Because you don't want to come to us and get set up with a full grazing system and get locked into that system
and then realize two years down the road that the system doesn't work right for you.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean we tried to do a lot of things when we first started and had a lot of ideas on what we wanted to do
and what farming would look like and some things we like got more passionate about and did better and are still doing
and a lot of things we drop.
Welcome to the 356th installment of Ear to the Ground, the Land Stewardship Projects podcast on family farming,
regenerative agriculture, community food systems, and local democracy.
I'm Brian DeVore, editor of the Land Stewardship Letter.
So here's a chicken or the egg situation to ponder. When you're launching a farming operation,
when should you approach the local Natural Resources Conservation Service office
about applying for funding to set up infrastructure such as a rotational grazing system?
It might be tempting to apply for a contract to the Environmental Quality Incentives Program,
also known as a QIP, right from the get-go. So when you buy that first beef cow or you,
they're ready to be plopped into the paddocks where they'll immediately start turning grass into protein.
Not so fast, says Klaus Zimmerman-Mayo and Emily Hanson. Klaus and Emily operate Wet Stone Farm,
a vegetable and grass-based cattle and sheep enterprise in western Wisconsin's Polk County.
They market via CSA, farmers market, and direct to consumer sales. They launched the farm on 40 acres
a decade ago and two years ago added another 135 acres. Over the years, the operation has brought
together multiple partners and enterprises. It's now run as a collaborative farm consisting of
several partners. Emily and Klaus recently hosted a field day sponsored by GoFarm Connect,
a farmer-led initiative that works to build relationships between non-traditional farmers
and agricultural support agencies such as the NRCS and Farm Service Agency.
Other sponsors of the field day were the USDA and Renewing the Countryside. The couple led field day
participants on a tour of their rotational grazing system as well as their vegetable plots and high
tunnel system. A number of beginning farmers and prospective farmers were present and it was clear
they were excited by the fact that Emily and Klaus had been able to set up the grazing system and
hoop house using NRCS equip funds. They're also receiving payments to conduct prescribed conservation
grazing on the farm. But the farmers made it clear that before they applied for funding from the NRCS,
they tried out a few enterprises and ways of running them first. That was important, given that
they ended up dumping some of those enterprises when they didn't work out financially and from a
management point of view. Figuring out which enterprises you're going to stick with in the
long term is particularly important when considering applying for something like a multi-year prescribed
grazing contract. It's critical to know what kind of farming you want to do and how you want to do it
before establishing the kind of infrastructure that could lock you into a certain system for years
down the road, advised the farmers. Brandon Wierda agrees with this trial and error approach. He's an
NRCS resource conservationist for Wisconsin's Pierce, St. Croix, Polk, Burnett and Washburn
counties. During the field day, he talked about the need for beginning farmers to feel out the
situation before jumping into all the paperwork required to receive funding for major infrastructure
improvements. He also reminded participants that the NRCS's priority is to fund on-farm projects
that help address conservation issues such as water quality and soil health. That's why it's
important for applicants to look around their farm and figure out what kind of NRCS-funded
infrastructure can help them be more viable economically, agronomically and environmentally.
After the field day, I talked to Klaus and Brandon about the need to do a little trial and error
before signing on the dotted line. They also offered up other bits of advice for beginning farmers
who are looking to procure financial support as they build up their operations infrastructure.
As they both make clear, there's a lot of good information available on the internet,
but sometimes you just got to pick up the phone and start asking questions. So Klaus, you have
taken advantage of some really good programs through NRCS as well as FSA. Once you got
established here that kind of helped you along, can you talk a little bit about some of the different,
I guess, infrastructure you've been able to set up through some of these programs?
Sure. The first program that we participate in through a QIP program with NRCS was for putting
up a high tunnel for vegetable production. There's a 96 foot by 30 foot high tunnel that
we do in-ground vegetable production in. So basically season extension and I guess just
increasing quality and having more control over summer production, especially for some of those
crops like tomatoes, which struggle more outside with a variety of factors, including weather and
disease and all that. We also have put in quite a bit of fencing for livestock for doing rotational
grazing, which we've been doing. And so we did that first on this original 40 that we've been on for
10 years. We put in quite a bit of interior fencing. There are definitely different loopholes and
different requirements they have for different things. So because that was already in pasture,
they wouldn't do perimeter fencing for us. So we had to put up perimeter fencing, but they helped
with our interior fencing for subdividing and basically doing these sort of like long lanes
that we could then subdivide into smaller paddocks depending on what our needs are.
And then we did a very similar program across the street at the 135 acres that we got. Well,
not on all of that, but there was about 30, 35 acres of cropland that we've converted into
pasture. So they helped, NRCS helped pay for seeding that down, buying the seed, getting it planted,
and then putting fencing in for very similar interior fencing. And we did get some exterior
fencing there because we were converting cropland into pasture. And this is all like cost share
thing. They have certain formulas for how much they pay based on like the footage of the crop
footage of fencing you're putting in or whatever. We also have water lines that we put in over there,
which has been extremely helpful as far as getting water out to animals grazing on pasture.
Where in the past we've had to pretty much haul water to animals every day, which
was a lot of work and a lot of wear and tear on equipment and just like a lot of, yeah,
I mean, labor is just a huge thing that these programs have been hugely helpful for setting up
infrastructure for those things. Yeah. And then we're also doing prescribed grazing. They have
some programs for that for doing rotational grazing on all this. It's basically on the acreage that
we've been, that they helped with the infrastructure with. They're also doing prescribed grazing,
which is basically help pay for us doing that more. It's a conservation type of grazing system
that we're moving them every single day. And that is a lot of labor and I think it's kind of helps
offset a lot of that. Yeah, that was neat. You kind of, we went out and measured some of your forage
and so that prescribed grazing system, it's separate from getting the infrastructure set up. It's,
you're approving, you're kind of reporting into the NRCS that you are doing daily rotations or
whatever, or that you're managing that perennial plant system in a conservation based way.
Yeah, that's correct. We've got our animals that we've got grazing. We are moving every day
and then we're recording which group of animals is moving, how many head is in that group,
where they're moving to, what the forage height is going into a paddock, what the forage height
is going out and then any other notes that kind of are associated with that. So yeah, we're keeping
a lot of records on that basically and which is actually nice because I've kind of been curious
about that but it's been hard to justify keeping that tighter records in the past but getting paid
for it makes me want to do it more. That always helps. I'd say too with, from NRCS's perspective,
helping producers get to prescribed grazing is the goal and the fencing, the water lines,
all of our other infrastructure pieces are there to support the prescribed grazing because from
our perspective that's the conservation practice right there. You're getting more forage production
out of the same land. You're getting more carbon put into the ground because when you're doing
prescribed grazing or a rotational grazing scheme, your root systems are getting a lot bigger and
you're not cutting the forage down to the point where it's sloughing off those roots.
You're allowing them to keep that reserve and they can rebound quicker then too. And when you have
plants out there with bigger root systems with more actual intact forage on the ground,
you're getting less soil erosion, you're getting less compaction issues, you're getting more better
microbe habitat as well, all sorts of benefits. That's a really good point Brandon. You had
brought up a point when we were walking out and looking at the grazing system and the high tunnel
that NRCS helped get established here. Sometimes farmers are frustrated that certain infrastructure
can't be set up but the NRCS has a certain kind of mission or a rule about what they can provide
funding for. Can you explain? I think that's a really important piece to keep in mind for folks
who might be frustrated with, oh I can't get, I'm not successful in getting a certain piece of
infrastructure set up. Yeah, I think a lot of beginning farmers get frustrated with that
when they're trying to get infrastructure put in and we can't just come in and help them do that
from the get-go. Our goal as an agency is to be solving environmental resource concerns and so we
need to be solving some kind of existing problem as justification to use taxpayer dollars to come
in and help out with stuff. So we're looking at issues related to soil health, water quality,
air quality, and numerous other factors but those things have to be existing problems in the system
that we're addressing in order for us to come in and help. We're not just helping farms build their
infrastructure from scratch. And related to that, Emily, you and Emily, Klaus, talked about a
suggestion you had for folks. There's a lot of beginning farmers here or perspective, want to be
beginning farmers here and one of the pieces of suggestion you had for them about working with
programs like this is maybe don't try to jump right into it right away but learn what you like
doing, what's working on your land, and then kind of go to the NRCS and say okay this is what we
rather than get tied into for example a long-term contract on prescribed grazing and maybe you
figure out well that doesn't really work for this farm. Yeah absolutely. I mean we tried to do a lot
of things when we first started and had a lot of ideas on what we wanted to do and what farming
would look like and you know a lot of those things like some things we like got more passionate about
and did better and are still doing and a lot of things we dropped and we're like this doesn't
make sense for our systems or what we're doing or kind of our ideas on what this could like look
like is just not the reality and so really getting a clear idea of like what you actually want to do
by like putting it into practice is crucial before just like jumping in and like throwing all your
eggs into a basket and then like taking on responsibilities through these programs if you
don't actually have the capacity to fulfill them. What Brandon was mentioning a second ago about
just like the infrastructure being there to make these practices more possible, I'll just say that's
absolutely true like our capacity to do rotational grazing is way increased from what it was before
as far as just the amount of labor and just like little things like having water lines that are
going out to the pasture where we can just like plug in our water tank and it fills up as opposed
to like hauling water or if you have a machine that breaks down or something happens suddenly
you don't have water going out there it eats up a lot of your time trying to figure out what to do
with the animals and then you got to put them somewhere where they have access to water and
then those areas are going to get degraded more and just like vehicle use in general like when
they're in the areas that we've like worked with NRCS for getting this infrastructure and I can
just like ride my bike out there now to do animal chores whereas before it's like I'd have to like
fill up 120 gallons of water on a machine and I mean it's like a whole thing. Well especially
you're doing vegetables as well and I mean that's labor intensive enough so like adding a livestock
enterprise anything you can do to save labor must be huge. Well yeah I mean it's my opinion that the
like kind of like the traditional nuclear family farm model that we have in this country is
completely idiotic it's not sustainable and I don't encourage anybody I would not wish that on
anyone so yeah it's a lot of labor and you need a lot of people who are interested in doing that
labor and have buy-in on it which is why we're working towards the collaborative farm model and
not just trying to do it as like a little family out here doing this and there's a lot of potential
on the land too it's like there's certain limits on land when you're using it as far as like how
much you can do for say grazing but within that there's also a lot more potential that just a
couple people working on can actually realize where you have more people you still have certain
limits on like how many animals can be there but then you can have other people doing other sorts
of enterprises and projects on the same piece of land but overlapping and just using land and a lot
just like a lot more conservation minded honestly where you have more of a deeper relationship with
the land if you have people who are like invested in it in that sort of way so we're trying to move
more in that direction do you recall call some of the enterprises you dropped that you were like
this ain't working pigs and chickens i mean i think we had some ideas on like what is
raising those animals look like in kind of a sustainable way and i mean the fact of the
matter is if you're raising those animals for meat you've got to well like for chickens it's like
you've got to feed a lot of grain and so you're like growing like monocropped a lot of times just
like you're doing commodity grain production which is in itself like often a human food but then you're
feeding it to a chicken and just like the amount of like resources that goes into that and then
i could go off on my own like tangents on these things but i fit my personal thing with chickens
is like they like i think laying hens are like i've got a lot of respect for them but the the
meat chickens even like the heritage breed ones or whatever they've been bred for meat production
and honestly the brains have been bred out of them if i can't like have a minimal level of respect
for the animals that i'm raising i don't feel like i should be doing that and so it's like
having like these grass-fed animals and like the sheep and cattle like these animals are great and
like have worked really well with our systems and like chickens just we're not doing it pigs it's a
whole thing too like they evolved in a different ecosystem than we can provide them and i think
they make sense in places where you have a specific farm waste like our friends at turnip rock where
they do uh grass-fed cheese production so they have a lot of whey and that's a great pig food so
you raise pigs and you can feed them this excess farm product that you're producing anyway and you
have a good way to like grow food with it but if you're just buying in grains it's like well what's
the point yeah in my opinion i gotta say if someone who has been around hogs a long time
they do have a lot of brain power there it's just yeah they i would say i respect their brain power
i have a lot i have a lot of respect for pigs they i would not equate them to meat birds at all
those are definitely different totally different like scales of like where they're at pigs i've
got a huge amount of respect for but i don't think they make sense in our system basically
so i think that's a good point though that this it backs up this idea that you don't
jump into some programs right away until you figure out what is working what you like to do
that kind of thing so what's your sheep in your are you doing with the is it a cow-calf operation
or what's your beef cattle it's a cow-calf operation and in the sheep what's your market for that
i mean we've got a flock of ewes and then we're lambing every year and then slaughtering those
lambs and doing direct market at farmers market and then we do direct sales like to csa customers
or we'll do deliveries to the cities once in a while and people come and buy meat off the farm
we've got like quite a few customers who like we have a relationship with and they they find
us various ways and just it's pretty much all direct market how long were you farming here
before you did start applying for your first programs that you feel like okay we're ready to
figure out what we really need support on um i think we did some of like exploratory like stuff
pretty like a couple years in but we didn't i think we put up with a high tunnel in 2018
okay so that was four years into being here so that's a good yeah you were kind of figuring out
that's a good point so brandon what would be some suggestions you would have for somebody who is a
beginning farmer and are yeah they're just getting established on some land what's some some of the
first steps they should take as far as approaching the nrcs and kind of i don't know getting familiar
with that program because it can be and you were very honest i i appreciate this you said yes it
is a lot of paperwork you know you were honest about that because that is a big complaint and
that's the way it is but yeah what would be your suggestion for people just starting to dip their
toes in the water a little bit it sounds like one of them is yeah get established for a few years to
figure out what works and what doesn't work for you yeah i think getting established is good if
you want to start an early relationship with people at the usda office that's always good
and inviting people from nrcs out to see your operation talk about what your potential goals
are and if you're having issues that you're currently experienced talk through those and see
if there's some help for them but when we're talking about larger infrastructure projects that
can potentially set your farm up for the long term you definitely want to have a good idea of what
you like to do when you're farming what your market is going to be like and hopefully have a decent
idea of what your five to ten year business plan is going to be because you don't want to come to
us and get set up with a full grazing system and get locked into that system and then realize two
years down the road that the system doesn't work right for you you should have designed it different
from the get-go and having that experience just either bootstrapping it for a while by setting up
temporary fencing or doing whatever you need to do to make sure it's working out at beginning to
give yourself that good experience with animals that you're raising or produce that you're growing
can be a huge benefit to you in the long term yeah and the um mission a business plan is that
something that's really helpful for the inter sis to see is is a business plan or what kind of i
guess paperwork or yeah what are they looking for from the farmer when they come in there we don't
necessarily look for a business plan if we're starting to get into infrastructure stuff we
we talk about if there is a business plan what kind of animal numbers is going to take
for you to be sustainable as a business for cash flow and to pay for infrastructure needs
and to support yourself for how you need to be supported the larger usda ecosystem does like to
see business plans sometimes if you start talking about getting into farm loans or micro loans don't
want to see that kind of stuff and along those lines having a good plan and just trying to do
the best record keeping you can do is going to help you when you start talking with us and it's
going to help your business in the long run too what's roughly i know it varies but from the time
you start applying to the time you actually get that support what's the timeline is that a bad
question to ask it depends on when you're coming in the sign-up cycle but don't expect to get
any financial support that year usually when you sign up it can often take a year before the
funding cycle comes to a close and we actually know who's getting funded and in those cases
sometimes it can take multiple years of being in those funding pools and not getting funded
until you actually do get funded and beyond that it becomes a it's it's an evolving relationship
you know you don't want to tackle everything you want to do with us at first do a contract here
we'll build off of it in later contracts down the road we have ways to kind of graduate people into
other programs to be a partner with them throughout a good chunk of their farming career clouse it
sounds like maybe the it's been the paperwork can be a headache and you had to figure out what you
liked and what you didn't like but some of these practices you've been able to put in you wouldn't
have been able to do it without this program is that fair to say or would you have figured out
a way to do it otherwise i mean this is how we want to farm and it's made it a lot more doable
i guess i don't know what we would be doing otherwise we'd be spending a lot more labor
trying to make things work basically and such as having the basic infrastructure i mean i think
that's been a big priority for us is just getting infrastructure in place so that we can do what we
want to do and it's like we're basically like you know i think a lot of folks us included or at least
me included like getting into this sort of thing you're kind of like oh i'm just gonna do it on my
own and this whole like myth of like the individual just like going out and surviving and being
self-sustaining is like total bs and like ever the the way the whole economy works and especially
agriculture is it's all like runs through the system so it's like you're not like there's no
free market and as far as i'm concerned like you leverage the resources that are available in the
best ways that you can and so we're looking at whatever we can whether it's from the nrcs fsa
if there's like grants or just like whatever is out there like we're like kind of ear to the ground
and like how can we like find resources that make the work we're trying to do possible while also
like there's just the reality of doing all the work too so it's obviously it's like we're not
like a non-profit who has like the resources to like go find all this stuff but it is like just
like staying in the certain networks where we can figure out what resources are available a lot of
this just like won't doesn't work without it and you just it cannot be competitive in like the larger
sort of like food ecosystem yeah well we're pointing to that too like uh claus had mentioned
this earlier on the tour but use your use the government employees that you're working with
like their job is to be the liaison between the producer and the farm programs and that's what
we're here for and the the programs can be a bit complicated and convoluted sometimes even for the
government employees themselves but uh that's our job i mean that's totally my approach of like
i will like find the resources available what the programs are and my approach as i go and i talk to
the whoever the agent is or the person like running the program and i'll ask them what's available
if i have questions though my instinct is to just like call up one of the agents and just ask them
because that's going to be a lot quicker and more reliable than me trying to like fumble through the
paperwork and like understand it all honestly it's like i'm just going to call the person and
they're going to tell me the answer and then i can just like do that and i just really encourage
people like not be overwhelmed by the paperwork but to just like see it as like that's sort of the
the necessary evil of the system that we're working in and there are a lot of really great
employees working for these agencies who are like very helpful yeah you said don't be afraid to
badger them with questions that's that that's that's what they kind of get paid for and a lot
of people try to look online for our resources and you know it's a country-wide programs that we run
so the online information isn't very well tailored to what the specific states or counties are doing
so maybe do a little perusing online but really the best thing to do is just call up your local
office and talk with them directly we get stuff tailored to the state level into the area level
and so whatever might be saying on the national website might not necessarily be true on the local
office i just have a general observation from the many years i've been writing about and and working
around some of these programs i get a sense that the nrcs is much more i'd use this term but
friendlier toward maybe the regenerative ag systems and the something that's not the mainstream
conventional corn and soybean system i mean it just feels like it's i don't know i mean i think
that's kind of why they exist i mean it's the natural resources conservation service right part
of this is they changed the name it used to be the soil conservation service and so it was soil
conservation so somebody who's doing a thousand acres of corn that puts in terraces is considered
doing good soil conservation this is just my opinion i feel like it's become now it's called
the natural resources conservation service there that is maybe part of its mission now is to look
at a bigger picture of not just putting in a single practice but looking maybe taking a more
holistic approach to to resource conservation i'd say that the current administration has done a
really good job of really trying to promote access to his programs to smaller producers
producers who are historically underserved that's been a huge push of this administration
and we're seeing a lot of results of that we also got a lot more funding through the inflation
reduction act to our agency it almost doubled our budget so and a lot of that got earmarked
for beginning farmers and to work on climate smart practices and to work with historically
underserved producers that being said we work with everybody you know we our goal is to kind of
protect the public well protect the land in general and in general the ability to use it for
resources and look at that from a public perspective of protecting those goods and so anyone who's
willing to come to the table and talk to us about ways to have cleaner water ways to have less soil
erosion ways to sequester more carbon and we're here to help
for more on resources available to help farmers build environmentally positive infrastructure on
their operations see the podcast page for ear to the ground episode 356 at landstewardshipproject.org
if you have comments or suggestions about this podcast contact brian devore at bdevor
at landstewardshipproject.org or you can call 612-816-9342 it helps us greatly if you can give
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