The interviews compiled for another special episode of Stories from the Field features Russ Zenner retired farmer from Genesee, Idaho, Clint Zenner farming outside of Genesse, Idaho talking with University of Idaho researcher Kendall Kahl, and Tracy Erikson retiring farmer outside of St. John, WA.
Russ Zenner
I was raised on the farm where my dad was a second generation. My grandfather immigrated from Luxembourg in 1908, ended up in Uniontown, Washington, and married a second generation German girl that had family ties that got them into farming in about 1911 and that they raised ten children.
My grandfather was was able to get all of his sons started farming in the North Idaho region and my grandparents set an example of opportunity for their children, a love for agriculture that I feel very blessed to have that stewardship and opportunity with my grandparents that was passed on to my father’s generation and we provided opportunity for our children.
None of them decided to be farmers. They all got degrees, master’s degrees and have had very successful professional careers. But we’ve ended up then the extended family Clint and Alisha Zenner farming our farm now. And I just feel very blessed to have had the opportunity to be in a profession that I just loved and an opportunity to manage natural resources.
Part of the winter wheat production region, still a primary crop, but raising spring grains, pulse crops got some alfalfa. Cattle have historically been a part of the farm In recent years we’ve not only been involved in Shepherd’s grain flour, there was a handful of other growers that were involved in that very first year of Shepherd’s Grain, and it was sort of an outgrowth of that Pacific Northwest Direct Seed Association trying to perfect no-till cropping management.
And that sort of got us involved in the retail side of it being connected to consumers where we had- all of that group had been commodity growers for their entire career and getting into a market with consumers that had an interest in how the food was grown and, you know, the impact on the environment and how we grew food was a very rewarding experience for a commodity producer, and we all shared that.
That was in about 2003. Fast forward another ten years and our son and daughter in law started Zacca hummus, Janine does not have a competitor that can trace the beans back to the farm in the family. That whole journey has provided a lot of inspiration to do better with how we farm, be much more environmentally sensitive to how we’re producing food, price advantage in the marketplace by producing food that people are willing to pay a premium for. It takes financial risk out of it, but rewards you for doing good things.
One of the first volunteer positions I got hooked into was the Latah County Soil Conservation District Board of Supervisors. And what I learned as far as soil conservation in that position had a profound influence over my natural resource management goals in my career.
Understanding the implications of topsoil loss, water erosion, wind, erosion, tillage erosion and the more I learned there, the more I became convinced that we’ve got to do a better job of farming to sustain the resource. And we are so blessed in this Palouse region with the incredibly productive sort of new soils, young soils that Mother Nature gave us.
And it was apparent that we were degrading this very rapidly. It’s not a criticism of all the farmers. My dad, my uncle farmed that way, my grandfather farmed, that’s the best they knew. But I was convinced that we had to do better
And later on we put together a little partnership group called VICO, three like-minded friends. I would say one of the advantages we had, the four of us,we all had a passion for an understanding that we’ve got to do better in managing this natural resource just the sharing and knowledge pushing, you know, the values of this group is we all had the belief that we had to contribute to pushing the envelope, doing something that nobody else was doing and share every year.
And that was very powerful as you and then go around once a year and share the information on what was going on there. Probably one of the experiences in my career that’s been the most satisfying to work with that group. It was such great people and respect for them, to see that carrying on in the next generation is very satisfying.
And then one of the other things, this was in 1995, I can’t believe it’s approaching 30 years ago. Monsanto sponsored a trip to the Dakota Lakes Research Farm. It was about 15 growers from the Pacific Northwest went back to see what Duane Beck was doing with that annual cropping system.
That no-till system they were doing on that 700 acre farm and the implications it was having to that region. On going from spring wheat summer fallow to a very diverse rotation corn, soybeans, pulse crops, annual cropping. I was part of that group. That’s when I met Carl Kupers, who ended up being one of the founders of Shepherd’s Grain and a lot of that group ended up being on the PNDSA board. We were trying to master no-till, make it consistent, profitable, competitive. You know, that the implications to reducing topsoil loss was so apparent and provable and that was the easy part. But to be more efficient on input, use those type of things that was one of the hopes that we were going to improve organic matter quicker than it is happening just with no till.
Because I’m a firm believer at this stage of the game, we’ve got to treat the planet better than we are.I believe in the science of climate change. I believe in the human influence over that and we’ve been involved in some of the early carbon sequestration activities.
Agriculture is a major player in the implications of human influence over climate change. And if we would get young people looking at that, it would encourage more non ag people, it would encourage STEM students. We need all of those working with us to help us do a better job. FFA programs, recognizing the implications of tillage on topsoil loss, wherever it may be.
some of the things my observations and in my career the last couple of decades especially, we have drier late summers, drier early falls than we used to have in my early career. And that has put some challenges into trying to do these multi-species cover crops between crops like they do in the summer rainfall regions has put more challenge to make that successful.
It’s as the population of this planet increases, as our reliance on the extractive industries is still a big part of how we produce food. There’s a lot that’s going to have to change in my view, I’m hoping that we can be a part of the effort to lessen the negative implications of all of this, these activities that are prevalent in how we produce this very cheap food.
A lot of the publicly funded genetic effort variety development programs are based on bulk yield and I think we need to be getting back to including nutritional density, maximizing, being more efficient in getting nutrients into that food that are healthy for the humans that are eating them or the livestock.
The problem with that is humans keep repeating past mistakes and somehow we’ve got to have the stewardship commitment, the recognition of the need on the producer level to be convinced that we’ve got to do a better job in not just raising cheap food, not just raising bushels, but foods that are nutrient dense, that are healthy, and and there’s opportunity there. If we have everybody moving in the same direction, we could be advancing much than we are.
We have talked a lot today about my activities through the years. And before we finish up here today, I would like to acknowledge the support of my wife, Kathy, of 58 years and our family that has supported and believed in what we were doing on our farm. My involvement in all the off farm activities wouldn’t have happened without her belief in the value of what we learned from the time spent in meetings locally and the travel to other regions.
She has been very involved in our Shepherd’s grain market promotion efforts in recent years. Our participation in everything from farmers market activities to meeting in-store promotions for Zarqa Hummus and her contribution to all the major decisions on our farm have been invaluable.
Clint and Kendall
Clint Zenner
So, I’m a fourth generation farmer. I grew up farming with my dad and grandpa on the Camas Prairie. Our farm back then wasn’t big enough to sustain three full time incomes with me, my dad and my brother, and I had the opportunity to move to Genesee and start farming Russ Zenner’s place with my wife, Alisha… sheesh, back in 2011 and it’s been a pretty neat rollercoaster of a ride since we were a pretty predominant livestock operation before I started farming with Russ full time, and I always had kind of a passion and a desire to make the ground better, even though I didn’t have any idea how to do it. I just didn’t think that the way we were farming was the best for the land. And the opportunity that we were given to be able to steward this land, for generations. Russ kind of had a lot of the same philosophies as well as my dad and grandpa, so yeah, it’s been quite a ride.
Kendall Kahl
I guess I’ve been in the Palouse since 2011. Also have been working in ag and doing soils research since then, and what got me into this is just wanting to know more about how farming practices affect our soil and how we can kind of farm better to preserve our soil. So a lot of my research has been looking at those interactions. And how do we think of soil as an ecosystem? And take that into consideration with how we think about how we manage it.
Clint Zenner
I don’t think there’s a soul on the planet that has poked more holes on my farm than Kendall. She probably knows my soil ten times better than anyone that has ever farmed any of it. Yeah.
Kendall Kahl
That’s funny. I mean, it’s a beautiful place to get to go work. Yeah.
Clint Zenner
We are pretty blessed where we farm.
Clint Zenner
Our environment is so different than most places. You know, you can go from right here on my farm, 60 miles in any direction and be in a complete different climate ecosystem. 20 miles, it’s crazy!
Clint Zenner
That adds a degree of complexity for sure. For the researchers, for the farmers…
I’m just kind of a traditional farmer that does a pretty standard rotation. And trying to figure out how to farm with less synthetic inputs is kind of my goal and my motivation. I want to sign the backs of checks and not the fronts of checks, that’s my goal. No more signing the front of them.
Definitely one of the key factors that I look at year to year is the nitrogen use efficiency. I try to take really good records of all nutrients applied and really good yield records. And even though we’re doing variable rate on the entire farm, it’s interesting to run the nitrogen use efficiency across the farm from what I was at when we first started farming it back in 2011, compared to what we are now. You know, that’s my usual key indicator, is my soil working better for me because every year I apply less and less traditional synthetic inputs…but our yields aren’t suffering. So we must be doing something right with the covers and maybe Kendall’s poked so many holes you just aerated the soil so good it can breathe.
We’ve ran cow, calf herd for my entire life. And, we’re kind of phasing out of the, running the pairs, and I want to do more stockers or yearling. That way we can get a better rate again and do a better job of putting a dollar value to grazing a cover crop.
I’m always eager to learn if what we are doing is working to improve soil health, soil structure, increased biology,
The hard part for Kendall is putting it in layman’s terms for a farmer and like, yeah, you know, thumbs up, you’re doing good or we haven’t really seen anything yet. So I feel bad for the university trying to do all this research and then having to convey it to farmers and keep us motivated on: yes, this is working. We are doing good. We are seeing benefits I guess just basic questions, you know, are we doing better? Are we improving our soil health, our soil structure and, and I always have to remind myself that it’s taken us 50, 60, 70 years to screw our soils up as bad as we have.
It’s going to take us a little while to fix them. And I…I like immediate gratification, and that’s a challenge because it’s going to take my entire career to try to undo some of the wrongs we’ve done the last several generations of farming. So it’s…it’s a challenge, but it’s yeah, that’s what motivates me to keep doing it.
Kendall Kahl
The Landscapes and Transition project was interesting in a lot of ways. That project is looking at integrating cover crops really managed more as a forage crop. and then also winter peas as a cash crop. And, we did we did livestock grazing on large field scale plots that Clint was describing and then we sort of mimicked hay and our smaller replicated plots of those same crop rotations. And then there’s some interesting entomological results that have come out of that and sort of, economic analysis, that others have been doing.
And what was interesting is that we had such extremely different weather years during that project from, very sort of idyllic wet, warm spring that produced like a, you know, record breaking high yield followed by an extreme drought with a record breaking low yield here. And so watching how these crops perform under these extremes, one makes it hard in the short term to say, you know, what are these crops actually doing?
But part of the other point of introducing these crops, you know, do they provide any kind of resilience to these more extreme scenarios that we expect to see? So it’s in some ways it’s sort of the perfect set of years to be trying to look at how they perform. But it’s hard in the short term to make fairly decisive conclusions about how it’s going to affect different aspects of the system.
Clint Zenner
Definitely the interesting thing for me, watching all of, you know, the decade’s worth of research we’ve done is that the climate is changing. Like, I don’t know if…I don’t have an educated stance on climate change one way or the other, but how can you not know that the climate is changing? We’re getting these severe weather events that maybe they’ve happened forever, but I think the climate’s always changing. That’s just one of the neat things about farming. It keeps you on your toes as you, you know, even as a researcher, you you never know what Mother Nature is going to do from month to month. And, it’s just- it’s going to be interesting 20 years from now when we’re sitting down looking at all of the data on this farm from when we started doing all this, just to see how we did do compared to the traditional cropping system.
Clint Zenner
I guess with the wild weather that we’re having, you know, we have these extreme heats, extreme droughts and then we boom, we get blessed with a perfect growing year. just trying to keep consistency on raising a healthy crop that has, you know, the right protein content, the right you know, we all want the best deal possible.
But as long as I’m staying at or above, you know, my ten year proven yield and continually, slowly reducing inputs. And…if yes, I reduce some inputs. But I’m also adding carbon sources like molasses in the spring. Some of the things we’re going to try is, you know, biochar and compost teas. And we got a lot of things that we’re going to try just on a…we went to a conference and somebody’s trying something really cool, and I’m like, hey, I think I can make that work. I’m going to try that on the farm and see what happens. And- but yeah, I guess my metric and my measurement I look at is I just want to make sure, you know, like in 2020 when we had the really great year, we had not the highest yields in the area.
But then in ‘21 when we had that super severe drought, we had some of the higher yields in the entire area. And just keeping that average up is kind of what I try to look for, for a metric. I don’t know if there’s anything scientific about it at all whatsoever other than average yield. But that’s kind of my motivation is I have to sell the crop to continue farming. So I need a pretty sustainable income of crop.
Kendall Kahl
I will say, though, from all of the digging we have done on Clint’s farm. Especially in some of that, that one field that I’ve done a lot of the work in, that’s been in really long term no-till that you’ve done a lot of this work to regenerate that soil. There’s a beautiful, earthworm population there. Not that I always see the worms, but just the evidence of their burrows in the channeling. And just you can, really see that it’s a vibrant ecosystem down there, at least from the evidence of those larger soil organisms.
Clint Zenner
She’s the new worm queen.
Kendall Kahl
Is that what I get to call myself?
Clint Zenner
Got worms.
Kendall Kahl
Right. Well, so earthworms are great for a lot of reasons, right? They help us decompose, that crop material and get our crop residues down into the soil and recycled back into a form that can be taken up by plants. And they’re also aerating the soil while they’re doing that. Right? So they’re affecting our nutrient cycling and also our physical structure of the soil in ways that are beneficial to the plants. And the way we farm obviously impacts the earthworms because there’s some physical interaction between our equipment and the soil and the worms themselves. And we’ve started to, I guess the two big categories of plants that I think about are like deep burrowing worms that tend to do better, in lower disturbance systems. And those are the ones that are going to really have a more drastic impact, in theory, on your infiltration, because they’re going to create the big burrows and allows a lot of water to come in.
But then we also have these horizontal burrowing worms that live closer to the surface. And, also do a lot for infiltration and nutrient cycling. And those ones tend to be less negatively affected by tillage. They seem to just be more resilient to disturbance. And I think some of that is because they’re a smaller worm and they reproduce rapidly. So their populations can rebound if they get knocked around by some equipment.
Clint Zenner
I’m always trying to reduce the salt content of whatever fertilizer it is that I’m using. We used to apply a lot of thiosol, and now we’re trying to fly more gypsum, for the sulfur source.
And it’s kind of a soil conditioning agent as well. What do you think, Kendall? Is it…the higher salt loads are hard on the worms?
Kendall Kahl
That’s a good question. I think in theory, probably. I don’t know that the salt content that we’re adding with our fertilizers is necessarily a problem. The things the worms need is carbon, right? They need material to it or, leaf litter, right? To decompose primarily, or roots. And so by- for adding this fertilizer and it’s growing bigger crops and returning more biomass, there’s sort of that secondary feedback from the fertilizer. We have another project going on that surprisingly isn’t involving Clint. But, we were actually looking at the interaction between different levels of tillage and carbon and also how that impacts a lot of aspects of the soil. But one of them is worms. Anyway, if you were to add a fertilizer that was more carbon based, like a manure that’s going to directly feed your earthworm population.
The two different types of fertilizer, whether it’s an organic material based fertilizer versus a synthetic fertilizer, fertilizer that’s going to help grow bigger crops. Either way, you’re eventually building up the food supply for the worm population.
Clint Zenner
managing moisture. You know, that’s one of the big reasons why we got into no-till. We thought that, you know, if we increase organic matter, we’re going to increase water holding capacity and be able to grow more crop. You know, that’s, that’s a double edged sword of this, this style of farming is you don’t want to eliminate all your inputs and have a, you know, I may reduce synthetics, but at the end of the day, I want to grow a big crop because if I’m not growing big crop I’m not sequestering carbon. I’m not, you know, you…to sequester more carbon, you need to grow a bigger crop. So we got to grow crops. We have to, unfortunately, feed the globe. And so…
ROI is important, no question. But there’s a cost associated. Like I can’t put a number on it for you, but like, I’m willing to sacrifice ROI to do things better. Because I do think it’s important because someday I’m going to be gone and this place is going to be farmed by someone, maybe one of my kids, maybe not. But I don’t want them to be like, wow, Clint really did a crappy job farming this place. There’s no worms, there’s no bees. The soil is dead. I- yeah, I just- I don’t want that to be my legacy so that it’s…I can’t put a number on it, but, it’s definitely something that I do think about, that I can’t sacrifice income to be better at what we’re doing.
Clint Zenner
Figuring out how to do it right without killing our soil is pretty important. The thing that….so the managing [of] the moisture is very important to me, as well as looking at, the entomology side or the, the bug side, the pollinators, you know, there’s some funky stuff on some of these traits and we don’t know what the implications are of these.
And that’s what I love about the covers is it’s a year that you get a plant, something on that field that doesn’t have all the neonicotinoids, and you see it like, I don’t think there’s as many bees as there used to be, personally. Like there just isn’t. The pollinators or, used to be, around our house we have a ton of different pollinators planted.
My wife loves native plants and native pollinators, and it is amazing when I come home and the life around my house and the garden and the flowers around the house, compared to at my farm shop where it’s just grass and rock and I keep all the weeds dead and I never let anything bloom and there’s no life there.
It’s just, it’s crazy when you sit down and enjoy that adult beverage and kind of look around and you’re like, oh, my house is just buzzing with stuff. And when I’m at the farm, I’m like, I, I never get stung by a bee or see a bee.
She’s a pretty strong decision maker on the farm, but we’re planting hedgerows, you know, trying to increase diversity of what’s on the farm for that reason. Yeah. She’s always coming up with new places to plant things that I have to spray around, which, you know, I know is a good thing.
I actually never profited from a cover crop in any way, shape or form. There’s always been a negative ROI.
We continue to do it, and the main reason why I like to do it, and I want to collaborate all the time, and this is something that I don’t feel like the university gets enough credit for. But us as growers would not do these things if it was not for people like Kendall that are looking at the data, analyzing the data, giving us data. They’re the ones that motivate us to keep doing it because we are seeing benefits. We are learning. We are making the soil better, you know? Can I explain how and why my infiltration rates and my biodiversity and all that? Absolutely not. But I can feel it with a shovel and I can see it with the bugs around the farm.
And that’s…yeah, if it wasn’t for getting these, the researchers involved, I mean, there’s nobody would think outside the box. So it’s very, very important to have the worm queen out poking holes in my field every year.
Kendall Kahl
It’s funny to hear you say that, because I feel like I get a lot of motivation from all of your guys creativity and the ways that you guys are trying to make things work. And…yeah, I think you guys, I think you guys are the out of the box thinkers
Clint Zenner
I’ve taken over some different farms around through the years and in…or done custom work for other farmers and growers. And it’s interesting the amount of hours we spent in a tractor, you can feel if the ground’s hard just by driving in the tractor, like you probably poking holes with a soil probe.
I mean, there’s times you’re like, Holy cow, what is- am I in a track? Like, is the whole field this hard? Like, what is going on? I’m not used to this feeling. And then it’s like, oh, wow. Some of this crazy hippie stuff I’m doing is actually making my soil softer. Great.
Kendall Kahl
Yeah. I mean, I think those types of observations alongside the numbers are great [and] are really helpful because there’s a lot of times we see something, we see a difference. Right? But we can’t always capture that in our measurements. We try, you know, I think having both it’s all information, it’s helpful. Yeah.
Clint Zenner
The definitely the most annoying thing about watching Kendall and her team is it doesn’t matter how cold it is or how hot it is, they’ll be out there working, taking samples in the blazing heat or the freezing cold, and I’m in my climate controlled cab thinking to myself, man, I feel like a real big wimp right now. Because Kendall’s out there and it’s 105.
Carol McFarland
There’s no part of farmers that are wimps, but it is pretty hardcore to do that, field sampling.
Kendall Kahl
I love having conversations with everybody we work with about what they’re seeing, their perspective on the land that we’re studying or just the way they see it all coming together, it makes my understanding of what I’m saying so much richer I think and. Yeah. I think a lot of the folks, Clint included, that we work with are really creative in the way that they try to solve these problems that I always find to be very inspiring.
Tracy Eriksen
Tracy Eriksen
My grandfather came here, in 1897 and actually came to this place where we’re residing right now in 1907. And, my father was raised in this house.
I was raised about a mile down the road. And then ever since my married life, I’ve been in what would be my grandfather’s house here. So we have moved about a mile or a mile and a half in, I have him 84 years ago or 83 years.
So, anyhow, we haven’t moved very far. My grandfather did homestead a place, but that was about seven miles away, and he sold that to his brother in 1907 when he came up here and settled here, married my grandmother, who lived a mile behind and, and the rest of its history there
You know, there’s a lot of stories like that around here, and we’re just one of them.
I spent 20 some years in an open cab tractor tilling the ground, and I spent another 20 or so years still tilling. This is about 70 years now, and I’ve affected- I’ve actually affected this ground the same amount of time as most of my predecessors, my grandfather and my father, both when they added up what they were doing on here. I’ve been here about the same length of time, so I probably have had more influence on either the destruction side and trying to improve it than anybody else that’s been on this piece of property.
My father was always pretty progressive, at that time. But, for that time. But later he got away from the plowing very early.
I really never did run a plow. I have, but it was never one of those things that I…we did deal in and deal out. We were mostly disking and chiseling. By the time I kind of got involved, which was, in our estimation at that time was an improvement.
we’re on the western edge of the Palouse Hills, so quite close to the scab land. So, yeah, we have in light soil most of those fertilize soils, so they run.
If they are over cultivated, they run down the hill. And that was really probably the thing that really kind of set me on the this road is in 1975, I was too lazy to get off of a tractor and get a piece of post that was in the road or in my in my track, and I watched that post go from the hilltop, the hill bottom in one season, just from my cultivation, and it would just move a little bit every time I did a pass.
And I said, and then, watch the soil flow down the road in front of my weeder. And I said, my kids are never going to be able to farm this ground. There won’t be anything left if I keep eroding it the way it’s going here.
So from about that point on, then I started working at ways to stop that. It was a slow process.
Our whole region here started out when my grandfather was on this and then, early years and my father, we raised turkey red wheat.
That was hard red wheat. That was standard. My father, he told me, he said I raised turkey red until they wouldn’t take it anymore at the elevator.
So, that was when we changed over. And when- my early farming days, basically, it was all club wheat. The whole region was club wheat. And, in 1960, we had stem rust, I believe it was that came in or leaf rust and took out all the whole countryside.
Prior to 1985, when the farm bill came and they released us from our bases, up to that point, you were locked into braces, into bases, and we had to raise wheat, and we had to raise right up the maximum, what the base allowed us, or we would lose that. So, the government really made this wheat farmers. Those up east of us, they were complaining at that time because they were in a pea, wheat, barley rotation.
Well, the wheat base for them got knocked back because they had other crops. Most of us down here in the fallow area, it was half wheat at that time, early in the 60s when that program came about. And, so we had a wheat fallow and knowing how there would be some barley, we had a low barley base, but we protected that because that’s what the program payments and everything. That was where we were in terms of rotation early on, is wheat-fallow for us. When 85 came and they separated the bases on that somewhat, then we started to be able to do some other stuff. I went in and started raising some spring peas, yellows. and we had more spring barley, and wheat, but that was about as far as it went.
In our case, we have, we have an individual who wants to put soybeans into the area, bring them in here. He thinks he has some varieties that might grow in here because this is not a soybean area,
In the future, yeah, I think maybe there’s a potential, particularly if our climate keeps warming, which most likely it will. And the moisture we heard yesterday from the weatherman, yeah. Seem to be getting a little more moist, you know, then maybe, maybe it’ll come this way, but, Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s one of those things that you try and you- you hope for success. And the likelihood is probably not great when you give it a try.
crop diversity. It basically is, what? I’ve become, you know, my interest once I got into the soil health issue, as you know. So or. Well, even before that, when I was more interested in listening to Beck, crop diversity was always his thing. The more diversity, the better.
So I was one of those, you know what? We’re pretty limited. We were wheat and barley and, you know, there was some peas in that here, but we needed more diversity. So we look at those crops. That’s why we basically got into canola and mustards and things like that, and garbanzo beans.
So just to get the diversity in there, the more current with the cover crops now is basically to get diversity out there. As I learn more about the microbial biology in the soil, we, the critters need feeding. They need different foods, different critters. So, you know, it’s all about the diversity.
We are trying to do less of the pH lowering fertilizer. There was a time I thought all nematodes were bad, that was a revelation to me to find out, no, nematodes are a main critter to do some conversions for us. You don’t want the plant eaters.
Used to be soil health to me it was just to stop the erosion, you know, get no till and that’ll do it all and blah, blah. Well, that didn’t quite work. Yes, we stopped the erosion, but still, we were taking material off the ground. We really started seeing that we weren’t putting anything back on there, even though we left everything in place.
In ‘16, we put 100 acres of a multi-mix with radish on our hills area. We had a big run off that year and I was out in the field watching that stuff go off in the spring. We had a Chinook.
It was- we didn’t have a lot of snow, but it went fast. Water was rolling everything. I was on our chem fallow winter wheat, which we had good cover on. The water was leaving quite clear. But it was still we were losing that. And all I could see by this time is yield going down the creek.
Then I went over and walked over the area that we had our cover crop on, which included radish. We, I like radish, and there was no water movement at all on that ground. And we were there were slopes around 30% on some of that ground. So the more I looked at that, the better I liked it.
Tracy Eriksen
We kept our moisture. it’s going in the ground. We’re not losing anything. If you’re losing water, you’re losing soil. You’re not. You can’t help it, moving water moves stuff. You got nutrients, you got pesticides, you got whatever is going down.
The university research is getting much better. Earlier on, a lot of the use or the reason for the biological groups that have been going on is that we were not getting the research out of the colleges that we needed to do what some of us were seeing that needed to be done. But we’ve also, I’ve noticed over the last three, four years particularly, a big jump in interest. Maybe it’s been more than three or four years, well, since ‘16 anyhow. But there’s a big interest coming up and we’re getting more, I think, good research out of that.
when all of the modifications I did for 20, 30 years, the equipment, the thing that I always looked at when I spent all winter making these modifications, part of that was how long was it going to take me to back out of that? How many days was it going to take me to reconvert my drill or my cultivating system back to where it was that I knew would work?
And I always planned that around a day’s change. If things didn’t work, I was going to lose a day, strip it all out of there and get it back.
since 2012, I’ve had a blog and I used to keep it up really well. But in the last about three, four years, I’m not in the field like I used to be. And I find I’m not observing. I’m having trouble. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll even try to keep that blog going because I’m just not out there doing the observations that I was.
But we just kind of do it by the seat of the pants an awful lot of it. If it looks like it’s growing good, we’ll dig in the soil and we’ll look around and see what plant growth and give it some thought. So is it doing what we want?
But I’m not an innovator. I would call myself an early adopter. I’m not sure I’ve ever had an innovative thought in my head. But I see this stuff out there. I think I do have a knack to say that has a potential. I’m going to try it. Or no, I’m not going to deal with that.
We’re not that big of an operation to start with, just to be throwing a lot of stuff out there.
I think the drones are going to help me when we get to that. That’s going to help.
Our heavy residue helps us on the weed issues.Trying to cut down the tracking is going to be a big thing for us.
One of the most frustrating things I think. We can cut our weed population down a lot, but we can’t cut our spray operation out.
I’ve got maybe a hundred weeds.I’ve cut it down from a thousand weeds, but I still got to go after those hundred weeds.