff on the farm?
Gary Esser
Oh, just the discovery. I don’t need to travel because I can see new things right here without even leaving the place. Just the whole process of planning something. And watching it grow and observing what happens. And it’s something you’ve never seen before because you’ve never grown like the sorghum this year. I mean, it was just intriguing to watch that stuff grow. And then it started tasseling. We’re all down there taking pictures going, well, this probably could have got on the internet and Googled it, but it’s more fun to watch it grow.
Carol McFarland
Way more fun.
Gary Esser
Yeah. I’ve always loved, you know, from the time I was really young, I wanted to farm. I’ve always loved farming. So growing things and being out in the field and listening to nature do its thing, it’s, yeah, it’s great. I love it. Well, you know, science is the art of discovery, right? And studying the knowns that we have to try and figure out what we don’t know. And so I think we all need to be citizen scientists. We need to be doing those things because no one knows better. Each farmer— I mean, if anybody would actually want to listen to this podcast with me on it, that would be surprising— but if they were, they know, they know what their land needs. And so they’re the best scientists you could get. But if I was going to ask a scientist who was trained in soil science, which there aren’t that many. It would be, how can we come up with a system of measurement so that we could try lime or compost tea or green manure and immediately have some indicator that the soil’s energy component has gone up because you’ve done this? Because soil tests just don’t show it. As a matter of fact, some of our highest yields have had the worst Haney tests. And the worst soil tests, and you’re just going, it’s confounding. So for us to move forward, we need to know if what we’re doing is right. Because as I get older I don’t have a lot more years to make mistakes. So I really would like to move in a direction. And so if science could come up with it. I’d love to have some little kit that you could bring to the farm and put your soil in there. It would spit out and say, yeah, I’m happier than the soil where you didn’t do that. But so far, they don’t have that.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, there’s been a lot of conversations around the soil health indicators.I know aggregate stability is a really big one. It’s one of my favorites because that kind of— anyway, I’ll stop now.
Gary Esser
No, that’s good. That’s good. That’s What we need to understand, right? But I don’t think we’ve looked there. A lot of research has been poured into yield, so I think we need to focus differently.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, I think there’s groups trying to really try to figure out what soil health looks like and how soil health looks different in different places, too. How does the Cornell Soil health test do out here? Or like in Lind, Washington, how does that soil health look different than your soil health? Yeah, there’s projects in Washington. The Soil Health Institute has been working at that. So there’s people trying, but I appreciate the question. If you could change one thing about ag right now, what would it be?
Gary Esser
I don’t know if a change is necessary, but I view it as necessary. I think that we have technology— drones, infrared, GPS, and I think that it’s all wonderful, wonderful tools, but it does not replace boots on the ground. And if I could with my son—
Carol McFarland
And grandkids.
Gary Esser
Yes. I encourage them to park all that stuff and get out in the field and watch and look and listen and observe what’s going on. Because a lot of times the tests and the technology just doesn’t tell the answers.You got to be out there on the ground. And if I could change one thing in farming, it would be to encourage farmers to be out on their land. Paying attention to what’s going on.
Carol McFarland
See what they’re looking at?
Gary Esser
Yeah. See what they’re looking at. Yeah.
Carol McFarland
That’s great, Gary. Really appreciate you being on the podcast. I’m sure we will have people listening to it. You’ve got a lot of really great experiences to share. You’ve really tried some pretty fun things and it sounds like you’ve got a good system for it. Again, really appreciate you taking the time to have me out to your place today and sharing your experience.
Gary Esser
Thanks for being with me.