pioneering no-till small grains farming: wish us luck!

Ninety-nine percent of small grain growers in the United States will insist it's impossible to farm these crops without tilling. There’s a good reason for this: At first glance, it does look impossible. Farmers like to plant into a nicely plowed, naked seedbed because their small grains won’t get shaded by something that outgrows it. But in the past the wild-type ancestors of the small grains we cultivate today had no problem growing chest-high — even with huge amounts of competition. We know the potential is there. Believing, and being willing to try, are the hard parts.

One big challenge we face is that in regenerative agriculture, you sow your main crop into the ground while your cover crops are still growing. But we are essentially trying to figure out a way to get a cover crop and a cash crop going at the same time. Even foundational books like Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution don’t have an answer for that. Mimi, of course, had some ideas.

She recommended we invest in a roller-crimper, an invaluable tool for farming as we do, because it mimics what happens in the wild. Annual grains, which are most of what we grow, need to germinate and produce seed. Getting to that first stage, where the plants can really grow, is a critical period. And that’s the period when the plants are going to have to push up through the cover crop.

In the wild, the plant would basically be finding little spots of ground that might have been turned up by the scuffling of herbivore feet. Then the plant would grow in a little patch, and that patch would make quite a bit of seed and that seed would spread and land somewhere else. This is why there are very diverse patch systems of perennial and annual grasses in the wild.

But when you're trying to do this with a commercial crop, you need a nice, big, thick stand. This is where the roller-crimper comes in. It essentially mimics the actions of a big herd of herbivore — be they deer on the east side of the country, or elk and bison out west. In the wild, these animals would work a small area very intensively, then quickly be pushed away from that place by predators and not return for at least a year.

This critical step is a mechanism for pumping nutrients from the sky into the ground and building up nutrient banks in the soil. Prime example, carbon. Carbon is tetravalent, meaning it can form four bonds with other carbon molecules. So the more carbon you have, the more you can draw down into the soil — exponentially. You just have to know how. Then you get into things like nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which are part of a symbiosis with many types of small grains. You can take atmospheric nitrogen and put that in the soil, too.

Working in this way turns the whole farm into an astonishingly efficient nutrient-building bank. But the bank  then needs to be staffed by an almost infinite number of microorganisms because they are what actually release nutrients to the plants in a slow and controlled way. That's the critical part. A regenerative farmer will get to these sticky points where he or she is increasing the quantity of nutrients in the soil, but can't yet unlock them for the crop. It takes time for the microorganisms to reach critical mass.

As we pioneer this approach to small-grain farming in the Hudson Valley, we can attest that there are many panicky moments along the way.  And we are learning that it’s exactly the times when it looks like things aren't going to work out that lead to pivotal conversations and deeper understanding.