This episode of On-Farm Trials comes to you from the Rosanoff Homestead outside of Ritzville, WA where we hear from Ron Jirava and the WSU research team Dr. Bill Schilinger, Dr. Tim Paulitz, Dr. Jeremy Hansen, Dr. Surendra Singh, and Bruce Sower about their work together on the longest running Dryland On-Farm Trial collaboration in Washington State. Their conversation covers an array of the work that has come from this trial around alternative cropping systems, the soil microbiome, pathogens, tillage equipment, and residue management and how they all of these management strategies interact with soil moisture in a dryland environment. We also hear about future directions for the research to come, building on past work and exploring new ideas, including even more focus on soil health!
Carol McFarland
Today we’re excited to be on the Rosanoff Homestead outside of Ritzville, Washington with Mr. Ron Jirava, Dr. Bill Schillinger, Dr. Tim Paulitz, Dr. Surendra Singh, Dr. Jeremy Hansen, and Mr. Bruce Sower. We are very excited to dive into the longest running dryland on-farm trial collaboration in Washington state.
With that, we’re looking forward to talking more and answering important questions to cropping systems innovation in our region and what that journey has looked like for almost three decades. Would you, Ron, please tell us just a little bit about yourself, who you farm with, and more about your farm and farming conditions?
Ron Jirava
Well, I farm with myself part of the time and I work with some neighbors off and on over the years. This is the family farm. It was established in 1892 and so it’s been around for a while. We’ve grown a little bit of everything over the years. We’ve done a little bit of canola, we’ve done peas, we’ve grown just about everything we can think about here over the years.
Carol McFarland
I’m excited to hear more about that. Welcome to the podcast.
Ron Jirava
Thank you.
Carol McFarland
Dr. Schillinger, I bet you’ve grown about everything under the sun as well. Would you like to introduce a little bit about yourself and some of your research interests over the years and where you’re at now?
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Yes, I was a professor and scientist and director at Lind research station for twenty-nine years. During that time, we did try to grow essentially any crop that could potentially grow out here. I won’t name them all off, but many of those were here on the Jirava Farm and certainly at Lind and other places as well.
Carol McFarland
Great, thanks. I look forward to hearing a little bit more of your history as well. But with that, let’s have Dr. Paulitz introduce himself.
Dr. Tim Paulitz
I’m Tim Paulitz, a research plant pathologist with USDA ARS in Pullman. When I joined in year two-thousand, I actually took over from Jim Cook, who was my predecessor who was instrumental in establishing this plot out here. Over the last twenty or so years, I’ve specialized in soil-borne pathogens of all the rotation crops, both fungi and nematodes, looking at ecology, epidemiology, and management. Then probably last fifteen years, my research has moved a lot into the soil microbiome as the technology developed. Looking at soil health, looking at the core microbiome of wheat, a lot of questions that we’ve tried to answer out here. That’s my background.
Carol McFarland
Great, thanks. All right, Dr. Singh?
Dr. Surendra Singh
I am Surendra Singh and I am an assistant professor and director at Lind Station. Following Dr. Schilinger’s footprint, continuing his legacy and building onto the program he built over the past thirty years here at mostly working on dryland agronomy and related issues around dryland wheat, peas, canola, ranging from soil nutrient management to acidity to soil health to soil microbiology and however we can improve our dryland systems.
Carol McFarland
Well, that’s a great legacy and really excited to see your trajectory as well. Dr. Hansen?
Dr. Jeremy Hansen
Jeremy Hansen. I have been working for the USDA Agricultural Research Service for twenty-one years. The first soil core I took as an employee for the ARS was here on Ron Jirava’s farm. And during my time at the USDA, I had the opportunity to get a PhD. Bill Schillinger was my major advisor, Tim Pollittz was on my committee, and we did some really interesting work on canola as a rotational crop and some of the effects of that. So I’ve really enjoyed working with this group and with working with Ron Jirava.
Carol McFarland
Nice. And now you’re the PLFA master for the Northwest Sustainable Agroecosystems Research Unit.
Dr. Jeremy Hansen
I seem to do a lot of that, yes.
Carol McFarland
Awesome. And Bruce, would you take a minute to introduce yourself and how instrumental you are at making research happen?
Bruce Sower
Yeah, my name is Bruce Sower and I actually came to the Lind Station in 1986 to work as a research technician in our breeding program. And have since moved on to being the farm manager there. So these long term projects, I’ve been involved in everything from since they started from, you know, filling in when Bill was between technicians and harvesting and doing the field work. So.
Carol McFarland
Okay. Thanks so much for all of those introductions, and happy to welcome you all to the podcast. Thanks for taking your time to spend with us today to hear a little bit more about this exciting research collaboration. How did it get started? This the on farm trials here at your farm, Ron?
Ron Jirava
Oh, let’s see. I was at the chemical dealership one day and the representative from Monsanto showed up and we’re sitting there visiting and it started kind of with the fields of tomorrow. And that was in ninety-six, I think we did that and Monsanto threw a whole bunch of money at us. Well, not at us, but at that project. And we had over twelve hundred people out here at the farm that day demonstrating what Roundup could do as far as chemical mowing for CRP and take out of CRP. And we had, if I remember right, we had like six or seven different drills all the way from conventional tillage to no tillage on the take out of CRP. We demonstrated as well out in the field on some stubble and some other things. So it was quite an eventful day. And that was kind of the genesis of the whole thing.
And it was like, okay, how do we actually make this work? Because nobody had done anything like this out here at all. There hadn’t even been any research into it at all. I mean, we’d looked at, one of the driving things that was behind all that was control of cheatgrass. We didn’t have anything for control of cheatgrass at that time, herbicide wise. And so the only real alternative was spring cropping, to try and do spring cropping more efficiently without a bunch of tillage passes was also in the back of my head as we were doing this. And that was one of the things that drove like, okay, can we go in and spray and have a drill and just seed straight into it in the spring. Continuous spring cropping really was never the idea to begin with, but it was kind of where we ended up because we didn’t have the capability of doing chem fallow at that time.
Carol McFarland
Just to clarify, is your farm all in no till now?
Ron Jirava
Yes, it is.
Carol McFarland
Okay. Sounds like that might have been part of the beginning of that journey.
Ron Jirava
Yeah.
Carol McFarland
Bill, do you want to tell your version of how this all got started?
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Yeah. Well, Ron correctly pointed out the Monsanto field day out here in 1996. And that got a lot of us thinking about what we could do. This area is wheat fallow, tillage based wheat fallow, especially in the nineties. Ninety-five percent plus one crop every two year. Wind erosion was a big concern.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, sounds dusty.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Beyond dusty. Soil quality issues, massive brownout storms. Some of this tillage could get very intensive. This has been going on since the onset of farming in 1880. So we got together and said, well, certainly we can do better. I was interested, I was fairly new and stationed at Lind.
I might point out that Lind and Ritzville are two unique environments. Ritzville is way more forgiving. It gets two inches more precipitation per year. But it’s got a, at least a twenty bushel per acre yield potential increase over Lind.
So I was doing work at Lind, of course, at Lind station. But I was, and Ron and I were friends and we did some on farm work on some other things. And we started talking and said, well, how about we do a really big long-term cropping systems experiment on your farm? And let’s start off by going, by going annual spring cropping, something really wild, growing a crop every year. And not only that, it’s planting in the spring. Tim mentioned that Jim Cook was instrumental. Jim Cook said, Bill, Ron, please put two back-to-back broadleaf crops together in one of those rotations and you will completely eliminate wheat-borne soil diseases. And we said, really? Okay, well, we better do that because Jim Cook says that’ll happen.
So we did. And we had a number of rotations, continuous spring wheat, spring wheat barley. We had two spring wheats followed by yellow mustard and safflower, those being the broadleaf crops, all annual cropping. And we did that for the first eight years of this long-term study, covering twenty acres. So again, and it’s still twenty acres today. So it’s a pretty good sized experiment. That’s how we started.
Carol McFarland
Great. Thanks for that. So kind of the summary of that would be this twenty acre multi-treatment back-to-back spring crops.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
That was the first eight years.
Carol McFarland
The first eight years?
Dr. Bill Schilinger
And then we transitioned.
Carol McFarland
Okay.
Dr. Tim Paulitz
And I’d like to add something because this became a disease nursery. And that’s kind of where I came in around two-thousand. So we knew that rhizoctonia bare patch could be a problem out here. And when Ron started that transition to direct seed for about two years, there wasn’t a problem. Right. And then all of a sudden these patches started to show up everywhere.
Carol McFarland
When was the transition to direct seed?
Ron Jirava
Ninety-seven, ninety-six, ninety-seven. That particular field that the plots are on actually was in ninety-six. We seeded it to spring wheat. So it had a year of everything being conformed before separating it off into plots. And the research plots then started in ninety-seven.
Carol McFarland
Okay. And this has been direct seed the whole way Okay. So rhizoctonia.
Dr. Tim Paulitz
So rhizoctonia. And so this is an interesting disease because it forms a hyphal network. And we’d kind of known that tillage would probably break up the hyphal network. So then if you stop the tillage, it could become a problem. But we really documented after about three years, we started seeing these rhizoctonia patches. And of course, as a pathologist, I just, my eyes lit up. I said, this is something we can work on. So let’s use this as an experiment to figure out how to manage this. And so one of the things that Jim Cook did, he thought that rotation would be a way of managing that disease. But lo and behold, we saw the patches in the other crops as well. So that was interesting information that this pathogen, this disease has a wide host range. And so that you really could not manage it doing that way. You also tried different openers, other things we looked at, but we never really found anything that was really effective.
But Mother Nature came into play here. So after about five years, we started noticing that these patches were disappearing. And one of the things we had done, Harry Schaefer, Harry Schaefer for about five years had mapped all these patches on that twenty acres. So this was back in the time when GPS was first released by the military declassified. So we had the first time high resolution GPS units, but they’re not like your phone now. This was a whole backpack that you walk around and spend days-
Dr. Bill Schilinger
With an antenna on the back.
Dr. Tim Paulitz
With an antenna and walking around and creating these elaborate maps, which nobody had ever done before. And we noticed after a few years that some of these patches started to disappear. And we thought this is a great example of disease suppression. We knew it had happened in Australia, nobody had documented it here. And this was at the time when the molecular techniques started to develop. So we could go to a patch that was there last year, disappeared this year and look at the microbiome and see what could have been responsible for that. And so we could look at patches that disappeared, patches that stayed the same or newly formed patches. So that was kind of my interest in this from a disease standpoint.
We documented it reached a peak after about five years and then the patches started to disappear. So it was natural suppression due to microbes that essentially manage that disease. So you can go out now and not find any patches at all. So that was an example, I guess, of where despite all of our best efforts thinking we were going to manage it, Mother Nature took care of it. So a lot of papers were generated from that first pathology work.
Carol McFarland
So what was the, was there a, what do you attribute that correlation and the suppressor?
Dr. Tim Paulitz
There are microbes that colonize the roots that are suppressive to rhizoctonia. And we had known this, you know, Jim Cook built his whole career on suppression of take all, which is another disease, very similar mechanisms due to bacteria on the root that actually grow better on disease roots. And so you start to get this displacement, they’re producing antibiotics and other things. And over time, the microbes essentially suppress the disease. And so that’s what happened.
So that was the first part of my research on there for that first few years is really pathology oriented. And then it kind of shifted later with Jeremy’s work on effective rotation crops.
Carol McFarland
Great. I’m excited to hear more about that. So how about the, again, what’s the agronomy of what you’re some of those early lessons learned and how that helped shape, maybe how the trajectory came along the way.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Planting spring crops out here is a recipe for a train wreck. That’s one lesson learned. We have not yet had a successful spring crop that we can grow in the long term. We might get a good crop one or two years in a row, then we’ll have a disaster. And that was the case out here as well. It just can’t compete with winter wheat fallow. We’ve grown, tried lots of lots of crops
Ron Jirava
And one of the other things that we don’t have a representative here today, but was the economics. Because that was one, when we sat down, it’s no, what are the economics of
this? Because the question was, can we even do it? We knew that we had a cheatgrass problem. We knew that we had some other issues that we’re going to try and address. What can we do? And so we just kind of started doing things. And the first question was, is it, how is it going to compare economically to the winter wheat fallow rotation, which is king? So that was also part of it. Didn’t matter if it was continuous spring wheat, continuous spring wheat barley rotation.
The two broadleaf rotations were almost a disaster big time as compared to the spring, continuous spring wheat and the spring barley. And part of that was because of markets availability. But the fluctuation in precipitation, which dictates your yield, whether it’s on an annual basis or bi-annual basis, messes with the– because it’s not a direct correlation between
half the inputs. Because it’s what was the number that they came up with about two thirds?
Dr. Tim Paulitz
Yeah.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
It costs a lot more money to grow a crop every year than it does every other.
Carol McFarland
Hopefully that’s redeemed by being able to sell a crop every year instead of every other year,
but it sounds like that might not be the case.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
We’ve had several economists–
Dr. Tim Paulitz
That was Doug Young.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Dave Archer from ARS. It’s just didn’t make it, not even close the spring crops.
Dr. Tim Paulitz
Any other thing that those were drought years, if I remember.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Well, yeah, in wet years it would hang in there.
Dr. Tim Paulitz
But then in the dry years.
Ron Jirava Yeah, that was the issue is the inconsistency of precipitation. Is that a wet year, everything looked great paperwise, crop wise, and then you’d get a dry year and we actually had some really dry years in there and–
Dr. Bill Schilinger
It looked like cancer out there with that rhizoctonia and four bushel wheat. It was like, but our first year in 1997, we had nineteen inches of rain here and Ron and I held a field day. That was the first year of our trial.
Carol McFarland
That’s the year to hold a field day right there.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Yeah, we looked brilliant. And they said, what the heck is this crop? We said, that’s yellow mustard. What’s that one? That’s safflower. And it was just, of course, looking superb in the spring wheat that year, yielded sixty-three bushels per acre for spring wheat at Ritzville.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, that’s different than four.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Yeah. But we had four as well.
Carol McFarland
One of the questions that intrigues me I have to put on my soil science hat a little bit. And I’m curious because it sounds like the inception of this trial came around the time you were transitioning your tillage management as well. And so, just from a speculation standpoint, what have you seen from your soils? Is there more evenness year to year since you maybe have been building up carbon in your soil that might have changed that dynamic early on?
Ron Jirava
Well, the one thing that the traditional fallow rotation does is it completely destroys organic matter. And it drops down to point six, point eight percent and somewhere in there. I mean, it can be in that
rate. It might be a little bit higher, but it stays there. And we looked at native soils, and they’re not a whole lot better, but they’re approaching two percent, right, about that?
Dr. Bill Schilinger
I think about one five.
Ron Jirava
So it’s like, how do we get back to that point as well? And so it’s like, okay, we need to leave more residue. We need to cut back on the tillage. And we actually did move things up a little bit,
not much.
Carol McFarland
Okay. So you think that if you were to run the trials with your soils now in, is that almost thirty years of no till?
Ron Jirava
Twenty-seven, twenty-eight.
Yeah. I think we’re already seeing that more evenness from year to year.
Carol McFarland
Yeah.
Ron Jirava
This last fall, for example, was not the best seeding conditions. In fact, they downright sucked. But yet on some of the stuff that we looked at of the neighbors that have been doing the no till
now for going on three crops, six years or so, they got some beautiful stands as compared to where the conventional stuff was hard to get to the moisture. So there’s things going on that we haven’t identified at all yet, but that’s got to have future work. Got to have something for Surendra to do.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, absolutely. And we’re going to hear about that. But I guess I’m curious about that kind of year to year evenness and the shift in tillage management that kind of came along with that asking of the question and how that might have impacted the work. And if you guys, Tim and Bill
have any response to that?
Dr. Tim Paulitz
Well, you know, when I first came here, that was probably the biggest management change that we were trying to affect was converting to direct seed, getting more farmers to do that. And there was a big interest in it. They started the Direct Seed Association around that time. So there were a lot of pioneers that were really pushing that. And I remember the first few years when they did the surveys in the high rainfall area, you know, how dismal those numbers looked in terms of how many people were doing direct seed. Remember Dennis Rowe, he had worked a lot on that. But now there’s a high percentage of them. And then we always start out here in this area here, you know, this will never happen. But now the last few years, with the work of Derek Schaefer and others, it looks like that’s starting to take hold.
And my interest from a disease standpoint was how can, you know, are there diseases that are going to become more important when you make that transition and what will happen? And in fact, we, that was right around the time when Kurt Schroeder was my PhD student, and we tried to duplicate that in trials. That was his thesis, where we specifically inoculated plots with and without rhizoctonia and could see the same thing by the third year that it became a big problem and then, and then got, and then suppressed. And we could even do it in the greenhouse. We could take cores out of this area here that had bare patch, cycle them through two or three plantings of wheat or barley in the greenhouse and the disease would disappear. So that’s a reproducible phenomenon.
Carol McFarland
Awesome. Thanks for sharing that, Tim. What’s your response to this question, Bill?
Dr. Bill Schilinger
I don’t think it probably changes that much for spring crops. Spring crops are driven by spring precipitation, rain, most specifically May rain. That is super important. May rain and first two weeks of June. That’s what’s driving your spring crop rather than tillage. But with that said, and Ron was alluding to it, farmers out here have tilled not only for, you know, for various reasons,
but mostly these days, the ones that are still tilling are doing the tillage during fallow to set a moisture line, which is very effective.
Carol McFarland
A dust mulch?
Dr. Bill Schilinger
It doesn’t have to be. I don’t like the term dust mulch, although some of many of these farmers still end up with a dust mulch. You can do conservation tillage and have a, still plenty of residue that’s not going to blow on you. You have to know how to do it and you need a special implement for that, an undercutter type thing. But that was a big driver that, oh, we’d never make the no-till work out here because we lose all our seed zone moisture. And so that’s still the reason that I think most of these farmers around here are still tilling.
But there’s innovators, Ron and, you know, you mentioned Derek Schaeffer and others that are doing this. And one thing we noticed in this particular trial is after our experience with continuous annual spring cropping and that we, after eight years, we said, well, we’ve been through two cycles of that. We’re going to publish some papers and we’re going to move on. We tried some other things, but in the last many, many years, it’s been comparing three, three year rotations that have been the most important. That involves canola chem follow, triticale chem follow, winter wheat. To just summarize, we’ve noticed that we are not having that much problem reaching moisture out here in these plots that have been in no-till all these years.
Matter of fact, we’re getting stands practically every year in no-till, as well as the conventional till. And to be frank, I’ve done a lot of work on this over three decades. [Conventional tillage] fallow is very effective in trapping moisture in the seed zone. Because it breaks capillary continuity, liquid water is moving up above that it has to move this vapor. But where no-till is a real benefit is it’s super great at, for infiltrating any rain that you get. That’ll move right down the profile. So if you get a rain sometime in the summer, and we seem to be getting a few more of those than we used to with climate change and everything, that will really set you up for a good no-till stand. And even if you don’t get that, some of these farmers are still out successfully planting into no-till.
So I think, I do believe it. Farmers were saying that at the very beginning, Tim mentioned 1998 when this really sort of got going with the Direct Seed Association. The thought was the longer you no-till, the better it’s going to be for retaining seed zone water in your no-till follow. And I think that’s the case. It’s certainly here at Ron’s on our experiments.
Carol McFarland
Well and you’ve done work on like residue and water capture and that sort of thing. Do you do anything with that on your farm, Ron? Do you like run a stripper header or how do you manage it?
Ron Jirava
We never did a stripper header. We did the undercutter. We’ve done just about everything you can think of out here on some of this stuff. I think the biggest change though was the technology and the horsepower tractors because I mean they’re still out there. The HZ drill is still out there at the neighbor’s fields and the HZ drill can only get through so much. And I don’t remember what year we switched the plots but I can remember distinctly we decided to split one of them to conventional seed and one to no-till seed. And we said we’d seed it. we split that one. We said we’d seed it regardless. And we’ve always had a stand there. We did that. We started it with winter trit or something.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
That’s a whole new treatment, not just a split of a plot, but yeah.
Ron Jirava
We started doing that and we got a crop and we didn’t have to. I mean it just it kept going and it’s always good. Since that first time we did it, it’s worked. It took a–
Dr. Bill Schilinger
With deep furrow seeding and no-till follow.
Ron Jirava
Yeah it took a special drill that was put together down at the station to get it to do it but it got done and it’s kind of that was kind of the genesis of what we’ve got today for the most part.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
And now the drills are way better than what we put together at the Lind station.
Carol McFarland
Innovation has to start somewhere and it sounds you know never underestimate as much as, as much as I love soil. The equipment pieces can be such an instrumental part in making things work.
Ron Jirava
Well and the biggest part of that equipment piece was Bob Papendick at that one meeting going why are they still using the HZ drill? It’s because there was nothing else out there. Then he goes well can we use some of this research money to do something about it? And we were told yeah.
Dr. Tim Paulitz
That was steep. Remember steep?
Ron Jirava
That was PM10.
Dr. Tim Paulitz
PM10 actually.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
So we actually had a deep furrow drill project. We said to heck with these HZ’s. You can’t seed through anything with them. These are the standard drills. These were the drills that came around in 1966 that allowed farmers to plant deep. Every farmer in this whole region went out and bought an HZ drill or an International one hundred fifty which is comparable.
But in 2010 a group of us got together and we gathered some money and Papendick was involved and then we got together with a group of farmers and we invited all the farmers in and boy did they come. We had two meetings with well over a hundred farmers and it was very interesting. We had the farmers involved saying this is what you need to have and this and that. So, we at the station built two drills. John Jacobson was my technician at the time. Bruce Sower was involved as well and they just pretty much fabricated two of them. One was well I won’t go into the details about these but they and then we had some private people.
McGregor put together a drill. They invested a lot of funds. We had one Lind farmer who actually put one together and we tested them over years and there were big improvements but still not what we needed. I would credit really Derek Schaefer for working with AgPro to fine tune one of their hoe drills for dryland follow seeding and working with them to get something that really works and Bruce Sower, farm manager at Lind, now has one of those.
Our deep furrow drill project really never went anywhere. We had a guy from Canada involved, it’s pretty wild.
Ron Jirava
But it got enough people interested to start looking at what could be done.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Yeah it did.
Bruce Sower
Well we you know like Ron was talking about the fields of tomorrow thing we originally we tried we brought a drill up from the station. It was a modified John Deere HZ drill. We went that route to start with because everybody had one and that was probably the easiest thing that was gonna you know get the drill going. The easiest thing that was gonna you know work maybe and well that kind of worked. I don’t know I don’t know what your opinion was
Ron Jirava
Well the problem with the HZ drill and even some of the 9350s.
Bruce Sower
Then like I said we built several drills at the station and you know in cooperation with some other. Ron Kyle built one of the better ones that we’re still using both the frame and everything for us on that.
Carol McFarland
What makes a good drill? In your experience.
Bruce Sower
One that has good seed placement. That will go through the residue. Yeah I mean yeah that’s– one thing I have noticed with the no-till they were you know they were talking about being able to seed into moisture. But you know what I’ve noticed is with a with chem fallow that you know as little as a quarter of an inch of rain and you can go out and seed it. Where with the tilled fallow you know it takes a half inch or more I don’t know maybe three quarters of an inch to soak through that mulch layer so you can actually go out and seed it. So yeah with the chem fallow you can get in a lot earlier with a smaller rain and get it in and get it up.
Carol McFarland
Great, thanks so much for that too Bruce. It’d be maybe nice to I’m going to ask a few of the actual questions if we’re paired here. I’m hearing a little bit about some of the management questions that started the trials. I hear cheatgrass from that field day. I hear rhizoctonia being a concern. What are some of the other research questions you started trying to answer and how have those evolved over the years of the trial?
Ron Jirava
Well water infiltration has always been one that was involved.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
We’ve extensively measured water out here all these decades in the fall after harvest in the spring. So we have pretty good handle on where the water is in the six feet all year long and how crops affect that and how winters affect that stubble, how stubble height and stubble quantity affect that.
Carol McFarland
You’re talking about this I have at least like ten more questions right. So what is your instrumentation? Did you just pull cores and bake them off and measure the
Dr. Tim Paulitz
Neutron probes.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Neutron probes and then at the surface we used gravimetric which is the hand the hand samples because the probes are not effective near at the top foot. So it’s a a lot of work but a lot of data.
Carol McFarland
What’s your favorite way in all of that sampling to conserve water or manage water?
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Leave your stubble standing over winter. If you can cut it a little taller that’s great. Don’t go out early in the spring. If you’re going to till your fallow you don’t need to be out there in March or April. Our data show you don’t even need to be out there in May most years. You can wait till June if you’re going to do that but that’s not so practical if you’re farming ten thousand acres of fallow ground because it takes a while to get over it but and we’ve seen that.
When I first came out here these farmers boy they would be out there in March tilling their fallow you know to seal it up. You don’t see that anymore and even you just drive around and here it is first of May and there’s many of them that have not and so we just don’t need to do that. So there’s been a lot of changes that farmers have made mostly on their own observations but certainly backed up by the research that we’ve done.
Carol McFarland
Right well I know that part of your reputation since you are kind of a legend is doing really trying to back up some of those questions with the research and what growers are seeing with you know good trial design and statistics and okay is this something that happens you know once or in one place into something that is more likely to happen reoccurringly across a broader space.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
And that’s the benefit of long-term experiments because the farmers can see those crops and believe me they watch during the bad years and the good years and it’s out there for to see and you know of course that we share data openly so, nothing to hide.
Carol McFarland
So since you’re talking about a little bit about trial design how are you setting up your trials differently than you know if Ron–Ron I think you have a lot of other experiments in your research portfolio on your farm other than the long-term trial but how is this set up differently so you can run statistics and kind of have that repeatable replicable scientific kind of credential to these on-farm trials?
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Well all the trials I’ve led in the field have pretty much not all but most of them been just this randomized complete block design which is a pretty standard design where you have some variability but not too much. Anything we do in the lab or a greenhouse we’d use a completely randomized design I mean this probably isn’t much interest but there’s designs that are appropriate for the for the experiment that we learn in college right.
Carol McFarland
When you’re doing an on-farm trial and what does that look like when you’re translating it from
you know the research station to a working farm and is there any difference and you know making it so– does is Ron– who’s doing the farming too is is Bruce doing the farming are you doing the farming is Ron doing the farming on these plots like what does that look like?
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Exactly.
Carol McFarland
Are you farming around the twenty-eight year plot?
Ron Jirava
No I mean when we first when we first started we were using my equipment and that they were set up to fit my equipment as things changed and equipment changed I still did some of it and Bill had one of his texts bring something and do part of it and and it’s a collaboration the whole way I mean it still is to this day I harvested the plots for I don’t know how long
Dr. Bill Schilinger
A couple years. The main thing that we learned and this was a a lesson learned in cropping systems. I wrote a paper on that lessons for successful cropping systems hasn’t been that well cited but still
Carol McFarland
I do think I read it.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Okay, thank you, but the farmers are busy and you can’t expect the farmer to say oh hey Ron it’s time to go plant a spring canola and I’d like that done this week. Well Ron’s sort of busy doing his own things, so after a couple years using Ron’s equipment we realized that that was just unfair on Ron this is a huge trial and so we converted it so we did essentially all of the work in the plot, so we could do it in a timely nature without being a pain in the butt to Ron. Because in fairness you can’t expect them to drop everything to go deal with our plots and so that is a important lesson. If you expect to have your work done on time plan on doing it yourself and don’t try to mooch off the farmer.
Dr. Tim Paulitz
Yeah I think the other thing was the plot size you know so what are the lengths of that?
Dr. Bill Schilinger
They started off thirty feet wide and five hundred feet long.
Dr. Tim Paulitz
Five hundred feet long, I think that’s important
Dr. Bill Schilinger
We were using Ron’s equipment when we went to our smaller research equipment we said hey we can we can narrow these they’re sixty feet wide. I’m sorry yeah they were sixty feet by five hundred. We said hey we can we can get twice as many treatments in here with just thirty feet wide and five hundred feet lon,g so that right now– and for the you know for the last twenty-five year plus it’s been fifty-six plots out there. Each thirty feet wide five hundred feet long they’re big.
Carol McFarland
Yeah.
Ron Jirava
That’s just on the twenty acre one.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
That’s just on the twenty acre one.
Carol McFarland
Alright, you guys keep alluding to like other trials you’re doing so you’ve got your crop rotation trial what what are some of the other things you you guys have worked on?
Dr. Bill Schilinger
We have a winter pea trial it’s not as big it’s only one hundred feet long and it’s not as wide. And then we have another one on the west side of Dewald Road here where we’re looking at– I should say Surendra now, to you know with the canola triticale wheat all with chem follow compared to traditional wheat fallow. Also no spring crops and where we still have spring crops in this in this one yeah.
Dr. Tim Paulitz
You’ve also got peas over there too right?
Dr. Bill Schilinger
And peas are an exciting new crop as you can see that Ron is planting them in your neighbor across the road who
Ron Jirava
Schoessler’s have got some. Derek’s got some.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Yeah there’s a bunch of peas out there now yeah and canola as well is if you can get it up.
Carol McFarland
Great and do you so these are you’ve tried a lot of things in this in this trial and I guess I want to circle back to the trial design and making that work on on the working farm. I think there are some collaborations that maybe, still try to do a scientifically valid design that’s not fully the complete randomized block design or or something like that to make that collaboration around the actual farming implementation a little easier
Ron Jirava
From my point of view being the producer and the farmer that has to deal with it, I mean you got to let them have their hand because if it’s going to work we want to know why. If it’s not going to work we want to know why. If someone from comes from the government say we want you to do it this way, we want to be able to say no we can’t do it this way we got to know what we have to document all this stuff we have to prove what we’re doing or why we’re doing it factually, and so you kind of got to let them have their hand in the research and go okay if we got to do this we got to do this and just live with it I mean it’s not that big a deal.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
We always insisted on everything we do is has to be publishable right.
Carol McFarland
Yeah no that makes sense. Especially with the research collaboration side again I know a lot of growers try stuff on their farm and that you know this is part of the question is what does the experimental design look like depending on the purpose.
Ron Jirava
And it’s like the other thing was too is like, what’s it cost you to go to WSU and attend classes or what does it cost me to have them come out here and give the class it’s you know it’s easier for them to come here as far as I’m concerned.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
You know one thing I want to say Carol: Ron has been such a superb collaborating farmer it’s unbelievable. I’ve– we’ve never even had an argument in all of these years. Maybe some dis– minor disagreements but it’s incredible.
Ron Jirava
I’d like the I’d like the you know the conventional tillage to disappear altogether but you know I get it
Carol McFarland
Now you’re on record saying that.
Ron Jirava
That’s fine. I asked that this year to again, can we get rid of that out of the plots yet no we got to keep it there. Oh okay.
Dr. Tim Paulitz
It’s our control we need to compare to what we’ve done in the past that’s the argument we made we kind of need the control
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Yeah the wheat fallow is well yeah, but whatever you and Surendra and you decide it’s fine.
The amount of data that we’ve uh published from this I counted them up actually last night because I thought that might be a question we have twenty-two publications so far directly from the Jirava experiment so.
Carol McFarland
Is he a co-author on these things?
Dr. Bill Schilinger
He is on all of the ones not on the scientific ones but on all of the extension bulletins and all of the field day abstracts and anything that goes out to farmers.
Carol McFarland
Great do you have um a favorite paper that you’d like to highlight?
Ron Jirava
Well Tim you’ve been well.
Dr. Tim Paulitz
I think the favorite one was documenting that suppression of rhizoctonia. It was an agronomy paper. We tended to kind of divide up so Bill would do kind of the agronomy paper and then set the stage and then we would come back later to try to explain it with some of our papers, but I really liked that one where we actually had the maps we had the bell graph you know looking over the tenyears you know increase in disease and then decline. I think that’s probably one of my favorite papers
Carol McFarland
It’s not the one with the PLFA?
Dr. Tim Paulitz
No that was later on
Dr. Bill Schilinger
That was actually that the one that’s been most cited of Jeremy’s papers is up at Hal Johnson’s farm. Long-term study that we did for his PhD
Another popular one from Ron’s here was the results of the first eight years of annual spring cropping. That’s received quite a few citations, it’s uh been very interesting and I’m sure it will continue under Dr. Singh’s tutelage
Carol McFarland
Tim you were talking about the rhizoctonia I made the crack about the PLFA,I would actually like to hear a little bit more about some of what um jeremy dug into during his.
Dr. Tim Paulitz
Yeah yeah. Talk about Jeremy because really, the genesis of the work we’ve done the last ten years was from Jeremy’s work asking that question of using canola as a rotation crop what is the effect on the following crop? And so that led to the work with Ron and Reardon, and then another segment of that research was was done out here at Ritzville.
Carol McFarland
Do you have any like awesomely cited papers from this work Jeremy, and what did you find?
Dr. Jeremy Hansen
Well the paper that’s been alluded to is a paper that was produced up at Hal Johnson’s farm. Bill Schillinger and his crew had established experiments looking at winter wheat winter canola rotation followed by spring wheat, and they had documented over a seven-year period a reduction in spring wheat yield following canola. It just so happened that I’d been collecting soil samples from that experiment and storing them in the negative eighty freezer.
So we went back and looked at through PLFA– which is phospholipid fatty acid analysis– essentially in that analysis we’re just looking at the microbial community. It’s a way to quantitatively calculate the soil microbial biomass and then break it that out into particular biomarkers such as bacteria fungi or specific fungi like AMF– arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi.
It doesn’t have the same resolution as DNA equencing but it’s a it’s a great way to quantify soil microbial biomass. And after Tim and Bill had documented that these effects were not the reduction yield was not an artifact of soil moisture or disease or weed pressure then we decided to look at the microbial community and we did see a suppression of the microbial community following canola. And so as Tim says it wasn’t a smoking gun but it put us on the road or at least a direction to follow as far as looking at yield reductions following canola.
That led us to try to reproduce those same results here at Ron Jirava’s, and moisture has been alluded to in these conversations. I do think that there’s a microbial component in yield reduction in this area but any yield reduction we saw here at this location was mostly attributed to soil moisture.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Well not, that’s the only paper we have so far on this. Moisture was a factor but there’s also microbial data that has yet to been be published, but will soon.
Dr. Tim Paulitz
So basically what happened is when I became a member of Jeremy’s committee at that time a postdoc named Dan Slatter had joined my group and brought in a lot of these DNA tools. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any DNA from that trial so that’s why we decided to to set this one up and so then we documented over that period of time the effect of of canola in the rotation on the spring wheat. And the real take-home thing that seems to have come from that was AMF seems to play a big role in it and Ron found that too with this PLFA data. And that’s what we’re really pursuing right now is because canola is one of the few crops that are non-mycorrhizal you tend to get a suppression of mycorrhizae the following year. And so we’ve also looked at the effect of triticale, barley and probably the most interesting rotation of all of them from a microbiome point of view is that continuous spring wheat that’s been– that one has a completely different microbiome than anything else so it’s probably selected for something over that period of time. So right now we’re just we’re in fact we’re going to go out there probably sampling in a few weeks and right now we’re concentrating on documenting what it’s doing to the AMF fungi in the following crops and the crops themselves.
Carol McFarland
Great I know that has been really important work in this area especially as more people are incorporating canola into their rotations from both an agronomic and economic standpoint. Are you or have you found any kind of takeaway best practices to help mitigate the impact of that?
Dr. Tim Paulitz
Yeah well I think it’s not a long-term impact and I think some of your work showed that so even though that one year you may get a reduction or suppression of amf the following year it bound it will bounce back especially if you have a broad leaf crop like peas or something. And in fact that’s kind of the impetus for a lot of this peaola research that people are doing where you’re intercropping the canola with the pea with the idea of maybe maintaining the mycorrhizal
status.
The other thing that’s still a big unknown is really what the role is of mycorrhizae in this cropping system. So a lot of the research has been done on horticulture crops, high rainfall crops etc. We know the mycorrhizae are out here we know we also have pretty high phosphorus conditions here so the question is what benefits are the mycorrhizae providing it if you’ve already got high phosphorus condition. That’s one of the mechanisms that’s been well documented to help plants take up increasing levels of phosphorus, and I have a hunch that it might have something to do with water relations and drought so it’s really wide open. It’s only been within the last ten years that the technology has out there that we can really identify what is out there. Before we could only– you can’t culture them in the lab you can’t you know you’ve got to grow them on living plants in the greenhouse all the identifications are made based on spores so if you didn’t have the spores you had no idea of who was in the root. So now we have those tools and with sequencing so that’s something we’re going to pursue.
Dr. Jeremy Hansen
And regarding AMF, arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, we have done a trial out here at Ron’s where we inoculated because that was a question we got a lot from growers is if we’re suppressing AMF can we inoculate and improve yields? We did a trial with one of Dave Huggins graduate students Cassandra Reiser where we inoculated and we saw a trend for higher yields but not statistically significant. And I think Tim alluded to this it’s the native populations, the AMF that are doing the work out there. It’s really hard in this environment to introduce AMF and have them survive those inoculations might be more suited for a greenhouse study or small plot vegetable crops, but out here it’s really hard to get AMF off the shelf to establish.
Carol McFarland
I hear it’s kind of hard living out here so maybe that has something to do with it.
Dr. Jeremy Hansen
Well it’s…
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Well, that’s kind of been one of our questions all along is what can the researchers do because I mean over the last twenty-eight years the technology has changed the things that we can test for and look at weren’t available when we started. And so it was like what can we do and what can we what is actually physically able to look at?
Carol McFarland
And yeah I mean that’s one of my questions around just the microbiome and when we add things into the microbiome if they’re selected for an ideal condition and then we put them somewhere you know as lovely as Ritzville, but also might not be best suited for all of the living organisms.
Ron Jirava
You’re almost leading into where we’re headed next with what we’ve talked about at our last meeting. What we want to do out here which is what is a healthy soil for Adams County or for Lind or Ritzville? Not just you know well this is what a healthy soil looks like well is that really what is that really what it is because moisture is a limiting factor out here so what rhizomes and
what microflora and fauna are going to actually exist.
Carol McFarland
Awesome. As we get some of these lessons learned out of Dr. Schillinger and kind of capstone this retrospective a little bit and then we’ll have the mic pass to where we’re going next with this. sSo with that, Bill and Ron and Tim, do you guys have like what are your we’ve we’ve been there’s been so much work done in this space but what are some of the key takeaways that you’ve really learned throughout the course of this work together and how that’s different from each of your perspectives?
Ron Jirava
Peas are easy.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Winter Triticale is easy too except it won’t pay for itself. It will out produce wheat consistently by fifteen percent year after year, drought year, wet year, Ritzville, Horseheaven Hills, Lind you name it it’ll always do that. There’s work being done by Josh Hegarty down at the University of California Davis and some other people to incorporate Triticale into bread. Make having some better bread quality characteristics in Triticale but what was still maintaining its yield and to raise that price bar for Triticale. Triticale right now is a feed grain feed grains are sell for less than a food grain like wheat except for this year which was very interesting.
Carol McFarland
Not depressing though.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
This this last year you could have received more money for Triticale than you could for the similar, similar volume of wheat, but that’s really an outlier if you go back to twenty years that didn’t happen so. But Triticale is easy to grow, it’s disease resistant, it never freezes out it’s one
tough customer.
Carol McFarland
Well and it can add a lot of carbon to the soil too from what I understand.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Not really, that’s one of our findings. It does not produce any more biomass straw biomass than winter wheat. It looks like it does because it grows so tall and those stems are so thick, but it doesn’t produce nearly as many stems and so we measured that and reported that. We do a lot of weird measurements as researchers and that was one of them and it’s it does not produce more residue than wheat at either Lind or Ritzville.
Dr. Tim Paulitz
Yeah and another interesting thing it may not be a problem out here but Triticale is much more tolerant of acid soil conditions.
Carol McFarland
Something I’m actually as you guys are talking about food quality type Triticale you know I’ve heard that rye can make really nice sourdough and I know that nobody wants rye probably in the crop rotation out here but I do wonder like how Trit might do in that context.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Feral rye can be a huge problem and farmers are already nervous because Triticale is a wheat rye cross, it’s got what they call rye blood. And when it volunteers you can certainly notice because it’s growing eight inches taller than your wheat, but it’s it’s not feral rye and so that’s a long term. I like winter Triticale I think if it’s easy to grow it uses less water than wheat in the long run. You’d never measure that in one year but you will over ten years plus. Will it ever catch on? Not unless it’s competitive economically with wheat, but maybe if these breeders get some better bread quality into the Triticale and that could that could happen.
Some bakers really like it they say it imparts a very unique flavor and you know not a lot maybe only ten percent of the flour’s Trit but still.
Ron Jirava
Well there again at the Trit it’s a market thing just the same as the peas the peas is a market thing. I mean we did try spring peas before we came along with the winter pea the spring pea out here was yeah we’re not gonna never mind. But the winter peas there again we started out with yellows they’re working on make coming up with greens because they have a better larger market and a better price unless you go to the grocery store and you see what they charge you for yellow peas. The canola is the same thing. We were sending canola to Montana and Canada. We were sending the yellow mustard to Montana. Well now we’ve got markets more local markets that are willing to help us out and deal with these things and it makes it more economical that way.
Carol McFarland
The marketing piece really you know having you need diverse markets to have diverse rotations and that it’s just really the fundamental part of that isn’t it. Okay you guys have grown some weird stuff it sounds like what was the weirdest thing you’ve grown? Was it the safflower
or something else?
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Safflower is easy to grow. That big slam on safflower is it dries your soil down to nothing just like a Russian thistle.
Carol McFarland
Also it hurts the chaff on it is like the worst thing
Dr. Bill Schilinger
It’s a thistle.
Carol McFarland
It is and you don’t like that in your socks at least I don’t.
Ron Jirava
But we had flax I had flax out here in a plot in a twenty acre piece.
Carol McFarland
Oh how’d the flax do?
Ron Jirava
They were pretty yeah but but, they yeah it was not the there again marketing I had to haul them all the way down to Clarkston to be cleaned, and then I sold them up in Okanagan.
Carol McFarland
Oh that sounds inefficient.
Ron Jirava
Very inefficient. Yeah. We had a crop called fenugreek out here that was actually pretty interesting smelled like a maple syrup factory out there for a while.
Dr. Tim Paulitz
Yeah that’s a crop widely grown in North Africa.
Carol McFarland
I hear that you don’t want your cows to eat that one.
Ron Jirava
No and and, yeah that’s there’s a few other things that come that they derive from fenugreek that you want to women that are close to having children you don’t want them out there either. Yeah.
Dr. Tim Paulitz
And then your, your dry land alfalfa.
Ron Jirava
The dry land alfalfa wasn’t a complete disaster.
Dr. Tim Paulitz
But it was an interesting.
Ron Jirava
Yeah it, but that predated roundup ready alfalfa and I think that a person could do something with with dry land alfalfa with the roundup ready stuff to help control the weeds and that a little bit everything.
Carol McFarland
Bill do you have a favorite weird crop?
Bill Schilinger
Well it’s not weird. Camelina. We looked at that long and hard and continue to do so.
Carol McFarland
Did you bring your duct tape for all the combine equipment?
Dr. Bill Schilinger
That’s the joke and that’s the truth. About you know very small seeded.
Bruce Sower
Special sieves to even harvest it.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
But yeah and it’s not economically viable so far and it too had a negative effect on the following wheat crop. And Jeremy did a paper on that one as well.
Carol McFarland
Do you want to talk about that?
Ron Jirava
Who was down there at the time that gave us the all the millet seed?
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Oh yeah. Um millet we tried to. Yeah.
Carol McFarland
You did try. Okay let’s have Jeremy talk about Camelina for a second and then I want to hear about millet. I saw a Capital Press article about millet. We gotta talk about millet.
Dr. Jeremy Hansen
So we asked the same question of yield suppression following Camelina and there were Camelina plots at Lind that we pulled samples from and saw suppression of spring weight following Camelina as well. And some of the suppression there’s a question of whether it’s because it’s a non-host for AMF or if it’s because of the glucosinolates that are associated with the plant that are actually suppressing the microbiome. And Camelina has a little bit higher glucosinolate content so if that is the cause it would have more potential to create a suppression microbiome, but we did see that is one of the plots where we saw a rebound where we came out of the rotation with Camelina within a year. The microbiome had bounced back to what it had been previously and so it was like when we went back into winter we there this is that was their home that’s what they’re used to and I think we refer to that as a legacy effect. So once we get back to winter wheat then they’re happy again. So yeah Camelina we covered in a very similar way.
Carol McFarland
Thanks for that Jeremy, and now I gotta hear about you threw some millet seed in the ground out here too how’d that look?
Ron Jirava
The millet seed didn’t like it at all it never got warm enough. It stayed purple it’s very short there I don’t remember how many varieties that they brought out, and most of them didn’t even put heads on them. So we learned really fast that warm season crops don’t like it out here.
Carol McFarland
Yeah when was that I mean you know maybe climate change will…
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Late nineties. We have not yet identified a spring crop that we can consistently grow out here in the drylands without this extreme variability in yield and so not so I say yet so that’s why we have Surendral.
Carol McFarland
I’m excited to see some of the the soil health components highlighted I think that’s going to be a real asset as foundational to maybe some of the buffer capacity not just around acidity but around kind of the moisture.
Ron Jirava
Well and I think too that because of the work that we did with the spring cropping I mean it’s pushed the the the research and it’s pushed the interest into the chem fallow, and making and seeing that actually we can make this work. We don’t have all the answers yet to the timeline or you know how long that transition period is like we do with the spring stuff but it’s doable.
Carol McFarland
So Bill I’m really excited to hear more from Surendra, but I really want to hear if you have any of your kind of final thoughts around long-term trials on-farm working with growers, multi-disciplinary collaboration. You’ve you’ve done so much do you have any kind of last words of wisdom before we hear where the fate of the project is where it’s going next?
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Well I don’t know about words of wisdom but when I was hired by WSU in late ninety-two, nineteen-ninety-two I was told that you know Lind is one tough place and you have five years essentially to prove yourself or you’re not going to get tenure and you won’t be here anymore. So make sure you do something that’s successful.
Carol McFarland
No pressure.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Well I didn’t even really think about that at all I just went out and tried to have fun and I reached out to growers and over the course of you know twenty-nine years I did I probably did sixty percent of my work in growers fields. A lot of it here at Ron’s, about half of it here at Ron’s and the others all over the place literally. Douglas County, Horse Heavens, you know Palouse. It’s just been really fun and growers always had good ideas all of these trials have always been developed in consultation with farmers the farmers had to want the trial. Some of it involved some long-term equipment– or commitments you know Ron here has been you know over.
Ron Jirava
Like Bill says though, it wasn’t just me the farmer it was my neighbors as well that sat in on these things and said this is what we want to do it wasn’t just my idea by any means or in any way and it’s and it continues not to do that. I mean we involve as many growers and neighbors that are interested.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Yeah good point Ron. And when I started work that I did a lot of work down the Horse Heaven Hills just because it’s so dry, it’s driest wheat country in the world.
Carol McFarland
Yeah we talked to some of the folks down there and heard a little bit about that too.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
And so I was interested in working down there and I got Papendick involved, Bob Papendick and I said will you come down to a meeting I have a meeting lined up with the Horse Heaven Hill farmers. So we went down there in early December and they the farmers had a lunch and we met at their Grange Hall out in the middle of nowhere up there and I laid it out and I said
this first trial that I’m proposing is going to be six years and it’s going to involve a lot of work
from the cooperating farmers. And they and they were they were we spent all day up there talking about this and what we’re going to do we tried some yellow mustard which was a failure. We did a lot of things and that was just the first of several trials up in the Horse Heaven Hills, and during all of that time relationships have just really been great. I looked forward to going to work practically every day unless that was a you know meeting or something.
Carol McFarland
Yeah they didn’t have so many zoom meetings probably at that time.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
But you know I had a great time I feel very fortunate and to to be able to to come do this work and I think Surrendra is a great hire and I hope you are out here and have just as much fun as I did, Surendra
Dr. Tim Paulitz
Yeah and I’d also like to make a few comments about this collaboration that I’ve had with Bill over the years and the fact that we’ve been able to leverage so much because without that I would not have seen the problems the disease problems out there and I wouldn’t have really been able to do that kind of applied research. So at the USDA we very much have a mission goal to try to to figure out how to help the growers with management etc. So I think that collaboration he provided all the agronomy which I never would have done. So essentially I’m kind of like a parasite. I hate to say that, Bill but basically you know piggybacking on the work and the trials and everything so I don’t have to do that and of course we don’t really have much of a field program with our unit anymore so we’ve had cutbacks, but I could essentially come onto that site take the samples ask the scientific questions work with Bill to publish so that kind of collaboration I think is another key part of this whole whole project.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
And it is and I’m remiss for not bringing that up. Collaboration with scientists from WSU, ARS, Oregon State and elsewhere has been key and if you’re doing cropping systems research– you know I’m an agronomist you know I don’t have all these other skills and so collaboration has been very key and I couldn’t see how you can be successful unless you had some really productive collaborators.
Ron Jirava
Well and that was it I mean if I had a question we’d ask the question the next question would be wait who can answer this question? And we had a whole slew of people to pick from it in that sense.
Carol McFarland
Yeah how many researchers have you had on your farm over the years Ron?
Ron Jirava
I can’t even keep track.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Many dozens.
Carol McFarland
And what do you feel like is kind of key to that you know keeping those relationships really positive and making sure that you know everybody feels good around that kind of network and that kind of work?
Ron Jirava
As a producer you have to understand that they have certain things that they have criteria that they have to meet. They got to be able to publish it for one. They have to have the equipment that they need to look at the question that we have. I mean that was always something that you know it’s just kind of a back and forth thing and just a sharing of assets.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
It’s worked really smooth here always.
Carol McFarland
Well I have to say so Tim I think I think we all know that parasites are things that don’t give a net benefit.
Dr. Tim Paulitz
Okay I should correct myself I call it a symbiotic relationship.
Carol McFarland
That’s mutualism.
Dr. Tim Paulitz
Mutualistic symbiotic relationship although some people argue a symbiosis parasite. I’m not going to get into that but yeah it’s basically been symbiotic, but I could not have done the work myself.
Carol McFarland
The framework of the cropping systems question and being able to piggyback all of these transdisciplinary and applied questions and having the grower perspective. You’re a pro at the I think you know these days we’re calling it stakeholder engagement in the co-production of research and so you you’ve been doing that for decades.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Well if you’re out here you better be doing something useful for them or else they’re not going to have much interest.
Carol McFarland
Well I know you guys this study is a legend, and Bill you have done such amazing work for the ag community in this region and I just want to say thank you. It’s been really wonderful to you know even though we haven’t necessarily worked alongside each other I’ve definitely read some of your papers, followed your work. I’m always inspired so by that legacy so thank you for the work you’ve done.
Dr. Bill Schilinger
Well thank you Carol but it truly is and has been a group effort by with many collaborators and support staff. Bruce Sower, several technicians I’ve had through the decades.
Carol McFarland
They say teamwork makes the dream work so it sounds like that’s been a really big part of the legacy as well, but with that I’m really excited to just invite you to pass your mic to Dr. Singh so that we can hear spend a little bit of time in this interview before we wrap up.
So Dr. Singh I’m hearing that you’ve had your first meetings of the you know soliciting the input of all of the stakeholders and introducing yourself and not just you as part of the Lind station
at this point. So and it sounds like hopefully it’s been a grand welcome.
Dr. Surendra Singh
Yes it has been and the biggest part that I consider myself lucky to like already done the heavy lifting by Ron, Bill, Tim that now we have a huge background of information to build upon and having these long-term trials. So yeah it’s been a really commendable job done so I really want to continue working at working and answer more and more questions and now that we go forward into the more conservation of soil and into soil health systems it’s and also the new challenges like herbicide resistance weeds and all these new issues are popping up. The previous researcher and the growers collaboration, you really set up this set up the stage for us to dig deeper into those future challenges. And will continue to so yeah that’s really grateful.
I, my mentor used to say like the long-term trials are exactly like a living laboratories that you can continue answer a whole plethora of questions whether it is from soil health science, microbiome, rhizosphere, weed science, pathology you just name it now the carbon emissions and everything. We continue to have meetings with farmers in the region and Ron has been to couple of them to decide what is going to be the future direction and how can we answer better using these trial that what exactly the soil health from our region looks like and what it should support and how we can continue to improve upon it, and looking at the importance of having tilled fallow at the control that how much we have already improved and where we can go from there is there a is there a plateau of improvement in soil health or soil carbon per se. So yeah those all research areas we are really excited about and and it obviously it wouldn’t be possible without the the grower support and the previous work done by scientist and Bill specifically here.
Carol McFarland
Great I’m really looking forward to hearing more and watching more as that evolves. So are you still asking questions about cheatgrass or you know what are the research questions more specifically for these long-term cropping systems trials that you’re inheriting?
Dr. Surendra Singh
So yeah there are like a lot of questions and this, these long-term trials also give us opportunity to invite the expertise I myself may not have like we are taking Tim’s and Jeremy’s help on to answering the more microbial questions and now we have new soil health scientist Dr. Shikha Singh, Haley Neely. And so we have all the scientists on board to answer the question about like pretty much everything we are facing and diving deep into soil health science of it and how it compares to the native healthy soils so yeah.
Carol McFarland
Great and there’s some biosolids work that you’re doing too still?
Dr. Surendra Singh
Yes that’s an interesting study and that is also just like Tim mentioned we are just piggybacking on Bill’s research that. So this is a trial established by Dr. Schillinger and at the Lind station, so last year when we were in the field we saw like really really lush wheat growth compared to the neighboring wheat and then we dig deeper what was there? And that turns out to be the the old biosolid trial which was concluded a couple of years ago. I think the papers were published in twenty-twenty-two, and so then I thought like there’s something definitely going on, so we just went ahead and sampled the soil and sent for analysis and we found out yes there is a lot of residual effects. I like to call it legacy of biosolids compared and that those trials has like a tillage undercut and distillage and biosolids and synthetic fertilizer these four treatments in different combinations. And so we looked at the yield and then the harvest season came we look at the yield components and grain protein and everything from the trial and it turns out that even after seven years of application there is still a considerable amount of nutrient present. Improved carbon and yields are still showing up improvement, and grain protein is still not higher in those biosolids so it’s comparable to synthetic fertilizers. So yeah that’s my– that’s how I got into that the biosolid science and and now that we have the confirmed results we want to continue tracking down not only on the benefits of it but also on the other side like how much heavy metals PFAS contents and and everything is available so that we can actually answer it’s is in in a whole not only looking at the agronomy side of it but also from environmental and and food side of the questions from that trial
Carol McFarland
Yeah this is the fun thing about cropping systems isn’t it? There’s so many different pieces to it. Ron have you been watching those biosolids trials on the farm?
Ron Jirava
Actually I’ve been using biosolids longer than they’ve been using them with the research station.
Carol McFarland
So is your input helping to shape some of the questions that Surendra is asking over there
Ron Jirava
To some extent yes. No but we started biosolids back in 1986 I believe and worked with WSU and the guys over at Puyallup that they were doing it at that time and come up with a lot of stuff out here and and a lot of numbers just right out here in front of the house
Carol McFarland
Awesome. Also, as we wrap up I’m interested to know, you know as you’ve been part of this legacy of long-term trials on your farm how has that affected your management over the years and are there things that you do differently that you might not have because of the collaboration? Aside from farming around a twenty acre piece given to researchers.
Ron Jirava
I don’t know that I’d ever gone and done spring cropping on everything the way I did if we hadn’t been doing some of this. I know that, I’m absolutely positive that there wouldn’t be a forty foot drill setting out here that can go through no-till fallow in the fall if we hadn’t been doing some of this. Now there’s there’s a there’s a lot of things that have taken place that have been incorporated on the farm here and there’s been a lot of things that have been a lot of things that have been stopped or done away with because of the research that we’ve that we were doing out there. I mean you know like I said you’ve got WSU coming here and doing the research you’re the first one to get the answers to the questions right
Carol McFarland
And it’s super relevant to your farm.
Ron Jirava
Absolutely. I mean it’s everybody everybody wants to have the variety plots on their farm so they can you know know exactly what variety to plant next year. It’s kind of the same thing.
Carol McFarland
That’s great thank you so much. Tim do you have any final thoughts?
Dr. Tim Paulitz
The final thoughts you were asking that question what did we learn, and I would have two or three lessons from a disease point of view. The first thing is that a shift in a management practice like tillage will have an effect on diseases and so that that was an important lesson. The second lesson I think that we learned was that you can have natural disease suppression taking place. It may take a few years for that to happen, but you know things kind of reach an equilibrium. And then the third thing from all this canola work that we’ve done looking at all the different microbiomes is that in reality the plants share a lot of the same micro, microbiomes. I mean we can, we can try to find some that are unique but in the end they’re just gobbling up everything that the plant’s putting out there and so there’s a lot of commonality but there still is that legacy effect. And I think that that’s something that we’ve seen in some of the rotation crops that can have on the following week crop so. And then one more thing you know this camelina thing, you know we’ve we’ve had this DOE grant we’ve been working on for about four years and I know that camelina kind of had its heyday and then it’s kind of declined, but I’m wondering whether there’s still a place maybe for winter camelina if they could breed good winter camelina. The spring camelina you know obviously isn’t going to work in this system so I wonder whether that’s another up-and-coming possibility of a rotation crop that could be work out here.
Carol McFarland
Nice. I hear there’s some work going on at the station in that vein so I look forward maybe we’ll see it at the field day. Awesome, okay. Surendra, what’s the weirdest thing you’re going to grow
in this trial because you’ve got such a great background around dry land cropping system, so I’m really looking forward to seeing what that looks like.
Dr. Surendra Singh
Well we had this I think for researchers, nothing is weird until unless we have the data. So I would like to put it a different way that I would like to try everything possible we can do to to continue improving our system. So yeah I wouldn’t call anything weird to be honest. Yeah, it’s just that hit and try, and it’s like it’s more important to learn what not to do than what to do. So in this like you know a little more unforgiving environment it’s more important to learn it that way, and yes and we have such an advantage of like try things on a small scale and tell that yeah this works or this doesn’t work and then pass on the on the results.
Ron Jirava
It’s like Bill mentioned earlier you know that first year we put it out there and we, we looked really really smart that first year one more year and we looked really like what are you guys doing?
Carol McFarland
You know that’s that’s part of the research process too.
Ron Jirava
One hit wonders, you know?
Carol McFarland
Try to make it look good. No that’s, that’s great. I am interested a little bit and I will, I am interested about the role of the research plots and then how to scale those up and how do you know when it’s time to try that or when to scale it up and that kind of the role of the the research from an applied perspective can you speak to that?
Ron Jirava
Well, what we’ve done in the past is try to set the research plots up that they get a full cycle. So if it’s a four-year rotation or two-year or three-year rotation so give it that time so every rep has its opportunity, and at that point then sit down and look and go okay did we have some success where did we not have success what’s going on and reevaluate at that time, you know. It’s like I mentioned you know the one year’s information doesn’t give us enough. Two years doesn’t necessarily give us enough, and so these long-term plots that’s where that’s what’s made them successful is it’s. But it takes patience it takes patience on everybody’s part, including those that have to fund it and every and those that got to live with it, because it’s not going to happen fast. I mean it’s you know we are a production system, but our production line takes a full year to get through it. Unfortunately we’re not like we’re– it’s not like we’re making cars or toothbrushes and it’s like oh that when we got to make a change in the in the line here. It sometimes takes a couple years to make that change.
Carol McFarland
Well, with that thank you so much for having us all out on your farm today. I really appreciate Dr. Schillinger, that you’ve come out of retirement for a moment to speak with us to hear a bit more about this great work you’ve done. Dr. Paulitz, thank you so much for all that you have to offer always a net benefit. Dr. Singh very much looking forward to the trajectory of the Lind research and all of all of your program that’s based from the station and I’m sure will affect the greater region. Dr. Hansen thank you so much for sharing all of your wisdom as PLFA master and master of the microbiome. And Bruce thanks for all that you do because making the research run it wouldn’t be possible without it. So thanks again Ron. Thanks to all of you, and thanks to our listeners for joining us.