NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State
University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
March 5, 1998
Many North Dakota wheat and barley farmers, shaken by years of failing yields and prices, now plan to experiment with new crops and new rotations—something Fred Kirschenmann has been doing successfully doing for 22 years. Kirschenmann's farming techniques probably can't be directly applied by most North Dakota farmers, for he devised them specifically to fit his 3,100-acre organic farm in Stutsman County. But his approach to agricultural problems might be useful to anyone contemplating a plunge into unknown production territory.
For one thing, North Dakota farmers who want to grow unusual crops are likely to find relatively little information to help them do it. Kirschenmann faced a similar situation when he set out to create an organic farm back in 1976. Research into organic and ecological farming has never been a high priority with the U.S.Department of Agriculture, and in those days was virtually nonexistent. So Kirschenmann did his own research—and that's what many North Dakota farmers may need to start doing also, according to Brad Brummond, North Dakota State University Extension Service agent for Walsh County.
"On-farm research is becoming more common in conventional agriculture," says Brummond. "Basically, what Fred Kirschenmann does is familiarize himself with all the available research, then try to confirm it on his own farm."
Kirschenmann, for instance, was inspired by work at NDSU's Carrington Research Extension Center to try interseeding soybeans and sunflowers. He found the system worked, but not well enough. "We did soybeans and sunflowers in 12-row strips," he says, "but with soybeans we're just on the edge: if everything works out just right we can get a fairly decent soybean crop. But normally things don't work out right and we're looking at a yield which isn't interesting to us."
Some experiments are inspired not by research but by accident.
He one year he planted sweet clover in what had been a sunflower field, then plowed down the clover to get out sunflower volunteers, and put in buckwheat—which yielded 1,400 pounds per acre. This made him think that maybe buckwheat responds more to nitrogen than people had previously thought, so he tried the sequence again. "I still don't know if it's the sweet clover or not," he says. "But if I do this three times and it works out each time, then I'm convinced."
What counts is not theory but result.
Some of his experiments seem inspired by the simple desire to reduce work—his compost and pour-on experiments, for instance. Kirschenman originally spread compost at six tons to the acre, but then an organic farmer from the Netherlands suggested he could get by with half that. So Kirschenmann tested the man's advice by cutting the compost rate to five tons, four, three. "We're at three ton now," says Kirschenmann, "and we're still seeing basically the same results."
His pour-on experiment proved even more emphatically that less can be more—in fact, that nothing whatsoever can be more.
Kirschenmann wondered if it was really necessary to use pour-on to control parasites on cattle, so one day he asked his dad, "Are you sure we really need to do this?" His dad replied,"Well, you know, we're told that's what we're supposed to do."
But that year they didn't. And they haven't since.
The cattle rubbed a lot the first winter, admits Kirschenmann, but the next year the herd had fewer problems, and the next year fewer still, and now it's mainly just the small calves that get irritated as the lice go through their cycle. "I can't substantiate this," he says, "but I think that the host-parasite relationship kind of balances itself out, and when you disrupt that you create the need to continue to protect the animal. But if you let the animal sort of develop its own immunity and community . . . I don't know, that's my theory anyway. In any case, we don't have a problem any more—so it's another management thing we don't have to worry about."
The second Kirschenmann tactic that farmers of all kinds might profit from, says Brummond, is crop rotation, the mainstay organic tactic for evading disease, insects and other pests.
"One difference between the organic or sustainable approach to production problems, and the conventional approach," Brummond says, "is the idea of avoidance. Some conventional producers take a let's-deal-with-it-when-the-problem-happens attitude. Organic producers do not have that luxury. To avoid disease, insect and fertility problems, their main tool is rotations."
Creating and maintaining a successful organic rotation, however, requires meticulous planning and frequent bursts of creativity.
"It's not a matter of simply reading the label and fixing the problem," says Kirschenmann. "Once the problem is there, it's already too late. You need to think about how the situation at one point in the year is going to develop, and then put the management system into place to prevent problems from happening—or to enhance something that you want to enhance...when we're combining, what's going through my head is the cropping plan for next year, all the time—to see what's going on in each field and pay attention to the soil, where the moisture is, what the weed problems are."
Kirschenmann's general rotation pattern involves alternating cool-season and warm-season crops, grassy and broad-leaf crops, and deep-rooted and shallow-rooted crops. But particular patterns for particular fields will vary with time and circumstance.
"The pattern of the rotations is pretty clear to me now," he says, "but how to specifically apply that pattern in a particular field or a particular year—and how to fine-tune it without having any weed problems—that's the critical challenge."
Much of the creativity required by rotations, he says, lies in determining the types of problems you had last year in a specific field, and how you may need to alter the rotation to solve them. For example, if wild mustard is a problem he may follow his hard red spring wheat with rye—an aggresive, weed-suppressing plant—instead of the usual sunflowers.
"We try to use rye within the crop rotation system wherever we have had a weed problem the year before that we feel we need to bring into check," says Kirschenmann.
Rye offers other advantages.
"One of the other things we've discovered is that sunflowers do really well following rye—we have never had a failure of sunflowers following rye, so there's some kind of symbiosis there."
Vigorous marketing is a third major Kirschenmann management tactic that farmers everywhere might use with profit—so says Tom Hanson, sustainable agriculture training coordinator at NDSU's North Central Research Extension Center in Minot.
"Kirschenmann has spent an awful lot of time developing markets that he now can tap into," says Hanson. "I believe that a lot of farmers—no matter what system they're using—would find that in the long run it would pay them to spend more time seeking out value-added, niche markets. What many farmers could benefit from, I think, is more focus on marketing, and less emphasis purely on crop production and getting more off each acre."
Kirschenmann has always spent a great deal of thought on trying to answer the identical question now plaguing many North Dakota producers, namely, "What can I grow successfully, and sell profitably?" Growing and marketing must mesh.
Kirschenmann very much wants rye in his rotation, but, he says, "One of the problems with rye—and of course in any crop rotation it not only needs to work in the field but also in the market—is that rye is not a great money producer and the markets are very limited." Organic growers, he adds, have a slight advantage but even for them the market is limited. This means very aggressive marketing is required. "Roman Meal likes our rye and usually buys at least half of our rye production each year, and the rest goes into our other market channels. We normally get $4 or $4.24 per bushel for rye on the farm and that can work. But if the market gets too oversupplied and the price goes lower, then it becomes a problem."
Aggressive marketing can create opportunities, but only within limits. Even a marketer as experienced and aggressive as Kirschenmann has more dreams than markets.
"One crop I'd love to raise is lupins," he says. "I think lupin could be marketed as an alternative to garbanzos, which are tough to raise. If we could do that, and then raise lupin and sunflowers in 12-row alternative strips, that would be ideal and would give us another cool-season nitrogen-fixer. But here again is where we need cooperation from the marketplace."
He does believe, though, that present trends toward global competitiveness and mass production of specialized products could be changing. "There are increasingly, now," he says, "people in the literature saying that this is not the future, that the new market economy is no longer the Ford model, where you produce a whole lot of model T's, all alike, for a cheap price. It's producing a special product for a special customer and having a relationship all the way from producer to consumer."
If so, that's the sort of market that alert and aggressive North Dakota producers might tap into, says Hanson.
Hanson also notes that Kirschenmann's relatively stable rotation schemes allow him to plan marketing strategy far ahead. "He's not faced each year with the question, `What am I going to plant?'"
Livestock is a fourth major part of Kirschenmann's farming strategy—not merely an add-on livestock enterprise, but one that is an integral part of crop production. Hanson believes many mainstream North Dakota farmers might find such a system useful.
"I think anybody wanting to add value to their farm output," he says, "could take a look and see how livestock might profitably be integrated into their system."
Kirschenmann runs a herd of a hundred or more cattle, all certified organic. He feeds them only native grasses, crop residues and alfalfa. Kirschenmann regards the alfalfa as actually "a kind of crop residue, because the main reason for raising the alfalfa is for nitrogen for the crop—so the cattle are using up the things that are not income-producing in the cropping system."
Each winter he collects about 800 tons of manure from the loafing sheds where the cattle are fed. He composts it, and spreads the compost on his fields. "Basically what we do," he says, "is put compost on everything once every four years, just as we have a legume on everything once every four years—and the combination of those two things is our nutrient recycling base."
Finally, growing a diversity of crops is central to Kirschenmann's management strategy, and is one more organic farming mainstay that conventional farmers may benefit from, according to Hanson.
Not so long ago a diversity of crops and livestock characterized many U.S. farms. Some think this diversity may be coming back into fashion, primarily as an alternative to the specialized style of farming that has led to monocultures, with all their attendant production and marketing problems.
"The economic theory behind specialization," says Dwight Aakre, farm management specialist for the NDSU Extension Service, "is that it pays to put all your emphasis into what you do the best—the assumption being that you know what you can do the best. Also that you'll be able do it. But nature alters that equation for farmers: Mother Nature has a way of changing a well-made plan into a folly."
Diversity, Aakre points out, evades the possibility of one pest wiping out the whole farm. It also reduces the possibility of one market shift wrecking a farm's profit margin. In addition, carefully designed crop diversity can permit a farmer to spend less money on labor and machinery by allowing him to use the year's months more fully.
"If you're not trying to compress your field work into a narrow time frame to meet the demands of one or two crops," says Aakre, "you can cover the same number of acres in a year while using fewer hired hands and fewer machines."
In summary, Brummond, Hanson and Aakre suggest that farmers setting out to reinvigorate their farm operations might do well to consider five key management tactics:
Brummond, Hanson and Aakre believe that every farmer should look at all the various kinds of farming systems, take the best elements from each, and construct a farming system that suits his or her own resources, interests and goals. Recent times have been very tough, and could get tougher. Finding new methods, new markets and new crops won't be easy, but may be necessary.
"We have to do something different, whether you farm organically or conventionally," says Kirschenmann. "It's a question of whether or not farmers are going to be in a position to retain more of the value of what they produce.
"If we can't do that, we're all going to be out of business in a couple of decades."
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Sources: Brad Brummond (701) 284-6248
Fred Kirschenmann
Tom Hanson (701) 857-7679
Dwight Aakre (701) 231-7378
Editor: Barry Brissman (701) 231-7866
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