We're building soil hills through the cows, so the cows are essentially working for us,
adding the biology to the soil as we feed what we grow on that soil.
So the only thing at the end of the day we're really taking off the soil is a pound of beef
versus a bunch of hay or corn and taking all the organic matter from it.
We're basically using the sun and rain.
I personally don't buy much fertilizer.
If I can fix something with a bale of hay, a cow, or a bag of seed, I'd rather do that
than fertilizer and hauling a bunch of costly inputs in.
Actually at the end of the year we do taxes now.
It's not quite as easy to show a loss as it used to be.
So we're coming out of a new problem there, but we'll be able to handle that one.
Welcome to the 350th 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.
Langdon Column farms in a part of west central Minnesota where the soil starts to thin out
to the point where it's not unheard of to hit gravel when digging down just a bit past
the surface.
But that hasn't prevented farmers from planting corn and soybeans in the region.
And Langdon, who owns and operates Column family cattle near the community of Eagle
Bend, does raise row crops himself.
But the former dairy farmer would prefer to produce beef cattle on forages, which he has
done for the past several years.
Langdon has long rotationally grazed his black angus cow calf herd, but a few years ago he
learned that adjusting the manner in which those animals are rotated can pay big dividends
in terms of building soil health, which in turn pays off by creating a more productive
herd.
Working with Jonathan Kilpatrick and Kent Solberg, grazing and soil health experts with
the Sustainable Farming Association, Langdon increased his stocking density and adjusted
the sizes of his paddocks, which are growing permanent pasture as well as annual cover
crops.
It turns out such tweaks to a rotation can, in a sense, increase the size of a farm, without
actually adding additional acres.
It's like adding vertical productivity via the soil biome.
It's paid off.
Not only is his herd more productive in the short term, but Langdon feels his soil's
long-term resiliency has improved as well.
That was proven the past two growing seasons.
Saw his region go from extreme drought to flood conditions that were so bad his cattle
found themselves stranded on opposite sides of running water at one point.
I saw the results of this soil building first-hand during a mid-September field day held at the
Colum Farm.
The event was sponsored by Match Made in Heaven Livestock Plus Crops, which is an initiative
that's helping show ways crops and livestock can be integrated in a profitable and sustainable
manner.
Match Made in Heaven is a six-state collaboration involving 50-plus groups, including the Land
Stewardship Project.
Also participating in the field day were the SFA's Jonathan Kilpatrick and Jane Jewett
of the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture.
During the field day, Jonathan and Langdon dug up soil samples to show how worn-out crop
fields have been revitalized after just a few years of exposure to a grazing regime
that involves a diversity of plants and careful movement of cattle that spreads manure and
urine evenly across the landscape, helping build biology.
Particularly impressive was a field that had formerly grown a stand of fertility-sapping
hybrid poplar trees, but which Langdon is bringing back to life utilizing cover cropping
and animal impact.
After the field day, Langdon, Jonathan, and I sat down in a back room of the nearby Rose
City Bar and Grill to talk about how integrating livestock into crop ground can help revitalize
the soil, as well as a farm's bank account.
Langdon started our conversation talking about how adjusting the carrying capacity in his
paddocks helped up the farm's rotational grazing game.
I bought the original farm in 2007, 150 acres, and started out with, I believe I bought seven
cows the first year, and from there I bought all the way up to around 15, and then from
that I've built a herd as, I believe at the highest point we've had 65 pairs.
Over the years I've added a 40 acres and then at least a couple other farms at 100, 120
acres apiece.
Basically, concentration has always been on raising beef cattle and having the healthiest
pastures we can.
I grew up conventional dairy farming with my father, I guess my heart was always in
the beef cows and we parted ways, so from there we've just done it my own way, always
rotated some, and I believe for going on 10 years now we've started to focus on more rotational
grazing and getting more out of each acre rather than just more land all the time.
Yeah, and one of the things you mentioned was you had, a couple years ago, I think maybe,
I don't know, three or so years ago, you really kind of upped your game a little bit with
the rotations where you started doing some different things, I think doing more movements,
that type of thing?
I had always rotated to some degree, my 150 acres used to be split up in roughly three
different pastures and then from there about six years ago we split it up into 15 different
sections and had rotations on two to three days in each section.
Then I ran into a fellow from sustainable farming named Kent Sahlberg and he and Jonathan
quizzed me on stocking density and that didn't make a lot of sense to me because my pastures
were always the same size and I wasn't going to buy and sell cows to change stocking densities,
well then they introduced me to the polywire and varying the size of the paddocks with
the same number of cows and really in the last two years I've seen tremendous difference
in the varying stocking densities depending on your situation and your goals and I've
actually been able to achieve and I can see the potential to really double the carrying
capacity versus where I was three or four years ago just to a more standard rotation
system.
I think that's a really good point and Jonathan, that's one thing, you had a really nice presentation
on that idea of what carrying capacity is, which I think would maybe be a good reminder
for folks what is carrying capacity but also if you could talk a little bit about when
you are doubling that carrying capacity it's like you're doubling the size of your farm
in a way.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
I think that's a really important piece people don't think about because land is expensive
and it's much easier to add value to that land than to try to get more land.
It's a really good point too, the carrying capacity and it's just, I guess the way I
define it is it's what your land can carry as far as livestock and obviously that changes
every single year but the example I like to use is for example like an F-150 or a half
ton truck and it only has so much capacity as far as what it can tow and what it can
pull.
You go up to an F-350 or a one ton truck and you can really do a lot more hauling and a
lot more towing so the carrying capacity of those trucks is very different and that's
kind of the same way with rotational grazing and most people when they go to what Langdon
just talked about is when they start rotationally grazing or doing more frequent moves like
get up to once a day moves most people are able to double the carrying capacity and the
reason for that is because grass that's not being over grazed, if the cattle are going
back and nipping off little shoots and stuff that's slowing the grass growth and recovery
back, slowing that down so you're not getting as much forage growth and production so really
in the long run what you're achieving is more forage production per acre which allows you
to carry more cows or have more cows per acre.
Yeah and it's that whole idea of kind of using soil health to add value to that land.
I hope this isn't offending you Langdon, this isn't the best soil in the world.
I think that's something you know, it's sandy and you said in one of the fields we looked
at this evening you don't go too far down you hit gravel so you are able to add value
to that land by building soil health it sounds like.
Correct, we're building soil health through the cows so the cows are essentially working
for us adding the biology to the soil as we feed what we grow on that soil so the only
thing at the end of the day we're really taking off the soil is a pound of beef versus you
know a bunch of hay or corn and taking all the organic matter from it.
We're basically using the sun and rain and I personally don't buy much fertilizer if
I can fix something with a bale of hay, a cow or a bag of seed I'd rather do that than
fertilizer and hauling a bunch of costly inputs in.
Jonathan one other thing we were standing next to a stand of, correct me if I'm wrong
it was a stand of Japanese millet, it was a seven way mix but the Japanese millet was
dominating because it's a wet year and they like wet weather.
But you said, you kind of said here's a quiz what are the principles of soil health and
I think it'd be good if you go through those principles but then also you said we're kind
of seeing this is the living proof right here we're seeing all of those principles of soil
health being covered right now can you describe why we were seeing those?
I first describe what they are but then describe why we were seeing all those covered by Langdon's
land there.
Yeah so the six soil health principles are minimize disturbance and that's both chemical
and physical disturbance to the soil with a plow.
It would be diversity so increase the diversity of species of plants on the soil and that
also increases the diversity of wildlife and insects and birds and all that.
The other thing is armor on the soil very important to keep the soil covered.
Integrating of livestock, the integration of livestock is also another key and the living
root.
Living root is also key keeping the living root in the soil as long as possible and then
doing all these things in the context of your operation which for every operation is very
different Langdon's context is different than some of the other farmers that I work with
and yeah so when we were standing there where the millet there you mean we had good soil
cover we were getting a lot of armor put back down the soil I mean Langdon was grazing cattle
at about a million to a million and a half pounds per acre so the amount of trample that
we were getting we weren't getting super high utilization rates on the millet but that's
okay because we're recovering the soil we're increasing soil health cows were getting the
best really of that millet anyhow.
We had you know diversity of species on the soil surface we had living root with plants
actively growing we had livestock on the soil we were doing it within the context I mean
we weren't disturbing the soil I mean we weren't plowing we weren't using chemical or anything
so all six soil health principles were in action in front of us so yeah really cool
to see that and that's typically what you'll see you know most grazing operations and it's
kind of an interesting joke that some of us SFA staff have is that you know most people
that go down this regenerative journey so to speak they end up becoming grazers because
of the soil health principles all being in action when you're grazing and if you look
back through civilization like when you start annual cropping that's really where the downfall
that civilization begins is when they start destroying the soils through annual cropping
I mean we see that the downfall of Rome and a lot of these other great empires throughout
throughout the history so yeah I mean you look at these what these soils would have
been 200 years ago they would have been native prairies so we're closest I mean we can't
replicate that perfectly but we are coming as close as we possibly can with what the
tools we have available to us and it's as proof positive of that after we looked at
the summer annuals that you're grazing there we went over to a permanent pasture that you've
established Langdon and you correct me if I'm wrong but it was in row crops for several
years and you I don't know how many years ago was it you okay about six years ago you
seeded that down to pasture Jonathan dug up some soil samples and it looked really good
and yeah so you haven't had a decent rain since the first week in August boy that pasture
looked great it was really flourishing green and the soil I just felt like it had some
latent moisture in it it really was working well can you talk a little bit about how long
that took to kind of get to that point after it being in row crops for all those years
and kind of what you're seeing with the soil a little bit and I took over the field it
had been corn and bean rotation for years basically rented to the neighbor and I continued
renting to the neighbor shortly after I'd bought the place for a source of income and
and basically just good relations but when I started getting more cows I decided I wanted
to turn that field into a pasture so I went to the NRCS office and they suggested a mix
which turned out to be I didn't know what I was buying but about it seeded it and first
year just made hay and let the roots get rooted down and established and from there started
grazing it and haying it once in a while but then I would say about three years ago when
I got into the more intensively rotating the cows I noticed the pasture would be you know
ready to graze again much quicker than ever when the dry times came the grass still seems
to grow and I did not know why we've been through three years of drought and that pasture
that was seeded down and grazed conservatively and always left enough for regrowth the pasture
seems to hold out throughout the year no matter what and now when you dig down in the soil
you do see a lot of earthworms it smells good and just you know standing in the pasture
is hard to find a patch of dirt anywhere and that's this year's been quite the opposite
we've had several rains three plus inches and though it's been muddy and the cows have
pugged it up quite a bit the pasture just continuously regenerates itself yeah you said
it had 40 days of rest and it looked great really dead Jonathan we've had three years
in most areas of really dry weather now we've had the faucet we can't turn it off you must
see you must get around and see folks who are using good grazing systems and regenerative
grazing systems to build their soil health and you're seeing now the two extremes of
the weather cycle are they able to build that soil to the point where it is able to be resilient
when it's in drought conditions and when we're having this you know really I think we're
on track to maybe be one of the wettest years that we've ever had in your recorded history
here in Minnesota are you seeing where were they are able to build that soil resilience
so it is able to weather those pardon the pun weather those real extremes yeah I would
say in general like you know the soil health is is a journey and so I don't even know
I don't think anybody really has an idea of what what the top is or if there even is like
a top as far as soil health goes you know we're dealing with massively degraded systems
I will say that you know instituting a lot of these practices and the principles of soil
health does definitely increase resilience but we don't really know at what point in
the journey these folks are on whether they're in you know they're beginning stages but yeah
to answer your question I'm kind of long way around to get to the answer but yeah I would
say in general for sure but also you know it involves like good management decisions
when you do have a drought and like de-stocking at the right time or getting cows off and
increasing that recovery period but you know I would say you can have really good soil
and when you have a wet season you're just having a wet season too so it's not I don't
want to like pretend like it's just a magic magic fairy dust it does help absolutely hundred
percent the farms that are doing this and turning into print you know going to perennial
pastures or whatever just doing soil health practice are definitely able to weather these
these extremes that we've had the last couple years Langdon you joked a little bit that
you bought drought insurance this year and the salesman is probably off into Haiti so
you never know but you know I feel like some of your insurance is really building that
soil health in the long term a little bit I don't know if that's the way you look at
it correct I figured three years in a row of drought if I had a force when I needed
a little money to buy hay so I went ahead and bought drought insurance but it seemed
like the rain turned on and it was a whole different challenge there wasn't a place I
could put the cows without mud in fact at one point my entire farm was separated by
the creek running through and some calves were on one side of the creek and the others
cows their mom was on the other side and six feet deep so there's been some challenging
days this year but too much water has definitely been a problem but I have yet to complain
about it because I'll always take more water than less I will say that I am glad that I've
been on this journey with building the pastures up because I feel like my pastures have actually
weathered the storm much better than they would have ten years ago I'm really interested
in anybody who's kind of transitioning row crops into pasture and grazing that type of
thing but you took us to something I've never seen before it was a former poplar plantation
I guess can you describe the history of that piece of ground I think it was in the trees
were actually cut five years ago and you had to do some pretty extreme stuff to that but
you're trying to kind of it's an interesting it's on a different scale trying to you know
it's one thing to transition a corn soybean field into grazing but this is a whole different
ballgame with this poplar stand that was across the road from your farm there in this area
I would say about 30 years ago there was an outfit about several thousand acres something
to the two and a ten or twelve thousand acres and put into hybrid poplar trees for paper
production but their plan did not work out in a lot of this land farmers are removing
the trees and going back into farming the particular piece that used to be part of my
farm I purchased it back with the trees standing on it and didn't really know what I was going
to do with it but the journey started we had the trees cut off and all the brush and stumps
were left so for a few years I tried to use the cows they could get around the field step
over the tree limbs and whatnot you could not drive a four-wheeler across the 40 acres
so for a few years I just grazed it whenever there was standing water in the field the
cows could drink and then would pull them off until there was another opportunity to
graze something the land was pretty poor as you can imagine tree roots had dug pretty
deep and pulled most of the nutrients out and left it in a state of some pretty rough
grass and obviously the tree limbs everywhere but a few years of grazing and then I basically
bought a cheap tractor and a disc and beat it across the top of the stumps and seeded
down about a I think it was a 15-way mix and what took off happened to be the buckwheat
sorghum sudan grass and some soybean and stuff like that and that began the process gave
the cows a lot of biomass to eat and start the process of rotting down the stumps and
tree limbs and so after really only three years has become a field that I could conceivably
plant corn in next year and thanks to the cows doing most of the work though I did pick
a lot of sticks up.
You did a little bit of the work and let's be clear you're thinking about planting corn
but you're not you're going to graze it right?
Correct I'll use that corn as a basically a deep of the winter feed typically around
here it's not uncommon to have one or two feet of snow on the ground so the corncubs
will be above the ground and basically I'll give the cows a few rows of corn a day throughout
the winter time and supplement with a bale of hay here and there and that way everything
that field grows is pretty much returned to the dirt and really no loss of income because
we're harvesting it with the animals.
You're keeping your options open as far as raising row crops like corn and beans but
it sounds like you're not you would just as soon not go back to that if I understand correctly
you're really kind of sold on letting the cows harvest that is that kind of what you're
looking at now that it's as you have a little bit more success with this?
To be honest with you I'm not really into sitting in a tractor and row cropping.
I do believe though that the most resilient farm is going to be the one with the most
diverse sources of income so to put all my efforts into cows only the cow market could
crash or something eventually and leave me sitting perhaps on too much beef and when
I could be selling corn or something so I'm leaving my options open leaving some ground
tillable though my preference is to graze perennials however I'd also thought quite
a bit about maybe establishing a relationship with a row crop farmer in the area where we
traded fields around and grazed for a few years and then row cropped a few years or
even the same year just row crop and put the cows on the following cover crop.
So the theme of the field day is transitioning or is integrating livestock back into the
farm and I was wondering if you have any thoughts on if somebody is thinking about transitioning
livestock back into a farm integrating livestock back into something that's been in row crops
for years is there a couple three two three things people should be thinking about first
steps that they should be doing it sounds like Langdon's kind of eased into this and
then he kind of upped his game a few years ago and has really seen some results but you
know you don't want to have throw your eggs in one basket and then have a disaster so
is there some things that people should be looking at yeah I would say the land needs
the livestock but that doesn't mean that each farmer has to do the livestock themselves
there's lots of examples of successful partnerships where the crop or the row crop farmer has
a livestock farmer come in and do the livestock part of it they don't have to own the livestock
you can successfully partner there are you know sites like the Midwest grazing exchange
or the Minnesota cropland grazing exchange where crop farmers can put out land and say
I have corn stocks for grazing or I'm gonna plant some cover crops can I get someone to
come in and so I would say that's one of the things is like if you are a row crop farmer
don't feel like you have to take on that extra responsibility the livestock but if you do
decide to do that I mean that's that's great and I think it's you know take some baby steps
find some mentors people who have done it who can help you out you can you know reach
out to land stewardship project or sustainable farming association you know we've got folks
that have a lot of experience with livestock integration so yeah I think it's take some
baby steps and honestly like I think the biggest thing is gonna be water getting water to livestock
a lot of people overthink the water thing you know I actually just picked up from my
own farm a water hauling rig for a couple hundred bucks it's an old running gear and
I've got capacity for 400 gallons on this trailer and I could add another couple hundred
gallon tank and so for a couple hundred bucks I've got a way to haul water so and typically
when you're doing a lot of this cropland grazing it's gonna be in the fall and winter when
water requirements are already low so yeah a good fence around your field and and some
water and you'll be off to the races so but yeah take it slow take the baby steps but
the most important thing is the land does need the livestock it's super important for
nutrient cycling and to you know follow the soil health principles so I guess I've always
kind of gone under the train of thought that never stick your neck out any further and
you can afford to get it chopped off so I've I've kind of started you know if I invest
something in this journey I don't always expect a return on it but by and large I would say
eight out of ten times I try something new it turns out to be positive and the two three
times it doesn't turn out positive I can usually see why sometimes it's my own stubborn way
of thinking and sometimes it was just a bad weather pattern or something but to date
I don't regret anything I've tried it all seems to be working positively and actually
at the end of the year we do taxes now it's not quite as easy to show a loss as it used
to be we're coming on a new problem there but we'll be able to handle that one I love
that regenerative agriculture and following soil health is starting to create tax problems
from him so I guess a really good testimonial like let's create massive tax problems for
farmers by following soil health like let's that's that's awesome so I don't know if
that'll fit on a bumper sticker but you know we could try for more on building soil health
profitably integrating livestock and crops and the match made in heaven initiative see
the podcast page for your to the ground episode 350 at land stewardship project dot org if
you have comments or suggestions about this podcast contact Brian Dvor at bdivore at land
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