Join the conversation with Andy Juris on his Diamond J Farm, in Bickleton, WA as he discusses
his trials with herbicide resistance, transitions in tillage systems, diversifying the cropping
system in the face of changing conditions, why innovation is critical, and talking crop insurance
and ag transportation issues with policy makers in DC and Olympia.
Carol McFarland
Today, we’re on Diamond J Farms outside of Bickelton, Washington with Mr. Andy Juris. Welcome to the podcast, Andy. Thanks so much for having me out.
Andy Juris
Yeah, thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.
Carol McFarland
Excellent. Would you start off by sharing a bit about yourself, your farm and who you farm with?
Andy Juris
Yeah. So I farm with my dad. I’m the fourth generation on the farm. We started here. My great grandfather came in about 1904 and I think he started out on his own about 1930. So we’re latecomers to the country and farm about four miles east of Bickelton. 5 inch rainfall zone is what they say on paper, but it’s a really good year anymore when we see that. Some of our drier grounds in that six, sometimes four inch. So shallow soils, if you get two, two and a half feet to bedrock, it’s pretty good. So it definitely is a challenge. High altitude. We’re about 3000 feet up here. The high school gyms at the same level of snow call me pass.
So it doesn’t feel like it, but we are in the foothills of the Simcoe Mountains. So you can see the trees. We got a lot of scenery. That’s about, that’s our biggest commodity, I guess, is scenery.
Carol McFarland
So it is really beautiful out here. So how does it feel to be growing some of the most water efficient food in the world?
Andy Juris
Yeah, it’d be like my, I believe I had a neighbor that was a particularly, you know, it was just always a horrible drought year when you talk to him. And I think it was at his funeral, one of the old farmers stood up and said he respected him so much because he was able to grow a crop every year in zero rain. So you know, there you go. It’s about as efficient as it gets out here.
Carol McFarland
Absolutely. Well, with that, could you describe a bit more? You’ve went into a little bit about your moisture and soil conditions. What- how about some of your standard rotation and management history?
Andy Juris
Yeah, so we for years have been a wheat fallow operation, like everyone. And we’ve moved in the mid 1990s into no till, have been no till now. Since then, up until the last couple years, we started having to incorporate a little bit more tillage for some weed resistance issues. Rotation wise now, one of the problems that we did deal with in the fallow days was erosion, due to the fact that we could not hold two years worth of moisture in the shallow soil profile. And some of our acres then transferred to annual crop. We’re in a low rainfall area. It’s weird to do that. But there is quite a bit of annual crop spring wheat, along with some chem fallow, no till, and we also grow hay now that whether it be right here at the farm is alfalfa, single cutting dry land, and then forage grains as well, barley, triticale, that kind of thing. So yeah, yeah, so no cows of our own. Sold mostly to local cattlemen around here.
Carol McFarland
Okay. Yeah, I noticed a few cattle operations along the way.
Andy Juris
Right.
Carol McFarland
Out here,along this beautiful drive, there’s definitely, as you said, there’s a lot of great scenery. Two cows being some of it. Anyway, well, would you talk a bit more about some of what you’re trying on your farm and how that looks out here in this ecosystem? You kind of talked a little bit about some of your herbicide resistance issues and your soil’s ability to retain water. So it sounds like you’ve been trying quite a few things just to overcome the climactic limitations.
Carol McFarland
I’ll talk about the herbicide resistance side of things for a minute. For us, it came out of nowhere. It’s probably how it happens to most people. We hear about it out there, water hemp in the Midwest, and you think, boy, that’s great. We don’t have that here. That’s a good thing. And for anybody that’s wondering about this same thing, it’s only a matter of time. It’s just the way nature works. And unfortunately, with no-till comes a reliance on herbicides. And a few years ago, we noticed a weird patch of cheatgrass in a field that didn’t die. And I thought I did a bad job spraying. The next year, we were more aggressive, whether it be with our rates. We had fieldmen come out and recommend various adjuvants. That didn’t work. The patch got bigger. And I believe it was in that we grew a hay barley crop in that field. And the cheatgrass got taller than the hay barley, which is bad. That’s a bad thing. That’s a bad crop. And I had Drew Lyon come out and look at it. And it was just like a textbook when he pops his slides up of herbicide resistance and the spreading of it and how it spreads. It couldn’t have been any more clear. And prior to that, I’d had a whole lot of fieldmen out looking at it. And I don’t blame them at all.
I think you’re not thinking about it. You’re not expecting it. And there’s a part of you that doesn’t want to believe it’s true. And it was just one of the, no, you need to try different, all kinds of different fufu in your spray to try to get this to work. And when we finally had that confirmation where they collected seed and they grew it in the lab and they did all the tests, and it takes a while. About a year later, Ian Burke had a call and said, I got bad news. I was actually relieved. At least I knew what I was dealing with now. And that changed everything about, of course we’d run the combines through it, spread it all over the place. Like you normally do.
Carol McFarland
You blow off your combines though between fields, right?
Andy Juris
Oh yeah, perfectly. You can eat off them, right? Yeah. And then of course comes that there’s that social aspect of trying to talk to your neighbors about this. It had actually been a problem for a lot of our neighbors about this. It had actually come out of some different fields around the area too. I don’t know if it started there, but it had spread. And we try to convince your neighbors you got a problem. And they’re going through the same mindset issues that I’d had.
No, it’s not. It’s just whatever the issue is. And that’s where we really had to sit down, I guess from an innovation standpoint and say, what do you do with this? Because when you only make roundup from your toolbox with a weed that’s a particular problem weed, you took a giant tool out.
Carol McFarland
That’s a big hammer.
Andy Juris
Yeah. That is your primary one that you have. And there are others out there. Like we grow alfalfa, we use clethodim and other group one herbicides in the alfalfa. So that option is available for wheat. But you realize that after that, there’s nothing. And that you have now overnight gone to a scenario where a few years ago, Ian Burke stood up in front of the tri-state commission of Idaho and Oregon and Washington and said, we are on the precipice of a collapse in the cereal grain systems here in the Pacific Northwest. And he wasn’t kidding.
Carol McFarland
That’ll get your attention.
Andy Juris
Yeah, that really got my attention when he said that.
Carol McFarland
I saw him at the Cook Farm field day last year and with the Italian rye, he said, there’s nothing I can mix from a jug that would take that out. And I think maybe that was in crop.
Andy Juris
Right.
Carol McFarland
But at the same time, that’s still a pretty big deal.
Andy Juris
Right. You know, these problems are going to continue to happen. We look at the rollout of new modes of action out of these chemical companies. The low hanging fruits have been picked and there hasn’t really been anything new now for 20, 30 years. You really got to sit down and say, well, what are we going to do to manage this? Or is it all done? You know, my 94 year old grandpa said he was at a meeting in the early 80s and the guy told him there, you know, once we get this cheatgrass thing nailed, we pretty much have all the weed issues done. We’ll be good. You know, well, here we are. It’s all 1980 over again. And so that’s where we started looking at all the various things. And there are, you know, whether it be straw or chaff management behind the combine, weed seed management behind the combine, which presents its own set of issues there, expense, equipment. And we haven’t gone that direction yet, but we’ve been really thinking about it. There’s various herbicide tools, whether it be, you know, green seeker type, you know, are there ways of dealing with this where we can deliver more intense or expensive chemical packages just on the bad spots? And then there was a tillage.
Steel is a little harder to be resistant to than some other things. And that was a really hard adjustment for us to go back to. We had a year where we tried some other things and I told dad, I don’t see much point in seeding this field again, if it’s going to be this bad. And at that point, we didn’t have any tillage equipment anymore. We’d sold it all. I had to go to a neighbor, borrow his disc and we sprayed the field and I disced it up right behind it. And we had the best crop of wheat that we had had in years off of that field, the cleanest crop of wheat we’d had in years. And you go, well, good, but darn, you know, that kind of just completely changes your thinking of how that works. And so that was more the beginning of that, you know, of that. So now down the road years, that’s kind of driven the directions that we’ve decided to go.
Carol McFarland
I imagine, you know, it sounds like you really committed to no till when you sold all your tillage equipment. You know, you must have had reasons for being all in on no till. It sounds like erosion was a big part of that and probably some other soil health goals. If you are up for sharing a little bit more about your reasoning for that initial commitment to no till and then how you’re maybe finding the balance in, you know, your land stewardship goals that maybe came out of no-till or some of maybe other efficiency gains that come out of that, if you could speak toward now how that looks as you’re bringing some tillage back into your system.
Andy Juris
Right. Yeah. So when we started with no till, it was mid 90s. I was in college and full disclosure, I was gone from the farm for over a decade. For a while I went to college at the University of North Dakota.
Carol McFarland
UND!
Andy Juris
Yeah, UND in an aviation program. I actually taught at the university for a number of years afterwards and then was at American Airlines after that as a pilot and then was in the train department there. And so I was gone for a pretty good chunk of time in that initial no till. I would come home and think, I used to spend all summer on a tractor rod weeding and here is this now, this system where we spray it and we seed it and it seemed in a way so easy. And I was looking at the numbers of our numbers of our fuel use per acre and it just had evaporated compared to what we used to do. Also, I remember having to carefully clutch combines through ditches so we didn’t break axles and that was no longer a problem. And this was great. And our yields had, especially in the annual crop stuff, had decreased from the fallow days. However, they hadn’t decreased that much and when you look at a crop every year versus one every other year, we’re actually more wheat at the end of that two-year cycle. And you say, okay, so there’s some efficiencies there. It really did seem like this was a system and it still is to a large extent, a system that works really well. It’s efficient. It is more beneficial for the soil. You lose less soil.
When you only have two feet, you kind of need to keep it around. And when we looked at tillage this second time, we obviously at this point at least realized that going back to sweet plows and rod weeding it all summer long and watching it blow and potentially having it erode over winter is not the direction we want to go. Fortunately, tillage equipment has come a long way since the 1990s and we now are primarily focusing on what we can do that is intense in the zone that we’re trying to kill things at. We’re trying to do shallow tillage, really stir the top, kill the cheatgrass. Rattail fescue is also a big problem here, which is when you have no till, rattail fescue follows it. And we now are looking at, there’s a lot of high-speed discs and that kind of thing. This equipment is expensive. And I mean, there are no free rides, that’s for sure, in ag. Whatever you do, nature seems to check you or adapt. It’s amazing. You can be mad at it or you can marvel at it, I guess. And so we’re back to burning a little more diesel.
We’re trying to, in a way, I guess you’re hybridizing either tillage or no-till, whatever you want to call it. We’re still seeding behind it with a no-till drill, trying to make that one pass fertilizer placed with the seed, all the benefits that we saw from that earlier. But not head down that direction of full tillage. We do do some fallow, mostly due to the rainfall issues that we have on some of our ground. But it’s also hitting the weeds at a different time. We try to no-till some this year. We had rains that were perfect, made chem fallow an absolute nightmare. it’s all got to work together. We’re still figuring it out. We’re still trying to figure it out. I don’t know if we ever will. But we thought we had it after 10 years, 20 years of no-till, and you haven’t pulled your plows out one time. You say, why do we have these things? And we sold them.
That’s actually fairly conservative. I know some guys, and I can appreciate their courage. They go all in right away. It is just in. The discs, the plows are gone, and this is what we’re going to do. We are going to make this work. We actually hung on to it for quite a while, just in case you never know. And after 10, 20 years, we thought, well, we’ve got this. Well, 10 years later, we didn’t have it.
Carol McFarland
Well, but it does sound like not hanging on to the old equipment did allow for some opportunities to rethink what you did then invest in subsequently. Do you want to talk a little bit more specifically about some of the equipment that you use?
Andy Juris
Sure. When we had to borrow a neighbor’s disc, we’d never used discs before. We’d always use chisel and sweet plows and cultiweeders. And now we had an opportunity to see what just a finishing disc would do. That’s what he had. It’s an older one. And we thought, you know, that actually didn’t work too badly if it was just more aggressive and we don’t have to. Rattail Fescue, you got a disc it three times to try to get it up. Some of these newer cross cut or high speed discs, they’re extremely expensive, but they do a job that you just couldn’t do , years ago. And so whether we, you know, our particular one is a Lemkin, it’s a European thing. It’s weird. It’s blue, but they are all…
Carol McFarland
Rainbow farm equipment?
Andy Juris
It is, you know, it was just what we could get around here. And it does a really good job. It’s aggressive. We have Great Plains Turbo Max. That’s kind of more, you’re less aggressive. It’s got adjustable hydraulic gangs on it. So if you want a sized residue, you can. If you want to do tillage, you can. And all of them are designed to be pulled at high speed. Requires bigger tractors and fuel, which these days is a big commodity. So, but that is currently where we sit. We actually do have one piece we have an old caulkens, good old caulkens. They’ve been around forever. Culti Weeder sitting over in a swale somewhere. And we were just talking about that the other day going, you know, maybe it’s time to get that out and start working on it again. Cause there has been a couple of times that it would have been handy to have something like that available. So it might be something we look at in the future.
Carol McFarland
Okay. Have you noticed differences in your soil? Like from kind of your original pre no-till soil to, you know, after being in no-till for a while and now the more hybrid so reduced-pass.
Andy Juris
So we have some ground that this summer it just, it was extremely difficult with the little rain showers that we were getting to, to take care of it with, with our sprayer. And it, and at some point we said, that’s it. We have got to get the disc out. We have koshcia particularly going that is once it gets bigger than, you know, your fingernail, it’s almost impossible to kill. And we need to end this now. So we went ahead and we ran the disc over it, not deep tillage, but down about four or five inches, took care of that. And it is just like it used to be. You catch a rain. It does not necessarily penetrate through your profile like it used to. And you now are back. What I remember is a teenager in college where we’re trying not to seed where we get that seed stranded, either get it started and then it runs out of moisture. Whereas there’s a couple of spots in the field. You turn, you miss a little bit. There’s some ground that’s not disked and it is wet. You know, that fallow is wet right to the top. I can seed it tomorrow. There’s that trade-off that you, that you take. And so you watch that soil change and you see that soil structure change for the worse. And you realize that this is not what, this is not the clear answer to every one of your problems. Maybe you’ve made a different problem now by doing this. Conversely, in the spring, we, again, it depends on whether if moisture is not a problem, then this is something we have noticed. We had a year where we had a Rat Tail fescue problem and we went out and we ran tillage directly ahead of the drill.
In fact, we were running the field at the same time we’d sprayed it and we’re running the tillage. And we had a few places in the field where it’s like, golly. I just don’t want to, you know, it does kind of kill you to do this, this kind of stuff after all these years of no-till. I don’t want to run the disk over here. I don’t think the weeds are that bad. We’re going to hope the herbicide takes care of it. And so I’m seeding across this line. At harvest, I could see to the line where we had stopped doing the tillage and the wheat in the tilled ground was significantly better. Significantly better. And the only thing, you know, I mean, you see it at harvest and you wish you could have seen this coming. It was in a spot of the field that you’re not normally in unless you’re spraying it or not. And it didn’t really look that different at herbicide application in-crop. But it’s like, oh man, I wish I could rewind this and get somebody out here and try to tell me what happened. I’m guessing soil borne diseases and that tillage had, I mean, that’s just a guess. I have no evidence of that. But so there, you see, as we talk about soil structure, I had some friends of mine that are very dedicated, no tillers, and they told me, you’re just going to watch your yields plummet now that you’re doing tillage again. And well, maybe, sometimes. Other times, no. And I was telling this to, I’ll leave his name out of it because I don’t want him getting harassed phone calls. No, but he is a very, very progressive no-till farmer. And he had some ditches in his field. And he says, I snuck out there with a disc on a dark night in the middle of the night wearing a mask and no one knows who I was. And I disced it. And he kind of says with a smile on his face, and he says, and I hate to tell you this, but the areas that I disced at harvest were way better than the rest of the field. And it really makes me wonder what’s going on out here.
Carol McFarland
That is an interesting research question, right? But especially, you know, there are a lot of known quantified benefits of a no-till system. So it definitely makes you wonder what’s going on. In the case of your farm, how are you using the perennials? Because you grow your alfalfa, I’m assuming, as a perennial.
Andy Juris
Right, yes.
Carol McFarland
And how does that, conversely, kind of affect the soil? And are you able to bring some balance?
Andy Juris
Right. So from just a straight up, like trying to get, I’ve always had alfalfa build as kind of like, well, all the roots and all the stuff in the soil, you’re building structure and it’s this great. Around here, alfalfa is probably your most vulnerable crop to the soil. Because once you take that top growth off, it is like the Gobi Desert out there. Some of this here, has been in alfalfa now for years. And we work really hard to maintain the stands. Sometimes you got to take them out much sooner. But this stand’s held really well. This variety is held really well. But once you’ve taken that crop off, that ground is so vulnerable, particularly to wind erosion, it is, and we’ve had some pretty good water erosion in the wintertime.
So from a structure standpoint, it’s weird how this thing that we thought would be one of the best things for sensitive ground is actually probably one of our most vulnerable. However, when it comes to whether you’re talking about diseases or anything else, wheat behind alfalfa does extremely well. In fact, it does so well, it creates its own problem. you’re having to really be careful to control how thick your stand comes up behind it or you’ll burn up the crop. It really thrives. You can definitely tell the disease regime has changed. And the wheat really does well coming in behind that. So any grain crop relief, sometimes we’ll switch, we’ll switch to like a forage triticale or something like that.
Carol McFarland
So how do you manage that? Is that with like seeding rate, fertility?
Andy Juris
You have to watch your fertility. It’s just like taking CRP out. The first year as those roots start to break down, you might have some tie up in your nitrogen. When it does release, it’s going to release hard and you’re going to end up with pounds in the top two feet or some number is going to come in at you. That’s going to leave you a little shaken. And now what do you do with that around here? If you seed wheat or spring wheat into that, you are, you’re going to have rice at harvest time. So then do you use a high end use crop like a forage triticale that really does well when you really pour the nitrogen to it. And that’s generally how we’ve chosen to manage that. After a year or two of that kind of levels kind of balance out a little bit and you can rotate it back to wheat. Most of the time by that point though, we’re rotating it back into alfalfa. We’re just out a couple of years and then going back into alfalfa on that ground.
Carol McFarland
Well, and I’m hearing if you’re using Triticale for forage, how much residue is left on there? Because I guess that, you know, if you have your carbon and nitrogen ratio with some of that dynamic of what’s going on, maybe that helps. But if you’re, you know, what is your residue look like throughout your fields and all these different things you’re doing?
Andy Juris
That is a challenge. Hay fields don’t have it. You take it all. And in your alfalfa, that is another misnomer out there. You know, you don’t have to fertilize. you are taking everything that it poured all of its nutrients into off that field. And even in wheat where in a fallow cycle, where nutrients cycling that breakdown of residue and, you know, there’s calculations for how much potassium and how much nitrogen, everything that’s in that straw. In a hay crop, you’re taking all of it and just leaving that tiny little bit left out there. And it does affect where you’re going to have to be really watching your nutrients coming into the next cycle with that full knowledge that the trade-off is it’s a rotation crop. It gives you an opportunity to maybe take the crop off and get to weeds mid-summer that are going out there that, you know, or you swath them off with the crop. prickly lettuce can be out there. Cows love to eat it and you can take it with the crop. I wouldn’t like it personally, but they seem to love it fine.
Carol McFarland
So I do think it’s the ancient ancestor of the lettuce that we all know and love.
Andy Juris
Yeah, I had a neighbor’s little kid riding with me one time And he said, oh, I love lettuce. And so he tried some. He had more courage than I did.
Carol McFarland
I think when it’s maybe little, it’s okay, but it gets very big.
Andy Juris
Yeah, you can pick your teeth with it later.
Carol McFarland
We’ve been talking about a lot of really interesting things and that probably lend themselves toward answering this question already. But what are things that you have tried that now are part of your standard management? Maybe they started as smaller scale trials or how do you handle the scale of your trials as you’re curious about things and scaling them up?
Andy Juris
Right. So, I mean, stuff that is standard now probably would be the rotation crop of alfalfa for us. It started with a neighbor that bought some ground. He was not a farmer, bought some ground close to here, didn’t want to have weed on it for some reason and planted alfalfa to see if it would work. And it did. So we started with a little test plot just over here and it actually did very well. Then we did a larger one. We put acres in. It did very well. We had some wet years. We thought we’d hit a home run. This is fantastic. We’ve got it figured out. And so then we went in pretty big. And some years now between alfalfa and forage grains, we will have , acres of it. It’s a lot. And so that has become a standard practice. Since then, we’ve taken some lumps in a drought year, alfalfa in this country. You get zero. You get nothing. So you have to have that in your calculation. We’ve hit some home runs just accidentally probably, but just had some great years with it. And then we’ve had years where you get nothing and it doesn’t have insurance programs like wheat. And it’s a challenge. But scaling that up over time was something we did fairly slow. We didn’t jump into it. It probably took us a decade to get to that point of realizing all of the various… It’s a high management crop compared to wheat, particularly alfalfa. So other things that we have done, we do a lot of plot trials. They’re not probably the epitome of science, but we have a scale on our grain cart. So when we’re applying a new product, we will go out. We have a couple of nice square fields. We’ll do check strips all the way across. So we’ve tried a variety of different, whether it be soil amendments or whatever you want to call it. Royal Organics had pelletized compost. We’ve tried all this various stuff over the years and then weighed across the scale looking at grain quality. Most of those have not become standard practice. Bickelton climate out here, when you talk to, whether it be WSU with their variety testing or whether you’re talking to some of the various…
For a while we had Helena Chemical that had a test plot on us of various things that I don’t even know what they were. They always said, we like this area because it can defeat something that will work everywhere else. And so we’re trying to figure out what really, really works.
Carol McFarland
It’s great to be known for that.
Andy Juris
I know. I was just like, well, geez, I guess. But at least I get, well, if it works here, it’ll work anywhere.
Carol McFarland
I’ve heard that about other parts nearby.
Andy Juris
Yeah. The Pacific Northwest seems to have that ability. I’ve heard more than once from a researcher, I don’t get it. This works every time. And I’m going, well, our check strips out yielded. I don’t know what to tell you. So some of the stuff that does come out of it have been, whether it be seed applied material, things like that where, again, we do the check strips, we do the tests, and we have scaled that up. Those we scale up pretty quickly. And as we’re looking at some of these things, seed treats, all that kind of thing has been probably one of the, in dry land, particularly very dry land areas, it’s always been an area we look to cut costs the most in. I think it’s an area now after a couple of years of looking hard at this, the area that we’ve been cutting our throat the most in. And so we’ve gotten pretty aggressive in the last couple of years on that sort of thing.
Carol McFarland
Okay. With your seed treats?
Andy Juris
Yeah. Yeah. I was just talking with a fertilizer dealer and my dad this morning about this. One of my big complaints with, you put a mix of fertilizer on that has all kinds of stuff, and now you can look at biological things and products, and there’s a billion of them out there, as Dana Herron told me here recently, about half of them are snake oil. But it’s a new industry. We’re still trying to figure out what really works and what works here. And you put this package on, and some years the wheat’s a little better. Some years you yield exactly what your neighbors did that did nothing, and you sit here and you try to figure out what the heck is really going on. What we noticed with some of the seed applied products, and I’m not necessarily talking about the fungicide packages. The fungicide packages, they’re great, I guess, sometimes maybe not. But when it comes down to whether it be biological things or growth stimulators, and now we’re starting to see some of the very first fertilizer packages on the seed, when you talk about walking out and just looking at a field and kind of getting that gut reaction, I had a field where we had check strips, stuff seeded right next, same exact variety seeded within a couple hours of each other. And it was startling how much of a difference those seed applied products actually made in that. And we’ve seen that now for a couple of years where, whether it was dry or wet going out, and especially when you’re seeding winter wheat here, even in fallow, we tend to be extraordinarily dry. So that wheat is likely coming up over winter. And in a cold environment, it’s just a slow coming out in the spring. We’re looking for something that really kick it in the butt and get it going. Spring wheat, the same thing. Soils are cold and they tend to be cold and we tend to be cold all the way through till early May and it turns off degrees and things just are not happy. And so as we looked at that, anything to get it out of the ground quickly and get it growing fast and build root structure. I’m not as concerned about top growth as I’m root structure and a lot of these, you dig them up. And like I say, my son-in-law works for a, he’s an agronomist for a company in the Valley. And whether or not we’re using any products of theirs or not, he’s often up digging around with a shovel looking and he sends me pictures. And I’m glad he does it because most of us farmers our Achilles heel is we get busy and we don’t look at things as hard as we should. And he sends me pictures and sometimes he says, what the heck did you do here? Sometimes he’s saying that is in, wow, this looks great. Good job. And sometimes he’s going, what were you, what were you doing that day? Cause it doesn’t look like you did something right. You know, and, and, and so that’s kind of the direction we’ve been mostly moving towards lately in terms of, I guess, if you would look at innovation on the farm that we’re now trying to scale up all the way.
Carol McFarland
Awesome. Thanks. Well, you know, something else I heard you talking about is that it sounds like you actually have a pretty dialed in process for how you go about exploring something new on the farm.
Andy Juris
Yeah, I guess our probably our…
Carol McFarland
I mean, I heard check strips.
Andy Juris
Right, it’s not formalized, I suppose. Like, as in we have a written policy. I do feel that all too often you get a product, even if it’s free to try and we just throw it in the drills. Sometimes you don’t even do it. It sits on the shop floor for a year or two. And, and then at some point it disappears. And, and one point the guy says, where did it go? And you say, I don’t know, you know, it’s out there in the, you know, , acres it’s out there somewhere. And there’s no point in really doing that. So we do try as much as it just, you know, in the heat of the moment in seeding kills me. We try to do check strips. We try to weigh it across the scale accurately. We try to look at the grain quality. and some of the other things they talk about, whether it be soil, beneficial soil things later on. I know there are farmers out there that I respect imminently that have way better processes than I do. For me, mostly it’s fairly simple. You know, we do the check strips, but I usually have stood there with a lot of guys going, I need to be able to see it with the naked eye to really get a good feel of whether this is working or not. Cause usually if you don’t, you’re going to come in with a statistically insignificant result is my experience here anyway.
Carol McFarland
Well, it sounds like you’ve got the weigh wagon. I know some folks will do something like they’ll put their strips going one direction and then harvest in another direction to see if they can see a difference on a yield monitor. Do you do any of that kind of process or how do you, and how do you mark out where you’ve done things or keep, keep track of it? How do you build it into your spring workflow? And the planning, where things will go, you know, do you put it on your best ground, your worst ground, that kind of thing? Do you like to put it where your 20 miles away neighbor can see it?
Andy Juris
I did have a neighbor tell me I need to put a billboard up sometimes just so they can see everything that we’re doing so they can talk about it all day in town. But, you know, it starts well behind just the whiteboard where we scribble all our field plans. We do utilize a fairly comprehensive farm management software program that we plan out a lot of our, whether it be rotations when you’re growing things like alfalfa and you keep track your beside rotations. And that’s where we start in some of these flagging fields for testing, uh, the ones that we want to use. And I like to use fields that have a variety of dirt in them. The couple that we identify, one that it’s by their shape, you can get consistent length to your strips. Uh, uh, the other is that we have both shallow rocky and, you know, some of that real good two foot depth soil out there. And, uh, and, but so you can get an opportunity to look at it in both good and bad. And then our drill is sized to our combine headers. And so we can share guidance lines across the field. And that makes it very much easier to mark out and deal with.
Carol McFarland
That sounds really handy.
Andy Juris
Yeah, in the past, that wasn’t the case. It made it more challenging. Um, usually at that point, the drill was wider than the header. And so you had to just harvest down the middle of the strip and, you know, it is still doable. And we’ve done everything from tying flags on fences to actually going out and measuring with a measuring wheel too, now it’s mostly done electronically through the guidance system.