June 12, 2025 • 58 mins
Grant Breitkreutz is a farmer from Minnesota who transitioned from conventional practices to a soil health–focused approach. Alongside his wife Dawn, he transformed their farm through no-till, diverse cover crops, adaptive grazing, and continual learning. He’s known for asking “why,” experimenting boldly, and sharing openly what’s worked and what hasn’t.
Grant is a key voice in agriculture because he proves what’s possible when farmers take ownership of their decisions and data. His operation is profitable, resilient, and community-driven. He mentors others, helps lead the Minnesota Soil Health Coalition, and focuses on farming for life, not just for yield or labels.
In this episode, John and Grant discuss:
-
The pivotal role of questioning assumptions
-
Developing a seven-grain blend for chicken feed that improves bird health, which created a profitable niche market
-
The power of adaptive grazing and how walking cows across a field can accelerate soil health regeneration
-
The importance of local adaptation in regenerative farming
-
How nitrogen management impacts not just yields but weed pressure and overall profitability
-
The growing importance of farmer-led communities like the Minnesota Soil Health Coalition
Additional Resources
To learn more about Grant’s work at the Minnesota Soil Health Coalition, please visit: https://www.mnsoilhealth.org/
About John Kempf
John Kempf is the founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture (AEA). A top expert in biological and regenerative farming, John founded AEA in 2006 to help fellow farmers by providing the education, tools, and strategies that will have a global effect on the food supply and those who grow it.
Through intense study and the knowledge gleaned from many industry leaders, John is building a comprehensive systems-based approach to plant nutrition – a system solidly based on the sciences of plant physiology, mineral nutrition, and soil microbiology.
Support For This Show & Helping You Grow
Since 2006, AEA has been on a mission to help growers become more resilient, efficient, and profitable with regenerative agriculture.
AEA works directly with growers to apply its unique line of liquid mineral crop nutrition products and biological inoculants. Informed by cutting-edge plant and soil data-gathering techniques, AEA’s science-based programs empower farm operations to meet the crop quality markers that matter the most.
AEA has created real and lasting change on millions of acres with its products and data-driven services by working hand-in-hand with growers to produce healthier soil, stronger crops, and higher profits.
Beyond working on the ground with growers, AEA leads in regenerative agriculture media and education, producing and distributing the popular and highly-regarded Regenerative Agriculture Podcast, inspiring webinars, and other educational content that serve as go-to resources for growers worldwide.
Learn more about AEA’s regenerative programs and products: https://www.advancingecoag.com
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hi friends, this is John. Welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast.
(00:03):
You know the types of conversations that we have here, and if you don't, they're all about
regenerating soil health, ecosystem health, the health of the plants and the livestock,
the crops that we're growing, and ultimately having an impact on people's health and on public
health. These are all important pieces that are integrally tied together. I'm very honored to
have a conversation today with Grant Breitkreutz.
(00:25):
Grant is someone whose work I've admired
from a distance for a long time.
I really enjoy the conversations that I have here
on the podcast with scientists and with innovators.
We have lots of fun conversations,
but ultimately where the rubber really meets the road
is in practice and having conversations with growers,
reporting things into practice. And there is no replacement for depth of experience
(00:49):
which Grant and his family and the people that he works with bring to the
table in spades. So Grant, thank you for being here. I've really been looking
forward to this conversation. Great, Aaron, a pleasure to be here, John.
Can you tell us a little bit about your story, your
background? What is, what's your farming context? What does your operation look
like and how did you get to where you are today? Our farming operation started
(01:15):
in 1997. It's kind of a unique story. My mom and dad, when they got married, they
they made a commitment to each other at age 50 they would decide if they had made
it farming or reassess life, reevaluate life in general.
And to my amazement, at age 50, their decision was to quit farming.
(01:37):
And I mean quit.
My dad bought a truck, went coast to coast for a while, my mom had a job in town, and
gave Donna and I the opportunity to buy them
out and start farming here. So at that time we were, it was quite the step. You
know, in farms you don't realize how you lean on older generations to help
(01:58):
you with decisions. And when my dad was gone and he didn't have a cell phone,
just there's nobody to back us up. So we made the decisions on our own.
And honestly, it was a blessing, John.
My wife was not from a farm, Dawn's not from a farm.
When I met her, she didn't know how to run a riding lawnmower
and she constantly asked, why, why are we doing this?
(02:19):
Why are we doing this?
She'd get done working a field and I'd say, well it looks pretty good, let's work it again. And she's like, why? You know, you're gonna get seed to soil
contact here. So that really kept me questioning things and and obviously we
were doing things what I would call the very conventional way in our
neighborhood. It's what I was taught, what I learned, and eventually it wasn't
(02:42):
working financially. And We were both working jobs
off the farm and it's like we got to make this farm more profitable and try
to get here full-time. And so we both really enjoyed the cattle side of it
and just loved the cow-calf operation, the feedlot at the time. And so I started
studying grazing management. I was blessed to meet Ian Mitchell Ennis in, uh, from South Africa.
(03:07):
And, and even after meeting Ian, I didn't
realize it was about soil health.
We were still chasing production,
production, production.
And eventually the good Lord tapped us on the
head and said it was about soil health.
And so then we spent.
Hopefully the tap was relatively soft.
Yeah.
(03:27):
Well, sometimes it was kind of harsh, but, um, and then, and then, you know, at that
time, uh, you just couldn't find the information like you can now on, on media
streams and all that type of stuff.
And there weren't conferences locally. So we
spent every winter we would run up to Burley County, North Dakota to see what Jay Feer and
(03:52):
the crew was doing at the Minocan Farm to their annual conference. And learned a lot from that and
experimented a lot here on the farm. And eventually our practices here on the farm with what I would call
regenerative agriculture, more like farming for life, opened the doors to a
(04:14):
lot of land opportunities. A lot of landowners saw what we were doing on our
farm, saw the wildlife coming back, saw the reduced erosion, in reality,
saw the life on the farm and started studying soil health
and what it is and what it means.
And we made a humongous expansion here.
(04:39):
We quadrupled the size of this farm in less than three years.
And at the same time had the opportunity
to expand it a lot more than that,
but we just knew the workload was gonna be too much.
And so I was blessed to know enough people in the community
that we got a lot of young farmers
to take on the land that was offered to us
(05:00):
and farm it the way we do or close to what we do.
Wow, that's a fascinating story, Grant. So how, as you traveled to North
Dakota to Burley County to those events, how did your operation
shift and change? How is it different today from what it was in the 90s?
(05:21):
We were a full tillage operation in the 90s. We did buy our first no-till drill
and we still have it in 1998 because if I remember right the ground froze early
that year and we didn't get tillage done. And so we've been no-tilling soybeans
since 1998 and it's like wow we're just not burning all that fuel, crops are good,
(05:44):
let's figure out
how to no-till everything else. And so corn was the last crop we switched to
no-till about 12 or 13 years ago. Operation... we actually were cover
cropping before it was called cover crops. Like I said earlier, we were so
so enthralled with our cattle and enjoyed the cattle side of it so much
(06:04):
and with the limited land base we had had we're trying to expand the cow herd and
couldn't ever get enough feed put up or enough grazing days. And so we were
planting winter triticale after we cut corn silage and try to grow three crops
in two years. And we got into extremely wet pattern. I'd have to go back and look at what
(06:25):
year it was but it was it was in the late 90s or early 2000s and we had had
two inches of rain throughout the night the Triticale was getting so tall it
wasn't getting through our older cutting equipment and I told Dawn I said as soon
as you get done with work I said you got to get on the swather and get this laid
down or we're never gonna get get it harvested. And she got home early that day and went out there and never left the track.
(06:48):
And I'm like, wait a minute, something happened here.
Something is different with this soil.
And, you know, six hours later, we were running with the cutters behind her,
pulling big silage boxes and we never left the track.
Wow.
And it's, it's like, what happened here? And then I thought, you know, we just had
two inches of rain. This might be crazy, but we own this no-till drill with a neighbor
(07:11):
and he doesn't like to sleep at night. Let's put beans in that drill and plant these beans
tonight yet. You know, and this is within 24 hours of a two inch rain and harvested
46 bushel acre soybeans. And so the combination of learning what we learned on the
grazing side of it, and then that particular experience, it's like there's something going
on below our feet. We need to figure this out. And we need to try to manage it better than we
(07:36):
currently are. So that's kind of how our evolution was. And since then, obviously,
our operation grows more than just corn and soy
and crops for cattle.
What all are you growing today?
We're still primarily corn and soybeans and I will admit that's because we still borrow
a lot of money here and we've got to keep our crop insurance.
(07:58):
That's part of that.
But we do, Dawn and I, decide how many acres each year we want to leverage without insurance on, which most times is a very good decision. So we do grow a bunch
of cereal rye here. We do grow some winter trit. We've done some field peas.
We grow, right now I've been working on it for seven years. I grow seven grains all at one time. We
(08:26):
plant wheat, oats, barley, peas, fava beans, lentils, and flax all at the same time.
And we use the same percentage each year and harvest it as dry grain and this has
turned into another huge market for us
for chicken feed. We grind and mix the chicken feed here and I think right now
(08:51):
we've got 26 customers. I know we've got a couple customers on the waiting list
because like I say last year we were wet and part of our field drowned out so we
didn't have any extra production. So what is the...
Why are the chicken producers attracted to that mix?
Are they particularly looking for the flax component, the omega-3 to 6 ratio
(09:12):
nutrient density, or they're just... it's an inexpensive and effective feed source
for them? Are they looking for quality?
What are the motivators? That's exactly what happened. Two years ago in March
in this upper Midwest region and I I'm not a conspiracy theorist but something
happened to the local flocks, small flocks that were buying out of our
(09:36):
fleet farm stores, where the chickens quit laying eggs and we had a couple
landlords that we were providing feed to for their layer flocks and they had a network and they just said well Grant and Dawn's feed, our
chickens haven't missed a beat laying eggs, maybe you should call them. And my
phone just exploded. I mean we went from supplying two landlords chicken feed to
(09:59):
all of a sudden we were to 15 to 16 customers. And what we're seeing is we've
got some customers that don't want soy. And that's what that's what pushed us to
this. For a while we had excess eggs and we had a customer that would buy our eggs
as long as they did not contain soy. So that's why I put together this seven-way
blend. And now most of the customers that are new to us now will say that our feed they
(10:27):
get consistent egg lay rates. I mean we've got a small producer locally here
that I think he's got about 18 to 20 some birds and they said that one day
they'd harvest seven eggs the next day they'd have all 18. And since being on
our feed now for six months, they're consistently
pulling 15 to 18 eggs a day. I mean, you can call it the weather, you can call it whatever
(10:50):
else, but that producer will say it's the consistency of the feed. And we don't add
anything to this except for an organic vitamin pack. I still believe in that. I don't know
if we could get by without it. And apple
cider vinegar.
Yeah, that's interesting. So what does this mix do for you agronomically? I mean, if you're
(11:14):
growing a seven-way grain mix all in one combination, I'm assuming you're planting that in the spring
and then harvesting later that year?
Yeah, so it's going in early, like our wheat or oats would here. We plant it Yeah, so, yep, so it's going in early like our wheat or oats would here.
We plant it early, basically, when we're thawed out here and can get through the fields.
And then we can harvest usually the end of July.
(11:34):
So besides the diversity in the seven grain mix, it gives us a great opportunity to put
in 15, 18 species cover crop mix and still get a lot of growing days here in
in Minnesota. I mean we you know we can potentially freeze the second week of
September but that this way we get a lot of growth and we can produce a lot of
(11:56):
forage for winter grazing and if we don't get to it don't need it for winter
grazing just just do a tremendous amount of healing and building of soils with that type of length.
And to be honest with you, John, I'll admit it, this has turned out to be one of our better
cash crops.
What we're charging for the feed is acceptable to the customer and it's a very good profit per acre situation.
(12:27):
What role do livestock play in your operation presently?
We've learned that livestock are key to our operation to build soil health.
Besides that, the livestock is key for diversity. We just, we realize that diversity is key to fixing soils.
(12:50):
We can't scientifically prove this,
but I know when we pick up a new piece of ground
that if we're given the good weather conditions,
good growing environments,
that we can speed up soil health metrics by about two years by walking the cows across it.
Wow.
There's, there's something that drops out of the back end of that cow that
(13:12):
can't be duplicated in a lab.
No way.
No how.
I mean, you, you watch a cow as she's walking across the land and the right
sunlight, there's just a hue of biology life around that cow besides what's going in that great big
fermentation vat inside of her and and that just stimulates the biology in the
soil so much quicker than than any of the other products we can find that can
(13:35):
do it. So we we we row crop about 1,200 acres here and our goal is to have those
cows across to every acre every other year And we're doing really good at it. We've got one farm that we
don't have fenced yet, but that's on the list to get done because we know how
important getting those cows across that land is. When you think about the last 20-30
(14:01):
years of experience, as you've learned from people,
you were one of the pioneers, so you had to,
you learned a lot from people
that were outside of your region.
And one of the things that we talk about constantly
is the need to adapt that knowledge to your local context.
What is it that you've,
what were the adaptations that were required for you?
(14:23):
What have you adapted?
What's something that you learned
that then had to be revised in order to fit?
Oh, just about everything I learned out of my region.
I was one of these go big or go home type producers
in the 90s and it really hurt us
because I didn't think about the adaptation
(14:48):
process of how it was going to work in Minnesota, something I was learning in
North Dakota or in Arkansas. So what we did learn and what I do encourage
producers to do is try it in
your environment with what you think is the right adapted practices and try it
(15:10):
on a small scale. Don't go big and go home because it hurts the pocketbook. We
as farmers need to try all these practices on our own operations. I've
said this forever, we can have a list of
parameters or regulations from the government or whatever. No two
farms are ever going to look the same. We all have different management systems,
(15:32):
we all have different environments, and we all react to those environments and
changes differently as producers. So what we do now is, you know, like the seven grains I just tried it on
ten acres and it's like wow, tremendous results. Now we're growing a lot of acres
(15:53):
of it because we know what works here and it fits here. Just those type of
things. Start small, but start. I mean for anybody that listens to this that thinks they want to
go down this path, the one thing Dawn and I will tell everybody is we regret not
finding this path earlier. I mean we were blessed to know David Brandt and to
(16:18):
watch the experience of that man starting this in the 70s and to see
what he built there in
those soils, you know, I just wish we'd have started right away when we
started farming. But that's everybody's experience. We got to get to it
in our own time frame. When you are learning and when you're adapting
(16:39):
things to your local context, you know, learning is never nonlinear. It's from an
outside observer, it looks like a straight path from point A to point B, your local context. You know, learning is never nonlinear. It's, from an outside
observer, it looks like a straight path from point A to point B, but for the
people who are doing it, they know it's all kinds of twists and turns on that
supposedly straight pathway. So what are some of the things
that you've learned? What are some of the things that you would do differently if
(17:00):
you were starting over? What are some of the things I would do differently if I was starting over? I would do more and more research. Even back at the time we
did, I wish we'd have spent more time traveling to find more research so we
had more confidence in what we were doing. And the other thing that I would, that Dawn and I talk about a lot is
(17:30):
Grant and John can tell you to do one thing, find three other people, at least
two other people that are saying the same thing that Grant and John are
saying. So you got the validation that there are other people that have experienced this, know it
works, and you're on the right path.
(17:50):
I think that would be one of the biggest things I would have changed, is to just make sure
I had more than one source telling me this was the path to go down. That's interesting. I just, I think about that in my own life a little bit.
And I don't think anyone would suggest, nor would I suggest, that I haven't done enough
(18:15):
research because that's one thing that I tend to really thrive at.
But you know, I don't know, thinking about your second point a little bit,
there are many cases where the pioneers have no peers.
Like if you really are on the cutting edge, you're doing things that you may not be able to find
two or three other people who have had similar experiences.
(18:38):
How do you approach that?
Well, on our operation here,
if we couldn't find anybody with experience on that, is we tried it
two or three or four years in a row to see if our thought process, our ideas were going to work.
And I would say nine times out of ten, they did. But you got to realize we're in agriculture and
(19:00):
we're, mother nature controls what we do out here. We can do everything we can
to make something succeed, or as human beings we can make anything fail also.
But Mother Nature is still in control, so when we try something we want to try it
at least three to four years to make sure that we're correct, and then we'll
(19:21):
expand on it. I mean some things are are just a given. Yeah, just go
ahead and do it. But like the seven grains, I mean, we slowly expanded it. I mean, in
our, in our livestock operation, you know, what stocking rates are right, what are wrong.
We've learned there's no correct stocking rate. There's lots of people out there that
(19:41):
can tell you what they think is right, and it's
not.
It's all our management decisions.
But the one key thing is, is I'm not tech savvy.
I know I could do all this on my phone, but we still do it all on paper.
As we record everything, especially on the livestock side of it, hey, did we overgraze
this?
(20:02):
What was the weather conditions when we overgrazed it? And now with all that information back there we can tell you this year and next
year where the most productive pastures are going to be by our past history. And
that's something that takes a long time to get your head wrapped around. We had a
group of producers here the other day and they said what how come
(20:27):
that how come this pastures got dandelions in it and how come this one
doesn't and I said I can tell you straight out I said we can go up to the
office look in the books and I can tell you that that was overgrazed sometime in
the last two years you know it was a sacrifice paddock there was a reason
that it was overgrazed and and overgrazing happens and it does in
our environment because it's something we have to do to keep these cows out of
(20:49):
the feedlot. But we've got that written down and we know it so we got to give it
longer rest and recovery periods. I mean it I guess it all comes back to I've got
I've got a great memory of things but if we don't have that type
of memory locked in our head we have to get it on paper or some kind of recorded
(21:11):
device to know the history of what happened there and that will predict the
future. I remember, I don't remember where this quote originated but it was at a
fairly young age it might have been with my mother she She repeated it quite frequently, if I recall correctly.
The poorest ink is better than the best memory.
(21:31):
Exactly, because the ink doesn't lie.
The ink can always be referenced back to.
Yeah. Yeah. So.
When there's this recurring conversation that I often have with growers who are,
who want to go down a different pathway and who want to,
(21:53):
and there's this common request of,
what are the most influential changes that I can make?
Where are the leverage points that can make points that can have the most significant impact
on improving an operation? I think there are a few pieces that are getting to be very commonly
(22:15):
recognized, the impact of cover crops and where possible the impact of livestock. But
I'd like to ask that question of you for your operation when you look at the modifications,
the changes you've made over time.
Where were the leverage points where a change produced an outsized impact that was larger
(22:35):
than you expected?
Well, like I said, we're in corn soybean country here, and I guess the one big thing on corn
for me was nitrogen
management. It boggles my mind why or how the foreign producer in America
(22:56):
listens to their input supplier, who's taking the money out of their pocket as
to how to apply nitrogen. And I was
blessed by my father who, and my grandfather, who I don't think they
studied nitrogen management, but they knew that split applications in nitrogen
were key to growing a great corn crop on very little nitrogen. And it's just
(23:18):
amazing when we change nitrogen management, how we change weed pressures,
how we change all these other things that we fight in a growing season. There's so much to that question
you asked, John. I just... but that's the one that popped to my mind immediately
that's specific to my area here, but corn's growing all across the country. As
(23:39):
we start changing these managements, like I said before,
you have to watch what else changes also.
Yeah.
So you've said this a lot in your podcast over the years
is nutrient management is so key
and it affects everything else in the ecosystem
(24:00):
we're farming in and where we're trying to grow a crop in.
And I guess that's the one that just popped to my mind right away was nitrogen management.
I watch what the neighbors do and I watch them fight waterhemp nonstop.
And it's like, you know, the waterhemp is one of the least of my concerns because of
cover crop and nitrogen management.
(24:20):
Well, you know, Grant, in spite of me being here on the podcast and the amazing work that
our team does all the time, we still have.
I got I received a message yesterday from a grower who has been loosely working with
our consulting team for the last four years, and he's.
(24:43):
This year, for the first time he decided,
okay, I'm going all in, I'm going to take
these recommendations, I'm going to apply them
as I'm being advised to.
And he sent me this message, he said,
okay, I get it, I really get it.
For the first time, I'm seeing the degree
of plant health and response that you've always
talked about, that I've never gotten up to this point.
And it's because he was putting his toe in the water.
(25:05):
And there are some things that you just, there are some things that have a compounding effect
and nutrition management is one of them.
So let's talk a bit about nitrogen management.
What are you doing exactly?
How is it different?
What are the benefits that you've observed relative to the way other the common management practices are?
(25:29):
So I'll answer that question this way John is we don't know what we're doing
We honestly don't we're trying so many different things
But the one thing that Don and I have always done is a minimum of three nitrogen applications on a corn crop. We'll apply some of that plant, we'll
spoon feed a little bit at V2, V3, and we'll come in and spoon feed some later.
(25:54):
That's how we started out doing this. And I have made the decision in the
economy, in the economic times we're in this year, we are gonna make no less than
six applications of nitrogen on the corn crop this year. And Dawn is, she's really
honestly not happy with me about my decision because she knows I'm gonna be
living in a sprayer to do all these applications. But when you look at the
(26:18):
dollars and cents of it, that is gonna, that's gonna pay my entire year's wages
by nitrogen management.
I mean, we're melting urea and we're using,
we're using humics and fulvics.
I mean, we've realized it's not just about N, P and K anymore
and I'll be honest with you, John,
(26:40):
I told Russell Hedrick this three years ago, probably four years ago.
Russell and I got split apart during COVID, and we got back together at a
conference, and we're sitting there eating a steak one night, and I told
Russell, I said, man, I'm really angry with you. I hate you. And he's
like, why are you saying that, Grant? We get along great. And I said, because I did
(27:04):
not like school. And I said, with everything that you've learned on your farm, with the
research you've done there, I have to go back to school. And I don't want to go
back to school. And to be honest with you John, I have made a commitment
that I try to spend three to four hours every day through the winter studying
anything. And I don't care if it's coming off of your podcast
(27:31):
or somebody else's podcast, or if I'm looking things up on the computer, I think we in agriculture,
as farmers, we've become chemologists. And we were pushed that way by farm bill, by input suppliers, everything else. We as farmers have to become biologists again. Our forefathers did not grow just corn and
soybeans. They had a rotation. Did they know why they were doing it? Some of them
yes, some of them no. But it was about the biology happening in the soil by
(27:56):
growing different crops. And we've just gone down a really nasty path and
your group is one I go to all the time to listen to and
search out knowledge. I mean, there's lots of other paths that people can find this and
try to learn it as a farmer and apply it back to their farms.
(28:18):
You know, many professions, well, I say practically everyone, benefits from having advisors.
And so, farmers have for a long time thought of co-op agronomists as being on their team.
They're on their, they're one of their advisors that are on their team, like their vet and other advisors, but you know, I think, I don't know if farming is unique in this,
(28:48):
but one of the things that stands out to me is that we, in no other profession that I'm aware of,
do people delegate knowledge to their advisors to the same degree that farmers do, or have done in
the recent past, I mean the farmers that I observed.
The one characteristic that I've observed are the most successful farms, the most innovative,
(29:11):
the growers who are exceptionally profitable and who are really making, they do not delegate
knowledge.
And what I mean by that is they want to understand it for themselves.
So they certainly, they have advisors, they have people that they're learning from.
But then they say, hang on, I'm not just going to follow your recommendations just because Mr. Genius, smart guy, said so.
(29:33):
I want to understand why did he make that recommendation.
Why are we doing this now?
And farmers for a long time have delegated the understanding of the why, or have been satisfied
with superficial answers.
I agree 100% with what you just said, John.
(29:55):
And I had to do some research on this on a presentation I gave some years ago.
Why do we as producers, and why, I guess the research I did as, as ag
producers, 85 to 90% of our input decisions are based on the co-op.
That's taken the money out of our product, out of our pocket.
(30:17):
Why that, that, that just, when you say this to somebody outside of
agriculture, they're like, why would you listen to somebody that's
taking the money out of your pocket?
And, and the one thing, it was the advice and we, we still have to get
product from our local co-ops.
And I go in there and I say, I want, you know, 5,000 pounds of urea in each
(30:39):
hopper, dump it in these two tanks.
And they're like, what are you doing?
I was like, I'm melting urea. And the head agronomist just gives you a blank look.
Our co-ops maybe don't have the knowledge
that we think we trust they have as producers.
(31:03):
And to me, that's extremely disappointing, but that's
where we, as an American farmer, got to take this back into our hand.
Just like you said, we, we have to have the knowledge we have to find.
John and his advisory team or other advisory teams that, that have this
knowledge and the one thing that I wanted to say in this podcast so far,
(31:25):
John, is the farther and farther I go down this road, the less and less I know.
It's scary. The less and less I know, but yet I can see the, I can see everything
changing for the better. From our bottom line to the environment to
(31:46):
our neighborhood and community. And I don't think we're ever going to get to a
point in time where we as human beings understand what God gave us here. Yes, I
understand the amount of studying you do, John, but you're still learning every day. Oh my goodness, yeah.
And I don't know as a human race
(32:09):
that we'll ever figure out what God gave us here to manage.
But the closer we can manage it
to the way it was before we got here,
to me and Dawn, the easier the system works.
And it's much more fun to manage in that environment.
Instead of looking every morning at what we gotta go out
and kill and take care of, managing for life
(32:32):
and what we can grow is so much more fun.
It put fun back into farming.
I think you're spot on about your assessment of we're never going to know everything there is to know none of us ever is a never is there is it's just not that's not the way it's going to work however.
(32:58):
I'm also really inspired by the idea that it's not really necessary to know everything,
because it was designed to work.
It was designed to work.
And when you can, when you understand the foundational principles of working with life,
as you described it, and you seek to enhance life rather than to kill it, then you unleash
(33:23):
it.
You allow it to express itself
rather than constantly suppressing it.
And then amazing things begin to happen.
And you mentioned something a bit ago
on nitrogen management related to weed pressure.
You know, often as we go down this pathway,
we observe things that, oh, dandelion pressure is a result
or dandelion expression is a result of overgrazing, weed pressure is a result of nitrogen management, and we make these
(33:48):
associations that we made change A and we observed all these various outcomes
B, C, D, E, F and as time goes by and we gain experience and we have the benefit of
deeper perspective all of a sudden we get to a point where oh I did this and
it had this domino effect and five years later that happened.
And that just blows people's minds
(34:08):
who are unfamiliar with this.
It's like, you're saying that?
But that's so far, Z is so far removed from A,
how can you say A caused Z?
But if you've watched that pattern repeat itself
multiple times, it's like,
no, no, those two things are connected. And that's an incredible experience. Mike McDonald It is absolutely an incredible experience.
And I'll admit this, on my farming operation, when Dawn and I started, there was a new agronomist
(34:34):
that must have paid attention to soils class in college. And I said, I said, I want to do a full
soil testing program. I said, I want to do things right. And he looked at me and he said are the cows leaving the farm
anytime soon Grant? And I said no. He said don't bother soil testing. Just floored
(34:56):
me. This is an agronomist that told me this. Don't bother soil testing. So on our
operation I feel horrible about this. We've got no real
baselines. We do have some soil tests here from 1996 or 1998 I believe. That's
the only soil tests I have from back when we started. So I mentored a producer
(35:17):
up the river here from me and I told him, I said, Phil, I said, you have got to
baseline everything. All the tests that
are out there right now, please baseline this. You don't have livestock, you're
corn soybean producer, so your data is going to be key to what happens here. And
that data set, John, is just amazing. Seven years into it, organic matter
(35:42):
climate is just constant. All the other parameters
that we know how to measure now are all there and all documented. Something I
can't show on my farm because we didn't do it. But now on these new farms that
were that were taken on, we're baselining everything and then monitoring the
increase in everything. Like you say, it's other than the tests, there's so
(36:05):
much more that we got to monitor visually as farmers. Just look at
what happens to the wildlife in that neighborhood as you make these changes.
And every producer I've ever talked to that's five to seven years into this
will notice those environmental changes also.
Yeah.
So I want to talk a bit about some of the farmers
(36:28):
and producers that you've been mentoring
and the people that you're working with.
But sometimes I get a little bit like a dog with a bone.
I don't want to lose sight of something.
And I wanted to come back to your point
about nitrogen management and weed pressure.
With your split applications,
and you're now doing six
applications, you said this summer, so I'm assuming, well you did say the sprayer,
(36:49):
so that means a lot of foliar applications. What changes in weed
pressure have you observed as a result of changing nitrogen management? How do
you think those two things correlate?
The biggest one in our area here is waterhemp.
And that species of weed is with a growing
cover crop, because I need to admit this, we do plant most of our crops into
(37:11):
into green living cover crops. So obviously we get the effect of that rye
or shiitake kale as a cover on the soil. But even in areas where we don't
get a cover crop seeded, we don't fight the
waterhemp pressure because of the nutrient applications. And the reason I
(37:34):
can say that is because we've been pushed into a corner at times where we
had to front load a lot of nitrogen because we knew we weren't going to get
it done. We were short on labor. We didn't have the equipment. And in those situations we fight waterhemp or
lambsquarter or pigweed. We fight them and when we split this up we
(37:56):
don't fight it. And the other thing I'll say John is I mentor a lot of people
here locally. And in fact one of them's working for me now. And he farms his own land. And he made the comment to me yesterday. He said, Grant,
he says, I got a spray. He says, I got water hemp horribly. And yet he's here with me
riding in my wheeler, scouting fields here. And he's like, how come you don't
have it? And I said, don't you think that 140 pounds of nitrogen applied before you planted might have something to do with it." And he just looked at me and he said, it can't be tied together. I said, it is. I said, it's tied
(38:30):
together. And he just kind of gave me a blank look and he says, well, he says, I would not believe
you at all, but I'd see it on your farm. And our farms are not that far apart, there's a difference.
Yeah, so what does, in an ideal scenario, well this year you're now going to
(38:50):
kind of another level, but what has your nitrogen split
look like historically? How much at planting versus how much later?
40 units of nitrogen put on with the planter,
and then we'll try to get between 60 and 80
more units on in the growing season. What we found here in our soils that are
(39:12):
really functioning well, and I can't prove this scientifically John,
and I wish somebody could, but it looks to me like we kind of shoot for six tenths of a unit of
nitrogen per bushel. It seems to be ideal. We've done 250 plus bushel corn on
(39:35):
four tenths of a unit of nitrogen. It seems to me that we might be burning
some organic matter then. It seems like that crop might be pulling hard on our soils harder than I'd like to see. So that's that's kind of
our ideal goal is is six-tenths of a unit of nitrogen per bushel of corn.
I will say we've we farmed some land along the river here that's that's not
(40:00):
going to be 250 bushel corn. I mean, maybe someday it will be. So that's not our yield goal.
So we strive for 175 bushel yield gold here
because we know we have marginal soils,
but 250 has happened, you know,
but that comes back to the environment.
I guess our goal here is we don't have a specialty
(40:23):
and market for our corn yet. We grow all
conventional corn, non-GMO corn. Our goal here as an operation is to produce it as
cheap or cheaper than our neighbors so we are profitable at $4 corn. We don't
we don't have to produce 250 bushel corn to make a profit if we watch our inputs
going in on the front side. I'd love to open that profitability can of worms, but it's, uh, the reality is anyone
(40:52):
who pays attention probably knows what that story looks like.
Profitability versus yield.
I'll say this, John, though, that that production cost per bushel should be a driver of an operation though.
It's what got Don and I to where we are. You know, there's a gentleman in North
Dakota some years ago told me he was growing corn for $1.47 a bushel. I told
(41:15):
him he was wrong and he can't do it for that. And I strived for five years to
grow corn for $1.47 a bushel. I can't do it. But I experimented
with everything I possibly could to do that and the big difference between here
and Burley County, North Dakota is our land cost. I'll never be able to grow
(41:35):
corn that cheap because our land cost is so much higher. But I did eliminate
everything else that I could on the input side of it to get my cost down to $2.25 in that particular
year.
So it pushed us to profitability.
Yeah, well, even at $2.25, much less at $1.47, the reality is looking at the economic landscape
(42:03):
at the moment, right as we're having this conversation, I
know a lot of growers who haven't made money in the last two years and it's looking even
less promising this year.
And that isn't sustainable for very long.
You're consuming your equity and at some point there's no equity left to consume.
And I just, our ag lending institutions out here in rural America are getting
(42:25):
nervous. I mean, yeah, we had a lot of profitability in farming, but like you
say, John, we're burning through equity. And my banker, when I sat down with him,
he's like, well, what's your seed cost? Well, we're planting the cheapest
conventional corn we can find here, so it's 56 bucks an acre. We don't need the
traits because we broke those pest cycles. So our seed cost is cheap." And he
(42:48):
says, well what's your fertility program? And I said, well it's gonna be between
90 and 120 dollars an acre. And he's like, no what what's your fertility cost? Not
your seed cost. I'm like, that's my fertility cost. And you know at the end
of the conversation he's like, well it looks
like you're gonna make money again this year. He said this is the first one I've
(43:09):
seen all year. He said most of the producers coming through here can't even
cover their living expenses. They're gonna be living off of equity.
Yeah, it's a sad state of affairs and there's a whole number of, a whole
array of contributing factors that have led us to that
spot but the farmers are being farmed and also they're voluntarily signing up for it.
(43:31):
They bear some responsibility as well.
Absolutely.
We have got to take our farms back into our own hands.
It's amazing to me in the last 75 years how we've been led down this path, like you mentioned, John, and there's so many influences and it's unbelievable.
Yeah. So when you consider that landscape and when you can think about how people change, I wanted to get to this conversation of you've mentioned how you've learned from other people. At one point you had to travel some distance to learn from others who were going down this pathway. And now you're mentoring a lot of other people.
(44:10):
What do the community dynamics look like from your perspective? How are growers shifting
and changing?
It's, uh, to the outside community, outside of agriculture, the farmers and producers
aren't changing fast enough. I get that question a lot. How come, how come the
(44:30):
rest of your neighbors aren't changing? They're not changing fast enough. Well,
that's, that's reality. And when you look at it, and I don't, I don't mean to say
this in a bad way, but when you look at what Dawn and I have done, you're
admitting two things, and two of those things are some of the hardest things that you can do as a
human being in a way you're admitting you're wrong and you're, and you're
(44:52):
changing. That's, that's two of the hardest things for human being to do.
So, so that part is hard and that, that stops a lot of people.
Now dynamics in our local community here, there's more
and more people changing. And it's not fast change and it's
pushed by many different things. It's pushed by mentoring, it's pushed by here
(45:16):
in Minnesota. We got the Minnesota Soil Health Coalition that spends a lot of
time on the ground putting on field, exposing producers to this way of farming. There's
a lot of one-on-one personal mentoring like you mentioned. There's a lot of, I
gotta say it, but there's a lot of government programs that are cautioning
(45:36):
to help make this change. But for an individual to make the change, it's right
here, it's between the ears, it's all has to be the change it's right here it's between the ears it's it's all
Has to be the human
Change is going to happen as I mentioned this before as humans we can make anything
(46:00):
Successful and we can make anything fail so if a producer plants a cover crop and
Doesn't manage it with the idea that it's going to work, it will be a failure or it will be a problem in their operation, in their management
system. So the first thing as a producer we got to decide, hey this this rye
cover crop is going to work. It's going to be the greatest thing since sliced
bread and it's going to add to our profitability. If we don't go into it
with that attitude, it's more than likely going to be a failure and never be used as a tool again.
(46:26):
And so with all of this, it's got to be, we got to manage it as successful as we can to
make it a plus on all sides.
You know, when you think about the two major changes that are the two big acknowledgments, as you pointed out, that I was wrong and making a change and how difficult those are for people.
(46:53):
They're difficult on several levels. They're difficult on a very personal level of just admitting those things to yourself, admitting that you the social pressure that comes with that and the community pressure.
What are people going to say at local restaurant and the bar and church and wherever else you
interact with people?
(47:13):
And then there is the possible counter of that, that people have frequently brought
up here in conversations is the need to surround yourself with a community that supports you and that is aligned with you to balance some of that.
What are, you mentioned the Minnesota Soil Health Coalition, how is that community structure
(47:34):
being developed and how are people, how is that helpful in facilitating change?
Well, like I say, we watch South Dakota do what they did with their coalition.
Just watch it blow up from zero to three years to just about 500 members.
And we're close to South Dakota, so we'd run over there for every event they had and just
saw the programming was great, exposing producers to what they need to be exposed to.
(47:59):
And so we got to go in here, Minnesota, and from zero to five years, we took this thing
from zero to a thousand plus members.
Wow.
I mean, that's something you don't see in egg programming.
I don't think ever to go from nothing to a thousand plus members.
The, the big thing with the coalition is it addresses all levels of a producer wanting to change. From the
(48:29):
baby footsteps of just planting the first cover crop or reducing that deep
tillage pass, the most aggressive pass, to the full-on schools. I mean they've
done a school for I think this is the fourth year of trying to get the producer deeper, fuller knowledge of what's happening in these
(48:51):
systems. You know we brought in a lot of a lot of very knowledgeable
instructors to try to dive deep into this to help the producers change. On the
local level we've been pushed,
and Dawn and I were pushed by a local producer
who we've mentored for seven years.
(49:13):
This man came to my office years ago,
we were a member of a small community church.
We ran out of people for our church.
We had to close the church.
Unusual, we didn't run out of money first,
but we ran out of people.
And he called me and he says, you and Dawn will be home at one o'clock today. And I'm
like, what's going on? I thought we had everything settled with the church. And no, he says,
(49:36):
you will be home at one o'clock today. I was like, yeah, I guess we'll be here. And he
comes into the office with tears in his eyes and he says, it's not working. I listened to you and you and Bob talk about this for 23 years in the back of
this church, you got to help my operation.
And so that, that producer, after seven years of mentoring as his
profitability is just incredible.
(49:58):
Uh, his nitrogen savings is, well, he's cut his nitrogen usage in half and still
producing the same or better crop, you know, just the dollars in his pocket. So he's like, we got to share
this with the local community. We got to start a local group. So I said, I'll
supply the office. I don't have time to help with this other than to host the
(50:19):
meeting. Don volunteered to take care of the clerical end of it, sending out
emails, that type of stuff. So two years ago in February we started a group here there
were six people at the first meeting, nine people at the second meeting. This
second year of existence of what we call the local soil health assembly has no
less than 22 to 26 farms at it every other week for a two-hour meeting. Now think about this John. We
(50:46):
have a two-hour meeting and why we do two hours is specific. We got a
lot of young producers in here. They got young families, which to my amazement is
just makes my heart full to see this many young producers here. We got people
with livestock so they know when they can get home to do chores or how to
balance their schedule. And what we found is this is key is putting
(51:08):
together these local assemblies or groups, however you do it, time restrictions have to
be in place. As farmers we all like to do side talk and whoever leads these
meetings has got to stop the side talk and we got to stay focused on what we're
doing. And as we've gone through these meetings, imagine this John, in this group there's between 25 and 30,000
(51:29):
acres represented. And one of the youngest guys in this group, his plea to
this group as we're getting ready to go to planting season this year was please
go to your home farms and experiment with one thing or two things. We don't
need university data on
this. If you got a yield monitor, do it. Grain cart, whatever. Do it. So can you
(51:51):
imagine what it's going to be like in November, December this year when you've
got 25,000 acres of farms doing experimentation? And I know some of them
are doing it with your products, with other products that are on the market.
It's gonna take us all winter to get through this.
And think about the compound of learning. Now instead of a
(52:15):
producer or farmer learning from one farm, he's learning from 20, it's going to accelerate learning by 25 to 30x.
Right, we only get 40-45 chances to do this in a lifetime and for
these young producers can you imagine what's going through their minds? That
they're so excited to get through this growing season to get to this winter to
be able to improve their profitability. And that's what we need is we've got to
(52:38):
keep these young producers here. And I want to say this too the one thing that
Dawn and I will say all the
time is as we started down this path and we started meeting other producers,
doing the things we are, it's not the cutthroat, stab you in the back
conversations or mentality anymore. There are producers sitting in this
(53:02):
room that I could go to their landlord and say, hey, I want to rent your land. That's never going to happen. We're so focused on trying
to make each other's farms profitable, more profitable, so we don't have to have land
expansion, so we don't have to farm the world and never get home to our families. Well, one of my contentions has been that this thing that we're calling regenerative
(53:51):
agriculture, I think is, is designed to prevail in the long term for the very simple reason
that it allows people when it's done well, it allows people to become the low cost producer,
which is another way of saying the profitable producers and the people who are going
to survive in the long term are going to be the people who figure it out and to
(54:13):
figure out how to be profitable even in the high-priced input environment.
But you mentioned pure pressure, John. I don't think anybody from the outside looking at agriculture
understands the amount of peer pressure in agriculture. It is... why are we the, you
know, why do we have the highest suicide rate of any occupation in the world? It's
(54:38):
because of peer pressure. It's because the pressure that's put on us to grow a
big crop and do it this, be the crop and do it this be the best in the neighborhood be the
Best in the community have the nicest looking crops all that
That pressure is real
But if we can get back to profitability
That takes that pressure off and I'll say this dawn and I we had to grow some pretty thick skin. You know, there was a lot of
(55:06):
things said, a lot of phone calls made to us that said, you can't do this. A lot of
our input suppliers said, well, you're just trying to run us out of business.
It's like, no, we're not. We're trying to keep ourselves in business. And if
you think I'm trying to run you out of business, well, you're a service provider, provide the services I need to make these changes.
This is, it can all work together,
(55:29):
and it needs to for our communities in rural America.
Yeah, exactly.
That's a wonderful ending note, Grant.
I wanna say thank you for everything that you've contributed.
I'd like to ask you one last question.
What is a point of view that you hold that is very
different from your peers? People who are in the same space, who are also aligned with
(55:55):
regenerative agriculture, what is something that you believe to be true that is perhaps
different from the common view. I guess you you brought it up already. Dawn and I
have had big discussions about this. We're afraid of the term regenerative.
We're absolutely definitely afraid of the term regenerative to the point where
(56:18):
my, where Dawn is a beautiful gifted writer and she can put things in words
and she said our motto
on our farm is not going to be regenerative it's going to be farmers of
life for life and a lot of that comes from dr. Jonathan Lundgren has become a
good friend of ours you know he talks about the whole carbon situation and he
(56:40):
says I hope in five years we're done talking about carbon because it's
simply because it simply comes back to the fact that carbon is directly associated with life. So that's
why Don came up with that model for our farm. And that's what we're going to run with.
Well, I'd like that phrase, but I'd like to better understand why the reservations
(57:04):
around the
term regenerative.
We're seeing it with sustainability, John.
You know, companies run with sustainability as their logo.
I'm afraid companies are going to run with regenerative as their logo.
I hope that it is for the betterment and for the good.
It's not greenwashing.
(57:25):
Um, that, that, that's why we're tentative about it.
It seems like all the terms in agriculture get, get used as a
marketing tool in some way or another.
And I really, and I really, I really hope that it gets used in a
positive and good, good purpose.
Yeah.
Good.
(57:46):
Well, thank you, Grant. I'm glad I asked that last question. Thank you for being
here. Thank you for all the work that you're doing, all the
support that you're offering to so many people
and I look forward
to chatting with you again soon.
Absolutely, and thank you, John, for what
your group does also. It's
influential and it's being noticed.
The team at AEA
and I are dedicated to bringing this show to you because we believe that knowledge
(58:08):
and information is the foundation of successful regenerative systems.
At AEA, we believe that growing better quality food and making more money from your crops
is possible.
And since 2006, we've worked with leading professional growers to help them do just
that. At AEA, we don't guess, we test, we analyze, and we provide recommendations based on scientific
(58:31):
data, knowledge, and experience.
We've developed products that are uniquely positioned to help growers make more money
with regenerative agriculture.
If you are a professional grower who believes in testing instead of guessing, someone who believes in a better, more regenerative way to grow, visit advancingecoag.com and contact us to
If you are a professional grower who believes in testing instead of guessing, someone who believes in a better, more regenerative way to grow, visit advancingecoag.com and contact us to
see if AEA is right for you.
Hi friends, this is John. Welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast.
(00:03):
You know the types of conversations that we have here, and if you don't, they're all about
regenerating soil health, ecosystem health, the health of the plants and the livestock,
the crops that we're growing, and ultimately having an impact on people's health and on public
health. These are all important pieces that are integrally tied together. I'm very honored to
have a conversation today with Grant Breitkreutz.
(00:25):
Grant is someone whose work I've admired
from a distance for a long time.
I really enjoy the conversations that I have here
on the podcast with scientists and with innovators.
We have lots of fun conversations,
but ultimately where the rubber really meets the road
is in practice and having conversations with growers,
reporting things into practice. And there is no replacement for depth of experience
(00:49):
which Grant and his family and the people that he works with bring to the
table in spades. So Grant, thank you for being here. I've really been looking
forward to this conversation. Great, Aaron, a pleasure to be here, John.
Can you tell us a little bit about your story, your
background? What is, what's your farming context? What does your operation look
like and how did you get to where you are today? Our farming operation started
(01:15):
in 1997. It's kind of a unique story. My mom and dad, when they got married, they
they made a commitment to each other at age 50 they would decide if they had made
it farming or reassess life, reevaluate life in general.
And to my amazement, at age 50, their decision was to quit farming.
(01:37):
And I mean quit.
My dad bought a truck, went coast to coast for a while, my mom had a job in town, and
gave Donna and I the opportunity to buy them
out and start farming here. So at that time we were, it was quite the step. You
know, in farms you don't realize how you lean on older generations to help
(01:58):
you with decisions. And when my dad was gone and he didn't have a cell phone,
just there's nobody to back us up. So we made the decisions on our own.
And honestly, it was a blessing, John.
My wife was not from a farm, Dawn's not from a farm.
When I met her, she didn't know how to run a riding lawnmower
and she constantly asked, why, why are we doing this?
(02:19):
Why are we doing this?
She'd get done working a field and I'd say, well it looks pretty good, let's work it again. And she's like, why? You know, you're gonna get seed to soil
contact here. So that really kept me questioning things and and obviously we
were doing things what I would call the very conventional way in our
neighborhood. It's what I was taught, what I learned, and eventually it wasn't
(02:42):
working financially. And We were both working jobs
off the farm and it's like we got to make this farm more profitable and try
to get here full-time. And so we both really enjoyed the cattle side of it
and just loved the cow-calf operation, the feedlot at the time. And so I started
studying grazing management. I was blessed to meet Ian Mitchell Ennis in, uh, from South Africa.
(03:07):
And, and even after meeting Ian, I didn't
realize it was about soil health.
We were still chasing production,
production, production.
And eventually the good Lord tapped us on the
head and said it was about soil health.
And so then we spent.
Hopefully the tap was relatively soft.
Yeah.
(03:27):
Well, sometimes it was kind of harsh, but, um, and then, and then, you know, at that
time, uh, you just couldn't find the information like you can now on, on media
streams and all that type of stuff.
And there weren't conferences locally. So we
spent every winter we would run up to Burley County, North Dakota to see what Jay Feer and
(03:52):
the crew was doing at the Minocan Farm to their annual conference. And learned a lot from that and
experimented a lot here on the farm. And eventually our practices here on the farm with what I would call
regenerative agriculture, more like farming for life, opened the doors to a
(04:14):
lot of land opportunities. A lot of landowners saw what we were doing on our
farm, saw the wildlife coming back, saw the reduced erosion, in reality,
saw the life on the farm and started studying soil health
and what it is and what it means.
And we made a humongous expansion here.
(04:39):
We quadrupled the size of this farm in less than three years.
And at the same time had the opportunity
to expand it a lot more than that,
but we just knew the workload was gonna be too much.
And so I was blessed to know enough people in the community
that we got a lot of young farmers
to take on the land that was offered to us
(05:00):
and farm it the way we do or close to what we do.
Wow, that's a fascinating story, Grant. So how, as you traveled to North
Dakota to Burley County to those events, how did your operation
shift and change? How is it different today from what it was in the 90s?
(05:21):
We were a full tillage operation in the 90s. We did buy our first no-till drill
and we still have it in 1998 because if I remember right the ground froze early
that year and we didn't get tillage done. And so we've been no-tilling soybeans
since 1998 and it's like wow we're just not burning all that fuel, crops are good,
(05:44):
let's figure out
how to no-till everything else. And so corn was the last crop we switched to
no-till about 12 or 13 years ago. Operation... we actually were cover
cropping before it was called cover crops. Like I said earlier, we were so
so enthralled with our cattle and enjoyed the cattle side of it so much
(06:04):
and with the limited land base we had had we're trying to expand the cow herd and
couldn't ever get enough feed put up or enough grazing days. And so we were
planting winter triticale after we cut corn silage and try to grow three crops
in two years. And we got into extremely wet pattern. I'd have to go back and look at what
(06:25):
year it was but it was it was in the late 90s or early 2000s and we had had
two inches of rain throughout the night the Triticale was getting so tall it
wasn't getting through our older cutting equipment and I told Dawn I said as soon
as you get done with work I said you got to get on the swather and get this laid
down or we're never gonna get get it harvested. And she got home early that day and went out there and never left the track.
(06:48):
And I'm like, wait a minute, something happened here.
Something is different with this soil.
And, you know, six hours later, we were running with the cutters behind her,
pulling big silage boxes and we never left the track.
Wow.
And it's, it's like, what happened here? And then I thought, you know, we just had
two inches of rain. This might be crazy, but we own this no-till drill with a neighbor
(07:11):
and he doesn't like to sleep at night. Let's put beans in that drill and plant these beans
tonight yet. You know, and this is within 24 hours of a two inch rain and harvested
46 bushel acre soybeans. And so the combination of learning what we learned on the
grazing side of it, and then that particular experience, it's like there's something going
on below our feet. We need to figure this out. And we need to try to manage it better than we
(07:36):
currently are. So that's kind of how our evolution was. And since then, obviously,
our operation grows more than just corn and soy
and crops for cattle.
What all are you growing today?
We're still primarily corn and soybeans and I will admit that's because we still borrow
a lot of money here and we've got to keep our crop insurance.
(07:58):
That's part of that.
But we do, Dawn and I, decide how many acres each year we want to leverage without insurance on, which most times is a very good decision. So we do grow a bunch
of cereal rye here. We do grow some winter trit. We've done some field peas.
We grow, right now I've been working on it for seven years. I grow seven grains all at one time. We
(08:26):
plant wheat, oats, barley, peas, fava beans, lentils, and flax all at the same time.
And we use the same percentage each year and harvest it as dry grain and this has
turned into another huge market for us
for chicken feed. We grind and mix the chicken feed here and I think right now
(08:51):
we've got 26 customers. I know we've got a couple customers on the waiting list
because like I say last year we were wet and part of our field drowned out so we
didn't have any extra production. So what is the...
Why are the chicken producers attracted to that mix?
Are they particularly looking for the flax component, the omega-3 to 6 ratio
(09:12):
nutrient density, or they're just... it's an inexpensive and effective feed source
for them? Are they looking for quality?
What are the motivators? That's exactly what happened. Two years ago in March
in this upper Midwest region and I I'm not a conspiracy theorist but something
happened to the local flocks, small flocks that were buying out of our
(09:36):
fleet farm stores, where the chickens quit laying eggs and we had a couple
landlords that we were providing feed to for their layer flocks and they had a network and they just said well Grant and Dawn's feed, our
chickens haven't missed a beat laying eggs, maybe you should call them. And my
phone just exploded. I mean we went from supplying two landlords chicken feed to
(09:59):
all of a sudden we were to 15 to 16 customers. And what we're seeing is we've
got some customers that don't want soy. And that's what that's what pushed us to
this. For a while we had excess eggs and we had a customer that would buy our eggs
as long as they did not contain soy. So that's why I put together this seven-way
blend. And now most of the customers that are new to us now will say that our feed they
(10:27):
get consistent egg lay rates. I mean we've got a small producer locally here
that I think he's got about 18 to 20 some birds and they said that one day
they'd harvest seven eggs the next day they'd have all 18. And since being on
our feed now for six months, they're consistently
pulling 15 to 18 eggs a day. I mean, you can call it the weather, you can call it whatever
(10:50):
else, but that producer will say it's the consistency of the feed. And we don't add
anything to this except for an organic vitamin pack. I still believe in that. I don't know
if we could get by without it. And apple
cider vinegar.
Yeah, that's interesting. So what does this mix do for you agronomically? I mean, if you're
(11:14):
growing a seven-way grain mix all in one combination, I'm assuming you're planting that in the spring
and then harvesting later that year?
Yeah, so it's going in early, like our wheat or oats would here. We plant it Yeah, so, yep, so it's going in early like our wheat or oats would here.
We plant it early, basically, when we're thawed out here and can get through the fields.
And then we can harvest usually the end of July.
(11:34):
So besides the diversity in the seven grain mix, it gives us a great opportunity to put
in 15, 18 species cover crop mix and still get a lot of growing days here in
in Minnesota. I mean we you know we can potentially freeze the second week of
September but that this way we get a lot of growth and we can produce a lot of
(11:56):
forage for winter grazing and if we don't get to it don't need it for winter
grazing just just do a tremendous amount of healing and building of soils with that type of length.
And to be honest with you, John, I'll admit it, this has turned out to be one of our better
cash crops.
What we're charging for the feed is acceptable to the customer and it's a very good profit per acre situation.
(12:27):
What role do livestock play in your operation presently?
We've learned that livestock are key to our operation to build soil health.
Besides that, the livestock is key for diversity. We just, we realize that diversity is key to fixing soils.
(12:50):
We can't scientifically prove this,
but I know when we pick up a new piece of ground
that if we're given the good weather conditions,
good growing environments,
that we can speed up soil health metrics by about two years by walking the cows across it.
Wow.
There's, there's something that drops out of the back end of that cow that
(13:12):
can't be duplicated in a lab.
No way.
No how.
I mean, you, you watch a cow as she's walking across the land and the right
sunlight, there's just a hue of biology life around that cow besides what's going in that great big
fermentation vat inside of her and and that just stimulates the biology in the
soil so much quicker than than any of the other products we can find that can
(13:35):
do it. So we we we row crop about 1,200 acres here and our goal is to have those
cows across to every acre every other year And we're doing really good at it. We've got one farm that we
don't have fenced yet, but that's on the list to get done because we know how
important getting those cows across that land is. When you think about the last 20-30
(14:01):
years of experience, as you've learned from people,
you were one of the pioneers, so you had to,
you learned a lot from people
that were outside of your region.
And one of the things that we talk about constantly
is the need to adapt that knowledge to your local context.
What is it that you've,
what were the adaptations that were required for you?
(14:23):
What have you adapted?
What's something that you learned
that then had to be revised in order to fit?
Oh, just about everything I learned out of my region.
I was one of these go big or go home type producers
in the 90s and it really hurt us
because I didn't think about the adaptation
(14:48):
process of how it was going to work in Minnesota, something I was learning in
North Dakota or in Arkansas. So what we did learn and what I do encourage
producers to do is try it in
your environment with what you think is the right adapted practices and try it
(15:10):
on a small scale. Don't go big and go home because it hurts the pocketbook. We
as farmers need to try all these practices on our own operations. I've
said this forever, we can have a list of
parameters or regulations from the government or whatever. No two
farms are ever going to look the same. We all have different management systems,
(15:32):
we all have different environments, and we all react to those environments and
changes differently as producers. So what we do now is, you know, like the seven grains I just tried it on
ten acres and it's like wow, tremendous results. Now we're growing a lot of acres
(15:53):
of it because we know what works here and it fits here. Just those type of
things. Start small, but start. I mean for anybody that listens to this that thinks they want to
go down this path, the one thing Dawn and I will tell everybody is we regret not
finding this path earlier. I mean we were blessed to know David Brandt and to
(16:18):
watch the experience of that man starting this in the 70s and to see
what he built there in
those soils, you know, I just wish we'd have started right away when we
started farming. But that's everybody's experience. We got to get to it
in our own time frame. When you are learning and when you're adapting
(16:39):
things to your local context, you know, learning is never nonlinear. It's from an
outside observer, it looks like a straight path from point A to point B, your local context. You know, learning is never nonlinear. It's, from an outside
observer, it looks like a straight path from point A to point B, but for the
people who are doing it, they know it's all kinds of twists and turns on that
supposedly straight pathway. So what are some of the things
that you've learned? What are some of the things that you would do differently if
(17:00):
you were starting over? What are some of the things I would do differently if I was starting over? I would do more and more research. Even back at the time we
did, I wish we'd have spent more time traveling to find more research so we
had more confidence in what we were doing. And the other thing that I would, that Dawn and I talk about a lot is
(17:30):
Grant and John can tell you to do one thing, find three other people, at least
two other people that are saying the same thing that Grant and John are
saying. So you got the validation that there are other people that have experienced this, know it
works, and you're on the right path.
(17:50):
I think that would be one of the biggest things I would have changed, is to just make sure
I had more than one source telling me this was the path to go down. That's interesting. I just, I think about that in my own life a little bit.
And I don't think anyone would suggest, nor would I suggest, that I haven't done enough
(18:15):
research because that's one thing that I tend to really thrive at.
But you know, I don't know, thinking about your second point a little bit,
there are many cases where the pioneers have no peers.
Like if you really are on the cutting edge, you're doing things that you may not be able to find
two or three other people who have had similar experiences.
(18:38):
How do you approach that?
Well, on our operation here,
if we couldn't find anybody with experience on that, is we tried it
two or three or four years in a row to see if our thought process, our ideas were going to work.
And I would say nine times out of ten, they did. But you got to realize we're in agriculture and
(19:00):
we're, mother nature controls what we do out here. We can do everything we can
to make something succeed, or as human beings we can make anything fail also.
But Mother Nature is still in control, so when we try something we want to try it
at least three to four years to make sure that we're correct, and then we'll
(19:21):
expand on it. I mean some things are are just a given. Yeah, just go
ahead and do it. But like the seven grains, I mean, we slowly expanded it. I mean, in
our, in our livestock operation, you know, what stocking rates are right, what are wrong.
We've learned there's no correct stocking rate. There's lots of people out there that
(19:41):
can tell you what they think is right, and it's
not.
It's all our management decisions.
But the one key thing is, is I'm not tech savvy.
I know I could do all this on my phone, but we still do it all on paper.
As we record everything, especially on the livestock side of it, hey, did we overgraze
this?
(20:02):
What was the weather conditions when we overgrazed it? And now with all that information back there we can tell you this year and next
year where the most productive pastures are going to be by our past history. And
that's something that takes a long time to get your head wrapped around. We had a
group of producers here the other day and they said what how come
(20:27):
that how come this pastures got dandelions in it and how come this one
doesn't and I said I can tell you straight out I said we can go up to the
office look in the books and I can tell you that that was overgrazed sometime in
the last two years you know it was a sacrifice paddock there was a reason
that it was overgrazed and and overgrazing happens and it does in
our environment because it's something we have to do to keep these cows out of
(20:49):
the feedlot. But we've got that written down and we know it so we got to give it
longer rest and recovery periods. I mean it I guess it all comes back to I've got
I've got a great memory of things but if we don't have that type
of memory locked in our head we have to get it on paper or some kind of recorded
(21:11):
device to know the history of what happened there and that will predict the
future. I remember, I don't remember where this quote originated but it was at a
fairly young age it might have been with my mother she She repeated it quite frequently, if I recall correctly.
The poorest ink is better than the best memory.
(21:31):
Exactly, because the ink doesn't lie.
The ink can always be referenced back to.
Yeah. Yeah. So.
When there's this recurring conversation that I often have with growers who are,
who want to go down a different pathway and who want to,
(21:53):
and there's this common request of,
what are the most influential changes that I can make?
Where are the leverage points that can make points that can have the most significant impact
on improving an operation? I think there are a few pieces that are getting to be very commonly
(22:15):
recognized, the impact of cover crops and where possible the impact of livestock. But
I'd like to ask that question of you for your operation when you look at the modifications,
the changes you've made over time.
Where were the leverage points where a change produced an outsized impact that was larger
(22:35):
than you expected?
Well, like I said, we're in corn soybean country here, and I guess the one big thing on corn
for me was nitrogen
management. It boggles my mind why or how the foreign producer in America
(22:56):
listens to their input supplier, who's taking the money out of their pocket as
to how to apply nitrogen. And I was
blessed by my father who, and my grandfather, who I don't think they
studied nitrogen management, but they knew that split applications in nitrogen
were key to growing a great corn crop on very little nitrogen. And it's just
(23:18):
amazing when we change nitrogen management, how we change weed pressures,
how we change all these other things that we fight in a growing season. There's so much to that question
you asked, John. I just... but that's the one that popped to my mind immediately
that's specific to my area here, but corn's growing all across the country. As
(23:39):
we start changing these managements, like I said before,
you have to watch what else changes also.
Yeah.
So you've said this a lot in your podcast over the years
is nutrient management is so key
and it affects everything else in the ecosystem
(24:00):
we're farming in and where we're trying to grow a crop in.
And I guess that's the one that just popped to my mind right away was nitrogen management.
I watch what the neighbors do and I watch them fight waterhemp nonstop.
And it's like, you know, the waterhemp is one of the least of my concerns because of
cover crop and nitrogen management.
(24:20):
Well, you know, Grant, in spite of me being here on the podcast and the amazing work that
our team does all the time, we still have.
I got I received a message yesterday from a grower who has been loosely working with
our consulting team for the last four years, and he's.
(24:43):
This year, for the first time he decided,
okay, I'm going all in, I'm going to take
these recommendations, I'm going to apply them
as I'm being advised to.
And he sent me this message, he said,
okay, I get it, I really get it.
For the first time, I'm seeing the degree
of plant health and response that you've always
talked about, that I've never gotten up to this point.
And it's because he was putting his toe in the water.
(25:05):
And there are some things that you just, there are some things that have a compounding effect
and nutrition management is one of them.
So let's talk a bit about nitrogen management.
What are you doing exactly?
How is it different?
What are the benefits that you've observed relative to the way other the common management practices are?
(25:29):
So I'll answer that question this way John is we don't know what we're doing
We honestly don't we're trying so many different things
But the one thing that Don and I have always done is a minimum of three nitrogen applications on a corn crop. We'll apply some of that plant, we'll
spoon feed a little bit at V2, V3, and we'll come in and spoon feed some later.
(25:54):
That's how we started out doing this. And I have made the decision in the
economy, in the economic times we're in this year, we are gonna make no less than
six applications of nitrogen on the corn crop this year. And Dawn is, she's really
honestly not happy with me about my decision because she knows I'm gonna be
living in a sprayer to do all these applications. But when you look at the
(26:18):
dollars and cents of it, that is gonna, that's gonna pay my entire year's wages
by nitrogen management.
I mean, we're melting urea and we're using,
we're using humics and fulvics.
I mean, we've realized it's not just about N, P and K anymore
and I'll be honest with you, John,
(26:40):
I told Russell Hedrick this three years ago, probably four years ago.
Russell and I got split apart during COVID, and we got back together at a
conference, and we're sitting there eating a steak one night, and I told
Russell, I said, man, I'm really angry with you. I hate you. And he's
like, why are you saying that, Grant? We get along great. And I said, because I did
(27:04):
not like school. And I said, with everything that you've learned on your farm, with the
research you've done there, I have to go back to school. And I don't want to go
back to school. And to be honest with you John, I have made a commitment
that I try to spend three to four hours every day through the winter studying
anything. And I don't care if it's coming off of your podcast
(27:31):
or somebody else's podcast, or if I'm looking things up on the computer, I think we in agriculture,
as farmers, we've become chemologists. And we were pushed that way by farm bill, by input suppliers, everything else. We as farmers have to become biologists again. Our forefathers did not grow just corn and
soybeans. They had a rotation. Did they know why they were doing it? Some of them
yes, some of them no. But it was about the biology happening in the soil by
(27:56):
growing different crops. And we've just gone down a really nasty path and
your group is one I go to all the time to listen to and
search out knowledge. I mean, there's lots of other paths that people can find this and
try to learn it as a farmer and apply it back to their farms.
(28:18):
You know, many professions, well, I say practically everyone, benefits from having advisors.
And so, farmers have for a long time thought of co-op agronomists as being on their team.
They're on their, they're one of their advisors that are on their team, like their vet and other advisors, but you know, I think, I don't know if farming is unique in this,
(28:48):
but one of the things that stands out to me is that we, in no other profession that I'm aware of,
do people delegate knowledge to their advisors to the same degree that farmers do, or have done in
the recent past, I mean the farmers that I observed.
The one characteristic that I've observed are the most successful farms, the most innovative,
(29:11):
the growers who are exceptionally profitable and who are really making, they do not delegate
knowledge.
And what I mean by that is they want to understand it for themselves.
So they certainly, they have advisors, they have people that they're learning from.
But then they say, hang on, I'm not just going to follow your recommendations just because Mr. Genius, smart guy, said so.
(29:33):
I want to understand why did he make that recommendation.
Why are we doing this now?
And farmers for a long time have delegated the understanding of the why, or have been satisfied
with superficial answers.
I agree 100% with what you just said, John.
(29:55):
And I had to do some research on this on a presentation I gave some years ago.
Why do we as producers, and why, I guess the research I did as, as ag
producers, 85 to 90% of our input decisions are based on the co-op.
That's taken the money out of our product, out of our pocket.
(30:17):
Why that, that, that just, when you say this to somebody outside of
agriculture, they're like, why would you listen to somebody that's
taking the money out of your pocket?
And, and the one thing, it was the advice and we, we still have to get
product from our local co-ops.
And I go in there and I say, I want, you know, 5,000 pounds of urea in each
(30:39):
hopper, dump it in these two tanks.
And they're like, what are you doing?
I was like, I'm melting urea. And the head agronomist just gives you a blank look.
Our co-ops maybe don't have the knowledge
that we think we trust they have as producers.
(31:03):
And to me, that's extremely disappointing, but that's
where we, as an American farmer, got to take this back into our hand.
Just like you said, we, we have to have the knowledge we have to find.
John and his advisory team or other advisory teams that, that have this
knowledge and the one thing that I wanted to say in this podcast so far,
(31:25):
John, is the farther and farther I go down this road, the less and less I know.
It's scary. The less and less I know, but yet I can see the, I can see everything
changing for the better. From our bottom line to the environment to
(31:46):
our neighborhood and community. And I don't think we're ever going to get to a
point in time where we as human beings understand what God gave us here. Yes, I
understand the amount of studying you do, John, but you're still learning every day. Oh my goodness, yeah.
And I don't know as a human race
(32:09):
that we'll ever figure out what God gave us here to manage.
But the closer we can manage it
to the way it was before we got here,
to me and Dawn, the easier the system works.
And it's much more fun to manage in that environment.
Instead of looking every morning at what we gotta go out
and kill and take care of, managing for life
(32:32):
and what we can grow is so much more fun.
It put fun back into farming.
I think you're spot on about your assessment of we're never going to know everything there is to know none of us ever is a never is there is it's just not that's not the way it's going to work however.
(32:58):
I'm also really inspired by the idea that it's not really necessary to know everything,
because it was designed to work.
It was designed to work.
And when you can, when you understand the foundational principles of working with life,
as you described it, and you seek to enhance life rather than to kill it, then you unleash
(33:23):
it.
You allow it to express itself
rather than constantly suppressing it.
And then amazing things begin to happen.
And you mentioned something a bit ago
on nitrogen management related to weed pressure.
You know, often as we go down this pathway,
we observe things that, oh, dandelion pressure is a result
or dandelion expression is a result of overgrazing, weed pressure is a result of nitrogen management, and we make these
(33:48):
associations that we made change A and we observed all these various outcomes
B, C, D, E, F and as time goes by and we gain experience and we have the benefit of
deeper perspective all of a sudden we get to a point where oh I did this and
it had this domino effect and five years later that happened.
And that just blows people's minds
(34:08):
who are unfamiliar with this.
It's like, you're saying that?
But that's so far, Z is so far removed from A,
how can you say A caused Z?
But if you've watched that pattern repeat itself
multiple times, it's like,
no, no, those two things are connected. And that's an incredible experience. Mike McDonald It is absolutely an incredible experience.
And I'll admit this, on my farming operation, when Dawn and I started, there was a new agronomist
(34:34):
that must have paid attention to soils class in college. And I said, I said, I want to do a full
soil testing program. I said, I want to do things right. And he looked at me and he said are the cows leaving the farm
anytime soon Grant? And I said no. He said don't bother soil testing. Just floored
(34:56):
me. This is an agronomist that told me this. Don't bother soil testing. So on our
operation I feel horrible about this. We've got no real
baselines. We do have some soil tests here from 1996 or 1998 I believe. That's
the only soil tests I have from back when we started. So I mentored a producer
(35:17):
up the river here from me and I told him, I said, Phil, I said, you have got to
baseline everything. All the tests that
are out there right now, please baseline this. You don't have livestock, you're
corn soybean producer, so your data is going to be key to what happens here. And
that data set, John, is just amazing. Seven years into it, organic matter
(35:42):
climate is just constant. All the other parameters
that we know how to measure now are all there and all documented. Something I
can't show on my farm because we didn't do it. But now on these new farms that
were that were taken on, we're baselining everything and then monitoring the
increase in everything. Like you say, it's other than the tests, there's so
(36:05):
much more that we got to monitor visually as farmers. Just look at
what happens to the wildlife in that neighborhood as you make these changes.
And every producer I've ever talked to that's five to seven years into this
will notice those environmental changes also.
Yeah.
So I want to talk a bit about some of the farmers
(36:28):
and producers that you've been mentoring
and the people that you're working with.
But sometimes I get a little bit like a dog with a bone.
I don't want to lose sight of something.
And I wanted to come back to your point
about nitrogen management and weed pressure.
With your split applications,
and you're now doing six
applications, you said this summer, so I'm assuming, well you did say the sprayer,
(36:49):
so that means a lot of foliar applications. What changes in weed
pressure have you observed as a result of changing nitrogen management? How do
you think those two things correlate?
The biggest one in our area here is waterhemp.
And that species of weed is with a growing
cover crop, because I need to admit this, we do plant most of our crops into
(37:11):
into green living cover crops. So obviously we get the effect of that rye
or shiitake kale as a cover on the soil. But even in areas where we don't
get a cover crop seeded, we don't fight the
waterhemp pressure because of the nutrient applications. And the reason I
(37:34):
can say that is because we've been pushed into a corner at times where we
had to front load a lot of nitrogen because we knew we weren't going to get
it done. We were short on labor. We didn't have the equipment. And in those situations we fight waterhemp or
lambsquarter or pigweed. We fight them and when we split this up we
(37:56):
don't fight it. And the other thing I'll say John is I mentor a lot of people
here locally. And in fact one of them's working for me now. And he farms his own land. And he made the comment to me yesterday. He said, Grant,
he says, I got a spray. He says, I got water hemp horribly. And yet he's here with me
riding in my wheeler, scouting fields here. And he's like, how come you don't
have it? And I said, don't you think that 140 pounds of nitrogen applied before you planted might have something to do with it." And he just looked at me and he said, it can't be tied together. I said, it is. I said, it's tied
(38:30):
together. And he just kind of gave me a blank look and he says, well, he says, I would not believe
you at all, but I'd see it on your farm. And our farms are not that far apart, there's a difference.
Yeah, so what does, in an ideal scenario, well this year you're now going to
(38:50):
kind of another level, but what has your nitrogen split
look like historically? How much at planting versus how much later?
40 units of nitrogen put on with the planter,
and then we'll try to get between 60 and 80
more units on in the growing season. What we found here in our soils that are
(39:12):
really functioning well, and I can't prove this scientifically John,
and I wish somebody could, but it looks to me like we kind of shoot for six tenths of a unit of
nitrogen per bushel. It seems to be ideal. We've done 250 plus bushel corn on
(39:35):
four tenths of a unit of nitrogen. It seems to me that we might be burning
some organic matter then. It seems like that crop might be pulling hard on our soils harder than I'd like to see. So that's that's kind of
our ideal goal is is six-tenths of a unit of nitrogen per bushel of corn.
I will say we've we farmed some land along the river here that's that's not
(40:00):
going to be 250 bushel corn. I mean, maybe someday it will be. So that's not our yield goal.
So we strive for 175 bushel yield gold here
because we know we have marginal soils,
but 250 has happened, you know,
but that comes back to the environment.
I guess our goal here is we don't have a specialty
(40:23):
and market for our corn yet. We grow all
conventional corn, non-GMO corn. Our goal here as an operation is to produce it as
cheap or cheaper than our neighbors so we are profitable at $4 corn. We don't
we don't have to produce 250 bushel corn to make a profit if we watch our inputs
going in on the front side. I'd love to open that profitability can of worms, but it's, uh, the reality is anyone
(40:52):
who pays attention probably knows what that story looks like.
Profitability versus yield.
I'll say this, John, though, that that production cost per bushel should be a driver of an operation though.
It's what got Don and I to where we are. You know, there's a gentleman in North
Dakota some years ago told me he was growing corn for $1.47 a bushel. I told
(41:15):
him he was wrong and he can't do it for that. And I strived for five years to
grow corn for $1.47 a bushel. I can't do it. But I experimented
with everything I possibly could to do that and the big difference between here
and Burley County, North Dakota is our land cost. I'll never be able to grow
(41:35):
corn that cheap because our land cost is so much higher. But I did eliminate
everything else that I could on the input side of it to get my cost down to $2.25 in that particular
year.
So it pushed us to profitability.
Yeah, well, even at $2.25, much less at $1.47, the reality is looking at the economic landscape
(42:03):
at the moment, right as we're having this conversation, I
know a lot of growers who haven't made money in the last two years and it's looking even
less promising this year.
And that isn't sustainable for very long.
You're consuming your equity and at some point there's no equity left to consume.
And I just, our ag lending institutions out here in rural America are getting
(42:25):
nervous. I mean, yeah, we had a lot of profitability in farming, but like you
say, John, we're burning through equity. And my banker, when I sat down with him,
he's like, well, what's your seed cost? Well, we're planting the cheapest
conventional corn we can find here, so it's 56 bucks an acre. We don't need the
traits because we broke those pest cycles. So our seed cost is cheap." And he
(42:48):
says, well what's your fertility program? And I said, well it's gonna be between
90 and 120 dollars an acre. And he's like, no what what's your fertility cost? Not
your seed cost. I'm like, that's my fertility cost. And you know at the end
of the conversation he's like, well it looks
like you're gonna make money again this year. He said this is the first one I've
(43:09):
seen all year. He said most of the producers coming through here can't even
cover their living expenses. They're gonna be living off of equity.
Yeah, it's a sad state of affairs and there's a whole number of, a whole
array of contributing factors that have led us to that
spot but the farmers are being farmed and also they're voluntarily signing up for it.
(43:31):
They bear some responsibility as well.
Absolutely.
We have got to take our farms back into our own hands.
It's amazing to me in the last 75 years how we've been led down this path, like you mentioned, John, and there's so many influences and it's unbelievable.
Yeah. So when you consider that landscape and when you can think about how people change, I wanted to get to this conversation of you've mentioned how you've learned from other people. At one point you had to travel some distance to learn from others who were going down this pathway. And now you're mentoring a lot of other people.
(44:10):
What do the community dynamics look like from your perspective? How are growers shifting
and changing?
It's, uh, to the outside community, outside of agriculture, the farmers and producers
aren't changing fast enough. I get that question a lot. How come, how come the
(44:30):
rest of your neighbors aren't changing? They're not changing fast enough. Well,
that's, that's reality. And when you look at it, and I don't, I don't mean to say
this in a bad way, but when you look at what Dawn and I have done, you're
admitting two things, and two of those things are some of the hardest things that you can do as a
human being in a way you're admitting you're wrong and you're, and you're
(44:52):
changing. That's, that's two of the hardest things for human being to do.
So, so that part is hard and that, that stops a lot of people.
Now dynamics in our local community here, there's more
and more people changing. And it's not fast change and it's
pushed by many different things. It's pushed by mentoring, it's pushed by here
(45:16):
in Minnesota. We got the Minnesota Soil Health Coalition that spends a lot of
time on the ground putting on field, exposing producers to this way of farming. There's
a lot of one-on-one personal mentoring like you mentioned. There's a lot of, I
gotta say it, but there's a lot of government programs that are cautioning
(45:36):
to help make this change. But for an individual to make the change, it's right
here, it's between the ears, it's all has to be the change it's right here it's between the ears it's it's all
Has to be the human
Change is going to happen as I mentioned this before as humans we can make anything
(46:00):
Successful and we can make anything fail so if a producer plants a cover crop and
Doesn't manage it with the idea that it's going to work, it will be a failure or it will be a problem in their operation, in their management
system. So the first thing as a producer we got to decide, hey this this rye
cover crop is going to work. It's going to be the greatest thing since sliced
bread and it's going to add to our profitability. If we don't go into it
with that attitude, it's more than likely going to be a failure and never be used as a tool again.
(46:26):
And so with all of this, it's got to be, we got to manage it as successful as we can to
make it a plus on all sides.
You know, when you think about the two major changes that are the two big acknowledgments, as you pointed out, that I was wrong and making a change and how difficult those are for people.
(46:53):
They're difficult on several levels. They're difficult on a very personal level of just admitting those things to yourself, admitting that you the social pressure that comes with that and the community pressure.
What are people going to say at local restaurant and the bar and church and wherever else you
interact with people?
(47:13):
And then there is the possible counter of that, that people have frequently brought
up here in conversations is the need to surround yourself with a community that supports you and that is aligned with you to balance some of that.
What are, you mentioned the Minnesota Soil Health Coalition, how is that community structure
(47:34):
being developed and how are people, how is that helpful in facilitating change?
Well, like I say, we watch South Dakota do what they did with their coalition.
Just watch it blow up from zero to three years to just about 500 members.
And we're close to South Dakota, so we'd run over there for every event they had and just
saw the programming was great, exposing producers to what they need to be exposed to.
(47:59):
And so we got to go in here, Minnesota, and from zero to five years, we took this thing
from zero to a thousand plus members.
Wow.
I mean, that's something you don't see in egg programming.
I don't think ever to go from nothing to a thousand plus members.
The, the big thing with the coalition is it addresses all levels of a producer wanting to change. From the
(48:29):
baby footsteps of just planting the first cover crop or reducing that deep
tillage pass, the most aggressive pass, to the full-on schools. I mean they've
done a school for I think this is the fourth year of trying to get the producer deeper, fuller knowledge of what's happening in these
(48:51):
systems. You know we brought in a lot of a lot of very knowledgeable
instructors to try to dive deep into this to help the producers change. On the
local level we've been pushed,
and Dawn and I were pushed by a local producer
who we've mentored for seven years.
(49:13):
This man came to my office years ago,
we were a member of a small community church.
We ran out of people for our church.
We had to close the church.
Unusual, we didn't run out of money first,
but we ran out of people.
And he called me and he says, you and Dawn will be home at one o'clock today. And I'm
like, what's going on? I thought we had everything settled with the church. And no, he says,
(49:36):
you will be home at one o'clock today. I was like, yeah, I guess we'll be here. And he
comes into the office with tears in his eyes and he says, it's not working. I listened to you and you and Bob talk about this for 23 years in the back of
this church, you got to help my operation.
And so that, that producer, after seven years of mentoring as his
profitability is just incredible.
(49:58):
Uh, his nitrogen savings is, well, he's cut his nitrogen usage in half and still
producing the same or better crop, you know, just the dollars in his pocket. So he's like, we got to share
this with the local community. We got to start a local group. So I said, I'll
supply the office. I don't have time to help with this other than to host the
(50:19):
meeting. Don volunteered to take care of the clerical end of it, sending out
emails, that type of stuff. So two years ago in February we started a group here there
were six people at the first meeting, nine people at the second meeting. This
second year of existence of what we call the local soil health assembly has no
less than 22 to 26 farms at it every other week for a two-hour meeting. Now think about this John. We
(50:46):
have a two-hour meeting and why we do two hours is specific. We got a
lot of young producers in here. They got young families, which to my amazement is
just makes my heart full to see this many young producers here. We got people
with livestock so they know when they can get home to do chores or how to
balance their schedule. And what we found is this is key is putting
(51:08):
together these local assemblies or groups, however you do it, time restrictions have to
be in place. As farmers we all like to do side talk and whoever leads these
meetings has got to stop the side talk and we got to stay focused on what we're
doing. And as we've gone through these meetings, imagine this John, in this group there's between 25 and 30,000
(51:29):
acres represented. And one of the youngest guys in this group, his plea to
this group as we're getting ready to go to planting season this year was please
go to your home farms and experiment with one thing or two things. We don't
need university data on
this. If you got a yield monitor, do it. Grain cart, whatever. Do it. So can you
(51:51):
imagine what it's going to be like in November, December this year when you've
got 25,000 acres of farms doing experimentation? And I know some of them
are doing it with your products, with other products that are on the market.
It's gonna take us all winter to get through this.
And think about the compound of learning. Now instead of a
(52:15):
producer or farmer learning from one farm, he's learning from 20, it's going to accelerate learning by 25 to 30x.
Right, we only get 40-45 chances to do this in a lifetime and for
these young producers can you imagine what's going through their minds? That
they're so excited to get through this growing season to get to this winter to
be able to improve their profitability. And that's what we need is we've got to
(52:38):
keep these young producers here. And I want to say this too the one thing that
Dawn and I will say all the
time is as we started down this path and we started meeting other producers,
doing the things we are, it's not the cutthroat, stab you in the back
conversations or mentality anymore. There are producers sitting in this
(53:02):
room that I could go to their landlord and say, hey, I want to rent your land. That's never going to happen. We're so focused on trying
to make each other's farms profitable, more profitable, so we don't have to have land
expansion, so we don't have to farm the world and never get home to our families. Well, one of my contentions has been that this thing that we're calling regenerative
(53:51):
agriculture, I think is, is designed to prevail in the long term for the very simple reason
that it allows people when it's done well, it allows people to become the low cost producer,
which is another way of saying the profitable producers and the people who are going
to survive in the long term are going to be the people who figure it out and to
(54:13):
figure out how to be profitable even in the high-priced input environment.
But you mentioned pure pressure, John. I don't think anybody from the outside looking at agriculture
understands the amount of peer pressure in agriculture. It is... why are we the, you
know, why do we have the highest suicide rate of any occupation in the world? It's
(54:38):
because of peer pressure. It's because the pressure that's put on us to grow a
big crop and do it this, be the crop and do it this be the best in the neighborhood be the
Best in the community have the nicest looking crops all that
That pressure is real
But if we can get back to profitability
That takes that pressure off and I'll say this dawn and I we had to grow some pretty thick skin. You know, there was a lot of
(55:06):
things said, a lot of phone calls made to us that said, you can't do this. A lot of
our input suppliers said, well, you're just trying to run us out of business.
It's like, no, we're not. We're trying to keep ourselves in business. And if
you think I'm trying to run you out of business, well, you're a service provider, provide the services I need to make these changes.
This is, it can all work together,
(55:29):
and it needs to for our communities in rural America.
Yeah, exactly.
That's a wonderful ending note, Grant.
I wanna say thank you for everything that you've contributed.
I'd like to ask you one last question.
What is a point of view that you hold that is very
different from your peers? People who are in the same space, who are also aligned with
(55:55):
regenerative agriculture, what is something that you believe to be true that is perhaps
different from the common view. I guess you you brought it up already. Dawn and I
have had big discussions about this. We're afraid of the term regenerative.
We're absolutely definitely afraid of the term regenerative to the point where
(56:18):
my, where Dawn is a beautiful gifted writer and she can put things in words
and she said our motto
on our farm is not going to be regenerative it's going to be farmers of
life for life and a lot of that comes from dr. Jonathan Lundgren has become a
good friend of ours you know he talks about the whole carbon situation and he
(56:40):
says I hope in five years we're done talking about carbon because it's
simply because it simply comes back to the fact that carbon is directly associated with life. So that's
why Don came up with that model for our farm. And that's what we're going to run with.
Well, I'd like that phrase, but I'd like to better understand why the reservations
(57:04):
around the
term regenerative.
We're seeing it with sustainability, John.
You know, companies run with sustainability as their logo.
I'm afraid companies are going to run with regenerative as their logo.
I hope that it is for the betterment and for the good.
It's not greenwashing.
(57:25):
Um, that, that, that's why we're tentative about it.
It seems like all the terms in agriculture get, get used as a
marketing tool in some way or another.
And I really, and I really, I really hope that it gets used in a
positive and good, good purpose.
Yeah.
Good.
(57:46):
Well, thank you, Grant. I'm glad I asked that last question. Thank you for being
here. Thank you for all the work that you're doing, all the
support that you're offering to so many people
and I look forward
to chatting with you again soon.
Absolutely, and thank you, John, for what
your group does also. It's
influential and it's being noticed.
The team at AEA
and I are dedicated to bringing this show to you because we believe that knowledge
(58:08):
and information is the foundation of successful regenerative systems.
At AEA, we believe that growing better quality food and making more money from your crops
is possible.
And since 2006, we've worked with leading professional growers to help them do just
that. At AEA, we don't guess, we test, we analyze, and we provide recommendations based on scientific
(58:31):
data, knowledge, and experience.
We've developed products that are uniquely positioned to help growers make more money
with regenerative agriculture.
If you are a professional grower who believes in testing instead of guessing, someone who believes in a better, more regenerative way to grow, visit advancingecoag.com and contact us to
If you are a professional grower who believes in testing instead of guessing, someone who believes in a better, more regenerative way to grow, visit advancingecoag.com and contact us to
see if AEA is right for you.
Popular Podcasts
CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist
It’s 1996 in rural North Carolina, and an oddball crew makes history when they pull off America’s third largest cash heist. But it’s all downhill from there. Join host Johnny Knoxville as he unspools a wild and woolly tale about a group of regular ‘ol folks who risked it all for a chance at a better life. CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist answers the question: what would you do with 17.3 million dollars? The answer includes diamond rings, mansions, velvet Elvis paintings, plus a run for the border, murder-for-hire-plots, and FBI busts.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.