In this episode we hear from Doug Schuester and his daughter Erin Ruehl outside of St. John,
WA – as they talk about their on-farm trials in remediating eroded hilltops with compost and
cover crops, growing cows and canola, and some farm succession planning.
Carol McFarland
Today we’re out here with Mr. Doug Schuster and Ms. Erin Ruehl out at Westfield Properties outside of St. John Washington. Thanks so much for having me out, you guys, and really appreciate being here, welcome to the podcast.
Erin and Doug
Thank you.
Carol McFarland
Looking forward to hearing more about your on-farm trials. With that in this father-daughter team I’d love to hear a little bit more about yourself and your farm and how it’s going farming together.
Doug Schuster
You go ahead and start.
Erin Ruehl
Okay so I’m Erin, I’m Doug’s daughter. I’ve been farming here with my dad for about five years officially but unofficially I’ve been I was raised on this farm I’ve grown up doing a lot of the things that I’m doing now and I took a little hiatus in going to college and then got a job in Seattle for a couple of years, and then after that decided that I really wanted to come back and give this a shot, and so I came back in January of 2019 and I’ve been here ,you know, just helping dad do the farm thing ever since.
Doug Schuster
We’re not really an anomaly either, there’s several gals, young gals, your age gals in our area that have come back to help their dad farm, so that’s really cool, and yeah, she hasn’t been doing it for five years, she’s been doing it for about 26.
Carol McFarland
Not to name any names or anything.
Doug Schuster
I first started [and] had her feeding calves when she was about two.
Carol McFarland
Oh, and nobody got life skills like farm kids, though.
Doug Schuster
She didn’t like it very much at first, but it’s grown on her. Yeah. Now my main job. Yeah.
Carol McFarland
Well I’d love to hear a little bit more about what made you come back to the farm and how it’s been going.
Erin Ruehl
So, in high school I was like, I’m getting the heck out of dodge, I don’t think this is for me, I want to go out and do something else with my life, so I actually went to WSU and got a degree in construction management, and that took me to Seattle where I worked for a large general contractor for about two and a half years. My husband and I kind of met over there and started dating, even though we also went to college together, but he’s from Spokane originally, so we always kind of talked about moving back, and when the opportunity presented itself and we left Seattle, I kind of thought ,you know, I want to be involved in the farm in some capacity because I don’t want to see it. At that point my parents have started talking about like what their future retirement might look like if neither one of us came back to the farm and I was like, God I don’t want to lose this ,you know, it’s such an important part of my childhood, and I want it to be there for my future kids, and so I thought, well, here’s an opening in my career where I don’t have a job lined out, and so why don’t I just go back and try it, and if it’s horrible and I don’t like it I still have you know, other opportunities to get a job, and if it is for me, then I gave it a shot. So with that we moved back here and I started working on the farm full-time, and it’s been- I think it’s been going great.
Doug Schueter
I think it’s been going just fine. It was funny, when they were in Seattle they kind of said, well we got this one-year plan where we’re gonna bail on this Seattle idea, and we’re gonna come over there. Marshall’s family is in Spokane and they they’d come to all the Cougar football games over that wretched pass ,you know, but they said we’re gonna- about a year we’re gonna come back and ,you know, and we’re gonna figure something out, and then about two weeks later they said, maybe more like six months,it’s happening kind of quickly over here, another week goes by and [they] said we’re gonna be there in less than a month. It’s like, what are you gonna do for housing, what are you gonna ,you know, there’s so many things that were just off the cuff, but yeah, right from the get-go she was working with me on the farm, so that was her job as Marshall took a different job in Spokane.
And there’s lots of things she can still learn. A lot of shop work. We started out with and got her hands dirty building the 350 Chevy engine first thing.
Carol McFarland
Got some mad respect for the fabrication aspect of farming, any- all the banging on metal…
Erin Ruehl
It’s definitely not my strong suit.
Doug Schuster
But you’re learning!
Carol McFarland
It’s good, I mean, it’s just…there’s so many different skill sets that ,you know, you get to grow in, it’s nice that you are part of the legacy, and so that you have grown up with this, and it is really exciting to ,you know, not just be able to visit with ,you know, next-generation farmer that is up and coming but it’s fun to see some more lady farmers, they have some more lady farmers, or “farm-hers” as I’ve had other guests on the podcast talk about…now, Mr. Schuster, would you share a little bit more about how you came to farm, a bit more of that previous generation farm legacy, and a bit about the farm itself?
Doug Schuster
I’ll try to keep it somewhat short, although I could go on for hours on that I started here working for my uncle in 1979, and I didn’t know it at the time but my uncle was none too pleased to have to babysit his older brother’s kid, and I mean, he put me right on the hard stuff right away, digging fence posts, picking up rocks ,you know, anything to try and break me, and I loved it. I mean, it was years before he even let me drive a tractor ,you know,.
Carol McFarland
That’s really how you get someone hooked, doesn’t it? Have him pick rocks right out of the gate.
Erin Ruehl
You haven’t lived until you’ve picked rocks.
Doug Schuster
It used to be your punishment, it still can be ,you know,. But ,you know, let’s see, I went to WSU as well, my dad really wanted all of us kids to get a four-year education, he’s an alum as well. so even though I was really focused on this, he said, you go get your dang degree and then ,you know, you can do what you want, and so after four years, it was about three years in, my uncle picked up some new ground and he said, what’s your plan after college? And I said well, if I get a job ,you know, in irrigation or something. He says, well, I got some new ground I could use the help right away, and I said, done. So right after college. I moved here, and they had a little house for me to stay in, and there’s not a lot of pickings around here, so I went to Portland found myself a nice wife.
Carol McFarland
Oh, well, that’s good, I mean, she looks like she’s still around, so you’ve done well.
Doug Schuster
Yeah, thirty five years.
Carol McFarland
And, so, is she a big part of the farm as well?
Doug Schuster
Um, yeah, she has been in the past, I mean here more recently, obviously, was taking care of the baby and everything, but she’s done it all, she’s picked up hay, she’s helped with the fence, she loves chasing cattle, that’s her favorite thing, yeah, but anytime you gotta have bodies, she’s always available, you know. She’s done it all, she’s driven a harvest truck and, you know, all the things you would expect.
Carol McFarland
It takes the whole family, and it’s also really important to make sure that somebody awesome is taking care of the babies so that mom can go out and farm.
Doug Schuster
Yeah, that’s really working very well right now.
Carol McFarland
It really sounds like you guys have a great family team making it work here. With that, would you share a little bit more about your farming conditions out here in St. John? Your soils, your climate, your kind of standard crop rotation, that sort of thing?
Doug Schuster
We’re right on the edge of the channeled scab here, I mean, the road you came in on, one side is farm ground the other side is rock, so we do have too many cows because we’re right here next to the rock and you can’t do anything else with it, so as those pieces have become available, we’ve gotten the lease on them, and- but rainfall here can be around 16 inches I would say, a lot of the hills here where, you know, they’ve eroded away because of the great flood are, rather steep and fairly difficult to manage, but it’s fairly good soil, it’s better than, you know, the lighter soil down in Ritzville you want, you know, further that way not as good as north up by Plaza, Spangle, and things like that, but I have it we have a sometimes you can call it like an eight-year rotation, more appropriately, maybe a four-year rotation with the winter wheat then spring barley until both girls won’t let me plant that anymore because they hate it.
Erin Ruehl
Well, we cut it and it’s only, like, six inches tall, you don’t really appreciate it.
Doug Schuster
But we go winter wheat, spring barley, then spring wheat, and then we’ll either do chem fallow or canola is what we’ve been working on for the last five years or so.
Carol McFarland
Nice. You said you’ve grown some peas in the past before, too?
Doug Schuster
I did in the past, yeah, my uncle dabbled in peas and lentils and stuff, we’ve never done garbanzos, haven’t just had, I’m afraid. But that or dad uncle did peas and lentils and once again just extremely difficult, they have got much better equipment now for cutting that sort of thing, but canola’s, it seems like a good moneymaker, I really really like what it does underground in the soil, and it’s really easy to no-till back into and a winter wheat.
Carol McFarland
So when you talk about those underground effects, what have you seen well?
Doug Schuster
You know, we’re building soil literally with with putting that much organic matter in the ground via root structure and those types of things you can’t see overnight, you know, it takes years and years and years to see results but, you know, we’ve been doing that and some other interesting things as far as, you know, growing organic matter or, you know, redistributing organic matter but it takes it takes years and years and years so I can see it from the combine cab, you know, when you get on one of those hilltops and in years past you were eating half barley and half dirt and then one year you’re like wait a minute my headers not in the dirt and I’m clipping off all the heads this is working, you know, so it’s growing better crops on those marginal pieces.
Carol McFarland
Nice, well, that seems like that’s a good segue into: what are some of your management goals as you’re thinking about, you know, trying things on the farm, what sorts of goals are you working toward?
Erin Ruehl
We’re trying to make money every year, as dad has said in the past, but we’re also trying to like do- we’re trying to do more with less inputs we’re trying to like improve the quality of the soil year over year basically trying to just like leave things in better shape over time than they were when we started.
Carol McFarland
So when your daughter grows up to want to be a farmer like her mom, she’s got some great soil to take on.
Erin Ruehl
That would be ideal, yes
Carol McFarland
Awesome. Did you want to add anything to that, Doug?
Doug Schuster
The goal is trying to leave it better than then when you first got here, that’s- we had to do that in Boy Scouts when we went camping, you know, you made sure to [have] left an area better than when you got there, and that’s what you want to do in farming, it, we- back then, me and my uncle both chose not to do CRP. A lot of the neighbors have capped off the hilltops, and they just don’t farm them anymore, because they don’t produce, so you put them in the CRP program and get a payment for growing grass, but we bowed our neck and said, we’re not gonna do that so my hills are still all in crop, so how do you make those hills do better is the big focus.
Carol McFarland
So with that, do you want to talk a little bit about some of the experiments and trials you currently have going on on the farm?
Doug Schuster
I can do that, yeah. I went- I wrote down a little note here because one of the questions and all this is how did you come up with this idea to do this and it had I don’t know how many years ago a piece of ground up the road we used to farm and we had a big hay barn right next to it and we were getting down to the end of the hay and my uncle said, you know, that’s just crap hay there, they’re broken bales, you know, there’s nothing we can do about them, why don’t you put those on a trailer and run them up here on this hill, just a really onry little hill just yards away from the barn, and just kind of flake it out a little bit so we can get through it with the rod weeders or whatever we were using, and I’m like, yeah sure whatever, and I didn’t think anything of it until we were harvesting the winter wheat and it was in standard fallow, you know, so we kind of mowed those piles around a little bit with the rod weeder, and he got through it with the cedar, and the next year I would- it looked like a cow had gone up there and pooped because, here’s these little tufts of wheat that’s a foot taller than all the rest, and I’m like what, is that you know, well it was the hay bales just decomposing and providing organic matter or water holding capacity for the wheat plant, and it was just it was really amazing, the difference in the size of the plant, I can’t speak to whether it yielded more, but it sure looked better, and the more organic matter you grow, the more you have, so when you’re growing a crappy crop up on top of the hill, you’re not getting back a lot of organic matter, so the more you grow, the more you get, so, and then from then, I don’t know, I got this wild idea one time, that, why do we have, you know, all this residue in the bottoms where the wheat does really well? We don’t really need it, our organic matter down there is a good number, it always does well, so we were into the hay business and whatnot, so we decided we would rake up, because we mow our stubble with a Schulte, we decided we would rake that into a windrow and try to pick it up with a big baler, they picked it up just fine, made nice little wheat straw bales that are already kind of processed, you know, they’re not long straw, so they were ready to decompose, and then I borrowed a manure spreader from a neighbor, it would just hold one bale, just one big bale set right down in there, pull the strings off, take off up on top of the one of the hills that I wanted to read, just redistribute the residue, and I just flinged it out, and like my first time I was like patting myself on the back, and then a week or so later, a big wind came and took all that residue and took it right over to the other side of the hill.
I was like, well dang, that’s not where I wanted it, you know, so here you’ve got this major problem now, because it’s a- now you can’t get through it with anything, so I learned quickly that if you’re gonna, you know, fluff out a foot of straw stuff on top of a hill, you need to pin it down so we use a chisel to stick it to the dirt, so when the wind blows it doesn’t blow away.
Carol McFarland
Hey, that sounds like a good lesson learned. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that one out, yeah. Oh, that’s great. So did you stop at straw with that, or you know, rumor has it that you might not have.
Doug Schuster
No, we didn’t stop at straw, we- I wanted to do more and more of it after that first year, and I couldn’t really see that many results because there is a nitrogen tie-up in the straw and obviously our following crop is barley, you know, so I knew I wouldn’t really see a result there, but I thought it was a really good idea, and I wanted to do more, so I found out that Barr-tech has a bigger spreader, and so I went and talked to those guys, and they said, yeah, you can run our spreader and it was twice the size of the one that I had. You could still pull it with a small tractor and you could put one and a half bales in it, maybe two, and so I did it again, and then Scott at Barr-tech the next year he says, hey I got a better idea, why don’t you buy our product?
Carol McFarland
There’s a good salesman.
Doug Schuster
Yeah, he’s like, why don’t you buy our product and put it through our spreader? And I said, well I don’t know, you know, I like what I’m doing and he said, I guarantee you you’re gonna get more results, you know, he’s selling and then he offered me to have the spreader for free if I bought X number of tons of product and did that that year, and we just kept getting…liked it did more and more and eventually got their biggest spreader which holds 16 tons of material so you have to pull it with a big, big, tractor and we were about that time Erin’s coming back and she’s super excited about the the compost idea you know, what a great way to get rid of excess material and so I kind of put her onto the job and we were doing the videos then and she was really having a good time teaching you know, what we’re doing and and then one day when we were in some bad conditions she went for a hell of a ride off a hill with the 40,000 pound tractor and a 40,000 pound spreader.
Erin Ruehl
Because, remember, we’re putting this on the onryest hilltops, so it’s not exactly the easiest to navigate.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, well, you guys really do have some of like the Palousiestiest of Palouse Hills out here.
Doug Schuster
Is that a word?
Carol McFarland
I don’t know if that’s a word, but we’re making it one today.
Erin Ruehl
Yeah, so that was fun. Not.
Doug Schuster
Yeah, that’s fun.
Carol McFarland
I feel like there’s a certain amount of Evil Knievel farming that just happens in this area, so I’m sorry that that’s now part of your legacy, too.
Erin Ruehl
There’s definitely an element of, am I gonna make this, did I make a bad call when you’re driving around on the hills, but you learn some good lessons occasionally.
Carol McFarland
I’ve got a couple of stories from the research tractor, too, but we’ll save those for another time.
Doug Schuster
If you want to keep your daughter driving the tractor, you can’t let it scare the pants off you, because then it’s like, I don’t want to do that anymore, that was scary, so got to find something that she’s comfortable with and, you know, you got to get back on the horse. But that was not a fun ride.
Carol McFarland
Oh, survival instincts. But it sounds like you were happy that you listened to Scott at Barr-tech. What have you seen since you’ve undertaken, like, what are- I mean, you want to talk a little bit about some of the rates and some of the outcomes that you’ve seen on your farm?
Doug Schuster
Yeah we’re trying for 20 tons per acre which you know, when I tell other people that and then you realize this stuff can cost as much as 20 bucks a ton so on a per acre basis you’re putting down $400 an acre on your worst ground, you know, people are like, you’re crazy but an 100 acre field you’re probably only gonna do five. You know, you pick your most eroded on knobs and your you know, your worst pieces and you just isolate those little spots so it’s not a huge cash outlay and once again you always got to be very mindful of the fact that this is not gonna give you a return on investment in one year you know, it’s gonna take years and so we’re gonna continue to do those spots and you know, either with that or now we’ve kind of segued into the cover crop thing in those same areas trying to grow the organic matter, you know, underground with a seed rather than sprinkling it on top.
Carol McFarland
Well now that stuff will grow up there.
Doug Schuster
Yeah, I mean it grows. I mean, and, it’s just really hard to quantify other than just know what it was before you know, I’ve been here for…since 1979 and there were times you know, he would almost not even want to cut those places. It’s hard on equipment, there’s nothing there, he’s like, oh they’re gonna just skip that, except for their seeds there, and then seeds become weeds if they don’t go in the bulk tank, so then you got this hellacious, massive volunteer barley or whatever and you’re thinking, I didn’t think there was a single seed in one of those heads, yeah you don’t want to do that. You want to try and shave it all off as best you can.
Carol McFarland
And now what have you seen as a result? It sounds like maybe one of the things you’re looking for is a bit more evenness across the field and year to year, do you want to talk a bit more about that too?
Erin Ruehl
The goal is to like improve the yield across the field, right? And the areas that there is definitely a margin to do so is where the yields are not great to begin with, I mean, there’s not as much improvement that you can have in the areas that are the draws and the good ground, because that soil is already doing pretty much as good as it’s going to be able to do but obviously there’s a lot of room for improvement where you have shallow soils, where you’re not growing a lot of crops you have less water holding capacity so if you can improve the soils in those areas then you can increase the margin of yield by a substantial amount and then therefore increase the yield overall across the whole field, so.
Carol McFarland
And you’ve been seeing that with these efforts, it sounds like.
Doug Schuster
I think so, yeah. We’ve gone through obviously some very good years and some fairly poor years. Last year wasn’t very good. I mean it never rained but, you know, more or less across the whole farm I didn’t feel like we got taken to the woodshed on our yields just overall.
Erin Ruehl
Very scientific quantification there.
Doug Schuster
They were pretty good, you know, considering the year. I was pretty happy with them, I mean we had some some really fairly good winter wheat on chem fallow, and the winter wheat on canola ground was adequate, in my opinion, considering the year so, and that’s you know, sometimes years like that you just got to get them behind you, you know, and hope for a better year, that’s what we do every year.
Carol McFarland
Well, I think there’s something to be said though, theoretically for the increased resilience, you know, if you have more organic matter in the soil, theory is that you really maximize whatever moisture you possibly have and turn that into the crop.
Doug Schuster
Yeah, then a side benefit is those those onry places around here all they grow is Russian thistles you know, because you got no competition so if you can grow a decent sized plant up there and there are better chemicals and whatnot, but just plant competition is the best for keeping weeds away.
Carol McFarland
How is it that you’ll decide to try something again?
Erin Ruehl
It speaks to just this like innate knowledge, I mean you’ve been working with the land for some years right, and so you just have an innate knowledge of what it looked like when you started, and what it looks like now ,and you maybe don’t have any like data to say that it’s improved but you just know that it’s better because you’ve seen results year over year.
Carol McFarland
Well I just think like, when you say, I can just see it from my combine…
Doug Schuster
That’s all I can tell you, I mean, I’m going to be working on getting the yield monitors or whatnot, but at least in the combine that I have a monitor in, the data just it’s so obvious you know, I’m like I know the draws are better I know that hillside had too many wild oats or something you know, I know these things sitting in the seat and now you’ve shown me on the screen, but my little areas are so small that I don’t think…I just don’t know that we’re gonna see it. Maybe. I mean I think a better test for it is, is that field in general doing better over the course of 20 years, even in a drought year?
Carol McFarland
I think that’s interesting to kind of how much is it buffered from the lows. That’s a really interesting metric that doesn’t come up often in conversations about ROI.
Doug Schuster
Well, I think Erin brought up a really good point about the different soils. I mean the draws are gonna do what the draws do, they’re just gonna yield you know, year in and year out, there’s gonna be better moisture, better organic matter, better soil and you can’t really change that. I mean, you can go from 100 to 105 but if you can take a 20 bushel hill and take it 40 all of a sudden then you’re bringing up that average rapidly even if it’s only five six or ten acres.
Carol McFarland
As you’re talking, I’m curious, have you done anything with the ground kind of in between? Because you talk about your really good ground and, you know, these hilltops, are there gains to be made in the ground in between?
Doug Schuster
Possibly, but I mean, that’s the super steep stuff.
Erin Ruehl
I mean I think that’s the hardest stuff to get something to grow on. I will say that…so we’ve started with this residue redistribution then we moved into like a little residue redistribution and some compost sprinkled up there, and then we kind of moved into cover crop and you can plant cover crop on your steep side hills, and the tops of the hills. Really hard speaking from personal experience when you go sliding down the hill to get the compost and the residue distributed on the steep stuff, but you can stick a drill in the ground and put some cover crop there so that would probably be the best way that we found to address the ground in the middle, and then otherwise you’re just, you know, erosion is going to continue to happen no matter what you do, so you’re hoping that there’s a trickle-down effect with the soil that you’re building on top of the hill.
Carol McFarland
Well there’s so many different carbon fractions I just…my brain just started kind of, oh I wonder how those are moving? I’m sure somebody’s got data on that somewhere, maybe Cook farm. Anyway, that’s really interesting, so now I gotta ask, what’s your favorite cover crop? Do you have a single cover crop? Do you mix it? What’s…
Doug Schuster
Can you answer that, or do you want me to?
Erin Ruehl
I don’t know that I have a favorite one. I have ideas of like stuff that I want to do with cover crops that we’ve started trying to do, but my focus has kind of been more on like improving pasture and like trying to get better grass to grow in marginal areas of the pasture so that we can, like, have better hay, or there’s more food for the cows, so that’s kind of where I want us, like, trying to be incorporating cover crop and, like, seeing what we can do there, but as far as, like, what you’ve done on the hilltops and stuff, like, I think you should speak to that.
Doug Schuster
Probably my favorite is the tillage radish, just because of the size and depth of the root. When I started growing canola, I thought, this is gonna be great, it’s got a good taproot, but I’d go out there and pull up an adult plant and it just hits this pan, so instead of this, yeah grows laterally, but you don’t really see that as much with the tillage radish on those hard hilltops. It really seems to get down there better than canola, and canola is good, but- and it’s hardy, it grows big. I think it’s a good pollinator, you know, I don’t really have a whole lot of opinion on that, but- and it, you know, out competes weeds and…
Carol McFarland
Probably makes a little more money than the tillage radish, though.
Doug Schuster
Oh, the canola does, yeah. I mean, for sure, I mean, that’s…canola is a cover crop. Let’s just get that done, one of the best.
Carol McFarland
Did you eat the tillage radish?
Doug Schuster
Oh I’m sure I’ve sampled it, yeah.
Erin Ruehl
There’s some mondo ones that are really wet and flat. Taking them to the county fair. Y
Carol McFarland
Maybe carved something out of it, like a weird little face?
Doug Schuster
And in that flat we also had the turnips that year. The thing that I’m not really hugely fond of with those is they tend to be on top of the ground, and when I seeded that field to winter wheat after cover crop and it was in a very wet zone I was using it as a mop instead of, you know, I’m like how can I dry this out, you know, and I’ve heard other people talk about that but in the fall I went to seed it and it was just…stink. Oh my god, everything’s rotting and then I’m running over all this stuff, and a neighbor came by he says, what the hell are you doing? I’m seeding! I look back and I said actually, it looks like I’m making salad. My drill was just cutting those darn turnips right in half. But there was plenty of moisture, because it’s a wet flat that wouldn’t dry out, so the only place that the wheat was compromised was where it drowned you know, the next year the wheat was fantastic and but in those areas where it flooded out again, it was…it wasn’t good so there’s no harm in doing cover crop or canola or anything else where you have unlimited moisture.
Carol McFarland
Oh, it’s fun the different purposes that you’re exploring cover crops for on your farm. From what I understand you guys are participating in the University of Idaho’s PNW cover crops project to make the decision aid support as well. Do you want to just talk briefly about your participation in that? I definitely want to hear what your growers choice treatment is.
Doug Schuster
I thought it was very educational, actually, I…every time they were there I wanted to go down and pick their brain, so it was really nice that they would contact me and say, hey we’re gonna be there you know, sometimes it didn’t work out but I want to know what they’re doing the replicated plot thing was was well thought out, and so I think we learned something you know, we’re trying to figure out they’re trying to figure out when is the right time to terminate to…It’s a crop insurance question, so that’s where they’re trying to, I think, base their whole thesis on, if you will. So there were some questions on that, but I thought the stand came up good all around even though it was very late seeded because I can’t really get myself to do an experiment before I get my money crops in the ground, so they were totally fine with that, but my favorite mix is a good question. It’s kind of morphed a little bit. You might say sometimes it just got some extra seeds laying around, it’s like let’s throw this in the cover crop, you know, so I had a couple of buckets of an old barley pea mix that I’d grown years ago and the mice were eating it away and I thought I might as well just chuck that in the ground in my grower choice one and then I- but then I also years back I used to blend canola with a little product that hung around for just a short time called Compel. It’s a compost pellet, and so I used it in canola as a bulking agent so I could get my seed rate down where I thought it needed to be, it’s very difficult with John Deere drills to open it up to the width of a dime and then pray, but I had a little bit of that stuff left over and I had mistakenly one time now that I can seed without a bulking agent threw it in my drills and it ended up plugging the seed cups and I had kind of a mess back there, fortunately where nobody could see it. But I had these bags left over and I thought, well let’s throw that in the cover crop so I’m not sure that they necessarily appreciated that, because when you terminate a cover crop with roundup, and it’s got roundup ready canola in it, it doesn’t terminate. So it was interesting to look at from the air or top of the hill where, you know, going through my stuff, it killed the other, it killed a barley, it killed the peas, you know, but that canola just kept growing.
Carol McFarland
That’s interesting, though. I mean, what- how did you evaluate that crop, or how would you evaluate that crop? Is there something to be learned from that?
Doug Schuster
Well, when I did the cover crop thing up here on top of the hills, I sprinkled in some of that, and that was in a special blend that I got from Clearwater seed just had four things in it, I don’t really care to have ten, but I did have some roundup ready canola in that and the nice thing, I guess, the nice thing about doing it on hilltops is I noticed: no need to terminate. it self terminated. I mean the canola got up to about two feet high and the tillage radishes were about the same and everything else just kind of petered out, so I didn’t have to spray it, I didn’t have to mow it to seed it and so you know, then I got a little bit more brave with seeding into growing canola with my drill, which is one thing that Tracy wanted me to do to seed into something that’s three or four feet tall and it makes a guy a little nervous when next year’s your money crop, you only get one shot, you don’t want to screw it up.
Carol McFarland
Wait, okay, so you’re neighbors with Tracy Erickson…
Doug Schuster
Yes.
Carol McFarland
Definitely been one of our pioneering innovators in the region, so what was he get trying to get you to try?
Doug Schuster
When I did that water mop, that was my first segue into cover crop, and that was just the tillage radish, and the turnips and he came up and thought it looked fantastic, and then when I came up harvest time approximately I was like, oh my god it’s six feet tall!
Carol McFarland
Did you invite him over to have some salad?
Doug Schuster
He didn’t come by while I was seeding, but well, cuz he was mad cuz you know, I looked at it and I said oh my god you know, I just seeded eight pounds per acre and I’m about to put 8,000 pounds of seed on the ground, how am I gonna take care of that? You know, so I mowed it with my Schulte and that worked that crap out of the tractor, let me tell you what. It was hard, there was only like 20 acres but it took forever and we actually mowed it twice because it just kind of laid it down then we went back the other way to cut it off a reasonable, and that grew back again! You know, grew back about two feet tall!
Carol McFarland
Now do you put- do you guys ever put your cows out on this stuff?
Doug Schuster
Would have been a good spot but we’re still very nervous about bloat. I mean, we don’t understand the bloat thing good enough to risk just having a bunch of legs up cows out there.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, that’s one of the things that I’ve been curious about with the integrated grazing approaches is it does seem like there’s some things that cows don’t…like they shouldn’t really eat.
Erin Ruehl
Yeah, normally things that are very, like, leafy and green haven’t, like, died down at all they have trouble processing, I don’t understand it enough either to really, like, delve into it but, like, for instance one of the things that we’ve done in the past is, you know, swathed our last cutting of alfalfa and turned some cows out onto that and it hasn’t gone as well, and so just knowing that there’s that risk, we don’t- we’re not confident enough yet in it to try that in very, like, constrained areas. Now if that, if they have other you know, options for food and it’s a larger area and there’s some dry material, we would probably try it, but we, again, like, cows are cows, and you still have to put up a good electric fence and make sure they have water and there’s a lot of work that goes into it so, would love to look into it though in the future if there’s options.
Carol McFarland
Yeah well, I mean, you guys already kind of, I mean integrated, you know, having both crops and livestock and you’re already not going on vacation real often so, you know, I was just wondering if you were getting exploration or not. No, that’s great, so, I guess let’s circle back to when when you try something, how do you know if it’s a success or something you might want to try again next year?
Erin Ruehl
I think, like, aside from dad just knowing, in my opinion I think the theory of cover crop is really good and I think that, again, it’s not something that’s going to just, like, instantly change things, I think you have to keep doing it a lot of times in order to see good results, so I think that’s kind of what we keep going back to it, like we really believe that like there’s something there, and like in theory this is going to work, and we just believe in that, and so we want to keep trying it long enough to determine whether or not like we are making a difference.
Doug Schuster
Well, and if you don’t go whole hog either, I mean you know, where I’m doing five ten fifteen acres you know, what I look at did, it hurt us in any way financially you know, did that really make a big difference on the yield of that field you know, and arguably probably you know, but in the long term it’ll make a difference in the other way because organic matter so in that one year it’s like, yeah we might have taken a little bath on those five acres you know, maybe but it didn’t you know, it didn’t hurt us in a way that we’re going into bankruptcy. You don’t want to get to that point, obviously but small little plots and small experiments makes it a lot easier.
Carol McFarland
Can you talk a little bit about your placements? How do you keep track of it? How do you put it out and manage that within your normal farming operations? Like do you want to talk a little bit more about that aspect of trying things on the farm?
Doug Schuster
Well, I think my daughter would say if I take better notes and do a journal we could keep better track of it. It’s all up here, don’t worry about it!
Erin Ruehl
I would answer that by saying that we like just know what our orneriest hills are, and like what pieces were really working to improve, and so when the rotation allows for the chem fallow, we have that field in chem fallowl and we’re like, okay this is- you don’t have a cash crop on there, this is the year that we’re gonna take that hilltop and we’re going to do cover crop there or we’re gonna you know, do residue redistribution there or whatever, so it’s not really like year over year, we’re like necessary being like this is our focus this year but it’s like, okay well this isn’t chem fallow of this year, so this year our focus is on those hilltops, and that’s kind of what makes a decision for us.
Carol McFarland
Thanks. I’m just always curious how people are making their trials work, you know, as part of the working farm, because I know that comes with a lot of its own challenges just in the workflow or but it sounds like maybe with the compost…does the timing you know, do you have more flexibility? It’s not something that necessarily has to happen during harvest, or during seeding, it’s like maybe you can kind of get to that when you get to it?
Doug Schuster
It’s still a timing issue, because if you’re borrowing that spreader, he wants it back, you know, you can’t sit on it for a month.
Carol McFarland
You don’t want to make Scott mad at you.
Doug Schuster
No, so we get it you know, on site and a week later he’s like, are you done with it? And it’s like dude we had 400 tons a freakin’…or you know, how many- a lot, and you know, not every day is a spread day you know, yeah, or freezes or it snows but this next year we’re going to be getting compost in the spring and putting it on in the summer rather than in the fall so we’ll see how that works in with everything with you know, it’s…I’m not gonna say we have just all kinds of time in the summer because they have cows and hay but the weather should be good enough to where we’re not sliding off of hills you know, that sort of thing and we should have a little bit more window to put it on. I don’t think that’s Scott’s busiest time with his spreader. I’m not sure, and we’re always looking to buy one too, if we can get the right funding to get one purchased and just have it in the area to use with people that want to do it.
Carol McFarland
Do you work a lot with the conservation district?
Doug Schuster
I’m- they know where I am. Yeah, I’ve worked- tried to…it hasn’t come to fruition. It might this year, maybe, yeah.
Carol McFarland
Have you done other projects with the conservation district?
Doug Schuster
Yeah. Oh yeah, we’ve done, I don’t know, we’re…Stephen’s coming tomorrow to look at some off-site watering projects that I’d like to do, pretty heavily involved in CSP, which is a big one..
Carol McFarland
Steve- so that’s the NRCS, and then I hear the Rock Lake Conservation District has a pretty fun and exciting history, wasn’t that Dan Harwood?
Doug Schuster
Yeah, he was the manager for years.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, he’s a good legacy.
Doug Schuster
Yeah, yeah, he’s always an asset. It’s always fun when he stops by and we start talking about things so he knows me you know, quite well, yeah, good egg. When I started doing that you know, the spreading the straw and stuff and and some people were, I should say, most people were like, that’s crazy you know, but that means it might be a good idea you know, the more people say you’re off your rocker you’re thinking well maybe not you know?
Carol McFarland
You kind of already spoke to do you have things you’ve tried in the recent past that you’re trying again this year to see if it has a similar outcome. Do you want to expand on anything there?
Erin Ruehl
So we’re involved in the U of I cover cropping experiment, and then we were also involved in one that the Palouse conservation district is sponsoring or putting on and that one we really focused on pasture cover crop, and so we’re gonna be trying that again because last year it didn’t quite go the way that we wanted it to, but we also had a lack of moisture, so that could have been why, so we’re just kind of choosing several little spots out there that have, like, really shallow soil or not growing a lot of grass or do grow grass on years that there’s a lot of moisture and then tend to not grow very much in years like last year, and so we put out a cover crop mix that had like some clovers and some triticale and had millet and peas in it, I think, things that we thought would be good forages for cattle that might take root and then come back the next year and we could just kind of you know, build on them to improve like these pasture areas, so we’re gonna try that again and hopefully see better results, but you’re also doing the U of I thing again.
Doug Schuster
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. We got several more experiments and I said the compost thing is gonna happen again this year, and we’ll just figure out how to get that done.
Carol McFarland
Awesome. Yeah, you guys are up to some really fun stuff. So let’s do like a bit of a lightning round here as we wrap up. What’s the most fun thing about trying new stuff on your farm?
Erin Ruehl
You go first.
Doug Schuster
The neighbors’ reactions.
Carol McFarland
So you’re a put the experiment right out on the road kind of guy?
Doug Schuster
I’m totally fine with that, yeah. I don’t want to hide it, I want to hide the seed skip because that’s just my bad, the spray skip, but you know, when I’m doing something weird and different I pretty much like to have it front and center.
Carol McFarland
This podcast should help with that, too.
Doug Schuster
Oh, I’m sure.
Carol McFarland
Make sure you recommend it, tell your neighbors. How about you, Erin?
Erin Ruehl
I think it’s just interesting to like see what happens you know, because I think that something always happens that you’re not expecting either like you know, it doesn’t work out the way that you wanted and you’re like, okay well what happened there or you know, it just does something interesting that you weren’t expecting and you’re like, oh that’s cool, let’s see if we can make that happen again. I don’t know, I think it’s exciting to just talk about and figure out what’s going on out there.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, it’s an adventure in curiosity.
Erin Ruehl
Yeah.
Carol McFarland
What’s the most annoying thing about trying new stuff on the farm?
Doug Schuster
The neighbors’ reactions. No, it’s the time. it takes a lot of time to do those things and you know, you’d rather be going on vacation or spending family time or going golfing you know, anything that everybody else has got their seeds in the ground and we’re still trying to amend soil you know, so that time constraint.
Erin Ruehl
I’d have to second that, yeah, and you think you’re done and then you’re like, oh yeah never mind, we’re not done yet, we still have you know, a whole bag of cover crop seed to put in the ground.
Carol McFarland
But it’s- I mean, you’re already getting family time, you know?
Erin Ruehl
Oh, every day’s family time!
Carol McFarland
You know, you tell your kiddo, “We’re doing this for you!”
Erin Ruehl
I’m not sure she appreciates it yet.
Carol McFarland
Hopefully she’ll get there. Did she have a good toy tractor to play with?
Doug Schuster
Oh, absolutely!
Carol McFarland
Excellent. That’s important, maybe don’t have her pick rocks just yet.
Doug Schuster
Soon! Soon!
Carol McFarland
Okay, if you could ask a scientist a question, what would it be?
Doug Schuster
Tracy will laugh, because I’m curious about soybeans in this area then he’s gonna dabble in them yet again.
Carol McFarland
I thought he was retired!
Doug Schuster
Well, he’ll make his kids dabble, and they’ll be like, oh my god. But I would be very curious to see beans be something in this area, and that’s a scientific thing, how do we grow a plant that will work in this climate? You know, and I know this isn’t really ask a scientist but there’s new things coming down about biofuel and what I’ve read, anyway, is gonna mean an awful lot more acres of both soybeans and canola needed for the oil so that’s very exciting.
Carol McFarland
New crops kind of always having an eye on what might be a viable addition to the rotation is an interesting question to me, at least, it’s fun to mix it up a little bit.
Doug Schuster
I think beans would be easy to cut and I think they’d be easy to seed back into you know, from what I can see I’ve never cut them. Sorry guys, maybe it’s hard.
Carol McFarland
It’s farming, it probably is.
Doug Schuster
Yeah.
Carol McFarland
So I imagine they probably wouldn’t have a lot of residue to stick around, so there might be a little bit of you know, balance to be found there in the rotation.
Doug Schuster
When they’re on normally on a 30 inch row maybe that’s not an option here but you know, we’re trying to do seven, eight, ten inch rows, that’s quite a bit of room in between stalks that’s just bare ground so it makes no-tilling quite a bit easier.
Carol McFarland
Interesting. Alright, how about you Erin? If you could ask a scientist a question?
Erin Ruehl
I don’t know if it’s really a question, but it’s just something that I roll around in my mind all the time, it’s like, how do you make water not the limiting factor for growing cover crops and then your cash crop? Because what I’ve seen in- just in growing hay is that in irrigated hay specifically, when you have a lot of cover and the ground is shaded you seem to have an abundance of water there because the ground is shaded and it’s not evaporating. So, in theory when your cover crop is like all leafed out you should be shading the ground and therefore retaining the moisture, yet it always seems to be that when you terminate the cover crop and then go to seed your cash crop into it, the moisture is gone. So how do we stop gap that is what I want to try and figure out.
Carol McFarland
That’s a really interesting question, appreciate that. So how do you think things will be different when it’s your kids turn to farm? We’ll start with Doug. How do you-
Doug Schuster
Things are the way they are right now, what do you mean? She is farming.
Carol McFarland
Wait, so sorry, how do you- how do you see the changes in ag affecting how your kids might farm throughout their career?
Erin Ruehl
You could even just start with, like, how it’s changed since…
Doug Schuster
Technology. Yeah. It’s the technology that’s gonna be the big factor and and just you know, the number of acres you can get over anymore with more horsepower and bigger combines and everything you know, and so with more acres means more work. But if the work is less because you can do twice as much, more family time perhaps, more…except for you’re gonna be experimenting [with] cover crops, time for that.
Carol McFarland
Or getting your drill clogged with compost prills.
Doug Schuster
I think technology has changed a ton since I started, you know, I can’t take advantage of all that new tech because it’s just on my size we just can’t afford it, but there’s a lot of new stuff out there. Maybe when you hit the lottery you can buy all that neat tech.
Carol McFarland
If she does hit the lottery, what do you think she should get? What’s, like, the aspirational thing?
Doug Schuster
Well, I think everybody would say, I want the new combine you know, I don’t know what…that wouldn’t be my choice.
Erin Ruehl
The thing about the lottery, I’ve heard is you have to play to win.
Doug Schuster
That’s what they keep telling me.
Carol McFarland
So like a self-propelled combine that drives up the hills themselves.
Doug Schuster
Oh, now you’re talking real tech, I was just…
Carol McFarland
Eliminate the Evil Knievel?
Doug Schuster
I was just thinking something less than you know, 25 years old would be a nice upgrade.
Carol McFarland
And how about you? How do you see ag evolving throughout your career and you know, again once someday your daughter grows up and wants to be a farmer like her mom?
Erin Ruehl
I guess I have two points on this, um…one thing that I think is really cool is I didn’t have a lot of female role models in ag when I was a kid, and now just like the amount of girls and women actually that I know that have come back to farm and are farming with their dads and stuff, I think that that will be really cool for my daughter to see is that there are you know, several of us out here doing this, so I think that’s one way that it’s changing. Um, I think another thing that’s changing that I think is really cool and exciting is just like ag’s outreach. I think there’s a lot of people who recognize that like consumers are pretty out of touch with where their food is coming from, and how important it is to consumers to like actually know who’s producing their food, and where it’s coming from and try to have it be local if possible, and so I think that’s something that’s really going to you know, continue and grow in ag in my lifetime, and so just to like try and be a part of that as much as possible I think is you know, in everyone’s best interest and is just really good for like communities, and people by and large, so I’m so excited for you know, maybe the women in ag peer-to-peer network and the robust regional food systems!
Carol McFarland
Awesome! I just want to give you guys a big thanks for being up for sharing your experiences, sounds like you’ve had some really fun on-farm trials and sharing a bit about your experience in farm succession, and yeah, just really appreciate you having me out today. Thank you.
Erin Ruehl
Yeah, thank you, this was fun.
Doug Schuster
Yeah.
Carol McFarland
Awesome.