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“From 1972 to the day, we've seen no till go from about 3.3 million acres to probably around a hundred million acres today. So over the last 40 years, these people have really contributed to the increase in the number of no-tilled acres.” — Frank Lessiter
Regular listeners to our podcast know that 2022 is a big year for no-till history. The first no-till farm field was planted near Herndon, Kentucky in 1962. No-Till Farmer was founded in 1972. The first National No-Tillage Conference was held in 1982.
But no-till farming doesn’t just belong to the past. It’s an important part of agriculture’s present and future.
Back in 2019, Frank and Mike Lessiter sat down to discuss 25 legends of the no-till movement who are still alive today.
This episode revisit that conversation in celebration of these three anniversaries and the ongoing no-till movement.
P.S. There’s lots more great no-till stories and history in Frank Lessiter’s new book, From Maverick to Mainstream: A History of No-Till Farming. Check it out here.
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Full Transcript
Brian O'Connor:
Welcome to the latest episode of No-Till Farmer, Influencers and Innovators. I'm Brian O'Connor lead content editor for No-till Farmer.
Brian O'Connor:
NewLeaf Symbiotics sponsors this program, featuring stories about the past, present, and future of no-till farming. I encourage you to subscribe to this series, which is available in iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and TuneIn Radio. Subscribing will allow you to receive an alert about upcoming episodes as soon as they are released.
Brian O'Connor:
I'd like to take a moment to thank our sponsor, NewLeaf Symbiotics, for supporting our No-Till Farmer Influencers and Innovators podcast series. Want to do more with your fields in 2022? Now available in convenient planter box at application, Terrasym, by NewLeaf Symbiotics, is proven by Becks 2021 PFR to improve yield by 2.7 bushels per acre in soybeans, and 4.6 bushels per acre in corn. And that's $20,000 more in incremental income with every 1000 acres planted. To calculate your return on investment for the 2022 growing season, and purchase Terrasym directly online for only $4.34 cents per acre, visit newleafsym.com/2022. That's new leaf, S Y M dot com back slash 2022.
Brian O'Connor:
Regular listeners to our podcast know 2022 is a big year for no-till history. The first no-till farm field was planted near Herndon, Kentucky in 1962. No-Till Farmer was founded in 1972. The first national no-tillage conference was held in 1982, but no-till farming doesn't just belong to the past. It's an important part of agriculture's present and future
Brian O'Connor:
Back in 2019, Frank and Mike Lessiter sat down to discuss 25 legends of the no-till movement who are still alive today. We'll revisit that conversation and celebration of these three anniversaries, and the ongoing no-till movement. But first, a couple notes at one point in the podcast, you'll hear Frank and Mike talk about David Hula's record breaking corn yields in the National Corn Growers Association yield contest. After this podcast was initially recording, Hula broke his own record, which now stands at 616 bushels per acre. And that's a lot of corn. Frank was also working on his book, From Maverick To Mainstream: A History of No-Till Farming at the time this podcast was recorded. It's finished. I have one on my desk. You can have one on your desk too. Check out no-tillfarmer.com for more details. That's no, hyphen, tillfarmer.com. Now here's Mike.
Mike Lessiter:
So now I'm going to introduce all you listeners to Frank Lessiter. Frank has been the editor in chief of No-Till Farmer since 1972, that's four and a half decades of covering no-till. Frank is my dad and the co-founder of Lessiter Media, put out the shingle with my mom, Pam, in 1981. And you are going to hear from him, unscripted in his own voice, in his own office, and I really think you're going to enjoy what we have planned for you today. Frank say hi to all of our listeners out there.
Frank Lessiter:
Hello, how are you doing today? When they talk about me being around and being editor of No-Till Farmer since 1972, I guess I relate to farmers, because most people at the desk jobs seem to move on to better positions over the years. Me, I've been stuck in this same job for more than 40 years. So I guess I'm kind of like farmers in that regard that.
Mike Lessiter:
That chair has fit you well, Frank. Tell us what you're going to cover here today in the podcast.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, we had the 25th anniversary of the national no-tillage conference last winter, and we picked 25 no-till living legends that played a key role in the no-till adoption. And I'm going to talk to you about each one of these today. And during this time, from 1972 to today, we've seen no-till go from about 3.3 million acres to probably around 100 million acres today. So over the last 40 years, these people have really contributed to the increase in the number of no-tilled acres.
Mike Lessiter:
And you have an exciting book project that you're working on as well?
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah, I've been working on it for years, and this will be a culmination of four decades of reporting on the no-till farming practice. Actually, it's going to be a coffee type book, more than 200 pages that will reflect on the pioneering advancements, both in technology and then people, and the people we're going to talk about today will be in the book. And these are folks who have changed a lot lives of so many farmers and their families. Attendees at the national no-tillage conference last year in St. Louis got a small taste of the history because we had some museum displays that we had at the 25th annual conference. And many people have encouraged us to tell me how happy they were and to see this book being written and memorizing the place no-till has had in the ag revolution. So I got to get it done.
Mike Lessiter:
It's fun to watch Frank in the office here. Many of you have heard others refer to him as the Johnny Appleseed of no-till agriculture because so much of the early information was passed through the publications and meetings that he was hosting. But this is a passion project, and Frank is finding something out of the archives every week it seems, that this book project is growing, but will really be something special when it's finished. We were just talking about this quote, Isaac Newton, who said, "If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." And that was kind of the impetus for this book, right? To honor the past, the pioneers risk takers, some of those things that caused you to want to put this together?
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah. And it's kind of the history of no-till. I can remember back when the no-tillers said they were afraid to go to the cafe for coffee in the morning in their small towns because everybody ridiculed them and laughed at them.
Mike Lessiter:
So what you're doing here is making certain that the next generations knows whose shoulders they're standing on today.
Frank Lessiter:
Exactly. And these 25 legends are a combination of educators, researchers, and farmers from, I think 15 states they hail from.
Mike Lessiter:
Excellent. Well, we should probably get that underway. Just a couple ground rules for how we're going to do this here for you, so you know how we're approaching it. We're just going to let the mic roll today, and going to mention each of Frank's 25 selections and let him loose. And as his son and business partner, I'm going to tell you, there's probably going to be some tangents, some rabbit holes and some entertainment here as well, and we're just going to let the mics roll. We can always edit something out if he takes us down a rabbit hole that we can't get out of, but we're going to let things roll and let him share what he and remembers, and excited to get this started. So you ready to go?
Frank Lessiter:
Ready to go.
Mike Lessiter:
All right. Tell us about Dwayne Beck.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, these 25 we're going to talk about not only are legends, but they're pioneer. And early in my career, I spent a couple years working at Michigan State University on the information staff. So I know how they universities run well. Dwayne is a South Dakota State University agronomist, but he's kind of a guy that, to me, doesn't fit in with the regular university setup. He's blunt. He's funny. He tells you what's on his mind, and when he thinks of research he thinks of practical ideas. So years ago he moved to Pierre, South Dakota and became the director of the farmer supported and financed Dakota Lakes Research Farm. And these are a number of farmers who said, "Look, we want to look at no-till in our area out here in Western South Dakota. We don't care what you do, Dwayne, as long as you make money. We don't want to go in the hole." So Dwayne's been out there for years. He's turned out some of the most practical research you'll see on no-till. He's a big believer in getting a number of crops into the no-till rotations.
Frank Lessiter:
One of the things I remember about him is I had him as a speaker at the very first national no-tillage conference in Indianapolis in 1993. And Dwayne got up and said... This is in the Eastern corn belt. And he says, "We live in the Western corn belt, and we no-till to keep every inch of rain that falls and turn it into a crop." He says, "You guys in the Eastern region of the country, the corn belt, you no-till to get rid of the water." And I've always remembered that for 25 years. He's very practical, got some great ideas. He's traveled the world, been a disciple for no-till all these years.
Mike Lessiter:
He can be pretty much a polarizing figure in agriculture, can't he?
Frank Lessiter:
Yes. And if you ask him a question, you're going to get a honest blunt answer about no-till. If he thinks you're going to try something that won't work, he'll tell you.
Mike Lessiter:
He's one of the fun ones to have on our conference, never disappoints there, and half the room's agree and half is challenging.
Frank Lessiter:
Exactly. Right.
Mike Lessiter:
Next one. Tell us about Jill Clapperton out in Washington.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, she originally started at Lethbridge Alberta. She worked for Agri Canada, was a microbiologist. She's probably the one who's done the best job of looking at the living creatures underneath the soil surface. She's done remarkable things. She's talked around the world on no-till, and now she lives in Spokane, Washington running her own company. She calls herself a soil ecologist, looks at the relationships between organisms and their environment to more effectively manage and benefit from the long term biological fertility of our soil. Another practical person. I've seen her be on our program to national no-tillage conference. I remember one time later in Indianapolis, after she had finished, an hour later out in the hallway, there were still 15 to 20 people out there asking her questions.
Mike Lessiter:
She's been a highlight at the meetings as well. Going back a little farther here, tell us about Bill Richards.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, Bill Richards in Southern Ohio, I first visited his farm, I think in 1973. He and his sons have a huge operation, been no-till all these years, was one of the real pioneers early on in traffic control and running your wheels in the same place in the field every year. And they went to a program that was set up with 20-inch corn. They were no-tilling 31 rows, and this was in a time when narrow rows to most farmers meant 30 inches. But he was in 20 inches. He later, I think maybe the boys said to him, "Let us do the farming." And Bill went to Washington DC and was the chief of the Soil Conservation Service for several years before he came back. Been a real pioneer in this business.
Frank Lessiter:
I always thought maybe he made a mistake, but he didn't agree with me because when he was chief of Soil Conservation Service, we had some real soil erosion problems in this country. And I always thought they should have slapped a couple of these guys with some fines and put them in jail and made some progress on this. But Bill and the politicians in Washington were not as blunt as I would've been.
Mike Lessiter:
Very good. Let's talk about John Aeschliman, a guy that we visited his farm a couple years ago.
Frank Lessiter:
Well John and his son run about 4,000 acres in the Palouse area. If you ever been to the Palouse area, it's rolling hills steep hills. Sometimes you can walk up one of these hills and you can think you're practically going to fall off. They do winter wheat, spring wheat, spring barley, in seven and a half inch paired rows. And they also no-till corn peas, sunflowers, garbanzo beans, and they're looking at cover crops. John normally wins, or has for a number of years, won no-till yield contest in Washington with no-till corn. Sometimes I think he's been the only entrant, but he's done very well. But he's done a great job of no-tilling these Eastern Washington hills. They're among the steepest in the whole country and they can erode. I've seen pictures, not on John's farm, but other area farms in the area, where there would be as much as 18 inches of top soil that come down off these hills in a rain sitting in the middle of a highway. In the county highway, people got to get out and scrape the topsoil off the roads.
Mike Lessiter:
Tell our listeners about some of the combine experience you had out there when we were there a couple years ago, and what exactly that terrain is like.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, it's really rough. We were there at harvest time in August, Mike and I. We rode with several of these people and it's crazy. It's like being on a roller coaster, anyway. And they just worked with it. We were on another farm in Idaho in which we were going along a ravine, and you look down to the right on the ravine and it was a 600-foot drop. And we got the header on this combine, probably they're no-tilling within 18 inches of going over that cliff.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah, I remember that was some thrill seeking in the combine, had our feet on the glass windshield there in some spots as we were dealing with the terrain.
Frank Lessiter:
John's been no-tilling since the mid 1970s, and one of the interesting things he's doing now is he's gone through a number of drills over the years, but he's running a cross slot drill. That's the technology that John Baker came up with in New Zealand, and it's getting in a little more popular. And interesting enough for 2018, they're going to do some tests with cross slot planters in the Midwest on no-tilling corn and soybeans at Western Illinois University.
Mike Lessiter:
We'll come back to the Midwest here for a moment. Tell us about David Brandt.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, David Brandt began farming in 1971, and ex-Marine. He's seeded numerous cover crops. He runs about 1,150 acres of corn, soybeans, and wheat. No huge operation, but he's been no-till for a long time. If you ever see Dave out on the farm, he's always got a pair of bib overalls on. He's seen a tremendous value of seeding cover crops and improving health. He's been a speaker at a couple of our national no tillage conferences, is in demand for other places across the country, and kind of pioneered some of the work on cover crops. Early on, he had a white planter, and he would get blank seed plates and he would drill them, drill the holes in them for the exact seeds that he was planting his cover crop mixtures. He's big on mixtures. He'll have a half dozen or more different species of cover crops. He puts out in one mixture.
Mike Lessiter:
He had some of the most interesting and eye opening presentations on things like tillage radishes early on, didn't he?
Frank Lessiter:
Right. He's done a number of things like this. And he's looked at seeding some of these things all by themselves, and then putting them in mixes, maybe as many as a dozen species in one mixture.
Mike Lessiter:
Very good. Let's go to John Bradley from Tennessee.
Frank Lessiter:
Well John, he's kind of retired now, but he was a University of Tennessee agronomist. He was at Milan Tennessee, ran Milan Tennessee no-till field day for a number of years, and that attracted tens of thousands of growers to see the most innovations and no-till research. You would get on wagons and you, they would have a tour. Later on, he went to WeWork for Monsanto and in the South helped a pioneer no-till in that area. And he was one of the pioneers of no-till cotton, which is not something we think about much of up here in the Midwest, but he really got it going. He showed him how they could do large payoffs. And then he worked later with Tennessee Agri Center for a while. Now he's retired in Lutz, Tennessee, and he and his wife are running a small herd of beef cattle. But another guy who was really practical and close to farmers. And another guy, like Dwayne Beck, that probably excelled because he wasn't on the main campus of the university.
Mike Lessiter:
Let's talk about Jim Kinsella out of Illinois next.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, Jim's been a long time no-till and strip till enthusiast. He was no-till for a number of years. He worked with BASF for a number of years, and got going with some of their programs of soybeans. I remember Darrell Smith from Farm Journal telling me once he was riding with Dwayne and all of a sudden comes to an abrupt stop right in the middle of the road, jumps out of the pickup and starts picking up earth worms out on the middle of the highway and throwing them back in his no-till fields. And Darrell also told me once that he caught bloody hell from Jim because he was about to drive across one of his no-till fields in Daryl's pickup truck and Jim put a stop to it. So he is really been big on the conservation. He and his son run about 2200 acres, a no-till soybeans and strip till corn. He's been a speaker at several of the no-till conferences.
Frank Lessiter:
Early on, he put together a big machine shed on the farm down there. And he used to run, probably still does, used to run tours during the winter and then field days during the summer. But he would draw 200, 300 people to these meetings in the middle of the winter on how to set your no-till planter. A big booster of no-till over the years. I remember once being on one of these summer field days and riding a bus, and it wasn't Jim, but it was one of the guys he works with, was talking about the erosion in field out there and how they had a slope. And one of the guys in the back of the bus said, "Hey, where's this slope? I don't see the slope." And the guy said, "Well, there is a 1% slope in this field." I mean, this is 1% when we were talking about John Aeschliman out in Palouse area, they're talking 45, 50% slope. So here's Jim was concerned about the soil loss off a 1% slope.
Mike Lessiter:
He's a name that when we're at meetings and ask people how they got into no-till or who influenced them, you hear that name quite often, don't you?
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah, I mean with these field days and winter meetings, he would go go through the program. He had really practical advice, and it was another farmer that farmers could listen to and grow on what they did.
Mike Lessiter:
Let's let's talk about Howard Martin out of Kentucky.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, Howard started no tilling in desperation. He had some really poor quality land. He wasn't doing anything with it. And Howard will tell you that no till saved his farming career. And then he got to where he wasn't happy with some of the attachments that were being made for planters, and he formed Martin Industries and developed row cleaners, fertilizer openers, closing wheels, everything. And he's gone from a humble one-person operation to a company that now has more than 40 employees. And you'll see his attachments on a lot of equipment that's added on to planters, and that some are coming out of the manufacturer's plants with it on there.
Frank Lessiter:
Very humble and capable guy. He was a great friend of Eugene Keaton who passed away in the last year or so. And Eugene was the one that came up with Keaton Seed firmers, and together they used to get together and scratch heads and see what needed to be developed in this field, and were real leaders in this field. He's at Elkton, Kentucky, which is in Western Kentucky.
Mike Lessiter:
And you just mentioned Keaton. You guys went out there and visited on the farms and got those two together to exchange stories here for a project a couple years ago that was really pretty cool. We should dust that one off as well.
Frank Lessiter:
We did. It was a great conversation. The two of them were sitting together in Eugene's nice home, and you could see that the idea of the Keaton Seed firmers was a good idea because Eugene and his wife had a great looking home on one of the rivers in Tennessee. But there were some real thinkers in that room that day, those two guys, and came up with some real ideas that really paid off. And Eugene also came up with a number of other inventions. I think there's some things on the Kinsey Planter and on the John Deere Planters that were Eugene's investments. So he was getting royalties not only off the Keaton Seed Firmer that Precision Planning had, but also off royalties from Kinsey and John Deere. Probably some others I don't about.
Mike Lessiter:
Let's go back to the educational world here for a moment with Paul Jasa out of Nebraska.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, Paul's been around for years. He did his master's degree, I think on planter attachments and stayed on it. Nebraska has got some plots that been out there more than 35 years of continuous no-till research, and he's helped producers recognize the value of a total systems approach. That means having a long term plan, not just thinking of one year. They got some fancy title now, but basically he's an ag engineer at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. The thing about Paul is he loves the total no-till program. He is a purist. He wants one program.
Frank Lessiter:
Now, when people start going off and doing strip till or vertical till or something else, man, that doesn't fit what he believes. He's a purist and says, "You got to leave that soil alone." But he's been big with farmers on making on no-till planters, drills, air seeders, making sure you're getting through the residue properly and getting uniform seed depths, getting that all important seed to soil contact.
Mike Lessiter:
And next, let's go back out west and talk for a moment about John McNabb.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, John McNabb is very interesting. One of the things I remember about him, he's in Southern Idaho and Northern Utah, and he and his sons run operation. There have been years where they had as many as 43,000 acres of no-till. They don't no-till that much anymore, but at one time early on, he was renting a lot of land at low cost from the Indian tribes out there until they caught on and figured out how much money he was making and rented it to some others.
Frank Lessiter:
He was at our first no-till conference. And my wife Pam and I, and Alice Musser, on a Sunday night, we're sitting in a restaurant. I think it was in Indianapolis. Anyway, we didn't know John at the time. But as it turned out, he was sitting in the restaurant at a table, and it looked like he was having supper with a bum. Guy wasn't very well dressed or anything. And it turned out that John had found a homeless on the street and had brought him in and bought him dinner and had a conversation with. That's just the kind of Christian guy that John was, and he cared about other people. But I always remember that from the very first year. I also remember talking to Guy Swanson, who has the Exactrix program now, and they had the big yielder drills that were huge.
Frank Lessiter:
And John ran two or three of these when he had 43,000 acres. And I remember Guy telling me that he went to visit John once. This was in late May, it was getting close to Memorial Day, and they were on land. That was so steep that when he and John talked, they stood there and leaned against the yielder drill and looked down below 200, 300, 400 feet where people were skiing on the hills. And there's snow there, and John is up on this mountain no-tilling probably spring weed or barley.
Mike Lessiter:
That's a great story about John bringing in the dinner guest there. I hadn't heard that one before.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah. And John is a guy who believes that no-till has been worth an extra 35 to $40 per acre. So if it's worth $40 per acre, multiply that by the year he had 43,000 acres and you'll see how no-till paid off.
Mike Lessiter:
Well, it's a good segue here into one of our other living legends from that area. You mentioned him a moment ago. Let's talk more about Guy Swanson.
Frank Lessiter:
Guy's dad came up with the idea for these yielder drills. And I remember before we bought... I've been editor No-Till since 1972, but my wife and I didn't buy it until 1981. But I worked for another company. So in that days it was a company who also had a magazine called Farm Wife News. And they took people to Hawaii during the winter. I've been on trips to Hawaii with them when we had 1200 farmers and their wives with us. So Guy's dad Mort went on one of these trips with us. And I first met him maybe 1974. That's how I got introduced to him. But Guy worked with him early.
Frank Lessiter:
Then Guy had a career with Caterpillar, and they came back and they did really specialized equipment. I think Mort built a sprayer that he put out with a Caterpillar tractor at one time. It was maybe 160 feet wide to work on these hills in the Palouse. And they had a farmer their own out there and they still do. But he had developed a system and then Guy has got into where he's got the Exactrix system that's really involved in effective nitrogen management.
Frank Lessiter:
(silence)
Brian O'Connor:
That was Frank and Mike Lessiter talking about 25 living legends of no-till agriculture. Before we get back to the conversation, a brief word from today's sponsor, NewLeaf Symbiotics. Want to do more with your fields in 2022? Now available in convenient planter box application Terrasym by NewLeaf Symbiotics is proven by Beck's 2021 PFR to improve yield by 2.7 bushels per acre in soybeans and 4.6 bushels per acre in corn. And that's $20,000 more in incremental income with every 1000 acres point. To calculate your return on investment for the 2022 growing season and purchase Terrasym directly online for only $4.35 per acre visit newleafsym.com/2022. That's new leaf S Y M dot com back slash 2022. Now here's Frank and Mike again.
Mike Lessiter:
Frank, why don't we keep going with the program here. And first up on the list is the name down from the deep south. Tell us about Grover Triplett.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, that's interesting. He's retired now. He's at Starkville, Mississippi. Still works with Mississippi State University, but his really claimed the fame was at Ohio State University. And he was at Wooster, Ohio, the experiment station and he pioneered some of the early work on no-till, and particularly in the weed area in early 1960s. And he also started the longest ongoing no-till research in the world there at Wooster, Ohio. And they've been going for more than 55 years. It's been more than 75 scientific papers on no-till that has come out of those plots. He retired from Ohio State a number of years ago, and then he moved back home. He's from Southern Mississippi, and he moved to Starkville and has been still a part-time researcher there.
Frank Lessiter:
One of the funny stories I remember about him is, he's from down south. He has an accent and I was in field day, one year and Jimmy Carter had just been elected for president. And I said to Glover, "So what do you think of having one of your own people from the South in the White House?" And he said to me, "Well, for the first time in my lifetime, we have a president who doesn't have an accent." But he really pioneered some of the work. One of the very first research papers ever done on no-till, Grover a couple other people from Ohio state authored.
Mike Lessiter:
Very good. Our next one, believe he was a speaker on the very first no-till conference 25 years ago, Ray McCormick out of Vincennes, Indiana.
Frank Lessiter:
Yep. He's been no-tilling for probably 30 years or more, runs a 32-acre operation. And he believes nothing pays bigger dividends than conservation. And he talks diversification. It means no-tilling corn, no-tilling wheat, no-tilling both full season and double crop soybeans and cover crops. And then he's got about 1000 acres of woodlands and wetlands for hunters who pay him to come hunt waterfall and white tailed deer. And he also raises peaches, and he recognizes the nutrient and soil protection value of keeping the residue on the surface. I've asked him a number of times whether he would sell the residue to an ethanol plant and he says, "Absolutely not." And I said, "So what if the price got to where they would pay a hundred dollars per acre for the residue?" And he says, "Nope, I still wouldn't sell it because it has more benefits to leaving it on the field."
Frank Lessiter:
A few years back, he pioneered an idea for seeding cover crops. He took a Gandy unit and mounted it on his combine. And he's he's seeding cover crops as he's harvesting corn and soybeans in the fall.
Mike Lessiter:
Next let's talk about Barry Fisher out of Indiana.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, Barry Fisher worked for the Soil Conservation Service that shows how old I am, because now it's called NRCS. But today he's a regional soil health manager for them, has a farm of his own in Eastern Indiana. But he's much of his career to encouraging use of no-till and cover crops. He's one of these guys that saw the value of no-till and cover crops, and promoted them from the start while other people were not doing it for political reasons or thinking we still had to put in grass waterways or terraces. One year he won a rotary [inaudible 00:31:36] that was a popular no-till in those days. He was really excited about it because he took it all over Indiana for the year that he had it, and helped him get people going with no-till. But he's been a great promoter of it, a great speaker. He's talked at a number of our no-till conferences and talks about no-till across the country.
Mike Lessiter:
Let's go back east here to Pennsylvania and talk about Steve Groff and what he's done and with no-till here.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, Steve Groff is at a town called Holtwood, Pennsylvania, and most people know him for what he is done on cover crops and tillage radishes in the last decade or so, but he's also no-tilled sweet corn, pumpkins, tomatoes, corn, alfalfa, soybeans, sweet, and a number of covered crops, been no-tilling for 36 years, really pioneered the use of cover crops. But one of the other interesting things he's done is he's shown how you could plant short maturity corns, maybe 85, 90 days, and then that gets you an opportunity to come in and see cover crops earlier in the year. And he's showing the dollar and cent value of making it pay. Even for the shorter maturity corn he's had great yields and the cover crops have made up for the benefits of it too.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah. He's giving a special workshop on our national strip till conference on cover crops here, coming up here shortly. Next, let's talk about Jeff Martin out of Mount Pulaski, Illinois, another name that is frequently cited when asked people for influences in their no-till career.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, that's in central Illinois and he's been no-tilling since '82. Farms with his son, and they do about 5,000 acres. He's been on strip tilling, continuous corn for 16 years. They had yields of over 250 bushel per acre, and they've done really well. A couple things about Jeff is years ago, there was a national corn champ out of Iowa. I can't think of his name off hand, but he was a conventional tillage guy. And Jeff paid a great deal of attention to them, and will tell you that he learned a great deal of what this guy was doing to get high yields that Jeff realized he could use in no-till and strip till. In fact, one year we had him talk at the no-till conference on, I think it was the 10 best ideas you can learn from a national corn champ was used in conventional tillage.
Frank Lessiter:
The other thing he is done is he's really promoted the use of no-till among absentee landowners. He's been president of a club in Chicago called the Chicago Farmers Club, which basically talks about agriculture to city slickers that own land down south in Illinois and other states. But he's really sold the benefits of no-till, and with 5,000 acres they're renting most of this land. And I think they do a great job with their landlords, have shown them the value of no-till and why they ought to continue renting land to them.
Mike Lessiter:
For our next one, we'll go north to a farm that I got to know as a young kid. And I know you've said to me that was responsible for some really out of the box thinking that you were checking on regularly up in Michigan. Tell us about Ray Rawson.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, he's kind of the father of zone tillage, and that's pretty much a system where they were running two [inaudible 00:34:59] and one in the center. So they had a three [inaudible 00:35:02] set up on their planters. And he and his sons pioneered this. Ray came up with a couple inventions that he used with a couple companies and they manufactured. And he was in the hot demand years ago as a speaker at many no-till conferences. And he's worked one on one with a lot of growers on zone tilling. They had a farm shop and a lot of great ideas that used to come out of there. My wife's family had a cottage maybe 20 miles from Ray Rawson's. So in the 70s and 80s, I would always go over while we were up there on vacation and spend at least a half day with Ray and seeing what he was doing.
Frank Lessiter:
And the unusual thing that he did is, this would be in July or August, and he would've sold the no-till planter that he used that year, and he finished up using in April and May, and he would sell it. And he would sell it immediately, and then he would create a new planter that he was going to use the following year and they'd build it in their shop during the summer and during the winter. But for a number of years, he always had a new planter and it always had new innovations on it. And I would go over there every year to see what he was doing One year I remember he took me to a field probably in July, and the soybean beans were just looking fantastic. And this is a field that he had rented for the first time. It had been a terrible, eroded field, compacted, everything. Yields on it were horrible.
Frank Lessiter:
And later Ray told me he got something like 85 bushel of soybeans off that field by no tilling it the very first year that he farmed it. And he and his sons, they came up with some sprayer ideas. They were marketing sprayers for a while. And I haven't talked to him in a few years, but I know that they're farming a huge acreage in mid-Michigan, and even farther south. And then a few years ago, he got the idea that there were city people looking for places to build cabins and get away for the weekend, and he and his sons came up with a project in some of their woodlands. They've been selling off lots. Actually Ray's crews been building these cottages and selling them to people out of Lansing and Detroit and Flint and other cities.
Mike Lessiter:
Move on here to the influential person on the, on the university side who helped spread the word on no-till. Let's talk about Dan Towery out of Lafayette, Indiana.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, Dan was originally from Illinois and worked for NRCS for a number of years, and then he went to the conservation technology information center and worked on it for years with no-till in many other things. And later on, he left there and became a consultant on his own. He's still a big believer in no-till and cover crops to increase profits while protecting an environment. He's played a critical role in the expansion of cover crops across the nation, especially within the no-till ranks.
Frank Lessiter:
I can tell you a story about Dan. We had him on our program one year at the national no-till conference, and I kept calling him up and begging him to write a few paragraphs on what he was going to talk about at the conference. Dan was very busy and didn't get it done. So I wrote it for him. And he didn't like what I wrote, but you know what? He was never late with another one after that.
Mike Lessiter:
Good story. Good story. Let's talk about Gabe Brown out of North Dakota next.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, Gabe is a guy they got about 5,000 acres. They're integrating no-till and grazing. They got a beef cattle herd. They're doing cash crops, multi-species cover crops. And they've run beef, poultry and sheep on the land extensively on many ideas of no-till and cover crops. He kind of has a holistic approach to what's going on. He's doing this with, I think he's got some fields that don't get any fertilizer, any herbicide, any insecticides or fungicides. So he's really showing how a total systems approach can work for himself and his sons.
Mike Lessiter:
Let's talk about Phil Needham, the voice, if you've heard him talk sounds different than much of the people who speak about no-till here.
Frank Lessiter:
Phil came from England a long time ago and was hired over here to bring the British system of high-yielding wheat production to the Midwest. And he worked on that project, soon learned about some of how no-till could work. He was in Kentucky. In fact, he lives in Calhoun, Kentucky. But he worked for one of the big crop suppliers on intensive wheat production, but he saw what no-till could do, saw some of its drawbacks due to a lack of equipment modifications.
Frank Lessiter:
And he later launched Needham Ag Technologies. He still works as a consultant for a number of farmers, but he also sells some equipment around the world that deals with no-till and some of the attachments for sprayers and drills. He's seen numerous equipment design modifications over the years, and one of the things he's really done is he's gone and kind of yelled at the manufacturers to do a better job of some of their equipment. And one of the things he really pushes is we need combines that got spreaders that will spread the residue the full width of the combine instead of putting it in a windrow. So he's had a major contribution to no-till.
Mike Lessiter:
I had seen, at a farm equipment dealer meeting last winter, talked to the folks at H&R Agri-Power, big dealer group that's in that area, and said that he was influential in spreading the gospel, the solutions out there on what no-till could do in that area. And they used him considerably to help get the word out.
Frank Lessiter:
And one of the things he's really done is he's shown the value of wheat or barley, particularly wheat, in a no-till double crop soybean situation, where you can get two crops off that field in the same year.
Mike Lessiter:
Tell us about Joe Nester out of Ohio next.
Frank Lessiter:
Well Joe is a crop consultant at Bryant, Ohio, and he's worked with no tillers in Northwestern Ohio for a long time. And he showed immediately how they could earn an extra 40 to $50 per acre with no-till. He's worked with it. He's been working with it since the late 1980s. And at one time he bought 10 of the John Deere 750 drills and rented them out to farmers. I mean, 10 of them, he bought. And within a few years he had most of his crop consulting. Clients switched from 100% conventionally tilled soybeans to nearly 100% no-till soybeans he's also worked on some of the algae concerns in Lake Erie due to the over application of phosphorus. He's been a trend setter in helping no-tillers reduce their cost and been big on nutrient runoff. He's getting a little older and he has cut back a little, but now he's doing some things of real interest to him, and that includes a few projects on and no-till fertility and other things that can help farmers make more money.
Mike Lessiter:
Let's go to our no-till champion, David Hula. Talk about what he's done and how his innovations and the publicity has helped no-till.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, David is down at Charles City, Virginia, and he's got some land down there that's been farmed for probably 300, 400 years. This is kind of where America got started down there, but it also is on the river that moves into Chesapeake Bay. He's shown you can turn out good yields with no-till. He holds the record breaking corn yield in the National Corn Growers Association contest, 532 bushels per acre. And that's the highest yield ever reported in the contest. He's doing it on no-till irrigated ground, but he also does some no-till dry land ground that does that. But he'll be in the top five every year it seems like in the national corn growers contest.
Frank Lessiter:
But he looks at that crop practically every day. If he sees something that's not right, they do something immediately, whether it's micronutrients or another inch of water or putting on some fungicides for disease. But been a speaker, and he gets a lot of credit for what's being done with his no-till corn, but he is also done really well with no-till wheat.
Mike Lessiter:
Let's move on next to Roy Applequist who founded Great Plains Manufacturing, and the role that he had in no-till.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, in the early days, in the early eighties, the major manufacturers, Deere, Case, IH, New Holland, some of the Agco brands at that time, weren't very excited about no-till because they wanted to sell big iron. They wanted to sell big horsepower tractors. They wanted to sell plows, 40 foot discs. And Roy was among a number of the short line companies. Actually he's at Great Plains Manufacturing, I should say, in Selena, Kansas. But he saw the need for designing the equipment specifically for the no-till market. And they were active participant in Tennessee's Milan no-till field days that John Bradley had started there.
Frank Lessiter:
And he, along with a few other drill manufacturers, introduced some narrow rope prototype drills that had been designed specifically for no-till conditions, and they would take them down there, get farmers to look at them and see what they would think. Roy would tell me, that field day was always held in late July, it was hot. And he said manufacturers would end up talking to each other in the swimming pool at night and having a few beers to go along and talk about what they learned.
Frank Lessiter:
But Great Plains has been a real player in the no-till market. They got in early with their drills. They're one of the few companies that have promoted no-till twin rows. They've done very well. And they adopted their drills for small grains and cover crops to fit the no-till market.
Mike Lessiter:
It had been shared with me that not only was there the influential in the designs and technology and enhancements, but funding a lot of the meetings and the road shows to try to get the word out to farmers so that they could consider this maverick practice in their own area.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah. And I think Roy, for a number of years, the way he traveled was with a pickup truck pulling a no-till drill behind it to show at these meetings.
Mike Lessiter:
Let's talk about Mike Plummer.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, Mike was another university guy who probably did well because he wasn't at the headquarters for the university. He was in Southern Illinois, now lives at Creal Springs. He's been a big booster of both cover crops and no-till, was an extension educator for a number of years in Southern Illinois, really has promoted no-till and cover crops, and he's used him on his own farm. And after retiring as a university educator, he's continued to work with growers and suppliers on finding new cover crop solutions, making more effective use of no-till and improving soil health. I think if you travel with Mike, pretty much you're going to have a shovel in your hands because he's going to dig into practically every no-till field he gets into to see what's going on underneath the surface.
Mike Lessiter:
So I've done my math right here in keeping track of it. That's 24. We're looking at number 25 here. Why don't you tell us about Marion Calmer and what he's done next?
Frank Lessiter:
Marion is at Alpha, Illinois, which is in Western Illinois. He gets a lot of credit for coming up with the corn heads to do 15 and 20 inch rows, and he deserves a credit for this. He had a farm shop down there in his barn, and he just came up an idea for coming up with a better corn head designed than the major manufacturers could come up with. But he got started early on with on-farm research. And we've had him speak at a number of our no-till conferences. I think the only one he's ever missed was the very first one, and I think it's because he didn't know about it. But he's done field size research. His plots run the entire length of a field. He's done a lot of great work, not only on fertilization, but weed control, but mainly on corn and soybean populations. Now we got a lot of people out there for years that were planting his money as 220,000 being seeds per acre in seven and a half inch rows.
Frank Lessiter:
And Marion has got down to where he's got research on his own farm that shows you can drop that population to maybe 60,000 seeds per acre and get the same yields. Now a few years ago, when he first came out with this, I said to him, "So are you doing the whole farm this coming year in 60,000?" He said, "No, I'm chicken to do it off just one or two years of research." But I think even then he had cut it back to 120,000 or so. And I think he's kept coming down. The research he had on his own farm showed there was no difference between 60,000 plants per acre and 220,000 plants per acre. And when you're buying Roundup Ready Seed that's pretty darn expensive, that makes a huge difference in what you can earn per acre off your no-till beans.
Frank Lessiter:
Early on, he used to spend a whole winner on the road talking at meetings. Great speaker, always has got something practical to tell people, is funny. And he always kind of picks on me at the no-till conferences, but the lesson he hasn't learned is I have always had the last word from the microphone.
Mike Lessiter:
You've done that part very well. So you've been covering this, how many years would that be? 45.
Frank Lessiter:
40 some. Yeah.
Mike Lessiter:
Yeah. So you've been doing this a long time, watching a practice that was in its relative infancy the day that you got involved in it. What's it like for you to look back on these people and how it was the people side of the relationship that they had with you and willingness to share that has made all this possible?
Frank Lessiter:
Well, it's really great. There's neat people in the no-till neighborhood. And they've been more than willing to share ideas with each other. Many of these people got started early when no-till was not a popular thing to do. They took a lot of flack from their neighbors. Reminds me of the story early on, must have been 1973 or so, we had a speaker at one of our meetings from North Carolina, and he had a farm on one of the states' mental health center properties. And so he no-tilled a field out in front of the hospital, and a farmer in the area came along, saw this just huge mess, farming ugly is what Chevron used to call it in those days, and asked him what he is doing. He said, "Well, I'm no-tilling corn or soybeans and this crop residue and it looked all right." And the farmer went up to the hospital and asked to talk to the director who ran the whole thing.
Frank Lessiter:
And he he got in to see him and he said, "You better go down there and check. There's one of your patients down there doing this crazy thing, what he calls no-till." And he says, "You're just wasting your money." Well, as it turned out, the director kind of knew what was going on and didn't say too much to him. Three months later, the farmer went back to the director and said, "That crazy guy down there no-tilling apparently knew what he was doing, because that crap's looking pretty damn good."
Frank Lessiter:
A couple other things that come up. We talked about these 25. We highlighted North America on this, but there's some people from worldwide that come into this. And one of them goes back to the first guy we talked about, Dwayne Beck. Early on, I think it was in St. Louis, must have been the second or fourth year, we had a guy talk, Frankie Dykstra from Brazil. And he's been no-tilling for 35 years down there, about 50% corn, 50% soybeans, does some oats and wheat in the winter and done a great job. Well, he got up and he talked about how they were making huge profits off land that was valued at $80 per acre. Now US people $80 per acre, they don't think it's too great. But then Dwayne Beck got up afterwards and said, "I hope you really listened to that guy, because if you go out in Western South Dakota," and this was probably 1974, 1975, he, he says, "You can rent land out there for $80 and you can make the same profits that this Frankie Dykstra is making down in Brazil." So I remember that one too.
Mike Lessiter:
Take us back to the early 70s right now and what agriculture was like, and I've heard some of these stories from friends of yours. But how crazy, how out of the box, how maverick, this no-till practice was and how it was regarded at the coffee shops.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, it wasn't thought of very good. I've talked to a number of no-tillers who said they'd walk into the coffee shop and they wouldn't sit at the main table because they were just going to get laughed and harassed about no-tilling. They would sit in the back sometime. And then some people just said, "I just quit going to the coffee shops in the morning because I didn't like being hassled all the time." And I have had a couple people over the years say it, "When you first started No-Till Farmer, I thought maybe you'd thrown your career down the tubes."
Mike Lessiter:
Your father was one of those people too, wasn't he?
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah, I had a job in Chicago. I was editor of a magazine that went to beef cattle and swine producers, and he thought I was nuts to quit this job. And I had gone home in between and the family had gone home, and I had left with him a couple brochures on how Paraquat worked, which is what really made no-till work in those days. And I was back there a couple weeks later and he asked me where he could buy some Paraquat. We ended up no-tilling part of our farm. My dad was getting up in years and we rented the land out, but it was no-tilled corn for a number of years. And it's kind of neat to see what's happened. A few of the herbicides that are still popular today were popular in the early seventies. Atrazine was one, Paraquat was around. Now, Roundup came in later and made a huge difference.
Frank Lessiter:
But even today we're having problems with Dicamba on Roundup Ready Resistant beans to it in some areas, like Arkansas and Missouri. But Dicamba was around in the seventies. There was a company called Velsicol that put out. It was called Banvel in those days, but it was basically a Dicamba product. So some of the things that we think back to the 70s are still being used today in no-till. And I had an editor in the middle 1980s, she said to me, "Well, Frank, your time has really come. It looks like no-till's going to catch on for sure."
Mike Lessiter:
It's got to be very satisfying that to see the risk that you and your readership had taken and to where it is today.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah. I mean, we went from 3.3 million acres in 1972, and nobody really knows today what we got, but it's got to be at least a hundred million acres in the US of no-tilled crops. And the other thing is you can no-till practically any crop. I mean, there's research out there on just about any crop. And one of the ones I really remember out of Kentucky and North Carolina is there were people who are no-tilling tobacco.
Frank Lessiter:
And one of the benefits of no-tilling tobacco, and actually this also makes a case for tomatoes and pumpkins that Steve Groff rates, because when they had conventionally tillaged and they'd get a rainstorm, they'd get mud on the bottom of those tobacco plants and pumpkins and it dramatic reduced the value of those crops, particularly with tobacco, because those leaves were useless. Well, by no-tilling, they didn't have this soil erosion damage on the no-till tobacco plants and the crop was worth many more dollars per acre.
Mike Lessiter:
Give us a couple examples, and I know you've been hearing about this from your subscribers and conference attendees on how no-till changed their lives in their farm practices.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah. They had more time to do things. Now, some people took that time and they expanded it and they no-tilled more acres or rented more land. But then we had other people who spent more time with their families, all of a sudden had time to go to their kids' baseball games in the spring. And there's a number of no tillers around who had huge acreages and weren't making it with minimum tillage or conventional tillage, and went to no-till and have cut back on their acreages because they're making more money with farming less acreage, and they don't have the huge machinery investment that they had. I mean, machinery manufacturers don't want to hear this, but there are some farmers out there that will tell you they haven't bought anything new in 15 years because they don't need it. They got a 80-horsepower tractor, they got an eight-row no-till planter, maybe a drill and a sprayer and combine. That's all they need.
Mike Lessiter:
You weren't necessarily real popular with the machinery people as you started blaring this from the mountaintops on no-till in the early days, were you?
Frank Lessiter:
No, they didn't like the idea. They didn't catch on. And it's interesting how you look at this, because early on... And it's going to be part of this book too, because early on there were all kinds of farm shop modifications to planters and drills, because people didn't like what they were getting from the manufacturer. Now what happened in those days, there were a couple manufacturers. Shortline really got to start in those days. Kinsey was a popular planter. Some others were. John Deere didn't have anything for a while. I think what happened is the John Deere people couldn't stand the fact that they'd go see farms that were no-tilled and they had a lot of John Deere equipment, but then they had a different color planter. Maybe it was a Kinsey blue or a Case red or Shortline yellow or something like that.
Frank Lessiter:
So they finally came out with adding a few attachments to their planters, but the planters were never really developed for no-till. But somebody said to me once, "Well, Deere's got a no-till planter now so I guess no- till's legitimate." So there's some really wild things that were done in farm shops. They'll be in the book. There's pictures of guys taking old combines and converting them into six and eight row no-till planters just by putting row attachments on the front.
Mike Lessiter:
Anything else that you want to cover while we're here today?
Frank Lessiter:
What's interesting on the no-till conference, this was our 25th year and there's six people who've been to all 25 of those conferences, and there are a few other people that missed the first one because they didn't know about it. I can tell you a couple scary stories early on. There was a farmer from Bay City, Michigan, in that area, who went to the first no-till conference in Minneapolis. He had never no-tilled an acre in his life. And he called me up about a month after the conference all excited. And he says, "Guess what?" And I said, "What?" And he says, "I'm having an auction next week. I'm selling off all my tillage equipment. I am going 100% no-till on my thousand acres." Man, that was scary to me. I mean, that's not the way to start, but he made it work. And he got so enthused at our conference that he made it work.
Frank Lessiter:
The other thing that came up is we started the no-till conference in '73, and it was also the year that Monsanto started some no-till conferences.
Mike Lessiter:
'93?
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah, I'm sorry. '93. And across the country, they had four or five of these conferences. And I had a couple people say, "Man, this wasn't a good time for you to start this. Monsanto's going to bury you." And it didn't work out that way. Monsanto did these. They were good conferences. And I give Monsanto credit because they were a sponsor of ours on those early conferences from day one. Just because they were running conferences didn't mean they wouldn't support us. But what really has worked for us, because a couple years later, one of our speakers who had talked at the no-till conference that Monsanto put on, said, "You need to do what Monsanto does." And I said, "What's that?" And he said, "Well, they get all the speakers to go to St. Louis and they talk, and they kind of talk the same message that, 'Here's how no-till works, what it needs to do."
Frank Lessiter:
And he said, "One of the problems that's your national no-tillage conference is people vary. One guy says this worked, and the next speaker says that same idea doesn't work for me." And I said to him, "No, we're not going to do that. I want everybody to get up there and tell what they believe and what works for them, and attendees can draw their own solutions." I said, "One of the things that I believe in, whether it's a magazine, a newsletter, or a conference, is we're going to give you the ingredients, but you got to write your own recipe."
Mike Lessiter:
And by taking that approach, by not having one agenda, you really brought out the free flow of sharing and information and the knowledge seeking that's necessary to move a practice like this forward.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah. And there's another great story about the early conference, because I think we charged $165. And I had people come up to me and say, "What are you doing? Are you nuts? We can go to an extension meeting on no-till for either nothing, or we pay 12 bucks that includes lunch." And I said to him, right from the start, "We're going to give you something that nobody else has done before." And I said, If you paid $165 and you come and you don't think you got anything out of it, I'll give your money back." And we've done this for all 25 years. And wife, who used to do the financial work, used to cringe once in a while because there'd be two or three people that would ask for their money back. To me, that was the best thing going. I liked it when we gave money back to a couple people because the word spread and they knew it was for real.
Frank Lessiter:
But that first year in Indianapolis, it was a woman named Alice Musser that worked for us. And in July of '72, I sent her to Indianapolis and we were going to get a hotel to run this first conference. And she said to me, "Well, how many attendees we going to get?" And I said, 'We get really lucky, maybe we'll have 250 or 300." So we booked some rooms in a hotel. And as it turned out that very first year we had 814 attendees.
Mike Lessiter:
Wow.
Frank Lessiter:
And we had people spread over a couple hotels. And the problem we had in the hotel was the meeting room wasn't big enough. And we went back to the hotel and said, "We got 600." And they said, "That's it. We can't take anymore. That's it." Then we went back and said, "Well, we need more room. What are we going to do?" And they got up 18. They finally said to us, "Look, you got a couple meals. We can't feed them all in one room. But if you feed 500 in this room and 300 in this other room, which is up the elevator 20 stories, we can make it work. And then those people can come down and join the others for the noon thing." That's what we did. We ended up 814 attendees. We had outgrown that hotel before we'd ever set foot in it.
Mike Lessiter:
Great story.
Frank Lessiter:
And even you look at strip till being important today, we had a speaker at that very first one in 1993, Cliff Roberts from Catlin, Indiana, who was a big booster of strip till. So we've talked about strip till for all 25 years.
Brian O'Connor:
Thanks to Frank and Mike Lessiter for today's discussion, and thanks to our sponsor New Leaf Symbiotics for helping to make possible the No-Till Farmer Influencers and Innovators podcast series. Thanks for tuning in. You can find more podcasts about no-till topics and strategies at notillfarmer.com/podcasts. That's no, hyphen, tillfarmer.com/podcasts. If you have any feedback on today's episode, please feel free to email me at B O C O N N O R at lessermedia.com., or call me at (262)-777-2413. And don't forget that Frank would love to answer your questions about no-till and the people and innovations that have made an impact on today's practices. So please email your questions to us at listenermail@no-tillfarmer.com. Once again, if you haven't done so already, you can subscribe to this podcast to get an alert. As soon as future episodes are released. Find us wherever you listen to podcasts For Frank, Mike, and our entire staff here at no-till, I'm lead content editor Brian O'Connor. Thanks for listening.
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