Join this conversation about On-Farm Trials with recently-retired farmer, Mark Sheffles, outside of Wilbur, Washington. Mark describes his trials with winter peas, the Weed-it spot sprayer, and his history with direct seeding.
Carol McFarland
Welcome to On-Farm Trials with the PNW Farmer’s Network. Where we explore the many trials that come along with cropping systems innovation in the inland Pacific Northwest. Plenty of questions get asked while farming across these regions, and together we’re digging into what it’s like to try to answer some of them as producers, researchers, and the many other professionals in the field that get things done. We’re glad you’re here. I’m your host, Carol McFarland.
Today, happy to be here with Mr. Mark Sheffels on his farm, Sheffles Company, outside of Wilbur, Washington. Welcome to the podcast, Mark.
Mark Sheffels
Thank you very much.
Carol McFarland
Would you please start by sharing a bit about yourself, your farm and who you farm with?
Mark Sheffels
Okay, I’m a fourth generation farmer. Right now, I am the only partner. My uncle passed away a couple of years ago and was inactive for several years before that. So that’s where we are right now. Our beginning was quite interesting. A German came to this country, farmed for a few years, brought his brother over to help, couldn’t pay his brother, tried to get rid of the farm and payment and go back to Germany. Neither one of them wanted to farm. They flipped the coin. My great-grandfather lost, so that’s how I became a farmer.
Carol McFarland
On a coin toss, huh?
Mark Sheffels
On a coin toss.
Carol McFarland
Wow, that is quite the story. Well, hopefully that was a lucky coin toss for you. It sounds like you’ve had a very rich career in farming and that the region’s lucky to have your innovations and on-farm trials be part of it.
Mark Sheffels
No, it’s been good since then. So three or four generations later, we’re still here and things have changed a lot. Much larger farm, but finished up a career last year, recently retired, but very happy with the choice to be a farmer.
Carol McFarland
That’s great. And I’m looking forward to hearing a bit more about how that journey has been, but let’s start out a little bit by talking about what it’s like to farm here outside of Wilbur. Your climate, your soil conditions, all of that.
Mark Sheffels
Well, over the years when attending meetings, often in the Palouse, I would introduce myself as being from Siberia because up here on Highway two corridor, it’s very cold. We have a short season, so our options are a little less than some other places, but twelve-inch rainfall. Good years you could call us intermediate, bad years you could call us low rainfall.
Carol McFarland
All right. And how about your soil, your typical crop rotation, length of time and no-till? Because I hear you’ve been doing that for a while.
Mark Sheffels
Yeah, rotations, I’ve been all over the board on that. So let’s say a typical rotation in our two locations, one being at Wilbur and one being at Davenport. Wilbur was traditionally most farmers would go crop fallow. Some would go three-year rotation. Davenport could be a three-year rotation. Occasionally people would annual crop, which I did when I first started direct seeding. So my inspiration to start direct seeding came in about ninety-seven. We had an inordinately wet year and I knew I didn’t want to fallow. I wanted to crop everything, so I hired a man with a direct seed drill to seed Wilbur and I shipped all my conventional equipment up to Davenport. So that was the last conventional crop up there. First direct seed crop down here, and I did things exactly like people advise you not to do and that is I went from zero to a hundred miles an hour. I did not work in, test it out, go slow. That fall I bought the no-till equipment and we were a hundred percent no-till from that point forward.
Carol McFarland
So what was your no-till equipment starter pack comprised of?
Mark Sheffels
Well it was comprised of a fixed frame drill, which means each opener did not have the ability to follow the terrain. So and that’s what I used through the entire time of roughly twenty five years direct seeding. People would call me all the time and ask about that equipment and then I would tell them the same thing: that I hate everything about my drill except for it actually does a pretty good job. Meaning that I really thought a drill ought to follow each opener that terrain and going through high and low spot. That is true. However this drill bids surprisingly well. I’ve had a few stands that were less than I would have wanted but actually I’ve never had to reseed a crop in twenty five years, so the drill worked all right.
Carol McFarland
That’s pretty good. Now with a fixed frame what sort of opener was on those?
Mark Sheffels
Well originally it was an Anderson opener and a split row and that worked fine. We didn’t want as much disturbance as you’d normally have with what’s considered a high disturbance opener. So we had weld-on tips to keep them down to a half inch rather than something getting up to an inch and we eventually went to a modified Bourgault opener. So we modified that by boring a few holes here and there so we could apply deep band fertilizer and likewise we kept that point to inch and a half fertilizer to seed separation. Which is, I think most of those types of drills are generally more like three-quarter but I wanted more separation.
Carol McFarland
You must have seen Dr. Madsen’s root videos about root response to nitrogen right next to it.
Mark Sheffels
Well I knew that your profile is going to dry out and I wanted that fertilizer available a little bit longer and also a little further into the plant growth. So I surmised or guessed originally that regarding the seeding date I would probably get accelerated growth in the fall with that banded fertilizer, and to my surprise that’s not actually what happened. Probably I would guess at this point I should have made my seed date roughly a week earlier than you would with conventional. However, the interesting part is in the spring when it was really tapped into that deep band it would grow at a double rate and more than catch up in pretty short order, so the accelerated growth for banded fertilizer actually came in the spring not the fall.
Carol McFarland
Well that’s an interesting observation. I understand that you’ve grown quite a variety of crops in your time, maybe both at Wilbur and Davenport. Would you like to spend some time talking about those?
Mark Sheffels
Yeah. Again when we started direct seeding it was a very wet period. We actually had in a couple years with eighteen inches of rainfall, and I jumped on that chance to annual crop and we did that for several years. Maybe too many, and barley was the crop of choice because historically our area had more cheatgrass and other fall annual grassy weeds than we wanted because the rotation was so limited. So we struck with spring crops and we ran annual cropping also with another reason to go with the spring crops, and that worked out quite well until then the moisture started to taper off and then another couple years it was either or annual crop or fallow crop. Worked out about the same financially, and then it got drier than average and that practice was a wreck for a couple years. So we decided we needed to fallow, and as the years went by costs went up and up and up till spring crop became much less viable because of the additional risk of what might happen if you had a good year. You might have a fifty bushel wheat crop. If you had a bad year you might have a fifteen bushel wheat crop.
Carol McFarland
Yeah it’s a pretty high margin of error.
Mark Sheffels
And I say I was only halfway through that direct seed career when the cost of inputs had increased about two and a half times, so that wasn’t very viable anymore. So now we realize we need to fallow winter crop but the problem still remains is winter annual grassy weeds, goat grass and cheatgrass and at that point we’d done pretty good avoiding goat grass so we started to work in to peas with the support of Howard Nelson who worked with Central Washington Grain Growers at the time before they became Highland. We did it on a small trial basis and did that for four or five years with the belief that I would eventually go large scale on that, and one day I realized that with a four-year rotation and closing in on retirement age I better quit talking about it and do it or I’d be out of business before I really got to do a four-year rotation.
So we did and we started planting a couple thousand acres of peas along with winter wheat. And some of those peas got sold into markets that were better than commodity cover crop markets, things like that. Prices up to twenty cents a pound and it was actually one of the best returning crops I ever had, but then the market got ambushed when India decided to put a heavy import tariff on peas to protect their own production and drop that market about eight cents and peas were a much tougher sell at that point in time. So the economics of it didn’t look near as good. Canola was a winter crop on fallow which had a good price and much better legs on it but I never went there because my drill didn’t have the accuracy I needed to seed that.
To this day from– forget about the economics for a second, just talk about the agronomy of it. A winter pea crop is an incredibly good thing. It gives you more microbial activity, more diverse bacterial colony. It leaves a lot of fertilizer behind available for the next crop and you don’t have to fertilize it so there’s pretty good saving this there. It also opens up a herbicide rotation which allows you to control those grassy weeds, so very advantageous that way. And that worked well until that market got shut down mostly by prices, but by then I was close enough to the end we did do some spring crop cereals again. We used very very little chemistry to control those winter annual weeds so we didn’t really–maybe only twice we’ve used IMI wheats and things like that. That’s how it went right up to the end.
Carol McFarland
That’s great so I’m hearing you talk a little bit about the broader ROI of peas both before and after kind of a major market change. Can you speak a little bit more to maybe some of the benefits that you saw? I know you were talking about the microbes and nitrogen and that sort of thing. I’m wondering if you could expand on some of that?
Mark Sheffels
Well I’d add moisture to that. Pretty much everybody knows that if you grow a pea you’re going to fix nitrogen. You don’t have to fertilize it. They know that it’s good to combat plant diseases that are specific to cereal grains. Most people don’t realize that a winter pea is very adept at getting by with minimal moisture. Even though it is a winter crop planted on fallow it really only utilizes moisture to three and a half, four feet versus a six feet profile for a wheat plant. If you’re going through a dry cycle following some pretty decent fallow moisture and you plant a crop that leaves behind at least a foot and a half of moisture you’ve already got a head start on fallow moisture for the next crop. So, peas have come back in price. I believe they run around thirteen cents or so now. So probably they ought to deserve a good hard second look at their viability as a rotational crop now. Canola has done quite well so peas will have a tough time competing with that.
Carol McFarland
Well there’s also the talk about peaola and intercropping the two, and there’s lots of fun ways to choose your own adventures with those alternative crops.
Mark Sheffels
Yeah I think we’re gonna have to figure out how to in these dry regions to grow whatever we can on fallow. To double up your input cost by trying to annual crop and hoping that moisture thing works out seems unlikely at this point unless you have an awfully high value crop.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, have you tried other pulses?
Mark Sheffels
No I have not. Way back in my father’s day we did run some irrigation and we tried a little bit of everything, but I would say with a little success.
Carol McFarland
Fair enough. You know one thing I’ve also heard about peas is people can tell after they’ve grown them they feel like they can see in subsequent crops some very real effects that they attribute to peas. I’m wondering if you’ve seen that?
Mark Sheffels
Yeah I have. You’ll plant a winter wheat crop after peas and it just looks healthier, less firing of leaves. Will keep on working to produce when other wheat crops with the lesser rotation start to shut down. So have a little better legs underneath a wheat crop and a good rotation. Interestingly enough even though it’s still within the cereal genome Triticale seems to have some very advantageous benefits long term. So I like Triticale and we’ve grown some of that too.
Carol McFarland
Yeah we just had Bill Schillinger on the podcast and he was talking about how much he likes Triticale as well so I guess you guys have that in common.
Mark Sheffels
It’ll come down to feed crop prices and exactly how that works. So at the tail end of this long run of growing annual crop barley I had quit and was dearly missed by feedlots who had bought an awful lot of barley from me. So they called up one day and said do I intend to grow barley and I asked them well what I said was I don’t know tell me why I want to. So after a good laugh the broker for the feedlot made a deal based on Futures markets. I believe Winnipeg they traded barley in Canada, and that worked out quite well but he never came back so I think that worked better for me than it did for him. That was just about the last barley I grew.
Carol McFarland
Any final thoughts on peas of like what would you tell your past self when you were first starting to explore experimenting with peas?
Mark Sheffels
Well I just– I like the idea because I knew we had to have a fallow winter crop and I knew it had to be adapted to dry conditions, and another additional benefit to peas is that they absolutely don’t care how deep they’re planted. Especially for a beginning chem-fallower that’s getting into direct seed before he develops the mulch rather than a tailored traditional mulch. You basically just build up organic matter, undigested material on top so this residue serves as a fallow and before you get that established you could have more trouble keeping seedzone on moisture with direct seed in a dry region. Total moisture will work out good. Some years are much better than conventional. Some years are not quite as good, but what is consistent is the inconsistency of seedzone moisture. So when you go to plant it can be worse in a tough year. Better if you get post harvest rain, worse if you don’t get any rain from June forward, and peas are very good at coming from a very deep depth so I’ve got pictures in my phone where I’ve dug them up they had not emerged yet but they were as long as a pin and they still will come up a hundred percent you won’t be missing any plants from your stand.
Carol McFarland
Well I’ve heard there’s some cold tolerance benefit to peas too.
Mark Sheffels
I would put them on par with winter wheat. I haven’t had any problems. I guess I didn’t have peas at the time I lost my last winter crop to a freeze out or had it substantially reduced, but I’ve had plenty of frost damage and it didn’t really seem to hit the peas any harder than it did the wheat.
Carol McFarland
How about harvesting peas?
Mark Sheffels
That’s a little bit more of a challenge. We had flex headers on our combines and it’ll be a little more wear and tear too because you’re going to run your header right on the ground. You’re going to have more dirt go through the machine, but with the flex header they do a pretty good job of picking them up. I think we did a little worse after a varietal change from Windham to one called Blaze, but the Blaze was a larger pea that was more marketable so I think that’s why the switch with the co-ops went to the Blaze.
Carol McFarland
And how about the residue that’s left over?
Mark Sheffels
Not as good. Peas are low residue crop. In fact a little bit embarrassing– the very last crop I planted my pea history happened to be right along the highway very visible and because of the lack of residue on the fallow year after that we did not do as well maintaining seed zone moisture, so the last winter wheat crop I planted on there was probably about the weakest stand I’ve had in twenty-some years.
Carol McFarland
Right on the road too huh?
Mark Sheffels
Right on the main highway. Everybody had a hard time that year. That field I’d say was definitely on the lower end of the plant stands. Other fields, the jerk seed, chem fallows– the whole did fine no worse than anybody else on fields that had a cereal history rather than the pea history in the prior crop I should say.
Carol McFarland
Herbicide management in peas?
Mark Sheffels
Herbicide management, well that’s a good thing. Yes you have to be more careful. I found that even though our weed control in peas for broadleaves our best success with the Imazamox– which is the same thing in Beyond used in an emu wheat; therefore, you’re probably going to have to be careful with following with a cereal after that, but I’ve never seen a yield reduction after a fallow year planting in a conventional wheat, not an IMI wheat. So I think the advice would be to not do that; however, at Davenport I’ve had crops over a hundred bushel following peas and the use of an Imazamox. So I think with the fallow year in between the buffer was good.
Carol McFarland
Well and they get all that rain down there too don’t they?
Mark Sheffels
A little bit wetter. Davenport is probably a fifteen inch annual rainfall– which doesn’t seem like a lot more than twelve but when you remember that it takes a good amount of moisture just to grow the plant, and then it takes what you have after that to actually grow production your percentages of how much more fifteen is over twelve is actually quite a bit so yeah there’s a big difference.
Carol McFarland
Yeah you get the premium rain package down there at Davenport.
Mark Sheffels
Yeah it was nice. Actually most of what we farmed was at Davenport versus Wilbur, there was more acreage up there so that was advantageous for us.
Carol McFarland
Yeah that’s great. So it sounds like you’ve been in direct seed for quite a while and you’ve been thinking a lot about soil and soil moisture. I’m wondering what you notice, you know through these different climactic cycles of wet and dry years and what the effect you feel like direct seed might have had on your soil?
Mark Sheffels
Well it was a year-to-year deal. It was interesting because we went direct seed did not have any fall tillage. I would say that there were years where coming out of the winter we did as well. There were years when fall tillage might have saved a little bit more moisture, but then farmers would have to go through the fallow period and lose more moisture than they realize with the tillage. So by the time you get through the fallow year and plant at worst we’re on par with them, possibly better. Now if you don’t have fall runoff and you have a wet spring and farmers that would not chem-fallow would try to control weeds strictly with tillage they’re coughing up substantial moisture every time they do that tillage operation and the earlier in the year they do it the more moisture gets coughed up. So direct seed fallow can have a substantial moisture advantage when you come into the fall that way. In addition to that thought, if you are to get rain after harvest the traditional mechanical tillage fallow is kind of a two-way street. If it helps moisture from coming up and evaporating it does not do near as well letting new rain late in the year get back in, so it takes a lot of water to bring your seed moisture zone up in traditional fallow and very little in chem fallow. So you can have a situation in the fall where chem fallow is more like seeding in the spring. The moisture is so good if you get a post-harvest rain.
Carol McFarland
Well if there’s one thing you know about farming there’s trade-offs for everything.
Mark Sheffels
Oh yes most definitely.
Carol McFarland
So I’m interested to know what is the most interesting thing you’ve learned from a past trial?
Mark Sheffels
I would say the most interesting thing…I would say the fact that the peas moisture-wise did so well with so little water. That means a lot in this climate, and that they were fairly well adapted to cold climate. We’ve also grown garbanzo beans a couple times and they’re still tempting because the price is good and even though they’re a spring crop not a winter crop on fallow their return can make them worthwhile, but we have seen garbanzo crops be lost up here to a late fall rain because of the fact that they harvest so late. So that happened in the Davenport area probably five or six years ago. When I was young it seemed we had to finish harvest by September. We were in big trouble with rain but that doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore. Occasionally we get to November before we see it.
Carol McFarland
That’s some variability that’s a little harder to live with isn’t it?
Mark Sheffels
Yeah we have a lot of variability we really do.
Carol McFarland
So you’ve kind of talked a little bit about how you determine ROI on something you’re trying. Do you want to talk a bit more about how you frame that for your operation, your management goals or how you have historically? Maybe how that evolved over your career?
Mark Sheffels
I’m more of a shoot for the hip guy. So basically I know what you can sell the crop for. I know what you can produce. I know the expenses were a little higher with the peas because the chemistry was more expensive for weed control. I know the potential was very good to come out far better with the continuous fallow crop and a four-year rotation would keep it clean, and just a matter of crop prices. You can get peas if you could consistently get a fifteen cent for them fifteen cents a pound. Well, I think I might have dropped into a consistent rotation. Which I really didn’t do. I kind of play crop rotations like poker hand. You don’t know how many cards you want until you see what you’re dealt, so if you do the same thing all the time regardless of what you start with that’s not necessarily wise and that’s where winter crops on fallow compared to spring crops come in. And prices play into that too. I think one thing I might have done most farmers don’t do is in making the decisions whether it would spring crop or fallow I would take a look at where prices were. I don’t want to necessarily get in a big hurry to plant a spring crop and this year would be a perfect example. We have the same prices basically we had fifty years ago so I would hate to waste my fallow moisture on trying to grow a spring crop. So if you see spring crop in a year like this it means there’s some serious rotational needs weed wise, and that would be mostly cheatgrass. So that’s the battle farmers face they know that spring crops are a tough row to hoe, but they know if they don’t do that or at least a winter crop of a different genome that they control weeds in then they’re going to be in trouble
Carol McFarland
What role does moisture play though in some of that playing the hand you’re dealt?
Mark Sheffels
I guess because I didn’t plant canola that wouldn’t have been a big decision for me because again the drill– my equipment didn’t have that kind of accuracy. But in the case of peas it would be a non-factor in a dry year because they do well with the low moisture and actually you’d be more inclined to plant a pea when you knew you could plant it six inches deep into moisture and have everything come up. The last wheat stand I had, which I confess was a little bit weak because of the lack of fallow moisture, that was because I broke my own rule and planted. It was marginal. It looked like I could pan into moisture and get it going and so I planted a little deeper. Normally the rule of thumb is you plant where you need to, and if it’s dusted in meaning it’s going to wait for rain before it comes in that’s better than having it not come at all. Well I pushed a little too hard and rain didn’t come until November, and then it got very cold so that one wasn’t one of the better decisions.
Carol McFarland
You never know what you’re going to get sometimes.
Mark Sheffels
You know that’s true. Even though I had pushed the depth it probably would have been acceptable if the water had come sooner or later, but if you’re already at the deep end of the range and then things don’t get started until November you’re not going to see it in the spring.
Carol McFarland
I’ve actually heard another grower talking about planting peas on snow
Mark Sheffels
Okay, no I haven’t tried that one. The original advice I got with peas is that’s the first thing you want to plant. That they needed to go in a little bit earlier, and that’s what we always did: we always planted those peas first. And in this area that meant that they would probably be in at the very beginning of September whereas most of those wheat crops might be in the second week in September.
Carol McFarland
Okay, yeah. I’m sure there’s some variability as we were talking about across the region as to where the climactic conditions align.
Mark Sheffels
Well, and things changed over time too. I was in these peas at the very beginning of winter peas as a crop, and so there was a lot of knowledge to be gained yet that maybe it’s been discovered since there and I never proved it that they could be planted later and not suffer. So as far as the late planted pea crop I couldn’t tell you.
Carol McFarland
Well I mean this is in the context of on-farm trials you know.
Mark Sheffels
I probably should have experimented a little more and maybe tried that. Planted two weeks with one field after another to see what would happen, but we were kind of mass production operations so when we did some we did a lot of it. We did it fast, but we didn’t do a lot of variations.
Carol McFarland
Okay. So yeah, when you did try things, what did you use to decide whether it worked or not or where it needed refinement or adjustment or whether it didn’t work at all? Like what did that process look like for you?
Mark Sheffels
Well it’d just be what kind of stand did you get, how did it produce, what the price is worthwhile, what’s the consistency of the price structure– which tended to be the downfall on the pea side of things. The agronomics of the peas was very, very good– likewise for Triticale as a feed crop as long as you had feed prices that were good. I gave up on barley after growing too much of it at eighty-eight dollars a ton and I also sold barley for two hundred fifty dollars a ton. So again just the agronomy of it is simply not the only factor you can pay attention to. The money thing it cannot be ignored.
Carol McFarland
Well you were talking to me a little bit earlier about how many loaves of bread that can be made from a bushel of wheat
Mark Sheffels
Yeah it’s kind of fascinating, and I guess that’s why farmers are very unhappy these days. They are well aware that for a loaf of bread it takes basically a pound of wheat meaning you get roughly sixty loaves of bread from a bushel of wheat, and if your wheat’s selling for less than five dollars that’s not very much money into a loaf of bread. If you look over the last hundred years and how that price has gone up, put that on a pie chart what percentage of that is wheat versus the other costs that go into that wheat’s been surprisingly stagnant. A piece of that
pie has gotten smaller and smaller for a very long time now. Too many generations
Carol McFarland
Yeah well and so I hear that maybe is part of what you found to be a benefit of diversifying what you were growing too
Mark Sheffels
Well that’s why you see a lot more canola and again I knew when I was going to retire. I knew it well in advance, and contrary to my normal MO I let the tail wag the dog which is not a good decision. So what I should have done is bought the seeding equipment that would allow me to plant canola, and I did not do that. A lot of farmers have and that’s quite why I think there’s a tendency for farmers to criticize those that do things differently than they do, and that is absolutely not the case with me. I would criticize myself for not doing that canola I should have regardless how many more years I was going to farm. I should have been planting canola.
Carol McFarland
Yeah well you did try something new from what I understand. You’re one of the first in this area to get a Weed-IT if legend has it correctly.
Mark Sheffels
Oh yeah maybe. One of the earlier adopters definitely not the first, but we did do something that was a little different. My tractors were a couple of twenty-seven ton quad tracks which is not something you want to pull a sprayer with, and I didn’t really have a smaller tractor. What I did have was a self-propelled sprayer and I knew I didn’t want to put the weed equipment on a suspended boom because it was important to have a certain height above the ground for the computers to do the calculations and get the application right, so I took a ground frame and I put all this equipment on it and modified it to be pulled by a self-propelled sprayer. And other than my frame was too weak and prone to cracking– which we eventually replaced it with a better frame, the principle is very good and I think is the way a lot of farmers should maybe approach this if they don’t have a smaller tractor to pull a ground frame.
Carol McFarland
Oh that’s an interesting way to overcome equipment limitation.
Mark Sheffels
Well you’ve got you’ve got the tanks, you’ve got the computers, you’ve got the guidance power. So you’ve got everything you need there, and a ground frame is relatively light. It’s not something you pull a first operation. So you don’t have to worry about traction so much on wet slippery soils so we had no problems going up and down hills with an Apache sprayer pulling an old Flexi-Coil frame which was later replaced by a Palouse Welding Custom built frame for that.
Carol McFarland
As you took on bringing the WEED-IT into your farm– aside from what to pull it with– what were some of your other things about using the WEED-IT.
Mark Sheffels
Lots of opportunities. Of course the biggest one which you’re looking for is to save on the application of chemicals mostly Round-Up, and so financially it’s a good saving but it also opens up the opportunity to average a very low rate over a given acreage but hitting the weeds you do spray with a higher rate and that’s a good way to avoid resistance. If a plant doesn’t survive in the first place you won’t start that selective process of taking the more resilient bio types and letting them reproduce. And even double down on that rather than using just a higher dose of glyphosate a person can use a different chemistry altogether which is even smarter. So now you’re less likely to develop resistance to one particular herbicide, so where expense would be prohibitive on a broadcast operation it is not at all if you get down to spraying only ten percent of your acreage and operations later in the year.
Carol McFarland
That’s great. I have heard that you might have to go over your ground a bit more if you run a WEED-IT. Is that true?
Mark Sheffels
That would be true. If you’re going to do tillage you’re going to kill weeds that have barely germinated and maybe you’re a couple inches from even coming up above the ground, and of course if you’re going to spray you’re not going to kill anything that hasn’t emerged and possibly be more likely to miss the smallest of weeds even if they have emerged. So even though the WEED-IT was impressively good at finding the smaller weeds I think the people have gotten used to using these realize that they probably need to be out probably every three weeks to do that, but you can move along at a pretty good clip and if you’re spraying versus pulling tillage you can spray thousand acres with roughly, well less than one hundred fifty gallons of fuel and you don’t get very far dragging steel to the ground with one hundred fifty gallons of fuel.
Carol McFarland
How about any things that it took you a little bit to overcome in adjusting your WEED-IT and making it work optimally for you.
Mark Sheffels
Well, I think we had to learn to run the more sensitive settings. The temptation was to set it so it wouldn’t misfire by spraying when there wasn’t actually weed there, but the bottom line is you really don’t want to be out there missing weeds because then you’re going to be out there all the time. And even if you were to misfire half the time if you bring what should be a five cent percent of your square footage up to ten percent that’s still pretty good. So go ahead and set the thing sensitive. Don’t miss weeds
Carol McFarland
All right, that’s good advice. How about anything with nozzles?
Mark Sheffels
Yeah we did change to a cone nozzle. When you’re spraying with single nozzles or maybe a couple nozzles you’ve got to keep in mind you’re not coming from different sides of the plant and you probably need to use a broader pattern per nozzle. Otherwise you risk spraying the bottom half of the weed not hitting the whole weed if you’re on the outer range of that angled spray pattern. So we were running one of the original WEED-IT’s which use eight inch spacing, the newer ones are ten inch spacing so we had a slight advantage there but nevertheless it was good to run a wider pattern.
Carol McFarland
Oh you are giving some great pro tips today! Thanks for sharing Mark.
Mark Sheffels
Well there’s certain weeds that are skinny and tall such as mare’s tail, and you don’t want to spray the bottom one foot of it and leave two feet of it sticking up if you have a weed that got that big, but ideally they shouldn’t be getting up there anyway. If you’re out there every three weeks you probably never have to spray anything taller than a foot.
Carol McFarland
Prickly lettuce can get up there too huh?
Mark Sheffels
Well it can, and they tend to be tougher. And that is a good thing to bring up because that particular weed has a tendency to be very slow to dry down, so that’s another good reason for mixing up chemistries and spraying something like a paraquat or something other than Round-Up because if you come back in three weeks that prickly lettuce might be completely dead but yet it’s still got a lot of green tissue it’ll probably get sprayed a second time even though it’s dead. So if you could turn that brown with something faster acting and glyphosate you’ve done something good.
Carol McFarland
All right. It sounds like you have had a lot of lessons learned on that WEED-IT. Anything else you’d like to share?
Mark Sheffels
Sadly, I think the way farming is all farms will be less of them and they will be bigger. And that lends itself toward WEED-IT’s also because of the ground you can cover, the speed you can cover it, and the cost. so it’s an expensive piece of equipment, takes more acres to justify it. It’s nothing new. Farmers farms have been getting fewer and further between since the nineteen twenties and that trend is certainly not going to decrease with current prices, so I’m afraid a farm like ours which was considered quite large twenty years ago is going to be an average farm in the future, and that would be who knows. I would say I’ve seen what you would call a small farm go from five hundred acres to a couple thousand acres. I think a small farm in the future is going to be five thousand acres.
Carol McFarland
Yeah that’s a different equation than it’s been. It doesn’t bode well for some of the rural community either.
Mark Sheffels
No it doesn’t. No, it’s like everything. We tend to consolidate and all businesses get fewer and bigger, and farming will be no exception. We’ve been told for generations now that population growth would dictate the need for more and more food and you think farming would have a promising future, and that might be the case but supposedly we’re going to run into this need for food generations ago and we managed to keep the grocery stores full regardless and prices low, and mostly it’s currency exchanges that are the problem. Wheat of course is growing all over the world and with the cost of the U.S. dollar that’s kind of our biggest problem now. Our costs are just high because of the dollar
Carol McFarland
Yeah. Yeah that’s that one’s a double-edged sword, I think. Over your career you’ve seen probably an evolution of technology
Mark Sheffels
Oh yes.
Carol McFarland
And you know so I think as you’re talking about the farm consolidation and also the cost of equipment to make things more efficient– you want to like speak to how you’ve seen technology evolve over like what your thoughts on that and reflections might be?
Mark Sheffels
Well no one would have dreamed thirty years ago that equipment would steer itself through the field, so the gps thing. Variable rate technology– very good thing. So all the technology has been an improvement. It’s allowed us to be more specific on what we do where because there’s no consistency in these fields for what they’re capable of– especially in hilly terrain. So it’s good we have variable rate technology. The frustrating part for me has been that like most farmers we have a good understanding of the mechanics of things, but the electronics that’s going to take some troubleshooting in computers. So when something goes wrong we can really lose more time to sorting out the electronics than we ever did with just the mechanical relationships.
Carol McFarland
That’s impressive because those mechanical relationships can be also their own big challenges.
Mark Sheffels
Most farmers just innately understand mechanics and there’s not a whole lot of things they can’t figure out just by looking and thinking about it with the mechanical relationships, but when you’re looking at electronics– whole different game.
Carol McFarland
Yeah they also can just get randomly possessed by things and decide to get ornery. At least that’s been my experience. Where do you go to learn more about a topic before trying it? Or where have you gone?
Mark Sheffels
Direct Seed conferences have always been a great source. Talking to other farmers, so being involved well off the farm. I see farmers– there’s two different ways to approach it: those that keep just doing the things they were taught and don’t leave the farm, don’t go places, don’t change things. They’re not going to be around for a long time. You have to adapt with change. These conferences are a great source of information. We started by just talking about direct seed. This was a different mechanical approach to do the same thing, and we started working more into more technical things in biology– cover crops and all kinds of things, so cover crops I’m pretty well pretty well behind on. I’ve done some experimenting trying them. I still have a hard time seeing how you use moisture to grow something that doesn’t have an economic return, but that I am not going to call that the final word. There’s a lot to be learned on that, and because my very minimal efforts didn’t work out I wouldn’t discount it completely, so I think the more moisture you have the more likely that is to be successful. The drier you are might be tougher to use moisture and come out ahead in the long run
Carol McFarland
And the cost increases a bit more. The penalty.
Mark Sheffels
That would be true too there’s. But that’s a new frontier is the biology of the soil so it’s simply not a matter of steel and soil– or dirt as it used to be called
Carol McFarland
We don’t call it that on this podcast.
Mark Sheffels
We know better now.
Carol McFarland
So what did it– can I ask what your trials on cover cropping looked like?
Mark Sheffels
Well it was a seed mix of many different things. Gosh everything from turnips. Some of those were huge. The idea would be that we would plant those along with the cereal grain. I believe we had triticale. We would go halfway through the summer and spray out broadleaf selectively but leave the triticale but, I think we came back and planted the triticale after the cover crop but before we did the spray out. But we had a very poor stand due to the moisture we’d use with the cover crop, so we didn’t get a very good triticale stand and eventually we ended up taking that out and fallowing that field. So that one didn’t work, but again my hats off to those that have worked with it had success and we’ll learn more but it would be very simple-minded to say it didn’t work for me so no it’s not going to work. That was just a one-off experiment and there’s a million different ways to do that, so I love to see farmers. Innovative guys that’ll step out there and try things, and we should all be very slow to criticize somebody that does something different because doing the same things not getting us very far these days.
Carol McFarland
When you tried the cover crops did you try them in your Wilbur place or at your Davenport place?
Mark Sheffels
That was at Wilbur.
Carol McFarland
Okay. Yeah you don’t see a whole lot of people trying cover crops out in this area.
Mark Sheffels
Yeah I had a small field and it was again right along the highway, so I guess I’m not too thin see and I’ve had most of my wrecks right on the highway visible for everyone to see.
Carol McFarland
Well I’ve got this other question here is how do you decide where to put your trials? So you’ve got highway two just as your showcase, that’s where you put them all?
Mark Sheffels
Well I didn’t necessarily do it there to showcase them, but they’re smaller fields and so from experimental basis that made some sense. But– and I wasn’t too worried about what people thought. We’ve had enough success that I’m not afraid to show failures. In fact we’ve been involved in lots of field days and I prefer to tell people what the wrecks have been rather than successes because the successes they speak for themselves. The wrecks are the ones you need to avoid. So when we discover something that’s a bad idea that’s what I really want people to know about.
Carol McFarland
In academia there’s the journal of null results. I don’t– I’m not actually sure it’s a real journal but we talk about it.
Mark Sheffels
I think I’ve written a few chapters
Carol McFarland
Oh you wrote the part of the book on it. No, that’s great. You did mention the Direct Seed Conference, and Iunderstand that you’ve been integral to the history of the Direct Seed Association. Would you like to share a bit about how that came together?
Mark Sheffels
Yeah I would. Yeah very, very excited about that association. It came along at a very very good time. I think I started going to steep reviews back when steep was a big initiative on conservation and it was mostly academia, mostly university people, very few farmers, much lower numbers. And eventually it morphed into the Direct Seed Conference operated by the Direct Seed Association, and with great cooperation with universities. From the very inception I was one of the original board members and a lot of our very valuable members were university people. It didn’t actually ex officio– they didn’t vote on it that was strictly a farmer organization but their input was extremely important and they were obviously a huge part of the presentations at the conference, but the fact that the farmers were involved in leading this thing and they were actually working at the application level in the field brought the two of them together. So it’s a great mix of university and the farm effort, so it was very, very timely very, very necessary. Should continue indefinitely.
Carol McFarland
Thank you for your service and getting it started. Were you part of that group that went out to South Dakota?
Mark Sheffels
Yeah. Yeah, I did make the trip to South Dakota. Rather funny it– we were all given the idea that what we should be doing was the same as South Dakota, which was not true because our climate’s very different. That is a summertime max rainfall area. In fact one of the stops we were talking to a farmer sitting on the bus why it probably during that half hour presentation it probably rained most of an inch which is something that rarely happens here. So I…
Carol McFarland
Especially in the summer.
Mark Sheffels
I was already direct seeding, and when we would talk most were not impressed that I was taking the opposite approach to time pretty much continuous cereals and soIi didn’t impress anybody with our efforts, but when I got back Jim Cook cheered me up by saying well this is an area adapted to cereals very, very well so I wasn’t necessarily wrong in my leaning towards cereals. Over time it’s kind of proved out the corn thing, again we’re too short of season too cold. I’ve heard farmers joke that their warm season crop was late planted barley so the corn thing very little of that, but that was one of the things in the South Dakota rotation it was a big part of this diversity.
Carol McFarland
Yeah the summer annual grasses. It’s interesting you hear some of the old school agroecologist talk about, you know, thinking about what was here before agriculture and then thinking about how to plant with that in mind and mimicking the natural systems.
Mark Sheffels
Yeah that’s good advice: don’t tell nature it’s wrong.
Carol McFarland
It’s pretty neat to hear that you were one of the one of the few and far between farmers involved in that original steep project. I bet you’ve gotten to ask scientists in general lots of questions over the years.
Mark Sheffels
Yeah, yep. It was very, very rewarding to sit in a room with guys like Jim Cook and others and from way back and figure out, you know, things weren’t changing very fast at the time it was still cereal crops and already mostly fallow wheat, but we were building a database. We were learning and eventually I’ve seen what used to be a good yield of sixty bushel an acre turned into the equivalent of sixty-five bushel per acre is probably a hundred bushel per acre in that Davenport area now
Carol McFarland
Yeah nothing wrong with that.
Mark Sheffels
A lot of rotation in that, and it wasn’t a real diverse rotation. It was still cereals but it went between spring and winter crops which was a world of difference and even though there’s still cereals triticale and barley’s can really be very advantageous for mixing up your rotation.
Carol McFarland
As you go into retire– sounds like you were very well prepared for your retirement so you probably asked all the questions you wanted to before you got to this point.
Mark Sheffels
Yeah I was fortunate. I made– picked my date about four years in advance of when I was going to retire. We have another generation. Even though my sons aren’t farming. I have a cousin’s son that’s very good at it and was ready to go and it was time to get out of the way and let him go.
Carol McFarland
Oh that’s great. Well I’ve got a few other questions here about your kids. Do you have kids? Do they like to farm?
Mark Sheffels
I have two sons. They harvested with me every summer. Very capable, very smart. One of them is a school counselor with a masters. One of them manages a couple national wildlife refuges and has a PhD. He had the interest in biology. Neither one of them really wanted to farm, and quite proud of them for being able to decide what they wanted to do and follow that. I have seen some farmers who lived with it, liked it, learned it, were very good at it. My hats off to them. Likewise is seeing people who chose to stay on the farm simply by default
Carol McFarland
And just lost a quarter toss
Mark Sheffels
And that’s it’s usually disappointing if something does something for a career their entire life. They do something that they never really did like that much but they just never took the initiative to do something else. Very few of those left. If you’re not good at it don’t work at it, don’t like it you’re probably not going to be around very long anymore
Carol McFarland
It’s definitely also its own kind of privilege to love what you do.
Mark Sheffels
Yeah it is. It was good to be self-employed. I had a lot of good people work for me. Some of them worried about my crops as much or more than I did. In fact, my most senior employee I always teased him that I didn’t have to worry about my crop because he did that for me.
Carol McFarland
How long did he work for you?
Mark Sheffels
Only about forty-five years.
Carol McFarland
Oh my!
Mark Sheffels
We actually grew up together. His father worked for my father. His name was Paaul Jones. He was exceptional, very exceptional. So we still see each other fairly often. We’re good friends and so that was tremendous. So his father worked for mine. We drove trucks together from about twelve years old on and made a career out of it . Those two families is a multi-generational relationship and it was quite good.
Carol McFarland
Sounds like everybody in that’s pretty lucky. Well and it, so it sounds like you’ve got your current farm succession settled.
Mark Sheffels
Yeah we do. You know we’re– did a little lease swapping, so the ground I farmed at Davenport was partially our own family ownership and partly it was a close relative, and likewise at Wilbur. So my cousin’s son– I guess cousin once removed to me– is handling our family ground as well as the relatives ground at Davenport and in return they’re doing a good job of taking care of ours down here, and it’s all direct seed. And that would be the only option we wouldn’t have it farmed another way.
Carol McFarland
I can see that after a couple decades of investing in that you’d probably want to keep seeing it taken care of in that way.
Mark Sheffels
Yeah I guess from presentations whatever kind of a canned statement I’ve used is if you don’t pay attention to the economics you won’t be around short term and if you don’t pay attention to the conservation you’re not going to be around long term. So it’s rather sad to see land that is losing productivity, and it’s hard to see because it’s masked by the technology improvements so people don’t realize even though they grow more grain than they ever did they’re growing less than they would had we not had some degradation. Very rewarding to see more direct seed all the time, and here’s an interesting sideline in all this: as part of my efforts with the Direct Seed Association I talked to many groups other than just farmers and I sat in region ten headquarters EPA a couple times and I think every farmer,every person has a certain level of paranoia. So they would probably be concerned I would be telling somebody like EPA that everybody should direct seed, and they say well why doesn’t everybody do this and I would explain that the demographic of farmers is very, very old and you should not be asking them to recapitalize and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for what years they have left the farm. The next generation will be doing that so let the industry take care of that self, themselves and they will and they are. And that’s what’s happening the younger generation I don’t, I think would literally none of them are going to come back and do things the same way. They’ll almost all be direct seeders so that’s not something that had to be regulated. The industry will take care of it themselves and that was my message to EPA, so in spite of the paranoia the farmers had over being pushed by direct seeders I think it was handled pretty well
Carol McFarland
It’s nice to find some of those other forces moving things in various directions, and you know whether that’s some of the win-wins that we see with the WEED-IT technology or similar.
Mark Sheffels
Yeah it’s– there’s always been a farm program. There’s always been some supplemental incomes to these farm programs to farmers and it became quite obvious a couple decades ago that that was going to slowly change from commodity support to conservation support insurance programs, so partially our program is ourselves through insurance premiums and part of it is through conservation programs and that will get public support which translates into political support , so that’s just the way it’s going to be.
Carol McFarland
Well Mark as we move into the direction of wrapping up I gotta ask you what’s the most annoying thing about trying things on the farm?
Mark Sheffels
Trying new things I guess it would be the lack of options in these drier regions. So some of the speakers of the Direct Seed Conferences just about eliminated outsource inputs outside sources because between the cattle operations and animals, and the diversity of crops and the rainfall they can almost become self-sufficient entities, and these drier regions that’s very, very tough to do. So the challenges for these dry regions to do these things is daunting but it is happening, and some of the members board members of the association I’ve mentioned names such as Rob Dewald have made this work in some drier areas, and my hat’s off to them. They’re some of our most important members because they’re doing things that some think only apply to the Palouse, but they’re doing it in areas with half that rainfall and that’s where we need to go.
Carol McFarland
Pretty sure he’s gotten a shout out for something real similar to that um on this podcast before.
Mark Sheffels
I love those innovators. As far as recommendations, who to talk to one of them would be Jesse Bruner but you’ve already done there and done that and he’s a wild man. Gotta love that guy he’ll try all kinds of new things with both crops and equipment and very, very innovative so even though I’ve doubled his age I always love to know what Jesse’s doing because I can learn a lot from him.
Carol McFarland
I bet he called you about the WEED-IT though.
Mark Sheffels
Yeah we might have had some discussions, but Jesse doesn’t need a whole lot of help he can figure things out pretty fast.
Carol McFarland
Well it was a good, good interview we had and we’ll probably have to follow up with him again. Maybe when we start talking more about canola. So we talked about the most annoying thing about trying things on the farm and you described a little bit about the challenges toward adapting the innovations to a dry climate. What’s the most fun thing you’ve experienced in trying new things on the farm?
Mark Sheffels
Just doing something that hasn’t been done before. You know things have to change. You can see that between the costs and the spring crops becoming less viable options that we have to learn. We have to move on. So coming up, finding the peas given a decent price can be quite successful and definitely canola can. That’s a game changer. I would venture to say there’s a lot of farmers that are hanging in there right now because of canola if they have nothing but winter cereals I’m not so sure. So you see more and more of it all the time and understandably I must admit I thought we lacked innovation at one point in time but I see that’s not really the case farmers are figuring that out pretty fast.
Carol McFarland
It’s funny how subtle innovations can also be; they don’t have to be big grand things always.
Mark Sheffels
Well and that’s where this Direct Seed Association comes in so well. Farmers have had an opportunity to see other guys that have a lot of similarities to them doing these things and the university is a huge part of making those tools available, but until other farmers see farmers do it they sometimes just don’t think that what the university is doing really applies to them until they see it in application
Carol McFarland
Or hear about it.
Mark Sheffels
Yeah so that’s where tying it all together has been very rewarding to watch that.
Carol McFarland
That’s great. Well thank you for sharing your many years of experience in on-farm trials and service to the ag community in our region and it sounds like on a national scale. I really appreciate you having me out today. Thanks for your time Mark.
Mark Sheffels
Well thank you. It was fun.
Carol McFarland
As always, a big thank you to our guest today for sharing their wealth of knowledge and experience with us. This podcast is produced by the PNW Farmer’s Network team with music credit to Carlos Flores. The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers alone and do not represent that of the PNW Farmer’s Network or any associated agencies. Please remember that experimental results will vary and listeners are encouraged to try things at home. If you like what you heard, please support this work by sharing, rating, and reviewing and do consider joining us as a guest or nominating a friend who is trying things on their farm. We look forward to hearing from you. Until next time, happy trials.