In this bonus episode, we hear thoughts on the what, how, and why,
around building soil health and cropping systems innovation in grain production systems of
the inland Pacific Northwest. Listen to these highlights from interviews with Uhlorn Family
Farms team, Tom Conklin, and Douglas Poole about the challenges and rewards working
hard to grow food, and steward land in their communities.
Uhlorn Family Farms
Darrel Uhlorn
I’ve been on the farm since eighty-one and it’s a third generation. I love every day Iām here, so it’s not a job, it’s love.
Brent Uhlorn
Brent Ulorn, I’ve been here for twelve years now. I came back a little bit later in life. Went out in the world, did some other work and decided that farming really was my passion that I wanted to come back to. So I’ve been back here now and enjoy getting to work beside my dad. I get along really well most days and it’s been good. And then with us we also have David Dalshrud, who we brought on the farm about two years ago, who has been a fantastic addition.
Dave Dalshrud
This is my first official farm job. I probably spent about fifteen, twenty years of my adult life trying to figure out how I could get on the farm and make a living, be able to support my family. And it was just kind of almost a providential thing. I ran into these guys and they’re doing awesome stuff here, so I’m pretty excited to be a part of it.
Brent Uhlorn
My son seems to be the one who’s the most excited. He comes, spends at least one day a week on the farm most of the year. If it’s summertime, it’s two to three days a week. He’s four years old and just loves everything about it.
Brent Uhlorn
We’re considered high rainfall moisture. We farm anywhere from sixteen to twenty-four inch rainfall zone, depending on where the farm ground lies. but, you know, twenty-four inches does come with its own headaches at times too, with having to deal with too much water and being able to get across the ground in a timely fashion. So there are some downsides to the other side of the picture too.
main crops are we do a winter canola into a winter wheat into a legume, whether it be a pea or chickpea, and then finish off with a winter wheat or an oat crop and then we’ll come in with the fallow. So that’s the base of the blend and then fromā but within that we grow winter wheat, spring wheat, oats, canola, peas, lentils, garbs.
Brent Uhlorn
Also do raise sunflowers. We’ve done millet in the past. We’ve done quinoa. We’ve grown a few different vegetable seed crops, spinach, turnips, and general radish, I believe. And so yeah, try to have aā find diverse crops to mess with.
Brent Uhlorn
The reason we came up with that was it was a financial diversification, or I guess to help reduce the financial risk if we’re invested in more regions or more crop types, we hopefully aren’t as susceptible to big price swings in the marketplace. So wheat production is down, hopefully canola is up, or legumes areā except another market there that we can look into for pricing diversification. So that’s kind of why we came up with the structure that we did or the rotation that we did is to, like I said, just spread out that financial risk of it.
Darrel Uhlorn
And it’s also fun. You’ll see what you can grow. Part of the problem with it is making sure you have a market that sometimes we grow something, we don’t have a market. But first you have to know if you can grow it on a real small scale before you can investigate the market. There’s just no way to get rid of it. So the quinoa is interesting that there’s no market that we could find a place to go with it, but use it to feed your cattle or whatever we can do, cut a crop, seed, whatever.
Dave Dalshrud
So I’m trained in and practice Korean natural farming.
Dave Dalshrud
Being able to bring some of that knowledge and some of those techniques and products and stuff like that and kind of sneak them in and put them on a broad acre has been really, really fun.
Brent Uhlorn
So Dave, because of his background there, has built us our own Johnson Su bioreactors. And so we’ve got four different ones going right now. We’ll probably start a couple more this spring. really neat to see that taking that indigenous biology and just ramping it up and putting it back in the agriculture fields where some of it’s been long, long gone.
how we got started in compost tea was several years ago,
Brent Uhlorn
So we started with a tote and some compost tea bags. We got off Amazon and would leave them soak. From there, we upgraded to a fish bubbler to get a little bit of oxygen in there. And then after that, we bought an actual brewer system. It was an eight-hundred gallon tank with a large air pump, bubblers, and then it had sleeves in there that we could drop in compost tea bags and then force the air up through it. And thenā system works well.
The biggest issue we probably run into is the time it takes to make up a full batch versus how fast we can put it out. So when we’re in the middle of seeding, that becomes our bottleneck. We just can’t brew up compost tea quite fast enough.
Dave Dalshrud
I think kind of a really important thing that’s relatively recent that’s come online is a lot of this information is being translated to broad acre crops, right? These commodity type crops,
Brent Uhlorn
I’d agree with that for sure.This stuff isn’t new that we’re doing. It just hasn’t been done in broadacre commodities as much. So, it’s taking stuff from the smaller market gardens or the really small high dollar value that take a lot of labor, a lot of love and just being able to find ways to translate those into more economically feasible and cover larger land masses with it.
Darrel Uhlorn
It takes a lot more work to do what we’re doing. It’s not simple. You’ve got to plan stuff out ahead. And it just takes more time, more hours. Once you get it kind of going and flowing, it’s not that hard. It’s a learning process. It takes time.
Darrel Uhlorn
When I started, we were one-hundred percent convinced. We started to have one with no-till, mid eighties, and saw some great benefits from it. And trying to find the proper drill that can do it all through the years. I got to give my dad kudos on this. I mean, he was not scared to try anything, try new stuff. I mean, he wanted to learn too in the process. I mean, that’s probably the excitement of a farmer. We were one of the first ones to get about the first one to drill spring canola. I grew canola here in the Northwest.
Darrel Uhlorn
Every time you disturb the soil, you’re killing the soil. Every time you kill it, every time you plow it. It’s hard on the soil biology. So the least amount that you can disturb, the better it’s going to be. So our soils have changedā just from direct seed have changed tremendously. The water holding capacity, the ease of being able to pull the drill. And we’ve noticed that we take this farm ground over and we pull the direct seed drill in there and take off. And one that’s here about five years ago, Rick pulled in this field and says, there’s something wrong with the cracker. This thing is pulling like crap. I said it isn’t the cracker. It’s not used to it. It’s been directā it’s been conventional tilled up until we took it over.
Brent Uhlorn
Don’t use fungicides anymore on crops. We just don’t have the disease. We rarely use insecticides anymore. We’ve just found ways around it to where we don’t need to use that stuff.
Darrel Uhlorn
We also get asked a lot of questions. People are curious about what you do and those kinds of things. So, because they want to learn too. I mean, if there’s something else out there that’s good or better than what they’re doing, there’s always interest in it.
Brent Uhlorn
Halts progress if you’re worried about the opinions too much.
Brent Uhlorn
The other thing we try and shoot for, I guess, that we’ve noticed is we don’t see the huge yield swings from year to year. On a really, really good year, we’re not going to be the top yielder, but on a really poor year, we’re going to have substantially better crops than most other people. And so what we’re looking for is that average to continue to climb. Like I said, we may not have to hit the tops of the tops, but if we’re way off of the lows of the lows, that starts to move that average up. And that’s kind of what we’re trying to work on is, is getting, taking that bottom end out and then being able to keep it higher.
Brent Uhlorn
Our goal is to not just grow a commodity. It’s to grow food, it’s to grow something that’s high quality, that’s flavorful, that’s nutritionally dense. And it can be challenging to go to all this work and then not have a home for it other than a barge that’s heading down the river. And so trying to find and develop markets has been a challenge. It’s something that I feel like we’re gaining on.
The awareness of the consumer when it came to food and what they were eating. And that has been a really big piece to this kind of regenerative movement, what we’re trying to do on our farm in terms of eliminating a lot of the synthetic things and maybe not going to a full organic, but we find a way to minimize and still make something really good that can still be healthy.
Brent Uhlorn
On top of that, through ecological services, how can we help protect or bring back or at least offer refuge or help for your beneficial organisms, your natural bugs and biology? How can we keep that dirt in the field, not in the river for the fish? How do we keep the pollutants out of the drinking waters? There’s a whole realm of issues that we’re trying to do with this.
Darrel Uhlorn
It’s frustrating just to grow these crops the way we do and then just send it down the river on the barge with everybody else’s. Because we do put a lot more into it.
Dave Dalshrud
I like the size of the lever on this farm. Like you can really sling some stuff around. I think that’s fun. Just the resources that are available here to really make big changes. For me, that’s exciting coming from a smaller scale.
Brent Uhlorn
Don’t be afraid to try something. Too often we get stuck in a rut and, you know, then it kind of becomes boring. So go out and try something and, you know, you don’t have to do it full scale. You can take it on a part of a field or a part of a couple of fields and just see how things shake out, how we advance.
Tom Conklin
Carol McFarland
We’re out at Wittman Family Farms outside of Cul de Sac, Idaho, with Mr. Tom Conklin.
We have a number of us all working together on what we’re trying to do.
It’s been a cattle and small grain operation, like I said, for four generations. And we’re just trying to do the best with what we have and have a good team doing it so.
Tom Conklin
We’re working on, yeah, raising up the fifth generation.
Tom Conklin
We do still have cows on the place. Sometimes they’re a lot of fun to be around and sometimes they’re not as much fun, but we do still have cows.
Tom Conklin
A lot of ridgeā ridgelines and canyon-type ground around this area.
And then up on the Camas prairie, just kind of that higher, wetter, colder ground up there. So we go anywhere from oh, twelve to fourteen inches of rainfall down in Tammany up to I think I’ve heard it called twenty-two, maybe all the way up to twenty-four inches annually up there. It kind of varies depending on where you are up there.
Tom Conklin
There are more people moving to annual cropping in this area. There’s not as much fallow as there used to be, but that’s, you know, probably more practice based than it is kind of how those maps are traditionally set up. It seems to me like there’s more of a movement towards the annual cropping, especially as you get into the higher elevation ground around here.
But I guess it is variable. There are still farms that do more fallow operations around here as well.
Tom Conklin
The family started using no till drills I think in the early eighties. It wasn’t until the mid to late nineties that it was a full transition to the whole farm continuous no till, so still quite a while there with continuous no till operations.
Tom Conklin
My father in law’s generation, Dick Wittman, was part of the Direct Seed Association early on when it started. And that was a big group of farmers in the region that were trying to figure this out. And I think it came down to if we’re going to figure this out, we really have to start doing this instead of like, āhey, we’re going to do a little dabble here and a little dabble there,ā because the system wasn’t improving itself that way.
So they got together much like a lot of us are kind of working on this whole region ag movement now and trying to figure out like, āhey how does some of this work, what are our downsides? What are theā what are the ways we make this work by sharing knowledge?ā And that was a big part of that.
Management’s goal is how to take all that, how do we want to take all that and, and at the end of the day turn a profit right where we’re business. So looking at that rotation, looking at those markets and figuring out, āhey, what can we do for our ground, that’s going to be the best thing, rotationally for the ground, but also produce a good crop based on that?ā
In the last few years, we’ve really looked at like, what can we do to lower some of the input costs as those have gone up? How can we maximize in that regard? And a lot of our tests and trials in reality have been based on that in the last few years, like how can we take some of the previous known quantities and maybe pull back a little bit, put something else in that could be helpful, that could offset that, whether it’s better for the soil or whether it’s that really maybe wasn’t needed at that level and we can do it differently at a different timing.
Years and years ago, you know, Dick and his team putting together kind of an idea of, hey, we need to have a mission, vision and values for the farm so people can get to understand what’s important to us. You know, you have some people that are here for a long time, some people that aren’t. And so it’s good for people to know, like, what do we stand for? What are we, what are we trying to do here?
At the end of the day, it’s not it’s not all about making money. You know, we want to steward the land that we’ve been blessed with and do that to our best ability. And that, you know, in some ways, sometimes that means we’re making decisions that aren’t directly related to this year’s profit, that are related to long term productivity of the farm or, you know, the ability to have that land in a good place as we move forward.
We’re always trying different things.
Itās hard to know until we do it. But based on, you know, things we’re reading about, things we’re hearing about it at different meetings, presenters and say, hey, you know, until we prove how that works on our farmā not that it works because obviously somebody has already done that and they’re saying it works, but how does it work here? How does it work at, you know, 3500 feet on ground where the rainfall happens at this time of year and it’s this much and then it gets completely baked and dry after that. Maybe that’ll happen a little differently. Maybe we have to tweak it just a little bit.
Tom Conklin
I think when it relates to like, what we’re going to do, how we’re going to evaluateā with our with our mission, with our vision is, hey, what do we what do we see as important? And like I said, like we are stewards of this land. And so, yes, we have toā if we want to keep doing this, we have to make a profit so that we can pay the bills and so we can keep doing this.
But along with that, like you can make a profit farming and do it to a point where you’re not going to be able to continue doing that for a long time if you do certain practices over and over and over and over. So we want to look at it and say, hey, how can we, how can we make things better as we go? And what does that look like? And we don’t have all the answers on that, but there’s a lot of terms out there conserv ation, farming, regenerative agriculture. You know, there’s a lot of cool visuals along with that. And how do you, how do you make all that work around here?
thereās just been some really cool things we’ve seen. And then there’s been some things that are like, that didn’t. that didn’t pan out the way we thought. But we’re trying it and that’s, that’s the neat part.
probably the reason why cover cropping has been so challengingā is that anything you ever hear on cover cropping before you start, what do they always ask? What’s your goal? Like, what’s your goal with this cover crop? Well, there’s certain websites where you can go and you can use a little calculator to check boxes and figure out like, hey, what’s going to work and what do I want to use? And I find that I check all the boxes because I want all of those things, right? Like I want to, I want to improve nutrient cycling. I want to potentially graze some cattle. I want to lessen weeds and we want to, you know, improve the fertilityā so you can’t have all those in the same shot.
At the end of the day, the challenge is coming down to like, okay, we got to we got to pick one or two things that we’re really going to target here and see how we can make that cover crop work for us. The most success we’ve hadā and it’s funny too, I don’t even know if cover crop is even the right wordā just a mixed species either a mixed species forage or one season we had a mixed species intended to be a cover crop turned into a hay crop. We actually hate it because it grew really well and the timing worked out that we came through with the swather and put it in bales and it was great. That wouldn’t have been the traditional cover crop mindset going out and starting and thinking, āhey, this is what I’m going to do with the cover crop. But that was only because I wasn’t thinking about it that way.But it turned out that way and it was a big win.
the mental health part of agriculture has been talked about a lot more, which is great. You know, from a community of people that don’t often sit around and talk about their feelings.
Well, and this leads down the road of when you have a team that, when you have a team that communicates well, you can do so much more when it comes to really pushing, pushing the envelope on what we want to do with the farm overall. When people communicate well, you just get so much more productivity out of the whole team because everybody seems vested in what’s going on. They feel like they can give some feedback on what they liked, what they didn’t like. No matter how you know, no matter how extensive that is, it just it makes everybody feel like a part of that team, which is great.
Tom Conklin
So this regionā very cool areaā you can grow so many different things not under a pivot. The challengeā like we talked about before, is the marketing piece. You know, where where can you go with some of these things? And there are a lot of great folks out there working on that trying to figure out like whether it’s your sorghum or your millets.
There’s there’s so many others, too, though. I think that is a big part of it. I think having more of a, more tools in the toolbox, right? Having more things that we can draw from that, hey, we’re dealing with this issue in the field instead of just having these three or four things to to plant and then work around, whether it’s from a weed or disease issue or whatever it might be, There’s so many other things we can grow out here that could potentially help in those scenarios.
Mustard is one example. Mustards a really cool crop. It doesn’t have. It can have pretty good production. It doesn’t traditionally have super high production out here, but it does some really cool things to the ground and it is a great rotational crop. There’s so many other things I feel like that are like that. It’s just finding, then finding a market for this area and how to how to make that work for us.
Tom Conklin
I think it would blow people’s minds that don’t have anything to do with agriculture to realize how much of that is actually going on on every single farm constantly, and what kind of what kind of information is being tracked and what kind of things are being studied in a non, you know, classroom research type of environment. I wasn’t from a farm and see how much of that was going on. And it’s really neat. It’s actually pretty exciting part of what we’re doing.
Tom Conklin
There is so much there’s so much to learn. I mean, in any realm that we’re not actively involved in, right? We have perceptions of what people do and what actually happens. And there is there’s just a lot of incorrect information out there on agriculture and the agricultural world of there’s just kind ofā it seems like we’re just out there for the money and there’s kind of like this evil we’re going to do. We’re going to put bad things on food. And it’s it’s, you know, I hope that’s changing, but it just seems like that’s a lot of the press that they get to put out there in the non-ag realm.
Douglas Poole
Douglas Poole
We’re about 10 miles northwest of Mansfield, easier to consider it North Douglas County. I farm on the Big Bend, so the Columbia River actually is actually bordering three sides of the ranch. From there, weā I’m a third generation farmer. Farm with my wife and my son Lane. We farm wheat, canola, sunflowers, millet, sorghum. We’ll try some phacelia and some buckwheat this year. We usually have about a thousand to fifteen hundred acres of cover crops a year where we integrate cattle on that. And then we do have half the ranch is, is just native rangeland that we’ve trying to get theā or bring the cattle out of the rangeland and out onto the cropland in one of our attempts that it been successful with soil health and the soil health principles.
Douglas Poole
Most of our moisture comes during the winter months. We have about six to nine, six to ten inches of rain a year. Very, very, very dry. And so if we get an inch or two during the summer, that’s that’s a make or break or a million dollar rain for us.
As you probably saw, you mentioned the big rocks. For every one you see sticking up. There’s forty that we farm over the top of. I could take you out to a field and maybe get six inches with a soil probe and go over a foot and go down four feet. And so very rocky, very glacial. The story goes the Missoula flood broke loose, washed allā what it didn’t wash here, dumped everything here just fifteen miles to the south. You can actually see where the glacier stopped.
Weāre kind of that last man standing as far as I have thirteen landlords. And that’s just no one else came to came back. I’m one of only one or two in the whole area that came back in my generation. And so there was, there’s a huge gap of people that chose to come back.
Douglas Poole
I tend to hang around people that, you know, kind of believe in the health of the soil, not that everybody doesn’t. I mean, Iā we always talk about, you know, is there a bad farmer? I can’t picture one in my area anyway. And so it’s not that they or anybody farms wrong or anything else. It’s just in my own farm and in my own context. When I came back, there’s fields that we don’t farm anymore. They’ve been farmed down to bedrock. And that’s no indictment on my grandfather, my dad, anybody else. It’s just erosion took place.
Douglas Poole
There’s a the generation below me. They’re all coming back.The school is vibrant again. The town is, you know, we’ve got our we’ve got a restaurant, you know, we’re able to support a store and a hardware in that. I would have told you 10 years ago, I’m not sure any of that was going to make it. And so it’s fun to watch these younger kids come back.
Douglas Poole
Neat community, obviously. I’m from here, so I’m a little biased, but that that group has really embraced Mansfield, and what we bring in and some of the innovation, it’s not just on our farm, but I would tell you, 80 percent of the farms in the Mansfield area are all no till now. And that happened all in a really a two or three year period.
Douglas Poole
obviously, limit disturbance, keep things covered, keep things growing root as long
as we can. Crop rotation or some sort of just diversity and then obviously cattle integration. And then the sixth one, there’s everybody keeps adding a new one, but context. And so what we do here in six to nine inches of rain is going to look a lot different than it does down in the Palouse or in Kansas. Or in Australia.
Douglas Poole
New rotations, millet and sorghum, the phacelia. We’re going to try phacelia this year, buckwheat in a monoculture. Wheat, chicory, and then sesame, interestingly enough, we’d like to try sesame. And I’m pretty proud that I leverage NRCS in those programs as well as we can.
It takes the risk out of it for not only myself, but the landlord.
I’m 90% leased. And so those, I mentioned those 13 landlords, I have to, in all of this, they are amazing in what they let us attempt. They see our vision.
We had a landlord day and they, all of them are really bought in. But at the same time, they have property taxes and they have all of that, you know, that they need to expect a living.
Those of us that had the opportunity and infrastructure started reintroducing cattle to the cropland. Which if you think about that, all of a sudden, my pastures get to rest because, you know, the cows are up on the cropland. So that was an unintended consequence that we all look back as a huge, huge turning point in our journey.
We started with putting them out in just in our fallow. And so that eliminated one, if not two sprays. So again, in this journey of soil health, trying to eliminate those chemical disturbances.
And so I have to go to the landlord and say, hey, we’re investing in the soil, trying to keep a living root as long as we can, And we’re going to do it with cover crops. We’re going to bear that expense. We’re going to bear the expense of management of the cows. But what should come out of that is better soil. And so anytime that I can get a program and help with the landlord. But everybody has really been amazing in understanding that I’m pulling something out of production for a year because I paint it in the idea that they’ve, you know, if I have a barn on something I’m leasing, they would expect me to keep it painted or, you know, keep the lights up or whatever else. But have I ever had a landlord say, hey, I want you to invest in my soil, keep the soil,
It’s fascinating how, you know, here you are drove all the way to Mansfield today.You know, the stuff that we do and are willing to do, people are willing to then come and help. And that hats off to WSU, really. You know, we kidded about Abby Wick over it. And in the Dakotas, you guys have really are, in my opinion, blowing by what they’re doing from an academia, from a from a land grant institution standpoint in that you’re wanting to come out and walk alongside of us, provide the instruction and the information we need in real time, handle some of these these trials so they get done right. That’s kind of a novel concept, because we’ll forget where we put the tire or the bucket or the flag or the fence post. And, you know, one of those usually goes through a combine because we forgot where they were.
Carol McFarland
Oh, yeah, you did just do that.
Douglas Poole
Yeah, we had a little boo boo. But it’s it’s an honor and touching that WSU would come, you know, come clear up here, U of I, Oregon State. The three of them really are, you know, they’re not standing around looking at this whole soil health thing and thinking, oh, geez, that doesn’t apply. It’s like they’re looking at it going, where do we insert ourselves to be sure we’re out ahead of it? And that I don’t in all the travels that we do, whether it’s down to Kansas for those conferences or Colorado and stuff, those WSU needs to really walk away and know that from an academia standpoint, they’reā you are leading, really a leading force.
North Douglas County is kind of ground zero for sage grouse and sharp tail grouse. And two years ago, when I first had my millet, I found twenty in the millet all hunkered down, you know, and it’s kind of one of those things like, oh, my gosh, good thing they went ahead and moved because I was putting some biological and extract of some sort over the top. And next thing I know, here’s twenty going right by the sprayer. And so they obviously they love our crop rotations.
The grouse, you know, to me, the grouse are going to be an indication that I’ve got some soil health going because that tells me that I haven’t killed the insects and everybody that the grouse would like to eat.
We actually laughed about we ought to just be growing our own bird seed here. And that whole idea of trucking it clear to Spokane. What is it that we again, back to that community? Why couldn’t we have our own bird seed market here, which would provide jobs and which would be an improvement to the Lions Club and the school and the churches and everything else? So that’s not out of the question yet. There’s enough of us wanting to grow these different crops.
Douglas Poole
in our cropping system to getting back to some of those heirlooms that land races that, of course, they were bred away because we started inputting nitrogen. And so those old those old varieties, of course, in the case of wheat, you know, went down. They just tipped over because they weren’t used to that. And so in our system, we’re trying to eliminate a lot of those inputs. Can we bring those land races back?
Douglas Poole
I’m an all in. I don’t have that many years left. I’m not going to be here until I’m 90. And so I want I want this to be functioning. So when my son takes it over, he doesn’t doesn’t have to worry about this transition. We’re in a huge transition. You have to remember that, you know, there’s been 80 years of tillage here, probably 40, 50, 60 years of anhydrous ammonia, no crop rotations, some of that. And so you just can’t undo that overnight and then add the complexity of the context. The lack of moisture or the, you know, the timing of the moistures and stuff like that.
Douglas Poole
I look at it in a long term. I mean, there’s obviously the did I did I make another year? Can I get another operating loan? There’s all of those numbers. But as we implement these things and I’ll use sunflowers, sunflowers as an example. We’re supposedly deficient in calcium in our soils, but yet when I grew sunflowers, all of a sudden, the plant itself in a tissue test has calcium all over the sunflower. And then the wheat crop following is now in adequate ranges for calcium. Where did that come from? I didn’t put it in.
You know, John Deere just came with another tractor, a million dollars. But yet I’m still growing the same wheat . we’re in a decline with our prices right, and so I’m struggling to understand where that isn’t. That number doesn’t pay anymore. It doesn’t balance. And so I see the cows as a way of packing just pounds off as opposed to bushels. But it’s following those cows. Then if we can follow or or grow some of these other crops.
Douglas Poole
We need those grown up here because they’re sourcing them out of Nebraska. And so it’s a win-win for everybody. That all came with it got out that we’re growing sorghum and millet. And it’s fascinating how those markets all of a sudden come. But those things are going to be successful because we’re going to be following a cover crop.
Douglas Poole
That drives me a lot. I mean, it’s always in the back of my mind. I don’t understand how I’ll ever be able to afford a million dollar combine. I feel like I’m there today and it’s so funny. We were cleaning something in the basement in our house, found an article of my dad was interviewed in 1993 and he wasā¦kind of funny, he was saying the same thing in 1993. I think he had just bought a combine for seventy thousand dollars. And his whole point was, is I my son would love to come back, but I don’t think I should let him because I don’t see where this is sustainable.
Douglas Poole
The changes we’re making with regard to no till and lessening the passes that we make with that equipment, the chemicals and the fertilizers that weāre able to reallocate those funds or just cut them all. And so I worry about the million dollar combine. Obviously, we’re addressing it, my generation and in the community and those that are on the soil health journey are trying to address it, much like my dad did back in 1993. The million dollar combine just doesn’t make sense.
We’ve hauled water, we’re trying to expand the watering stuff. And there were moneyā there were monies for that, for infrastructure. If we treated this all as an ecosystem and I’m wanting pollinator strips and tree lined creek beds and all of these things that whether they were here or not, I want them now toā because all of that benefits our farming operation. I don’t have spray anymore. There’s all these things that can be eliminated if Mother Nature just was operating right.
We have to think about the soil as a herd of living organisms. And if we take care of them, it’ll take care of the economics.
Again, this journey. One of the things that really clicked with me one time was is every time I drive my four wheeler out, if there’s that much life in that teaspoon of soil, I’m killing some of that biology every time I drive out here. And so I need to minimize my trips, whether that’s with my four wheeler or my sprayer or my combine.
Douglas Poole
Our soil can support seven or eight feet tall grass. I’ve seen it. What we’re not allowed to do is then to disturb that. We’re missing the animal impact in that ecosystem. And so after 10 years, that’s really become a really become a kind of a dormant ecosystem because all of that heavy grass now is just sitting on the ground and nothing is able to to cycle the carbon.
But it- when we had our landlord meeting, it was fun. I tell everybody, it was a double edged sword, because all of a sudden I had some soil health experts because they have time and it’s of interest to them because it’s their land. And so it’s been cool. I love getting an article from a landlord said, hey, have you thought of this? Probably not. You know, they. So now all of a sudden you have all of these different people doing research on your behalf because it benefits their land, too.