My mission is to grow organic, nutritious crops while implementing the five principles of soil health: Keep the soil armored with cover crops and crop residues, minimize tillage, grow a diversity of species, have living plants on the land at all times, and integrate livestock or their manure.

While organic is the benchmark for clean, chemical-free food, organic farming has struggled to minimize the destructive practice of high intensity, high interval tillage because it's traditionally seen as the only herbicide-free way to keep weeds in check.  Constant tillage allows for soil erosion from wind and rain, destroys soil life, and releases large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. 

Fortunately, researchers and farmers have discovered over the years ways to use cover crops to suppress weeds instead. On my farm, inter-seeding cover crops into growing cash crops like corn, sunflower and soybeans to tillage passes and build soil has been revolutionary. With the right species you can build soil quickly and experience all the positive things healthy soil and a diverse annual cover crop have to offer. It sequesters carbon as plant food, attracts pollinators, reduces erosion and disease while suppressing weeds. And then later in the season when the inter-seeded cover crop is mature, I run an inter-row crimper between the grain crop to smash it down and make worm food out of it indirectly fertilizing the cash crop.

One strategy I employ is to plant a cover crop of buckwheat amongst newly emerging corn or sunflower shoots. Buckwheat has a tremendous ability to suppress weeds with its rapid growth, and to build soil health with its strong, fibrous root system. In the past I’ve used high population, tall corn to simply shade out the buckwheat. It eventually collapses on itself due to its hollow stem and getting leggy, or I drive down the rows with the inter-row crimper before the corn gets too tall for my tractor to run through. This year I am adding Sunn Hemp with the Buckwheat. Sunn Hemp is a super quick growing, tropical nitrogen-fixing legume that hopefully will create a much more nutritious meal for my corn to snack on late season, but it will need to be crimped with a high clearance machine, which I am building! Sunflowers are getting the same program but probably won’t need the inter row crimping because they shade out so well.

In Soybeans, I inter-seed white mustard - another tremendous weed suppressing cover crop but instead using biomass to shade out, mustard uses chemical signals (literally the mustard flavor) to prevent or communicate to weed seeds not to germinate. Mustard is also a tremendous eater of nutrients and matures super quick in heat which make it a great crimped mulch meal for the soybeans 5 weeks after planting. It also suppresses fungal disease in a natural, healthy way through balancing soil life! I also add a small amount of phacelia with the mustard and am going to add flax as well this year for it’s great soil health benefits.

And in an effort to keep plants growing year round, I am experimenting with aerial broadcast seeding into standing crops to grow after harvest and until spring field preparation.

I am always working to attain the most ecological low impact method of farming that works for me here. Cover crop intensive organic farming isn’t only great for regenerating our soil, but also makes organic farming a little easier, more profitable in the long run, and perhaps more popular.