Across much of the agricultural Midwest, tile drainage has been widely utilized for decades to facilitate crop production in areas where wetness limits crop productivity. However, as you journey north to the Red River Basin of northwest Minnesota, you’ll encounter a landscape where tile drainage is largely in its infancy.
The most recent episode of the Iowa Learning Farms Conservation Webinar Series takes us up north to the University of Minnesota-Crookston to some of the newest AND coolest drainage plots in the US (literally … their average annual temperature is 40°F)! With average annual precipitation of 23” and such a short growing season, is tile drainage worth it?
Pease’s drainage plots were established in Fall 2019 – with drained and undrained plots side-by-side. Their current crop rotation includes wheat and soybean.
With four full seasons of crop production now under their belts, tile drainage was found to—
Boost crop yields in wet years (little/no yield impact in dry years)
Allow production to be more consistent year-to-year
Result in drier soybeans in the drained plots (potential to harvest earlier)
Move nitrogen down deeper in the soil profile
Check out Pease’s full presentation, Does Tile Drainage Pay if You Only Get 20 inches of Precipitation?, for further details on this research—and for all the dog people out there, you can look forward to several appearances by this most delightful Corgi field research assistant!
To catch up on any other webinars in the ILF Conservation Webinar series, all past presentations are archived on the ILF Webinars page for your viewing pleasure.
Please join us for the Iowa Learning Farms webinar at noon CST, Wednesday, Jan. 3, featuring Mike Castellano, William T. Frankenberger Professor of Soil Science, Iowa State University. Castellano’s research focuses on biogeochemical cycling and transport within the soil as it extends to the atmosphere and subsoil. Working to maximize the productivity, profitability and environmental performance of crop production he employs a systems approach that considers genetics, environment and management.
In the webinar, “How do we Best Define and Promote Soil Health?,” Castellano will draw on research activities to offer insights into soil health within the agricultural sector. He will discuss the meaning of “soil health” within the context of yield, water quality and greenhouse gas emissions. Castellano will also place a special emphasis on use efficiency of nitrogen fertilizer and how it relates to a broad perspective of overall soil health.
“Defining soil health is complicated, but any definition must be measurable and defined on the basis of the outcomes that matter the most: productivity, profitability and environmental performance,” said Castellano. “We continue to make progress in our efforts to define and measure soil health, but there is still work to be done.”
Webinar participants are encouraged to ask questions of the presenters. People from all backgrounds and areas of interest are encouraged to join.
Webinar Access Instructions
To participate in the live webinar, shortly before noon CST Jan. 3 2024:
A Certified Crop Adviser board-approved continuing education unit (CEU) has been applied for. Those who participate in the live webinar are eligible. Information about how to apply to receive the credit will be provided at the end of the live webinar.
Mark Kenney, Iowa Learning Farms farmer partner, is a 5th generation farmer in Story County where he farms corn, soybeans, and seed corn. After growing up in the 1980s during the farm crisis he didn’t think he would become a farmer or have a career involved in agriculture at all. When Mark started high school, he had a great agriculture teacher and FFA advisor who opened students’ eyes to agriculture careers that weren’t involved in production. Mark then went to university in Missouri and majored in agricultural business with a minor in agronomy. He continued his learning and received a master’s degree in agricultural economics.
In 2005, after working in finance for a few years, Mark returned to farm with his dad and uncle for many years. Reflecting on his first years returning to the farm, Mark emphasized the knowledge he received from family on how to farm was invaluable. He also mentioned how complex the business of farming is, especially with how much input costs have increased in the last 15-20 years. These increases are why Mark, like many farmers, are looking for ways to keep making ends meet.
Today Mark is focused on the economics of farming and protects his investments by incorporating conservation practices. There are large scale changes Mark has made, like switching to vertical tillage after corn and no-till after soybeans which affect all of his acres. “It is difficult to change a practice that has been generationally done, and it can take years to make the first change”, said Mark, “For me, switching to vertical till was a hard first step, but once I switched, I wished I had done it years ago”.
In addition, Mark takes a grid approach when looking at the field’s productivity and breaks it down to what is done on a per acre basis. He has grid soil sampling done to assess soil type and nutrient management, which has led to less phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) inputs and changed land use. Mark noted, “I would like to see more engagement from farmers to understand both economic and environmental needs their farm has acre-by-acre.”
“Adopting solid conservation practices are the answer because they are complementary to productivity and profitability, not contradictory”, attests Mark. For him, transforming a couple of acres that were prone to flooding into prairie helps his bottom line, while also providing habitat for pollinators and many other benefits for soil health and water quality. This approach of Redefining the Field Edge was documented not only on Mark’s farm but other farms as part of a North Central Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education project led by Iowa State University and Iowa Learning Farms.
Mark believes everyone should be part of the environmental movement, and farmers should be on the frontlines. “As a farmer, I have an outsized impact on the environment when compared to someone who lives in a suburban setting. We have an impact – not just on our own farms, but on everybody”, stated Mark.
The most common crop rotation in the Midwest today is a corn-soybean rotation. What would happen if we expanded that to include three additional crops? The Kellogg Biological Station is comparing these two cropping systems, Business as Usual and Aspirational. Brook Wilke shared what they have learned in the first year in the webinar, Designing Cropping Systems for Efficiency, Environmental Performance and More Profit.
There are many reasons to expand a crop rotation, including improving biodiversity, climate resiliency, soil health, water quality, less nitrogen use, mitigation of greenhouse gases, AND profitability. That being said, not everything has gone perfectly. KBS has been trialing some of these practices for years and has run into hiccups. This year they had a six-week period of no rain, and their corn has struggled. They’ve also had pest issues affecting soybeans and winter canola.
KBS has found using precision ag to be the best way to limit their failures and improve their cropping system. They have utilized yield maps, soil maps, variable rate inputs, drones, airplanes, and satellite imagery to make changes.
If you are thinking about expanding your rotation, give this webinar a watch to learn not only timelines for each year in the 5-phase system but also how to reduce losses in your rotation and add more to your win column.
Find any previous webinars from our archive on our website.
Please join us for the Iowa Learning Farms webinar at noon CDT, Wednesday, July 19, featuring Brook Wilke, associate director for agronomy and science: Kellogg Biological Station, Long-Term Agroecosystem Research (KBS LTAR). Wilke oversees agronomy and science activities for KBS LTAR and conducts research on agronomic innovations that enhance efficiency and sustainability of cropping systems. He has extensive experience in agricultural systems ranging from organic vegetables and local markets to pasture-based livestock and cropping systems, including educational activities related to these systems.
In the webinar, “Designing Cropping Systems for Efficiency, Environmental Performance and More Profit,” Wilke will highlight sustainable cropping system approaches that have been field-proven to deliver profitability and improved environmental performance as he shares successes and challenges identified through the Long-Term Agroecosystem Research program implementation in southwest Michigan. He will provide insights into measurement approaches used to evaluate performance of an aspirational cropping system in comparison to prevailing practices in the area. Wilke will also highlight some agronomic challenges identified through the project which could present obstacles for broad adoption.
“There are clear economic and environmental advantages of implementing a regenerative and efficient cropping system in the upper Midwest, but these practices do come with layers of challenges that require precision and attention to detail in order to optimize performance and minimize risk,” said Wilke. “I hope that by sharing our experiences and lessons learned from the KBS LTAR project, farmers throughout the region will gain insights and confidence in utilizing more of these tools that can help improve the sustainability of their cropping systems.”
Webinar participants are encouraged to ask questions of the presenters. People from all backgrounds and areas of interest are encouraged to join.
Webinar Access Instructions
To participate in the live webinar, shortly before noon CDT July 19:
A Certified Crop Adviser board-approved continuing education unit (CEU) has been applied for. Those who participate in the live webinar are eligible. Information about how to apply to receive the credit will be provided at the end of the live webinar.
Please join us for the Iowa Learning Farms webinar at noon CDT, Wednesday, May 17, featuring Seth Harden, Upper Wabash River project director, The Nature Conservancy. Harden leads the Upper Wabash River Project for The Nature Conservancy in Indiana. He regularly speaks with farmers to help support The Nature Conservancy’s objectives to discover conservation solutions that realize mutual farm profitability and positive environmental outcomes.
In the webinar, “Conservation Adoption: The Role of the Trusted Adviser,” Harden will discuss the importance of trusted advisers – particularly ag retailers – in promoting implementation of conservation practices. He will highlight the top influencers on adoption and draw on data and outcomes from research conducted by The Nature Conservancy and the Purdue University Center for Food and Agribusiness, as well as paired qualitative research with ag retailers and their customers, and quantitative research via the Large Commercial Producer survey, Harden will identify opportunities for ag retailers to facilitate grow their influence and accelerate conservation practice adoption. He will also introduce a business model decision support tool that can aid retailers in considering integration of conservation systems into their customer relationships.
“Research clearly indicates that farmers are seeking information about conservation practices from their trusted advisers and that ag retailers are poised to deliver this sort of information IF the customer requests it directly,” said Harden. “Providing retailers with the tools and support enabling them to assume a leadership role in furthering conservation adoption while also improving business outcomes through additional customer touchpoints, added services and profitable supply chain collaboration.”
Webinar participants are encouraged to ask questions of the presenters. People from all backgrounds and areas of interest are encouraged to join.
Webinar Access Instructions
To participate in the live webinar, shortly before noon CDT May 17:
A Certified Crop Adviser board-approved continuing education unit (CEU) has been applied for. Those who participate in the live webinar are eligible. Information about how to apply to receive the credit will be provided at the end of the live webinar.
New Iowa Learning Farms farmer partners Matt Bormann and Nancy Bohl-Bormann live with their three children in Kossuth County. Together they farm corn and soybeans, as well as raise corn and soybeans for seed. They are passionate about nutrient management, making a profit while farming with conservation, and continuing education for farmers.
Matt grew up in Kossuth County and started farming in 1998, raising livestock and custom baling. He transitioned to full-time farming in 2001 after graduating from Iowa State University with a degree in Agricultural Business. Matt and Nancy met at ISU while Nancy, who grew up in Wisconsin, completed her bachelor’s degree in Agricultural Education and Environmental Science. Following graduation from ISU in 2004, Nancy earned her master’s degree in Soil Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2006 and is currently obtaining her Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota.
Matt and Nancy are always looking for ways to innovate and improve the resiliency of their farm whether it’s new conservation practices or a new way of doing things. While Matt is a 5th generation farmer, he started out farming independently by renting cropland and raising cattle and pigs. While the farm no longer has livestock, Matt and Nancy, his parents, and some of his siblings’ who farm, still maintain financial independence and bill each other for equipment usage and labor. This allows them all to make their own decisions and provides the freedom to try new practices.
“We are able to make our own choices which has been fantastic for our innovation,” said Matt, “We also can fail, but I believe if you’re going to be successful you need to know what it’s like to fail.”
An example of practices they have adopted and have continued to use for over 10 years is the use of strip-till before corn and vertical till before soybeans, some acres are entirely no-till. They incorporate manure into all their tillage practices and are passionate about soil testing and applying nutrients on a field-by-field basis. They also use cover crops on their acres that have seed corn and seed soybeans, usually cereal rye or oats.
Nancy said, “A good way to try a new practice is to custom hire someone to do it, whether that’s strip-till or cover crops, then there is no need to buy a whole new setup just to try.”
They not only do conservation tillage practices for soil health but also because it saves time and money. Family is important to Matt and Nancy, and they both enjoy spending any extra time they have with their kids and community. They are both active with their local Farm Bureau and FFA Chapter, and Nancy is an elected Kossuth County Soil and Water Conservation District Commissioner.
“Since switching to strip-till we can start planting two days sooner and plant more in a day – almost all of it in the daylight too,” noted Matt.
“There are three principles that we try to abide by: good agronomics, environmentally friendly, and profitability. To us all three are equally important,” said Matt. Not only do they farm with these principles on their own land, but they communicate with their landlords about the importance of conservation practices. “Don’t leave your landlords in the dark, tell them what’s going on with farming today and work out a conservation plan,” said Matt.
Nancy and Matt understand the struggle with farm input costs, but emphasized they wouldn’t be doing these conservation practices and nutrient management unless it was profitable as they are achieving consistent and better yields than previously recorded.
“Farming is already fulfilling from planting to harvesting, but in farming today we can make good decisions in terms of money spent, resource management, and our time,” said Matt and Nancy.
Join us 12-2pm on April 5th at their farm 1307 130th Ave, Bode, IA50519 for a field day to learn more about cover crops and how to start the conservation conversation with landlords and tenants.
Iowa’s Monarch Conservation Strategy seeks to add 160,000,000 new stems of milkweed to Iowa’s landscape by the year 2038. What if I told you we could double that and help farmers save money while we’re at it?
That’s the lesson from a recently finished project at Iowa State University where we dispatched armies of water resources interns to a few small patches of grasses and wildflowers in the middle of crop fields south of Ogden to count milkweed stems.
These weren’t just random patches of grass though. These were marginal acres converted from unprofitable corn and soybeans into native perennial vegetation. The spots in fields where farmers make more money by not farming them than trying to milk a crop in rare favorable years.
In our Ogden fields, these areas were wet spots created by the rapid retreat of the Des Moines Lobe of the Wisconsin Glacier 12 or so thousand years ago. But on other farms they may be hillslopes, floodplains, old building lots, compacted areas, or more. They’re the agrarian equivalent of Lady Liberty’s “tired, poor, and huddled masses yearning to breathe free” and they’re the greatest opportunity for win-win-win outcomes in agricultural lands conservation.
Aerial image of one of the five crop fields in our study with four patches of grass and wildflowers in unprofitable areas of the field. The field in the picture is 310 acres and includes 62 acres of grasses and wildflowers among the four parcels we surveyed in yellow.
Water Rocks! intern Kate Lucas poses with monarch larvae during our monitoring.
Research at Iowa State has estimated how prevalent these profit-loss areas are. A study published in 2018 estimated that 12% of Iowa’s corn and soybean acres annually lost over $40 per acre and over 40 pounds of nitrogen each year. Extrapolate that number out to Iowa’s 23 million acres of corn and soybeans and we’re talking about 2.7 million acres annually losing money.
Our Ogden study investigated 208 of those 2.7 million acres of unprofitable cropland that had been taken out of crop cultivation and enrolled in the CRP. We chose this site for our study because many neighbors had all enrolled small parcels, ranging from 7 to 32 acres, into the CRP within their crop fields in the same place and time. It offered us a lens to the future where such a practice is more mainstream to ask, once we stop farming profit loss areas, what benefits accrue to monarchs?
During the first two summers of the pandemic, our interns sought to answer these questions counting milkweeds and monarchs in the 13 parcels within 5 larger crop fields. With the gracious permission of the farmers and landowners, our crews traipsed through growing corn and beans and dodged battalions of mosquitoes to enumerate and inspect 3,969 stems of milkweed following standardized protocols. I applied some fancy trigonometry to convert what the interns measured into an estimate of milkweed stems per acre and came up with 154 (+/- 31 stems).
Interns searching fields for milkweed.
Now, estimating milkweed densities is tricky business because their stems are patchy in distribution. You can walk a hundred yards without seeing one and then find yourself in a forest of them. This makes extrapolating a density estimate a bit fraught, but, our estimate of 154 stems per acre does align with Iowa’s planning estimates and numbers used in international planning scenarios. So let’s run with it.
If we can make 154 stems of milkweed per acre on 208 acres of marginal land near Ogden for a total of 32,032 stems in the neighborhood, what if we applied that estimate out to the 2.7 million acres of land that annually lose $40 or more per acre when they’re cultivated for corn and soybeans? The answer: 415,800,000 stems of milkweed. Two-and-a-half times the total number of milkweed stems sought to be added in the entire state in the strategy.
That’s why we at the Conservation Learning Group are working with farmers to get the word out at field days (like this one or this one), publications (like this one or this one), and instructional tools (like Conservation Case Study on the theme). I hope we can all work together to make Iowa farms more profitable and grow a few hundred million milkweeds to feed the monarchs while we’re at it.
Do you have farmland that does not return a profit most years whether from frequent flooding, poor soil quality, excessive slope, or machinery access challenges?
Consider redefining the field edge with strategically placed prairie!
This idea of redefining the field edge was the focus of our field day yesterday hosted by Mike Kenney on his farm near Nevada. This idea was not a new concept for Kenney as he had started to utilize perennial vegetation on his farm to improve farming ease over the past six years, so he was excited to participate in a project led by Mark Licht, ISU extension cropping systems specialist and associate professor, and funded by North Central Region Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, that is working with Iowa farmers to convert marginal land areas prone to flooding to perennial vegetation to evaluate the profitability and explore the potential benefits to water quality, soil health, wildlife habitat and overall aesthetics.
“While it looks dry now and we think we could have gotten a crop there, in May and June we had water standing twice in both fields, ditches and over the road, and any crop would have drowned out and been a total loss,” noted Kenney. “I estimated $300-$350/acre cost of production (not including land rent) would have been lost if we had tried to grow soybeans in the area this year. While there is negligible impact on top-line revenue and there is definitely a positive impact on total costs. So while taking 50 acres out of crop production across all our acres may sound intimidating – with it spread out over the farm it is a benefit to total farm profitability.”
“This project is so easy – farming it (that land) sucks,” stated Kenney. “That’s one meter I use to determine if something needs to change. It’s a way to help improve the environment around us and provide significant additional value to bees, butterflies and other wildlife that hadn’t been considered. Impacts don’t stop at the fence line, so we need to look at the bigger picture. Solutions don’t have to be complex to have a big impact on the environment from water to soil to carbon storage. Maybe sometimes the easiest solution is the best one.“
Chuck Barr, an extension educator with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, spoke this week on their Testing Ag Performance Solutions (TAPS) real-life real-time competition program. This program strives to improve efficiency and profitability in the field. The UNL-TAPS program provides participants with the opportunity to test out their ideas for different farming strategies and management techniques.
Throughout the competition participants make many different agronomic and marketing decisions – which will later be collected and shown against others choices. All participants are farming the same field, experiencing the same weather and ultimately have the same market opportunities. This means that the results of the competition solely reflect the results of the participants choices and decisions.
The four primary conceptual components of the program include competition, peer-to-peer interaction, experiential and social interaction. Below are the different technology & services that were also provided to those involved in the program.
This program began as one competition and included only participants from Nebraska. In five years the program has grown and expanded to six total competitions representing five different states! Below is a representation of how the program has progressed over the last five years.
You can find more specific information about the competition and how to get involved on their website.
Check out this weeks webinar to learn more about the program!
Iowa Learning Farms 