In the first of a two-part episode, host Carol McFarland visits with cropping systems innovator and award-winning conservationist Mr. Wade Troutman. Check out episode one of the two-part interview to hear about his adventures trying things on his farm in Bridgeport, WA – from being one of the first to grow canola in WA, to direct marketing of organic ‘Wade’s Wheat’, finding sunflower pans for the combine, and how ag and his neighborhood have evolved over his decades of On-Farm Trials!
Carol McFarland
Today, we are on Open Heart Farms, LLC with Mr. Wade Troutman. Thank you so much for having me out. It’s very exciting to be able to speak with you today. You’ve got a beautiful view out here with the river and all the sagebrush and there’s orchards. It’s a great place you got up here outside of Bridgeport.
Wade Troutman
Well thank you. That’s why…one of the big reasons, the perks of living here is I really love this country.
Carol McFarland
Excellent. Would you share a bit more about yourself, your farm and who you farm with?
Wade Troutman
Well I’m in my 70s. I’ve farmed all my life. I was a child out with my grandpa and stuff. And so I’ve got to see the farm transition over all these years. All I ever wanted to do was farm. Our farm wasn’t very big and so I really didn’t have an opportunity. There wasn’t the income for a couple of generations to live on the farm and I was encouraged to get a job elsewhere. So I did go to college but all I wanted to do was farm. I came back to [the] farm with all this knowledge I had from college and my father and I disagreed on a lot of stuff. And apparently we’re both very stubborn.
Carol McFarland
Well you have to be to farm out in this country, I think.
Wade Troutman
We ended up with a very good relationship. We just found out we couldn’t farm together and so an opportunity came up for me to lease some ground and it was only 300 acres. It wasn’t enough to make a living in this country. And work construction in the winters and stuff to make ends meet and I was very lucky because the opportunity to farm on a shoestring and without very little capital behind you was possible in the 70s.
Carol McFarland
No million dollar combine?
WadeTroutman
No million dollar combine. I think I had a Graham-Hamey chisel plow that [I] used and I ran sweeps on it and did the majority of my farming with an old 820 John Deere tractor, what they called Popping Ginny and I might have had a total of investment with that and an old 95H of maybe $10,000 tops. And I could get $10 an hour working construction which was a lot of money back then. I was able to start farming and then we’ve just built from there and this country is maybe inch moisture.
It’s a couple thousand feet in elevation but it’s fairly far north and the glacier covered it and left a lot of rock on the ground and because it’s not the best ground in the world, when I was starting farming, when people retired and their children had left or they didn’t have children, there wasn’t a lot of competition to lease other ground because people would look at it and say, who in the hell would want to farm that? And I took the ground that nobody else wanted. I know I did one early soil test and it had .3% organic matter in it.
Carol McFarland
That’s very low.
Wade Troutman
Yes, and it was blowing. We have very abrasive soils here, a mix of volcanic ash and loesss. And I used to joke that the only way to hold your moisture is just to turn the rocks over in the fall and usually it’s wet under where the rocks are. That was my opportunity, if you really want to farm, I’m hoping you can still make that opportunity. And it also makes you a lot more innovative because you don’t have the capital to buy the fancy equipment, you don’t have the assets or safety net to fail, although there’s a better safety net now with crop insurance and things like that. But that challenge, and it’s one of the reasons we like to farm is because of the challenge of it. If anybody could do it, then I don’t think it’d be any fun.
Especially out here, I mean really, you’re talking inches of rainfall and that’s probably very little summer rainfall and all of these conditions that we get out here in eastern Washington, you get some of the best of it.
Yeah, well, and the thing is almost all of our precipitation comes in snow. It’s very unlikely, I mean if it rains a half an inch in the summer, we’re just happy as can be. We have snow from November to first to April, at least into March, and we’ve got snow mold, but we also have the type of soil that…most of that moisture will go into the ground. Where our soil erosion problems come from is more from the wind.
So the management history has gone from over the times when I grew up, the first chisel plows started coming out in the country and this whole concept of leaving more stubble and not burning the ground so you can get a rod weeder through it. I was there, as that transition happened and as machinery began to develop and I worked for a neighbor who got the first cultivator in the country. So I’ve seen that and then as we developed better equipment, then we started farming the ground to death, in my opinion. We got really good at cultivating.
We had decided that our ground was too fragile for that and I’ve been experimenting with no-till back in the 80s, I think. Because the technology hadn’t been developed enough, it was very, very difficult to do here. Now, it’s pretty much all in direct seed, has been for maybe 15 years. Anyway, the philosophy or the management style all depends on two things, how much time you got, and how much money you got. So the goal is to make enough money to farm again next year.
Carol McFarland
So that leads into my first question for you: how would you describe your management goals and how they might be different from the whole farm by crop, by different fields, and of course, over the years? Can you talk a little bit more about what motivates your decisions?
Wade Troutman
There’s a lot of factors going on and one thing is because our weather is very variable, we’ll go into periods of drought, we’ll have some lack of snow cover some years. So adaptive management is the key. You got to kind of listen to Mother Nature and see what she’s going to give you this year and kind of guess how it’s going to go. I think you always have to be positive. You can’t say, well, it’s never going to rain again, You try not to ever go for the highest yield potential because that can bite you really bad if you’ve laid a lot of cash out to raise that 100 bushel crop on ground that you’re lucky if you raise 50, you’re happy.
So you adjust to what you see going on around you. And then trying to stay current. Maybe the main goal I saw 40 years ago was we didn’t have any organic matter. And then I realized we were compacting our soils. And so a lot of the management is how much of this can we fix in a lifetime? How much can we go back to when my grandpa came out and it was Virgin Prairie? How far, because they raised pretty good wheat for the first 15-20 years. No fertilizer, very little inputs, and they were successful. And then as far as I’m concerned, they lost the organic matter. And it’s been a battle to get back to that point. And so I guess we [will] manage for the future. We try, even though you’re caught up into making a profit this year, you still, the long-term goal is always the underlying management factor.
Carol McFarland:
Well, you did say that one of your main goals is to not go broke.
In that vein, what experiments or trials do you currently have going on your farm?
Wade Troutman:
Well, we’re part of a crop rotation study where we’re trying to find summer annuals that will grow here. So working with a group of younger farmers, they seem to all be younger than me now, and that wasn’t the case. Just seemed like a few years ago, but so we had decided, a group of us, to raise some sorghum and we got WSU and ARS contributing on this. So it’s been a fun project. The best part of it is to sit down with growers in Eastern Washington and try to figure this out as a group instead of just as an individual. And so that’s been the really fun part of this crop rotation experiment. And crop rotation is right up my alley because I have been trying to find something else other than wheat to raise all my life.
Carol McFarland
Well, legend has it that you were one of the first people in Washington state to start
growing canola.
Wade Troutman
That’s correct. A lot of this ground that I took over that I had the opportunity to lease was contaminated with feral rye. And they planted that in the depression because you’d have enough feed for the horses and enough seed to put in the ground for next year. And it worked. It helped them survive through the 30s, but then the rye had gone feral and the ground was polluted with it. So I raised a lot of spring wheat and it’s very hard to do in this country because it’s rocky, because we don’t have spring rains or June rains we can rely on. And so I just started researching and asking around and, well, Curtis Hennings down in Ritzville, they were talking about canola. So I wanted to try some.
We planted some really on the worst places where I knew the rye would just sod in the ground. and we’d spray it with an assure-two and by golly it worked. And so I wasn’t raising it for typical rotation reasons. I was raising it to get past a weed that was just totally out of control. And so it turned out to my amazement and surprise that it was doing some other stuff I never planned on and that was I didn’t know I had a tillage pan until I saw the roots start j-hooking. And I’m saying oh we got a problem here. Well, we can’t subsoil in this country because it’s full of rocks left from the glacier. And so, I’m saying, well, we got a natural subsoiler here. And it started breaking up the hard pan. And even though I was just hoping to break even on the crop, there was no crop insurance on it at the time and stuff.
We kept planting acres and getting a little braver every year. And after we started planting enough acres in our rotation, we were eliminating the need for spring wheat which was not a profitable crop here. And it was the subsequent wheat crop that you could drive by and the neighbors could drive by that you just knew it was better. You could tell from the road that it was just a healthier crop. That piqued my interest more than profit because that’s kind of an ego thing.
I’m sure your neighbors love you.
Then we kept good enough records that over time we thought we were making more money off the canola than we were off the wheat. I’ve worked with people like Frank Young and stuff to get the crop insured in this county. Originally the literature said that you can’t raise canola under 14 inches.
And when I was first interested in it, Jack Brown down at U of I was the only one breeding it and he was doing it for the Palouse country for a higher rainfall area. And so I realized it was competitive up here because we weren’t going for the huge yields. We just needed…we wanted something that would give us a similar cash flow as wheat did. And actually, I’ve kept records over the years and we have found out that we’ve made more money on the canola than we have on wheat and now you drive through this country, you see canola all over the place. So I think at one time I had 10% of the canola acreage in the state and now it’s like just a drop in the bucket.
Carol McFarland:
Having a place to market it though kind of makes a difference, doesn’t
it?
Wade Troutman
And that was a big game changer, that and federal crop insurance because the first crop we shipped to Lethbridge, Alberta. And so if we got seven cents on the farm we were doing good.
Carol McFarland
You must have seen some really big benefits from canola. Your commitment really shows through there.
Wade Troutman
So I think all these trials, if you don’t think you’re doing trials you are. I don’t know of a farmer out there. I remember when they brought out fertilizer anhydrous-ammonia when I was a kid, you know they were trying. Well if you put 20 pounds and then do a 40 pound test strip on your own farm and people would do that. Well at a nickel a pound I can’t afford 40 pounds of nitrogen but they’d try it anyway even though it was going to cost them $2 an acre. God I wish those days were back.
Carol McFarland
Those are some different numbers aren’t they?
Wade Troutman
You know, the economics were the same and there was a stretch but people were interested in trying. It doesn’t matter how much money you have because actually…poverty or you know how do I hang on here another year. I got to try something else because what I’m doing is not working and what if I try this crop or what if we do this to the soil. What I’ve seen farmers do all my life and you figure out what works for you because you know doing the same thing is not working. Some of the stuff I guess we tried, we tried before there was a market and I think some people need the security of a market. I’m just always one that I wonder if I can get this to grow. And so you do what sparks joy in your life and one of the things I’m just very curious in this, like, can I get this to grow and find out some of the benefits later. And you know if it works eventually other people will start growing it too and the market does develop. I try to stay away from really closed markets where, like, clubs and stuff because even though it might assure you a profit in the short term, in the long term we’re still in a global marketplace. So, that whole system has to be developed.
Carol McFarland
Do you want to tell your Wade’s Wheat story? You’re talking about developing markets and it seems like you had your own actual direct marketing experience.
Wade Troutman
Well we and actually I give my wife a lot of credit for this, it was a time when we didn’t have any cash. couldn’t borrow money. and so we were trying to figure out a way to bring some additional cash on the farm and so, kind of out of desperation, I was going well. It’s not going to be that hard to go organic because we’re not using that many chemicals in the first place. We went and got in the car and drove to Seattle and we started going, knocking on doors from bakery to bakery and seeing if there was anybody interested in organic wheat.
We were a little naive. There was probably a market there somewhere but we didn’t know where so and then we found a baker that had his own mill and he was game for it. And so we started certified organic dark northern spring and we shipped it directly to Seattle to his bakery. His expense was enlarging his door because the one ton totes we were shipping wouldn’t fit through his original door. As he made his bread there he called the loaves from my farm Wade’s Wheat.
And so I’d been farming for quite a while at the time and I’d gone over to visit the bakery and I’d just shipped some but I beat the shipment over there and he’d ran out and I was talking to him and yeah the truck will be here in the morning and this woman come in and she wanted a loaf of Wade’s Wheat. And he says well we don’t have any on hand right now, we will tomorrow, but Wade’s right here.
And we were introduced and she thought we were pulling her leg and then we finally convinced her but for me being a wheat farmer that is the first time I’d ever met a customer of mine and that was kind of cool. And that relationship of direct marketing directly to the baker worked fairly well for me and it brought some much needed cash in at the time and it was profitable even though we were only, you know our yields weren’t that great but we were able to maintain them. The biggest expense was bringing in organic fertilizer, sourcing that all had to be shipped in and then when he retired I could not find that direct access. It was more going through a miller that did organic grain that sold it to a baker that did stuff in volume and then the profit margin went down because too many people were in between.
Doing organic I liked the concept, I didn’t like all the tillage that needed to be done to control the weeds. The direct marketing was very necessary, very good at the time but it’s really hard to establish its personal relationships completely and you almost, I’ve known quite a few people that do it and you almost have to have a person doing it full time developing those relationships and marketing. That’s the tough part of that because I think most of us just are happy places on the tractor or and we like to crawl on the tractor and things are looking good out here. You need to do what sparks joy in your life and there’s nothing like getting on the tractor when you have the luck of pulling into the field and the yield beats expectation and the combine is just growling with the load of wheat or whatever you’re pulling to there. I mean we live for that, let’s face it.
Carol McFarland
Well and you know as far as I can tell it looks like your office has a pretty good view from the tractor cab.
Wade Troutman
Yes it does, we’re up here and we’re right next to the mountains.
Carol McFarland
You talked a little bit about fertility and the organic ground. Can you talk about what you learned from that trial?
Wade Troutman
Well for one thing we learned that to throw the handbook on fertility out because you know they say you need this much nitrogen to raise 14% DNS. Well we were never even coming close to putting enough nitrogen on the ground from organic sources but we were always hitting protein. And so it probably gave me the realization other stuff is going on in the ground and even though I had gone to college and had microbiology and stuff I don’t know in the late 60’s if the knowledge at the university was limited but I do know today, that there was a big chunk of the picture that we couldn’t see that was missing on production. And I still haven’t figured out today all the functions that are going on in the ground and I think some really smart people still haven’t figured that out but just to know that there’s more to what the eye can see down there is you have to reach that epiphany and this whole idea of feeding the critters in the soil, that’s a really new concept in agriculture because when I started farming it was so many pounds of N and most of us put it on as anhydrous ammonia which was the cheapest and it worked great for a while but then things started going south and we needed more and more and getting less results. We weren’t getting that first few years that people started using anhydrous ammonia I mean the yields just jumped but then what we found out is the pH changed in the soil. So on the organic end what I didn’t like was the amount of tillage we had to do to control weeds.
The weed control is the hardest thing to do in organic and unless you got the time and money to go out there and hand pull the weeds it gets really, really tricky. I like what you’re saying though about the soil, I keep going back in my mind to just the definition of soil health as a vital living ecosystem and how do we support that moving forward with all of the other management practices that play into that.
Carol McFarland
Do you want to talk a little bit about what experiments you have currently going on on your farm?
Wade Troutman
I’ve always got some experiments going on, some intentional and some not. I mentioned that we’re raising some sorghum this year. It is the crop rotations I’m interested in. I have another maybe 80-90 acres of sunflowers in. I tried those last year and they were a complete failure. Talking I think to Professor Lyon, he was saying that they need lots of subsoil moisture and so when we planted them last year we didn’t have any moisture in the second foot and so even though we got three inches of rain in June, which was an anomaly, it grew weeds instead of sunflowers.
So you never want to try something just once and say, well, that doesn’t work. So we come back and tried it again this year and I look like a genius out there. I mean it’s just the perfect looking crop. We haven’t cut them yet but I mean they look good and pretty weed free and the rows, I mean it’s just a great stand. It’s everything you want. And we did have four or five feet of snow for several months this winter and so I think the subsoil was the moisture so I learned that from there. Don’t bother if you don’t have the subsoil moisture to begin with. Not don’t bother growing them.
It is again taking the cues from nature and so the more diversity of things you can grow and then as you increase your knowledge of, well these are the conditions they need, as we get a different weather system, you know, if we’re in an El Nino period or climate change, whatever you want to call it, you can take your best guess at it and start adapting. this year, the canola made it through the winter fine. We did get hit with snow mold for the first time for a long time and the winter wheat suffered and growing up as a wheat farmer, I mean a good crop of winter wheat, it’s still a joy and there’s nothing like it in our minds but those crops in rotation, what we’re really figuring out is it gives some boost in the ground and I don’t know all the science behind it. I don’t need to know, I just know that it happens and finding crops that will grow and then finding markets for these crops is something that I just really enjoy trying to do and doing and seeing the results but I do know you can’t just make up your mind in one year and you also need to deal with the consequences down the road and it’s just like rotating your herbicides, who knew that during the drought that Beyond would have a 36 months plant back restriction, we saw a lot of damage out there from chemicals that were supposed to have disappeared that didn’t that’s the other thing going down the road is, so you’ve raised canola for myself for at least 30 years, what are the long term consequences, there’s some positive ones but there you always got to watch for some negative ones.
One thing I never had to worry about when I first started planting it was seed pod weevils, now we have to check for them all the time because there’s enough acres and they’ve came in which requires you spraying an insecticide which well how does that affect the bees because we’re surrounded on the riverside by orchards and at the same time they’re pollinating the orchards and they get really mad if you kill their bees so you get all these other challenges that when you start you never conceived of them and so it’s important to keep monitoring the changes because I’m in my seventies I’ve never seen one year I can’t ever go back and say yeah this is just like it was in 64 because my memory is a little foggy of how it was in ‘64 but it’s also no it’s not the same every year has been different and so I know we got off subject but anytime you’re doing a trial don’t try it for just one year because I guarantee you things will be different next year.
Carol McFarland
Well I think you know from a research standpoint you know you hear about how do we replicate right and in order to make it an experiment meaningful we have to see what the trial does over a range of landscape conditions or field conditions as well as over time and those climatic conditions and capturing that year-to-year variability so I mean it sounds like you’re a researcher Wade
Wade Troutman
Well it’s I think every farmer out there has something that really they get into they enjoy that’s on the farm I’ve seen people just completely rebuild a piece of equipment and stuff and they enjoy the challenge and they enjoy the results and they got confidence that yeah if we tweak this and do this and add a few RPMs here this will be a better machine and you know everybody has their own little thing that sparks joy and I think I just like my curiosity always gets the best of me and I wonder if I can grow this because technically I shouldn’t be growing anything in this harsh of an environment and so sometimes it’s a challenge that excites me it’s that part that it’s maybe like a hobby where you know yeah I’m gonna try safflower so I’m gonna try this because nobody else knows how to do it so I’m as knowledgeable as anybody else.
Carol McFarland
Well that is one of the reasons I’m very excited to have you as a guest, thanks again for talking with me about all of this. Can I ask you a little bit about what you’re seeding all of these different things with? What kind of drill?
Wade Troutman
Right now we’re using a Bogall foot drill with the narrowest shanks I could find because I’m in doing the least amount of soil disturbance I can I’m pulling it behind a flexicoil cart that I had bought back in the 90s and it was before John Deere even had a cart or anybody else and the thing is not perfect but I make it work and so you’re dealing with all these seed sizes and we do cover crop experiments I’m still trying to figure that one out. I’ve gotten I don’t know you just work with one piece of equipment long enough and you just know Its weaknesses and you kind of tweak around those and that’s the small seeds are I’ve got that down to pretty much the science where I just know exactly where to set that drill the sunflowers were probably the most difficult because you’re only putting you know they’re calling for so many like 18,000 seeds per acre well we deal in pounds per acre. I think that’s in my experience was one of the things that made seeding like cover crop mix a little bit challenging because we’ve got all the different seeds and they’re all seeded in different units.
And on those when you mix them together the little seeds want to run out before the big seeds and so all these things are somewhat difficult but I think if you want to do it you can do it and you don’t I mean we don’t run planters in this part of the country that would work perfectly except for all the rocks in the field and stuff and so I’m curious if I can find one cheap enough I may try it but then that will probably bring its own Problem. we know what will run through our rocky ground right now and it’s trying to I think guys will the more equipment minded guys if they see sunflowers or something like that starting to be oh there’s some money in that they’ll figure out a way to get the planter through the ground.
Wade Troutman
So actually on the podcast one of the first episodes was a conversation with Dusty Walsh and he talks about his adventures in using a planter including to seed sunflowers. If you’re harvesting sunflower and safflower and sorghum, what are you harvesting with?
Wade Troutman
Well most of them you know with just a 97-70 rotor works fine most combines although they’re built I think now for corn more than for wheat but you can adjust them for all sorts of different crops it’s it’s for the sunflowers we did have to take the reel off and put on some sunflower pans they call it and by the way if you go google sunflower pans you will get get Target every store in the country trying to sell you pot pans for the kitchen with a sunflower on it.
Carol McFarland
Well those sound pretty. Did you pick any of those up?
Wade Troutman
No but I got like million hits for those and I couldn’t get any for you know I’m saying well maybe I’m calling them the wrong name or something but they’re just a metal attachment you put on your header to guide the sunflowers in and they are called pans but it’s not the first hit you’re going to get on google on where to find them.
Carol McFarland
Hey, there’s a good tip! Thanks for that, Wade.