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Diversified North
Dakotan Works With Mother Nature
In 1976, when Vern Mayer began farming his 4,000 acres in southwestern North
Dakota, he used the same wheat-fallow rotation that had become the area’s
agricultural two-step. “We’d plant only half the land every year,”
he said. “We were storing moisture in the fallow, but we were burning
organic matter.”
As the economics of farming tightened, Mayer and his neighbors began planting
wheat – and the occasional field of oats or barley – two years out
of three. As profits became rarer, most growers eliminated fallow years entirely
because it failed to produce sorely needed income.
Mayer didn’t simplify his rotation, however; he expanded it. In addition
to spring and durum wheats, he now grows corn, flax, buckwheat, sunflowers,
Austrian winter peas, crambe and either canola or mustard. With the “minimum-disturbance”
tillage system he adopted a decade ago, his soils are never bare – even
though his region’s brief frost-free periods put the chill on double-
and cover-cropping.
“Caramel popcorn” soil
conserves critical moisture
Mayer’s soil-friendly seeding operation moves his soil just 3/4-inch to
the side, drops in seed and closes the slot behind it with nary a trace. “To
the untrained eye, you can hardly tell the soil has been disturbed, and you
haven’t destroyed the networks the microorganisms have developed,”
he said.
Instead, his soil structure is like caramel popcorn: secretions released by
the soil microorganisms bind the soil particles together, but the matrix remains
so porous that the soil soaks up even heavy thunderstorms. With no streams or
even aquifers to tap, Mayer is dependent for moisture on whatever falls from
the sky. “In this semi-arid climate, we cannot afford to squander any
of it,” he said.
Nor does water still run wasted off Mayer’s rolling fields, taking precious
soil particles with it. “Water erosion used to be a regular fact of life
on my farm,” he said. “Now it’s essentially a non-issue.”
His healthy soils conserve enough moisture so that he can grow corn for local
livestock feeders; after harvest, his corn stalks – like all of his other
crop residues – capture rains and snows and hang onto soil.
To reduce pest problems, be unpredictable
Mayer’s diverse, minimum-disturbance system also stands up well to potential
pest pressures. He “cheaply and easily” controls grassy weeds like
wild oats in his grains by switching to broadleaf crops. He treats seed for
insects and soil-borne diseases but rarely battles pests after planting, except
for cyclical grasshoppers. “That’s another reason why crop rotation
is really important,” he said: “The leaf diseases that attack the
wheat are not a problem with some of the broadleaf crops, and vice versa, so
by rotating those crops we minimize those problems.”
Mayer likes to plant wheat two years in a row. He also likes to rotate out
of wheat for at least two years, but his crops don’t follow one another
in any pre-established pattern. Mayer aims to be unpredictable, so that Mother
Nature can’t define – and then defeat – his system. “If
you’re very predictable in what you do, Mother Nature will find a combination
of pests that fit that particular pattern to plague you.”
When it comes to markets, it’s human nature that makes it hard for Mayer
to predict what will happen next. His planting decisions are consequently straightforward:
If he can’t identify a market for a crop, he doesn’t plant it. When
he knows he can get an acceptable price for a niche crop like crambe, Mayer
gladly grows it. As a rule, though, he focuses on larger markets.
Mayer’s Austrian winter peas go to a local buyer of bird feed ingredients,
who markets them as homing pigeon food. “It is hard to believe that this
industry is large enough to have this kind of demand,” he said. Some of
Mayer’s mustard seed goes to flour millers and some to sausage manufacturers.
More profits lie ahead
While prairie soils contained 6 to 8 percent organic matter before white settlers
began farming North Dakota, the region’s wheat-fallow rotations stripped
organic matter down to 2 percent or less. Mayer estimates that he has rebuilt
his soil organic matter to about 3 percent and that this enrichment has not
come at the expense of his farm’s bottom line. He clears as much profit
now as conventional farmers do, he said, and he’ll soon clear even more.
“After 10 years, we’ve kind of turned the corner in our productivity;
in the next 10 years, the changes will be even more pronounced.”
“I would never, never go back – absolutely never,” Mayer
said. “When you see the benefits, I just quite frankly don’t understand
why everybody doesn’t do this.”
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