Modity production of anything by nature is going to reward the lowest cost producer and
reward kind of a race to the bottom, a race to zero.
And that's what corn and soybean production is in Northern Iowa and Southern Minnesota.
And that's not a sustainable model in the long term.
We need to grow food that people eat and that they want to eat, not trying to push them
into consuming something that they may not want to eat or may not be healthy for them.
Welcome to the 363rd 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.
On a recent January morning, Landon Plagge drove me out to a 200-acre field, his family
farms in North Central Iowa.
Like all the farm ground in this part of the state, the field was tabletop flat.
There was little on the landscape to block the arctic-like winds that were raking the
area.
But Landon made clear this field differs greatly from the majority of crop land in the region.
A closer inspection showed that it was covered with the remnants of sorghum, sudan grass,
millet, radishes, and turnips, and the perimeter of the field was bordered by livestock fencing,
something that's increasingly uncommon in corn-soybean country.
It turns out beef cattle from a neighboring farm had recently grazed this cover crop mix.
While making use of a low-cost forage, the bovines had spread manure across the landscape,
adding natural fertility to the soil, and breaking up pest and weed cycles.
Landon reported proudly that it was their most profitable field in 2024.
The farmer credits crop diversity for generating good income off this and the rest of the 4,000
acres his family farms near the town of Latimer.
And the linchpin of this diversity is oats, a small grain that used to be ubiquitous in
the region, but that's been removed from most farmers' rotations during the past
several decades.
Stewardship of the soil is important to the Plagueys.
They utilize no-till and cover cropping on all their farm ground.
Landon, who farms with his wife Anne, as well as other family members, says establishing
oats as part of their rotation not only fits their conservation ethic, it's also served
as a gateway for integrating other enterprises into the operation.
For example, the Plagueys were able to establish those cover crops for grazing because oats
had been grown on that ground earlier in the growing season.
Since the small grain was harvested in July, that provided a wide planting window for the
covers, something that wouldn't exist if fall-harvested corn and soybeans were growing
there.
Diverse cropping systems also provide flexibility when it comes to the timing of applying the
manure the family's hog operation produces.
But Landon isn't just bullish on oats because of their ability to diversify a farm's agronomic
mix and build soil health.
He's also excited by recent market trends showing that U.S. eaters are increasing their
consumption of this healthy grain.
Turns out the U.S. is the biggest importer of oats in the world.
Given that we get the vast majority of that grain from places like Canada, wouldn't
it be great if large food companies were sourcing more of their product closer to home?
A greater reliance on more local farmers would not only diversify the landscape in a way
that results in healthier soil and cleaner water, but could inject vitality into rural
communities that are suffering from an economy dominated by the monocropping of commodities
like corn and soybeans.
Landon, who studied business administration and investment banking in college, sees lack
of a supply chain infrastructure that allows farmers to get a third crop-like oats to the
market as the biggest barrier to diversifying the landscape.
That's why he and Anne have launched Green Acres Milling, a venture that's establishing
an oat processing facility in Albert Lee, Minnesota.
Seventy other farmers have bought shares in the facility, which will break ground in the
spring of 2025 and be located in an area that's easily accessible to not only oat producers
but regional transportation infrastructure.
When it goes online in 2026, the processing facility will be able to handle 3 million
bushels of oats annually, which could potentially impact the crop rotation on 90,000 acres
of farmland in southern Minnesota and northern Iowa.
In January 2025, Landon was invited by LSP to talk about the benefits of integrating
oats into the rotation during a special small grains workshop in Albert Lee.
As part of a three-part series of podcasts focused on the workshop, I interviewed Landon.
While we took shelter from the winter wind in his family's machine shed, the farmer
described why oats make such a good fit for this area of the upper Midwest agronomically,
environmentally and economically.
So Landon, you just took me on a really appreciate it.
You took me on a little tour kind of showing me how you've been integrating crops like
oats into your rotation and kind of the role that they play in it.
And one of the points that you made, I think, was really important was that you really were
drawn to oats.
It sounds like around eight years ago, you started integrating them into your rotation.
Based a little bit on the environmental benefits, you really saw how it could help build soil
health.
But you realized pretty quickly, it has to make sense economically.
And one of the pieces that you laid out was if you're looking at it on a single growing
season basis, a single year basis, corn and soybeans still beat oats financially.
But if you look at it over a multi-year basis, it really can pencil out to have something
like oats in that rotation.
Can you just go over that a little bit and talk a little bit about how that over a multi-year
kind of as part of a system, has to be part of a system, I guess, I think was one of your
points.
Farmers really need to look at growing crops as a systems approach.
Corn, soybeans, oats, the cover crops, the different crops you can grow, the sorghum
sedans, the millets, and how they all work together in maximizing our efficiency, our
sustainability, and our economics.
We found that by integrating small grains like oats, we've been able to cut out the
fungicide on our corn.
We've been able to go to non-traded corn, eliminate insecticide, and reduce the input
cost of growing our corn while boosting the yields by breaking the diapause of insect
cycles, feeding different microbes on our soil.
So we've seen an economic benefit of adding the small grains when it's looked at as part
of a three-crop rotation.
In a one-year scenario, you could run a cash flow and say, corn looks better than oats.
But if you consider the other benefits that oats have or small grains have in your rotation,
then all of a sudden the oats will look $100 an acre better than growing corn.
And it spreads out your labor, it spreads out your workforce, it spreads out your machinery.
Just makes your farm more diverse and more resilient in the future.
And you said, I think you said you've cut in half your spending on crop insurance just
for your corn and soybeans too as a result.
Yeah, overall on our, over our entire operation, we've cut our crop insurance by about 47%
our crop insurance spending per acre.
Part of that is that we self-insure on oats.
Part of that is that we're buying a lower guarantee on our corn and soybeans because
our soils now have more water holding capacity, more pore space in our soils.
And we've seen our yields increase on our corn and soybeans following oats, even in
the challenging weather that we've had the last several years.
When it rains, our soils soak up water.
They don't pond as much.
The water doesn't run off.
And that water is stored for when it doesn't rain.
And so we've been able to reduce our crop insurance expense significantly by having
small grains.
Can you take me through one of the first fields we visited was I think a 200 acre field.
You take me a little bit and you said it was your most profitable field this year, I think.
Can you take a little bit through the what that rotation has been like the last couple
years and I know you've added neighbors livestock into that system and kind of how that's worked
out?
Right, our most profitable acres the last two years since we started reintegrating livestock
on a larger scale into our operation has been oats followed with livestock cattle grazing
on it.
That's because the oats themselves may break even, but then you consider the benefits on
the corn and soybean price.
But we're also grazing cattle on sorghum, sedan grass, millet, radishes and turnips
following the oats.
And we're grazing about one head per acre.
The cattle have averaged three pounds a day both of the last two years grazing that and
we have them out there for about 100 days.
So we're putting on 300 pounds of beef, rough math of a dollar fifty a pound of value, but
let me back up on purchase price, that's $450 an acre of beef that we're doing on our operation.
And so you add that with cattle, with the oats, we're making significantly more per
acre with livestock reintegrated and it's better for our sustainability, better for
our soil health.
It really supercharges the soil quality having livestock grazing on the land and I'd rather
make $300-$400 an acre than make 50 growing corn.
Out of your 4,000 acres that you're farming, how many were in oats this year?
In 2024, we farm about 4,000 acres.
We're 100% no-till, 100% cover crop.
We had about 600 acres in 2024.
In 2025, we're going to have about 1,600 acres of oats.
We're increasing our oat acres because of the economics of growing oats and having the
three crop rotation.
We like the environmental sustainability, but we also need to stay in business too and
we can be more profitable by having a three crop rotation on our farm, integrating livestock,
growing double crops.
We're growing Caranada on acres, Camelina on some acres, hybrid rye on acres, and oats
allow us to do all of these other crops while maintaining our corn and soybean oat rotation.
I think that's a good example of you were talking earlier about oats can be an example,
integrating a crop like oats into a cropping system can be a way of, instead of pushing
farmers to do things that maybe are good for the soil, good for the environment, that type
of thing, kind of pulling them along with the market type of thing.
Yeah, consumer demand is really showing a shift to more sustainably produced products,
more sustainably produced food, and they also want to know where their food is coming from
and how it was raised.
With a small grain such as oats, domestically sourced, domestically raised, we can provide
what consumers want and they are willing to pay more money for that product as well.
That pulls farmers into integrating a cover crop, reintegrating livestock, and we want
the market to reward producers for growing these more sustainably produced products on
their farm rather than trying to push farmers into growing a cover crop or into no-till.
If the market rewards guys, they'll do it and it'll be a long-term scalable solution
instead of say an incentive-based solution that may go away when the incentives disappear.
So one of the things that I think an idea that you're kind of trying to integrate into
this farming operation and it seems like it's very important to you is this idea of raising
a crop that's food for people.
That kind of idea and it's not just like, oh, that's a nice idea, but you really feel
like that that works into the economics of helping the farmers and helping the rural
economic development.
You're very involved with the community and I think you own a grocery store in the area
as well, so you saw that side of it, the retail side of it, but this idea of getting farmers
maybe into the mindset of raising a food product rather than just a raw commodity that somebody
else is adding value to and getting the economic benefits out of it.
Yeah, since we've moved to a more sustainable operation, we've quadrupled in size of our
operation and tripled the number of acres that we own on our farm.
It's been successful for us moving to being a food producer instead of being a commodity
producer.
Community production of anything by nature is going to reward the lowest cost producer
and reward kind of a race to the bottom, a race to zero, and that's what corn and soybean
production is in Northern Iowa and Southern Minnesota.
It's everybody competing against each other to try to be the lowest cost, highest yielding
producer and that's not a sustainable model in the long term.
We need to grow food that people eat and that they want to eat, not trying to push them
into consuming something that they may not want to eat or may not be healthy for them,
just because that's the crop that we want to grow.
Farmers need to look at what people want to consume and grow those things and that will
be the long term market driver that will make us be successful.
Speaking of which, so the next you talk about side projects you got going, you got a really
big side project going and it sounds like it was sparked a little bit by three years
ago you and your wife going to Europe and seeing how much more oats was being raised,
how much was being consumed, how that was much more part of the food system.
So can you talk a little bit about this Green Acres Milling enterprise that is going to
be going online here in the next couple years?
Alright, so we're the founders and majority owners of a oatmeal that we're building in
Albert Lee, Minnesota and we're owners of it as well as 70 other farmers in our area
that have all bought in to deliver oats to because they see the economic benefits of
growing oats and they see the sustainability benefits of growing oats.
So we're a real team of like minded producers building a mill that would provide traceable,
sustainably produced oat products into the marketplace.
We're seeing consumer demand for it increasing significantly.
Every year the US oat market demand has increased 8%.
92% of the oats consumed in the US are imported from Canada though.
The supply chain logistics that we have with the mill located here at the southern end
of the oat growing region allow us to pay a higher price for oats than say what's currently
paid while also providing a fair price to brands that are purchasing the product from
us.
We're breaking ground here when the ground thaws in spring of 2025 should be in full
production by July of 2026.
Our farm, we've grown a number of oats over the last few years.
In the last five years I've grown about 2500 acres of oats.
They've averaged 136 bushels an acre on a yield and 40.2 on a test weight.
So we've been able to grow high quality, high yielding, milling grade oats here in
Northern Iowa.
Other farmers in our group have similar results in southern Minnesota, western Minnesota,
western Wisconsin, eastern South Dakota.
So we've proven in our region we can grow good quality milling grade oats.
Our facility will handle about 3 million bushels of oats a year, both conventional and organic.
Our focus is on the conventional product via some better differentiating factors on that
but we also can provide a traceable organic product as well.
Rough math on it is we're going to need 30,000 acres of oats to supply product to our mill.
And so that will actually affect the rotation on 90,000 acres of crop land here in southern
Minnesota and Northern Iowa.
Which sounds like a lot.
It is a scalable change.
It's a lot more than we're currently doing but I think it's just the tip of the iceberg
of what we can do.
The consumer demand that we've seen and the brand demand we've seen.
We have our products sold through 2028.
We've seen demand for three times as much product as we're going to produce initially
and we are building the mill, envelope the mill, building large enough to be able to
double capacity just by adding some more machines.
So I anticipate in two to three years from now we'll be doubling our capacity at the
mill which in turn will affect 180,000 acres of crop land which then you're starting to
talk larger numbers.
You have any rough idea what roughly how many acres of oats are being raised in this region
now?
Currently there's about 45,000 acres of oats grown in a 120 mile radius of Albert Lee Minnesota
which is where our mill is.
What we're seeing is a number of growers that are participating in the project doubling,
tripling, quadrupling the acres of oats that they will grow because of the improved market
for the oats.
And we're not actually really competing against the existing millers in the area.
We're just selling into market growth.
We don't need to take any oats away from the existing millers.
We don't need to take any market away from the existing millers.
We're selling into market growth.
We're not displacing oat production from anybody else.
There's just that much more demand for oat product in our region.
Well and another really good point is that there's a lot of excitement about some of
these quote unquote new alternative crops.
I know Forever Green Initiative at U of M has been working with a lot with say, Kernza,
Camelina, some other crops like that.
The market isn't quite there for those.
I mean that doesn't mean we should give up on them.
It just, you know, there wasn't a market for soybeans earlier in the 20th century.
But right now, you know, you've done the calculations and I've seen the numbers.
There is a market for oats plus farmers know how to grow that.
They maybe have gotten out of the habit of growing it, but there is that culture there
of integrating a small grain into the corn soybean rotation.
So that, if nothing else, can be, if we're going to diversify agriculture, boy, it's
kind of a real reachable goal right there with integrating something like oats right
now.
With the different factors our U.S. domestically sourced oats have over the current oat supply,
the market is here for oats and it's a growing market.
Some of these other specialty crops, we have to develop the knowledge on how to grow them.
We have to develop the infrastructure to grow them.
But we also have to develop the market and that takes time.
It just does.
It's 20 acres of kernza, you know, is great, but to make scalable change, that might take
10 years, 15 years to be a viable third crop in our rotations where the demand is here
for oats now.
And so we see oats as kind of a low-hanging fruit essentially to get farms into a more
diverse sustainable rotation through crop rotation.
And they're also kind of a gateway to some of these other crops.
They allow other crops to be planted because oats are harvested in mid-July and that opens
up the opportunity to have a much more viable cover crop, a much more viable second crop
than a corn and bean rotation.
And as farmers learn about other crops and have experience with growing, say, a small
grain like oats, they're also more willing to try other different crops as they have
success.
You really strike me as somebody who's looking at this and some of the other things that
you've been doing over the years, really look at the rural economic development, kind of
the big picture holistic view of how is this going to benefit the community and the rural
economy and not just, well, can we get a great market for this one commodity and make money
while we can kind of thing.
But that's something that sounds like you really think about quite a bit.
Yeah, our rural communities struggle here in Northern Iowa, Southern Minnesota, and
they struggle because our farms aren't diverse enough and our labor isn't diverse enough.
And we're so focused on a monocrop culture that we need to move beyond that and figure
out a way to, say, export more dollars per acre from our communities, from our towns,
from our counties, from our states and our areas and the more dollars we can sell per
acre, whether that's oats and cattle or the more profitability a farmer can have per acre.
If a farmer is making $50 an acre, that's the dollars they have to spend in their communities.
If they're making $200 an acre, that's the dollars they have to spend in their communities.
And by farmers being more successful while also being better for the environment with
our cover crop practices, small grains in our rotation, that in turn is better for everybody
involved in the community.
It's more dollars for our schools, more dollars for our hospitals, more dollars for our main
streets and more people shopping there as there's more different things growing on our land.
It spreads out our labor growing small grains, but it is most likely more labor per acre,
but you're growing more dollars per acre, more money per acre coming in.
You have to take care of the cattle on the land or the chickens or the sheep or your
second crop or your third crop on that land.
And so that will make our farms and our farm communities be more successful while also
being able to compete economically and scalably.
We have to provide good quality, low cost food for consumers.
That's what people need to eat.
And we can't necessarily produce food that costs four times as much just because it's
grown in a sustainable manner and expect consumers to buy that.
We need to appeal to every consumer out there by providing high quality, sustainably produced
food at a price point that's very similar to what's currently out there.
Yeah.
And going back a little bit to the environmental, when you were talking about how many more
acres you could scale up or how many acres, how this could change the rotation in the
region because of the number of acres you would need to supply this facility.
Something as simple as, it's not simple, but it's not a simple problem, but particularly
in Southern Minnesota, the nitrate contamination issue, and I know it's an issue in Northern
Iowa as well.
You could, by converting that number of acres or getting that amount of oats into that rotation,
you can reduce the amount of just something like nitrates, which is a huge issue and we're
having a real problem trying to figure out how to prevent it from getting in there in
the first place because once it gets into the groundwater, it's almost impossible to
get out, that type of thing.
Yeah.
Oats and small grains in general, they do take less nitrogen to grow them than say corn
does, but their root systems and the cover crop root systems, following oats with oats,
companion to with oats, the data is out there and we have the data from some of our partners
that it's basically, it can be up to a four-fold decrease in the amount of nitrates in drinking
water in tiles, leaving a field of oats as compared to leaving a field of corn.
A lot of that's due to water holding capacity.
The water isn't leaving our farm.
It's staying there.
The nitrogen is staying on the farm operation where it's placed and so that's available
for crops.
We can use in turn as kind of a staircase effect.
We can use less nitrogen because our soils are retaining more nitrogen.
It's not running away.
It really has a lot of positive effects for the environment on nitrates in the drinking
water to erosion from the farmland to insects, beneficial insects, just different crops on
our land as well.
Are there one or two major barriers you see to getting more small grains or other third
crops integrated into our corn and soybean system?
Is there some barriers that you were like, boy, if we could figure that one out, that
would really help us get over that hump a little bit?
I think the biggest barrier we have to overcome is the market and middle of the supply chain
infrastructure.
A product like oats, the market is there, but the middle of the supply chain infrastructure
for farmers to sell to that market isn't there.
That's why we need projects similar to our Green Acres milling project that allow farmers
to move farther down the supply chain, become more vertically integrated, and go beyond
just being a commodity producer to actually producing food people eat.
For more on building soil health profitably, diversifying agriculture, and community-based
food systems, see the podcast page for Ear to the Ground episode 363 at landstewardshipproject.org.
There you'll also see links to other episodes in this series.
If you have comments or suggestions about this podcast, contact Brian DeVore at bdevorre
at landstewardshipproject.org or you can call 612-816-9342.
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Thanks to Laura Borgendahl, a Western Minnesota musician, for Ear to the Ground's theme music.
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Thanks for listening.