In this week’s episode we interviewed Jesse Brunner whose farm near Almira, WA has been under No-Till management for over 20 years. Jesse grows canola, wheat, and several other rotational crops, including his experimentation with re-crop winter wheat in an otherwise crop-fallow system. In this episode you can hear about his favorite drill for direct-seeding canola, residue management in No-Till, his strategy for making trials happen, and the record-keeping he uses to determine if a practice is something worth repeating. He also describes experimenting with his Weed-it system over the last year, optimizing nozzle selection and what he’ll be trying next year.
Carol McFarland
Today we’re here with Jesse Brunner on 5th Gen Farms outside of Almira, Washington. Thanks so much for having me out today, Jesse. Excited to talk with you about your on-farm trials.
Jesse Brunner
I’m happy to have you, Carol.
Carol McFarland
So would you share a bit about yourself, your farm and who you farm with?
Jesse Brunner
Sure. So, I’ve been farming for a little over 10 years. I’m [the] fifth generation in my family to take over the farm, hence the name. I took over from my dad. He’s in retirement now, so it’s pretty much my show at this point. The area that I farm in, we’re about a 12-inch annual rainfall zone. Most of our crops are fall seeded following a year of fallow, but that’s definitely not how we always do it.
Carol McFarland
Excellent. Looking forward to hearing more about that. Would you describe a bit more about your farming conditions, your soil and your standard rotation?
I guess you kind of spoke to that, but what crops do you grow out here? And some of your management history.
Jesse Brunner
So our soil is mostly silt loam. I would describe it as a kind of a medium textured soil. Primarily, I’m a canola farmer. I also grow a large amount of wheat, and then occasionally barley, triticale, peas. These are all things that I’ve grown in the past and continue to grow as the conditions present themselves.
Carol McFarland
Would you describe some of your management goals and how they might be different across your whole farm, by field, and year to year?
Jesse Brunner
So my long-term management goal for everything is to remain productive and profitable in the long term. I’m the fifth generation. I want this farm to be around for my kids should they choose to farm. So what can I do to put us on the right path for that happening? I look at each field on a case-by-case and year-by-year basis and try and decide what it is I’m trying to address in this field, what are its challenges, what are its strengths. That affects things like my crop rotation choices, my herbicide choices, and just overall management.
The farm has been no-till since about late 90s, early 2000s. My dad started that, and I kind of picked up the torch where he left off and have continued down that path, trying to take things to the next level, take those next steps, just to kind of see. It’s a process of continual improvement. So it’s about the journey, not the destination.
I have picked up some ground in the past few years. Some of it has been no-till prior to me managing it, some of it has not. So part of that is there’s a process trying to transition, especially the ground that hasn’t been no-till, to move it into no-till and try and improve the soil quality and make it more productive. And that’s definitely been a learning experience for me. I wouldn’t say I have it all figured out yet, but it’s just kind of learning on the go.
For each of my fields, I have management goals for everything, whether that’s weed control, road goals, soil health. So each year I approach each field on a case-by-case basis and try and decide what’s going to be the best path for it going forward.
Carol McFarland
You mentioned the ground that you took over that wasn’t in no-till. Can you maybe talk a little bit more about some of what you’ve learned and how you’ve used your on-farm trials to transition that into no-till, as well as what are some of the challenges that maybe you’ve encountered with long-term no-till, especially with your crop diversification?
Jesse Brunner
Every field is an experiment every year. There’s always things to try. Sometimes those are more focused. I have strip trials in quite a few of my fields every year, but the whole field might just be an experiment too. So with the ground that I’ve taken on recently that hasn’t been in no-till, that ground has been in nothing but wheat and nothing but tillage for 80 years.
My first step in my process is to try and build up surface residue and soil carbon. While at the same time, I want to avoid putting wheat on those fields because that’s all they’ve had for forever. So one field in particular, we started off with some spring barley, and then this year I had it in winter triticale, which aren’t super different from wheat, but they’re at least somewhat different, and I’m trying to build up my residue levels.
One of the challenges I’ve run into with no-till in a dryland environment is what I call the
no-till suck cycle, which is where when you have a piece of ground which could be as small as a half an acre or as large as a whole field where you don’t get a good stand, and then the next year you don’t have a lot of residue left, which makes it harder to get a stand to the next crop around, and then the cycle repeats itself and it becomes very difficult to break.
A lot of times we need a really wet year so we can come in there and get a good stand established regardless of how bad the soil conditions were up to that point. That’s really the best case scenario, but waiting on that happening, waiting on the weather is definitely not an easy path to success. So that’s where choices like should I put spring crop in because it’s easier to get a stand, or if I do have a poor stand do I go in and patch those places in the spring even though they’re not going to make me any money. I guess that one of my biggest experiments is trying to manage that suck cycle and break out of it.
Carol McFarland
Thanks for sharing that. It sounds like soil carbon is harming your residue, it’s a big part of your management goals. Do you want to talk a little bit more about what you’ve seen that do on your part?
Jesse Brunner
Well, the biggest challenge we have in no-till is having the seeds on moisture in the fall. It’s not uncommon for us to have the rain shut off in late May or June. We don’t seed until August or September, and so having moisture to seed into is definitely the biggest challenge we face. Some years we get lucky with that and get August rains and a lot of years we don’t. And so a lot of what I do is about trying to have that good seed zone moisture and leaving residue on the surface. It’s definitely the easiest way to do that.
It just becomes really hard in those low productive areas because there’s not a lot of residue to begin with, and then so there’s not a lot of moisture to hold onto, and then you get pulled into the suck cycle. Changes that I’ve made to try and preserve that residue is…quite a few years ago I switched over from a conventional header to a stripper header, and so I leave my stubble tall all through the winter.
Then my variety selection when it comes to wheat, the other side of it is my highly productive areas I get too much draw, and that leads to seeding challenges. So trying to manage that through variety selection and then in my rotations. Like I don’t like to put the same crop on a field back to back. So it’s alternating between canola and wheat, and then maybe barley or peas or something. And maintaining surface residue is a big factor in my mind as to what crop I’m going to put on the field next.
So when you have crops like peas where there’s very little surface residue left, maybe we should go in there with some wheat next time. But if the seeding conditions are great, maybe I could go in there with canola. That’s something that I am yet to try. At the same time, I’m also trying to balance market conditions because what crop is going to be most profitable definitely changes year to year. So there’s just a lot of things to juggle, sometimes competing priorities to try and manage.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, you guys definitely make a lot of different decisions and have to be experts in a lot of different things in order to make your farm work, especially as a solo operator. What experimental trials do you currently have going on your farm or that you’re wrapping up from this last year?
Jesse Brunner
Well, so from this last year, I have kind of an ongoing trial with recrop winter wheat.Last year, I did some strip trials using a fungicide on the canola blooming.I had some strip trials involving an AMFC denoculant. Every year is always experiments with optimizing my chem fallow during the summer.Herbicide resistance is a big concern.So I’m constantly trying to find ways to manage herbicide resistance while not spending too much money.
A big part about this last year has been I added a Weed-It to my equipment lineup. I’ve used a neighbor’s Weed-It for several years, but this year I was actually able to get my own, which definitely makes it easier to experiment with. So I’ve been playing around a lot with that in terms of herbicide mixes and timings. I learned a lot of things this year. I’m excited to try some different things next year. But yeah, those are my big trials I had going on this year. For this next year, I’m going to be playing a lot with my fertility management, both in terms of timing and rates.
I switched my drill over from dry starter fertilizer to liquid, which gives me more flexibility into what I can put down. So we’re going to be experimenting with that this coming year. In the spring, I also plan to repeat my sorghum trial that I did this year. That one still remains to be harvested, so we’ll see how it turns out. But regardless of how it comes, I’m going to try something next year too.
Carol McFarland
So you mentioned your Weed-It. Some people are on Team Weed-It already. I think there’s a lot of interest in this technology, especially in the dry land fallow…
Jesse Brunner
Well I think to get the most out of the Weed-It, you need to plan for how you’re going to use it before you even get it out of the shed in the spring.
It’s things like I’m going to apply a residual herbicide this fall in my field that we planted the weed next year, which will hopefully allow me to go straight to the Weed-It next spring instead of having to start off with a broadcast application. So I’m excited to do that for this coming year. I built my Weed-It sprayer myself. I started with a 20-year-old flexi-coil wheel boom sprayer.
I spent the last year looking at other people’s Weed-It systems, both locally and there’s tons of Weed-It systems down in Australia. And so I had a really good idea what I wanted my system to be when it was done.
So I spent a lot of time getting it to that point. And once you start using things, then you realize, well, this thing didn’t work out or this thing did work out. This needs to be a little different. So the biggest thing I ran into initially was there’s limitations in how far away the nozzles can be from the cameras on the Weed-It. And so you can’t use the stock nozzle mounting location on the flexi-coil sprayer I had. So that required me to pretty much totally redesign the booms, move everything around.
The Weed-It is something that has to be part of your entire system, and you have to make choices on how to manage your fields before you go in there with the Weed-It to optimize its use.
I think one of the mistakes I made this year was I didn’t get aggressive enough with my rates fast enough. So the tricky part about the Weed-It is, especially in your spring glyphosate, is it doesn’t kill the weeds quickly.
And so if you have some bigger weeds and you didn’t use strong enough rates, they’ll get sprayed the second time around with the Weed-It, even though they are going to die. So you’re hitting stuff twice, it doesn’t need to be hit twice. And so I think I actually would have saved money by using more herbicide earlier. Those are probably my biggest takeaways from this year. Next year I also plan to change up my herbicide mixes with the Weed-It, trying to get some different mode of actions in there, some different combinations. I love the Weed-It, it definitely does what it claims to do. I average 80% reduction in my herbicide. That gives me the freedom and flexibility to use herbicide mixes that would not be economically viable any other way. So I want to fully leverage that in the future.
Carol McFarland
From what I understand, you’re really into your nozzle selection as well. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Jesse Brunner
So the nozzle selection on the Weed-It really is challenging because almost all the nozzles made out there are not appropriate for a Weed-It due to its narrow spacing. Since you have nozzles on inch or inch spacing, the broadcast sprayer, your overlap between your nozzles is a good thing. With the Weed-It, it’s not because when only one nozzle comes on, if you have a lot of overlap, you’re effectively getting only a fraction of the desired rate. And so finding nozzles with a narrow spray pattern has been challenging, especially since most of the ones that are available, you have very limited choices when it comes to droplet size. And so when I’m spraying glyphosate and it’s hot out, I don’t want to be putting out mist. I want to use low carrier volumes with large droplets. And finding nozzles to do that has been a real challenge.
There are some coming out of the market now and I was able to find some for this year that have worked pretty well for me. It’s definitely something I’m going to continue to play around with going forward. One of the other things I’m excited to try with the Weed-It is you can actually kind of put it in a, I call it dual mode or hybrid mode, where it applies a blanket rate of herbicide and then when it detects a weed, it applies a much higher rate. And so one of the biggest drawbacks to the Weed-It is, is you do have to spray more frequently. There’s a minimum size of weed that it can detect and it’s pretty small, but it’s not nothing.
And so instead of having to spray every four or five weeks, I have to spray every three or four. Well, maybe if I applied a low blanket rate of herbicide to get those weeds that have just emerged and are too small to be detected and then only apply a higher rate where there’s larger weeds, maybe I can stretch out that interval between sprays to what it used to be before with the broadcast sprayer.
Carol McFarland
And you can go to the lake more?
Jesse Brunner
I can go to the lake more.
The challenge there is there’s a cost to everything. It costs me money to run over the ground with the weed, even if I don’t apply any product. And if I do a blanket rate, well, that has a cost associated with it too. So how do we balance those numbers out to get me the optimal procedure that’ll give me the most bang for the buck?
Carol McFarland
Well, that’s a great segue into this next question. How do you determine your return on investment of a new practice and if it is something that you want to carry forward?
Jesse Brunner
I think the easiest way to determine your ROI, you have to start with having good numbers for what it costs you to do your current practices. And so I love spreadsheets more than any person probably should. And so I have a spreadsheet for every field where I document everything I do and I try to assign a cost to that, not only just my fuel burned or my man hours, my machine hours, my depreciation, everything. I try to have my cost of production is very, very well worked out. And so then when I want to try something, I can use strip trials and see like, well, what did this gain me in terms of yield? Yield is obviously the easiest thing to measure.
You know, primitivity has yield monitors in their combine and it’s easy to go out there and cut a test strip and see what it yielded. When it comes to things like herbicide, that’s a little more difficult because it’s hard to say for sure did this herbicide work better than that one. Even if you do strip trials, it’s a little more difficult to quantify that. But that is where things like strip trials do pay off. So I do try and get out there, you know, maybe got to walk the field and count weeds.
Carol McFarland
What are those things that you are looking for in monitoring over? It sounds like it kind of depends on what you’re trying.
Jesse Brunner
It depends on what you’re trying. For example, I guess something else I experimented this year is I tested some different adjuvants with glyphosate. And so I was lucky I had a field of canola stubble and this was in June. And so I had lots of my challenging weeds out there. There was a lot of prickly lettuce and volunteer canola and mustard. So I have a small sprayer on a loader tractor. And so I went out there and sprayed two ounces of Roundup on those just to see what would happen. And it’s actually surprising how much weeds you can kill with just two ounces of Roundup.
And I had three different adjuvants and it was very easy to see the difference in performance at that lower rate of herbicide. And that had helped me kind of narrow down what adjuvant I want to stick with going forward.
Carol McFarland
So I’m going to throw you under the bus a bit and say that a couple of years ago at the Direct Seed Conference, you were on a panel and something that really stood out was that as we talk about all of these different practices, whether they be for optimizing yield or soil health, whatever the management goal is, there’s always new products coming out. It really stood out to me the way you said what’s important is to try things on your farm and to make sure you get the most meaningful results. Do you want to expand on that?
Jesse Brunner
Yeah I think one thing that frustrates me most when talking to other growers about things they’ve tried is you get different fields, different years, and I got totally different results. How can you expect to learn anything if you can’t control your variables? And so when I do my trials, I really try to control as many of the variables as possible. I do a lot of strip trials, so it’s the same field, the same year, strips right next to each other. I don’t just do one strip of something. I try and get some replications in there. And then things like I have scales on my bank out wagon, which has been amazing.
The yield monitor in the combine is really good, but it is definitely not a scale. And so that helps me go out there and get good data for my results. And like I said previously, yield is probably the easiest thing to check, but there’s lots of other metrics out there too. I’ve added a protein monitor in my combine, which gives me another thing to look at in the crop. And for things like herbicides, there really is no replacement for going out there and just walking the field. But the same thing, I’ll try and find a field that’ll give me good conditions for getting good data off of it.
Carol McFarland
Excellent. And you actually worked with many of my colleagues at the university on various trials on your farm as well. It sounds like maybe they’re rubbing off on you.
Jesse Brunner
I think the word’s gotten out that I’m a glutton for punishment when it comes to these kind of things. I’ve worked with the research community in the past to do cover crop trials, and that was really informative. Unfortunately, cover crop doesn’t seem to be real applicable to my area just yet, but learning that… I mean, a lot of times learning that something doesn’t work is just as valuable learning that it does. And so there’s been lots of opportunities in the past where I’ve worked with the research community to help kind of figure things out such as that. And that’s probably the one off the top of my head that jumps out to me the most was the cover crop trials.
But I’ve also done a lot of variety trials, which those are always interesting, mostly with canola. We’ve done some experiments with peaola in the past, which also has been very interesting. I’m optimistic that someone’s going to continue that research going forward, because I feel like that’s a crop that has potential for this area.
Carol McFarland
It sounds like you do use these best practices, the strip trials and the replication and the data that’s important to you. How do you balance and plan for the time and building that into your workflow on a working farm?
Jesse Brunner
I think at the end of the day, you just have to make it a priority. I mean, when it comes to a lot of things, people are like, I don’t have time for that. And really what you’re saying is that’s not important enough for me to spend the time doing it. If you want to do trials and you want to do research, you just have to make them a priority. And they are a pain in the butt. I mean, when I’m out there, if I have a trial that’s something that’s implemented during seeding, you know, that’s a big hassle. And I don’t want to do it. But I just force myself to. And then it comes time to harvest it.
And like there have been times where I’ll do a trial and I’ll get the harvest. I’m like, no, I don’t got time for this. And every time I do that, I’m always disappointed later. I’m like, I did the work, I created the trial, and then when it came time to gather the data, I just didn’t do it. And so it really just comes down to making it a priority for yourself and just setting the time aside to do it. And making sure your trials are well labeled and indicated. That’s always a bummer to get out there. And it’s like, well, I know I have strip trials here somewhere. I guess I should have put flags out here or I guess I should have written down what the flags indicate. That’s definitely happened to me, too. So I do try to be very diligent in my note taking. My phone really is an extension of my brain. Pretty much everything I do gets written down in my phone so I can reference it later and don’t have to try and remember, well, which trial did I do in the first strip and so on.
Carol McFarland
Your protein monitor, is that part of some fertility work that you were doing?
Jesse Brunner
Yep. Yep. I was able to get a protein monitor as part of doing some fertility management work. And that’s been tremendously useful. I really feel like that closes the loop on dialing in our fertility rates and helps tremendously. I mean, fertility is our single largest expense. Anything we can do to do that better. And that doesn’t necessarily mean applying less fertility. It just means about applying it in a more productive fashion.
I’ve been very well-ready applying my fertility for quite a few years now. I definitely feel like that’s the way to go. It’s easier for us here in the Pacific Northwest versus places like the Midwest. In my fields, the highly productive part of the field is the highly productive part of the field year after year after year. Other places in North America, that’s not always the case. Sometimes their draw bottoms are really high yielding, but then they have a wet year and everything floods out and then they don’t yield so well or they get a lot of disease pressure. I understand why a very wide application isn’t such a big deal other places, but for here I think it’s huge. Especially considering the high amount of variability we have within our fields.
Carol McFarland
Yeah.
Jesse Brunner
I mean, up here it seems like you don’t have as much variation in topography as around Pullman, but you definitely still have plenty.
Carol McFarland
Oh yeah.
Jesse Brunner
Yeah. I mean, we’re definitely not Palouse Hills, but we do have hills. And I have, you know, my highly eroded areas and I have other places where the soil is deep. You know, looking at most of my fields, my highly productive areas yield five times as much as my low productivity areas. Crop is a…crops have variable rate removal. And so that’s why I think we need variable rate application.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, that makes good sense. What things do you do now as part of your standard management that started as trials?
Jesse Brunner
Basically everything. I mean, everything starts with a trial somewhere. It’s hard for me to pick out just one thing because there’s constant little refinements. Like even the direction that I seed and harvest in, you know, that started out as a trial as you know, what’s the optimal direction to do this. And that has relevance for me because of my…my crops are pretty much all seeded with disc drills and the direction the straw is lying on the ground impacts their ability to cut through it.
So I’m very deliberate about the direction that I harvest and then the direction that I see in the direction that I spray. And you know, that’s just one example. I’m literally, literally everything I do started with an experiment somewhere trying to figure out what was gonna be the right choice.
Carol McFarland
So you mentioned your drills. Do you have one favorite drill or do you have a variety of drills?
Jesse Brunner
So I have three different drills. It’s kind of different horses for different courses. I’m a strong believer that you’re not gonna find one drill that works best in all situations. Our seeding conditions are highly variable, whether that’s just seeding in the fall versus seeding in the spring or seeding different crops. The real challenge is definitely canola. It’s got that little itty bitty seed and it does not have a lot of push. And so the biggest things that we’ve learned with canola is you can’t have a drill that packs over the seed.
So I have one drill that all I do with it is seed my winter canola. And I use a different drill for seeding my weeds and pretty much everything else. And that gives me the flexibility to tailor each piece of equipment to its specific job and hopefully get the best results. Even with that, everything’s still a compromise. There is no perfect drill. I love and hate my drills, you know, on a seasonal basis.
Carol McFarland
What are some of the features you love about your canola drill?
Jesse Brunner
So my canola drill is a John Deere 1890 that I rebuilt and re-spaced one inch spacing. And I love the accuracy of the seed placement. It has row cleaners on it, which was the main motivation for getting that drill. Due to using the stripper header, I’m typically seeding my canola into some pretty heavy wheat stubble and so I want something that can move that out of the seed row. And the row cleaners do a pretty good job. It’s not perfect, but they’re definitely, definitely help a lot. And so the ability to move that straw out of the seed row has been hugely beneficial. And that’s really its claim to fame.
That combined with the fact that it does not pack any soil over the seed. It has a closing wheel at the back of the opener that kind of kicks some loose dirt over and up to close the trench to keep things from drying out, but doesn’t pack the seed at all. And that allows me to seed canola. I can seed canola over three inches deep and it still comes off just fine, which is handy on our drier years, which this year has not. We’ve been very fortunate, but more often than not, that is the case.
Carol McFarland
It sounds like you put a lot of thought into your drill if you’ve rebuilt the whole thing. What’s one thing you would really like to try but can’t right now because of some limitation, whether that’s equipment or precipitation or a lease agreement?
Jesse Brunner
Well, you know, there’s a lot of things I would love to try.
Carol McFarland
Cows?
Jesse Brunner
Not those, but there are many other things. We’ve had cattle in the past. I would love to have them on my ground if they were someone else’s problem.
Carol McFarland
Sorry. What are things that you would like to try?
Jesse Brunner
You know, I would be curious to try different crops. Sunflowers. I think those are really great. You know, the limitation right now is they don’t have any on-farm storage. And so when you harvest those, I can’t just haul them into my local elevator that’s five miles away. So they have to go to Spokane. That’s at least an hour and a half away. So without on-farm storage, there’s really no way for me to grow those. I’d be curious about some of these low disturbance soil compaction tools, you know, like Ecolotil. I know I have a compaction layer down there.
I don’t know how much it impacts my yields. And without having one of those tools go do some trials, I don’t have a good way of finding that out.
Carol McFarland
Sounds like you could talk to your conservation district on some sort of equipment share?
Jesse Brunner
Yeah, that might be one way to do it. I do have neighbors that have these tools. So unfortunately, due to all the precipitation we’ve had this year, this isn’t going to be a good year to try it out. But going forward, it is something I’d be curious to experiment with. There’s always, you know, different herbicide mixes. A lot of things with my fallow. That’s always in a constant state of refinement. And then my residue management. Right now, I mow my stubble in the spring. If I don’t mow the stubble, eventually it comes back to bite me.
It won’t be that next year, but maybe the crop after the next one, it comes back to get me. And so trying to find the, I don’t want to, I don’t want to mow that stubble anymore than I have to. So I’ve played around with a lot of stubble heights when I’m mowing, a lot of mowing timings. This last year, I actually mowed things twice going opposite directions and that worked awesome. It’s just slow and expensive. So trying to dial that in. I always have ideas.
Maybe if I could do a variable rate map for my mower height. You know, there’s a, there’s a quote out there that can adjust the height on the fly, ran off of your, your GPS system. So that’d be a cool thing to apply to the mower. I don’t know. I have lots of ideas.
Carol McFarland
I believe you. That’s great. Thank you. I haven’t heard you talk a lot about soil biology. How do you think about your soil biology in terms of your management?
Jesse Brunner
It’s definitely something that’s important to me. You know, I want to have robust soil biology because I think that that helps me in the long run. You know, if you take care of the soil, it’ll take care of you. And that is one of the reasons I switched from dry starter to liquid because that lets me put things down like molasses, humic and fulvic acid. It lets me incorporate things in the soil that I haven’t been able to do in the past. And considering looking at compost tea going forward. And so, you know, that’s something I’d like to experiment with. Yeah, I think the big thing is, is acknowledging that it’s not dirt, it’s soil. It’s a living breathing thing too. And so you need to be cognizant of what it needs and trying to take care of it.
Carol McFarland
Vital living ecosystem.
Jesse Brunner
Exactly.
Carol McFarland
Excellent. What are your biggest barriers to trying new things on your farm?
Jesse Brunner
You know, largely it’s time. And it just kind of depends on what it is. Time is the big one. You have to, so you have to make it a priority. And sometimes it doesn’t matter how much priority is there just isn’t time to do it.
Then you know, the things, it’s equipment. You know, in the case of sunflowers, I don’t have on-farm storage. With soil compaction, I don’t have an inline ripper. So I do try and find things that I can try each year. And I, you know, throughout the year, I have my list on my phone of all the things to try for next year. And a lot of those get implemented and some of them don’t, you know, they might wait, might take me another year before I get around to try it. But I don’t know, the financial limitations are always there.
Some things are cheap and easy, a lot of things aren’t. So you just have to decide how much effort do I really want to put into this. You know, I’ve made some very expensive mistakes and I’ll probably make some more in the future, but that’s just kind of part of the game.
Carol McFarland
Well, I think at one point you mentioned something about your decision making process around trying things as well and how you know when to try something in the first place, kind of in that cost benefit analysis versus then also carrying it forward into more of an adopted practice.
Jesse Brunner
Well, that really is the trick to farming. I think we always like to simplify things down to the point that’s like, okay, this practice is good or bad? Should I do this or should I not? And it’s not that simple. A lot of these practices, they might be the right thing to do 80% of the time or 50% of the time. And so it’s not as simple as does this work or is this the right thing to do? It’s figuring out when does this work? When is this the right thing to do? How can I know?
And, you know, the hard part is a lot of this is determined by what kind of year we have from a weather standpoint and you’re not going to know whether something was the right thing to do until long after it’s already been done. So I try and look at things and assign values. What is the probability this is the right thing to do? What is the benefit going to be? What is the cost going to be? Whether it’s successful or unsuccessful in that particular year, you know, and try and weigh all those things out and chart a path that way.
Carol McFarland
Sounds like you’d be a good person to advise some decision support tools.
Jesse Brunner
Maybe.
Carol McFarland
I think I know a guy.
Jesse Brunner
I do love spreadsheets and I, well, that’s one of the things I try to do. I try and track all these things as much as possible so that I can look at numbers and have some basis for which I can make a decision. It’s not just, well, I feel this happened or that seemed like it worked well this year, so it’ll probably work well next year. Like on my dry years, these are the things I do. On my wet years, these are the things I do.
Carol McFarland
Stack the odds in your favor.
Jesse Brunner
Stack the odds in my favor. I think probably the best example of that would be like putting in spring crop. Spring crop is probably twice. Well, I know it has twice the yield variability as my fall seeded crops do. And when it’s good, it’s really good.
I can make more on a per acre per year basis with spring crop than I can with fall seeded crops. But when it’s bad, it’s really bad. So what can I look at when it comes time to make that decision of should I put spring crop in this field or should I follow it to try and stack the deck in my favor? So I know, well, at this point, I have a greater than 50% chance that this crop is going to be very good, so I should put it in. Or nope. At this point, I can tell my odds of success are low. And while it’s still possible, it’s not a risk I want to take. So we’re not going to do it.
That’s also why I don’t like getting stuck into rigid crop rotations. I like to approach everything on a year by year basis. What are the market conditions for this crop? What are the weather conditions? What are my probabilities for success? And not just be like, oh, well, I already decided four years ago this is what I was going to put in when we got to this point in the calendar and the decision’s already been made and I have no flexibility.
Carol McFarland
Well, with that flexibility comes other tradeoffs like making sure you have good herbicide records. Is that correct?
Jesse Brunner
Yeah, absolutely. Well, that’s things like I try to avoid any herbicides that have a really long plant back restrictions just because I don’t want to get to a point where like, man, it should be really great to put a lot of canola in this year, but I can’t because the herbicides I used made that impossible. And so that definitely limits me. There’s herbicides that are very commonly used that I don’t just because I don’t like the restrictions going forward.
Carol McFarland
Also on that, the spring crop, you did mention your recrop and your experimentation around how to reduce the number of years in fallow and maybe you only have to fallow every one out of three years instead of every other year.
Jesse Brunner
Yeah, I mean, the Weed-It makes fallow a lot more economical and a lot more effective, but if I didn’t have to fallow at all, that’d be great. My goal is to grow as much canola as possible. The problem is you can’t put canola on canola. You can get away with it for a year or two, but I don’t like the practice and I haven’t done it. So right now, typically I’m growing winter wheat and then fallow and then canola and then fallow. And it’d be really great to kind of shorten that rotation a little bit. You get from one canola crop every four years down to one canola crop every three. Spring wheat would let me do that.
If I followed the canola with the spring wheat crop, then I could follow that and go back into canola again. But spring crops are unreliable and just something that’s not appropriate for them. So that’s why I’ve been experimenting with recrop winter wheat. I just have my third crop of that put in this fall and it’s looking pretty good. The crop I grew two years ago was great. This last year’s crop was not so great. So there’s a lot of experimentation there trying to figure out how to use that crop, which is something that hasn’t been traditionally used on this farm. Hopefully I can figure it out and if I get to a point where most of the wheat I grow is recrop winter wheat following canola, that’d be fantastic.
Carol McFarland
What’s the most fun thing about trying new stuff on your farm?
Jesse Brunner
Yeah, there’s a lot of fun things about it. I think it’s seeing those things that work. I might try different things and three of them will be total failures. Five of them will be no difference, but then two will be really promising. So it’s exciting to find that 20% that does work out really well and is going to change how I do things going forward.
I feel like farming is a constant game of trying to find these little incremental improvements. It’s not like I did something and I gained 20%. It’s more about finding things that gave me 2%. It’s the cumulative effect of all those little incremental improvements that do add up to a lot. You just got to go out there and work for it and find them.
Carol McFarland
You’re talking about big improvements or big differences or high variation in things that you try. What is the role of yield stability in your management?
Jesse Brunner
That’s always a goal. We love to have yield stability. The challenging part is the number one thing that affects my yield is the weather. It’s hard to do much about that. I do think it can be managed for…to a degree. That’s things like I’ve shifted my seeding date in the fall earlier and I keep moving it up every year as much as possible. Part of that motivation is I’m trying to beat the heat in June.
So if it’s going to be hot in June, well, if my crop is farther along before we get there, that decreases my susceptibility to the weather in the early summer.
Carol McFarland
So if you could ask a question to the research community, what is your most burning question that could be answered in that space?
Jesse Brunner
I don’t know if I have one single biggest question so much as it’s a lot of little questions. I’m curious about things such as what’s the optimal seeding date and seeding rate? What can we use to try and determine that? Because I suspect it’s not going to be the same thing year after year after year. A lot of different varieties affect that, both for canola and for wheat.
Looking at our fertility management, we have these tools for determining what is the so-called optimal rate of fertility, but I think those are pretty simplistic and they don’t take into account things like, well, if fertilizer is cheaper, should we use more of it due to the fact that our soil tends to hold on to our fertility a lot better than it does in other places in North America? So maybe we should try and bank some of that. Organic matter. Do we have the yield response curves to facility that the tools say we do? Or is that something that’s changed over time? Is that something that’s affected by variety? Trying to get these things dialed in better for each specific field. Whereas right now we’re using formulas that are applied to all of the Pacific Northwest. There’s a huge amount of variability in the Pacific Northwest.
Carol McFarland
So that’s kind of a fun… A lot of that site-specific information, and how much do we fine-tune that, both on the farm and at a regional level, is definitely one of potentially the challenges, right?
Thanks for sharing that.
Jesse Brunner
Well I feel like that’s the direction that agriculture is going to go. We’re going to get the ability to manage things on a lot more granular level. We used to fertilize at a fixed rate, so it was done on a field-by-field basis. I don’t farm field-by-field anymore. I farm acre-by-acre. And as technology improves, we’re just going to continue to shrink the size at which we can manage our fields on. All the way down to at some point I expect we’ll be farming on the plant-by-plant acre. That may be a long ways off in the future, but that’s definitely the direction things are going. And when you have that ability, that level of control and flexibility, it’s going to be pretty awesome.
Carol McFarland
You think that’s…If your kids come back to the farm, you think that’s their future?
Jesse Brunner
I do. I mean, just things like you look at salad imagery or drone imagery. It used to be a 10-meter pixel size with satellites, and that’s come down a long ways. Now that we have drone imagery, that can get down just about to the individual plant scale. It’s definitely headed in that direction. And so things like PWM-controlled nozzles, we can do per-nozzle rate control. So pretty soon we’re going to be able to apply our inputs on a lot more granular level with a level of control we haven’t had in the past. And a lot of these different things we’re doing are trying to help take some of the risk out of the things that you can’t control.
And again, it’s a process, it’s a journey. It’s made up of a lot of little different things that there is no one huge thing that fixes it all. You just have to keep working at it.
Carol McFarland
That sounds like a good note to end the interview on. Do you have anyone you would like to nominate to be on the podcast?
Jesse Brunner
Sure. I would nominate Brady Hayden.
Carol McFarland
Okay. I’ll look forward to following up with that. Thank you so much for sharing your experience, your on-farm trials with me today and with our listeners. I’m really glad to have you on the podcast.
Jesse Brunner
Thank you. Happy to be here.