In the first full episode of On-Farm Trials Season 2 Jason Bishop of Living Heritage Farm in Edwall, Washington, describes his trials building life on the farm with alternative crop rotations, intercropping, and a range of cover cropping strategies that include cows jumping fences- all while looking both forward and backward for inspiration to further the farm’s management goals.
Jason Bishop
Yeah. So in the last few years I’ve been trying to focus on I just need to farm well. There’s just some simple things that, mistakes that I’ve made that my dad probably wouldn’t have made, that I need to, I just need to do the basics. I need to keep my machines maintained so I can do things at the proper time. Those are the sort of things that I need to really dial in on so that I don’t make these mistakes. Like, for example, I know you like to talk about drills on your podcast.
Carol McFarland
Yeah.
Jason Bishop
My drill is an old flexi coil, hoe drill, and it usually does a great job. But this last year, I didn’t dial it in to get good seed depth for my small seeded crops. And so I had it crowned in the middle. So I had stuff that didn’t even germ because I was just praying for the rain to soak it in, because I knew my drill needed another day or two, and I was thinking, I’ll just power through it. Surely it’s going to rain, but it never rained and it never came up. And so, I that that choice that I made in that moment was the wrong choice. I should have taken the time, slowed down a little bit and just dialed it in right. And, and, it’s just the little things like that.
Carol McFarland
Well, it is, it’s amazing. That the little things are the big things and that, you know, when we’re thinking about ways to do things differently. Also, what are the basics that need to stay? Yeah. So I actually— one I haven’t asked you yet— it was a beautiful drive here, over to Edwall and you guys are right here on the edge of some of the pine trees outside of Spokane.
Jason Bishop
Yeah.
Carol McFarland
And do you want to talk a little bit about what it’s like to farm out here in Edwall?
Jason Bishop
Yeah, it’s kind of an interesting area. We, we, like you say we are on the edge of kind of the Turnbull Reserve near Cheyney is to our east. And then we also have our own little mini Palouse, we like to call it. It has some pretty good hills and some deep soils.
Carol McFarland
You get the rain along with it?
Jason Bishop
The rain? Not quite. We’re around, we can be anywhere from 8 to 13in, and we’re kind of spread out in a ten mile square area with four different fields. And, our south most southwest field is the most like Ritzville. And so that’s usually our most, our driest field. And our northeast field, closer to Reardan, gets the most moisture. And, but it’s I love farming that piece up there because I get to look towards Spokane. I see the trees. We’re right on the channeled scablands in fact, our home places here on the channeled scabland. So, we have a lot of exposed basalt rock. And then just above that is the rolling hills of, of crop. And it’s beautiful.
Carol McFarland
So you’re like, at the nexus of all of these little ecosystems that make up eastern Washington. I bet your soil is really interesting.
Jason Bishop
Yeah, it’s highly variable. We have caliche on the hilltops, we have clay knobs, we have silts, loam. Yeah. It’s all over the board. Some sandy areas too.
Carol McFarland
Okay. Do you want to talk about soil pH?
Jason Bishop
Yeah, I can talk a little bit about soil pH.
Carol McFarland
I see those trees and I gotta wonder.
Jason Bishop
You know, what I really like to see, we, we do a lot of family history stuff, and so we have some books that some of the local families have put together that recorded some of their experiences. I guess sodbusters, like back in the day, and I wish they were accompanied with photos because I wonder, like, what kind of ecology was present on our fields that we’re farming today. We do have ponderosa pine scattered on our, on our north slopes, but I think those were put in later by the conservation district programs. Our soil pH is our mid fives to high fives. I’ve taken all the soil data that my dad collected when he was in some programs, and I do see a trend slowly acidifying the soil. And that concerns me. We’ve been no till for probably twenty-five years. And, I can still go out there with a soil probe, though, and I can find the hard pan from the rod readers back then. So, there’s a lot of structural challenges in our soil, and trying to figure out ways to mitigate those.
Carol McFarland
Interesting. Okay. So this is a good segway, and I feel like we can and might do a full episode about the— and there is already, from the Palouse Conservation District, a full podcast episode on the Flourish Project, which is…
Jason Bishop
Farmers leading our united revolution soil health.
Carol McFarland
Absolutely. That’s such a great name too. That was your brainchild years ago at this point, but has just really brought about so much, so many adventures and cover cropping, and, yeah, do you want to just talk a little bit more about cover crops? Just we can, we can dabble. So if people want to listen to the Palouse Conservation District’s interview with you specifically about that podcast, which was very good. And hopefully we can get you on here another time, too, with, with them as guests as well. We can hear about that joint inception process as well. But let’s hear about your interesting cover crops and what started all of that.
Jason Bishop
Yeah. So when we first came back to the farm, my father was kind enough to let me experiment with sixteen acres just up, up the road here.
Carol McFarland
We’ve had that, actually a similar situation described with a husband and wife team. Amy McKay was on the podcast, and she said her husband calls it her granola patch.
Jason Bishop
Oh, yeah, I like that. Yeah, I should call it some sort of patch.
Carol McFarland
So your experimental Your on-farm trial zone.
Jason Bishop
Yeah. And I really appreciate him letting me try that, because the first thing I did right out of the gate is like, I don’t want to use fertilizer. I don’t want to use synthetic fertilizer. And I want to try a cover crop. And, I know you talked about unintended consequences, but looking back on that now, my soil was not prepared for that transition, and we hadn’t put measures in place that would make that succeed. It actually did really well. But so did the weeds that were there, the dog fennel and, just the way it did amazingly. So we ended up splitting it up into three different pieces as a trial. I like to do many trials. And so, we grazed a third of it, I hayed a third of it, and then I took a third of it to crop it and harvested it with the combine. And, I shouldn’t have I shouldn’t have collected that grain because it was just filled with mayweed seed. And because what I ended up doing after that, like a fool, was I fed it to my goats that we had trying to do some rotational grazing around the farm here, and it just went right out their backside, and I’m still trying to pick up that’s kind of scattered around the farm here.
Carol McFarland
So you, you just disseminated a whole bunch of mayweed chamomile all around your farm?
Jason Bishop
Yeah.
Carol McFarland
I’m sorry to hear that.
Jason Bishop
Yeah, it was a very poor choice.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. I mean, that’s something I, you know, wrote there’s so many documented benefits around integrated grazing. But unfortunately, the transmission of weed seeds is an unintended consequence.
Jason Bishop
That was an unintended consequence.
Carol McFarland
If you’re if you’re not on it. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah.
Jason Bishop
But yeah, so we’ve, we’ve done some cover cropping. I’ve done some intercropping. Trying to find varieties that work well, trying to keep I’ve kind of honed in on trying to establish a cover crop that possesses different plant types and root structures, so I’m looking for something grassy, something like legumes, something for, like, something that, is a brassica and trying to combine those, try to get a broad spectrum of the plants. I don’t necessarily have a magic number that I’m looking for, and also trying to find sources of seed that are affordable. So things that either I’ve grown myself and grown out myself or, if I can find something that is it, like a pre-mix. I’ve had the opportunity to buy some mixes that other people had extra from. So yeah, I’m trying to keep it below that twenty dollar an acre threshold.
Carol McFarland
And that’s where you’ve kind of found your ROI zone.
Jason Bishop
Well, if you can find an ROI on cover crops.
Carol McFarland
Fair enough. Theoretically, you’re supposed to amortize their benefits over multiple years when you see their delightful effects. Right.
Jason Bishop
And that’s what I’m looking forward to doing with the flourish program is to be able to try to quantify these. I’ve chosen it with my trials to do it on the same piece of ground for the duration of the period, to see if I can get that transformative change. And, yeah. So then last year when I put wheat over everything, I’m just crossing my fingers, hoping and praying that it’s going to be different than the business as usual.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. I hope that for you. And it sounds like it’s been quite a journey to get to that point. When are you going to do your final? So that’s the final test? So you’ve still got these three, do you still have the three?
Jason Bishop
The first was your number two. And we have another cover crop next year. And I believe I think twenty-six is our last year. So yeah that that’ll be the test okay.
Carol McFarland
And then you’re just going to put wheat all over that and see?
Jason Bishop
Wheat next. Yeah. It is going to go across that right into the business as usual and see if we can see a difference.
Carol McFarland
Interesting. Now does your granola patch reflect field conditions? I mean, it sounds like you have extremely diverse field conditions across your farm.
Jason Bishop
No, it doesn’t. It’s, it’s kind of captured, it’s a depression in the channeled scabland where a lot of soil washed into it. And so I think it has, there’s probably a basalt bed, so it’s maybe somewhat like Mansfield where there’s, like a tub to it, where it captures moisture,but no. I’ve kind of expanded outside of that and did start to do trials on the bigger, larger acres.
Carol McFarland
Oh, so you are taking some of that prerogative of having more acreage.
Jason Bishop
Yeah. So that piece that, the granola patch, as you refer to it is, is now, sainfoin and an alfalfa field.
Carol McFarland
Oh, sainfoin.
Jason Bishop
I actually carved off two acres of it several years ago and tried the Gabe Brown cover crop where you just throw a bunch of garden seeds together in the drill and put it in the ground. And that actually did pretty well. We had pumpkins out there, dry land pumpkins. We had zucchini. We had corn. And then the cows jumped over the fence.
Carol McFarland
Oh well, why wouldn’t they? That sounds like a beautiful cow buffet.
Jason Bishop
Yeah, they enjoyed it.
Carol McFarland
So you got some integrated grazing.
Jason Bishop
Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Carol McFarland
It doesn’t sound like what you— I hear cows like pumpkins though.
Jason Bishop
Oh yeah. They’ll, they’ll, they’ll chew them down. Enjoy ’em.
Carol McFarland
And did you seed all of that with your normal drill?
Jason Bishop
No, I have a tiny little, well, it’s called a pasture pleaser. It’s something that, a wildlife food test plot drill. So it’s like a, there’s a leading closer, and a double disc and a little, closer on the back, and it’s about six feet wide.
Carol McFarland
It sounds cute.
Jason Bishop
It is very cute. And, that’s what I was doing some of these grow outs for these small trials. I was doing different grains.
Carol McFarland
Cool. Do you pull that with a big tractor?
Jason Bishop
No just a little sixty horse wheeled tractor.
Carol McFarland
Okay, so you got a cute tractor to pull the little drill with you? Yeah. Okay.
Jason Bishop
Yeah, it’s all on our Instagram if somebody wants to check it out.
Carol McFarland
Is it really?
Jason Bishop
Yeah.
Carol McFarland
Oh. That’s fun. Is that like living heritage?
Jason Bishop
Yeah. If you go to our website there’s a link to Instagram on there.
Carol McFarland
Oh awesome. Okay. Well that’s that’s a great resource for people that
Jason Bishop
We haven’t updated in years though. So it’s like back in our old trial phase.
Carol McFarland
Okay. Yeah. It still sounds cute and worth looking at.
Jason Bishop
Yeah. It’s fun.
Carol McFarland
Okay. Maybe we’ll get a picture of it before we take off here.
Jason Bishop
Yeah, sure.
Carol McFarland
Okay, so you’ve got sainfoin in that, though. That’s a perennial legume isn’t it. Obviously I heard of alfalfa in there which is also a perennial legume, but I know that’s more, much more common. Do you feed that to your cows?
Jason Bishop
Yeah. So the sainfoin has a unique ability. It has some tannin, I believe that stops the bloat in alfalfa. So it’s actually beneficial to mix the two. It alleviates the bloat concern. It’s a very dryland legume, and it enjoys different, slightly different soil types than alfalfa. So it’ll do okay in the less moist moisture. Has a pretty good taproot on it, and it’s supposed to have a long life to it. So some people say that they have a patch the last like 50 years and its seed is, it’s larger and more like a tiny little bean pod that has little spikes over it, and so it’s, it’s something I was looking at possibly, as a, as a crop because I could harvest it with a combine. It’s not something I would want to mix with a grain because it’d be hard to separate. So it’s kind of a unique plant, though.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. I’ve heard just enough about it to think that that’s interesting.
Jason Bishop
It has beautiful flowers. I mean, it’s yeah, the bees love it. It’s very, a lot of nectar that they get out of that supposedly.
Carol McFarland
Nice pollinator friendly option. You know, we’ve talked a little bit about your cows already. What kind of cows do you like?
Jason Bishop
Well, when we first got into it, we were looking kind of more of the homestead type cows. So one of the ones that seemed like a lot of people on the internet were recommending was the Galloway breed.
Carol McFarland
And those are the ones that have, like, kind of that white pig stripe on them.
Jason Bishop
Yeah. So you could get the belted Galloways and they look like Oreos.
Carol McFarland
Nice Oreos. That’s much better than comparing them to pigs.
Jason Bishop
Yeah, yeah. And, so we ended up getting a few of those, and they’re doing really well, I think I got a little excited. I built my herd size up to about sixty mouths to feed, and that was a we had a lot of moisture that year, and the next year was the drought year. And that was shocking. Like, I need to liquidate these cows because we just don’t have enough food in our pasture. I don’t have enough hay in my barn. And so we downsized. In the process of that, I was trying to get my feedback from the Seattle customers, and somebody suggested I should maybe try some Wagyu genetics, because maybe you’ll get some more marbling. So I was like, oh, okay, we can give that a shot. So we sourced ourselves a Wagyu from WSU and their department, and we had just made the transition, and so we were just about to see the calves coming out of that cross. And I thought, well, what am I going to do with all these now? So I ended up selling my cows, which in retrospect was a bad idea because I had a bunch of teenagers running around in my past year after that. And what I also didn’t know is that Wagyu, I don’t know if this is like in their literature or even on their website, or maybe I just have a unique circumstance, but they are very athletic animals and they somehow have the ability to jump over a standing four wire, barbed wire, at a standstill. They just leap over like a deer. And I was like, this is not going to work for me in my system so.
Carol McFarland
Well, I mean, they’re eating your garden vegetable cover crop. Yeah. Is that how they did it?
Jason Bishop
They just leaped over. Jumped right over.
Carol McFarland
Wow.
Jason Bishop
Yeah. So I, I then had this is all a very slow process, like changing your herd genetics. This doesn’t happen overnight.
Carol McFarland
I feel like most things in agriculture aren’t an overnight gratification equation.
Jason Bishop
You’re so right. So. So I ended up going back to the Galloway and they’re a nice, lumbering breed that’s very docile and less athletic.
Carol McFarland
Excellent. Well, maybe there’s some entrepreneurial act to opportunity for one of your kids too.
Jason Bishop
Yeah, yeah, at some point, we’d like, I’d like to spin that off to my children.
Carol McFarland
Let’s make a half farm kids, right?
Jason Bishop
Yeah, exactly.
Carol McFarland
It’s like, well, I mean, you know, no obligation there, but, yeah, it seems like it’s worked out for your parents.
Jason Bishop
Yeah, it seemed to work out.
Carol McFarland
Awesome. Well, so you’re you’re I, you know, I wanted to give it a shout out for a resource around cover crops that I just saw, at an event coordinated by the Western Sare group. And, there’s the Western Cover Crop Council. Are you familiar with that group?
Jason Bishop
Yeah, I’m on their email chains.
Carol McFarland
Great. It looks like they are in development, and they’re almost completed with a Western States cover crop tool. Where you can actually do that variety selection, but they’ve really tried to tune it to the kind of ecoregion that you’re in based on as much knowledge as they could, could collect. And it sounds like it was quite the effort. I mean, it’s like they said two hundred hours on Zoom of all these cover crop experts, were compiled into and then this data, database that then is being transitioned into the outward facing decision aid to illustrate. There’s a lot of lot of stuff building around cover crops too, with the PNW Cover Crop project. You know, we’ve highlighted that in a few of our Farmers Network spaces as well. So yeah.
Jason Bishop
I’m optimistic and hopeful for cover crops because I really, really like the ideas behind them. And I experiment a lot with them, and just trying to figure out how to fit them into a system that would, they would work in a way that meets my obligations for the landlord and then also meets my objectives for creating soil health and independence.
Carol McFarland
Nice. So you’ve been trying some other stuff too.You’re, you’re, you know, you’ve got heritage grains, you’ve got your sainfoin and alfalfa, you’ve got cover crops going on the farm. I wanted to say that you are trying a few other things as well, or have been recently trying some, some other things. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that?
Jason Bishop
So some of the things that maybe have rolled out to my bigger acres, well, we partnered with WSU and their Western Sare grant for the millet trail. For three years. That was a great experience. I really saw a lot of positive things with millet, and it gave me an opportunity to play with it and see how you know how to set my drill, how to harvest it. That was, how to or just watching it, its behavior as it grows, looking at how it, what soils it likes, what it doesn’t like, so what it did to myself, I really I really love how it, those shallow roots, it’s just amazing. Like, it feels like the ground feels like a sponge after it. And some of my best winter wheat was when I seeded right into that residue. So we’ve worked on that. The other thing I’ve been experimenting with is camelina with Kurt Greenwald of the Old World Oils in Ritzville. And, I really like that crop because it’s a local market, and I know where the commodity is going. I don’t know that I want to call it a commodity. I know where my grain is going, my oilseeds are going. And, Kurt’s been great to work with, and, and, at the end of the day, when I look at the ROI and penciling things out, I see a lot of potential with camelina that I haven’t seen in wheat the last few years.
Carol McFarland
You don’t have to put anything on it. It basically grows like a weed.
Jason Bishop
Yeah, it basically is, it’s just a glorified weed. Yeah.
Carol McFarland
I mean, I think they’ve been working on some of the shatter, which is part of the differentiating factor from what I understand. But yeah, it’s very good for marginal land crop right there. But yeah, so long as you like to duct tape your combine
Jason Bishop
If they can grow. Yeah, exactly. If they can grow it in Lind, then I figure that I should be able to grow it here. So it’s been fun growing camelina and trying to figure out how to manage the crop. Okay, okay. Here’s an unintended consequence. So I thought I would be able to grow winter wheat, re-crop winter wheat into camelina stubble like you would in a canola. That’s it. I highly do not recommend that after that experience. I had difficulty getting through all the residue without mowing it first. The other challenge was, there was so much volunteer that came afterwards in the spring. I had to make the choice: should I save the camelina or save the winter wheat? And so I decided to save the winter wheat but in hindsight, I probably should have saved the camelina.
Carol McFarland
That says a lot, doesn’t it?
Jason Bishop
Yeah, but what that did teach me, though, is that camelina, that was a that was a pretty tough winter, it has resilience through the winter from just being thrown on the top of the surface of the soil. So now this, this fall, I’m actually going to intentionally try putting out some camelina and seeing how it over winters.
Carol McFarland
I actually think there is some work being done at the Lind station on winter or fall seeded camelina.
Jason Bishop
Yeah, I’ll join them.
Carol McFarland
Well, I might know a guy.
Jason Bishop
Okay. That’s great.
Carol McFarland
So what is it that you like about camelina, aside from, I mean, it just sounds like it’s a very hardy crop? Is that…
Jason Bishop
Yeah, it’s hard to tell exactly how it’s, I mean, it’s a low carbon crop, so it’s not giving me a lot of residue, which I’m not sure I like. I think what is interesting to me is that I can, I’m trying to figure out how to break up my crop rotations. Because most guys here in my area here in Edwall the rotation is continuous spring wheat, so I’m trying to figure out how can I break up my rotations so that I can use different chemistries and not use expensive chemistries? And so I see, perhaps a way that I could, I could do a camelina followed by a canola, or if I can get this winter camelina up and going, that would be a very early harvest. I might be able to double crop something like millet after if we get a summer rain.
Carol McFarland
Okay, I’m definitely coming back to talk to you if you figure out how to double crop in eastern Washington.
Jason Bishop
That would be amazing. I think it’s worth a shot. I don’t think it’s, I don’t know if it is going to work, but it’d be fun to try.
Carol McFarland
That’s the thing that innovation is made of, isn’t it? So I’m thinking about your wheat seeded into camelina. Do you think that, so there’s been some of the work on the microbiomes and maybe having an inhibitory effect to subsequent.
Jason Bishop
Yeah like an allopathic effect.
Carol McFarland
Do you think that there was some of that, or do you think it was mostly just the volunteer?
Jason Bishop
There was so much out there. It could have been a combination of both.
Carol McFarland
So maybe they haven’t gotten the shatter thing quite as under control yet.
Jason Bishop
Well, I don’t know if my combine was duct taped enough.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, maybe that was it. Do you have any pro tips for harvest? Because it sounds like you really have had probably a lot of lessons learned around setting your drills and combines for things other than wheat. Or other than a, you don’t have like a business as usual setting on your drill or combine.
Jason Bishop
Yeah, my recommendation is take your time and get out of your machine and check and double check and triple check. And then also when you get those numbers of your settings, your drill depths, write them down so you remember them the next time you do it. That’s just practical advice.
Carol McFarland
No, I appreciate that. Now, are you an analog writer downer, or do you have some sort of really great system?
Jason Bishop
I have a One Note on my phone and make comments and just put my notes in there.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. No that’s great. I think that good note taking can go a long way. And do you just write down your wins and successes or do you write down like, don’t ever do this again?
Jason Bishop
I don’t know if I do those kinds of high level things because they really stick with me. I do more things like, remember this bearings going out in this piece of equipment. You better check this and fix it before you use it again.
Carol McFarland
How do you mark the— do you ever put trials, like, when you do your trials, do you mark those in a really obvious way, or do you ever, like, lose a trial? Or do you have a good way to keep track of them when you’ve got?
Jason Bishop
Like with the millet trials, we did variety and it was kind of on us to, I guess, set that up. So I would, I would take my drill with my thirty-three feet and I would just go make a pass change out the seed variety. And this is a very tedious process.
Carol McFarland
Did you use your cute drill or your big drill?
Jason Bishop
Big drill. And then I would, I put a just a, a large stake in the ground, one of those tall, like, signs, like four foot tall sticks. I just use a marker and write down, okay everything to the right is this variety of, you know, left is that variety. So it’s pretty simple. Yeah. Nothing too fancy.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. Do you want to talk a little bit about what you saw in the millet trial? Because that’s kind of intriguing as well. There’s a lot of, there’s more types of millet than, you know, just in the last couple of years, I’ve been learning about more than I knew ever before.
Jason Bishop
So in our trial, they were looking for human grade. And they’ve sourced most of the seeds from a company in Oklahoma, and I forget the name off the top of my head. And they gave us, they didn’t give us, I think we purchased it through the grant. Six different varieties. And then towards the end of the grant, Dryland Genetics, I believe, was their name. They gave us two more to add to the mix, but they were all proso varieties. And they had, if you go to their website, they have different day length durations, different growing degree days. And they have different traits like height, how high, how tall the plant is supposed to be. But other than that, there wasn’t much to tell between the differences. I found it very difficult to see the difference between the different plots on the, on the scale, I did it.
Carol McFarland
Is millet, is it something you’d grow again based on what you saw in the trial? I mean, it sounds like you like seeding into it and you liked what it did for your ground.
Jason Bishop
The problem was the market.
Carol McFarland
That’s another hulling thing, too, isn’t it?
Jason Bishop
Yeah, yeah, there’s the dehulling process, which Joni from Snacktivist is, I think she’s going to overcome that hurdle. I think she’s going to figure that out.
Carol McFarland
I think Joni’s going to figure out a lot. I don’t know, speaking of someone who wears a lot of hats.
Jason Bishop
She’s got horsepower. Dehulling the millet is a step that we hadn’t been able to figure out. So everything that we would grow would have to go to Global Harvest, which is a viable option. The problem was, my millet wasn’t clean enough to send there because the first year I grew it, it was frosted out and it all went limp and on the ground. And, I had a hard time picking it up with just a straight cut header. So the second year, I used my swather and put it in windrows in a pickup header. But the problem was my little swather is only twelve feet wide, and my machine is used to a thirty foot swath. And so it’s hard to keep the machine moving fast enough to keep the machine full enough to make the grain clean enough, so I had a pretty trashy, bulk tank. And so, all that millet is still sitting in a tank waiting to be cleaned to a better degree. So somebody could take it. Somebody would want it. But it supposedly has a really long life in storage, so we’ll get there some point.
Carol McFarland
I hope so. From a food grade standpoint, it’s supposed to be very nutritious. And gluten free.
Jason Bishop
Gluten free. We’ve made we’ve taken just some of it out of the tank and ran it through our blender and made pancakes with it. Tastes great.
Carol McFarland
Awesome. So did you have any issues with birds after the whole like horned lark and canola thing? I know that can be a consideration. It’s literal bird seed.
Jason Bishop
I shouldn’t say that. It is literally bird seed. The last year we put our millet, and it was only six acres. You always run into problems when it’s, so the third year of the millet trial, we had just six acres instead of that year before it was twenty acres. And I planted it right by the road. And the road has lots of power lines running next to it, the power poles. And, it attracted starlings, I believe it was starlings. And I didn’t know a bird could land on the top of the plant. But it is possible they can do that, and they can eat a lot of the millet right out of the standing millet plant. And I didn’t realize that. I had seen it before. I’ve done small plots of cover crops with sunflowers, a large percentage of sunflowers, and I had those decimated by birds. So, I should have thought about that before, but definitely that third year of the millet trial, a lot of bird issues, because they like bird seed. Birds, like birdseed.
Carol McFarland
As it turns out.
Jason Bishop
Don’t put it near power lines.
Carol McFarland
Hopefully location base can help solve that problem if we can do horned larks and canola, hopefully we can still grow bird seed.
Jason Bishop
Oh, yeah. Oh, the other birds, the giant birds do not like safflower.
Carol McFarland
Oh yeah. Ooh, safflower. Well, it’s so pokey. Does anybody like safflower?
Jason Bishop
It’s brutal. I don’t think, nothing likes— the only thing that will eat it is iron. The combine does. That’s about it.
Carol McFarland
So we’ll just hope you’re not having to do any amount of monitoring that crop.
Jason Bishop
Yeah I hope nothing gets caught in the concaves and I have to get in there with welding gloves. I’ve heard bad stories.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. One of the things that I’m wondering about is harvesting the millet.
Jason Bishop
Yeah. So harvesting the first year I mentioned it, it went flat. So the second year I did the pick up header, and third year I did the pick up header, but there was nothing in it because of the birds. But the second year it did pretty well. As long as I kept that machine moving fast enough.
Carol McFarland
Okay. But everything else kind of handled okay? I’m sure there’s room to, like, adjust and fiddle with lots of things to get it right.
Jason Bishop
You know, it’s challenging because when you need to harvest millet, it’s going to be at least in my area, it’s going to be later September. And there’s a chance that that the rains, the fall rains could start changing. And so trying to capture the crop when there’s moisture content is correct. That’s that could be a challenge, with some of these warm season crops.
Carol McFarland
Okay. And that was another part of my question: when do you harvest? When did you harvest that millet? Because I know, you know, from talking to, well, Dusty Walsh, when he was talking about harvesting sunflowers and he got to use the heater in the cab of his combine.
Jason Bishop
I didn’t even know it had a heater. Just kidding.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, I think that was part of the sentiment, wasn’t it? And then, I know there’s been some trials, other alternative crops that get harvested much later than when the combines are typically put away.
Jason Bishop
I don’t know, did Dusty mention he actually has a drier to mitigate situations where the moisture is too high.
Carol McFarland
Oh, yeah. I think we talked about that a little bit off record, but I don’t know if that was part of the podcast that was captured. And I guess, yeah, all the logistics when you’re trying something a little bit different. Speaking of that and some of our conversation around cover crops, one of the things that comes up is if you’re trying a mixed species cover crop and putting that through your drill, how do you deal with that and seeding that or running that through a drill? And how does your drill handle it?
Jason Bishop
Yeah. I try to be conscious about seed size. However, the more I’m doing cover crops, the less, the less concerned I am about it. So my current thought process is, and, my buddy Josh and I were talking about this, is how the seeds, they all go in the ground, say, at a certain level, there’s big seeds. There’s little seeds, but those big seeds will actually start germing and they can actually break some of that tension for the small seeds to, to come up as well. So, I think they could work together. So I am, recently in my cover crops. I’ve been going deeper with the small seeds and favoring the larger seed first depth. Then rather than trying to go shallow in favor of the small seeds. So I favor going a little deeper than a little more shallow. And it seems to be working.
Carol McFarland
How about rate wise, you know, or how you get just the kind of the logistics of getting the right mix in the drill and getting it all out in the right mix when you’re actually getting it in furrow.
Jason Bishop
Oh, yeah. So I, with my drill, I have a way to meter it when it’s standing still. So I’m looking for a certain pound per acre and so I can, I can dial that in really, really well. The content of the seeds in the mix is another story. So, I made the mistake two years ago, in the first year of the Flourish trial, I put too much canola in the mix, more than I wanted to. And so I ended up having way more of that small brassica seed than I thought was going to be there. So my cows grazed it for, was it three, three or four weeks? I think it’s four weeks, or it wasn’t my cows, I partnered with the neighboring rancher. His replacement heifers grazed it for four weeks. They got two pounds, again per day, which we were both pretty pleased with. It wasn’t spectacular, but it wasn’t like a break the bank sort of situation, like it was this year. And, so, after the cows were on it, we saw a bunch of canola plants popping up and there was regrowth. And so after they grazed it, I thought, maybe I’ll just go in and harvest that. So I went back and I harvested a ton of canola seed after grazing the cover crop.
Carol McFarland
Wow. You did have a lot of canola in there, didn’t you? What an interesting opportunity and way to take advantage of kind of a flexible or, you know, being flexible around that situation.
Jason Bishop
But mistakes give you ideas. So that gave me the thought. Well, what if I what if I planted a grain into, standing, a standing perennial crop and let the cows graze it and then come back later and try to take whatever’s left that regrows. And so that’s what I’ve been doing with it. And I tried it last year. It didn’t work because I had a bad time, bad timing with my swathing. And actually, I should have gotten on there before it headed out. But, I’m interseeding triticale into standing alfalfa and seeing if I can get hay crop, early hay crop off of it, and then have the triticale regrow, and then have probably be very minimal, but somewhat worth it to go back and pick the triticale seed up later.
Carol McFarland
Nice. Would you market it or feed it to your own livestock at that point?
Jason Bishop
If I could figure that out, it might be possible to not use any chemistries, then that might be my ticket to transition to organic. Possibly. So anybody who’s listening to this, give it a try. Let me know. I’m trying it. Maybe we can figure this out together.
Carol McFarland
Nice. Well as part of the Cascadia Grains work, we partnered with the Tilth Association and of course WSU Food Systems as well, and we did a farm walk on Aaron Flansberg’s farm outside of Palouse, and we’re hoping to actually have him on the podcast as well, but in a collaborative interview where he’s talking about his transition into organic and have some more, shortened value chain kind of marketing opportunities as well.
Jason Bishop
So I see organic as something a goal to aspire to. I just, in our, more fragile ecosystem where we have less rain, any time I’m running something over the soil it dries it out and I lose moisture. And so usually organic, in fact, their sheets, their tip sheets recommend you control weeds with iron, but that every time I do that, I lose moisture. And so then the plant’s not productive. And so trying to find like this no till organic holy grail is, I don’t know I don’t have the answer, but I’m hoping that maybe this alfalfa and some sort of tall cereal grain combination might get me closer.
Carol McFarland
If you find the Holy Grail, you should let me know.
Jason Bishop
I will, I’ll let the world know.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. Please do. We’ll have you, as you know, on the speaker circuit. Because if you could do it here, you could do it anywhere. No, I did note during the farm walk and we’ll have, I think, an article with some notes around that are coming out in the Food Systems newsletter and will be available on the Farm and Wax website. But, that was they were captured by some students. So that was a nice little student group there. But they also weren’t fully ag experts. But something I really noted was that Aaron, to control weeds, went over the field twenty times.
Jason Bishop
Wow, that’s a lot of times.
Carol McFarland
One of the things that he described, and I don’t want to speak too much for him because as I said, hopefully he’ll be a guest on this podcast. But, you know, he is also as a long term multi-generational farmer and no tiller, with the rest of his farm also looking for that holy grail. And, so it was fun to see the roller crimper in action. Have you done anything with the roller crimpers?
Jason Bishop
I did. I brought it out to the farm a few times.
Carol McFarland
Is that like a conservation district share? Equipment share?
Jason Bishop
Yeah, that’s the one that it’s kind of toodles around the Spokane area here. I think it came out of WSU, one of the one of the grants at some point. So we brought the roller crimper out, and I was using it and I had two experiences with it. Once, I didn’t put enough water in it, and so it would roll over and the crop was quite thin. And so the roller would roll over it, and then the crops would just pop right back up behind it. So it didn’t get a good termination.
Carol McFarland
There is actually a WSU graduate student years ago, Sandra Wayman, I think she was doing some cover crop research out of Puyallup, and she did her full exit seminar on zombie cover crops. So she has perfect academic execution, lots of great data there, but like the entire talk was was centered around these zombie cover crops, and with that effect of, okay, they’re almost dead, but not quite.
Jason Bishop
But they’re not dead.
Carol McFarland
Yep. They are undead. Yeah. And so, but that’s a roller crimper effect. I know, and again, I’m still speaking for Aaron because we’re kind of talking about this transition organic and roller crimper. But he had his roller crimper on a three point hitch, and so he said, that he could control the
Jason Bishop
The down pressure.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. The down pressure more than with a tow behind.
Jason Bishop
I, so my second experience was in sweet clover. I’ve grown sweet clover a few times, and taking a seven, eight foot tall sweet clover and knocking it down that actually does work. That roller crimper did a pretty good job, and I had a loader bucket on the front of my tractor and it was amazing to see the life that was in that bucket as I’m driving through all the sweet clover. It was a surreal experience. I think the videos on YouTube, if anybody wants to see it.
Carol McFarland
Really? Okay. Where’s your YouTube?
Jason Bishop
Well, it wasn’t actually mine. It was my good buddy Denver Black’s YouTube channel, but he did drone footage and I’m driving the tractor.
Carol McFarland
That’s amazing. I mean, you basically used your loader bucket as a sweep net. I’m impressed that you grew anything eight foot tall in this area.
Jason Bishop
It was amazing. You got to see the video to believe it.
Carol McFarland
Okay. I’ll have to check that out. Thanks, Jason. So I don’t know if you’ve already covered this or not, but I appreciate your willingness to share some of your lessons learned as unintended consequences, but would you talk about the most memorable time when you experienced unintended consequences from a trial and how you moved on with the information from that experience?
Jason Bishop
Well, since you’re talking about sweet clover, I and we are Living Heritage Farms, so one of the first things I did when researching farming is I was trying to figure out how did they farm in the past. And so, I found some old articles that talked about how Sweet Clover was used as green manure back in the day. They would, they would roll it into the soil and it would ferment. And we’re talking massive sweet clover. And that was their nitrogen source for the subsequent crops.
Carol McFarland
A little microbially mediated digestion again.
Jason Bishop
Yes, exactly. Little sauerkraut action. And so while that was popular back then, I think it fell out of favor probably a hundred years ago. So I thought, well, maybe I’ll give it a try and give this effort a sweet clover again. So I interseeded sweet clover with some heirloom wheat. And I like the heirloom wheat in these particular situations because it’s not dwarfed, so it’s a little taller. So the understory that first year it worked really well. I could, I could just pick the heads off the top and the sweet clover is just smoldering down there in the bottom. Sweet clover is a biannual clover, so it doesn’t really go gangbusters until the following year. And so that was my unintended consequence. I didn’t realize how crazy sweet clover could get. It literally exploded. I went out there in the spring. I was like, oh, that’s nice. There’s a little sweet clover out here. Maybe I should hay this or something. I went out there like three weeks later and it was already up to my waist and I was like, what is this stuff doing? I need to get back here. By the time I got back to it, it was already up to my shoulders. And it’s just.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, and you’re not a short, you’re not a short person either.
Jason Bishop
I’m not. I’m over six foot. So that was just unbelievable that I could see that much growth, that much biomass coming out of there. That was totally unintended. I did not mean to do that. So what do you do in those circumstances? You have to make lemonade out of lemons. And so I ended up, I tried to hay it, and I could barely get it, through my swather. So I did the periphery and made a few bales, but the middle I had to leave was just too big and too monstrous. So I just let it go to seed. And I came in there with my combine and my headers probably five feet off the ground. And I just tried to get as much seed as I could, and, yeah, I mowed the rest.
Carol McFarland
Wow, that’s an amazing story. Did you collect the seed or like, grow sweet clover again?
Jason Bishop
Yeah. So I did collect it and it’s in the super sack in my building of random seeds. And, I’m just waiting for the right opportunity to use it, and I’d like to try to put it in some CRP ground. I think that’d be a really good fit. And, yeah, I’m hoping to find a good spot for it.
Carol McFarland
Great. Can I ask a quick question around, so you grew some heirloom wheat, and because you wanted more biomass than the dwarf varieties? How tall did that get?
Jason Bishop
Oh, it’s probably like, I’d say four and a half feet tall. There’s there’s some varieties. So soft white wheat is like our bread and butter here, but when you go to the WSU library and you look at the wheat book, there is a tremendous amount of diversity in the wheat plant. I mean, they’ve got all sorts of different seed colors, sizes. And there’s just one particular variety that I’d love to grow. I forget the name of it off the top of my head, but it’s like a six foot tall wheat, and it has these monstrous kernels on it. It’s like synafel, sinabel. But that is something I’d like to partner. If I could get enough quantity of that seed to put with some low growing legume I think that could be a match made in heaven.
Carol McFarland
Is that more of a perennial legume, like the sainfoin, or is that something like a lentil?
Jason Bishop
Something even like an alfalfa? Yeah. So then I don’t have to provide the synthetic nitrogen, and I could perhaps piggyback off the nitrogen that’s already being fixed in the soil by the alfalfa.
Carol McFarland
That’s amazing.
Jason Bishop
If it works.
Carol McFarland
You are inspired by unintended consequences, aren’t you?
Jason Bishop
Well, I think we learn so much from unintended consequences. And, I wouldn’t be scared of unintended consequences. If that’s a hesitation for growers. In fact, I would pose the question like, what is the unintended consequence of just doing your business as usual? Like, if we just keep doing what we’re doing, what is going to happen? Our soils are going to go more pH negative. We might continue to struggle with erosion. With just the continued degradation of our soils, and what are the consequences of that happening to human health? And, the loss of agriculture and our ability to feed the tremendous amount of people we feed? So I think really trials, we have to trial. We have no other alternative.
Carol McFarland
Well, one thing that came out is, this episode with Aaron Esser and Howard Nelson. So in the episode with Aaron Esser and Howard Nelson, Howard was coming at land, like soil health from the perspective of a landlord. And we were in this case, talking about soil acidification and degradation of the land in that way. And he said, you know, as a landlord, I don’t, in addition to wanting to preserve my family’s legacy, what if there’s a situation where, like, no farmer wants to farm my land because the soil is so degraded? That’s somewhere no one wants to be. That is a lose lose situation.
Jason Bishop
Yeah. There’s a lot of challenges. Well, even looking at agriculture from the standpoint of the aging of the farmer, I mean, do we have enough farmers? How do we inspire young people to continue in this endeavor and to love the lifestyle?
Carol McFarland
Homeschool them on an awesome homestead, build their life skills?
Jason Bishop
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Carol McFarland
I mean, and there’s also, I think some really great work being done in the farm succession space where, you know, people do want to give their children the freedom to have a life, have choice in their own lives, and so if there are families where the next generation doesn’t want to come back to the farm, but there are a lot of other people out there who might want a farm. Trying to figure out that there’s a lot of great work being done by different programs around farm succession with matchmaking people who might want to farm but don’t have that, in-built infrastructure around being able to just have a natural pathway into a farm life.
Jason Bishop
That’s huge because, I mean, I have the luxury of being able to participate in my parents’ farm, but if we were to just cold turkey farm, the amount of capital and the community that you would need, it’s almost insurmountable. I don’t even know how you’d do it. And, that I could see the great benefit to that.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. I think there is a growing recognition of the need and opportunity. And at the same time, there’s also just fewer farmers because farms are getting bigger, too. So it’ll be interesting to see as we move forward. You know, over the next several decades how that space continues to evolve. But I definitely want to give accolades to all of the ways that farm succession looks and even planning and whether maybe that’s a nephew, maybe that’s. It’s really amazing to hear the different stories.
Jason Bishop
Or hired hand.
Carol McFarland
Absolutely.
Jason Bishop
Yeah. I, I don’t know, I think we have lost sight of the community aspect in some regards in agriculture. Like we make our own, we make our business decisions based on what is profitable on our farm, sometimes at the expense of community. And what I mean by that is like, I think about my grandfather and the choice he had to, when he had a hired man that was maybe they spent a lot of time on the tractor burning a lot of diesel, making a lot of dust back in the day. And he had the choice of when his hired hand was retirement age, should I find another hired man to replace him, or could I just buy a bigger tractor and get a bigger tool to drag around? And that choice that he made was, it made a lot of sense economically for his farm and is more efficient. But it was at the the sacrifice of the community because now there’s one less person that’s connected directly to agriculture in the area, and that’s one more residence that isn’t going to be filled up by someone in ag. So when I look at Lincoln County, I think we’re one of the few counties in the state that actually has less population or very close to it than it did a hundred years ago. And I just look at my hometown of Edwall. And when I was a kid, there was, there was a post office, there was a little hardware store, there was a little grocery store, there was a little restaurant, there was an automotive repair place, and there’s nothing left there now, except for we do have a school and chemical corporation, but everything else is eroded away. So when we see the soils degrade, you’ll see, the community slowly go away with that.
Carol McFarland
Well, soil health is all about a vital living ecosystem.
Jason Bishop
That’s right. Meaning the whole system.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. Yeah, there’s a lot there, Jason. And some of that, well it’s all connected, so it’s definitely within the scope of this space, but we’re also, I think getting, getting we got a couple more questions here, too. Yeah. I want to suggest, too, that when we think about the ability to hire and bring more people into the— and employ more people in the farm space— there are some policy barriers as well. The Association of Wheat Growers does a lot of advocacy work in, in some of that space and kind of recognizing when policy limitations or creating barriers to the ag community as well.
Jason Bishop
So, yeah, maybe there’s opportunities, if we could think a little outside the box. Not necessarily hire these individuals, but rather partnering, partnering with them. So maybe giving them a way to have ownership in the farms. So we’d be coming alongside each other. Maybe that’d be another option. So maybe, I don’t know, just thinking off the cuff.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. No, there’s I really appreciated what you said with the unintended consequences when something doesn’t work the way you expected and you have to pivot. And sometimes that pivot can lead to better things.
Jason Bishop
Could be the next— I mean, we’re just maybe we’re just one failure away from finding the solution.
Carol McFarland
That holy grail. Well, I’m looking forward to you finding it Jason, or someone out there in this region. So what’s your biggest barrier to trying new things on the farm?
Jason Bishop
I think, you know, there’s a lot of discussion about the social component, which is it’s big for me. I have obligations to my landlords, and I want to make sure their investment that they’ve made to the land I can return to them. That’s definitely a barrier. I know that my landlord, aka my parents in this, their family surrounding them, they are dependent on some of that income that I’m raising on the farm. So they want me to succeed. So there’s kind of a social component there. I think my biggest hurdle at the moment is time and money. I think I have so many things I want to try, so many ideas I just don’t have. I need more hours in the day. And the money. There’s some really cool tools out there that I would like to experiment with, but I just don’t have the cash to pay for them. So, if anybody wants to just come alongside me and just give me a few million dollars, we’ll put it to good use.
Carol McFarland
Maybe Joni will work on that. Getting some of that region’s money investment fund.
Jason Bishop
Well that is why I really appreciate the Flourish program is because they do come alongside the growers and they de-risk some of the the challenges that we face in doing some of these trials. And, every trial it takes time because you have you got to, it takes me just as much time to do thirty acres, to do three-hundred acres to set everything up and the drills and, and get it all, all the way it needs to be. So, yeah, it really makes a difference when people are willing to come alongside us in some of our crazy crackpot ideas, and believe in us to make these work.
Carol McFarland
And, and, I mean, it sounds like really being able to bring resources into the system that allow the freedom to try those things makes a big difference. Including just that time. Like, you know, supporting the time piece. If you could ask a scientist a question, what would it be? Like, how would the scientific community come alongside you and help support the work you’re doing, help you ask and answer questions on your farm?
Jason Bishop
If I had one ask for a scientist?
Carol McFarland
It could be like two or maybe three.
Jason Bishop
I guess my big ask big, big ask would be, can you help me figure out how to farm biologically?
Carol McFarland
What does that mean to you?
Jason Bishop
That means, going back to my overall management goals. It means independence where I allow creation to work the way it was intended. And I allow the biology of the soil to do what it was made to do. And I’m not trying to manipulate it. I’m instead just, shepherding it and coming alongside it, letting it work its magic. And so…
Carol McFarland
That also sounds like agro ecology.
Jason Bishop
Hey, I love that word. That’s, that’s, I think it needs to be used more.
Carol McFarland
But I like the, the way you framed it as well.
Jason Bishop
Yeah, I, I just think that we have a lot of questions in some of the trials we’re doing and finding the resources to actually see the results. Like Chris tells me often, Chris Eckhart will tell me we’re terrible scientists. And that’s true. I am a terrible scientist. I sometimes don’t do checks. I’m just all in. It’s hard for me to quantify. There’s so many, the scientists, I mean, they struggle with this, too. There’s so many variables that we’re trying to account for, whether it’s the climate conditions from one year to the next in our trials or whether it’s the soils, it’s just overwhelming. And so a lot of times we’re just running on our gut and trying to do simple visual tests. You can put things in your mouth that you probably shouldn’t put in your mouth. There’s just ways, how how can we quantify the difference, if any, that we’re making? And, help us regain our independence as farmers?
Carol McFarland
Awesome. That actually sounds like a really good note to end on.
Jason Bishop
Thanks, Carol.
Carol McFarland
I really appreciate your willingness to share your wealth of experience and trials. And how you think about your living heritage on your farm.
Jason Bishop
I appreciate it.
Carol McFarland
Thanks again for having me. Well, hopefully to talk to you again.
Jason Bishop
Until next time.
Carol McFarland
Until next time. Thank you.