6

Feeding Innovation’s Roots

True Believers, Late Adopters, and the Power of the Soil Pit

Michael Werling is, literally, a card-carrying connoisseur of soil health.

“I call it, ‘My ticket to a farm tour,’” the northeastern Indiana crop producer said on an overcast August day, referring to the business card he was handing me. We were standing with a couple dozen farmers and agronomists next to a four-foot-deep trench that had been clawed out of a field in preparation for a show-and-tell about the benefits of building soil biology.

The words on the “ticket” left little doubt what was in store for the lucky holder who chose to redeem it: lots of reminders about the precious nature of the land we trod on. Headings at the top said, “My soil is not dirt” and, “My residue is not trash.” A third bold line of script across the middle read, “For Healthier Soil and Cleaner Water Cover Crop Your Assets and ‘NEVER TILL.’” Buried at the bottom as a bit of an afterthought was Werling’s contact information. Given his excitement over the world beneath his feet and how to protect and improve it, maybe it made sense that the farmer’s card relegated his address and phone number to footnote status—soil is his identity.

While traveling the state of Indiana from one end to the other that August, I ran into a lot of farmers like Werling at workshops and field days dedicated to promoting better soil health on agricultural land. Perhaps that’s no surprise, given that events like this tend to attract true believers in the power of healthy humus to do everything from create more resilient fields to clean up water. Agrarians like Werling see wildly successful farming as something that goes beyond what’s happening on the surface—it extends deep into that dark world of microbes, invertebrates, roots, and fungi, a place that scientists say is the most diverse ecosystem on Earth.¹ “Dirt Heads” like Werling make supporting and improving that soil universe a priority when choosing what practices to put in place, much like Martin and Loretta Jaus put brushy fencerows and wetlands front and center when making management decisions on their farm.

I was in Indiana because people there had found a way to take the passion of farmers like Werling and use it as an engine for driving change on a whole lot of farms whose owners may not be card-carrying soil sophisticates—they’re just looking for ways to cut fertilizer costs and keep regulators off their backs, all the while remaining financially viable. Werling is one of a dozen “hub farmers” located across Indiana who are at the core of one of the most successful soil health initiatives in the country. In just a few short years, a public-private partnership called the Conservation Cropping Systems Initiative (CCSI) helped get 8 percent (around one million acres) of the Hoosier State’s crop fields blanketed in rye and other soil-friendly plants throughout the fall, winter, and early spring—times when corn and soybean fields are normally bare. As of this writing, no other Corn Belt state is even close to having that high a percentage of its land protected with cover crops. Indiana’s success has farmers, soil scientists, and environmentalists across the country excited about the potential CCSI holds as a national model for bringing our agricultural landscape back to life. Such a model is needed—despite all the buzz these days around providing continuous living cover for the land year-round, little progress has been made in getting a significant number of U.S. farmers to plant cover crops on a regular basis, making what has been accomplished in Indiana even more impressive.

But as I traveled the state, one question dogged me: can such an initiative parlay all this localized interest in one conservation farming technique—in this case cover cropping—into a holistic embrace of a larger wildly successful way of managing soil health? Can the true believers like Michael Werling influence their more industrialized neighbors? Figuring that out could have implications not only for revitalizing the soil universe, but making all aspects of our farming system more resilient via farmer-to-farmer education and support. While touring farms and talking to farmers, soil experts, conservationists, and agribusiness employees, I heard several arguments for why Indiana has succeeded where others haven’t. Economics, fear of regulation, teamwork, a tradition of innovation—these reasons and more were brought up repeatedly as I crisscrossed the state. They all play a role. But in the end, a simple love of learning and a feeling of being on the cutting edge of something great may be the ultimate driving force behind making deep changes to a farm.

A Corn Belt Leader

In the early 2000s, around twenty thousand acres of Indiana’s farmland was cover cropped, and as recently as 2013, that figure was around half-a-million acres. By 2016 it had doubled to roughly one million acres. That’s an impressive growth curve: most people in agriculture agree that cover cropping is a smart practice from an agronomic, economic, and environmental perspective, but frustratingly few farmers have adopted it. One recent estimate is that nationally only around 2 percent of U.S. farmland is consistently cover cropped.² That means for some seven months out of the year, most of the Corn Belt’s rural landscape is devoid of living plant life, both above and below the surface.

University of Maryland soil ecologist Ray Weil has visited the Midwest numerous times to give presentations, tour farms, and scramble around in soil pits. He recalled a drive he took in Indiana during the winter of 2012. “We must have passed a couple thousand fields and I counted two cover cropped fields,” he said. But on one recent return visit to the state, Weil was impressed at how much progress had been made in the intervening years. “Indiana seems to be leading the change. On paper, it doesn’t make any sense.”

But it does make sense when one takes a closer look at Indiana’s intensive team effort to get more of its land growing plants (and roots) for more than a few months out of the year. The Conservation Cropping Systems Initiative consists of federal, state, and local natural resources agencies working with farmers and an array of private businesses, from fertilizer and seed companies to implement dealers. Barry Fisher, a soil health specialist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), said CCSI is rooted in a statewide program that began in 2002 and was focused on promoting and supporting no-till farming (no-till has long been popular among Indiana farmers, given that many of them don’t have the luxury of the deep, prairie-based soils their counterparts in Illinois, Iowa, and southern Minnesota cultivate). What he and others discovered during that program’s run was that successfully adopting a major change like no-till is more complex than junking the moldboard plow, buying a new planter, and modifying field work schedules. The transition years are critical, especially since a major deterrent to no-till adoption is its reputation for causing a drop in crop yields, particularly the first few years—something farmers call “yield drag.” Going cold turkey on tillage may produce conservation benefits on the surface, but the soil underneath is likely to be so biologically dead that it lacks the ability to carry out basic functions like providing nutrients and minerals to plants while making good use of water. “You’re going to struggle in any system if your soil fails to function,” Fisher told me.

That’s when he and other soil conservation experts realized they were going to have to focus on soil health in general, and not just one tool or method, such as no-till. So in 2009 CCSI was born. Under the leadership of Indiana’s NRCS, the initiative used federal funding to develop a core group of specialists who were given advanced training in soil health development. Some were even sent to North Dakota’s Burleigh County, which has become the model for advancing soil health on farmland utilizing a teamwork approach and where I first witnessed the impressive environmental and economic benefits of bringing soil back to life (chapter 5).

Back in Indiana, these specialists then formed their own regional soil health teams, or “hubs,” which consist of farmers, soil and water experts, and Purdue University Extension educators, among others. At the heart of CCSI’s work are the workshops and field days it puts on, many of them at working farms. The initiative organizes around sixty such events across the state a year, drawing around 6,500 farmers and certified crop advisers.

Talking about the importance of protecting our soil is nothing new in farming. But the explosion of interest in the biological aspects of soil health in recent years has added a new wrinkle that CCSI has been able to take advantage of. By supercharging that biological activity, farmers can go beyond just putting in a terrace or a grassed waterway to cut surface erosion. They can actually have a positive impact on their entire field’s ecosystem using homegrown creativity—an affirming message that they are in the driver’s seat.

“That’s been a real game changer—the language we use to talk about this stuff,” Ryan Stockwell, senior agriculture program manager for the National Wildlife Federation, told me. Stockwell has been involved in soil health trainings in Indiana, and utilizes cover crops on his own Wisconsin farm. “Now that you talk about soil structure, all these benefits from soil health, it creates a lot of excitement. Indiana was just primed to take advantage of that.”

Seeing soil as a living entity that, when fed a balanced diet, can become self-sufficient, is a pretty big paradigm shift, one that goes counter to the conventional agricultural wisdom that has dominated society for over 150 years. The idea that we could use a few select sources of fertilizer to “feed the plant, not the soil,” was popularized by Justus von Liebig, a nineteenth-century German chemist who is considered the father of the fertilizer industry. Using research done by, among others, botanist Carl Sprengel, von Liebig did his best to debunk the “myth” that soil humus determined the productivity of plants. Rather, he argued, if we simply focused on, among other things, applying fertility in the form of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, otherwise known as N-P-K, we would get exactly what we wanted from plants: big yields. Under such a scenario, soil was simply a medium for holding up the plant and passing on that fertilizer to the roots of the crop.³

Not every nineteenth-century scientist bought into von Liebig’s zeal for promoting N-P-K to the exclusion of everything else, but the reductionist cat was out of the bag.⁴ Ever since, the N-P-K trifecta has become the center of the crop production universe. Not coincidentally, von Liebig’s ideas instantaneously plucked fertility out of the grasp of farmers, and transformed it into a marketable commodity, one that has made chemical companies countless billions of dollars over the years. Once big money gets involved, paradigms, however misguided, become more entrenched than ever.

The industrial takeover of the nutrient cycle has had a profound impact on the complexion of our landscape and rural communities. Before the widespread availability of petroleum-based agrichemicals, farmers needed livestock and diverse cropping systems to return nutrients back to the land and to control pests. For example, a farmer would raise cattle on hay, oats, corn, and pasture. The manure from those cattle went back to the land that produced the feed, and the cycle started over again. The technologies that went into manufacturing munitions during World War II were adapted to agrichemical processing. By the 1950s, it was assumed by most farmers that synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides made the fertility-building, pest-disruption abilities of diverse cropping rotations superfluous.⁵

But CCSI has made progress in getting people to stop viewing soil as merely a plant stand and temporary holder of chemical fertility. I can’t count how many farmers I met in Indiana who in one way or another mouthed a version of the phrase, “feed the soil, not the plant.” A major focus of CCSI, and its biggest source of success, has been one particular soil health tool: planting cover crops to protect fields during the “offseason” for corn and soybeans. It’s a relatively straightforward practice, and sometimes farmers and conservation experts misconstrue cover cropping as the end-all to building soil health. Of course, it’s not, any more than no-till was. But it is a handy gateway practice for getting farmers excited about such things as soil bacteria, root interactions, and organic matter. Whenever CCSI team members get a chance, they emphasize that cover cropping is just one tool—albeit an important one. In other words, CCSI isn’t just laying out a menu of innovative practices producers can pick and choose from—it’s trying to change the very nature of how farmers view soil. “If you can’t trigger the ‘want-to’ in a farmer, all the data won’t do any good,” Fisher told me. “It’s almost an emotional response.”

But farmers have to start somewhere on the road to building their soil’s biology, and invariably that means experimenting with planting a few acres of small grains or a brassica species like tillage radish as a cover crop. Like soil health initiatives in other states, CCSI has made extensive use of providing government cost share monies to help farmers establish cover crops. But Fisher said his experience with promoting no-till imparted an important lesson about the need for going beyond just subsidizing some seed or equipment.

“If we threw out cost-share money for forty acres and didn’t help them in that transition to a new system, they would fail and say, ‘I’ll never do that again,’” he said, adding that even if the farmer was initially successful, the experimental practice must be sustainable long after the government money is gone.

Customer Support

That’s why from day one, CCSI’s strategy was to create the same kind of support network farmers enjoy when they pursue more conventional farming practices. That meant not just having government technicians available in each region to help with the basics of bringing the soil back to life. It also requires teaming up with the players that farmers are comfortable working with on a daily basis: fertilizer suppliers, seed dealers, co-ops, crop advisers, and implement companies. I was reminded of how influential such input suppliers are one Thanksgiving while driving through a southwestern Iowa landscape recently left barren by a successful corn and soybean harvest. Rising above the frozen, brown fields on the edge of a farm town was a colorful billboard for a major regional farm services cooperative. In giant white letters on a green background was a message from on high: “Feed The Plant, Not The Soil.”

Sarah Carlson, a cover cropping expert for the group Practical Farmers of Iowa, assured me that unfortunately this attitude is the norm within much of the agribusiness community. The thinking from input suppliers is that soil is little more than a place to drive over while applying a few individual products the farmer-customer has purchased from them in order to produce one outcome: high yields. But the CCSI folks are starting to modify this business model on a limited basis. At first it was a bit of a hard sell to get input suppliers on board with promoting cover cropping, since it’s a technique that can eventually result in reduced demand for the fertilizer, chemicals, and other products they are in the business of supplying. But in the early years of the initiative, Fisher visited businesses throughout the state and talked about how helping farmers build healthy soils can open up new markets—they need to purchase cover crop seed from someone, for example, and chemical application equipment can be modified to spread seed.

One member of the agribusiness community who early on saw the potential in such a business model was Betsy Bower. She’s an agronomist for CERES Solutions, which provides everything from grain handling and agronomic services to fuel and crop insurance to farmers via twenty-two locations, mostly along the western edge of Indiana. She said her company started getting into the cover cropping business around 2010 as a result of customer demand.

“Farmers were coming to us as their trusted adviser and asking, ‘What do you think we ought to do? What are the various rates? How do we control weeds?’” she recalled. “As cover crops become more popular, it’s going to be in our best interest to learn along with them.”

CERES now offers an array of cover cropping services, from soil tests and species selection advice to planting and termination of the plants in the spring to make way for the subsequent cash crop of corn or soybeans. By 2015, cover cropping services made up between 5 percent and 10 percent of the company’s business, depending on the branch location. One thing cover cropping does is allow firms like CERES to keep their applicator drivers busy at a time when they would normally be idle or underutilized. They can apply chemicals and fertilizer in the spring, and cover crop seed in the late summer and early fall.

Another key player in CCSI’s success is implement companies, which not only sell the planters to put on cover crop seed, but can offer custom field work or modify equipment for seeding. During one field day, I ate lunch with Adam Fennig of Fennig Equipment in Clearwater, Ohio, not far from the Indiana border. He told me that the interest in modifying tillage equipment so that it could plant cover crops “exploded” around 2010. His family’s company specializes in mounting cover crop seed boxes, drop tubes, and deflectors on tillage tools. At the time I talked to him, he was doing some sixty modifications per year, mostly in Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois, and the custom enterprise made up about 30 percent to 40 percent of the firm’s business.

“But that’s about to change in a big way,” Fennig said excitedly, estimating that perhaps as much as half of their business would be related to modifying equipment for cover crop seeding by the end of 2017. That’s because more farmers are starting to report back major benefits from planting cover crops: everything from reduced soil compaction to yield increases. Many of those reports are emerging firsthand at CCSI field days and workshops.

Fennig said there’s a lot of excitement these days around modifying “high-boys” into cover crop seeders. These are the gangly, skinny-wheeled chemical applicators that can drive through standing corn late in the season without damaging the stalks. In a “swords into ploughshares” kind of trick, mechanics in Indiana and surrounding states are modifying high-boys so they can seed cover crops into corn in August, providing a jumpstart on fall growth and providing soil plant protection over the winter. Fennig and Bower credit CCSI for not only supplying them the information they need for providing the proper cover cropping support, but for creating the initial interest in this technique on the part of farmers. “We keep in close contact with Barry Fisher at the NRCS and he lets us know of events in the area,” said Fennig. “We try to participate when we can, because Barry can always draw a crowd.”

Indeed, the agribusiness support arm of farming was on display at several well-attended CCSI field days I was at. At Moody Farms, a large cropping operation in northeastern Indiana near the Ohio and Michigan borders, seed company representatives showed off an impressive array of miniature cover crop plots containing crimson clover, Austrian winter peas, hairy vetch, radish, rapeseed, turnips, kale, Ethiopian cabbage, sunflowers, annual ryegrass, cereal rye, oats, pearl millet, triticale, and winter barley. As participants walked past each planting, their advantages and disadvantages were described in detail by a local seed dealer. Nearby, Fennig stood next to a tillage implement that had been modified into a cover crop seeder and described how the process works. A shiny red high-boy sat a few yards away and another implement expert described being able to use it to plant cover crop seed in corn that’s near the point of full maturity.

The Farmer Next Door

Back in the cavernous Moody Farms machine shed, well-stocked with the tools of a modern row crop operation, some sixty farmers were being reminded that growing corn and soybeans is about more than iron, oil, and chemistry. The reminder came in the form of a question from Dan DeSutter, who raises crops in the west-central part of the state.

“How many of you raise crops with no livestock?” DeSutter said.

The majority of hands in the room shot up.

“So you say,” responded DeSutter coolly. “We’re all livestock farmers when it comes to soil biology.”

DeSutter was one of the first hub farmers recruited by CCSI when it was created in 2009. He and the other hub farmers agreed to host field days and travel to events to talk about their own experiences. CCSI trained them in presentation skills and pays a stipend to cover transportation costs and other expenses. There are also “affiliate” farms that host field days, further helping to tell the soil health story. An added component to the hub concept is that member farms are involved in an ongoing study where information is being collected from their operations on economics, fertilizer use, yields, and, of course, the health of their soil. Beyond that, CCSI collects information from affiliate farms, as well as research plots operated by Purdue University and local Soil and Water Conservation Districts.

The hub farmers represent a wide range of acreage, methods, and growing conditions. DeSutter is on the larger side—he farms five thousand acres near the Illinois border, so he has many of the conditions found throughout the middle of the Corn Belt. Werling, on the other hand, raises 320 acres of corn and soybeans, as well as oats for the local Amish market, on the opposite side of the state near Ohio, putting him more in the eastern Corn Belt.

But no matter where they are located or their size, the hub farmers share a similar passion for improving soil health. To stay connected they usually meet face-to-face for two days every year. The first day is just the farmers; the second day soil experts and agency people are invited to join the discussion. “Somebody starts a topic and it goes onto something else, then those ideas go out to the wider world and other farmers,” said Werling. “I love that.”

The hub network can serve as a sounding board for proposals that might seem a little “out there” for the conventional ag community, a not-ready-for-prime-time safe place for idea generation, according to Werling. One topic hub farmers have discussed is the idea of seeding cover crops at the same time that nitrogen fertilizer is applied as a side dress during the growing season.

Werling, who has been using a combination of cover cropping and no-till (he calls it “never-till”) successfully during the past several years, acknowledges that he is more fixated on the soil biome than the average Indiana farmer. That’s why he appreciates the chance to throw new ideas around among a group of people who are as committed to soil health as he is. I asked him, “Like a support group?”

“That’s a good way to put it,” Werling said with a laugh.

Agents of Change

In some ways, the hub concept is similar to how farm innovations have been germinated and broadcast in farm country for generations. A landmark 1941 study conducted in Greene County in central Iowa traced the adoption of hybrid seed corn during the 1930s. On the face of it, this new technology appeared to be an overnight success—in 1927 it was considered an experimental product not seen outside of college research plots; a decade later it was almost universally planted by Iowa farmers. But through extensive interviews, rural sociologists discovered that the majority of farmers did not accept the innovation immediately, but rather “delayed acceptance for a considerable time after initial contact with innovation.”

That’s an important point to keep in mind when considering that one can’t pick up a farm magazine these days without seeing an article on the importance of soil health—the word on cover cropping and diverse rotations is getting out. However, awareness of an innovation does not always result in immediate adoption—many Iowa farmers who put off planting hybrid seed for years were first made aware of its existence at the same time as their early-adopting neighbors. Although the widespread acceptance of hybrid seed corn over a few years’ time is impressive, it’s striking that some farmers did not adopt it until a full ten years after their innovative neighbors.⁶

It turns out these early adopters served a key role: they were willing to jump in feet first and test this innovation on their own land almost as soon as they heard about it, and they shared the results with their neighbors in a kind of community laboratory setting. Seed salesman may have been “introductory mechanisms” for hybrid seed, but early adopting farmers were the “activating agents,” according to the sociologists. Another important lesson from Greene County is that even after hybrid seed had proven itself on a neighbor’s farm, later adopters insisted on experimenting with it personally on just a few acres before making a full conversion.

CCSI’s hub farmers are early adopters: people who are trying something new because of a love of innovation and personal goals they’ve set for their operations. But they don’t necessarily have a vested interest in seeing their neighbors make a conversion. “I talk about what I do as a farmer,” said Werling of his presentations at workshops and field days. “I don’t sell seed. I don’t sell fertilizer. I don’t work for the government. I think that’s an advantage.”

Werling’s passion for soil health is palpable, and his enthusiasm is contagious as he talks about using crop rotations, no-till, and cover cropping to make even his poorest fields productive. But passion about the soil universe isn’t enough, and he knows it. If the majority of Indiana’s farmland is going to be planted in continuous living cover, CCSI needs to reach the bigger farmers out there. At one field day Werling attended, the farmers there represented control of some three hundred thousand acres, according to an impromptu survey. When the co-op agronomists and crop advisers attending were included, a total of six hundred thousand acres was represented.

“I don’t know if they understand the soil health so much,” said Werling of some of the larger farmers. “But there is a lot of excitement over cover crops.”

Those bigger operators may not be watching YouTube videos on mycorrhizae fungi—I don’t know how many farmers I’ve talked to who didn’t care much about high-speed internet until they became interested in soil health—but we all have to start somewhere, said Fisher. A farmer starts seeing that a cover cropped field requires less nitrogen or yields well in droughty conditions, and then maybe later takes other steps to avoid doing the kind of damage that impedes soil health. What an initiative like CCSI can do is not only support the early adopters out there, but provide an infrastructure for later adopters who are being activated by early examples, and who want to start experimenting on their own farms. Technical expertise, connections with agribusinesses that can provide the seeds and other inputs, cost-share funds to get started on a small scale—these are all offered through the CCSI hub system.

The National Wildlife Federation’s Stockwell believes that larger acreage farmers showing up at field days is a sign that CCSI’s “saturation coverage” is starting to change the culture. “What the hub farmers do by bombarding farmers from every angle is make it impossible for them to ignore the message,” he said. “The middle to late adopters are being reached.”

Unearthing Economics

Maybe those later adopters are being reached, but as Greene County’s hybrid corn example shows, awareness does not guarantee full acceptance. Fisher said the majority of farmers agree a practice like cover cropping makes conservation sense, but it also has to pencil out financially. That’s why the hub farmers were chosen not only for innovative attitudes toward soil management, but also for their ability to track financials and willingness to talk about them. Dan DeSutter, the west-central Indiana farmer, fits the role perfectly. In a sense, farmers like DeSutter serve as an important link in a chain that extends from the ecologically minded motivations of someone like Werling to the more economically centered drivers on Indiana’s larger operations. A former financial analyst and commodities broker, he knows how to track trends, talk numbers, and sniff out inefficiencies.

One day while standing in a trench fixing a tile drainage line, DeSutter noticed that roots from the rye cover crop a Purdue University researcher was studying on his family’s farm were boring at least four feet deep into the soil. Such “bio-drilling” was impressive, given that over the years the DeSutters had been putting a lot of effort into using a mechanical ripper to break up compaction. Ripping requires a tractor with lots of horsepower and burns lots of fuel.

“That was my aha moment,” DeSutter told me. “We were spending all this money on ripping when for a few dollars per acre worth of seed, this plant would be doing it for us. You tell me what’s going to do it better: the plant or the steel?”

To DeSutter, that was the “physical” economic argument for building soil health. As he has gotten deeper into cover cropping and talked to other leaders in the field (he traveled to Australia one winter as an Eisenhower Fellow to study soil health building techniques there) DeSutter has also been convinced about the “biological” benefits. Namely, the conventional system of growing corn or soybeans, which covers the land only a few months out of the year with living plants, is actually very inefficient at utilizing all the free sunlight above ground and biological activity below ground.

DeSutter provided a mini soil economics lesson while giving a presentation in the machine shed at Moody Farms. He explained to the gathered farmers that he has doubled his organic matter to 4 percent on many of his acres; as I describe in chapter 5, organic matter is a key element of healthy, biologically active soil. DeSutter then went into a simple calculation showing that the nitrogen he is gaining from this increased organic matter is basically a source of fertility he doesn’t have to purchase. “That’s like a forty dollar per acre annuity that keeps paying us,” he said at one point as the seated farmers took notes.

DeSutter also pointed out that 1 percent of organic matter in the top twelve inches of the soil profile is worth an inch of water storage. “How much is a two-inch rain worth in August?” he asked, following up with an answer in the form of more math. “Let’s say it’s worth twenty bushels extra per acre. With corn going for four dollars, that’s eighty dollars per acre added value. That’s resilience.”

At another CCSI meeting I attended, central Indiana farmer Jack Maloney talked about how since he started using cover cropping and no-till together, his inputs of nitrogen fertilizer have gone down, but crop yields have continued to increase. He finds cover crops provide fertility to his fields at a more consistent level throughout the growing season—he compared it to a steady sine wave. Applying petroleum-based fertilizer, on the other hand, provides roller-coaster-like peaks and valleys, which don’t always match when the crop needs nutrients most. This kind of talk gets a farmer’s attention, particularly at times when crop prices are slumping. One corn and soybean farmer working with CCSI, Rodney Rulon, has been taking part in an analysis that shows his use of cover cropping and other methods that build soil health have resulted in a net per-acre value of around eighty dollars, a return on investment of over 320 percent.⁷

Such financial lessons may be directed at conventional farmers, but they are packaged in a way that isn’t instantly recognizable to producers who automatically equate the highest yields with large profits. One of the biggest differences between early adopters like Michael Werling and Dan DeSutter and the next wave of farmers who are interested in improving soil health is the role yields play in their decision-making. Werling makes it clear that he does not make a direct connection between high yields and profitability—if he has a few bushels per acre less come fall, that’s more than made up for by the fact that he spent less money on inputs as a result of good soil health. DeSutter takes a similar holistic view.

“I don’t give a damn about yield,” he said in his typical blunt manner during one of our conversations. He then paused and reconsidered. “That’s an overstatement. I think there’s way too much focus on per-acre yield, and not enough on profit. As a finance guy, I look at what I need to do to make a profit in the long term, to gain a long-term advantage. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.”

However, the more-bushels-per-acre-automatically-equals-more-profits trap is a hard one to escape. During the CCSI field days and meetings I attended, more than one farmer expressed the goal of getting record-breaking yields while using cover crops. “We’ve got to get back to science, fellas, if we’re going to get to three-hundred-bushel corn,” said an Indiana farmer at one point during a CCSI presentation (currently, producing around 170 bushels of corn per acre is considered excellent for the average Indiana farmer). He was half right: science needs to be reintroduced into the soil profile, but so does long-term sustainable profitability.

A Conservation Ethic

One thing that can get lost in all this talk about making soil health pay economically is that for many early adopters the main motivation is care of the land itself. The 2015 Iowa Farm and Rural Life Poll showed that “stewardship ethics” was the most influential factor in farmers’ decisions to change how they manage their soil—48 percent of respondents said it was a strong or very strong influence, with economics, at 43 percent, a close second.⁸

Werling, the northeastern Indiana farmer, is acutely aware of the impact his farming activities have on the environment. He farms along the St. Mary’s River, which is one of the biggest contributors of phosphorus to Lake Erie. Algal blooms in the lake in 2014 contaminated the water for four hundred thousand people in the Toledo, Ohio, area, forcing a shutdown of the city’s drinking water system for three days.⁹ “I’ve been to Toledo Bay,” Werling told me. “I’m often the only farmer on those tours. It makes you aware of the algal bloom.”

During the CCSI field days I participated in, the often-contentious relationship between production agriculture and water quality hung over the proceedings like a dark cloud. Numerous speakers—whether they be farmers, scientists, or soil experts—made the point that building soil health is one way to be proactive on the issue of protecting the environment and perhaps dodging the hammer of stricter regulation and/or lawsuits.

“I hear you have a million acres of cover crops in this state, and you did that without someone putting a gun to your head,” said the University of Maryland’s Ray Weil as an opening to his CCSI presentation at a restaurant in southwestern Indiana. Maybe Indiana farmers don’t have a gun to their head, but in conversations with me many conceded they felt some sort of stricter water quality regulation of farming practices is inevitable. Watersheds that supply drinking water for the Indianapolis metro area are contaminated with agrichemicals such as the corn herbicide atrazine. “They want someone to pay for it,” said hydrologist Robert Barr, referring to Indianapolis officials. Not surprisingly, farmers are working with Barr to show how building soil health can reduce runoff.

An argument could be made for the short-term effectiveness of a top-down approach to cleaning up water when one considers the example of Maryland, where agricultural runoff has decimated fisheries in the Chesapeake Bay. It was determined several years ago that cover crops were the cheapest, most efficient way to capture nutrients before they made it to the Chesapeake, so state officials there instituted a “Flush Tax”—basically a fee all residents hooked up to public water works systems pay. Revenue from that tax is used to pay farmers outright to plant cover crops, usually in the form of a single species such as rye. Maryland farmers can receive as much as seventy-five dollars per acre to plant a cover crop, with other economic incentives thrown in for planting it earlier in the season, among other things.¹⁰

The result? Around half of Maryland’s one million acres of cropland is now regularly cover cropped and agricultural nutrient runoff has been reduced. On the face of it, the program has been a success. But Weil, who has worked with farmers in numerous states, is concerned that most Maryland farmers are narrowly focused on the minimum they can do to adhere to regulations and ways they can qualify for cover crop payments. What happens if economic challenges or shifts in the political winds cause the payment system to be dropped? He prefers what he calls the “rock star farmer” model, where leaders in soil health are driving innovation within their communities.

“The conversation is different in my state, which I think is sad,” the scientist admitted to me. “At farmer meetings in Maryland, farmers talk about how they can qualify for higher payments—they don’t talk about how they can improve their systems and build soil health.”

In a way, such a model is as reductionist as focusing on how much N-P-K is needed to produce a certain yield. When such a narrow view boils soil health down to planting a minimum amount of a single cover crop, it becomes easy to drop that practice once it doesn’t pay or it otherwise becomes too big a hassle. The key is for soil health to become the driver of all other farming decisions, rather than one side effect of a few isolated practices. For example, DeSutter has added wheat to his corn-soybean rotation. The small grain long ago fell out of favor in much of the Corn Belt, but since it’s harvested earlier than row crops, having it in the rotation gives DeSutter an opportunity to get cover crops planted earlier, providing a jumpstart on winter. Building soil health has to be put on the same level as other farming practices if it’s going to weather mercurial markets, shifts in farm policy, or the desire to return to old habits, according to DeSutter. “It’s all about priorities,” he said. Like wildly successful farmers who base management decisions on how they impact, say, pollinators or grassland songbirds, DeSutter is viewing all his practices through a lens trained on those bugs and biota beneath his feet.

Digging into the Science

I think Weil is onto something when it comes to the power inherent in having a deeper knowledge of something like soil health. When I first started reporting on sustainable agriculture back in the early 1990s, “soil quality” was all the rage within the farm conservation community. Scientists and government conservation officials produced fact sheets and how-to guides on how to protect the soil’s ability to remain productive. Most of these methods centered on ways to make conventional cropping systems more “sustainable” by warding off the most destructive elements of this system: intense tillage, overuse of chemicals, compacting the ground with massive machinery.

Some good came out of the soil quality phase—the amount of land that was put under no-till systems that shun moldboard plowing, for example, exploded.¹¹ But mostly, farmers were not piloting these efforts, and remained unaware of the inner workings of a biologically healthy soil. It didn’t have the same connotation as “soil health,” which is rooted in building the land’s own ability to generate long-term productivity and resilience. It’s an ecosystem approach of the most basic kind. As Aldo Leopold wrote: “The most important characteristic of an organism is that capacity for internal self-renewal known as health.”¹²

Many farmers undertaking soil-building practices aren’t shy about saying nature, specifically the tallgrass prairie biome, is the model they are aspiring to. In Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and other spots in the Midwest where the most recent soil health revolution has taken hold, what comes up repeatedly from the farmers I talk to—from early adopters to those who are just thinking about it—is how exciting it is to be on the cusp of a new way of looking at farming. An argument could be made that another form of support—an input supplier so to speak—farmers rely on is agricultural and, increasingly, ecological science. And helping farmers unearth what’s going on deep in their fields can take them beyond just focusing on one tool like cover cropping. During one series of summer CCSI field days he participated in, Weil repeatedly drove home the point that soil is more than a growth medium for corn, soybeans, and a few small grains or brassicas.

“You can’t just throw out cover crop seed and keep doing what you’re doing,” he said at one point while standing in a four-foot pit that had been backhoed out of a southern Indiana cornfield. As farmers and crop advisers gathered around the trench, Weil used the point of a hunting knife to show where fat corn roots were tracing their way through the profile. Roots were a key part of Weil’s lesson that day. It was August 20, and just a few days before, the owners of the field, Clint and Dan Arnholt, had used a high-boy to seed radish and rye into this stand of corn, which was well above everyone’s head. Weil estimated there can be a couple hundred pounds of unused nitrogen at the four-foot level, and corn is inefficient at making use of it. Within three or four weeks of being planted, rye and radish roots will be soaking up the excess nitrogen while bringing other nutrients and minerals closer to the surface, he explained.

Fisher and the CCSI team had brought Weil to the state for a week of field days and presentations like this because of his reputation as one of the nation’s leading soil ecologists, someone who can put cover cropping in perspective as just one tool for attaining soil health. Soil pits play a major role in such field days. Seeing radish roots bio-drill through what was thought to be an impenetrable soil hardpan caused by years of plowing, wheel traffic, and lack of biological activity can be a real eye-opener.

Michael Werling, the northeastern Indiana crop producer, recalled to me when a soil pit dug in one of his more marginal fields revealed that his use of cover cropping, no-till, and crop rotations had built up the organic matter to the point where a soil expert determined he had slightly modified his soil type. “He said he would have to reclassify the soil,” said the farmer proudly while checking out a soil pit at another farm during a CCSI field day. “That’s pretty encouraging.”

During what were affectionately termed “Ray Days,” Weil spent a lot of time in soil pits from one end of the state to the other, talking about the latest innovations in soil science. He should know: besides doing cutting-edge work on the impacts various farming techniques have on soil, Weil is the co-author of the seminal textbook The Nature and Properties of Soils.¹³ Whether standing in a hole or giving a PowerPoint presentation in a farm’s cavernous machine shed, Weil had a consistent message: the science of soil is in flux, and farmers can be on the forefront of this exciting revolution, instead of passive consumers of handed-down knowledge. They can, as has happened in places like North Dakota’s Burleigh County, even get ahead of the scientists and be sources of innovation themselves. Weil described how cover crop roots not only go vertical in search of moisture and nutrients, but send branches in a horizontal pattern. The scientist has utilized the same cameras that are used in colonoscopies to trace root channels—it doesn’t get any more high-tech than that. Of particular interest to soil scientists these days is the role mycorrhizae fungi can play in building soil health. By interacting with a plant’s roots in a symbiotic fashion, such fungi can create a diverse biological universe that’s resilient and able to generate its own fertility.¹⁴

“We’re finding out plants send out all sorts of signals underground,” said Weil at one field day, citing a recent study that showed older corn hybrids were sending out distress calls when besieged by rootworms; such signals recruit nematodes to attack the pest. “That’s pretty cool. That’s the way nature works. We didn’t really appreciate the role of roots in building soil until relatively recently.”

His point, which is reiterated by the soil pits: it’s not enough to look at the surface of the soil—take a peek underground as much as possible. In fact, more than once a chagrined Weil admitted to farmers that while revising the latest edition of his textbook he had to re-write the section on organic matter. It turns out farmers can have a bigger influence on their soil’s organic matter than scientists like himself once thought. But Weil has another critical message: we don’t need to understand the minutiae of how soil protozoa and bacteria interact in order to benefit from this activity on a landscape scale. The key is diversity, which provides the habitat for these interactions to thrive. “If we can encourage the diversity, we can encourage the workings of this system, even if we don’t understand all of it,” said Weil. “Nature will sort it out.”

It’s an effective message for the groups that typically attended these field days: a mix of veteran cover croppers and newbies. I talked to several farmers who were having less than stellar results with cover crops, but were hoping they’d learn a trick or two at these events. At each presentation, farmers nodded their heads in agreement with Weil’s point that we’re all along for a ride on a train pulled by an exciting, if sometimes baffling, ecological engine. This conversation was going way beyond just providing tips on the best seeding rates for rye and radish.

One of the farmers paying close attention to Weil’s presentations was Gordon Smiley, who farms 1,200 acres of row crops with his brother Jeff in southern Indiana. When I met Smiley, the brothers had been using cover crops for a couple of years, and despite a few hiccups along the way, they finally felt this soil-friendly system was an important component of their farm. They have a farrow-to-finish hog operation and the cover crops offer a way to soak up excess nutrients in the manure they apply to their fields. Smiley enthusiastically shared with me how their soil has a crumbly, mellow texture and is full of earthworms.

“What convinced me was the shovel test—digging and seeing the soil underneath,” he told me while standing in the shade of a machine shed several yards from a soil pit where Weil had just finished one of his presentations. Up until that point, the brothers had focused mostly on planting a single species like rye as a cover crop, but they were excited to move to the next level of soil health and try cocktail mixes of as many as ten species. Smiley had been watching online soil health videos and attending CCSI field days during the previous few years, and he gave me a long list of websites I should check out as soon as I got back to my computer. Earlier, I had overheard an animated discussion involving him and a couple of other farmers about how one predicts a particular innovation is going to be the next new thing, or just a fad. Smiley was convinced soil health was the former.

“They’re way out there,” he said of the innovators in soil health he’s been observing and interacting with. “We talk about mycorrhizae fungi, we talk about all the bacteria.” Then he threw his hands in the air and whirled them around to symbolize lots of activity going on all at once. “It’s exciting.”