I call myself the HRH, I'm the Honest Regenerative Hypocrite.
Welcome to the 343rd 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.
There are times when central Minnesota farmer Clifford Johnson finds himself
planting what he calls plastic worms.
That's what he calls the drainage tile systems he installs as part of a side
business he runs.
The point of burying these flexible pipes in farm fields is to help carry away
excessive moisture
and thus keep corn and soybeans from being drowned out. Clifford sees tiling as
an important tool, but, the farmer maintains, it's no replacement for
healthy soil that has active biology and good aggregate structure. Dead compacted
soil does not manage water well, and thus calls for a band-aid solution like
drainage tile. Clifford farms 2,000 organic crop acres and grazes cow-calf
pairs near Paynesville with his wife Heidi and their daughter, plus his parents
and brother. Building soil health is key to Johnson Family Farms' operation.
They use cover cropping and rotational grazing, and have even experimented with
cutting-edge composting systems, as well as using a roller crimper to do no-till
organic production. Clifford says that when he installs tile on the land of
customers that he works with, it gives him a chance to get a first-hand glimpse
of some of the issues farmers in the region struggle with when it comes to
their soil. Often, he says, it can be traced to not having living roots in the
ground all year round, which results in lack of biological activity, and thus the
kind of compaction that makes for muddy fields and a general inability to make
the best use of moisture. At times, Clifford will talk to customers about the
advantages of building more resilient soil via practices like cover cropping.
But he also makes it clear that each farm is different, and what works on one
operation may not be a good fit for another. He made that point during a
presentation at the Land Stewardship Project's Driftless Grazing School,
which was recently held on the Jordan and Rochelle Meyer farm in southeastern
Minnesota. The two-day school was led by other grazers in the region and
featured hands-on tutorials in everything from fencing and watering
systems to monitoring soil health biology, managing finances, and developing
grazing plans. In his presentation, Clifford emphasized the value of close,
consistent observation and the willingness to adjust practices from year
to year. Sometimes such adjustments mean setting back soil health temporarily in
service of a longer-term goal of building farm resiliency from an economic
and quality of life point of view. In fact, Clifford jokingly calls himself an
honest regenerative hypocrite, or HRH, because of the fact that at times he's
been forced to do tillage, thus disrupting the soil structure. But, as he
explained in an interview we conducted at the conclusion of the first day of
the school, it's all about context. So one of the things that you talked about
was you also have a side business, a tiling business, and you said that it
gives you an opportunity to get onto farms and see a lot of the issues that
can come with year after year of monocrops and not having diversity out
there and some of the compaction issues and maybe even when they do put in
tiling they can still have issues. One of the things you talked about was it just
really, people are really flummoxed by that and you're like, well you don't have
soil life in there. Yeah, we get on these farms and you know with our sideline
business, our business is to get rid of water for these farmers. But, you
know, you get questions like, well what do I do about erosion on these hillsides?
And what do I do about this even though I'm no-tilling, I'm still
getting washing? And the thing is, you know, they go to no-till but there's not
a living root in the system. There's nothing functioning feeding the soil
biology. So it gives me an opportunity to, you know, show them that we're
addressing a symptom here but it's not the problem. I'm not saying that you
shouldn't put any tile in but it's a tool and it, you know, it should be used as a
tool and you should try to fix, you know, your other problems, water infiltration
and stuff like that through, you know, the cover crops and different
management practices. And that can be a stumbling block for people that aren't
used to it. They don't know if their equipment can handle it and how do I do
that and how do I implement that and that's just going to be more work and
you know, and I guess I see they need to realize they have a problem and when
they do and they get the willingness to try to address it, they, you know, need to
start working that way and I like to try to guide people to that if I can.
Well one of the things you said is you see tile as kind of a plastic earthworm.
Yeah, it's kind of an inside joke. So our friends are like, yeah, put more of the
plastic earthworm in and you know, and it's like, yeah, if you don't have a
living soil, it's like, well, we need to put, use a different tool to put air in
the soil and get rid of water and you know, it's a means of doing that but
there's other things that could help address some of that too. You talked a
little bit about, yeah, it's one thing to maybe learn that there is a problem and
and be aware of it but another thing to make that transition. Yeah, the
transition can be rough, you know. The thing is, you don't, people don't know
what to do and how to do it and the thing is, if somebody does something and
makes a mistake or it doesn't work out, they're never gonna do that again. Just
give up on it and I think that's some of the best ways we learn is from our
mistakes. Why did it fail? What did I do wrong? What could have I done different?
It all takes time. Well and a really good example is you had used roller crimping
and correct me if I'm wrong, I think you'd used it like three years in a row
and had a lot of success with it and then the drought came but you learned
some hard lessons from that that whole experience. Yeah, the roller crimping was
a blessing when it came in for us and really helped us out with a lot of
situations and we had a lot of success with it but when we hit the drought
years then we started having issues with that and you know, so we've had to change
some things around and do some things different and now you get a wet year
like this and I wish I had more roller crimp dry but actually this year it was
been so wet. With our crimper so heavy it would just cut into the soil and it
would have chunked it all out so it wouldn't have worked anyway so that's where I'm
adapting again and changing to gonna try to harvest the rye crop off and the beans
beans will come through later and I'll get what I can off of them so that's one
thing I learned last year was after losing or the rye taking all the moisture
and crimping the rye and killing that off there was no beans to be had and
there was no rye to be had so that's what I told dad last year if it's going to be
dry we're just going to leave the rye stand at least we'll get that crop off
of it and if we do get rain later maybe we can get some beans off of it so well
and it takes for folks who may not be familiar the roller crimping system is
you plant your say rye cover crop the fall before and then you go in when
you're going to plant say beans in the spring and it's this roller thing with
a chevron pattern on it that crimps that rye and kills it and it's been real
popular with folks who are trying to perfect that kind of no-till organic
system which I know is something that you've looked into so because of that
setback a little bit you you've had to kind of maybe return to some tillage
which what you weren't really psyched about but it sounds like you're pretty
confident that you've been building soil health over the years and you can have
some years where maybe okay I'm doing some things I don't really like but I've
built up enough soil health to kind of make up for that yeah well that's where
you know trying to compost in the field and you know cycle the nutrients in the
field and to be able to do that I mean we were doing stuff at home and checking
stuff on the microscope and we got a lot better understanding soil biology than
we ever had and I'm glad we did all that because we would have never understood
what the soil needs or what it how it functions and what we can do differently
to allow it to function everybody's like oh you got to get rid of the plow
because it's just killing the soil and yeah using that tool the wrong way yeah
it can really kill the soil I mean am I not harming the soil by plowing it I
believe I am affecting some of the biology and but I feel by spring
plowing now with a cover crop growing off you know into the fall and into the
spring I have a living root there pretty much every day of the year except for
maybe one or three days while we work the field but my goal is to plow it and
plant it that same day or next day so we come in with a heavy plow tillage we
just run over it with the heroin level it off a little bit and plant it and for
it then if you're gonna cultivate the field everybody oh it's so rough it's
not smooth enough I'm like why does it need to be smooth we're gonna cultivate
it anyway and with that's gonna ridge it up so it it levels it out in that
aspect of it so in that scenario it works and it's hard you got to make them
decisions at the beginning of the year and in two weeks things can change and
you're just like I wish this would have happened or wish it but that's part of
farming yeah you're a little hard on yourself you have a nickname for
yourself what is it yeah I call myself the HRH I'm the honest regenerative
hypocrite so you talk about all these soil health practices but then here oh
here's the guy all mow board plow in his field and well that's my context you
know I don't have I can't give it a whiff of some chemical and take
magically take care of it and there's days I scratch my head and wish I kind
of had that tool but that's not where God's got me placed right now this is
the path he's got me down and we're gonna keep fighting the battle and keep
getting educated and keep meeting nice people so I mean a lot of my
relationships have become come through events like this and you know that's
they can go a long ways because when it comes down to it there's not a lot of
people doing this I mean you drive across the countryside and I told my
dad the one day I'm like boy we are in the minority aren't we but you are
starting to see more a little bit more and more of it so it's in that's
encouraging well you brought that the word up context so that is so key is
that context it sounds like in the long term both from season to season as well
oh yeah it's it constantly changes you know and that's the big thing too about
a school like this too you know you can listen to somebody say what they're
doing on their farm it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work on
your farm because you need to figure out what your context is but you can learn a
piece of a puzzle that could help you or you know whatever so and get some guy
guidance and yeah relationships I mean I was really impressed just this day one
with all the great questions and it's kind of a diverse people approaching
things from a real diverse backgrounds and that kind of thing but kind of the
common connector I think is that soil health that they're really if we can
build that soil health and as like Rochelle Meyer talked about it's part of
that three-legged stool for them that that really a lot of good other good
things come out of that yep that's that is for sure we need to address all the
aspects of our life and we need to balance it out and like your I think
Jordan said we could have everything perfect but our family life could be
absolutely miserable and is that where you want to be I know context is so key
from farmer to farm so you can't have general guideline that's what has gotten
maybe agriculture in general in general in trouble is we have these cookie
cutter things and say it's going to work on every farm the same way but if you're
going to give any suggestions to somebody who is looking at kind of
heading down the regenerative path a little bit and basing things on building
soil health what would be a couple of key steps they should start out with well
I guess YouTube's probably the easiest place you know or a podcast or something
somebody in the soil health world you know and just start digesting stuff and
start learning I mean and then look for events that either LSPs putting on
Minnesota soil health coalition SFA I mean just others all kinds of things
around if you're willing to look into it and you can get ideas and keep digging
and digging I mean it's an endless path to learn I mean we by far we don't
understand at all I mean we're we're just people practicing what we're
learning and doing and and we're learning every time we do something so I
guess you need to be willing to accept your failures too and learn from them
and yeah it's you know you can go to school and pay for a school education or
you can or you can do it yourself and learn from your education on your own
well and that's a good point in that education that failure education could be
quite expensive but if you can keep your inputs or your kind of infrastructure
investment in major infrastructure down and and not go whole hog into something
that's gonna be really costly then at least you can bounce back from that and
learn from it and not have it be a deal breaker for the bank
you definitely need to access your risk tolerance and you need to figure out
where it needs to be and our risk tolerance is a little high sometimes but
you know to me a couple acres don't cut it you know it's like I want to see it on
a farm I want to you know I want to see it happen and yeah it it can make you a
outlier in your community but at least you're trying and every year is
different you know and so you're like oh I should have done this so then you're
all set up for next year and then it's like oh but this is different yet again
and observation is so key that's the one thing I learned from today is just
observation on every level right I mean that's the biggest thing I mean
everybody wants a book to follow or this and that's just not the way I operate
you know a measurement of this I mean yeah obviously if you're grazing cattle
and you're gonna have X amount of cattle out there you need to know their forage
consumption and you need to know that you're gonna have enough but for me to
measure a paddock with an instrument you know an instrument and calculate that
out the whole pasture isn't the same you know so I mean you need you take your
best educated guess and you observe the animals and if you see your short you
give them more sooner or you give them more for the next day and then you see
where you go from there and then it's like oh that's okay but then also it's
like oh we're coming up to a hill and it's thinner well maybe we should go
another post or two further just to give them a little extra so yeah it's
constantly observing you're planning for what you're gonna do for your next move
but you're observing what your move you're just did and you're observing
what the move you did before and you're constantly adjusting you know and then
you got weather it comes in if you're gonna have a big rain event and you
don't want them to plug a spot up too bad you might be you're gonna have to be
ready and you might have to go move them an extra time or two you know so I mean
it's just all things you need to do but if you want the weekend off give them
a big paddock and take the weekend off I mean that's not gonna destroy the farm
we all need to breathe sometime too well that's that's brings it back to context
if called that's an important quality of life piece and it's just as important
as maybe doing a really tight rotation or or observing certain things but is is
if the farm farmer isn't sustainable the farm isn't sustainable and the thing is
we aren't supposed to do things the same all the time anyway you know we're
supposed to change up the way we graze how you know when we graze where we
start how long we graze them how many pounds you know per acre we put on all
that's supposed to change from year to year constantly and you know there's no
set standard that this is how you do it
for more on building soil health profitably see the podcast page for
ear to the ground episode 343 at land stewardship project org if you have
comments or suggestions about this podcast contact Brian Dvor at be Dvor
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