In this episode we hear from WSU Extension Specialist Aaron Esser, and land-owner cooperator Howard Nelson of Creston, WA. In this interview on the WSU Wilke Research Farm in Davenport, WA our guests discuss liming trials along with soil pH as it relates to maintaining soil health. We also hear about a long history of collaboration from work on winter peas, to decision-making for the advisory committee for the Wilke Farm.
Carol McFarland
Today we’re with Mr. Howard Nelson and Mr. Aaron Esser on the Wilke Research Farm outside of Davenport, Washington, and looking very much forward to talking more about their on farm trials as a research collaboration in answering questions important to cropping systems innovation in the region. Welcome to the podcast, you two.
Howard Nelson
Hi.
Aaron Esser
Hello, Carol.
Carol McFarland
Thanks so much for joining us. Howard, would you please start by talking a little bit about your farming conditions on your plants, which is not in fact, this Wilke Research Farm.
Howard Nelson
Yeah. So, I grew up on a farm four miles south of Creston, and so I’ve never strayed far from home. I went to school at WSU and got my degree in agronomy. Worked in agribusiness for a number of years, was offered kind of my dream job at Central Washington Grain Growers, which later became Highland Grain Growers. And, so I worked with alternate crops, and I got to work with a lot of great farmers that made some friendships and was able to possibly help them with some issues they were facing.
Carol McFarland
Right. Looking very much forward to hearing more about that. And also, your place outside of Creston. Aaron, do you want to talk a little bit about yourself, your work, and this place?
Aaron Esser
Yeah, I’ve been with WSU now for WSU Extension for twenty-six years. My primary focus has been in the Lincoln and Adams Extension region area here. I do stray outside of the region once in a while. Anything really focused on wheat production. And today we’re at the WSU Wilke Research Extension Farm, as you mentioned, and we’re– this is a facility I’ve been director of now for fifteen years, or something like that, and it’s been fun.
Carol McFarland
I bet most of the people listening to this podcast probably already know, because you are a bit of a local legend yourself. Thanks for all the work you do. I know how important it is to our region’s cropping system.
Howard Nelson
Yeah, whenever I needed a presenter at a winter meeting, Aaron was always there.
Aaron Esser
Yes. Always fun.
Howard Nelson
Yeah.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. No, you always get the good– I’ve had you at some of those– he always gives some really good feedback, too. So he’s great. So we’re here to talk about some collaborative on-farm trials. I understand you guys have some stuff going on.
Howard Nelson
Yeah. So I retired from Highline Grain Growers in twenty-twenty, and I decided, you know, I’ve never done any agronomic work on my own farm. So, I’d seen some pH issues in different areas, and I thought, well I should grid sample my fields. And so, I bought a four wheeler and got a little pH stick, and a soil probe, and off I went grid sampling my fields. And, I was disappointed to find that I did have low pH issues on my farm.
Carol McFarland
You know, Howard here, some people golf when they retire.
Howard Nelson
No, I fish. I’ve had too many shoulder surgeries for golfing.
Carol McFarland
I’m gonna measure pH. That sounds like a good way to spend some time.
Aaron Esser
Hey, you just told me how much you fish, so…
Howard Nelson
I’ve been busy.
Aaron Esser
Yeah, and you also failed to mention the app that you use on your phone to figure out how to grid sample on one acre grids, and is probably the only field here in the PNW that’s been one acre grid sampled.
Howard Nelson
Yeah, I’m kind of a nerd when it comes to that kind of stuff.
Carol McFarland
Well, we like that. You’re in the right place.
Aaron Esser
Nothing wrong with being an ag nerd.
Howard Nelson
My kids are always picking on me.
Carol McFarland
So let’s dive into it. Would you talk a little bit about what motivated you to do these very intensive one acre scale grid samples?
Howard Nelson
I kept running into these pH issues over time at different instances across the Pacific Northwest. The first instance was we had a triticale program, and all of a sudden I had all this production coming out of the Rockford, Washington area, and in visiting with those growers it was one of the few crops that would still grow out there because the pH’s were so low. And then I started to see other things, but it’s like I wasn’t connecting the dots, you know? I saw the fall peas that I was working with. They didn’t nodulate, and my first assumption was that the rhizobia was bad. Well, it wasn’t that the rhizobia was bad, it was that the soil pH’s were low. And so, it was affecting the nodulation on the peas. And then I just happened to plant a trial– winter wheat– and I planted triticale as the border of the wheat trial, and ph my gosh, it was night and day. The triticale just looked beautiful. The wheat was sick and wasn’t doing well. And so that’s when I started to finally figure out that it was just straight up soil pH issues that I was seeing.
Carol McFarland
Would you briefly give me a range of when you kind of started to notice that in your professional career? Like, what was the time frame?
Howard Nelson
Oh, gosh. So I worked for Highline in Central for twenty-one years, so I probably started seeing the peas, probably around two thousand and six or seven. And like I say, I wasn’t smart enough to figure it out. And then, the triticale plot trial was about two thousand sixteen. And so I started doing some work with Columbia River Carbonates. They had a liquid lime that we tried, but it was really hard to work with it. If you didn’t keep using it, it would set up and you’d have calcium and all your fertilizer lines. So, so it kind of went to the wayside at that point, because I was approaching retirement and I was trying to finish up some of the projects I had going on.
Carol McFarland
I’m looking forward to hearing a bit more about the peas, too. Aaron, you’ve got some. I understand you’ve been working a bit with Howard on his lime trials at his place, and also you’ve got some trials here on the Wilke Farm.
Aaron Esser
We’ve been– I mean, Howard and I have been cooperating for years. Going back to the Central Washington days. We used to have the northern Lincoln County field tours, a joint tour between them and WSU, so we’ve always had a lot of great collaboration. We established a lime study here at the Wilke Farm back in two thousand and seventeen, and it too was with Columbia Carbonates, Columbia River Carbonates using their liquid lime. And I wish I would have talked to Howard sooner about that stuff. If you don’t keep it agitated and moving because we were using a spoke wheel applicator to apply it, and each one of those fertilizer tubes plugs up and there’s like seventeen small tubes on every one of those spokes on the fertilizer applicator. It wasn’t fun. But we did get the trial in, and it’s been interesting, and the thing that makes the liming, I think for this reason a little bit more difficult is we never see the results per se that the textbook says we should be seeing, and I have a couple theories of that now. One of them is, you know, all these varieties that we’ve been planting around here are all being selected on ground that we have around here. So we may have bred in there a little bit of the tolerance, and triticale may have come from a different area where it was developed and that’s why you might be seeing a bigger jump in triticale. Although it too is a– in general is a tougher crop, but our soils can’t keep going in this. We got a you know, we can’t just put our head in the sand and say it’s going to go away or it’s not my problem let the next generation figure it out, and we need to get it figured out and how we can do it and still maintain, both short term and long term economic viability.
Carol McFarland
Well, I know one of the questions, and I’ve talked with both of you guys about it since we’ve recruited both of you to be beta testers for the updated lime requirement calculator that we’re going to be putting on the Small Grains website shortly, but it’s just a question of how much to put down. And I know I’ve given you a hard time at least one sort of field day, Aaron, and it got me into my own sort of trouble.
Howard Nelson
Well, I guess I can tell you from the trial that we had, We have got to go the full rate. You can’t skimp and you can’t think, oh, I can’t spend this money because you’re going to spend the money and get no results. You’ve got to apply the recommendation that comes off of the soil test. And then the second thing that we saw was it needs to be incorporated. If you want to see, benefit in your lifetime, because if we have this stratified pH…
Carol McFarland
In no-till systems.
Howard Nelson
In no till systems, and you have to get the lime down into that four to eight inch zone because that’s the hold up right there. That’s the zone that the roots when they hit that they just– the plant just goes into shock.
Carol McFarland
And it sounds like one of the ways that you were able to measure that in your grid sampling was with a portable pH meter. Is that how you approached that?
Howard Nelson
Yeah. So I used the portable pH meter to lay out my zones. And so then once I figured the zones out, I came back and took soil tests and sent them to a soil lab, because if you’ve ever used those pH sticks, they wander. Sometimes you wonder what they’re doing because it takes so long, you know, to get it to settle in on a number. And so basically what I did is I just developed the zones, and then I followed that up with actual soil tests to a soil lab.
Carol McFarland
How much difference did you see between your zones? Did you see a lot of variability across your fields?
Howard Nelson
Oh yeah. So all my fields have exposed caliche knobs on the hills, and so all those areas were pH seven. Plus, they’re not as productive as the rest of the ground. So those zones are going to get zero lime. The mid range zone was really small. There’s hardly anything in that mid range zone. Almost everything went to a high rate. So we either had a zero or a high rate basically.
Carol McFarland
You said that’s being delivered like as we speak?
Howard Nelson
Yeah. Last Friday they started delivering six hundred and twenty tons of lime. And sometime in October, they’ll, they’ll get it applied. I just need to get the zones mapped out so they can get it in their computer system on the applicator, and so, so they can hit the rates that I’d like.
Aaron Esser
Who’s applying that?
Howard Nelson
Cascade Ag.
Aaron Esser
Cascade. Okay.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. So when you decide how much lime to apply, what’s your experience with trying to– I’m going to call you out Aaron– what’s your experience with putting down, like, the right rate of lime?
Aaron Esser
So in my experience, I mean, my background is in economics, not soil.
Carol McFarland
I gave you the “I love soil” stickers, though, because I know you do love soil.
Aaron Esser
I do love soil, and that’s part of the thing I think farmers find frustration in is with this whole process, acidic soils and trying to find a solution for it and everything else is, you know, we need the calculator to figure out how much we have or how much we need. And that has to be step one. You talk about the lab that gave you numbers. She’s going to tell you that those numbers aren’t quite tested for our soils, per se. Well, it depends on which test it was, because we have done the research on this. Yeah, and it does depend on what test. And I don’t think the lab you were using was using that test.
Howard Nelson
He did because I requested him to use the modified mehlich test, and I called Carol. I called her up on the phone. She sent me her master’s thesis.
Carol McFarland
Oh you poor thing.
Aaron Esser
It was used!
Howard Nelson
I highlighted areas of that Carol.
Carol McFarland
Oh man! I know, like, two or at least three people that have read it.
Howard Nelson
No, it was very valuable to me, but it still didn’t have the calibration of the field, actual field work. And so that was what, you know, Aaron and I did. We put this trial on in twenty-twenty. Aaron came down with his equipment and he broadcast it on, and then part of the trial was disked, so it was incorporated. And, the first year in winter wheat, there was no, no yield difference. This year we had a five percent increase where we put the recommended rate, and it was tilled.
Carol McFarland
So you saw some results.
Howard Nelson
Yeah. And five percent for me is enough. I don’t want to have a ten percent loss, because, as we’ve talked, the lime works on geologic time and it doesn’t work on my time.
Carol McFarland
It’s not a fertilizer input. It’s not a this season thing. And that it’s hard. I know that from an economic standpoint, that makes it even more of a challenge.
Howard Nelson
So, from my viewpoint, it’s like, I have a house and I’m not going to wait till the roof leaks before I change the roof. You know, when, when it starts to rain, you know, I want to have all my ducks in a row and I want to not have any issues. And the other part is I want to leave this to my family and my kids, and I don’t want to give them problems. I want them to enjoy the land. And, you know, there’ll be struggles I’m sure, but I want to hand it to them in the best shape, because, you know, my one daughter’s a school teacher. My other son’s a lawyer. They don’t know anything about soil chemistry.
Carol McFarland
I mean, honestly, like, they’re probably better for it. Like, soil chemistry really is fully Alice down the rabbit hole. And you’re right, that, as fun as it was to be a graduate student I did have to draw the line somewhere. And doing a multi year geologic time level follow up of ground truthing of some of that work I did leave to someone else, so thanks for being part of that. Aaron, you’ve been making some facial expressions throughout this part of the conversation.
Aaron Esser
I always make facial expressions, that’s nothing new, Carol.
Carol McFarland
But I had to describe it for the listeners,
Aaron Esser
Howard said it beautifully on, you know, the basis of a landowner and a farmer and stuff and how they really want to leave the land better for the next generation, you know, and that’s something the general public doesn’t understand or anything else. They think that we’re out, you know, degrading the land and stuff and putting pollutants out there, but that’s not the case at all. Howard is very passionate about what he does, much like every other grower and landowner around here, and I think that’s the one thing, you know, if I can figure out a way to tell the people is that, you know, we’re doing a good job and we’re always looking for ways to do a better job. And that’s what makes my job fun, is to work with people like Howard and work with farmers and make it better. And I love working with those passionate people who want to make stuff better. So to me It’s been a joy. And it’s frustrating to me from certain areas because, you know, I put a trail and we have the one at the Wilke Farm that you’ve alluded to. We’ve put lime on it. We put some more lime on it. We’ve changed the pH, we have less exchangeable aluminum, but our yield results have been minimal. And this year we did see about a four or five bushel gain on our winter wheat where we put the lime on and we’ll see what happens with subsequent crops coming through that. We’re hopefully going to get another trial established here on the farm, and helping people like Howard, helping all these landowners figure out how we can do it and remain economically viable. I know in my study here, there’s no way we’ve come close to our a return on our investment at this point. I mean, you talked about the five percent gain. Short term, that’s not a return on the investment, but you’re absolutely right looking at an in and a long term investment.
Howard Nelson
You know, I don’t want to wait until I get a return on investment because it’s too late in the reaction time for the liming is too slow. But, we did hit a little bit of a bump when I went to my tenant and said, hey, I want to put lime on these fields. And there was nothing in our lease agreement that addressed lime, so we had to come to an agreement, which we did. And so we had to actually write a liming clause into our farm lease.
Carol McFarland
And from what I understand, actually, there are, you know, places in the country where liming is common practice and has been for a long time. That’s a very normal thing to happen to lease agreements
Aaron Esser
In the Midwest, I think, from my understanding, it’s a very common thing to have a liming clause in, in your lease arrangements. Here in the PNW, there’s probably one, one or two now that have a liming clause in their, in their lease agreements.
Carol McFarland
I still hear that that’s progress. Way to pioneer that. That’s cropping systems innovation.
Aaron Esser
Yeah. And then you know the reason I got involved in the liming in the first place.– not from the triad here, but WSU owns a piece of ground down by Roselia, and the farmer wanted to put lime on. And he called WSU and said, we’re going to put lime on. They said, sure I guess. And they said, it’s going to cost this much. And it’s like, time out. And then, you know, it’s not necessarily a fertilizer. You know, WSU is paying, I think, twenty-five percent of the fertilizer bill at the time or whatever it was in the standard crop share lease. And all of a sudden they’re being dropped with this bill much larger than a fertilizer– like time out. And the only way WSU agreed to work with the landowner on it, so he put on a large scale lime study.
Carol McFarland
That’s a real, it’s a very real issue. And actually, you know, Aaron, I think you said it really well. And honestly, it’s it’s, very, very poignantly and it’s a theme that has actually come up as many of the guests that have been on this podcast have talked about their desire and motivation toward cropping systems, innovation and trying different things on the farm– is this desire to keep moving forward.
Howard Nelson
Well, that’s what I think. The Wilke Farm is the only rotational crop farm in the Eastern Washington area. And, for growers the one any kind of information on the crop rotations– Aaron’s the guy, he keeps detailed expenses, you know what it costs him for each crop. He looks at the long range chemicals that he’s applying so that it doesn’t mess his rotations up. It’s an undervalued farm, in my opinion. And I just, I think you do a great job.
Aaron Esser
Thanks. I– you know, my premise is with the farm, from my perspective and WSU it’s easy for me to stand up in front of people and say, this is what you gotta do. You gotta do A, B, and C, you need to plant this Friday, put on this much fertilizer, and do this. But it becomes a little bit different when it becomes your own situation. And I like to say, you know, I gotta put a little bit of my, you know, your money where your mouth is at. And that’s what we do on this farm– is work through those issues, and I fully understand making the decisions on crop insurance and what level of coverage to use or how to market your crop. You know, when I took over the farm, we had the worst marketing program, grain marketing program, I think, and rival any of the worst programs. I’m like, here we are talking about grain marketing programs, and this is how we market our grain? That’s ridiculous. So we do have a grain marketing program for this farm that utilizes forward contract, the tools that we have available. I can’t do any– I still want to put in a situation where WSU is receiving puts and calls and requesting money for something they can’t see. That would be interesting. So I can’t go to that level. but we do a lot of forward contracting stuff for our grain and as well as marketing, contract marketing and specialty crops.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. The specialty crops are interesting though. I have heard that you have yet to grow winter peas here on the Wilke farm, despite some input from your advisory committee.
Aaron Esser
I think my advisory committee misspoke. We have had winter peas on the farm. The section around the home site.
Carol McFarland
Okay. When did you put those in Aaron?
Aaron Esser
One of your fellow podcasters, Mark Sheffield, seeded them for me six or seven years ago.
Carol McFarland
I was misinformed, I apologize for that.
Howard Nelson
I missed that too.
Aaron Esser
Yeah, I had the numbers. Did you go back and look at the Wilke production report? I have a write up back in the year when we had the winter peas on the farm. And I’m not opposed to winter peas. It comes down to a lot of the numbers. And also where they have to be delivered and if I have the equipment to deliver them and stuff. One of the things that I struggle with winter peas is the weed control. I’m trying to figure out a better way to control weeds. We had a lot of mustard in our winter peas. We put the Raptor on, and then I realized Raptor just kind of like it wasn’t very effective on mustard. So we have to go back to square one there.
Howard Nelson
It just depends on the mustard species you have. It does, it works on tansy mustard, but it doesn’t work on some of the other mustard species.
Aaron Esser
And that was, that’s why I have chemistries around the farm that I like to stay away from. Raptor, which is the same as Beyond for the Clearfield system, because of plant back restrictions on a research facility. I don’t like to have a lot of ground that has Beyond on it. You had the winter pea trial here on the farm?
Howard Nelson
Well, I had winter pea trials here.
Aaron Esser
Rebecca McGhee has had winter pea trials on the farm.
Howard Nelson
No. Aaron was always great. I’d call up and say, I want to put up a trial and he’d say yeah go out here and strip such and such, and lo and behold all his good ground was in trials out there.
Aaron Esser
You have a point. Yes. I want farmers exploring different things and utilizing different things and using some some form of a matrix or a decision point to make those those calls on when the to put peas in, when to put wheat in, when to put canola in on the spring side, when to use peas, chickpeas, canola as well. Or heck, we even have kernza on the farm. I’m not saying we should broadcast kernza out across the whole countryside, but it’s interesting and it’s I think it’s worth keeping our eyes on.
Howard Nelson
So on, on, my farm, my wife’s on my farm south of Creston. It was basically a wheat summer fallow farm for years and years and years. And the downy brome was killing us, so we started growing Steptoe barley. And that was, that was the savior for taking care of the downy brome. Then, for whatever reason, the barley yields didn’t seem as good as they were. Kind of went to spring wheat. This year, the spring wheat on that farm was twenty-five bushel to the acre. And so talking with, with the tenant he wants to go back to the two year rotation. And that’s fine with me because we have winter canola, we have winter peas, we have other crops. So we can still control the downy brome in that rotation. Now, where we weren’t able to do that just several years ago.
Carol McFarland
So now, what have you to say about winter or managing– now, how do you– what do you recommend for managing weeds in winter peas?
Howard Nelson
Yeah. So it was basically the Raptor Clethodim mix, and we’ve used other things prior to that, and it was just enough that it would nick the peas up that it affected the yield. That seemed to be the best combination where we were able to get the high yields and control the majority of the weeds.
Carol McFarland
How’s that working with canola and rotation? Is that, I mean, especially long term as we think about managing for herbicide resistance?
Howard Nelson
Well, there’s Clearfield, both spring and winter canolas.
Aaron Esser
That’s one I have used. I talk about it. I don’t like to use Beyond on the farm, you know, field for this year I got Beyond on it. We’ve used Beyond or the Clearfield system in the past, field one and that went from Clearfield wheat and then it’s scheduled to be a spring crop. Spring’s down with broadleaf and we went with Clearfield canola on top of that. So, but it’s just– I can’t emphasize enough having an outline of where you want to go, having a plan in place. A good plan should always be flexible, but have a plan in place. Know what you maybe want to put in that field in three or four or five years out and have a map with that in mind.
Carol Mcfarland
You were talking about kind of the decision matrix around all these different crops. Do you want to expand on that? Especially since we’ve kind of been talking about pH and how that might affect some of the decisions if you have low pH. I know that that makes it a lot harder to grow things like pulses.You were talking, Howard, about, really noticing an effect on nodulation and the success and thriving of legumes.
Howard Nelson
Yeah. So I leave it up to my tenant to make those decisions because he feels the full effect of the economics. I don’t, I get Social Security. So, so I get a monthly paycheck, but they do ask me for my input, but when, when it comes right down to it, it’s their decision.
Carol McFarland
Kind of like being on the advisory committee for the Wilke Farm.
Howard Nelson
That’s right. Yeah, yeah, Aaron’s the manager, and he has to pay the bills, right?
Aaron Esser
Yeah, I remind everyone that this farm doesn’t receive, WSU doesn’t give me an operating account, I guess for the farm. So what we do, we have to figure out a way to get it paid for, whether it’s crop sales, grants, teamwork, gifts, donations, whatever to get stuff done. That’s what we do, so. And that’s and that’s fine. I like having– to me it’s a challenge and it’s a unique challenge, but I also like the the results coming out of that challenge. Of having that real, real world prospect that does.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. You were kind of speaking to that before because, you know, you can stand up and say like, oh, you should be doing this, but you know, you’ve got your skin in the game too on the research and management side of things and such.
Aaron Esser
And that is why I come back to the matrix like I’m always– I was even working with a grower from a different county, south of here. He’s considering putting in some dark northern spring wheat. So I, yeah, he’s never planted dark northern spring wheat, but he’s where a lot of the farmers are trying to find something profitable, the race. And he’s not uncommon in that. I quickly did up okay, in your area, these are the type yielding dark spring varieties, these are the top yielding spring wheat varieties, on average this is going to require this much fertilizer, this is going to require this much fertilizer, here’s your price of fertilizer and market price. So then I put on one axis the price of dark northern spring wheat, and on the other axis I have soft white spring wheat. And then you know, what price level is it worth switching from soft white to dark northern spring wheat.
Carol McFarland
Now I’m going to throw a wrench in that, because I know that you were at the workshop where last winter, where we actually had a got to see a different calculator that accounted for the units of calcium carbonate equivalent to offset the input of your nitrogen fertilizer. And so if you’re increasing that, you’re adding also more acidity and you’re taking out of any reserve capacity for that.
Aaron Esser
I work with growers, and I’ve known a few of them who’ve switched away from darker northern spring wheat and go to soft white just because they don’t like putting that much additional nitrogen on for dark northern spring wheat, because of what it does for your soil. You know, on average, I think you might yield soil– Carol may correct me– but on average, for every pound of nitrogen you put on the ground, you need two pounds of calcium
Carol McFarland
Carbonate.
Aaron Esser
Calcium carbonate. Sorry. You need two pounds of calcium carbonate to neutralize it. So if you’re using dark northern spring wheat instead of putting on fifty pounds for soft white, you put on seventy pounds, all of a sudden that’s forty more pounds of calcium carbonate in it.
Howard Nelson
But you have to account for the sulfur too.
Aaron Esser
Yeah, we’re getting into a lot of accounting all of a sudden, you know, it’s it’s it’s really complicated. But it’s I think I keep reminding myself what it’s what makes it fun.
Howard Nelson
So I went back, to try to calculate a kind of a timeline on the fields on my farm. So they, they first had ammonium fertilizer after World War two, so roughly forty-eight to fifty is when they started applying fertilizer, and it was low rates at the time. But you know how it is, you know, you have a good yield on, you bump it. You can just keep pumping the rate up a little bit because you’re getting good results. So, but I calculated there’s only been about forty applications of fertilizer on some of these fields, and now we’re starting to see the acidification effects of forty applications. So if you wait to put your lime on and say you have another, add another five applications of fertilizer to that, what’s your pH going to be? What effect are you going to have? And at some point, if your yields are going to drop, and just farming in general is not going to be economic on these fields.
Aaron Esser
Yeah, I like your house analogy on the roof. My analogy is I like to hunt, and to me it’s like hunting out on the breaks. You got a deer kind of up on the field edge eating in the field. You have to make a business decision. Can I make a good shot? That’s an easy way I can get my side by side over to it or it’s an easy pack out. If that deer is just a few more feet before it gets to the field downwhere it really drops off, and if you make a shot and don’t quite get it down and it makes it all the way to the bottom, you have a heck of a pack out. You have a lot of work, so as soon as it gets over the edge, you’re going to end up with a lot of work. So let’s keep it from getting over that edge.
Howard Nelson
So let’s say we never put lime on these fields and the yields drop. The tenant can say, hey, I can’t farm your ground anymore. It’s not economic, right? So then I’ve got nobody to farm the ground. I’m seventy years old. I’m not going to farm it. So I have to keep this land in good condition or I won’t have somebody to farm it.
Carol McFarland
I also saw a talk in the last couple of years. We had a speaker come in from Australia, one of the winter things, and they’ve got a lot of pH issues in Australia. A lot of my– you might have seen some of the citations from my graduate work that came out of Australia, but so they deal with stratified acidity over, over there. Their stratified acidity in no till systems, they it actually looks a little different because here we deep band there they surface apply, so actually as it turns out, if you put nitrogen at the surface, you can just put your lime on the surface and kind of that takes care of it a little bit differently than when you put it down a little deeper and you have to kind of figure out how to get get down there with the amelioration amendment. But, in any case, the speaker from Australia was describing their cropping system and they were rotating wheat and canola, and that was what the market was providing. And it was, they actually didn’t really have to deal with their acidity because the wheat and canola was doing just fine for the time being on the pH as they were, but the market shifted and actually lentils became like a really desirable price premium. And so then a bunch of guys try to put in lentils, and they wouldn’t grow. And so when I think about if we do want to reap the benefits of crop rotation, you know, whatever they are, whether that’s rotating herbicides and getting weed management benefits from that, or you know, you’ve described Howard, some carryover benefits after growing peas, like, whatever it is that drives someone to see the benefits of crop rotation diversification. The ability to do it can actually be limited by your soil conditions.
I just think that’s really fascinating. And, I’d actually also like to hear more about some of your experience with growing peas, because you know, when you talk about– like that’s still relates to soil, too because you don’t have to fertilize them.
Howard Nelson
Yeah. No, fall plant peas are a great crop, and they’re just the opposite of winter canola. And the fact you can see them as deep as you want and, it can rain on top, and they still come out of the ground. So in some of these really dry zones that the fall planted peas really fit, deep seeding, and the issue we had when we first started with them is we had such a range of maturities and plant types and whatever. It took a number of years to find a variety and then winter hardiness was the next issue that popped up. And so over time, we’ve been able to come up with varieties that grow well, and yield well, and are relatively easy to harvest that are a stand up type pea. And we started growing the peas down in the Ritzville area. Derek Schaefer was one of the early growers down there with Rob Dewald, and we just had fantastic yields. It was like that fall- planted pea heaven in that Ritzville Sprague area down there.
Carol mcFarland
That’s fun, so, yeah, I hear that you’ve done, I mean, you have this whole background of doing on-farm trials work. How do you set up? What’s your favorite way to set up an applied trial on the farm to get meaningful results?
Howard Nelson
Most of my work were variety trials. So, so I would have a variety trial of peas, and then each year, I would do some kind of agronomic study right next to it, because I didn’t have much of a budget. And, and basically I was working all by myself, all the time. So one year I did a seeding depth study, and one year I did rate and date study, and so it was always in association with the variety trial I had. So over time, I was able to kind of build up the best agronomic practices for fall planted peas, but it took a while.
Carol McFarland
Would you like to share some of those pro tips at this time?
Howard Nelson
Like they say, plant them deep. No, we planted them deep, and then when it would rain in that soil would get wet above it. All these adventitious roots would come off the hypocotyl. Well, it was totally amazing, some of the pictures that I was able to take. And, you know, the rain date studies were important because, risk management, they had nothing in their crop insurance adjusting books for fall plant peas. And so we started a project to get those reevaluated with RMA.. And so, they came up with the peas because the fall planted peas tiller, like wheat. A spring pea doesn’t tiller, you just get the one plant. Fall planted peas, you’ll get between three and eight tillers that’ll actually produce and flower.
Aaron Esser
So yeah. And you’re talking about RMA and risk management and getting insurance for peas. I don’t know how many letters I’ve written for growers on winter peas is an acceptable practice for insurance because they often need a recommendation letter of that this is an acceptable practice, and I’ve used a lot of Howard’s data on that variety, trial data and stuff. You know, saying that winter peas are an acceptable practice if you’re planting the correct varieties, and I include the data and stuff in that.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. It’s amazing how much, you know, as we try different crops and rotation, how much, how big of a piece that really is.
Howard Nelson
Oh, it’s huge. All these growers have lines of credit, and the banker likes to see crop insurance right on there.
Aaron Esser
And the landlord sometimes likes to see that security as well. The bankers and the landowners like that security as well as the growers, that’s all part of what makes it go around.
Carol McFarland
So I want to circle back a little bit more to the lime trial work that you guys have been doing, and we talked a lot about the why behind it and a little– we started to get into the how with the grid sampling, and actually getting the modified mehlich buffer tests, and determining the rate to apply that way. But, how are you setting it up? I mean, in this case, it sounds like you’ve you’re just you’re going in the two different zones. When you did that first trial, you said you started in twenty-twenty?
Howard Nelson
Yeah.
Carol McFarland
How did you set that up?
Howard Nelson
Well, Aaron came down and we had the lime, and we just drew it out on a piece of paper. I don’t know if you remember it any different than that.
Aaron Esser
No, I don’t remember it much different than that. I brought my tractor down. I bought a brand new spin spreader. And thank you to Goodrich and Columbia River Carbonate for their donation and their help with the trial as well. And even the one here on the Wilke farm they’ve been fantastic to work with.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, I’ve worked with them too.
Aaron Esser
Yeah. And they’ve been really helpful for my projects, Howard’s project and stuff. So I bought a spin spreader. We put the calcium, the pelletized calcium carbonate in there. And first of all, we had to see how wide it spread. So we figured out sixty feet would work for our plot width. And then calibration is kind of difficult. So we put out a known area pipe pans and ran the spin spreader over the top of it, and figured out how many pounds per acre we were putting on. And then we got our rate finally set. That was putting out about two thousand pounds an acre, and that was our first trade was two thousand pounds an acre. And then we did a four thousand pounds an acre treatment. So that was just going over it, I think twice.
Howard Nelson
Right.
Aaron Esser
Or was it, did we have to go over it twice on one and four on the other. So that’s how we put the trial in. And we spent a lot of time on our phones and calculators and crunching numbers and figuring out the width and the plots, and then it being sixty feet wide by sixty feet long. And then we had blocks of that. I brought my disk out that afternoon, and I disked it and harrowed it smooth.
Howard Nelson
The thing about our on-farm test is you can make it whatever you want. As complicated or as simple. But you have to have something that you want to test. You have to have a hypothesis, and then you decide the treatments and, and where you go.
Carol McFarland
In my experience, you have to also decide what data is important to you and what you’re going to collect along the way. So what do you monitor? And then also what are you really collecting and looking at at the end, and what you’re going to compare it to
Howard Nelson
Right. So I’m looking at yield and I’m looking at soil, the pH, and the effect that has on yield, because the yields the ultimate measurement, right. You have nothing if you don’t measure the yield.
Aaron Esser
Yield. And growers do this sometimes, they think the yield is being the ultimate. But I– my degrees in economics and economics will trump yield.
Howard Nelson
So, Aaron, what do you think I’ve calculated the years to pay off my investment?
Aaron Esser
I’d have to go back and look at the price of lime. I don’t know what it is. And that’s one of the things I want to do for a test, and I haven’t done a full economic production on it. Is the sources I’m using– can we find some, some different sources of lime to put on this much? My guess. So you’re going to take five crop years to pay it off. Am I close?
Howard Nelson
Yeah. So, because we’re doing, we’re doing three fields. So there’s going to be a crop every year from one of these fields basically. So I figure it takes six years for me to get my investment back. And that’s a lot faster than I thought. And if the price of wheat would go up it would go down. But I get my return faster.
Carol McFarland
I think everyone wants that. So how are you calculating return on investment Aaron?
Aaron Esser
I mean, it’s pretty, you know, understanding what you’ve spent, what your return is and looking at your return on investment. And I’m looking at the other things too– that’s the ultimate from a farmer standpoint. I also pull soil samples on my plots each and every year looking at zero to three, three to six, six to twelve inches or I’m looking at what the soil pH is doing and what the exchangeable aluminum is doing.
Carol McFarland
The KCl, the extractable.
Aaron Esser
And I also send grain samples off to the lab and have a nutrient analysis, because we talk about when you get more acidic soils, you don’t have the nitrogen uptake efficiency or the phosphorus uptake efficiency. Am I going to see any of that in my grain samples? Are my grain, my grain going to have the same amount of nutrients in it? So I’m looking at that as well. This next year on this study, I’m also going to pull soil compaction data across this study because I say where you’ve been applying lime and the calcium carbonate, you should see less compaction. So I want to look at that as well.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. Calcium actually aggregates the soil.
Aaron Esser
Yeah. And I want to see if I can set that up on my meter.
Howard Nelson
Your calcium is up here, but your compaction is down here. So you have to get that calcium down there.
Aaron Esser
I’m gonna measure, but I don’t need to get it down to where my compaction is. I want it where the pH is at, first and foremost. But I also want to use that as a tool to see if I will be able to use my compaction meter. It reads, gives me a reading every inch down to eighteen inches. So I will see if somewhere in that range if there’s a difference where I’ve been applying the calcium or where I haven’t. And I’ve been putting my calcium down about– I use the spoke wheel applicator though the last couple times. The first time I used the boom buster nozzle and blew the liquid on the surface, and then the neighbor came in and did a light test. Since then we went to the spoke wheel, which I say puts it down about three inches down. It puts it everywhere from zero to three inches down, because it kind of spins around and it doesn’t put a nice band going at three inches. It really moves that throughout that zone.
Howard Nelson
So we know calcium will move in the soil because we have these calcium layers right, that are down eighteen to twenty-four inches typically.
Aaron Esser
Some places are even a lot closer.
Howard Nelson
Well, in erosion, you know, yeah, they’re right at the surface. But the only, soluble form of calcium is calcium bicarbonate, and it takes a living plant to first, calcium bicarbonate to form, so there should be some kind of a look at cover cropping, I think in, in trying to trying to get the calcium into those zones that we need them in.
Aaron Esser
In your point exactly, one of the reasons I haven’t gone, I guess, gung ho on liming the whole farm is trying to find some alternatives to liming, and that’s one of the things I’m interested in from our, for no better terms– our cow chow study we have on the Wilke Farm.
Carol McFarland
Cow chow!
Aaron Esser
I know, or other cover cropping system here, and a piece I always say about liming as well, and it comes from some, some of my experience with the trial we have is I’m not sure any of us can answer correctly what we have to do to correct the situation, but the one thing I want each and every one of the farmers I talk to to do is understand what got you in that situation, and it doesn’t do you much good to you know, like you’re talking about the roof, you know, take all the old layers off and do the roof right. Don’t just put a roof on top of I mean, you’re not really fixing it. You’re covering it up right? And that’s– you’ve got to take care of what got you that problem. And about the same time we put the lime study in we also put– we went to variable rate fertilizer instead of one zone for these fields. We soil sample three zones. Our red zone, our lowest yielding zone– which is about twenty-two percent of every field– we soil sample our high yielding zone, about twenty-two percent of every field, and we fertilize and manage each of those three zones differently. The one thing I’ve noticed in my trial that has me scratching my head is we’ve seen the pH come up where you put the calcium carbonate. I’ve also seen pH come up a touch where we haven’t put the calcium carbonate. And the only thing I can think of is I’m doing a better job of fertilizing there and not leaching as much, or putting on excess fertilizer.
Howard Nelson
A lot of questions.
Aaron Esser
I wish it was easy.
Howard Nelson
Every once in a while. Where’s that easy button? But no, for every answer you get, you get two or three questions. Right?
Aaron Esser
And if we knew the answers, I wouldn’t have had to put in the trial. If we all knew the answers to your situation we wouldn’t have had to put, spend the days out there putting it in. But, for any grower trying to make that type of investment, doing what Howard’s done instead of just saying, oh, someone told me to do it, the neighbor told me to do it or I can’t make money I can make money– sit down on your situation and figure it out. Yeah. There’s a lot of people who are willing to help.
Howard Nelson
Well, thing is there’s areas in every field like an approach that for years had excess fertilizer applied and they don’t grow much anymore. So I think a good way for a grower to experience this would be to just get a little bit, put it on those spots or down the borders where they’ve had excess nitrogen applied for years, and just see if you can see a visual.
Aaron Esser
Yeah.
Carol McFarland
When you say a little bit I don’t think you mean just– you have to put a little bit at the right amount to a small area. Right?
Howard Nelson
Right. So when I say a little bit I’m not referring to the rate per acre, I’m referring to the quantity applied. So take a soil test, put out the recommended rate. As you told me one time, this is not new. Liming is not new. It’s been around a long time. We’re just starting to see it here is all.
Carol McFarland
Well, and actually, from a research standpoint– I’m sure you run into this too Aaron– I know in the work that I’ve done– and thanks to the Washington Grain Commission, because they’re the ones that funded the research I did– but it’s very difficult to get funding for liming because so many other places already have well-developed liming programs. And so, you know, our region here is experiencing this– and yes, we have mehlich soils, not necessarily naturally acidified soils, but I don’t know. I guess I don’t know what you’re, if you’ve tried to get funding for this, but it is a regional problem. And so I think regional dollars really help to answer some of these outstanding questions we have for our area, but to go for, you know, a lot of the university funding comes from federal sources and it’s just not a really easy sell because there’s so many other places that are like, this isn’t even a problem.
Aaron Esser
Yeah.
Howard Nelson
Yeah. Well, that’s why I want to pair what Aaron said is Columbia River Carbonates has been right there, trying to get trials out, providing material, paying for soil tests. I mean, good friend Mark has really been an advocate. To correct these soil pH’s.
Carol McFarland
Well, and they really, you know, they’ve really in my experience been working to try to make a product that will do that more ag time, not geologic time, because the particle size can go a long way toward reactivity. But, I think ultimately also the quantity needs to be there. Like you can get a really great product, the research I’ve seen suggests is that you still need to figure out how to get the right quantity at the right rate,
Howard Nelson
Right.
Carol McFarland
If you want to actually see your pH moving. But I also know, you know, you were talking, Aaron, about, your spoke wheel injector. I know the Cook Agronomy Farm and the researchers with the Northwest Sustainable Agroecosystem Research Unit with the USDA, ARS– they are, they’ve got an undercutter injector, and it’s been modified to–
Aaron Esser
Put lime down or across the soil. I mean, you can truly set it down for four inches, three inches and lay a row of lime down where it’s needed on your, on your zero to three, three to six, six to twelve inch where you need the lime.
Carol McFarland
Dr. Joaquin Casanova is the scientist who’s been leading that charge with a lot of support, just in terms of the equipment side of things from now the other support.
Howard Nelson
Yeah, because to get like a two ton rate of say, super lime, that’s a lot of gallons of liquid, to get.
Carol McFarland
But also the super lime is only like sixty-eight percent calcium carbonate. So we have to remember–
Howard Nelson
No, it’s eighty.
Carol Mcfarland
It’s eighty?
Howard Nelson
Yeah.
Carol McFarland
Okay. I’ve seen different tests I guess, so that’s good.
Howard Nelson
Well, that’s the last one that I was provided.
Carol McFarland
That’s great. I’m glad you have that number, because that’s a very important number, because when we get our– if we’re doing it, the liming program proper way is when we get our rate from the soil test lab we have to make sure that we’re calculating into pounds of calcium carbonate and then adjusting for it only actually the product having eighty percent of that in it. So you did your homework and that’s all built into the new calculator too.
Aaron Esser
Yeah. And even with our spoke wheel applicator to get the right input on, we have to run it over that same piece of ground three times.
Howard Nelson
Yeah.
Aaron Esser
We can put out about thirty-three gallons at the speed we’re traveling, so putting out a hundred gallons at a time and just going back and forth, back and forth. And one of the tools I look forward to using that we got on the farm a little too late this spring is the Veris machine. And the thing I’m most excited about that is– you’re talking about you have the map of, the map of your farm, I don’t have that for this whole farm. I can come very close. I know each zone or I know each field. I have a long history of pulling soil samples a zero to three, three to six, six to twelve inches. And I’ve known what my extractable aluminum is, what my pH is for years, but I don’t have it for every four across the field. And that’s the next step I want to get to.
Carol McFarland
Now, are you familiar with some of Tabitha Brown’s work where she ran that around Cook Farm? One of the various probes
Aaron Esser
A little bit.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. I think she had, you know, you don’t want to poke that into super dry soil, and I think..
Aaron Esser
That’s why I said we got it too late and didn’t figure it out. And spring went too fast, and then now we have to wait for the spring. Yes. It’s just I– we talked about finances and stuff being short, but in my experience time is the most limiting factor. Always has been.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. Do you calculate that in your ROI on a practice?
Aaron Esser
No, it never makes sense. Both financially or common.
Carol McFarland
I wanted to briefly touch on, so you have an advisory committee. We kind of joked a little bit about your advisory committee for the research that you do here on the Wilke Farm, and Howard, you’ve been a part of that community for a long time.
Howard Nelson
Yeah. I don’t know, ten, fifteen years, maybe?
Aaron Esser
Something like that. Yeah. No, I don’t know how long I’ve been on the committee. I made up my number earlier in my introduction. Feels like forever.
Howard Nelson
It’s always kind of a fun meeting because Aaron and I can spar back and forth a little bit.
Aaron Esser
And, I mean that’s I, I was like even giving a presentation– nothing’s better than giving a presentation with an audience who asks a lot of questions, and you know, wants to know more about the whys and hows and things like that, because that’s really where the learning takes place from both participants. And I’ve always enjoyed that with Howard going back and forth on, on various things and stuff. We were talking about the winter peas, but chickpeas– and we’ve had chickpeas on the farm. And the one crop I had a significant return on the field before we had the lime study, we had chickpeas on the ground, and we saw a significantly increasing yield with chickpeas on that piece of ground. Where we have the lime study. So, and he’s the one that made it. You know I put the matrix together for Howard. And yes, we get a better wheat yield off of it, but my spring wheat yield suffers following. If you go chickpeas, winter wheat, spring wheat– that spring wheat yield will be a bushel or two less. And if you go canola, lower winter wheat, and then you’ll have a little bit greater spring wheat, because the winter wheat took more out of the ground where you had the chickpeas. It’s fascinating to watch.
Howard Nelson
Well, that’s why Aaron’s rotations are important, because it’s a system. Everybody tends to look at this crop, this crop, but you have to look at the whole system over time because one crop affects the next and right down the line. So.
Aaron Esser
And then you got the details. What do you want to do, and then what happens? I mean, like this year, the north side was going to be chickpeas. We lined it up to get chickpeas. Okay. Everything was going. I call and say, where do I come pick up the chickpea seed? We don’t have any. We over-committed. or something like that was the answer they told me. So I said, well, I thought I had pea seed, all of a sudden I didn’t have pea seed. So then I had to quickly go plan B, plan B, plan B. And stuff, and shuffled things around. Because what you want to do in farming and what you can do can sometimes be– I don’t I don’t think my experience was different from what farmers see on a daily basis. So.
Carol McFarland
Howard, you mentioned the kind of effects on the system and I wanted to circle back again, because I know how much we love winter peas.
Howard Nelson
Yeah.
Carol McFarland
And what sort of effects like carryover effects have you seen year to year when in your experience with winter peas?
Howard Nelson
Yeah. So, so I, I’ve been fortunate I had winter peas in one field. There was eighty acres in the on the one end, and there was two hundred and forty acres of wheat on the other side. And there was a perfect line between these two. So I decided I was going to do a fertilizer rate and variety study, and I was going to do both the winter and the spring. So the first year I did spring wheat with different fertilizer rates, and there was a thirty percent increase in spring grains, following fall-planted peas versus, following winter wheat. So then, so then I had identical size plots saved for the fall. I put winter wheat and fertilizer rate with six different winter wheat varieties, and there was no yield increase. And so when I charted out the yields with the fertilizer rates, I finally determined that we’d already hit the top yield with a zero fertilizer rate, and we were coming down the backside of the production curve because we had over fertilized on the back side. So to me, you really have to be careful of your fertilizer rates following winter, fall-planted peas or you’re going to wipe out the benefit that you had from the crop rotation by over fertilization. So there was way more mineralization than I had determined prior to that study.
Carol McFarland
Just for sharing that.
Aaron Esser
Let’s see the soil sample.
Howard Nelson
That’s right. In not just one foot. So I had a guy helping me. I told him I wanted six foot soil samples, and he literally destroyed my soil probe to get that fifth and sixth foot. It was just hard, but that’s where a significant amount of fertilizer was at.
Aaron Esser
Yeah.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. And then, I don’t know, should we plug your nitrogen use efficiency calculator Aaron?
Aaron Esser
That’s one of the things I’ve always talked about with the whole soil thing is, you know, step one is what are you doing to improve your nitrogen use efficiency? Yeah, I said a long time ago: doesn’t do you any good to fix your problem if you’re going to use the same methods that got you in the problem in the first place. So I don’t know how to fix the problem, as I said, and we’re doing a lot of learning, and we’ve come a long way in the last five years, six years on it, but I’m not sure we all truly have the answer for the area. But I do know we need to do a better job of just improving our nitrogen use efficiency, and there are tools available for that on the Small Grains website.
Carol McFarland
WSU Wheat and Small Grains.
Howard Nelson
What you need, you need to know your grain proteins. And so all you gotta do is have a few bags, put some wheat in there and you get done with harvest, you go in the local elevator and they’ll say, fine here’s the protein machine. You know, this is how it works. Then you can calculate a lot of that out yourself pretty simply.
Aaron Esser
Yeah.
Carol McFarland
I mean, or you can get really fancy and you can run a protein monitor on your combine like some people here on this farm.
Aaron Esser
Yeah. All it takes is time and money. That, that doubles the value of the old ninety-five hundred over there. But it does take time then to process the data. It’s a combination of time and money. Always has been always will be.
Howard Nelson
Well the hard part is always sorting through the data you have, trying to make sense of that, because there is so much data you can collect at this point.
Aaron Esser
And that’s why the nitrogen uptake use efficiency calculator stuff, you need to know your yield, how much soil nitrogen you have had, how much you applied, and your protein. You only need four pieces in preparation. It doesn’t take a lot of work time or money to get those four pieces of information.
Carol McFarland
Well and hopefully that is time that will save you money.
Aaron Esser
And that should be time well spent and should help with the profitability side of things as well.
Carol McFarland
Now, seriously, Aaron, I think you are you still running a protein monitor in your combine here?
Aaron Esser
Yeah.
Carol McFarland
Okay. And you’re pairing that with your yield monitor data to kind of do some of that on the fly.
Aaron Esser
Yeah we bring that information in. When I talked about our prescription maps we bring that in. And I use that– the one thing I use the protein monitor for, it’s almost like my grade sheet. I mean my dream is to be able to take my field, harvest it, and say, I want my protein between nine and a half and ten. Maybe ten, three. If I can get a whole field in that range, that’s what I want to get. That’s my goal. Maximize the yield. You know, ten and a half is kind of the maximum yield. The Grain Commission doesn’t like that, so a nine and a half to like ten three to a ten five. No more, actually probably nine and a half to ten and a half. If I can get a whole field and then after ten and a half is my fertilizer program is doing pretty good.
Carol McFarland
So now, speaking of the ARS scientists with the Northwest Sustainable Agroecosystem Research Unit, I mentioned Doctor Casanova, and the lime sweep study, but he also has a nitrogen optimization by wheat class tool. He gave a soil health coffee hour with the Farmers Network, and it’s available on the YouTube channel as well. So that might be something you’d be interested in checking out. Yeah. So they’re getting the nitrogen, right? Whether you’re getting some benefit from the peas, making sure that you’re optimizing pH, and calculating our nitrogen use efficiency It’s a system, and it all plays together. And see, I don’t think we looked at any of these questions at all. During this conversation today.
Aaron Esser
I studied for all of them.
Howard Nelson
We’ve been talking the whole time.
Carol McFarland
So I’d be interested just to hear a little bit from each of you of some of the benefits that you’ve seen in terms of working together for your on farm trial work. You know, whether it’s you, Howard, as an advisory board member– it sounds like some of that came up already for the Wilke Farm research, or being able to call up Aaron and say, hey, how do we do this trial?
Howard Nelson
Aaron was always a good resource, and always open to basically letting me plant whatever, whatever I needed on the farm. You know, that was my data. So, it wasn’t something I gave to Aaron until later in the fall until after I was able to go through it. But, Aaron was always looking for ways to help farmers. And whether it’s the cropping rotation or the different, chemical rotations and stuff, and that’s, that’s a resource that nobody else was looking at. So anyway.
Aaron Esser
Yeah. And I’ve always, like I mentioned earlier, I’ve been with extension for twenty-six years, and one thing that some of the older extension agents pounded into my mind is, you know, when you think about extension, you think I’m working with farmers and stuff on a daily basis. Some of the ways I can tell my biggest impact with farmers is working with the people that the farmers work with. Their field men. And that’s always been a very important part of my job, is to work with the crop consultants and stuff around the area. And Howard’s always been one of the great ones to work with. So it always makes it fun. I like the challenge of it, but I’ve, I’ve always enjoyed– I know where his heart’s at with the farm and going back to that. So that’s what’s always made it fun for me. His heart’s in the same place my heart’s at. Yeah.
Howard Nelson
In the dirt.
Aaron Esser
In the dirt.
Carol McFarland
In the soil.
Aaron Esser
In the soil. Some of it’s still dirt. But he’s never been a corporate ladder guy. And I’ve always enjoyed that and our working relationship that we’ve had.
Howard Nelson
So, so I hear when was it you took over management of the Wilke Farm?
Aaron Esser
Fifteen, sixteen years ago. Seventeen.
Howard Nelson
And so I was around before Aaron was here. And Aaron has turned this around and really done a stellar job to make it applicable to what farmers need to know.
Aaron Esser
Yeah. I think it was probably before you in the Wilke Farm Committee– I made a statement– the only thing we’re doing with this farm right now is showing farmers how not to farm. We have the weediest summer fallow in the county. We can’t even see our wheat because we have to mow it. You know, we had issues and stuff, and you know, every once while you can hear the traffic driving by, right? That’s highway two. A lot of people see this facility driving by, and, you know, I wanted to showcase what we can do with it. With these cropping systems, crop rotations, and for no better term– which is good farm management.
Howard Nelson
The only problem the Wilke Farm has is it’s too small. It needs to have more acres, so…
Carol McFarland
You should see the face Aaron’s making right now.
Howard Nelson
It’s just making sure, you know, well, there are more rotations that can be studied, and maybe cover crops, things like that. And so, you know, as part of the advisory committee, we actually approached a neighbor and received a resounding no as far as you know, interest in working with us. So, if there’s anybody listening that’s willing to help Aaron, just let us know.
Carol McFarland
What kind of help is Aaron looking for? I mean, is this like growing really weird stuff? More cows?
Howard Nelson
Crops we’re pretty limited. You know, he does a three year, a four year, and continuous crop rotation. It’d be nice to try some different crops within those systems. Maybe.
Carol McFarland
Like, what? What would you like to see?
Howard Nelson
Fall-planted peas.
Carol McFarland
Yeah.
Howard Nelson
Triticale. I love triticale.
Carol McFarland
We just got to hear from Bill Schillinger and a whole crew of other great, on-farm trial cooperators with Ron Jirava and his place, yeah. It sounds really like one of Bill Schilinger’s favorite takeaways from his long career at the Lind Field Station. Is that he likes triticale pretty well.
Aaron Esser
Yeah, everyone who’s raised triticale likes it. I just wish we had a chicken farm closer to us.
Carol McFarland
Do we though?
Aaron Esser
It’s one of those crops that frustrates me because of the marketability of it. And trying to find a good, consistent market is…and the peas. I can’t wait for them, for the winter peas to become edible. Instead of– I mean, a lot of year old marketing pulls they were going into cover crop seed and dog food, right?
Howard Nelson
Yeah. One year we killed it with cover crop seed, and that was a good year.
Aaron Esser
It was a good year.
Howard Nelson
Yeah.
Aaron Esser
But you know you’re trying to come up with that good consistent mark and I you know when I look at what people are consuming, those proteins are coming back pretty strong. And I can’t wait to get the winter peas that are more for human consumption, and I think that will add a lot. Except then everybody will be raising them and that’ll crash the price. The best care for high prices is high prices.
Carol McFarland
Everyone will be rotating responsibly.
Aaron Esser
That’s what John Kirk always used to say to me– the economist– the best cure for high prices is high prices.
Carol McFarland
Is that the words of wisdom you want to leave with?
Aaron Esser
Oh, yeah. That sounds good to me. Would you rather ir be I love soil?
Carol McFarland
That’s my world.
Aaron Esser
I love, I love it. Yes, I love profitable cropping systems.
Carol McFarland
Well, yeah, I guess, just just to wrap up, I would like to offer each of you the chance to share any, any final thoughts on any of the plethora of topics that we have discussed today in the partnership as we see meaningful results from on-farm trials and cropping systems innovation and soil health.
Howard Nelson
I think soil pH is a ticking time bomb. It’s, it’s going to happen. You can, you can say, I want to see the return on investment. You can say all these things, and don’t wait too long is going to be my piece of advice. Don’t wait until you have a severe problem, because it’s– you’re not going to fix it overnight. It’s going to take time for the calcium to react and for you to see the results.
Carol McFarland
Carbonate to react. The calcium will stick around to do all the other cool stuff.
Aaron Esser
It’s easier to get those to react if you have actively growing roots.
Howard Nelson
That’s right.
Aaron Esser
If you can’t get actively growing roots to help it react,it makes it. a lot more difficult.
Howard Nelson
We look back to what was here before we were here. Right? It was grassland. There was an actively growing crop every year. And maybe it was, you know, lupines with grass, or sagebrush, or different forms, you know, but it was a mixture of things. And, you know, I don’t. I’m not saying that we can go back to that, but I think we need to look at that and see what we can learn.
Aaron Esser
Never stop looking, never stop learning.
Carol McFarland
Well, I really appreciate both of you. It’s such an honor to interview folks like you, and have you all give me some of your time, sharing your wisdom and experience and lessons learned in this space. So I really appreciate you taking some time today to be on the On-Farm Trials podcast. Thank you very much for all you’ve shared.
Howard Nelson and Aaron Esser
Thank you. Thank you Carol.
Carol McFarland
Thank you.