I just got sick and tired of spending this money on fertilizer, planting it in the dry powder,
and watching the soil blow away. We spent zero dollars making those switches.
We spent zero and we were actually gaining probably tens of thousands of dollars. It's fun farming again.
Welcome to the 358th installment of Ear to the Ground.
The Land Stewardship Project's podcast on family farming,
regenerative agriculture, community food systems, and local democracy.
I'm Brian DeVore, editor of the Land Stewardship Letter.
Engaging the cost of doing business on a farm can take many forms. For example,
buying a bunch of equipment to switch over to a no-till system or to seed cover crops
can run up the tab pretty quickly. On the other hand, doing nothing can be pricey as well.
Continuing to do things the same way can come with its own set of expenses.
Economically and environmentally, as well as from a quality of life perspective.
But Meadowbrook Dairy in central Minnesota's Stearns County seems to have found a way to
thread that balance sheet needle when it comes to making dramatic changes to the way it manages the
soil. In 2016, the farm, after decades of conventional tillage, began using conservation
tillage and cover crop mixes to reduce erosion and build organic matter. Over the years,
the farm has also modified its manure handling practices to make better use of this by-product
as a source of fertility. The latest innovation the farm is experimenting with is adopting a
composting system that can take their soil even further biologically. The operation consists of
an 80-cow dairy and 300 beef steers, and also raises corn, soybeans, alfalfa, and small grains
on 1,000 acres. Today, Meadowbrook is 100% no-till on its crop acres, which lie relatively flat,
which consist of soils that are pretty sandy. Multi-species mixes of cover crops are a regular
part of the rotation, and the operation is able to get manure applied across the fields
at rates that are good agronomically and environmentally. When Alex Uderman and the
rest of his family hosted a Practical Farmers of Iowa Field Day in August 2024, it was clear
that these changes on Meadowbrook farm were paying off in more ways than one. A slaking demonstration
and some impromptu sampling showed that the sandy soil has good aggregate structure and is developing
a rich, dark color, with lots of signs of activity on the part of earthworms and other beneficial
critters. A cover crop planting demonstration showed that the soil was soaking up and retaining
moisture well, at a time when precipitation frequency is a major guessing game. Alex Uderman
is the fifth generation on this farm, which also consists of his wife, Chrissy, his brother, Jake,
and the brothers' parents, John and Mary Lou. As he explained during the field day, this transition
to regenerative practices has helped the farm dramatically reduce its reliance on chemical
inputs, saving roughly $100 per acre in the cost of putting in a crop. The Uderman Soil Health
Journey has also paid off environmentally. Their farm is now enrolled in the Minnesota Agricultural
Water Quality Certification Program, which is an official recognition that they're using
conservation practices that protect lakes, rivers, streams, and groundwater. In addition,
at the time this podcast was being recorded, Meadowbrook Dairy was a finalist for the 2024
Minnesota Leopold Conservation Award. Getting so many payoffs from building soil health doesn't
come without some investments. But as Alex explained to me during an interview after the
August field day, during the transition period that covered the years 2016 to 2021, the family's
expenditures were decidedly not of a financial nature. In what Alex calls a low-input transition,
rather than sinking big bucks into new equipment, for example, Meadowbrook Dairy invested more in
taking a different approach to management and the way they viewed their soil. In a sense,
knowledge was their biggest investment. And once this approach began to show signs of paying off,
then the family put money into tools that would help continue their soil health journey.
At that point, Alex explains, such purchases are no longer seen as a one-way expense.
The expenditures graduated to the level of being long-term investments in fortifying a more
resilient way of farming. Alex started our conversation by describing how the desire to
save time and labor initially prompted this farm's different approach to profiting from the soil.
Well, just with running the dairy and the steers and just those thousand acres of row crops,
it's a lot of irons in the fire at one time to get stuff done. I mean, you're milking cows from
5.30 in the morning and finishing up with chores, hopefully by 8.30, 9 o'clock. Then we got to
get all the field work done and get crops planted. And it kind of started with a labor issue. There
isn't one single thing that defined it. It's just one thing started the snowball effect. But when
people ask me why we changed, like I said, it's all the above. It's not just one thing. It's a
labor issue, the timing, the money on the equipment, the return investment on fertilizer,
the topsoil only we have no soil structure. Just backing up from like 2016, we went from
full conventional prior to as long as I can remember. Dad did it. Grandpa did it.
Great grandpa did it. I think I was the first generation said this is there's got to be a
better way. So what really struck my nerve was, like I said, in the springtime, like so just
managing the dairy and the steers, we ran full tillage. So in the springtime, for example, we
were, you know, we're disking chiseled ruts down from last fall, or we'd haul them in our first and
disc and then we'd pick rocks. And then we'd come back and spread commercial fertilizer on
those same acres to put some more nitrogen down or on the bean acres, we'd run P and K.
As we pick rocks and we come back and field cultivate, and then we come back and plant and
possibly roll. So we had any time in the springtime, we were relying on hired labor
that weren't full time employees, we're relying on people just showing up to help us hopefully.
And you know, two four wheel drives usually running in the spring, plus the planner is usually moving.
And then we had, you know, with morning chores and trying to get two or three guys picking rocks
with two skid loaders and a tractor and a wagon. Just got to be so many tires moving in the spring.
It's like there's, there's gonna be a labor issue here sooner or later one day. It's like,
if we could reduce some of this stuff, that would help out tremendously. And then so it was kind of
started and the next thing was, I just got sick and tired of spending this money on fertilizer,
planting the dry powder and watching the soil blow away. And I wasn't having good success with
that anymore. What just seemed like the weather was changing. We weren't getting the moisture like we
were and planting the dry fluffy soils seemed silly to me. Even when we were, when I was planting
tires on the tractor, it sank down five, six inches. And then you'd be making ridges with the
corn planter and it's like, why, why am I even doing this? Cause it's not a level seed bed. And
it's just, it didn't seem right to me. So we kind of said, well, maybe we should just reduce our
tillage on some acres and just work at one time instead of doing chisel, disc and field cove it.
Let's just maybe don't do no fall tillage. Let's just hit in the spring one time and work our
fertilizer and do our spring warmup pass on one pass. So from like 2016 to 2021, we had five years,
we implemented no till soybeans and then we implemented a one spring light disc pass on our
corn acres where we had the ability to work in that fertilizer we were commercially buying or
our manure. So we had five years of that and that kind of got the jumpstart on our transition.
When we made those initial five years of that transition, we spent $0. That's a key point that
I want to stress here. We had the same equipment, same tractors, same tillage stuff, same planter,
same manure. It's just, we managed our farm totally different without any investment.
And we became just more profitable doing that way because we weren't running them four wheel drives
in the fall no more or in the spring hardly much because we're just working up maybe a third to
half of our acres to plant our corn. The other half went to beans or whatever, you know. So we
initially were saving money on fuel and filters and man hours and everything else that gets
implied with owning tractors and equipment. And so that's kind of, I like to preach that the most.
We don't have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to try something. We can just quit
tilling the dirt and save money from the start. And then once we start doing that, we started
seeing the soil health benefits with the darkening of the soils and our worm count went up and
started seeing some aggregates and the soil health was improving, but it wasn't at the rate I wanted
to see it at. And so we knew this process worked. We just had to figure out a better way to kind of
meet some more of our bigger goals we had in our back of our minds. So when we made the switch to
no-till soybeans, like I, I'm a big believer, I like getting out of the tractor at least two or
three times, checks to see depth and make sure the planter's working. So prior when we're doing
conventional, I still did that too. I just, I never saw any, I always just thought soil was soil. Like
you grab it, it's just supposed to be the slight fluffy stuff and it's just dirt. But then like
as I said, I never found any worms when I was digging the soil and I was like, I didn't know any
better, but I didn't know what I was supposed to be looking for. And that's kind of what I stress
at these field days too. Like, like we needed, you know, train farmers eyes, like we need to be
looking at what's the color of our soil. So the first things I picked up on was our soils, like
our sand soils went from like that light brown beachy sandy looked, it's getting to be that,
not like a maroonish brown color. It's like, it's not black, but it's not brown. It's like an in-between
color. So we're obviously getting more carbon stored in the soil and we're starting to see a
lot more earthworms probably within the first couple of years. We just saw that immediately,
but now after I've kind of educated ourselves up in the last two or three years, I can understand
what soil structure means and what it actually looks like. So to untrained eye, I thought, like
I said, I thought soil is just, will be this nice fluffy loose dirt when it's totally false. Correct
soils is supposed to be a little firmer have aggregates. They almost look like little dirt
pebbles. And then you want to have, if you take a shovel spade full, you want to tear it up, kind
of have a good chunk on your soil and you lift it up on the soil. You should see a bunch of little
holes almost looks a little cheese grater. Those would be your earthworm channels going in there.
So that's the kind of stuff you can see in the soil. And then on top, you'd want to see if you
got really good soils, I've even seen myself too now, like you can almost put a pencil in some of
these earthworm hole channels. And then these, they almost like little, little teepees where these
worms will come up and they'll start pulling residue in and leaving their aggregate or the
worm castings. They just look a little, little poo mountains kind of, but I mean, that's, those are
your telltale signs that you're really improving your soil health structure and your soil functioning.
But like I said, it takes a lot to train the eye to see that stuff. And then we need, you kind of
need a few years for some of this stuff to get into place. And we're getting our biology cooking
again. We're having the worm activity. We're getting the biology back and things are cycling,
getting the cover crops out there with the roots and the glucose is getting pumped in the soil with
photosynthesis. It's just, it takes time. And like I said, it takes a trained eye to start picking up
on this stuff because we were so used to just running conventional. We weren't really looking
for that stuff. So after that first five years of low input transition into soil health practices,
where you weren't investing any money per se, making big investments in equipment, you kind of
took the next step. You really thought this is the way to go. And we would kind of want to step up
our game a little bit. So it sounds like you invested in some, did some investments in equipment
and some other systems there. What we did was probably not the most traditional thing to do.
Like I said, we had goals and visions for our farm, especially me. I like dreaming big and
shooting for the stars, I guess. So I just had an idea. I want to do no till corn. And I knew
from just from talking to everybody else, they said it was impossible, which nothing's impossible
if you have the heart and desire to do it. So just spent countless hours researching and going to
field days and Googling stuff and meeting people and networking with people and talking to a co-op.
What's the issue going to be doing no till corn? And they told me it's gonna be too cold, not enough
fertility and the whole gamut. And it's like, I just took all that information and laid out the
cons of why no till won't work for corn. And then I found a solution to every single con that got
addressed. So I knew, I knew if I could address all the cons that told no till corn ain't gonna
work, I know I won't fail then. If the soil is too cold, well then everyone's soil is gonna be too
cold. And if we're not getting the right nutrients down, it's like, well then let's ban some nutrients.
And if we're not getting proper seed desks, well then let's put the downforce on the corn
planter. And if there's too much residue, well then let's put the row cleaners on there. It's like
there's a solution to every problem. You just have to figure out what the problem is first and then
find a solution. You can't just run into this thing thinking it's gonna work fine because it
takes time to do it. We did something very untraditional, probably the worst time farming.
And my dad's been farming for his whole life too and he's 60 and he said this is the worst time
he's been, he's been through the 80s. I heard that was not fun. But he said this is probably worse
than the 80s, the last three or four or five years ago. We went through a pretty down downhill
slump in farming and that's the same time we made a significant investment in equipment on our farm.
We pretty much flipped our business inside and out. We sold our two four-wheel drives,
our Chesaplow field coal elevator went down the road. We traded off two other front wheel
assist tractors. We sold all our forage equipment, like our silage boxes and our pull type chopper.
Bail wrapper went down the road, our hay binds are down the road. We just sold a lot of stuff
that we weren't really using. We hire all our chopping now. In return we bought some higher
horsepower front wheel assist tractors, a new corn planter, the no-till and a new no-till air drill
that do cover crops in small grain. And we bought bigger vertical beater spreaders and we bought
our own liquid manure equipment. We kind of made the investment on our farm to look towards the
future of how we're going to meet our regenerative goals. And we needed to have control in the way we
handle our manure because we had smaller box spreaders and we were keeping manure close to
the farm just because it was not financially profitable to haul manure down the road with
smaller equipment. And we were relying on a custom liquid applier to haul manure too. And the farther
you go down the road the more it costs and it just it doesn't pencil out financially to haul
manure three four five miles down the road custom wise. So we made the financial decision to buy
manure equipment too. And then like I said we bought that new corn planter and the new air drill to fully
adapt 100% no-till on corn and soybeans and small grains and be able to cover crops. The way we took
the approach we had like I said we had those five years of our our low input trial error which I
don't regret doing that was probably the best thing we did. And after we knew the system was
going to work we just had to figure out a way to get the proper equipment bought and purchased and
cash flowed on our farm. So just started talking with Soil and Water and NRCS. This would be our
I believe our second or third time we're in CSP that's Conservation Stewardship Program. So we
pretty much went down there. This same year we got re-enrolled in CSP and that's the same year we got
water quality certified too. I wanted to be water quality certified in the worst way because I wanted
that signed approved to show our community because we farm in Sartell where all our rented acres is
pretty much residential. So I just wanted that proof that we're you know we're good farmers in
the area and we're not the bad people that the media puts us to be. So in 2021 we got become water
quality certified with a new CSP contract renewed for five years and we also got secured funding
through two egg BMP loans that we worked with at Soil and Water or at SWC4. One egg BMP loan was
for the planting equipment, the planter and the drill and the other one was to purchase
some manure equipment. All at 10 years at 3% payments were manageable with the CSP payment.
So I kind of had all these things brewing up in the back the scheme of things. It was a big year.
Yeah it was there's a lot of stuff to kind of get into place that kind of pulled the trigger on
going to Arnold's and buying all this equipment and at these other manure dealerships but we needed
to have the plan in place to offset that financial risk that you know pulled the plug on this stuff
to commit 100% to no till. So that's kind of how we jumped into where we are right now.
To be able to do 100% no till with that equipment purchases we bought the right equipment.
We're in control of when we're in the field hauling manure and putting it where it needs to get put
whether it's three miles away or seven miles away. We're putting the manure where it needs to go at
lower rates just to cover more acres as well and we have the proper planter now and the proper drill
to implement all the practice we're doing. What I'm struck by is some of the things you talk about
in your approach to this is you really took kind of a holistic approach in that you weren't just
looking at one practice but kind of looking at the bigger picture of how you can build biology
and one really important element was it sounds like you took a different approach to your manure
that maybe I'm not saying you were treating it like a waste product you were probably getting
fertility out of it but you kind of looked at it as oh is this a way that we can maybe replace
a big part of our fertility program by looking at the biological activity that it can generate
and kind of treating that manure a little differently. The first step to come successful
at this is we have to understand what all five soil health principles were. We have to minimize
our soil disturbance. Are we doing reduced till, strip till, no till, vertical tillage, like
maximizing our living roots. Are we planting a cover crop after our small grain harvest or our
silage and our soybeans. Maximize plant diversity. Let's get out of our corn-soy rotation. Let's add
a small grain or alfalfa or cover crops. Integrate livestock. That can even go from anything that's
that's the one that really gets picked on the most is I can't get livestock on my soil. Well
we can add a cover crop possibly or we can get manure if we have a neighbor that has manure or
poultry litter or we can get into composting. I mean there's lots of things that we can
integrate livestock into just in a different shape or form. It doesn't have to be a hoof on the ground
but ideally hoof on the ground is the best thing but I don't have hoofs on the ground but
we're taking the approach of doing compost to get that one in. Last one is maximize soil cover so
that could be your cover crops or last year's residue manure or compost anything protecting
that soil. And then like my approach too is like there's so much stuff that I'm trying to do but
I try to focus all of my energy like 100 some odd maybe 120 percent of my energy on try to pick one
thing pop maybe two that might be stretching it for me but I just like picking one or two things
and dedicating a lot of my time and energy and focusing on that so I can pretty much hone in and
specialize my time and talents and mastering that craft whether it's doing no till or cover crops or
composting now like I don't like doing too many things at one time because then I lose focus on
the task I'm trying to limit or that the thing I'm trying to you know produce on that farm like if I
want to maximize and how do I get to no till work well that's when I spent the whole winter
researching and getting the planter built the way it was and stuff like that so I try to focus on
one thing to do a really good job at it and I know I won't fail then because if we if we take the
time and dedication it's going to work so that's another thing I think is very positive to do and
so and back to the manure thing yeah I'm I'm sure we were abusing the system I think I don't want to
speak for everybody else but I know we were trying to keep manure close to the farm just because the
financial costs of moving it and I think once we made the conscience decision going from manure as
being a waste and a byproduct of our cattle and we started treating it as a commodity on our farm
it opened our eyes to the the value of manure that we never even saw as a possibility in my opinion
we went probably from hauling 10 to 15 000 gallons of liquid manure per acre on
the liquid manure per acre on our corn acres we're going to plant corn too and the bed pack you know
where it could be 20 ton or it could have been 50 ton we had no idea because we didn't weigh nothing
and kind of just haul it looked good to me and as long as it worked in the soil just that's the way
we were taught and like I said once we started treating it as a commodity and then once you
understand how the soil works and what the soil needs to grow a crop and going on a few of them
fertilizer recommendations based off soil analysis like I said we're just working with soil and water
on that part and we took a whole different approach to how we manage our manure and
now like I said with the proper equipment we're in control of when we haul and how we haul and
where it goes so we've lowered our rates tremendously and we got our we can calibrate our
manure tanks to figure out how many gallons an acre we're starting out on we don't have to haul
extra amount of loads to figure out hey we hauled 10 loads on this 10 acre field oh now geez now
we're at you know 7300 gallons an acre on this manure when we should have been whole crap we
should have been like 10 or 12 or whatever we just you kind of just guess and but now like we know
what the formula is you got to there's a formula to take your gallons per minute times 485 divided by
your target rate times your width and that gives you your ground speed you should be running
and then like for the solid manure too like we've never weighed a spreader in our life until a few
years ago when we got started this program like so we know exactly how many tons we're hauling per
acre or if you don't like I said if you want to calibrate your manure tank or your box for it
it costs zero dollars to do or hardly any is it the the manure the liquid stuff there's a formula
you don't have to own nothing you just do some math the solid manure you might have to spend
maybe 50 bucks to buy a fish scale just a little hand fish scale you can make a a one by one
square pad that you would I'd recommend maybe doing two or three of them and you just put those
out kind of in your field where you're going to haul manure on haul your manure like you normally
would and that manure would fall on top of that one by one square and then you could weigh that
so that's going to weigh x amount of grams or pounds or whatever it is and you take that times
43,560 because there's that many square feet in an acre and that will give you your total pounds
per acre you're applying that manure to so then we can really dial in our bed pack and our liquid at
the right rates we want and we soil sample every fall we're starting to do some hainy testing the
spring on our corn acres just even pull back our end rates and if there's any natural organic
uh nitrogen available for manure or just in the soil that our current tests weren't picking up
soil sample our manure every spring and fall as well to see where we're at see if that changes
but it pretty much stays consistent but I like knowing what we're hauling it's just simple things
like that that really don't cost a whole lot of money to really improve your bottom end line like
I would never tell our co-op to go skull spread 500 pounds of urea on a cornfield just because I
thought it needed it like manure is money it's a commodity and if you utilize it the way it's
supposed to be it actually is a rather huge benefit and because the more I know about the soil health
and how the biology works if we haul too much manure at one time it actually is a detriment and
it's harmful to our soils and obviously the more manure we haul the more likely we are to be prone
to leaching and run off so we try to keep our rates relatively low and cover over more acres and
we're kind of just trying to replace our p and k values as comparable as with our manure do you
have a rough idea of how much of your commercial fertilizer you've been able to replace the
percentage with by kind of focusing more on the manure I don't exactly have a percentages but I
can just tell you what we've done like in the past we bought a lot of p and k and nitrogen just
because we were keeping manure close to the farm and our rung of acres off the farm really relied
heavily on commercial but since we got our our own manure equipment we're hauling manure where it
needs to go we've eliminated all of our p and k commercial fertilizers dry on our corn and soy
acres and the only thing we really buy now is a liquid starter for our corn it's a 6246 with a
pint of zinc I just added a pint of sugar in it this spring but then the for the beans it's just
it's relying on any manure we hauled or the fertilizers in the soil we don't either haul
no manure or no fertilizer the fertilizers in the soil we just plant beans right into that with no
additional p and k so yeah the biggest thing we eliminated all commercial p and k dry yeah so that
must be a huge savings well it's tremendous doesn't matter if you farm five acres or 50,000
acres if you can pull that out if you're operating that's a lot of dollars and you had a really
interesting chart that you showed where you've kind of compared a difference that you've seen
between the kind of what you call the conventional system and kind of the regenerative system that
you're using now I just went off of kind of Iowa custom farm rates and I put in what we were doing
from I just started at harvest the combine was the same for both sides and after combining we
maybe haul some manure or we'd stock chops and we chisel come spring if we didn't haul manure in the
fall we'd haul it in the spring then we got to diff set in and shut the chisel ruts or then we
got to pick rocks and then after pick rocks we spread some fertilizer field cultivate that then
plant and then possibly roll and then that's that was our program and I took all the dollar amounts
I just put kind of a custom rate I didn't factor any you know debt load or principal and interest
payments on equipment or I didn't factor any size operation it just kind of this is if you want to
get this hired out this is kind of what it would cost and I think that came up to $332 an acre
just on getting the tillage done and getting that seed in the ground I didn't factor in like spraying
or harvesting because I was just looking hot what does it cost me to do that tillage and get that
seed in the ground growing and then I went to our current system we're doing now or say after
harvest I plant a cover crop in the spring either day and gets better in the fall we'll get better
in the spring kind of same scenario so we went from cover planting cover crop to manure and just
to planting now three steps instead of whatever the eight or ten whatever it was on the other
side I think that one came to like 230 or so it was it was almost a hundred dollars difference
and that's that's including a cover crop at like 55 bucks an acre in that equation you said did
you do in a five-way mix of cover crops now or what all are you doing well after small grains
trying to shoot for like a five or ten way mix just to get that diversity out there so we're going to
plant a bunch of legumes like peas clover some vetch I really don't have the exact formula kind
of just playing around with that idea right now but after small grains I would highly suggest
getting that legumex out there that multi-species because we have we have growing days yet to get
that stuff growing for us and growing that nitrogen for next year's corn crop that's the
whole purpose of that cover crop is grow that nitrogen and obviously all the other benefits
from the soil health standpoint but once silage comes off and soybeans come off it's you're kind
of limited let's just stick to the basics and do rye and oats because we don't have a whole lot of
growing days left and let's get some out there to get some green so the oats will come up real quick
and get their benefits and the rye will overwinter and come back next spring for us and it's kind of
the same thing after we get field corn off or high moisture it's you're kind of almost just limited
to rye because oats ain't gonna really grow much in middle october so we just stick to rye goal is
to get in the ground and get it germinated and it can just hang out all winter long and time spring
comes it just takes off we're not probably won't get a whole lot of growth in the fall but it'll
come back next spring so the the last thing that we kind of looked at and it sounds like it's the
latest piece that you're trying to add to this soil health picture that you've got going here on
the farm is composting you kind of just been experimenting with that a little bit but it
sounds like it's another way for you to really build that biology overall and maybe also make
use of homegrown ingredients a little bit have a little bit more control over kind of what's going
into your your production system a little bit well i wouldn't say that's the last thing to our piece
of the puzzle here because there's there's other ideas i want to try but like it's prior to like i
like picking one thing and dedicating a lot of my time and energy to it but the whole goal of the
composting is we're hauling manure seven miles away it's a long time that's about an hour
or it's a good hour per load that's a lot of hours and fuel and tires on our tractors but
because if i can make compost i can get half the tons in the same quality so instead of hauling
one load of just straight bed pack we can get two loads crammed in one spreader after it's compost
and get the same value and have less hauling the soil science behind it would be if i get compost
made i'm going to create a highly fungal dominant compost and i'm going to introduce that fungi
out in the field that it's the field are bacteria dominant out in our row crop fields just because
we have no like wood source or carbon source typically like the woods and forests do so we
want to we want to reintroduce that fungal activity back into our soil so that's kind of the whole
goal i guess behind making compost we want to get fungal activity back on it whether we're going to
do a windrowing composting or a johnson sue like i don't really know i'm just i'm playing around
with the idea i'm trying to figure out how the system works how composting works learn what all
the different fungi and the bacterias and the protozoa and the the good bugs versus the bad bugs
they're like the prey versus predator just working with nrcs trying to figure out a game plan that's
cost effective this is my low input approach we're not spending any money doing composting just been
using the skid steer turning piles we didn't make the investment in a turner or any other fancy
stuff you need but i'm just really trying to learn the system behind making compost kind of the same
approach we took to adapting no-till and cover crops with the intentions of taking this large
scale either when growing with the compost turner or making the johnson tune making extracts and
then possibly getting to seed treatments and running in furrow or foliar spraying it and
all sorts of stuff this compost that we looked at now you had gotten that started last october
and it's got like what wood chips bed pack manure what all you got in that oh yeah i made five piles
last year i just started working with julie from nrcs and she has a microscope and she's
pretty knowledgeable about composting so i'm not going to pretend i know what i'm talking about so
like i try to surround myself with knowledgeable people that know what they're talking about they
want to help so it's a huge help working with nrcs and swollen waters because they give you the
information expertise that i necessarily don't have right now at the time and they try to educate
you and they have the proper tools like the microscopes and know what they're looking at
and stuff when we want to run some of this stuff composting the biggest thing she said you can use
anything you want for materials but we have to make sure we have the correct carbon to nitrogen
ratio so we want to be in the like the 25 to 30 to 1 ratio so we get the proper heating to get that
compost broken down then we want to the biggest thing we want to have a good high carbon source
and we want to have some wood chips in there from what my research is that we can put corn
socks or rye straw that they're very high in carbon but the wood chips there's something about
the wood chips that bring that fungal activity alive in a compost pile but they're they're
bare to compost because they're just they're like 600 to 1 for a seed nrc they're just it's insane
especially corn socks and rye are like 60 or 60 to 80 or whatever seed a one the wood chips are
i think a necessity or a necessary thing to have in that compost but i said it just takes time to
figure out the correct formula but because i got five piles of first one was just grass and leaves
and then maybe a little bit of it was like probably 50 or yeah probably 40 40 percent grass 40 percent
leaves and then 10 some bed pack that was one and then the second one was i forget the exact
numbers but it was like 60 percent grass and so many percent of leaves and so many percent of wood
chips and some finished compost and some bed pack like there's a whole formula that i i kind of just
said if there's so many parts i just picked it's gonna get one bucket of wood chips versus and then
like 10 buckets of grass that's kind of how i made the formula and my other pile i kind of created my
own creation what i thought in my head let me make a good compost so i just kind of had fun with it
i just did my own ratios but pretty much the same material just different rays just to see what would
happen and then i also had another pile of just pretty much straight wood chips and i also added
some cattle lot scraping so like the just the loose minn are that collecting the cattle yards just to
get that some more moisture in that pile and get some some nitrogen to help break them wood chips
down and then i added a lot of water just to get them wood chips saturated and then i also had the
last pile was just straight bed packed but i found that one the straight bed pack i don't think is
going to be a very feasible thing for us to do because it's bed pack is like 15 or 20 to one
cinder it just gets it's too hot all the time and you'd be constantly turning it i don't think you'd
ever not stop turning it just gets so hot and it'd get away on a guy you don't want to have to add
that with the higher carbon source and i still think it would probably get away on a guy but like
i said i'm still in the learning phases of composting but trying to experiment and learn as much as i can
right now before we make a bigger investment in a turner or stuff like that or an extractor
one thing that really struck me is the because this is another very important element to making
a farm quote unquote sustainable is quality of life and you were talking about how some of the
when you were in the midst of some of these pretty major changes financially in in farming things
were not good but ironically or i guess fittingly you actually felt like people like your family was
getting along better and and that things were actually going better on the farm in a way
because of some of these changes you were making i was really struck by that because i forget the
times was like i said dad been farmers whole life and he's 16 he went through the 80s which are rough
and he told me i forget what years it was but it was three or four years ago we had those like three
or four stretches of farming everything just sucked there's no other way to put it i mean crops
were down beef were down everything was down in the crapper and equipment was too expensive to buy
and it just everything sucked about farming and you know that's that's kind of the same time we
made this fish like we have to do something different because what we're doing is not working
financially or on like a sustainable land approach like we're depleting our soils nothing's working
on the ground no more because they're we have zero soil health so i mean it just running a business
with family is great but at the same time too it's your family you're going to have disagreements but
we all got to sit down at the table at night time or get together for family functions once you mix
money in business sometimes it money and family together sometimes it's conflict of interest one
guy has this idea and the next one has the other idea and there's no money to invest or play around
with things and it just becomes a conflict of interest sometimes but things were very well or
happy family but just tensions get a little high when there's bills be paid and milk checks don't
cover stuff like they used to and beef don't and crops don't grow like they should but so once we
made those five years of that reduced till like and the no-till soybeans like so we spent zero
dollars i like what you said the low input switch or how would you for low input transition yeah i
really like that i was looking for a word that i'm going to steal that from you but that's fine but
that's a really good way to look at like i said we we spent zero dollars making those switches
we spent zero and we were actually gaining probably tens of thousands of dollars saving fuel
filters parts labor the whole gamut it went with it and it's like it took the stress a little off of
trying to you know how the hell are we going to be farming next year if we can't meet ends meet you
know kind of and it just gave us a reinsurance that it's going to be all right and we were seeing that
we were seeing the economic side first on our regen journey before we saw the like the actual
soil benefits that we're seeing currently now but like i said once once you see the economics
it's a lot easier to keep reinvesting in like say equipment or different strategies like
the composting or cover crops now like yeah they're a new expense for our farm but we can see the
the benefits they're creating or so it doesn't bother us no more to keep reinvesting into the
soil health side of stuff because we're going to get the economic return on it for sure and like
i said we were just working like dogs like every other farmer does like we're running all
autilogy equipment we're working nine ten eleven midnight one in the morning just because he had
to and like we don't we're picking rocks for a week and a half and just doing a lot of hard labor
unnecessary labor now what we're doing now but like we're not doing that no more take care of
our cattle so we're no tilling cover crops we're not out in the field as much as we used to and
you're at home every night for the most part and we don't have to work till midnight every night
just to get things done we can quit at dark and be home and have supper with the family and enjoy
life a little bit more and we're not you know fighting about how we're going to pay our bills
and expenses we're going to cut here to save a dollar and every time you cut a expense you lose
something over here that helps you out too so it's just i mean it's a never-ending battle but
i don't it it just seems to work a lot better when we made the switch financially and as a family
because the pressure isn't there no more to you know we got to get this many bushels per acre this
much milk per cow or get this rate again on our steers just to make ends meet it's it's more kind
of a relaxed approach actually enjoy farming again i guess it's a kind of better way to put it it's
it's fun farming again it takes time it could take three years or it could take 10 years to fix that
soil so if we jump into this thing you know spending hundreds of thousand dollars on
planter technologies or updating this or getting guidance and all this other fancy stuff i don't
think we're going to see that economic return on that right away so that that's why we took that
low input approach like let's get kind of our soils started on the soil health journey before we make
these huge investments on the planner and stuff like we did so if we would have bought that planner
in the drill right away i think it would have been pretty tough making those payments because we
wouldn't have that economic return on it because our soil health was not there be willing to accept
no-till corn and that water infiltration and the earthworm activity and the nutrient cycling i just
i don't think it would have been there i'm we're eight years into this now and we're nowhere near
i want to be and i think i hear a lot of people coming to say these are some of the best soils
we've seen i they are pretty nice but they could be better so i always had the mind force like i
can always be doing better when we bought that new corn planter and the drill i thought i was done
there because i told myself when we had those five years from 2016 to 2021 i told myself if i can
figure out how to no-till corn i'll be okay i'll be done i'll be happy but once i figured that out
i was like this ain't cutting the mustard no more because i we weren't seeing the soil structure that
i wanted but i told myself right i'll be happy once i can no-till corn i'll be just fine it will be
no more but then it's like no there's more to this so that's when we started you know now we
gotta do a cover crop so that was the next thing we invested a lot of time and energy in cover crops
and it's like well now i told i'll be happy when i get that now no now now we're gonna be planting
like 10-way leggy mixes after small grains and looking at getting the inner seeding now and or
aerial droning and stuff like that and now i'm making compost and gonna be washing the compost
getting the extract running that possibly through the corn planter seed treating or spraying as a
fuller spray or whatever or just spreading bulk compost like if you would have told me i'd be
washing compost 10 years ago i would say you're a lunatic there's always more once you get by this
bit by the soil bucket it don't stop it's like this like i said it's a snowball down the mountain
cliff it just rolls out of control and you kind of get addicted to it and like i said it made
farming fun again for more on building soil health profitably see the podcast page for
your to the ground episode 358 at landstuart project.org if you have comments or suggestions
about this podcast contact brian devore at bdevor at landstuart project.org or you can call 612-816-9342
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