Join the conversation on Uhlorn Family Farms outside of Cottonwood, ID with Darrel and Brentley Uhlorn and Dave Dahlsrud. In this interview they describe their trials with cropping system innovations, alternative crops, weed management, integrating cattle, and using compost teas, extracts, biostimulants, and foliar fertilizers at production scale.Â
Carol McFarland
Today we’re out on Uhlorn Family Farms outside of Cottonwood, Idaho. We’re excited to be here with Mr. Darrel Uhlorn. Would you like to take a moment to introduce yourself?
Darrel Uhlorn
Yeah, I’ve been on the farm since eighty-one and it’s a third generation. I love every day I’m here, so it’s not a job, it’s love.
Carol McFarland
That’s great. And you’re passing the baton, not fully passed, but you’re working on it.
Darrel Uhlorn
No fully, but I’m getting pretty close to my son, Brent.
Brent Uhlorn
Brent Ulorn, I’ve been here for twelve years now. I came back a little bit later in life. Went out in the world, did some other work and decided that farming really was my passion that I wanted to come back to. So I’ve been back here now and enjoy getting to work beside my dad. I get along really well most days and it’s been good. And then with us we also have David Dalshrud, who we brought on the farm about two years ago, who has been a fantastic addition. So I’ll let Dave introduce himself.
Dave Dalshrud
Dave Dalshrud, like Brent said, I’ve been working here with Ulorns for a couple of years. This is my first official farm job. I probably spent about fifteen, twenty years of my adult life trying to figure out how I could get on the farm and make a living, be able to support my family. And it was just kind of almost a providential thing. I ran into these guys and they’re doing awesome stuff here, so I’m pretty excited to be a part of it.
Carol McFarland
Well, from what I hear, you’re a really valuable part of the farm. So I’m excited to hear from all of you. Now Brent, you’re also raising the fourth, fifth generation here.
Brent Uhlorn
Yes, fifth generation, yep. So my son Baker seems to be the one who’s the most excited. He comes, spends at least one day a week on the farm most of the year. If it’s summertime, it’s two to three days a week. He’s four years old and just loves everything about it. So I have a hard time keeping him away. And I only suspect that’ll get worse the older he gets in school.
Carol McFarland
I noticed you guys have some cows around the corner. Does he like the tractors or the cows better?
Brent Uhlorn
So he prefers the tractors. Cows still spook him a little bit. And I guess one thing fortunate for us is the cows are not ours. We just lease out the feedlot and pasture land up here. We moved away from cattle about seven years ago, probably. And the herd was too small for the amount of headache it was. Anyone with livestock knows that- and tries to farm at the same time. Cows get out during the middle of harvest, not when you have nothing else to do. They get out on the weekends when you’re trying to hit the road for a family vacation that you rarely get to take. So we decided it was better not to deal with them than to be someone else’s headache.
Carol McFarland
Well, that sounds like a pretty ideal arrangement, really.
Brent Uhlorn
It’s worked well so far, yeah.
Darrel Uhlorn
It’s worked very well, yeah. We’ve got a good guy on here taking care of the cattle. He’s conscious about what he does. We’re excited to have him. He does good work.
Carol McFarland
Well, before we get into more of the details around your farm system, I’d like to hear just a little bit more about– since we’re talking already about having that partnership around the cattle– what are some of the things that have made that successful for you guys?
Darrel Uhlorn
He loves cattle. I mean, that’s what he’s always wanted to do is raise cattle. So, I mean, in our mind, that’s important. So he takes care of them. He watches them. He’s very good with them. And it’s just fun to watch him take care of them.
Brent Uhlorn
You can tell he’s passionate about it.
Darrel Uhlorn
He’s passionate about it. So that’s just like we are with the farm. He’s kind of the same way. So that’s what’s really exciting.
Carol McFarland
Nice. Well, I hope we get to hear a little bit more about how maybe the cattle are part of your on-farm trials as well.
Brent Uhlorn
We’ve been doing a little bit. Yeah. Actually, Dave has had a few different types of livestock on our farm doing some grazing experiments that we can, we’ll touch on those a little bit, but we’ll also be partnering with our cow guy this year because we’re going to be needing some more numbers. And like I said, Dave was generous enough to lend us his cattle herd last year, but he needs to keep them around home to do some work there, it sounds like, this year. So that’s a good thing. Better to have too much grass than not enough.
Exactly. Those are good problems to have. At my place, we have a kind of a small holding where we do like, I guess, like homestead, hobby farm types of stuff. So we’ve had cows, sheep, pigs, chickens, ducks, like just a pile of stuff along with market gardens, stuff like that. And I grow a little bit of seed for a local seed company too. You know, it’s nice to be able to have time to work on all that along with the big farm.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, what a diversity of farm hats you must wear. And price of menagerie, that sounds really fun. Well, I guess we’re going to circle back and just, if you guys wouldn’t mind talking a bit more about your farming conditions here outside of Cottonwood. What’s your soil like, your moisture, what’s your standard crop rotation?
Brent Uhlorn
Yeah, so we’re considered high rainfall moisture. We farm anywhere from sixteen to twenty-four inch rainfall zone, depending on where the farm ground lies. I know quite a few guys who farm out in the dry land area and just wished that they could have half of that rainfall some years too. And I completely understand that, but, you know, twenty-four inches does come with its own headaches at times too, with having to deal with too much water and being able to get across the ground in a timely fashion. So there are some downsides to the other side of the picture too.
Soil conditions we’re clay loam soil. We’re not overly deep soils like the Palouse, but what we do have is very rich soil. We’re up here on a high mountain prairie, so we are a little bit cooler climate. Rarely, rarely, rarely break a hundred degrees less than ten days in the nineties, so not particularly hot. Have quite a bit of snowfall in the region too. So kind of some just background on the area.
Standard rotation, we run a kind of, we call it a five year flex rotation with the main things, main crops are we do a winter canola into a winter wheat into a legume, whether it be a pea or chickpea, and then finish off with a winter wheat or an oat crop and then we’ll come in with the fallow. So that’s the base of the blend and then from– but within that we grow winter wheat, spring wheat, oats, canola, peas, lentils, garbs.
Darrel Uhlorn
A lot of grass seed, we have a fair amount of grass seed that we grow perennials. So that isn’t really included in the rotation because it’s in the crop for six to ten years. So we try to rotate, our goal is to rotate that throughout the farm. You can pick and choose what field you want it on.
Brent Uhlorn
Also do raise sunflowers. We’ve done millet in the past. We’ve done quinoa. We’ve grown a few different vegetable seed crops, spinach, turnips, and general radish, I believe. And so yeah, try to have a– find diverse crops to mess with.
Carol McFarland
We were just talking a little bit about Peaola too. You guys are like the gluttons for punishment.
Brent Uhlorn
We are. We did a ten acre Peaola trial four or five years ago, I think.
Darrel Uhlorn
Three or four years ago.
Brent Uhlorn
And they both grew. The problem we ran into was pod weevil in the peas. And so we ended up just cutting high to target the winter canola and left the peas standing and just dealt with them later.
Darrel Uhlorn
All the seeds had pod weevil burrowed into the seed. So there really wasn’t anything there in our harvest that was salvageable. So that’s the reason we didn’t cut it together.
Carol McFarland
Yeah, those pea weevils can really do some damage.
Darrel Uhlorn
Yeah, and it didn’t take long. So, you know, I don’t know, there’s probably a spray a guy who will put on that we could have control of it. We never ever thought much about it. I was hoping that it wouldn’t be an issue.
Brent Uhlorn
I think there’s some nutritional things too that we can work on getting the pea weevil under control.
Carol McFarland
Well, thanks so much for sharing about the diversity in your crop rotation. It sounds like you guys have tried a lot of things, and to have a conversation about on-farm trials we’re in the right place today.
Brent Uhlorn
Yeah.
Carol McFarland
Can I ask a little bit more about what motivates you to diversify so much?
Brent Uhlorn
A lot of it. The reason we came up with that was it was a financial diversification, or I guess to help reduce the financial risk if we’re invested in more regions or more crop types, we hopefully aren’t as susceptible to big price swings in the marketplace. So wheat production is down, hopefully canola is up, or legumes are– except another market there that we can look into for pricing diversification. So that’s kind of why we came up with the structure that we did or the rotation that we did is to, like I said, just spread out that financial risk of it.
Darrel Uhlorn
And it’s also fun. You’ll see what you can grow. Part of the problem with it is making sure you have a market that sometimes we grow something, we don’t have a market. But first you have to know if you can grow it on a real small scale before you can investigate the market. There’s just no way to get rid of it. So the quinoa is interesting that there’s no market that we could find a place to go with it, but use it to feed your cattle or whatever we can do, cut a crop, seed, whatever.
Brent Uhlorn
Yes, that is one benefit to having cattle up here is we can get rid of a lot of crop through them.
Carol McFarland
Well, diversifying the risk on those on-farm trials. That makes sense. It’s really inspiring. And also, I think you bring up a good point, Darrel, in that kind of chicken or egg around the markets and how do we really explore what’s possible and then also what’s not. So with that, I’m excited to hear more about what experiments and trials you currently have going on the farm.
Brent Uhlorn
So we’ve got several of them going on and we’ll kind of touch on them just real quickly. If we need to dive into more, some of those we certainly can. One of the ones we’re working on through our local conservation district is we have one of those harvest weed seed control units, hammer mills on the back of the combine. So we’re doing strip trial research on those to see how we can affect weed populations. And so that is on three strips. One where we use just the hammer mill only. One where we use hammer mill and herbicides in conjunction. And then one where we just do our standard herbicide treatment and turn the hammer mill off during that. And then over a three-year period, we’ll go in, we’ll count weeds and see what those populations look like. So we just had our first full year under our belt for that. And so looking forward to kind of see how those numbers come forward with that.
So other ones we’ve been doing is reduction of soil-applied nutrients. That’s probably going to be the best way to describe that. So switching from the soil-applied fertility to more foliar fed crops, I guess that’s pretty much whole farm now. We’ve kind of moved on past the trial phase for those and feel pretty confident in that. It’s just a matter of call it a how low can you go scenario.
And then, we’re using a lot of bio-stimulants, biologicals, compost teas,
Darrel Uhlorn
Compost extracts.
Brent Uhlorn
Compost extracts.
Darrel Uhlorn
Manure for which– you’re…fulvics , humics… that’s what’s needed to help everything…
Brent Uhlorn
Stabilize.
Darrel Uhlorn
Stabilize, grill, give it food, all that kind of stuff. So just this whole health and trying to get that soil working like it should again.
Carol McFarland
The carbon inputs and ecology.
Brent Uhlorn
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, we do…or I guess looking to do some more in-depth biologicals and pulling back more fertility stuff. So for example, last year we ran a field of oats that had zero applied soil fertility. We were able to manage everything via foliar feeding. We had a really nice crop with that, really good quality. So we’re looking to repeat that one. Just using all biologicals, we used some pivot bio on that trial and it worked really well. So hoping to replicate that and hopefully replicate the results again, because that was really nice on the checkbook there.
Carol McFarland
Well, I’m curious because you are trying a lot of different things it sounds like from the foliar applied nutrients to some of the biological stimulants and whatnot. And based on your description of the harvest weed seed trial, it sounds like you’ve really got some solid farm scientific processes down for trying things on your farm. Do you want to talk about how that looks when you’re dealing with different things like your foliar application? How did you decide to go from… what did your trials look like? And then how did you decide that that was something you want to scale up?
Brent Uhlorn
Yes. We’ve done trials multiple different ways. We’ve done whole field trials where we will take
two fields that perform very similarly and we will do one under one method, one under the other.
We’ve taken fields and we’ve split them in half. We’ve also done strip trials in the fields. And so those are kind of the different ways we’ve done this. I would love to have the time and the equipment for doing like large scale plot work, but just don’t have the small equipment to do it.
Don’t have the time to go out and do it. But we’d love to be able to do some more of that on some of this called further reaching regenerative type stuff. But just haven’t gotten there yet, but
that’s kind of how we’ve done it.
The biggest challenge with this is at the end of the year, most of it comes down to yield. How does it yield? And so taking the time to harvest those separate can be tough, especially on the strip trials where you’ve got multiple combines from the field. You’ve got to cut one off that’s dedicated just to that, which means it’s own separate truck that’s heading to the scales to measure everything. Nowadays, a lot of the grain carts have scales on them. So that would be a nice addition to have. You can get all your weights right there and just keep on moving. But that would probably be the biggest thing is at the harvest time, making sure to take the time to gather the data to do that. And when you’re in the heat of it, it’s really hard to do. I’m not going to say we’re perfect at it. There’s been plenty of times we’ve just gone right on through and hope we can see it on the yield monitor.
Carol McFarland
So you guys also layer in your yield monitor.
Brent Uhlorn
Yes. That’s part of it.
Carol McFarland
Of course, I have to dig into compost tea. You’re really well known and the reason I think for
being one of the pioneers around actually running compost teas and now extracts through a large system. We’d love to talk more about that. And I know Dave, you have a whole different, maybe not a whole different perspective on it, but I know you really bring something to the table on that regard as well.
Dave Dalshrud
So I’m trained in and practice Korean natural farming. And so on the smaller scale where you see a lot of that implemented, it works really well. A lot of guys are high dollar crops, cannabis, hemp, stuff like that. Right?
Carol McFarland
Those are high value crops.
Dave Dalshrud
They are high value crops and those guys are seeing a lot of benefit from that. And so that’s kind of where I stuck my toe in there and started figuring that stuff out. And I’ve translated it out into pasture situations, winter confinement, stuff like that, and really see a lot of benefit there. And then coming here to the big farm, right? Being able to bring some of that knowledge and some of those techniques and products and stuff like that and kind of sneak them in and put them on a broad acre has been really, really fun.
We’re seeing, I think, pretty good results with this.
Brent Uhlorn
Yeah. So Dave, because of his background there, has built us our own Johnson Su bioreactors. And so we’ve got four different ones going right now. We’ll probably start a couple more this spring. We’ll wait for those first ones to get mature enough. We’re hoping we’re able to use those this year or this spring, but if not, hopefully they’ll be ready by fall. But yeah, just really neat to see that taking that indigenous biology and just ramping it up and putting it back in the agriculture fields where some of it’s been long, long gone. So yeah.
And then, how we got started in compost tea was several years ago, I heard a talk by Tom Poole, who was doing some on his farm out in Mansfield, Washington. And so my wife’s family vacations out there and we had a little window between grass harvest and wheat harvest. And so I tooled up to go meet them up there for a couple of days and it takes me right past their place. So I called them up and popped in just to see it. And it really blew my mind that– the best way to explain it is we started off across the road in the conventional wheat fallow rotation there and the field was dusty. It was hard. And just kind of what I guess you would expect to see in that region. And then we went across the road and it was almost like walking on a firm mattress as soon as we stepped onto his fields. And you could take the toe of your shoe and you could scratch the top of the ground. He had moisture all the way to the top. This is the middle of August. Across the road, you had to dig down about six inches that particular year to find the soil moisture.
Carol McFarland
Wait, you could dig in that?
Brent Uhlorn
Well, not easily, but yeah, with the shovel, you can jump on it hard enough to get down there.. But so yeah, that’s the kind of what really intrigued me is he talked about how he was using this compost tea and was just spraying it on his ground and was getting these results.
So we started with a tote and some compost tea bags. We got off Amazon and would leave them soak. From there, we upgraded to a fish bubbler to get a little bit of oxygen in there. And then after that, we bought an actual brewer system. It was an eight-hundred gallon tank with a large air pump, bubblers, and then it had sleeves in there that we could drop in compost tea bags and then force the air up through it. And then– system works well.
The biggest issue we probably run into is the time it takes to make up a full batch versus how fast we can put it out. So when we’re in the middle of seeding, that becomes our bottleneck. We just can’t brew up compost tea quite fast enough. So last year, we switched to a compost extract machine. So there we take a really high quality vermiculture compost. We run it through a machine that uses water jets and gently blasts the biology off the compost and puts it into a concentrate, which we can then either run the concentrate straight or we can put that into the brewer with a little bit of food and we can get really, really quick responses to that, to where we can actually put the compost in. We can actually start to plug up a fifty mesh filter with a biofilm in as little as four to six hours. So when it wakes up, it really gets going.
Carol McFarland
That’s exciting. So I have to just kind of give a nod to some of your background transferable skills and how fearless you are in the face of brewing and these biologicals because you– if I recall correctly, in your time before coming back to the farm, studied wine?
Brent Uhlorn
Yes. Yep. So before I came to the farm, I went to school out at Walla Walla Community College and did their agriculture program. And in conjunction with that, I also went through the wine school that they have there. And so became familiar with handling yeast and fermenting and all that kind of stuff. And so it’s a fairly easy crossover living with a live organism. They take a little bit of time and work. And so yeah, it was a fairly transferable skill.
Carol McFarland
I had a few folks on here that came in with mechanical engineering and that sort of thing, but it’s fun to hear the background in Korean farming and winemaking and how those are transferring into this space as well. Actually, Dave, would you talk just a little bit more? I’m not terribly familiar with the Johnson Su method. I think I might’ve seen a YouTube video once, but want to talk a bit more about that?
Dave Dalshrud
Oh, sure. So it’s basically, it’s an actively aerated static compost pile. Right? And so you have air tubes that run up through the center of the pile. Everything has to be within a foot of air. And Dr. Johnson–I think it’s from New Mexico state, I believe– and his wife, Sue. And that’s her last name. She’s of Chinese heritage, I think. But so anyway, they did all the background, all the hard work on this right at the university level and figured out like, okay, if we make this thing so that we’re able to be within twelve inches of passively oxygenated source of air, then the pile doesn’t go anaerobic. Right? And so you have air shafts through the middle. You have air able to get underneath and then air from the outside as well. You use mostly high carbon materials to create the pile. And it’s basically after you make it initially, you leave it alone, right? Pull the air tubes out and everything is knit together. They stay open. And so you’re able to maximize oxygen that way.
It requires a higher moisture level than probably what you’re used to with general composting, something like the seventy percent range. And you’ve got to kind of keep it there for a year. The way we’ve done it here on the farm is the first ones, the first bins that we made, I hand water every morning and start work. Then these ones I’ve done at my place and I keep them in my shop. So they’re able to stay active over the winter time. I set up like an automated sprinkler system with it. And so that works really well. We used old fertilizer shuttles for the cages to make solids so we can pick them up, move them around, work on them that way.
But basically you go for a really high fungal compost. After it heats up initially with your source materials, you add worms to that as well. So it’s everything. It’s the very best of every composting method. So you get the thermophilic compost and then you add the vermicompost to it. And at the same time, because you have such high carbon matter in there, it requires a high fungal population to break it down. And so it ends up being a really nice product.
Carol McFarland
That’s exciting. Thanks so much to you guys for sharing more about that. I know the compost tea conversation that was at the last Direct Seed Conference was really well attended when Dr.
Lynn Carpenter-Boggs was speaking about it. it seems like it’s gaining interest in the area. It’s pretty exciting. The management goals around that, from what I hear, there’s fertility as well as kind of stimulating the biology. What kind of benefits are you seeing? Or how have you seen it?
Brent Uhlorn
Well, yeah. I mean, the other thing is that I think too is you’re taking live– what’s the brewery– you’re taking that live biology. And for us, we, there’s several different ways we apply it. We will put it in a furrow with the seed. We’ve actually used it on seed as a seed treat or a seed inoculant. We can come back on and we can top dress with like a stream bar or a flood jet on top of ground, or we can even put it in with foliar fertilizers and we can inoculate the living tissues of plants. So it has a bunch of different aspects on where it can be placed, how it can be used. And like I said, it’s all about getting that live biology back there. Hopefully, you know, there’s so many microbes in the soil that what we’re doing is such a micro dose of it in the scheme of things. But if we can get a couple of these species that we don’t have anymore to start to come back and start to, you know, divide or reproduce or grow however they do in population a little bit at a time with each dose, then over the scheme of things, we’ll be able to build those populations faster. And so that’s kind of what we’re trying to do with that.
Carol McFarland
Great. Well, thanks. Thanks for sharing all of those things. How about materials for putting in all of these different trials? What do you look for? How do you source if you’re trying something like real weird? How do you source that stuff?
Brent Uhlorn
Well, anymore it seems like the real weird stuff finds you. So that makes it a lot easier.
Carol McFarland
Sorry, I didn’t mean to stop at the beginning. How do you guys talk about what you’re doing on your farm?
Brent Uhlorn
So, you know, at the beginning it was hard because a lot of the stuff we do is not available at your average agronomic hub. And so some of it is, some of it isn’t. And so finding places that deal with that takes a little bit of time. So when we first started, we were actually dealing with companies back out of the Midwest who were kind of in the early stages of the biologicals and the bio-stimulants back then. Since then, there have been multiple places here in the Pacific Northwest who started dealing with them. You got Soilcraft, Ag Enterprise, Stirling Valley Agronomy. There’s also, you know, some of the manufacturers of fertilizer stuff out of the Tri-Cities areas are starting to make like humic acids and folic acids now. And the internet, I mean, is a great place to start to find stuff and connect you with little micro dealers or whatever closer to you. So it’s become a lot easier to get our hands on stuff than what it used to be, that’s for sure.
Carol McFarland
Well, it seems like some of the bigger places are starting to handle things like the humic. So it does seem like as interest in some of these things grows and, you know, there is more adoption, it becomes more available and that’s exciting. But I guess I was wondering when you said the real weird stuff finds you, is that why I’m asking?
Dave Dalshrud
That’s how I ended up here. I was going to say,
Carol McFarland
Darrel, were you going to add something?
Darrel Uhlorn
Another part of it is you’ve got to find an agronomist, who knows the ways and what you’re doing and understands the whole process. And that’s probably what the biggest game changer we had was we found a couple of different ones on the way and we’ve got another one that know the culture– know what it takes to make this work. So, and they know where to source stuff and they’ve got all sorts of connections that we don’t have time to find. And that’s probably the hardest thing to do is find somebody that you trust that can guide you down the path to where you’re trying to go.
Dave Dalshrud
I think kind of a really important thing that’s relatively recent that’s come online is a lot of this information is being translated to broad acre crops, right? These commodity type crops, whereas, you know, you got our somewhat local, you know, rockstars in this, the Tanio guys, right? They’ve been doing this for a long time the biological stuff, but it was expensive, right? And so, they concentrated on high value crops. But now they’re starting to figure out how does this stuff translate into dry land situations, into these broad acre commodity type crops and the agronomist piece of it is coming along with that. And so, I think that’s been very, very important and helpful in making this sort of transition kind of snowballing the process.
Brent Uhlorn
Yeah, I’d agree with that for sure.This stuff isn’t new that we’re doing. It just hasn’t been done in broadacre commodities as much. So, it’s taking stuff from the smaller market gardens or the really small high dollar value that take a lot of labor, a lot of love and just being able to find ways to translate those into more economically feasible and cover larger land masses with it.
Carol McFarland
Well, it seems to me like some of those things that can be incorporated logistically into a working farm as well, because there’s just, yeah, the workflow is different than in some of those other contexts that I understand.
Brent Uhlorn
Yeah, absolutely.
Darrel Uhlorn
It takes a lot more work to do what we’re doing. It’s not simple. You’ve got to plan stuff out ahead. And it just takes more time, more hours. Once you get it kind of going and flowing, it’s not that hard. It’s a learning process. It takes time.
Brent Uhlorn
And on that note, for the listeners, that are wanting to do this, a jar test will be your best friend, because we have plugged up a sprayer from tip to tank more than once. We’ve plugged up drills from tip to tanks more than once. We have spent three days washing out, holding tanks, truck transfer tanks, drill units. So, jar tests are your friends.
Carol McFarland
Okay, so just for as a best practice, when you say a jar test and that people should do those, you want to just briefly describe what that looks like.
Brent Uhlorn
Yep. So, if you’ve got fertilizers or biologicals or anything like that that you’re going to be mixing together, put them together in a proper ratio in a jug and give them a good shake and leave them set for a little bit. And if you start to see something settle out in the bottom or it gets really foamy or kind of a chalky look to it or something like that, you’re having some kind of a reaction that most likely is not going to go through filter systems or handle well under high pressures.
We’ve actually ran into instances before to where a jar test looks and holds well. It’s been stable for a couple of days until you put it under pressure in the sprayer system to be applied. So, that’s one of those you just don’t know there.
But yeah, definitely jar tests, especially when mixing new fertilizers coming in that you’re not really familiar with. Phosphorus is very reactive with a lot of nutrients. Calcium is very reactive with a lot of nutrients. And so, just be mindful of those going into it. And like I said, just do a jar test.
Carol McFarland
I see Dave’s expression. It just keeps changing. I think as you talk about these things, I just see memories and flashbacks happening.
Darrel Uhlorn
A lot of the stuff, the places you get it from have come a long ways. When they first start out, they didn’t know or have the resources. This doesn’t necessarily mix with this under these conditions. So, they’ve got a lot better at being able to get you products that play nice with each other. So, that’s helped a lot. I’d say most places are pretty good on that.
Carol McFarland
Well, you know, Darrel, I’m going to say that as we’ve been having this conversation so far about innovation and the way things have changed, I’m sure you’ve seen quite a bit in your farming career. And it sounds like that’s something that’s been a big part of your farming career as well because you find it interesting.
Darrel Uhlorn
When I started, we were one-hundred percent convinced. We started to have one with no-till, mid eighties, and saw some great benefits from it. And trying to find the proper drill that can do it all through the years. I got to give my dad kudos on this. I mean, he was not scared to try anything, try new stuff. I mean, he wanted to learn too in the process. I mean, that’s probably the excitement of a farmer. We were one of the first ones to get about the first one to drill spring canola. I grew canola here in the Northwest.
Carol McFarland
Where did you market that?
Darrel Uhlorn
We had a company that came in that wanted to try it. And so we tried it. And it actually did some amazing things for the soil. We had a field that had some canola put on it. We went back probably three years later and it went into the spring peas. You can see right to the line where the canola was the peas were so much healthier. And then that gets you to thinking about your crop rotation and the benefits and the disease control and everything that that can help you with. So it’s a long learning progress job.
So then in the late nineties, I went on a farm tour to the Dakota Lakes Farm. And that was very inspiring. And convinced me that we can make one hundred percent direct seed work. And after that, we started pretty much one-hundred percent direct seed. Not long after that. So we’ve been direct seeding since two-thousand, probably. Everything. Haven’t had moldboard plows since then. And that whole process, I mean, has matured where we’re at now. And I think it all helped in the whole process of getting where we are.
Carol McFarland
Are you saying that direct seed is a gateway to the rest?
Darrel Uhlorn
It definitely is. I mean, every time you disturb the soil, you’re killing the soil. Every time you kill it, every time you plow it. It’s hard on the soil biology. So the least amount that you can disturb, the better it’s going to be. So our soils have changed– just from direct seed have changed tremendously. The water holding capacity, the ease of being able to pull the drill. And we’ve noticed that we take this farm ground over and we pull the direct seed drill in there and take off. And one that’s here about five years ago, Rick pulled in this field and says, there’s something wrong with the cracker. This thing is pulling like crap. I said it isn’t the cracker. It’s not used to it. It’s been direct– it’s been conventional tilled up until we took it over. It just, it takes, it takes a while to convert that. So, yeah, like I said, these things are just, they’re fun, they’re exciting to see happen.
Carol McFarland
Okay. What’s your favorite drill?
Darrel Uhlorn
You know, there’s no perfect drill that we found, and I don’t think there is a perfect drill. You find one that works well. We use a hoe drill. And part of that is at our elevation, the springs we have are very cool for a long time. So if we can get a little black dirt to show them, that really helps warm up the soil. I feel that helps. A good general all purpose drill for us. I mean, I’d like to have that. I’d like to have a disc drill. We do have a planter that we use for things. Is it economical to own the planter? Probably not. Will we keep it? I don’t know. If you had one, everything that would be is really what you need. But you’ve got to figure out what fits your system. Where are you trying to go? What are you trying to accomplish? And kind of back them and guide your seeding tool into that. So, you know, trash flow through the drill on a hoe type drill can be a challenge. And before we got the newer combines with choppers that size the material really, really well. It was hard. The heavy harrow does about so much, but it also spreads weed seeds, so we quit running the heavy harrow as much as we can. So we use a rotary mower.
Brent Uhlorn
Just a little bit anymore.
Darrel Uhlorn
We don’t have to use it all, but we decompose– we can take out a bunch of wheat and by the next fall there’s hardly any residue left. We’re cycling our material from the past, and we have for a long time.
Carol McFarland
You think that’s the results of some of your biological stimulants?
Brent Uhlorn
We’ve been doing it for a while, but I think it’s definitely…increased
Darrel Uhlorn
That definitely stepped it up.
Brent Uhlorn
I think the rotation helps with that too. Going from a high carbon to a higher nitrogen residue. You know, not constantly high carbon, putting that down.
Carol McFarland
Spoken like a true compost guru. Well, thanks for sharing that. It’s always fun to hear all the different perspectives around innovation, but I know it’s really something when you’ve been farming for, you know, at least twice the time, maybe not twice the time I’ve been alive, but probably at least twice the length of my career.
Darrel Uhlorn
Now, you’re dating me.
Carol McFarland
No, no, no. I’m maybe dating myself. No, okay. Well, to get us back on track, what kind of things fo you do now as part of your standard management that started as trials? Maybe, you were speaking a little bit about that with the direct seeding, but what else is that looking like?
Brent Uhlorn
So the compost extracts, you know, those are– compost teas, compost extracts. Those are a part of our full-time regimen now. Seed treat . Yeah. Oh, that’s one we didn’t really touch on.
Experiment trial is starting to go with the naked seed and using biological inoculants. So getting rid of the fungicides, insecticides, and all those on the seed in mechanical forms and going to biological components and using those as our crop protectant there. So we are starting to do bigger trials with that. So more acres with natural untreated seed and just using the inoculation to do that. The reduced synthetic inputs in the soil are way down and switching to more foliars. That’s something that seems to be, you know, pretty much a full-time part of what we’re doing now.
Don’t use fungicides anymore on crops. We just don’t have the disease. We rarely use insecticides anymore. We’ve just found ways around it to where we don’t need to use that stuff.
Carol McFarland
Do you do anything for beneficial insects on your farm?
Brent Uhlorn
We started bringing bees in last year. So we bring bees in all over our canola crops. So that’s one of the ways we’ve been able to start to move away from the insecticides is on the flower and canola. We’ll bring in honeybee populations, which helps stimulate other beneficial organisms that will keep your problem pod weevils out. They’ll keep them a base. So that and some good plant nutrition too. So looking at multiple facets of being able to get away from those, like I said, a crop nutrition and promoting beneficial insects.
We are hoping to in the next couple of years, be able to start taking our rock patches and our scab ground that isn’t productive, but it’s in the middle of the field and start putting in pollinator habitat plots and some things like that. We’re just not quite there yet with sprayer technology. We don’t have the individual nozzle shut off yet. We’re still in boom sections. So once we get there, we can start doing internal habitat zones and different things like that.
Carol McFarland
Do you guys do a lot of work with conservation programs and districts? I heard you talk about the weed seed destructor, but also, you know, when you start talking about pollinator habitat zones and some of the precision input management, you know, that seems like some people use conservation partnerships.
Brent Uhlorn
Yeah. So we’ve– with the local conservation district, we partnered up with them on the harvest weed seed control unit. We have done equip and CSP programs in the past. It’s been a while since we’ve done one. We’re kind of looking at doing some again. There’s decent money out there for some of those programs, but there again, we’re asking questions about programs that our local office doesn’t know anything about. So we are kind of pushing the envelope above and beyond what I guess some of the more status quo programs are. So trying to get answers on what those are going to look like for us. That’s kind of how we– you start to get the practices in the area is you get someone or two guys who are willing to do the ones that aren’t very well known about. And NRCS gets a little taste on how they work and operate. And then they can take it to other growers and say, well, you know, we’ve seen this work. Here’s what it takes. Is this something that you’re interested in and go from there?
Darrel Uhlorn
Been doing work with CSP for quite a while. I mean, off and on with the program, we can find another fit. I mean, it’s always nice to have some financial help to transition to these new projects.
Brent Uhlorn
So at the same time, like a lot of the stuff we’ve been doing hasn’t really been funded through that though. It’s just been like kind of a dollar for dollar exchange, moving money from one side of the budget to the other.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. No, I heard definitely the feedback that the conservation projects of the conservation programs can support an adoption of things that are progressive, but not necessarily the leading edge. So, it’s cool that you guys are finding ways to keep pushing and asking the questions and working with those partners to do so. Do you have things that you’ve tried in the recent past that you’re trying again this year to see if it has a similar outcome?
Brent Uhlorn
Yeah. So we’ll, we’re going to do another repeat of the bio product on, on the oats to see if we can again, replicate the zero soil applied fertility side of it. And how that turns out. I’m not comfortable doing that on wheat yet, but we’ll keep doing plots where we or trials where we ratchet that way down and just see how low we can go without severely hampering or being severely detrimental to the crop. You know, we know that we can address the nitrogen side pretty easily with foliars. So, but just making sure that we can keep on top of them as we need. The naked seed trials, one that we’re going to run again this year.
And any other ones we’ve got?
Darrel Uhlorn
Well, we’ll put sunflowers in. You were talking about soybeans.
Brent Uhlorn
Oh, yes. Yes. Yeah. So I guess not one that we’re going to run again, but we’re going to try, try some soybeans this year and then researching into dry land rice production. We’re going to cross our fingers so we can get that one in this year too.
Carol McFarland
Dry land rice?
Brent Uhlorn
Yes. Yeah.
Carol McFarland
That was my mind blown. For those who didn’t see the hand gestures. Well, that’s exciting. So I’m coming back again next year. See how all that goes. That sounds like a good time.
All right, you guys, I got to ask, how do you decide where to put your trials? Do you love to have the neighbors gossip about what you’re doing?
Darrel Uhlorn
If you really cared about that, you wouldn’t do half the stuff that most people do. I mean, sure we get talked about, but we also get asked a lot of questions. People are curious about what you do and those kinds of things. So, because they want to learn too. I mean, if there’s something else out there that’s good or better than what they’re doing, there’s always interest in it. You can’t let that be a factor that’s going to stop you from doing something. It’s just, oh, you’ll never try anything new.
Brent Uhlorn
Yeah. Halts progress if you’re worried about the opinions too much. Yeah. So, and where do we put our trials? We typically try and find, so, just our average producing ground. What’s it going to do to our average ground? Is it going to make it better? Is it going to make it worse? If we’re looking for a replacement product where we’re just replacing dollars for dollars, does it keep things the same? So, that’s kind of what we look for. And then we will go and try and find our challenging fields too and say, okay, is this a product that can help us in a field that’s been struggling? We’ll try and do at least in a couple of different places. If they work there, we typically know they’re going to be beneficial on our good ground. But the problem with good ground is it’s usually a lot better balanced in terms of nutritional needs and in terms of soil health and soil biology. So, you’re not always going to see the benefits as big as you might on some of the other areas. You’ll still get them, but they might not be quite as-
Darrel Uhlorn
Pronounced.
Brent Uhlorn
Yes, pronounced.
Carol McFarland
You know, one of the things I think about in the gains that you can see from innovation and these on-farm trials is the yield evenness, and that’s both across the landscape and over a year. And how are you guys thinking about that on your place? Because it seems like you’re getting at that.
Brent Uhlorn
Yeah. You know, I guess one thing we’re looking for is the poor spots in the field to not be as poor, to bring out or I guess eliminate some of that fluctuation. The other thing we try and shoot for, I guess, that we’ve noticed is we don’t see the huge yield swings from year to year. On a really, really good year, we’re not going to be the top yielder, but on a really poor year, we’re going to have substantially better crops than most other people. And so what we’re looking for is that average to continue to climb. Like I said, we may not have to hit the tops of the tops, but if we’re way off of the lows of the lows, that starts to move that average up. And that’s kind of what we’re trying to work on is, is getting, taking that bottom end out and then being able to keep it higher.
Carol McFarland
And that can be really worth something from what I understand.
Brent Uhlorn
Yeah.
Carol McFarland
Great. Well, thanks for sharing that. And it sounds like when you put out your trials, I’m hearing you talk about thinking about representing varying field conditions, mimicking similar ones when you’re pairing your business as usual to the new thing that you’re trying. I hear that you’re also doing some year over year replications. So listen to your farm science, making it happen on the working farm. It’s really fun to hear how different operations make that work. Even if you’re not, you’re talking about having tiny equipment, especially those little combines. Yeah, those are fun.
Brent Uhlorn
They’re so cute.
Carol McFarland
They’re so cute and they’re also so top heavy. But how do you make that work in the context that you’re farming? And it’s really fun to hear how that’s looking for you guys. What’s your biggest barrier to trying new things on your farm?
Brent Uhlorn
Depends on what it is. Sometimes it’s infrastructure. Sometimes it’s markets. Sometimes it’s capital. It just depends on what we’re trying to do. Some things are very simple to bring in. It just depends on what is your goal.
Dave Dalshrud
Don’t forget about the hours in the day. That’s kind of a thing too.
Brent Uhlorn
Very good point. Yeah. So like Darrel mentioned at the beginning, this type of farming that we do does take a lot more labor than the more conventional style. And so longer hours, longer days, longer seasons, we don’t have much of a lull from one season to the next. And so…is this something that we can bring in without having to add a lot of extra work?
Sometimes technology is maybe the barrier. Maybe that’s the barrier to trying to break. One thing that’s got me interested right now is some of this drone technology in terms of either drone sprayers or drone weed mapping that can then upload maps into sprayers that can then just now start spot spraying weeds in fallow or in crop. You’ve got sprayers that have direct injection. So now you can just inject your chemicals where they need to be applied in the field, depending on where your weed pressure is. So there’s some really cool stuff out there, but that all takes quite a bit of time and capital to get into some of that stuff. So the barrier just depends on what you’re looking at doing.
Carol McFarland
There’s been some other episodes, where they were talking about, the drone sprayer. One of the barriers is getting your, if you’re going to run your own drone, it’s getting your pilot’s license or getting the license and complying with the rules and regulations around having that air-based piece of equipment.
Brent Uhlorn
Absolutely. Right. Absolutely. New markets was one that we talked about. We threw out all this. Our goal is to not just grow a commodity. It’s to grow food, it’s to grow something that’s high quality, that’s flavorful, that’s nutritionally dense. And it can be challenging to go to all this work and then not have a home for it other than a barge that’s heading down the river. And so trying to find and develop markets has been a challenge. It’s something that I feel like we’re gaining on. We’ve met some really awesome people that have got processing capabilities that are getting really well connected in the ingredients world. And so people are asking for that direct to farmer connection. And so we’re kind of starting to break into that a little bit, we feel like. And then the other thing too is the consumer.
While the issues that twenty-twenty caused with the pandemic, one thing it did do is it really opened up the mind of the consumer, the awareness of the consumer when it came to food and what they were eating. And that has been a really big piece to this kind of regenerative movement, what we’re trying to do on our farm in terms of eliminating a lot of the synthetic things and maybe not going to a full organic, but we find a way to minimize and still make something really good that can still be healthy.
Carol McFarland
I see a lot of what you’re doing, in alignment with agroecological principles. And I guess that’s my lens, so of course that’s what I see. As we add not just value, but values, identity preservation and what is the story behind the food and capturing that it’s not just a commodity, but it’s nourishment and that care was put into growing it. It sounds like that’s really a big part of it.
Brent Uhlorn
Yeah. And on top of that, through ecological services, how can we help protect or bring back or at least offer refuge or help for your beneficial organisms, your natural bugs and biology? How can we keep that dirt in the field, not in the river for the fish? How do we keep the pollutants out of the drinking waters? There’s a whole realm of issues that we’re trying to do with this. The problem is where you market it’s what pays the bills that helps justify all that other stuff.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. It’s a system. I know one of the slogans I’ve heard is, vote with your fork. Yes. That’s a fun one. Well, thank you so much for sharing all of your thoughts there.
Brent Uhlorn
Absolutely.
Carol McFarland
Did either of you guys want to add anything to that?
Darrel Uhlorn
It’s frustrating just to grow these crops the way we do and then just send it down the river on the barge with everybody else’s. Because we do put a lot more into it. There should be a Bible that would do that. And I’m sure the rest of the group, which I think is hard to find that market and develop it and get paid for it. But we’ll get there.
Carol McFarland
I want to point out, you also mentioned what COVID may have catalyzed. I think something many people also saw was supply chains and the impact of supply chains on food security. And maybe the valuation of a more regionally based food system and food economy. So that brings some real win-wins.
Brent Uhlorn
Definitely. Yeah. I think that made a lot of people nervous, especially, well, I mean, rural America was tough to get to at times, but so was it in the larger cities. That made more people to feed in that much more of a condensed area. Yeah. I think it really struck people how vulnerable we can be.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. Well, thank you guys for your good work. You know, it takes first steps, right? Absolutely. It’s the chicken or the egg. If you keep doing your work, and maybe we can get more of this figured out.
Well, let’s get into some fun things. So it’s some more fun. And I’d love to hear from each of you guys on these two questions. Maybe we’ll start with Darrel on this first. What’s the most annoying thing about trying new stuff on your farm?
Darrel Uhlorn
Stuff that doesn’t go as it’s supposed to.
Carol McFarland
Is that the plugs?
Darrel Uhlorn
Everything. The plugs, the sprayers, the plug drills. Just the frustrating part of some of that stuff, trying to figure it out. When you think, going in, you think you have a plan that’s going to work and you thought you’ve done all the things that you’re supposed to do and it doesn’t pan out. It’s all of a sudden you’ve got another day or two to work and you’re behind the start list. So that’s the most frustrating probably of this whole thing. Putting the extra hours in isn’t that big of a deal. I mean, it’s what we do. So, but it’s just the little things like that that aren’t supposed to happen that do happen.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. Well, one of the things that comes up a lot on this podcast is that kind of sounds like farming.
Darrel Uhlorn
It is farming, but it seems like it’s worse the way we’re doing it. Things have gotten so much better over the last several years. A lot of that stuff is much more rare than it used to be.
Carol McFarland
Oh, sounds like it’s time to look for some more weird stuff.
Brent Uhlorn
Well, and to kind of expand that a little bit is when we have breakdowns or problems or hiccups, a lot of our stuff is a living, living organisms in the living system that have a timetable with, you know, when they don’t have oxygen. And so if they set the tank too long, because we had a breakdown on the drill or sprayer or something like that, those things can go bad or they can, even worse, they can switch anaerobic and go foul on you. And then they can start throwing really cute colors of pinks and greens and other stuff from tanks that then it gets really hard to get out. So yeah, that can be kind of one of the other annoying things about trying some of this stuff is, you know, maybe not something particular with that product, but when you have a breakdown related to some of this stuff, the issues you can run into with it. So yeah.
Dave Dalshrud
Well, I think it can be frustrating not being able to repeat your result. Right. So like, you know, one year we throw out a cover crop and it does fabulous, right. Everything works. And then you think you got it figured out and you try to tune it up a little bit and it just falls on its face. Right. And so there’s some frustration there just as far as like, it’s a complex system and there’s a lot of variables. There’s a lot of moving parts, a lot of moving targets. And so being able to try to hit that every time, that can be a little tough.
Carol McFarland
It’s tough working in a system for that reason. And I can see why maybe that’s why sometimes trying really systems based things can be maybe a bit intimidating. It’s cool that you guys tackle that as a team. Bring your own respective strengths into some of that process.
Darrel Uhlorn
We work very well as a team. I feel like everybody knows what everybody else is doing. I mean, it’s, yeah, we’ve got a great team.
Carol McFarland
Yeah. None of you said that working together was the most annoying part.
Darrel Uhlorn
So that’s nice. You get along and understand and believe in what we’re doing. So. Yeah.
Carol McFarland
Awesome. Dave, do you want to start out by what is the most fun thing about trying new stuff on the farm?
Dave Dalshrud
I like the size of the lever on this farm. Like you can really sling some stuff around. I think that’s fun. Just the resources that are available here to really make big changes. For me, that’s exciting coming from a smaller scale. So that’s number one on my list.
Carol McFarland
I mean, that’s a big deal. When we’re looking for win-win solutions we’re talking about adding ecosystem services, reducing the potentially negative impacts around agricultural inputs. It is such a big lever when you can make some of these changes successfully and find those win-win solutions. That’s exciting. Thanks. How about you, Brent?
Brent Uhlorn
I guess I’m the eternal optimistic is kind of my personality. So a new trial is, I’m very hopeful that it’s going to work well and it’s going to bring us on to the next step for the next things. And so that’s what I like about coming in or bringing on something new to the farm is that hopefulness of seeing those positive results and positive changes.
Carol McFarland
Thank you.
Dave Dalshrud
Throwing on a new farmer hat. Yeah. Adding them up.
Carol McFarland
What do you got, Darrel?
Darrel Uhlorn
When something that you try the works. I mean, the funnest ones are the ones that just pop. I mean, they work like you wanted them to and it’s all sunshine and rainbows at the end. I mean, that’s really rewarding stuff that we get to enjoy. And so that is nice.
Carol McFarland
I mean, it is really pretty out here. I’m sure that the actual sunshine and rainbows are great.
Darrel Uhlorn
Just trying stuff. I mean, it’s exciting. See what you can do and see if you can make it work. So I just enjoy it.
Carol McFarland
Thank you. I really want to just appreciate all of your guys’ time in sharing your experience, on you– some of your on-farm trials. I know we didn’t even come close to getting to them all today. I wanted to just open it up if anybody has any kind of final thoughts, I mean, words of inspiration for maybe for folks who might not be quite as far along the journey or maybe other innovators. You want to give them a little extra nudge?
Darrel Uhlorn
Don’t get frustrated too fast. I mean, it takes time. This system doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time for it to develop and mature itself. We’re not mature yet by any means. We’ve got a
lot– we’ve got a ways to go, but we’ve been doing that a long time, so we have some results. So, you know, just try not to expect too much too fast. I guess would be my best advice to people.
And we’re not good at this, but don’t do too many trials at one time. That’s one of our biggest kind of hurdles we find. Oh, we need to do this, this, and this. That’s how it’s going to be really cool. I mean, you throw them out there and then it’s hard to keep them separated on what we have and where. And try to get the final report card at the end of the year to know what we have where. So maybe do it a little bit more methodically in what we try to do sometimes. Because it’s fun to do lots of different stuff, but you also have to be able to document it and quantify the results.
Carol McFarland
To make it really mean something so that you can keep doing it. Do you want to?
Dave Dalshrud
Well, I can say, don’t be ashamed of what you’re doing if you’re out there, you know, throwing out these crazy trials and weird stuff lands on your front porch and you decide to throw it out in the field. Talk about it. Don’t keep it a secret. Put it out by the highway. Let people know, get people talking.
Carol McFarland
Be on the podcast.
Dave Dalshrud
Sure.
Carol McFarland
How about you, Brent?
Brent Uhlorn
Yeah, no, to echo what Darrel said, especially when we’re working with anything soil health, biology related, it’s not the same as going out and putting on a fertilizer or a herbicide or something like that. You’re not going to see those instant results. It does take time. And I hear that quite a bit from people who start to dabble and, I didn’t see anything. How long you’ve been doing it? It’s my first year. You’re not going to see it your first year. You might not even see it your third year. It can be your fifth. So patience is key when it comes to that. So don’t go bet the whole farm on it. Start with a field or a part of a field and go from there.
Darrel Uhlorn
A couple of fields.
Brent Uhlorn
Yep, a couple of fields, but, you know, have some patience with some of this stuff too. Replicate. Do it more than one year because there’s going to be years where, you know, sometimes this stuff doesn’t showcase at all. And then there’s going to be years where it’s tremendous or it’s a failure. You know, you can have it go both ways. And so you want to kind of look through the, what’s the average of it and go from there. So those are probably– don’t be afraid to try something. Too often we get stuck in a rut and, you know, then it kind of becomes boring. So go out and try something and, you know, you don’t have to do it full scale. You can take it on a part of a field or a part of a couple of fields and just see how things shake out, how we advance.
Carol McFarland
Great. Thank you all so much for sharing today. It’s really appreciated on behalf of our listeners as well. Thanks so much for having me on.
Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it.