One Montana Farmer’s Conservation Solution: Get Back to His Prairie Roots

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 14:54:23 GMT

A few years ago, Jeff Sather was dealing with burnout and the routine of doing things how they’ve always been done.

“Spray this chemical, put on this fertilizer and hope and pray you get a crop,” he says.

Sather Farms sits in Larslan, Mont., the far northeast corner of the state. When it comes to the ranching side of his operation, Sather felt like he’d made great progress after taking a course in the art of “ranching for profit.” Through that work, his 10,000 acres of pastureland was finally working for him.

What wasn’t working for him? The 4,500 acres of crop ground he was farming.

He started looking for a solution. He took online courses and went to the Montana Soil Health Symposium.

“In spring 2020, I heard these guys talking about how biology in the soil works and how they could cut fertilizer and phosphorus use,” he says. “That was what I wanted to do, so I went home and told everyone we weren’t buying fertilizer that year.”

“I knew that was our end goal so I thought we’d might as well go there now.”

Partnerships That Unlock Potential

Sather had heard about farmers in his area receiving financial and technical assistance from the USDA NRCS to implement conservation. It seemed like a logical place to start.

Completing conservation enhancements through NRCS’s Conservation Steward Program meant he could afford a no-till disk drill to plant seed with minimal soil disturbance.

But the dominos kept falling for Sather. The no-till disk drill could be used with a stripper header that would leave stubble standing after harvest. In Montana, stubble is critical.

“Because we’re high and flat with long winters and the wind always blows, anything that’ll catch snow is in your benefit,” he says.

That’s when the biggest domino fell for Sather Farms. In an effort to find financial assistance for that equipment purchase, he connected with Marni Thompson, then a NRCS soil health specialist.

In 2020, Sather Farms enrolled in an Environmental Quality Incentives Program contract aimed at solving their most challenging soil health concerns.

Sather’s path to regenerative farming was now in overdrive.

Jeff Sather uses cover crops as part of a five-year intensive soil health partnership with USDA-NRCS.

(USDA-NRCS)

On 600 acres, Sather and Thompson got to work. The partnership put these key soil health practices into place:

Using a no-till disk drill to limit soil disturbance
Implementing a diverse rotation with no fallow ground
Planting diverse, full-season cover crops
Integrating livestock through grazing cover crops
Using a stripper header to maximize organic residue
Testing soils regularly

Betting On Diversity

Of the soil health principles, Sather is putting his chips into diversity. He calls it intensive cropping of his cash crop rotations.

“We were growing yellow peas and spring wheat before and maybe some lentils,” he says. “Now we grow peas, lentils and spring wheat, durum wheat, winter wheat and hull less oats for gluten-free flour.”

Sathers planted some safflower and flax, and he’s looking into adding old-fashioned oats or maybe another crop.

Montana doesn’t have an extra-long growing season, so Sather has started intercropping to stack those crops into the same field in the same year.

He’s grown lentils and flax in the same field, harvested them at the same time and then used a cleaner to separate them. Last year, he intercropped flax and chickpeas.

“We are looking at adding a grass, or some kind of perennial mix in the rotation, so we can plant the grass and keep it in grass for up to six years. Then we would take it back out to farm again as a quicker way to improve soil biology and organic matter,” he explains.

By implementing his rotational matrix, he’s seeing surprising benefits, including an increase in residue material and a decrease in pathogens.

Planting lentils and peas along with flax has allowed Sathers to avoid spraying a fungicide because he’s eliminated the likelihood of blight becoming a problem.

“Peas and lentils are not a high-carbon plant, and their stubble basically disappears before winter even happens,” he says. “But by adding in flax, when we harvest we leave more residue behind and a higher carbon that will still be there next year.”

Multiple years of experimenting with this mixture is starting to pay off, even with current drought conditions in Montana.

“The cool part about intercropping is it might be flax one year and the next year might be a lentil,” he says. “You end up with two different crops you can market.”

Soil health practices are helping Sather Farms weather the drought that Montana has faced for the past several growing seasons.

(Sather Farms)

Reaping the Benefits

Thompson had taken some initial soil health tests prior to the pair’s work. Now, every June, she’s back at it, collecting more data to see the benefits of Sather’s intensive soil health focus.

“It’s tough in Montana because the environment is dry and it’s windy, so soil health moves pretty slow,” she says. “But we did see some really cool things happening in comparison between benchmark data and where he’s at now.”

Slake tests show Sather’s soil is staying intact and the water around is remaining clear, signs his soil biology is holding the soil together.

“In a PLFA soil test, we are keying in on the increase of mycorrhizae fungi because that is lacking in our area,” Thompson says. “In his soil test, we are seeing an increase in those, which is huge because they are very susceptible to chemical and physical disturbance.

“We are seeing the increases in mycorrhizae fungi because he is bought in to these practices and incorporating the soil health principles,” she adds.

Agronomic Armor

Coincidentally, Sather says his work with NRCS hass coincided with the tap drying up for his region.

“We went into a drought in 2020 and now we are in a long-term drought,” he says.

Sather knows what the data is showing him in terms of the health of his soils, but anecdotally it’s adding up to a protective armor for his crops, which he can see every growing season.

“A couple of the years, the guys who used the heavy fertilizer with their seed, their crops really never even grew, where mine put on with biology and fish hydrolysate came up and look good,” he says. “It still ran out of moisture and wasn’t worth combining, but it looked better than some of the crops across the field or across the fence line.”

That visual confirmation made Sather feel like he’s on the right track.

“Now we’re just hoping, praying one of these days it’s going to start raining again.”

Jeff Sather is working to establish a “farming-for-profit” model for his cropping acreage by investing in soil health practices.

(Sather Farms)

Farming for Profit

Sather feels like he’s on track to reaching a profit-centered approach on his crop acres that is yielding benefits not only for his soil but also for his brand, Prairie Roots , a brainchild of his wife, Marisa, to direct-market their food products.

“I might not have the bumper crop yields everybody else might have in the area, but I’m still making a profit on every acre,” he says.

While Sather is concerned about the health of his soil, interested in preserving a legacy and choosing to grow healthier food products for consumers, he knows none of those interests trump his ability to keep farming.

“Mom and Dad rent me everything they own, so I need to make profit to be able to pay them rent,” he says. “I need to be able to make a profit to afford to stay here.”

If the Sather legacy is going to survive in Montana agriculture, he knows he must make a profit in order to set up his sons for a future on the farm. Along the way, he’s bringing his sons on his regenerative journey, hoping they will learn how to steward the land for the future.

“I’m just working on trying to get my system figured out and learning as much as I can to hopefully continue to improve yields,” he says.

America’s Conservation Ag Movement is a public/private collaborative that meets growers across the country where they are on their conservation journey and empowers their next step with technical assistance from USDA-NRCS and innovation solutions and resources from agriculture’s leading providers. Learn more at www.americasconservationagmovement.com .

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New Survey Shows Labor is Serious Challenge for Ag Industry

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 18:00:19 GMT

A new survey from the Minneapolis Fed found ag bankers rank labor availability as a top concern for their farm clients.

The survey, which was conducted with ag bankers from the ninth district (Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin), found the issue is viewed as a “serious challenge” for 63% of respondents and a minor challenge for the majority of the remaining 37%.

“It’s becoming more and more difficult to obtain the labor needed to operate,” a Minnesota-based banker told the Minneapolis Fed.

The availability of livestock workers was seen as more limited than crop workers and those surveyed also shared that finding long-term help is more difficult than temporary help due to the seasonal nature of the ag industry.

As far as how this compares to past conditions, 39% of respondents said labor availability has gotten “much worse” over the past five years and 44% said it’s “a little worse”.

The Minneapolis Fed attributes this challenge to the region’s low influx of migrant workers and aging workforce.

According to U.S. Census Bureau data, 10% of animal production employees in the area are foreign born, compared to 18% nationally. The number is even lower for crop production with just 5% of workers being foreign born, compared to 32% nationally.

The region also has some of the lowest unemployment rates in the U.S.

At the same time, the median age of workers in the region rose from 51 to 56 in 2021. The number of workers between 45 to 54 has declined over the past decade with a small increase of those between the ages of 25 to 44 and a large increase of those over 55.