One person’s journey into soil health

You’ve probably noticed the emphasis on soil health in this week’s issue, particularly that High Plains Journal is sponsoring Soil Health U and Trade Show in Salina, Kansas, Jan. 24 to 25.

Sharing a few details about my own farm operation helps put into context why we are working on this program.

In 2000, my father and I began converting our 1,200-acre northcentral Kansas crop farm from conventional tillage to no-tillage. It takes a few years to transition into no-till; there is a lot of crop residue to deal with at first and we had to be careful planting and fertilizing into the extra residue. It took additional management, but was not insurmountable because there were several herbicide options we could use to kill weeds.

At that time, our crop rotation was essentially either wheat/sorghum/fallow or wheat/soybean/fallow. With no-till, we took fallow out of the system and had cash crops growing on every acre, every year.

Easy at first

Until about 2012, it was easy. But then we noticed glyphosate was no longer killing all our weeds. We tweaked our crop rotation to help with that. Weeds that affected sorghum, for example, could be suppressed when we grew wheat and soybeans.

In 2012, I experimented in growing cover crops for the first time. After wheat harvest, I planted a mix of several different cover crop species. My goal was to keep the ground covered, and to have living roots in the soil “feed” all those microorganisms. The mix included deep-rooted crops, to help break up compaction layers that occurred after years of tillage. There were legumes to convert atmospheric nitrogen to organic nitrogen in the soil (and hopefully reduce the amount of commercial fertilizer I needed to apply). Flowering plants provided pollinator habitat.

Although the cover crops cost me $24 per acre, I saved that much in herbicide applications, although we did apply herbicide before the next cash crop, which was sorghum.

Since then, I use a mix of cover crops after wheat harvest, or double crop cash crops such as soybeans. I’ve also had two years of “companion crops,” or planting sunflowers mixed with cover crop species, also planted after wheat harvest. I harvest the sunflowers as a cash crop, but get the soil health benefit of cover crops, too.

The next steps

In the last few years, I’ve tried a couple of new practices, including growing cereal rye after sorghum harvest in the fall of 2015. The theory is that cereal rye helps suppress the growth of some weeds that can cause problems in the soybean crop to be planted the next spring. Left to grow in the spring, the cereal rye is killed with herbicide before planting soybeans. It didn’t work as well as I’d hoped, but I’m not done trying as a lot of farmers have had great success with this practice.

In 2017 I tried grazing cover crops for the first time, partnering with a neighbor on a 40-acre field. I planted the cover crop mix into wheat stubble on July 17; on Sept. 1, he put 40 cow-calf pairs on the field, which was divided with electric fence into four 10-acre paddocks. To date, I have not had to spray this field (which normally would require two herbicide passes) and he has gotten the benefit of putting pounds of beef on his cattle and I get the benefit from cattle manure and urine. Is it a success? We have been extremely dry, so the cattle were pulled off earlier than expected. But both my neighbor and I are pleased with the 2017 results and are excited about doing this again in 2018.

A different mindset

From a personal perspective, adopting soil health practices has improved my soil organic matter content and I’ve reduced the amount of commercial fertilizer and herbicides on cash crops. An ancillary benefit is that it is fun to learn about new crops and see how systems mesh together. Even when commodity prices are low, or the weather doesn’t cooperate, there are exciting things happening due to reduced tillage, cover crop adoption and grazing.

Some farmers and ranchers will argue that these practices don’t work on their farm or ranch. That’s why we’re hosting Soil Health U and Trade Show—so that you can learn from folks who have made the mistakes and have paved their own path to soil health.

Soil health requires a change in mindset from conventional farming practices. There’s an old saying from automobile maker Henry Ford: ‘Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t—you’re right.’ Come to Soil Health U and learn how you can.

Bill Spiegel can be reached at 785-587-7796 or [email protected].