A 30 YEAR JOURNEY

This is a 15 minute presentation that I was suppose to give recently, but ended up in a snow bank.  I looked it over and decided that it was a pretty good representation and decided I would post it.

A  30 year  Journey To  Improve  Soil  Health

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My name is Tracy Eriksen.  My wife, April, and I farm as a family corporation.  My son Kye, joined us in 1994.  Most of our land in the 14-16” rainfall area between St.John and Ewan.  The remainder is in the 18-20” rainfall zone near Thornton. 

My journey started in 1975.  One hot summer day, riding a noisy steel tracked tractor with no cab, making one of those mindless passes round the field pulling a rod weeder, I come to realize that I just can’t do this any longer.  At that point in time I had already spent more than two decades doing that same operation, making that same pass, and watching the dirt flow down the hill.  Tillage erosion became real to me at that point.  

My farming experience has totaled more than six decades.  Two of those decades were spent farming like my grandfather and father farmed. 

    [pic-erosion 4]--This could have been our field but was not.  I never saw erosion on our place quite this bad.    The next three decades were spent with only one goal, —STOP EROSION!,—salvage what top soil we had left.  During that period there was never any consideration of  building topsoil.   The information stating that it took 100 years for natural processes to build 1” of soil was accepted.  I no longer accept that statement.  My belief is that we now have the knowledge to build soils much faster if we stop degrading our soils and fix the biology.    Articles printed back in the mid 1970’s described the wonders of the Palouse, and how soil erosion was destroying those deep rich soils.  Soil erosion in the 1930’s -40’s -50’s -60’s, and into the 70’s was bad, and not infrequently,—horrendous, as pictured here.  

Have we changed our farming practices so as to not revisit those bad old days??..  Some of us have, … but there is still a lot of vulnerable land in the region showing those scars regularly.  A miracle saved our region last winter.  Do we get two in a row??  Looking outside it appears we are set up for serious runoff with a lot of drifted snow on frozen ground late in the season.   Our climate appears to be in an erratic cycle with more extremes.  My hope is that the ground we steward is prepared for some serious rainfall and runoff event.  We are not yet prepared for a serious drought.  Our soil biological health is just not good enough.

My early attempts to reduce soil erosion took a four prong approach.  

—-the first prong was to mulch till.  I called it trashy fallow.

—-the second prong was having a strict three year rotation that included winter wheat, spring barley and fallow or peas. That was pretty common rotation for the day.  A two year rotation of wheat fallow was problematic.

—-the third prong was to strip out each field according to NRCS guidelines and put all three crop types in each field annually.  The extra moving time proved significant, but was done for many years.

—-the fourth prong was to modify the equipment to combine operations, and size to fit the strips, and also, be easily moved from field to field.  Since my interest, and education was in engineering I enjoyed those challenges that consumed most of two decades.  Some of the projects were to complex to be practical for long days in the field.   They were generally modified after a couple of years.  This was a time of continual evolution.  Today, computers and software are doing what I was doing manually with switches and levers.   

Everything that I had put in place to stop erosion at that point in time was marginally successful.  Come spring the fields still looked bad from erosion.  Dennis Roe, who, many of you know, would figuratively hold my hand from time to time and assure me that those few ditches carried less dirt than the rilled and sheet eroded fields that were so prevalent.  I was never completely convinced.  

By the 1990’s no-till technology had made significant advancements.  Glyphosate, available since 1974, was more reasonably priced.  There were several types drills being marketed.  Guy Swannson regularly sponsored seminars supporting the value of no-till and various soil topics.  He brought speakers in from all over the country, and Canada.

In the mid 1980’s I started doing some no-tilling.  For several years I had Dwayne Blankenship custom drill winter wheat into my pea ground.  I rented disc drills to seed my chem fallow ground for a few years.  In 1992 I bought an AgPro hoe drill.  We modified and reconfigured that drill many times.

Around the year 2000, while touring the long term field plots at Oregon State University’s Pendleton Station I learned that no-tilling, with fallow in the rotation was not building soil health.  The fallow year degraded our soil more than the two crop years could build.  No-tilling was obviously saving soil.  Our chem fallow looked a lot better than the fields at Pendleton, so our response was to improve the residue on our fallow ground.  By this point in time I come to realize that even using no-till, if the soil was loosened and the surface exposed, there would be erosion.  Our response was to build and preserve more residue.

From the beginning, I and then, we, continually fought with residue. There were days I spent more time under the drill than in the tractor seat.  When entering a field we were never confident we would be able seed it.  We always did, —but some of it didn’t look pretty.  Every winter, and summer we would modify the drill and finally, the fall of 2009 we hit the residue wall.  A decision had to be made, —do we go back to doing some strategic burning, or use a different type of drill.  Burning was a huge step backward, —not acceptable.

    Starting the spring of 2010, we hired custom operators that used the CrossSlot technology.  All our residue issues went away.  By 2014 we completely retooled, going to ULD (ultra-low disturbance) system. We use the CrossSlot drill to minimize soil disturbance, and we are able to drill through any residue.  We have a GVM sprayer to minimize field tracks and be more timely, and  we bought a Shelbourne stripper header to maximize snow capture, and reduce wind velocity across the ground surface.   What have we accomplished by going this route?

1—Soil erosion has disappeared, —but we are still losing some water.  The armor is protecting the soil, but water, and all the bushels it represents is still escaping.  The fields look a lot better without rills and gullies.

2—Weedy cultivars are fewer and less competitive.  The mat of residue we have on most of our ground makes a very hostile environment.  Seed needs to contact earth to grow competitively.   Drilling with minimum disturbance minimizes the planting of weed seed.  If we could remove wheel tracks we would do even better. 

3—Soil temperatures have moderated both in the summer and winter.  In 2015 and 2016,  I used HOBO sensors to measure temperatures at seed depth.  Ground with good armor is 3-5º warmer than bare ground in the winter, —and 20-25º cooler in the heat of summer.  

Early spring planting has not been a problem.  Our seed depth temperatures are 1-3º cooler than in cultivated ground at seeding time.  Once seeded though, within 2-3 days the armored field reaches the same temperature as the cultivated field.   Soil armor helps support and spread the weight of our equipment, reducing compaction.

4—The drill technology has given us good emergence and stand count for a variety of crops in very difficult seeding conditions.

Are we at the point where we are improving our soil health, building soil organic matter and related carbon?  I would say YES …. and NO!  

Soil health has many parameters.  The physical parameters of our soils have improved dramatically, but the biological parameters are definitely not where they should be.

Over the years we have included more crop diversity in our cropping rotation.  Crop diversity has certainly helped make no-till successful, but the biological soil component has not gained a perceptible amount.

The next step appears to be the introduction of cover crops. Inter-seeding holds some promise.  This will be a new and challenging experience.  

At this point we have been replacing some of our fallow ground with a mixture of cover crop species, —making it green fallow.  In the short run green fallow is showing a yield drag because of the late emergence of our winter wheat crop.  My hope is that this yield drag disappears when we can get the right biology in the ground to provide the nutritional elements needed for a stronger, faster growing plant.  That sounded crazy a few years ago, but we now have a better understanding of plant nutrition and the problems that arrive from imbalances.  We are still trying to figure out what species and how many species need to be in cover crop mixes.  There are lots of ideas about that.

Seeding radish with our winter wheat will be pursued. It’s cheap and holds promise.  The idea here is for the radish to develop a finger size tuber that  extends below the frost layer before winter sets in.   When the radish dies, it shrinks quickly leaving a hole in the frozen ground for surface water to enter the soil profile.  I first saw the possibility in February of 2017, while walking a field during the spring flush.   I noticed that water was visibly moving across all of our winter wheat field except where we had grown the cover crop.  This observation supported earlier soil tests where our cover crops were using 3” of moisture, but nearly all of that moisture was replaced by the following spring.  I believe radish played a big part in that.  Except for radish all the other cover crop cultivars die leaving roots or tubers intact through the winter.

Seeding a perma-cover of a short statured perennial legume intrigues me.  I visualize seeding them onto our eroded hill tops.  This will help armor those vulnerable areas.  It will displace weedy cultivars.  It will add nitrogen, for a cash crop that will be seeded into it.  

I am currently part of a small group that is looking at soil additives, testing methods, composting, and application of compost teas and extracts to our soils and crops.  The purpose is to enhance the soil biota, and eventually reduce dependency on commercial inputs of fertilizer and chemistry. 

We are living in exciting times, and the future will be more so.  Since the mid 1980’s a great deal of work has been done on soil biology and how that component interacts with plants.  After hearing, Dr. Elaine Ingham’s story on how to rebuild soil health, I have been fascinated with the subject.  The more I delve into it, the more complex it becomes, but it holds hope where there was none before.  I doubt that there will ever be a play book on how to put all of this together, —but similar to the set of principals established for successful no-tilling, I envision a set of  principals to be developed that a farmer can follow for successfully developing a biologically healthy soil.

         This concludes my presentation.  I pray it invokes some thought about the future of FARMING THE PALOUSE.