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Michaela Paukner:

Welcome to the No-Till Farmer Podcast, brought to you by The Andersons. I'm Michaela Paukner, Managing Editor at No-Till Farmer. Today's episode of the podcast is the second installment in a series of interviews with No-Till living legend and 2024 Conservation Ag Operator Fellow, Ray McCormick. In this episode, Ray takes Associate Editor Ben Thorpe and me on a tour of his farm and wetland projects around Vincennes, Indiana.

How many people do you farm with?

Ray McCormick:

My son and that guy right back there, Brandon. Sometimes we have an extra, so Jesus helps us, but he doesn't help us farm so much as helps us maintain the properties, mowing and pruning and taking care of stuff. He'll give us a ride so we can go get three pieces of equipment or something, but he doesn't like being on equipment and so forth.

So he really wanted us to plant the peach trees back, so I kind of did it for him.

So this is one of our fields. And this one, the reason I wanted to show you this one is this is going to be baled up for haylage, so we planted it much thicker. It's got triticale in it and we fertilized it in the fall. We burned it down and rounded up, planted it, fertilized it in the fall, and now we've fertilized it in the spring, so we're doing like it was a wheat crop, so it'll be so much hay. I don't know what we'll do with all of it.

Michaela Paukner:

What was the rate for this?

Ray McCormick:

A hundred pounds of seed.

Michaela Paukner:

And you're usually doing 13? Okay, wow. Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

It was drilled to be able to put that much bulk on.

We've just baled up our cover crop that we put on as normal and we've baled it up and just got phenomenal hay. So that annual rye grass, clover blend is fabulous.

But my friend who does it, they got 200 cows, so they try to get as much hay as possible off as few acres as possible.

Michaela Paukner:

Sure.

Ray McCormick:

So we got 40 cows. My god, that'll be a lot of hay.

And so it's rolled up into airtight bags. So you bail it wet and then it won't rot. It actually keeps a lot more nutrients by not letting it dry.

Then you bring the bales up to the guy and he's in a long row and he's just sitting there, rolling them. And he can roll like one every minute and a half to two minutes, so you've got to really bring the hay to him or he's just sitting there.

But still, to go back and forth across that field and have a bale there every minute or two, it's a big job.

So with that skid steer, they can just drop them. And then the skid steer can lift them up and set them on his rack, where it's constantly feeding them in and wrapping them. So that allows you to get really high quality hay and it will last about three years, two to three years. As long as the air isn't getting to it, it's preserved.

Michaela Paukner:

Do you have the machine to bale that? Or do you have someone do that for you?

Ray McCormick:

We have the baler. We have the mower. But we don't have the wrapper and that's very expensive because he's wrapping them all with plastic. So he charges a lot of money to do that. And if we'll say, "We'll be ready to start at six o'clock," he just stays there until you got it all wrapped and then he goes, "Well, I got to go to another one," and off he goes to another field because when it's ready to wrap, you got to get it.

Ben Thorpe:

Can I ask you a question, Ray, for something that I'm working on? What do you think about electric tractors?

Ray McCormick:

I'm going to get one soon as they come out.

Ben Thorpe:

Really?

Ray McCormick:

Yep.

Ben Thorpe:

Okay. Why's that?

Ray McCormick:

Save the planet.

Ben Thorpe:

You thinking like a compact or how high horsepower would you go on an electric?

Ray McCormick:

Well, I would buy a big electric tractor if it can do what I want it to do. So if it can plant all day, pulling a planner or a drill, it has to be able to do that. I can't go for two hours or three hours and then have to recharge it. So I think Case International has one.

Ben Thorpe:

They got a utility. I think it's equivalent to 80 horsepower. I saw it [inaudible 00:04:43].

Ray McCormick:

Oh, that's very cool.

Ben Thorpe:

I was talking to someone who said the big problem is weight. You know Solectrac? Are you familiar with that electric tractor brand out of California?

Ray McCormick:

Mm-mm.

Ben Thorpe:

Well, first of all, they're going bankrupt because they can't find a market to sell their tractors out there. But the weight equivalent between that and a Kubota, same horsepower, it's an extra 1,000 pounds on a 25 horsepower equivalent electric.

Ray McCormick:

Mm-hmm.

Ben Thorpe:

So one of the big concerns is the bigger horsepower that weight is going to exponentially grow.

What do you think about that? Do you think that will be a concern or would that keep you from using one?

Ray McCormick:

Well, we generally try to run our equipment as light as possible because we're not doing tillage. We're idling our equipment while we plant. We don't put any weight on our tractors. We don't put fluid in the tires. A lot of people do, to get traction. So I'm not sure that the weight, now, it depends on how it's distributed. For some farmers that wouldn't be a problem. I'm trying to run the least amount of weight possible because we are literally idling the tractors when we're planting, so we're running them where they're not using a lot of fuel or horsepower.

Ben Thorpe:

So that would be a concern if it was an extra ton of weight, that would maybe give you pause to buy one?

Ray McCormick:

Yes.

Ben Thorpe:

How about price? Because, on average, I think it's 30 to 40% more expensive, again, for the electric equivalent of what you would want. Would that be a concern for you?

Ray McCormick:

For me, it's about saving the planet. So you can't put a price on that. That's why I paid all the money I did for this pickup. I paid unbelievable amount of money, but it was the only one out there and the guy's mouth fell open when I said, "Okay, I'll take it." And he's like, "That's more money than I spent on my home."

Michaela Paukner:

Oh, my God.

Ray McCormick:

I'm like, "I can't put a price on saving the planet."

So here's cover crop. So Dr. Thompson and I was talking about, my friend since we were 11 years old, this is where he lives and his practice is there in Monroe City and he's a primary care doctor and they're packed. They're literally packed with people.

And primary care doctors are disappearing across the countryside. Everybody wants to be a specialist, where they can go home at three o'clock after doing whatever it is they do. They don't want to see people in their community coming in at all hours with all kinds of woes and having to run a business versus working for the hospital.

So the family practitioner is disappearing. I talked a lot about that when I was helping Obama in his campaign because he put a lot of emphasis on healthcare. And a lot of the big problem is, is primary care doctors are disappearing. It used to be there's a doctor in every town. He'd come to your house. And now people, they're having a heart attack or they think they're having a heart attack, a stroke, they got to drive 40 miles to get any medical attention.

I'm around him all the time. My wife comes in with pneumonia. He says, "Yep, you got pneumonia. Give me three days and if you're not better in three days, we'll take you to the hospital."

Three days, she's feeling much better. So if you do that to people, he charges 40 bucks. You go into the emergency room, it's 4,000.

So primary care doctors are an important thing and they're disappearing.

Michaela Paukner:

What do you think the answer is to that?

Ray McCormick:

They're looking at or back then they were looking at paying for your medical school if you would commit to working in a small town for so many years. That sounds good to me.

Michaela Paukner:

It sounds good, yeah.

Ray McCormick:

Cover crop. Cover crop. Could be wheat. I don't know. These are my neighbors. They do cover crop.

And this is where my wife grew up and we're trying to buy this field from her brother, but it's got cover crop on it. And he can't stand them, tall as corn stalks. So he goes around the field, mowing them down and making a thick mulch on the ground. I don't have the heart to tell him, "Quit mowing my corn stalks down." You know, he's my brother-in-law, so I just let him do it. I'm like, "You don't understand. You're not helping me. You're hurting me."

So this area here is where they would bring coal from a coal mine back here behind us. And then they'd make giant piles there. And then those belts would take the giant piles up and load rail cars.

Michaela Paukner:

Is it still in use?

Ray McCormick:

Mm-mm. I don't think so. There's a truck over there, but there'd be big... See those holes in there? There'd be piles of coal all the way up to the top of those holes.

So in this area, there used to be just coal trucks running everywhere. Very dangerous, very poor drivers. They're bored. They're running the same route over and over and over and over, every day. They're in shitty trucks. They take all kinds of risk passing people and stop lights and stuff. Not so much anymore.

Think of what it takes. The coal mine there at Dugger, biggest... just the county above us, biggest strip mine left, east of the Mississippi. They're going down 400 feet, which means they got to clear the topsoil off, drill holes, blast it, shove it off, clean it off, and then drill holes, blast it, shove it off in the mine. They got to do that down until they get 400 foot down and can get to coal.

And when you stand there and look down there, those big trucks they use and stuff, they look like little toys down there.

Then they got to put it all back and put the topsoil back, besides transporting it to wherever it's going. Think of how much energy that takes to get that out of the ground. Makes no sense at all.

But coal is king. They have a lot of political power.

Michaela Paukner:

Mm-hmm.

Ray McCormick:

So our state's very coal-friendly and very anti-renewable.

So this is our grain facility. He's loading the truck right there, I think. So it's all non-GMO. So we put non-GMO corn in there and non-GMO beans back there, so we avoid contamination and so forth.

Ben Thorpe:

Ray, how do you feel about renewable fuels versus electric in agriculture, like a hydrogen- or methane-powered tractor versus an electric one? Which one appeals to you more?

Ray McCormick:

I would say the renewable fuel one.

Ben Thorpe:

Sure. Why's that?

Ray McCormick:

I think the ability to run for long hours and if it's environmentally friendly, I'm all for it. So if hydrogen is a better way to go, I'm like, "Okay. I'll buy a hydrogen-powered tractor." But whatever comes along, I want to be the first in the community to do it, to set an example for others. And I'll pay a lot of money to do it. And I want to be able to live with myself that I'm doing all I can to save the planet.

Ben Thorpe:

There's a liquid natural gas, there's methane, there's hydrogen. Does one stand out to you, particularly usable?

Ray McCormick:

Hydrogen, I was looking at hydrogen 25 years ago, back when they were saying you can use your engine to produce fuel using water.

So I even had a guy came and I brought some of the business leaders to the meeting and he's showing how in his car he was doing it and it's simple and easy. I wasn't sold on it. It takes a lot of energy to separate the hydrogen from the water.

Ben Thorpe:

Mm-hmm.

Ray McCormick:

My cousin, for a long time, since the Obama administration, is running his trucking business on natural gas, so they can convert a diesel engine to natural gas for $5,000. And they were getting a bunch of credits for doing it.

And he bought a natural gas... Or he made or built a natural gas filling station, so they can fuel their trucks up at his own station.

Ben Thorpe:

I was going to ask about that, because that's a big thing people bring up, is whether or not you have the fueling infrastructure to support a lot of this stuff. But he built his own.

Ray McCormick:

There's one of our duck blinds. See that tank there?

Ben Thorpe:

Mm-hmm.

Michaela Paukner:

That's a duck blind?

Ray McCormick:

Mm-hmm. We bury them under the ground and we put it right at water level and we tie it down with a concrete pad and hook so they won't come out of the ground until we use old fuel tanks and so forth.

Michaela Paukner:

And then you just stand in there?

Ray McCormick:

Sit in there.

Michaela Paukner:

You can sit?

Ray McCormick:

Comfortable, with a heater. Don't tell anybody. I'm supposed to be suffering. But you don't need to suffer to duck hunt.

So you climb down in there and sit on a chair and you can watch out. We put it just at the right height where you can kind of see out. And we put corn stalks over the top of it and it can be brutally cold and blowing. You're down in there, out of the wind, with a heater, and people are going, "I don't know how you can stand that. Oh, you just got to be tough."

Michaela Paukner:

(Laughs)

Ray McCormick:

That is not true.

Michaela Paukner:

You just have to have the right duck blind?

Ray McCormick:

Yeah. Here's a wetland I built with prairie grasses and so forth, right along the highway, so everybody can look at it.

And then here's one of my fields with cover crop.

On the end down there, you can see unharvested soybeans along the fence row.

And then all along this overflow bridge, all along this ditch, I've got prairie grass.

This is conservation buffers, which is in a different program where it's continuous sign up. So unlike CRP, you got to wait until the sign-up period and so forth. Conservation buffers, you're automatically in and you automatically get in whenever you sign up. So it's continuous sign-up, which is different than putting a field in. So they prioritize buffers along streams, keep the nutrients out of the creek.

Michaela Paukner:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

It used to be just solid. It didn't use to be four-lane, it was two-lane, like it is there at my grain bins. That's the old highway.

So when they changed these bridges and made it farther across here, then it started destroying the ditch bank there, the ditch bank here, the ditch bank here, and it was tearing my levee down when it whirlpooled here.

So I took the levee down and moved it. See, I moved it a hundred feet from the stream, to let that stream widen out after it come through the bridge.

And then I put pollinators habitat, all seed, all down through there. And then see where there's not any prairie grass, like along the stream?

Michaela Paukner:

Mm-hmm.

Ray McCormick:

In that area was the base of the levee. We took and cut down willow trees and used the forks on our tractor and stabbed holes in the ground and put the willow trees cuttings down in the ground, to give them a start on growing willow trees all down through there.

So on this side is wetland mitigation that we did for the four-lane highway, 26 acres of mitigation for the impact the highway made.

So they built this brand new four-lane, and in 2009, the river went over the top of it and flooded all this.

Michaela Paukner:

Oh, my gosh.

Ray McCormick:

So it closed the brand new highway. It was like a record flood.

And then, within less than a year, it broke the record by a foot and a half and went over top of it again and lost everything.

So that is mitigation. This over here is WRP.

Michaela Paukner:

Okay.

Ray McCormick:

See the oak tree plantings there? Very cool. That's on my neighbor. I used to farm that.

So here, I was getting tired of the invasive species and Johnson grass and mowing all this and it was not benefiting anything. We went in there last fall and killed everything on the levee and then sowed it to wheat. And then we're going to kill the wheat and sow it to short grass prairie and pollinators and everything this spring. So instead of having 16 acres of levee, we're going to hopefully have 16 acres of nice wildlife habitat.

Michaela Paukner:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

This is my wife's field. They had it when she was growing up. And see? Tall corn stalks with annual rye grass growing down in it.

Michaela Paukner:

Mm-hmm. How many acres do you have that are irrigated?

Ray McCormick:

About 250.

Michaela Paukner:

Okay.

Ray McCormick:

This one's 200 and I've got a 50-acre one over in Illinois, at Birdland.

Michaela Paukner:

And why do you irrigate? Because it seems like you guys have too much water, more often than not.

Ray McCormick:

So right under the surface of all these river bottoms is gravel. So when the glaciers were melting in northern Indiana, they would melt out from under the glacier, which would roll all the rock that they'd mowed down from your country. And so it'd wash out all this rock.

So these flood plains, see how wide they are? If the river's only yay wide, but during the glacier melt, this was all rivers. It just mowed down the hills and deposited gravel. And then eventually the wind blew silt over the top of it.

So all of the river bottoms has unlimited water. This is how wide the river is underground, so it's all the water you want.

And look, if you never have to turn your irrigation rig on, fine. But there's always a period in the summer where you're running out of water. Big rains and it never rains.

So we, as part of CSP, pay Betsy and she remotely monitors the field moisture and the root growth from a solar-powered monitor that's stuck down in the ground, so she can see how deep the roots are, how deep the water is at different levels, or how much water there is at different levels.

And she says, "You need to irrigate starting like Monday."

And so then we've got permission to turn it on and use it. So that's part of CSP. We're using her as a consultant and we follow her. And the reason they do that is to limit the amount of fuel you're using so you're not irrigating when you don't need to be. And you wouldn't know unless you had a probe in the ground.

And then the motor out there. Well, it's not out there now. When I built this myself, which I'd never do again, we took a combine engine out of an old combine to power it.

So we got the irrigation system, we put it in ourselves for like $230 an acre, not 2,000.

Michaela Paukner:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

And so we ran that diesel engine for years. Well, then come along the REAP grant, renewable energy program. So we took out the diesel engine, laid a gas line from where we turned off the highway out to there and then put a very energy efficient, low-pollution motor out there.

And they paid a good percentage of it, less than 50%, but they paid a lot, under the REAP grant, to put that in. And it is, it runs very quiet, very clean, and very efficient, where that old diesel combine engine, it's just roaring black smoke and pouring fuel into it.

And so in the drought year, which I think was 2012, we liked to never shut it off. And everything outside of the irrigation rig wasn't hardly worth harvesting.

Michaela Paukner:

Oh, sure.

Ray McCormick:

So it can get dry. So it's seldom in a summer where you just say, "I don't need any water."

Michaela Paukner:

How did you decide to put it on the [inaudible 00:22:43]?

Ray McCormick:

Well, it's a big field.

Michaela Paukner:

Okay.

Ray McCormick:

So a lot of fields are odd-shaped. They got power lines running through them. We're renting them. We don't own them. So this one, it does about a 200, 202-acre loop. Now, some of it gets sprayed over the levee and so forth.

But this is not corn stalks but bean stubble. So this is the cover crop that we put on with the Gandy seeders off the back of the... And you can see, perfect stand every time.

Michaela Paukner:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

Just perfect. That'll be lush green and two-foot tall when we plant it in corn.

Michaela Paukner:

Oh.

Ray McCormick:

Uh-huh. We'll probably wait until the clover is blooming.

So that whole area out through here, from up in here, all the way down through there, is a low spot in the field. So under CSP, we're getting paid to leave the water out there for an extended period in the spring for shorebirds.

Unfortunately, it's been so dry this winter, it doesn't have any water in it, but normally there would be 20 to 30 acres of water out there. So it's an old oxbow lake that the previous landowner drained.

Michaela Paukner:

Oh.

Ray McCormick:

Mm-hmm. And it's the right soils to do that. It's Zipp soils, which is the highest clay content soils in the county.

And the reason it is such a good high clay soil, it was underwater.

Michaela Paukner:

Oh.

Ray McCormick:

The soil was formed underwater, so it made a high clay content soil.

Again, all these levees, we killed the fescue, killed the noxious weeds, drilled it in wheat, and then we're going to drill it in wildlife-friendly mixes.

And I need to be ordering the mixes, instead of riding around in the pickup. Put that on my list.

Michaela Paukner:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

And we didn't look at my natural pond either. It's going to be really cool.

Michaela Paukner:

Are you building that right by your house?

Ray McCormick:

Mm-hmm.

Michaela Paukner:

Yeah?

Ray McCormick:

It's for my wife and my Labs. This don't make... They all want a pond to swim in. I said, "Okay."

So back here, all that back in there, all those trees right in there, that was part of a field. But again, it was Zipp soils. So we used it for wetland mitigation for the highway.

Michaela Paukner:

Okay.

Ray McCormick:

And then you can see along the edge is unharvested soybeans, because in every field we leave crops for wildlife.

So yeah, I'm being paid for it with CSP, but I love it, that I can leave crops for wildlife and get paid for it.

Michaela Paukner:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

And again, you got to, like there, leave a half acre, but it's not the best half acre in the field. It's along the trees, where the wildlife is. So it's a great deal.

So I was telling you where the ditch broke out of the levees and just went out into the flood plains, see all the trees up there?

Michaela Paukner:

Mm-hmm.

Ray McCormick:

Where they abandoned farming that, because see, it was cutting these low swags out into the field. So what that ditch and that floodwater was doing, coming down through there, was tearing up his field and it was all down through here, covering the road with silt, filling in the ditches.

Michaela Paukner:

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So when the highway was being built, did they tell you you had to do the mitigation?

Ray McCormick:

Yeah.

Michaela Paukner:

Yeah?

Ray McCormick:

They said, "We're going to take your field and do mitigation on it and if you don't agree to that," because what I said is, "I want the land."

Michaela Paukner:

Mm-hmm.

Ray McCormick:

And they said, "We can't do that by law." And I said, "Well, then change the law, because you don't want to take care of it and I want to take care of it. I don't want to give up the land. I want to take care of the wetland."

And you know, by God, they got the law changed. So I was the first one ever to be able to retain ownership of a mitigation side for MDOT.

Michaela Paukner:

Wow.

Ray McCormick:

Because they don't want to take care of it.

Michaela Paukner:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

It has to be a wetland and it can't be anything else because it's a mitigation. So I said, "That's fine, but I'm keeping it."

Michaela Paukner:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

And then a guy I knew, his company was to do the restoration. So he says, "Ray, come down here and meet with me and if you got some ideas on the restoration, we'll get together and have that as part of the design."

So I did and he changed the design to some of my ideas.

Michaela Paukner:

So now under the law, somebody can still keep the land, but they have to agree to maintain it?

Ray McCormick:

As a wetland.

Michaela Paukner:

Okay.

Ray McCormick:

As a mitigation site. When they flat told me, they said, "We're going to condemn it." And I said, "Well, you're not paying enough." And they said, "You either accept what we're paying you, or we won't let you retain ownership."

Michaela Paukner:

So you had to accept it?

Ray McCormick:

I had to give, because what happened is we paid 2,600 an acre for the land, and then years later, land prices had fallen during the farm crisis under Reagan. So they're coming in there and saying, "We're going to pay you $2,000 an acre." I'm like, "Well, I paid 2,600 an acre." "We don't care. This is what it's worth now."

Michaela Paukner:

Mm-hmm.

Ray McCormick:

So I had to take less money than what I paid for the land. And that was on my wife's property and this farm.

Michaela Paukner:

Okay.

Ray McCormick:

It was a lot of acres, because they cut a new path for the four-lane.

So up there, where the log splitter is, that gap through the hill, that's the Buffalo Trace. So the buffalo crossed the White River right down here, and that was the trail they used, and onto French Lick to the salt licks at French Lick.

So this is the West Fork of the White River and it's the fork that comes out of Indianapolis.

And then the East Fork comes out of Seymour, lower eastern part of the state, and they both come together at this power plant here at Petersburg, down below us.

So where we were earlier, where the oxbow lakes and everything, we get both barrels there.

Michaela Paukner:

Mm-hmm.

Ray McCormick:

So either one of them can have a big rain and flood us down there.

So again, that's WRP. We planted oats. This is mitigation, so it's more of a scattering of the trees. There's some open water in the back.

Michaela Paukner:

Okay.

Ray McCormick:

And then I had to put a berm across the middle of it so we would have two stages of shallow water. And the water is only there after floods. You can see that berm I had to put down through there.

Then we did some stuff down here, but all this has been... See, they've planted trees, too. See, they redid all this because it was all falling in.

Michaela Paukner:

Oh.

Ray McCormick:

And jeopardizing their bridges. And this is the wetland that I built under CREP. It's CRP enhancement. So the enhancement comes from state dollars. So the state pitches in and they're almost a hundred percent tree planting. That's what they wanted to do here and I said, "No. We want to have a wetland." And there's water oozing out of the hills. And they said, "No, we only do trees." I said, "You do not. They have wetlands provisions in CREP." [Inaudible 00:31:52].

They said, "Well, you're going into an archeological side." I said, "No. We're going to build the levee up to the archeological site, but we're going to borrow," and this is what I do, the reason I do this creative borrowing. So I did all these snakey... like there was a stream there to borrow the dirt, to build the berms. And that's why I got so many jobs. I was really good at envisioning how you can enhance the wetland versus what the engineers would draw up. They'd just draw up the levee and say, "That's it." And I'm like, "That's boring."

Michaela Paukner:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

So we'll burn this to keep down the trees, see the trees invading the prairie grass. And then I've got a lot of flowers out in there that I've planted with containers and so forth. But the prairie grass is doing what prairie grasses do. They're so aggressive, they're taking over the site. But the burning will set back the prairie grass.

Michaela Paukner:

Like burning with fire or burning with chemical?

Ray McCormick:

Fire. That's how there was prairies. The Native Americans would burn lots of areas, all the way into Indiana, so that there would be habitat for buffalo. So they would set fires.

And so a lot of ecosystems were very fire-dependent. Then when you went away from fire saying, "Fire is a bad thing," a lot of those enhanced fire areas disappeared.

Michaela Paukner:

So where is the archeological site?

Ray McCormick:

Right here. The base of this hill. There were two. There was a village at two different eras, like the very early Native Americans had a village there, and then hundreds of years later, they had another village there.

And so it's just covered with flint and arrow heads and everything. So this would've been probably not a dug up... They know it's an archeological site, but this is the Buffalo Trace and here's the base of the hill on the Buffalo Trace. So they'll just map it as such.

Michaela Paukner:

Okay.

Ray McCormick:

They won't come in and do the digging and everything, but if it's a site in which they suspect it was a Native American site, they won't let you build on it.

Michaela Paukner:

Okay.

Ray McCormick:

So they won't let you dig in it or anything. The US government won't let you.

So I'm like, "Fine. Let's put in prairie grass." "Well, we want to plant trees." I said, "No. We want pollinator habitat." So lots of squabble. I'm like, "Quit doing these boring restorations."

So up here I've got prairie grass field and we're going to spray it down. It's time for the renewal and try to slow down the prairie grasses and put in much more wildlife-friendly habitat in there.

And back when I first put it in CRP, 15 years ago, they were thrilled that it went into prairie grass.

Now, they don't like prairie grass, they want it more diverse habitat. So they've come a long way since the days in which they let you plant fescue.

So this is one of my wife's fields and there was a grass waterway up through there and it was really getting grown up. So I went in with my grinder and grind most of it down, but I didn't have the heart to do it. There's so many pollinators using that area up through there, just of the natural plants that came up. I'd go, "My God, there's so many bees and butterflies out here. I can't mow it down."

So we may try to burn it, but it was getting to I was afraid it was going to plug up all the tile.

Michaela Paukner:

Oh.

Ray McCormick:

So we ground it down. It'll come right back up. But that was six acres of grass waterways. That's just great wildlife habitat.

Now, here's your natural gas. That's a million dollar well. Horizontal drilling. And they never pumped any gas out of it.

Michaela Paukner:

Why?

Ray McCormick:

They put them all across the landscape down through here.

Well, gas people had more money than they knew what to do with. And, see, cover crops here. And here.

This one had a cleaning plant right over here. And they had to go to Oak Town, which is at the top of the county to get hooked onto the line and they never could reach an agreement with the people, the company that owned that line. So they never got hooked up. Isn't that crazy?

Michaela Paukner:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

A million dollars of well. So they abandoned it.

Michaela Paukner:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

There, my wife's sitting with a gas well, all the stuff hooked to it, and she's not getting any money and they're not cleaning it up, taking it down. So I'm going to start digging the gravel up around it and utilizing the gravel.

So see this area right here, this low area, this was thousands of acres of wetlands. It was called Monter's Pond. And it went all the way up through here, up way up there, and went down this way to Lucky Point, where there's a rock ledge where the Native Americans would hunt right there, because that's the way that wildlife could get across it.

And they drained her all. Drained her to the river.

So my grandpa, when he was in high school and would play the basketball team there at Wheatland, this was all a covered bridge.

And so you would stop here at Monter's Pond and you would listen down through the covered bridge. And if you couldn't hear the click-clack of a horse coming through, then you could go.

Michaela Paukner:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

And anybody else coming the other way would have to stop and listen if there was a horse coming through there. So it just went forever. Beautiful lake. Natural lake. Wetland. All gone.

Michaela Paukner:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

This is my good high school basketball buddy and everything. He's my attorney. He said, "Well, where are you going to get the mitigation ground from?" I said, "I know an attorney on 241 that's got something I'd really like to flood." He laughed. He goes, "I'm not selling it till I die."

So everywhere I look, down in there, I can see I could build a wetland, build a wetland, build a wetland.

So back in the day, I would search through auctions and so forth and then I'd look at it on web soil survey and see what the soil types were. And if it was wet and had the right soils, then I'd go try to buy it. And a lot of times those were going pretty cheap.

Michaela Paukner:

Mm-hmm.

Ray McCormick:

So where we got the four-wheeler out, that's Doc Tom's property.

So Doc Thomas is who took care of me for months and months and months, scratching that wound and making it bleed and everything. I was kind of a star, because in the hospital, nobody had ever seen a wound like that.

Michaela Paukner:

Really?

Ray McCormick:

Sustained crushing, where the leg died. And they would come in and go, "Look at this." They'd bring other nurses in, "Look at this," and everything. And then in his office, his nurses would come in there and their eyes would get big, because I'd just go down, go in there and pull my pants down and expose it, waiting for them to come in and they'd look at it. And then he'd start scratching it across the wound and making it all bleed. And they're going, "Oh, doesn't that hurt?" And I said, "Nope. Don't feel a thing."

So he's the one that stayed with it for a long time, to get it to grow back together.

Michaela Paukner:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

The surgeon that operated on me, Doctor Vo, he was from Vietnam, South Vietnam, and after they lost the war, they took his dad and put him in a concentration camp, or whatever we want to call it, for six years. So there he is, a little kid, no money, no food. Dad's in prison. And so they just survived on whatever they could grow around their house.

And when his dad got out of prison, John McCain came over to Vietnam and said, "We're going to bring back to the US, South Vietnamese people who were punished for their involvement in the Vietnam War."

So his dad and his family, John McCain brought them back to St. Louis.

Michaela Paukner:

Oh, really?

Ray McCormick:

So he was 13 years old. So he went from that, no English, no education. He went from there to be a surgeon. And he was real kind and good. And he made them take the... As soon as he saw me after the operation, he told those nurses, "Get those bandages off of there." And he said, "Now. Get them off of there." And so they're like, "Geez."

And that leaving the wound open, don't cover it up, they learned that and doing what they did to it, to make it grow back again, they learned that in the Vietnam War, all those atrocious wounds to legs and stuff, that's where they learned those techniques of letting the air to it, letting the light to it, don't cover it up.

Michaela Paukner:

So when you were at home, you had just left it uncovered or was it wrapped?

Ray McCormick:

They would try to put, to keep for getting scratched or damaged or something, they tried to put a sock up over it, pull it over it. And, of course, being on your thigh, I'd walk about 10 foot and it'd be down around my knee.

Michaela Paukner:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

It just didn't work. And they're going, "Well, let's do this. This'll work." It'd fall down.

So a lot of time I just farmed and stuff with not covering, the wound cover down around my knee.

Then I'd come home at night and Cheryl would try to put stuff on it and get it covered back up. It was uncovered a lot.

And I'd come home and if I was sitting in an easy chair, I'd uncover everything and let it just sit there in the open. I didn't know, I never thought about it, because it just didn't cross my mind, but later on, after I healed, they said a lot of people would've never survived the trauma of what happened to you. They just died right on the spot. They'd went into shock and died.

And I'm like, "Hmm." Well, I didn't go into shock. I was all about getting the tree off the top of me and getting out of there.

And then they told me, several nurses told me and stuff said a lot of people would've lost that leg with a traumatic injury like that to the leg.

Michaela Paukner:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

Their body wouldn't have been able to save that leg. So I was luckier. I never thought about it. I'm like, "Let's do this. Let's do that," and everything, just all about recovering.

Michaela Paukner:

Mm-hmm.

Ray McCormick:

I never thought about it. If I'd have lost my leg at the hip, that would've ruined my life. There wouldn't have been any duck hunting, going out with the dogs, and it'd been real hard on the farm. If you lose your leg below the knee, they can do a lot for you to be able to walk and have a pretty normal life. Anything above the knee, it pretty much ruins your ability to walk or do anything.

Michaela Paukner:

Oh.

Ray McCormick:

And in my case, it went all the way up into my groin so they'd had taken it off at the hip.

So Doc Tom owned 700 acres over in the end of Long Pond, on this ridge. The Kauhn farm, K-A-U-H-N, and it's all in WRP.

Michaela Paukner:

Mm.

Ray McCormick:

And then he bought this farm and I went to the auction up here at just house. And so for Half Moon Pond, they never got a bid. And for this farm, they never got a bid. Nobody bid anything.

Michaela Paukner:

Why?

Ray McCormick:

It was in the '80s, when everybody was going broke. And it's a rough farm and who wants an oxbow lake?

And so we ended up, Tom and Dave and I, going together and buying the 70 acres of the Oxbow lake for $15,000. And I think Tom paid $800 an acre for this farm.

That was back when you weren't going to be farming the next year.

Michaela Paukner:

Oh.

Ray McCormick:

And that's what the bank's saying and said, "There's no way, this is the last year. We're not going to stick with you anymore."

So it was hard to go buy farmland under those conditions.

Michaela Paukner:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

So that farm, with that white fence there by our elevator, I didn't even go to the auction. I went quail hunting instead of going to the auction. And they sold it for $700 an acre. It's like, "Oh, my God." And I didn't even go because I was saying, "I'm broke. I can't buy anything." Well, I would've written, like I have before, a bad check and figured out how to cover it, beg people to help me.

Michaela Paukner:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

And my God, you can stand on that farm and throw grain into our grain leg. So seeing this WRP planting, I've been trying to save some of them. See how little the oaks are, compared to the ash trees there? So I've went out there and tried to save some of them, but he went way too long before he started worrying about it.

So we made these upper ponds and that one snakes around, back to kind of the bluff of that hill. And there's a spring coming out of there. It's just tremendous.

So we call this the 690 B hole, and the one below it, the 48 hole, because it's the pieces of equipment I slid off down in there and hung them up, building them.

So you're a machinery guy. Nothing like naming the ponds after the equipment that we buried out there, and had to have neighbors come and dig it out with a bulldozer and get us out.

So this part of the county, you go all around these highways and stuff, there's cover crop everywhere. You go to the northern part of the county, zero.

Michaela Paukner:

Oh. Well, they can't use the excuse it don't work here.

Ray McCormick:

You know, it's just different cultures. It's the Dutch up there. Nobody's going to tell them what to do.

Michaela Paukner:

Who's down here that is willing to be told what to do? Or make independent decisions?

Ray McCormick:

It's been a really strong soil and water conservation district. Really strong state on conservation. And farmers have been doing a lot of conservation down here and they started doing no-till. And then it just led right into cover crops.

It was just strong conservation in this part of the state . They call it the Fab Five. There's five counties down here, in southwestern Indiana, all hooked together and they do all the conservation.

Michaela Paukner:

Okay.

Ray McCormick:

They're called the Fab Five, the five counties that are doing all the no-till cover crops.

It renews your belief in people that take care of the land, that care so much about the resource. They don't want to have erosion and they want to do the best they can for the land. So they think like I do, you do everything you can at all costs, to take care of that resource and that resource is the most important thing.

And you look at my farm, the most important thing and the thing that is of the most wealth, by far, is the value of that land. So the land will take care of you if you take care of it.

And so if I were out here buying a farm, one of them we looked at, that's so highly eroded, I would really cut the cost of what I would pay for that farm. If it had been no tilled and take care of a farm like I'm trying to buy now, that soil is already good and getting better and it's got all that biology, all those earthworms. To me, that's a real incentive to buy that ground or rent that ground.

So people that respect the land and aren't so damn greedy that they're going to get every dollar while they're around, it's almost a spiritual belief and people that think like I do, and of course, I've met so many of those people through no-till farmer conferences and so forth, that it's that common thread of caring for the land and wanting to figure out better ways and better ways and better ways of doing that. It's quite inspiring.

Ben Thorpe:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

Too much of our society is led by greed, whether it's cutting timber, mining coal, tilling the ground. It's just greed, greed, greed. And this planet can't take that.

We did it with the buffalo. And we're doing it with the wetlands. And the wetlands of Indiana are just like the buffalo. They're not going to be happy until every wetland's gone.

So I was on a conference call the other day and they're saying, "We have this wetlands group of all these organizations." So they always say, "Tell them your name and tell them the organization you're with."

I go, so when it gets to me, I go, "Well, I'm Ray McCormick, a farmer, and all I'm doing is trying to put wetlands back faster than the state can destroy them and I think I'm winning." So that got a chuckle out of everybody.

But I've been putting wetlands back, and a lot of them, as fast as I can go.

Ben Thorpe:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

Because it's just like the buffalo. They killed them and killed them and killed them, out of just greed to get the tongue and so forth.

And then it got down to where there's just a few left. Then there were people that wanted to kill the last ones and say, "I killed one of the last ones."

Ben Thorpe:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

So some of the people, like Teddy Roosevelt, they had to travel for days to even find one for him to kill. Well, that makes me feel pretty bad, that people want to kill the last one. They want to drain the last wetland or plow under the last remnants of a prairie. It's greed. When it comes to the land, that's not good.

Now, this is a farm I started renting and it was the most eroded farm you could ever see. And it hasn't come back. It's up there against the fence row, up there. It's about six foot lower on this side than it is on the other side.

Michaela Paukner:

Uh-oh.

Ray McCormick:

And you just cannot replace all that topsoil and think that it's going to come back with cover crops and no-till in two or three years. I mean, it's a little better than when I rented it, but the soil used to run out across the roads. The county would have to shove the dirt off the intersections because it was all mud. And I tried and tried to try to get them to rent it to me so it quit. I usually don't try to take land away from people, but seeing that atrocious erosion, I couldn't take it.

And I went and talked to them and the husband would say, "I told him. If he don't no-till it, we're going to take it away from him."

Well, 10 years later, he's disking it, planting beans, disking it in the fall, disking it in the spring. Next year beans. It's just all he did. Well, he finally, his health went so downhill that he passed away at a pretty young age.

Michaela Paukner:

Oh.

Ray McCormick:

And so I was over there and they said, "Yeah, we're going to rent a farm to you if we can get everything together."

And she brought out this piece of paper and it was... She says, "Now, I'll pay for the bulldozing." I said, "The bulldozing? She goes, "Yeah, every year I pay for the bulldozing."

So she was paying for bulldozers to go up there and shove all the gullies in with more topsoil so they could get across the field.

And she was saying, "I'll pay for the bulldozing now."

And I said, "If I'm farming it, you're never going to see your topsoil again. It's not going to be out across the roads. And you're not going to have gullies in your field, because I'm going to cover it up with cover crops and you'll never see your soil again."

Michaela Paukner:

Thanks to Ray McCormick for hosting Ben and me in February and giving us this tour.

If you missed the first interview with Ray, go to No-Tillfarmer.com/podcast to catch up.

Many thanks to The Andersons for helping to make this No-Till podcast series possible.

From all of us here at No-Till Farmer, I'm Michaela Paukner. Thanks for listening.