In this bonus episode ‘Stories from the Field’ 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 Soil Health Producer of the year 2023 Clay Hutchens of Hutchens Family Farms in Dayton, WA, one of the original founders of the Pacific Northwest Direct Seed Association Mark Sheffles of the Sheffles Company outside of Wilbur, WA, and Aaron Esser of WSU Extension and Howard Nelson retired career agronomist and land owner in Lincoln county, about the challenges and rewards working hard to grow food, and steward land, in their communities.
Clay Hutchens
So our farm is all located in Columbia County, which is southeastern Washington, and my wife, Rachel and I are the operators of the farming business. And we farm all non-irrigated crops. We’re spread out around a twelve mile radius of the small town of Dayton. Our elevation that we farm ranges from fourteen hundred feet up to almost thirty-five hundred feet. So the growing seasons– they vary a little bit. The annual rainfall varies between fourteen inches and twenty-two to twenty-four inches. It’s a family farm for sure. My father was a farmer, my grandfather and my great grandfather. So that makes me fourth generation, and trying to keep the farm going and not just keep it going, but trying to trying to improve it, trying to put our own thumbprint on it as to, just how the– hopefully there will be a next generation and they’ll be able to look back and see how how, how Rachel and I impacted the farm in positive ways. We have– right now we have two full time employees, and so we’re operating our farm to support our own family, but we’re also trying to support other families in our small community. We hire several seasonal employees too for harvest and seeding season. So it’s not just about our family, but it’s about our, our employees’ families and our community as well.
I’ll go with what it does first. Healthy soil…it fulfills a purpose. In my case, my purpose is largely growing crops. I’m trying to grow crops to produce food for people. I mean, we’re not just farmers, dang it. We’re farmers. And I’m proud of it. But that– but being a farmer means we’re growing crops. But ultimately that turns into food for people. So the purpose of most of my soil is to produce food, and that soil has to be kept in such a condition and improved so that it can continue to do that intended purpose and intended to do it well or better than it has in the past. Healthy soil for me and my fields does have some physical characteristics. It has the ability to– I’ve already used the word resilience. It has the ability to weather some storms, both, figuratively and literally. So it’s a process to try to keep it not only the status quo, but try to improve it. So when you do have setbacks, that soil is healthy enough that it can, it can push through the storm. It’s not that different than any other biological system. You know your human body if if you’re taking good care of it and and feeding it the right nutrients and you’re exercising properly, if you’ve got a track record of doing that over time, then when you do have an injury or you you have an illness, more than likely your body is going to push through that and recover. Soil, I think, is similar to another biological system. Give it the right things, take care of it. And, it seems to be able to take care of not only me as a, as an operator on a farm, but it takes care of the world, too, by providing food.
When somebody says they’ve solved the problem, a small part in the back of my brain chuckles a little bit, because as soon as a farmer thinks they’ve solved the problem, they better be on guard, because that’s about when something’s going to happen in the environment, with with Mother Nature, that’s going to come around and, and show you that you’re not quite as smart as you thought you were.
Solving things in farming, it’s a continual process, I think. I think it’s a process of working towards things. I don’t know that we ever solve anything because there’s trade offs and everything.
Clay Hutchens
I look at what’s right in front of me. I look at the daily management decisions, the weekly, the seasonal. So, you know, spring, summer, fall, winter management decisions. But then you got to balance it with, with the annual, with the five year, with the twenty-five year, and then maybe with the, the generational. And it’s working backwards sometimes from those twenty-five years plus– because we don’t know there’s so much that can happen in the next twenty-five years. Farmers care, we do it. It’s not only economic. Nobody wants to take something that they probably have had in generations prior to in their family that’s been passed on, and nobody wants to be the one who, who has their name tied to ruining it or having it become something that’s, that’s not usable or not quality soil anymore. Everybody wants it to, to to sustain and maintain, be productive for now, in the future. I really believe that’s true. And we’ve got to keep forging ahead to try to use the best information we have to to do a better job than we are. But I’m not saying we’re doing a bad job now. That’s not what I’m saying either. We’re doing a great job now as farming in general. We’re doing great things. The soil conservation that’s gone on, that’s been involved, the the, the production methods, the efficiencies. It’s so much better than it was when I was a little kid the amount of water erosion that happened in this county, and these were all good farmers. But what was available for technology and methods, what we’ve learned and the things we’ve accomplished have been fantastic, and that should not be, that should not be shied away from either. We should be proud of that. It’s been great. What are the next improvements we’re going to make to be determined? Right. We’re going to keep looking for those. But we’ve made a ton of progress, and people need to be willing to shout that from the mountaintops of what quality farming is going on right now.
Farming is hard. For anybody that doesn’t know that, farming is not easy. As a farmer, there are many times where you feel like you’re just getting beat down. You don’t know what, you don’t know what the next thing that’s going to come around the corner and smack you on the top of the head is. There’s enough of those that happen, whether it’s equipment or people or finances, or whether there’s just lots of things lurking in the shadows that are going to try to try to knock you down. It’s what it feels like sometimes. And you’ve got to have enough encouraging things happen to to want to continue to, to fight.
I have a I do have a, a heart and a passion for farmers and what they’re trying to do, what we I mean, I say they I’m, I’m in I’m on the team. I’m on the team farm. But what they’re trying to do and the stakes that are out there, I mean, we’re trying to feed, feed the world with a lot of people. We’re trying to support our families, support our communities. And, I wish, I wish it felt like the general population understood a little bit more about the complexities, the risks, the challenges, the farming, because it’s it’s all too easy to to see a post on online or to to hear something in the news that the just can paint farmers in a way that comes off as pretty negative. And it’s a character flaw in myself, but I take that more personally than I should because I know what it’s like to actually have your skin in the game, to be doing it, to try to do it. And it hurts when the public or the news or something goes viral on social media that throws farmers under the bus and makes them less respected. And, you know, I think that one and two generations ago, I think farmers were ranked as I think farmers and teachers were ranked as school teachers. The two most respected professions in the world. And that’s changed some now. And that’s rough. That’s rough on me because there’s nobody I respect more than a farmer who’s trying to make work– even if I don’t farm the same way that he or she does. They’re taking their set of circumstances. They’re looking at their whole situation, they’re evaluating it. They’re making the best management decisions they can make for their situation, and they’re making it work. That’s something to be respected because it’s difficult.
We’ve got to have a safe and abundant food supply otherwise, otherwise a lot of other stuff won’t matter. I firmly believe that. I don’t care if you’re an organic producer or a somebody who believes that you should only be eating vegetables, doesn’t believe that cattle should be, you know, people can believe that cattle there are harming the harming the world, or people that can believe that synthetic fertilizers are harming the world. We’re making conscious, educated decisions on how to make the best decisions for the big picture. And, and all of those different types of agriculture– organic, conventional, tillage, no tillage, livestock, biodynamics– all these different types of agriculture, we could we could start bickering amongst amongst each other and tear, tear the other guy down for your farming technique, your farming system is not as good as mine– however you define good. But that’s counterproductive to tear each other down because the ultimate goal is we need environmentally sustainable ways of producing food. And environmental sustainability varies by region. We need economically sustainable ways of producing food. And that varies by region. And we need safe and abundant food. We’ve got to support each other and recognize that it’s not going to look the same everywhere.
We can do one thing as a farmer one year and it doesn’t work, but that doesn’t mean we should never do it again, because a set of circumstances, set of variables that were dealt with again might make that might make that hit a home run. It might not, but that mindset, if we’ve tried something, but maybe we should try it again. Or maybe we shouldn’t be afraid to try it again. I think that’s a good lesson.
It’s a pretty cool occupation. It’s a little more than just an occupation, I think. But I’ve been really, really fortunate.
Carol McFarland
I think the Hutchens Family Farms really says a lot, because it sounds like your family really is all in.
Clay Hutchens
I would say that’s true. It’s– we’re all in.
It takes a lot of people to to make a farm function and to function well. And I think to, for one entity or for one person to take credit for, that would be a little bit of a mistake. There’s a lot of people that deserve credit. The generations before me. The people that I’m currently working with. Extension. Researchers. Neighbors. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of people involved in.
Mark Sheffels
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 we started to work in to peas with the support of Howard Nelson. 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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
We have a lot of variability we really 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.
The agronomy of it is simply not the only factor you can pay attention to. The money thing it cannot be ignored.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s good advice: don’t tell nature it’s wrong.
I have two sons. 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.
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Howard Nelson
I grew up on a farm four miles south of Creston, and so I’ve never strayed far from home. I went to school at WSU and got my degree in agronomy. Worked in agribusiness for a number of years, was offered kind of my dream job at Central Washington Grain Growers, which later became Highline Grain Growers. And, so I worked with alternate crops, and I got to work with a lot of great farmers that made some friendships and was able to possibly help them with some issues they were facing.
Aaron Esser
I’ve been with WSU now for WSU Extension for twenty-six years. My primary focus has been in the Lincoln and Adams Extension region area here. I do stray outside of the region once in a while. Anything really focused on wheat production. And today we’re at the WSU Wilke Research Extension Farm, as you mentioned, and we’re– this is a facility I’ve been director of now for fifteen years, or something like that, and it’s been fun.
Howard Nelson
I retired from Highline Grain Growers in 2020, and I decided, you know, I’ve never done any agronomic work on my own farm. So, I’d seen some pH issues in different areas, and I thought, well I should grid sample my fields. And so, I bought a four wheeler and got a little pH stick, and a soil probe, and off I went grid sampling my fields. And, I was disappointed to find that I did have low pH issues on my farm.
Howard Nelson
I kept running into these pH issues over time at different instances across the Pacific Northwest. And then I started to see other things, but it’s like I wasn’t connecting the dots, you know? I saw the fall peas that I was working with. They didn’t nodulate, and my first assumption was that the rhizobia was bad. Well, it wasn’t that the rhizobia was bad, it was that the soil pH’s were low. And so, it was affecting the nodulation on the peas. And then I just happened to plant a trial– winter wheat– and I planted triticale as the border of the wheat trial, and ph my gosh, it was night and day. The triticale just looked beautiful. The wheat was sick and wasn’t doing well. And so that’s when I started to finally figure out that it was just straight up soil pH issues that I was seeing.
Howard Nelson
I probably started seeing the peas, probably around 2006 or 2007. And like I say, I wasn’t smart enough to figure it out. And then, the triticale plot trial was about 2016.
Aaron Esser
Howard and I have been cooperating for years. Going back to the Central Washington days. We used to have the northern Lincoln County field tours, a joint tour between them and WSU, so we’ve always had a lot of great collaboration. We established a lime study here at the Wilke Farm back in two thousand and seventeen.
It’s been interesting, and the thing that makes the liming, I think for this reason a little bit more difficult is we never see the results per se that the textbook says we should be seeing, and I have a couple theories of that now. One of them is, you know, all these varieties that we’ve been planting around here are all being selected on ground that we have around here. So we may have bred in there a little bit of the tolerance, and triticale may have come from a different area where it was developed and that’s why you might be seeing a bigger jump in triticale. Although it too is a– in general is a tougher crop, but our soils can’t keep going in this. We got a you know, we can’t just put our head in the sand and say it’s going to go away or it’s not my problem let the next generation figure it out, and we need to get it figured out and how we can do it and still maintain, both short term and long term economic viability.
From my viewpoint, it’s like, I have a house and I’m not going to wait till the roof leaks before I change the roof. You know, when, when it starts to rain, you know, I want to have all my ducks in a row and I want to not have any issues. And the other part is I want to leave this to my family and my kids, and I don’t want to give them problems. I want them to enjoy the land.
Aaron Esser
Howard said it beautifully on, you know, the basis of a landowner and a farmer and stuff and how they really want to leave the land better for the next generation, you know, and that’s something the general public doesn’t understand or anything else. They think that we’re out, you know, degrading the land and stuff and putting pollutants out there, but that’s not the case at all. Howard is very passionate about what he does, much like every other grower and landowner around here, and I think that’s the one thing, you know, if I can figure out a way to tell the people is that, you know, we’re doing a good job and we’re always looking for ways to do a better job. And that’s what makes my job fun, is to work with people like Howard and work with farmers and make it better. And I love working with those passionate people who want to make stuff better. So to me It’s been a joy. Helping people like Howard, helping all these landowners figure out how we can do it and remain economically viable. I know in my study here, there’s no way we’ve come close to our a return on our investment at this point. I mean, you talked about the five percent gain. Short term, that’s not a return on the investment, but you’re absolutely right looking at an in and a long term investment.
Howard Nelson
You know, I don’t want to wait until I get a return on investment because it’s too late in the reaction time for the liming is too slow. But, we did hit a little bit of a bump when I went to my tenant and said, hey, I want to put lime on these fields. And there was nothing in our lease agreement that addressed lime, so we had to come to an agreement, which we did. And so we had to actually write a liming clause into our farm lease.
Aaron Esser
In the Midwest, I think, from my understanding, it’s a very common thing to have a liming clause in, in your lease arrangements. Here in the PNW, there’s probably one, one or two now that have a liming clause in their, in their lease agreements.
Howard Nelson
The Wilke Farm is the only rotational crop farm in the Eastern Washington area. And, for growers the one any kind of information on the crop rotations– Aaron’s the guy, he keeps detailed expenses, you know what it costs him for each crop. He looks at the long range chemicals that he’s applying so that it doesn’t mess his rotations up. It’s an undervalued farm, in my opinion. And I just, I think you do a great job.
Aaron Esser
Thanks. I– you know, my premise is with the farm, from my perspective and WSU it’s easy for me to stand up in front of people and say, this is what you gotta do. You gotta do A, B, and C, you need to plant this Friday, put on this much fertilizer, and do this. But it becomes a little bit different when it becomes your own situation. And I like to say, you know, I gotta put a little bit of my, you know, your money where your mouth is at. And that’s what we do on this farm– is work through those issues, and I fully understand making the decisions on crop insurance and what level of coverage to use or how to market your crop.
Aaron Esser
I want farmers exploring different things and utilizing different things and using some some form of a matrix or a decision point to make those those calls on when the to put peas in, when to put wheat in, when to put canola in on the spring side, when to use peas, chickpeas, canola as well. Or heck, we even have kernza on the farm. I’m not saying we should broadcast kernza out across the whole countryside, but it’s interesting and it’s I think it’s worth keeping our eyes on.
Howard Nelson
So on, on, my farm, my wife’s on my farm south of Creston. It was basically a wheat summer fallow farm for years and years and years. And the downy brome was killing us, so we started growing Steptoe barley. And that was, that was the savior for taking care of the downy brome. Then, for whatever reason, the barley yields didn’t seem as good as they were. Kind of went to spring wheat. We have winter canola, we have winter peas, we have other crops. So we can still control the downy brome in that rotation. Now, where we weren’t able to do that just several years ago.
Aaron Esser
I can’t emphasize enough having an outline of where you want to go, having a plan in place. A good plan should always be flexible, but have a plan in place. Know what you maybe want to put in that field in three or four or five years out and have a map with that in mind.
Aaron Esser
WSU doesn’t give me an operating account, I guess for the farm. So what we do, we have to figure out a way to get it paid for, whether it’s crop sales, grants, teamwork, gifts, donations, whatever to get stuff done. That’s what we do, so. And that’s and that’s fine. I like having– to me it’s a challenge and it’s a unique challenge, but I also like the the results coming out of that challenge. Of having that real, real world perspective.
Howard Nelson
So I went back, to try to calculate a kind of a timeline on the fields on my farm. So they, they first had ammonium fertilizer after World War two, so roughly forty-eight to fifty is when they started applying fertilizer, and it was low rates at the time. But you know how it is, you know, you have a good yield on, you bump it. You can just keep pumping the rate up a little bit because you’re getting good results. So, but I calculated there’s only been about forty applications of fertilizer on some of these fields, and now we’re starting to see the acidification effects of forty applications. So if you wait to put your lime on and say you have another, add another five applications of fertilizer to that, what’s your pH going to be? What effect are you going to have? And at some point, if your yields are going to drop, and just farming in general is not going to be economic on these fields.
Aaron Esser
I like your house analogy on the roof. My analogy is I like to hunt, and to me it’s like hunting out on the breaks. You got a deer kind of up on the field edge eating in the field. You have to make a business decision. That’s an easy way I can get my side by side over to it or it’s an easy pack out. As soon as it gets over the edge, you’re going to end up with a lot of work. So let’s keep it from getting over that edge.
Howard Nelson
So let’s say we never put lime on these fields and the yields drop. The tenant can say, hey, I can’t farm your ground anymore. It’s not economic, right? So then I’ve got nobody to farm the ground. I’m seventy years old. I’m not going to farm it. So I have to keep this land in good condition or I won’t have somebody to farm it.
In some of these really dry zones that the fall planted peas really fit, deep seeding, and the issue we had when we first started with them is we had such a range of maturities and plant types and whatever. It took a number of years to find a variety and then winter hardiness was the next issue that popped up. And so over time, we’ve been able to come up with varieties that grow well, and yield well, and are relatively easy to harvest that are a stand up type pea.
Most of my work were variety trials. So, so I would have a variety trial of peas, and then each year, I would do some kind of agronomic study right next to it, because I didn’t have much of a budget. And, and basically I was working all by myself, all the time. So one year I did a seeding depth study, and one year I did rate and date study, and so it was always in association with the variety trial I had. So over time, I was able to kind of build up the best agronomic practices for fall planted peas, but it took a while.
The rain date studies were important because, risk management, they had nothing in their crop insurance adjusting books for fall plant peas. And so we started a project to get those reevaluated with RMA.
Aaron Esser
You’re talking about RMA and risk management and getting insurance for peas. I don’t know how many letters I’ve written for growers on winter peas is an acceptable practice for insurance because they often need a recommendation letter of that this is an acceptable practice, and I’ve used a lot of Howard’s data on that variety, trial data and stuff.
Howard Nelson
All these growers have lines of credit, and the banker likes to see crop insurance right on there.
Aaron Esser
And the landlord sometimes likes to see that security as well. The bankers and the landowners like that security as well as the growers, that’s all part of what makes it go around.
Aaron Esser
And growers do this sometimes, they think the yield is being the ultimate. But I– my degrees in economics and economics will trump yield.
Howard Nelson
So, Aaron, what do you think I’ve calculated the years to pay off my investment?
Aaron Esser
I’d have to go back and look at the price of lime. I don’t know what it is. And that’s one of the things I want to do for a test, and I haven’t done a full economic production on it. Is the sources I’m using– can we find some, some different sources of lime to put on this much? My guess. So you’re going to take five crop years to pay it off. Am I close?
Howard Nelson
Yeah. So, because we’re doing, we’re doing three fields. So there’s going to be a crop every year from one of these fields basically. So I figure it takes six years for me to get my investment back. And that’s a lot faster than I thought. And if the price of wheat would go up it would go down. But I get my return faster.
Aaron Esser
And I also send grain samples off to the lab and have a nutrient analysis, because we talk about when you get more acidic soils, you don’t have the nitrogen uptake efficiency or the phosphorus uptake efficiency. Am I going to see any of that in my grain samples? Are my grain, my grain going to have the same amount of nutrients in it? So I’m looking at that as well. This next year on this study, I’m also going to pull soil compaction data across this study because I say where you’ve been applying lime and the calcium carbonate, you should see less compaction. So I want to look at that as well.
Aaron Esser
one of the reasons I haven’t gone, I guess, gung ho on liming the whole farm is trying to find some alternatives to liming, and that’s one of the things I’m interested in from our, for no better terms– our cow chow study we have on the Wilke Farm.
Or other cover cropping system here, and a piece I always say about liming as well, and it comes from some, some of my experience with the trial we have is I’m not sure any of us can answer correctly what we have to do to correct the situation, but the one thing I want each and every one of the farmers I talk to to do is understand what got you in that situation, and it doesn’t do you much good to you know, like you’re talking about the roof, you know, take all the old layers off and do the roof right. Don’t just put a roof on top of I mean, you’re not really fixing it. You’re covering it up right? And that’s– you’ve got to take care of what got you that problem. And about the same time we put the lime study in we also put– we went to variable rate fertilizer instead of one zone for these fields. We soil sample three zones. The one thing I’ve noticed in my trial that has me scratching my head is we’ve seen the pH come up where you put the calcium carbonate. I’ve also seen pH come up a touch where we haven’t put the calcium carbonate. And the only thing I can think of is I’m doing a better job of fertilizing there and not leaching as much, or putting on excess fertilizer.
Howard Nelson
A lot of questions.
Aaron Esser
I wish it was easy.
Howard Nelson
Every once in a while. Where’s that easy button? But no, for every answer you get, you get two or three questions. Right?
Aaron Esser
And if we knew the answers, I wouldn’t have had to put in the trial. If we all knew the answers to your situation we wouldn’t have had to put, spend the days out there putting it in. But, for any grower trying to make that type of investment, doing what Howard’s done instead of just saying, oh, someone told me to do it, the neighbor told me to do it or I can’t make money I can make money– sit down on your situation and figure it out. Yeah. There’s a lot of people who are willing to help.
Howard Nelson
Well, thing is there’s areas in every field like an approach that for years had excess fertilizer applied and they don’t grow much anymore. So I think a good way for a grower to experience this would be to just get a little bit, put it on those spots or down the borders where they’ve had excess nitrogen applied for years, and just see if you can see a visual.
When I say a little bit I’m not referring to the rate per acre, I’m referring to the quantity applied. So take a soil test, put out the recommended rate. As you told me one time, this is not new. Liming is not new. It’s been around a long time. We’re just starting to see it here is all.
Aaron Esser
I don’t know how long I’ve been on the committee. I made up my number earlier in my introduction. Feels like forever.
Howard Nelson
It’s always kind of a fun meeting because Aaron and I can spar back and forth a little bit.
Aaron Esser
And, I mean that’s I, I was like even giving a presentation– nothing’s better than giving a presentation with an audience who asks a lot of questions, and you know, wants to know more about the whys and hows and things like that, because that’s really where the learning takes place from both participants. And I’ve always enjoyed that with Howard going back and forth on, on various things and stuff. We were talking about the winter peas, but chickpeas– and we’ve had chickpeas on the farm. And the one crop I had a significant return on the field before we had the lime study, we had chickpeas on the ground, and we saw a significantly increasing yield with chickpeas on that piece of ground. Where we have the lime study. So, and he’s the one that made it. You know I put the matrix together for Howard. And yes, we get a better wheat yield off of it, but my spring wheat yield suffers following. If you go chickpeas, winter wheat, spring wheat– that spring wheat yield will be a bushel or two less. And if you go canola, lower winter wheat, and then you’ll have a little bit greater spring wheat, because the winter wheat took more out of the ground where you had the chickpeas. It’s fascinating to watch.
Howard Nelson
Well, that’s why Aaron’s rotations are important, because it’s a system. Everybody tends to look at this crop, this crop, but you have to look at the whole system over time because one crop affects the next and right down the line.
Aaron Esser
And then you got the details. What do you want to do, and then what happens? I mean, like this year, the north side was going to be chickpeas. We lined it up to get chickpeas. Okay. Everything was going. I call and say, where do I come pick up the chickpea seed? We don’t have any. We over-committed. or something like that was the answer they told me. So I said, well, I thought I had pea seed, all of a sudden I didn’t have pea seed. So then I had to quickly go plan B, plan B, plan B. And stuff, and shuffled things around. Because what you want to do in farming and what you can do can sometimes be– I don’t I don’t think my experience was different from what farmers see on a daily basis.
Howard Nelson
I’ve been fortunate I had winter peas in one field. There was eighty acres in the on the one end, and there was two hundred and forty acres of wheat on the other side. And there was a perfect line between these two. So I decided I was going to do a fertilizer rate and variety study, and I was going to do both the winter and the spring. So the first year I did spring wheat with different fertilizer rates, and there was a thirty percent increase in spring grains, following fall-planted peas versus, following winter wheat. So then, so then I had identical size plots saved for the fall. I put winter wheat and fertilizer rate with six different winter wheat varieties, and there was no yield increase. And so when I charted out the yields with the fertilizer rates, I finally determined that we’d already hit the top yield with a zero fertilizer rate, and we were coming down the backside of the production curve because we had over fertilized on the back side. So to me, you really have to be careful of your fertilizer rates following winter, fall-planted peas or you’re going to wipe out the benefit that you had from the crop rotation by over fertilization. So there was way more mineralization than I had determined prior to that study.
Aaron Esser
Let’s see the soil sample.
Howard Nelson
I had a guy helping me. I told him I wanted six foot soil samples, and he literally destroyed my soil probe to get that fifth and sixth foot. It was just hard, but that’s where a significant amount of fertilizer was at.
Aaron Esser
One of the things I’ve always talked about with the whole soil pH thing is, you know, step one is what are you doing to improve your nitrogen use efficiency? Yeah, I said a long time ago: doesn’t do you any good to fix your problem if you’re going to use the same methods that got you in the problem in the first place. So I don’t know how to fix the problem, as I said, and we’re doing a lot of learning, and we’ve come a long way in the last five years, six years on it, but I’m not sure we all truly have the answer for the area. But I do know we need to do a better job of just improving our nitrogen use efficiency, and there are tools available for that on the Small Grains website.
Howard Nelson
Aaron was always looking for ways to help farmers. And whether it’s the cropping rotation or the different, chemical rotations and stuff, and that’s, that’s a resource that nobody else was looking at.
Aaron Esser
Like I mentioned earlier, I’ve been with extension for twenty-six years, and one thing that some of the older extension agents pounded into my mind is, you know, when you think about extension, you think I’m working with farmers and stuff on a daily basis. Some of the ways I can tell my biggest impact with farmers is working with the people that the farmers work with. Their field men. And that’s always been a very important part of my job, is to work with the crop consultants and stuff around the area. And Howard’s always been one of the great ones to work with. So it always makes it fun. I like the challenge of it, but I’ve, I’ve always enjoyed– I know where his heart’s at with the farm and going back to that. So that’s what’s always made it fun for me. His heart’s in the same place my heart’s at. Yeah.
Howard Nelson
In the dirt.
Aaron Esser
In the dirt.
Carol McFarland
In the soil.
Aaron Esser
You know you’re trying to come up with that good consistent mark and I you know when I look at what people are consuming, those proteins are coming back pretty strong. And I can’t wait to get the winter peas that are more for human consumption, and I think that will add a lot.
Howard Nelson
I think soil pH is a ticking time bomb. It’s, it’s going to happen. You can, you can say, I want to see the return on investment. You can say all these things, and don’t wait too long is going to be my piece of advice. Don’t wait until you have a severe problem, because it’s– you’re not going to fix it overnight. It’s going to take time for the calcium to react and for you to see the results.
Aaron Esser
It’s easier to get those to react if you have actively growing roots.
Howard Nelson
We look back to what was here before we were here. Right? It was grassland. There was an actively growing crop every year. And maybe it was, you know, lupines with grass, or sagebrush, or different forms, you know, but it was a mixture of things. And, you know, I don’t. I’m not saying that we can go back to that, but I think we need to look at that and see what we can learn.
Aaron Esser
Never stop looking, never stop learning.