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Full Transcript

John Dobberstein:

Hello, and welcome to the latest edition of The No-Till Farmer Podcast, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment. I'm John Dobberstein, Senior Editor of No-Till Farmer. In today's episode, Dennis Michelson and Michael Musselman, hosts of the podcast Innovations in your Fields, powered by New Fields Ag, interview No-Till Farmer editor Frank Lessiter, and Lessiter Media President Mike Lessiter about the evolution of no-till, the founding days of No-Till Farmer and trends and technologies that help no-till practices grow across the US. They also discussed the vision behind Frank's first book about no-till, From Maverick to Mainstream, A History of No-Till Farming. With that, let's go to Dennis and Michael for part one of their wide-ranging interview.

Dennis Michelson:

Welcome back to Innovations in Your Fields, powered by New Fields Ag. Oh my goodness, folks, do we have a treat for you today. Mr. Michael Musselman, when you get to talk to people who have been involved in a subject that everybody's talking about and they've been doing it for over 50 years, that's quite a treat.

Michael Musselman:

Well, it's amazing, and I've looked forward to this interview for a long time. Today we get the opportunity to have veterans of the industry and ag publication in the no-till space, the iconic Frank Lessiter and Mike Lessiter, his son who has joined the business a while and back and is working very closely with his father to continue that legacy. We're going to talk about some legacy today. We're going to talk about these innovations.

We want to talk with Frank about how's a guy in 1970 something saying it's time to start a magazine about no-till? He stood in the gap there and said, "Let's do it." And it's been around 50 plus years. We're going to take some time with the father and the son and they're ready to answer some questions for us, give us some insights. This is just going to be a fun time. Appreciate the opportunity for them. They kindly gave of their time here, especially right ahead here soon to the strip-till conference that's going to be going on. We'll maybe have them talk about some of those things as we go too. Dennis, this is going to be fun, exciting.

Dennis Michelson:

Yeah, it's really crazy because if you look at the world of no-till and the world of strip-till, there have always been parts of the country where it was the way to do business, but we've been seeing that expand. As a meteorologist with a background in statistical climatology, it makes even more sense nowadays, Michael, because statistically speaking when it comes to weather, we are in an environment that is more similar to the early part, the first 50 years, if you will, of the previous century. We remember from our history books what happened in the thirties, for instance, when it came to agriculture, so the idea of minimum tillage operations will probably make more sense here, even going forward if the weather gets as wacky and unpredictable as we expect it to. Just the natural cycles of things, let alone anything if you want to talk about climate change or anything like that. It's just the natural changes alone that we're likely to see in the weather will make these practices even more important in the years to come.

Michael Musselman:

They definitely are. Let's go ahead and welcome Frank and Mike Lessiter to the show today. Frank, thanks for taking the time, Mike also. To start it off today, just give us a real quick idea of when you came on to this topic in the late sixties, early seventies, tell us about what brought you there and what brought you to that place in your history.

Frank Lessiter:

Well, we were living in Chicago at the time, and I was editing a livestock magazine. This is 1972, and I was getting kind of bored of what I was looking to do, and there was a publisher in Milwaukee who decided they were going to start No-Till Farmer. Now my wife and I and Michael have owned it since 1982, but for the first nine years I worked for somebody else and then we bought it away from them. We talk about 50 years, 52 years in no-till. We're just saying I'm old.

Michael Musselman:

Well, age has its benefits, Frank.

Frank Lessiter:

Yeah, we came back and we didn't own the publication for the first nine years, but I'm still the only editor that No-Till Farmer's ever had for 52 years.

Mike Lessiter:

That's got to be some kind of record. Before he's done, I know it'll be a record here. Unusual.

Michael Musselman:

That's amazing, and lots of awards that you've won in between this time. We hope that you're able to get many more and Mike in the future too. Mike, tell us a little bit about growing up in the magazine world there and what you decided to do in between coming back. How did you find yourself to come back into the magazine world and work with your dad?

Mike Lessiter:

Sure. I'll start it off by saying I was three years old when dad moved us to Wisconsin and No-Till Farmer felt like the fifth child in our family. I can barely remember a time that there wasn't a stack of farm magazines and No-Till Farmer on it and dad's work reading magazines every night as he continued to stay on top of all the trends out there. I accompanied dad on some farm visits as a young boy, were memorable and fun and I loved the time back at the family farm in Michigan. Dad here was the first in six generations to leave the farm, so I'm the first one that was born off of the farm.

Michael Musselman:

Oh, wow.

Mike Lessiter:

I went to journalism school. I wanted to be a writer, wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do, but after college I went to Chicago for 12 years in the manufacturing space. It's been 20 years ago this fall actually, I answered the call to come back to the family business. I wanted to work with mom and dad and we kind of got some new things going, acquired some publications. We've been kind of on a straight growth path ever since, but it all started with No-Till Farmer, that was the flagship of our company. Some other businesses didn't work out, but No-Till Farmer has been the piece of the company ever since 1981.

Dennis Michelson:

Frank, talk a little bit about your background and how your background, both educationally and professionally, led to this career.

Frank Lessiter:

I grew up on a centennial farm, dairy farm, about 40 miles north of Detroit. Been in the family since 1855. It's now all houses, it's suburban. It's always been a suburban area of Detroit and Pontiac. Went to Michigan State, was a dairy science major and then took all my electives. I didn't want to go home and milk cows, I didn't want to self feed the dairyman. I want to do something else, so I had an advisor who let me take all my electives in journalism. My mother had been an English teacher. She had turned me into writing, and a farmer down the road from where I grew up got me involved in photography.

I started out working for the Michigan State University Extension Service for three years. Came to Milwaukee, edited the Massey Ferguson Farm Profit Magazine, which in those days went to about 400,000 farmers across the US. Then I went to Chicago for three and a half years and edited a magazine on livestock, beef, cattle and hogs and sheep. Then came back in 1972 and started with the first issue of No-Till Farmer. Now there's people around who've written as long as I have, but I don't know of anybody around who's had the same job all these years. Most people get promoted. I never got promoted.

Michael Musselman:

Well, it's interesting you say that about not going home to milk cows. I grew up on a dairy also, and it didn't work for me really to go home and milk cows. Maybe in some cases dairy is one of those things you do that you figure out maybe you aren't going to milk cows the rest of your life. Really appreciate those comments on that and how the farm and what you did there is the basis, and it gave you the ability then to kind of catapult or step into doing something still in ag.

There's a lot of people listening to us that probably would like to be farming but didn't get to go back to the family farm. I know that in my family we probably would've liked to keep the beef cattle around and keep the Simmental herd going, but we just were not able to. Sometimes we have to move on into the next opportunities. That's a very interesting path you took there in terms of the livestock area, but then really finding your calling into the communications side of the field.

Frank Lessiter:

Got to tell you about my dad. He thought I was crazy to leave this job in Chicago and move up here. He thought it was nuts, and then later on we no-tilled the home farm.

Michael Musselman:

Oh, wow.

Frank Lessiter:

He moved around, and we had a tenant who farmed some of it and they no-tilled. The other thing is he told me once, "You figured out it was easier to tell others how to farm than to do it yourself." I've been in ag journalism forever.

Mike Lessiter:

Dad was 34 years old, had three kids and another soon on the way, so grandpa was wondering, "What the hell are you doing attaching your good journalistic name to this no-till practice?"

Michael Musselman:

I could see that. Yeah, that's a great story.

Dennis Michelson:

Frank, I got to ask you because to be really good at what you do for over 50 years, you not only have to be really good at what you do for over 50 years, but you have to really passionately believe in what you're doing. What was it about no-till, the operational side of no-till that convinced you that this is worthy of a career?

Frank Lessiter:

Well, I got sold on it for changing jobs by the publisher here in Milwaukee. I actually didn't know hardly anything about no-till. We got educated, six of us went down to Kentucky on a chartered plane and we spent three or four days with the people who really got no-till started in Kentucky, and that's how I learned. In fact, we went to work and they had promised me we would go down on this trip, so the first question I had was, when are we going to go? They said, "Well, we don't know." I said, "Well baloney. You guys said we're going to go." So we went a week later. I said, "I don't know anything about this field and you got to get me up to speed right now."

Mike Lessiter:

There was no book on no-till, no resource really. You had to go there and experience it and then share it with others. If you think about that time period, there was virtually no resource you could turn to and study up on it.

Michael Musselman:

Yeah, and what's interesting about that is I like your comment, Mike, about the idea of where you're innovating in a field where it hasn't been done before and by the nature of it, you just had to get in and be scrappy about it and go to it and figure it out, get educated. I think that that's a great principle of the basis of your success was you had curiosity and you had a desire and you said, "Let's get with it." That's a really interesting pathway to how you became very adept and learned to grow with it.

John Dobberstein:

We'll come back to the episode in a moment, but first I'd like to thank our podcast sponsor Yetter Farm Equipment. Yetter Farm Equipment has been providing farmers with solutions since 1930. Today, Yetter is your answer for finding the tools and equipment you need to face today's production agriculture demands. The Yetter lineup includes a wide range of planter attachments for different planting conditions, several equipment options for fertilizer placement and products that meet harvest time challenges. Yetter delivers a return on investment and equipment that meets your needs and maximizes inputs. Visit them at Yetterco.com.

Frank Lessiter:

The other thing was I didn't know anything about no-till, so I didn't have any biases.

Michael Musselman:

You're right, that's a great comment.

Frank Lessiter:

I decided right from the start that we needed to do in-depth editorial and do a quality job and tell people how they could make more money, how they can protect the environment, etc, with no-till.

Mike Lessiter:

I'll jump in just for a second because I think it might be important to the rest of the business that we've turned into. Dad's editorial principle was that we're not going to go out there and tell you what to do. We're going to understand the problems and then go to the audience and try to pull the solutions out of them. That's a formula. If you do it, it's a formula that works and I think we're doing it in our farm equipment division we have now. We have an equine division and that's key to the last, every year since 1981, how we think that we have a different approach than some others out there. Not to tell you what to do, but to draw out from their peers in another state another part of the country what that solution might be.

Michael Musselman:

What's interesting about that, Mike, is in your publications, I always notice that you have farmers that are doing no-till as part of the people that are the teachers. It's very good when you have the farmer saying, "I've done this, it works for me so it could work for someone else." I think that's part of that teaching method that you came up with from that regard.

Frank Lessiter:

Well, the other thing is our philosophy here is our editors don't know anything, because you've got to listen to the farmers. There's communicators around who think they know everything, including a few radio broadcasters. Our philosophy has always been learned. I've done stories on farms in all 50 states, and I've never been on a farm that I didn't learn something. It may be a great idea to try or maybe a idea you wouldn't want to recommend to anybody else, but you learn something on every one if you can keep your eyes open and keep quiet.

Mike Lessiter:

It's not just the successes that he would report on, it was also the failures, the landmines, calling out the farmers telling what landmines there were to hopefully let their peers avoid that same misstep.

Dennis Michelson:

The amazing thing to me, gentlemen, is that this is what science is all about, being a scientific geek. The changes don't come from the consensus. The changes come on the edges, the innovators, those daring people that try something. We see it in the ag industry all the time. People try new things. If it works, they try it more on more acres. Was there a point though, Frank, when you really saw that tipping point that you saw, "Hey, this is not just useful in a dry land situation or whatever, or if you're trying to deal with heavy erosion near a river valley." When was it that you started seeing enough of the results from ag producers to say, "Oh my goodness, there's something here that needs to be shared more with the ag community as a whole because the way we're doing things, maybe there's a better way to do it."

Frank Lessiter:

Yeah, a couple things came up. We had inflation. We had high diesel prices and people were looking to cut their costs, which meant cutting trips across the field. I just read a story today about a California rancher who's been to our no-till conference and he got into no-till because it was so wet he couldn't get his crops planted and somebody said, "Hey, there's a no-till planter sitting over here." He got it. Some of his employees said, "I don't think this is going to work." He said, "Keep going." Well, one of the best corn crops they ever had, they got into no-till by accident.

Mike Lessiter:

Might tell the Dwayne Beck story about moisture in no-till.

Frank Lessiter:

Yeah, we started the National No-Tillage Conference in 1993 and Dwayne Beck is kind of the godfather of no-till in the dry land area at Pierre, South Dakota. He's retired now, but he runs a research facility over the years and he made this comment at the very first no-till conference and the comment was, "In South Dakota, we no-till to keep every inch of rain that falls. You guys in Ohio no-till to get rid of the moisture." It works both ways.

Michael Musselman:

Very interesting.

Frank Lessiter:

We got Dwayne coming back to our no-till conference in Louisville next January. He's going to speak on what happened when he spoke at our conference 25 years ago and an update on that.

Dennis Michelson:

I'm just curious, Frank, has there been a time over this whole 50 years when you were a little surprised that more people were not adopting more of a no-till or a strip-till approach?

Frank Lessiter:

Yeah, that's true, and it's actually still true today. In fact, it may be more important today than it was back then. When we started, we did a national survey on how many acres of no-till there was. 1972, there were 3.3 million acres. Today, our best guess is it's at about 110 million acres. We think by 2023, and this is just off the top of my head, that maybe we'll have 148 million acres of no-till, which would make up 48% of the cash crop land. Worldwide, this would grow to almost 500 million acres of no-till. Then with strip-till, it's way behind, but maybe we get to 12 million acres in the next six years.

Mike Lessiter:

That was 2030, the 148?

Frank Lessiter:

Yep, and we made these projections back in 2018, so it's gotten better.

Michael Musselman:

Wow. Okay.

Frank Lessiter:

What really turned no-till around was in the late seventies, early eighties, Monsanto came out with Roundup, Which big problem with no-till in the early days, one of the big problems was weed control. People didn't know what to do, and so Roundup helped that. Then the other thing was none of the major manufacturers were interested in no-till, because they wanted to sell plows and discs and chisel plows and big horsepower tractors. Well, in the late seventies, John Deere said, "Well, I don't want one of our really good customers running a Red Planter from Case or whatever." And so they came out with the John Deere 750 Drill, which made a big difference. All of a sudden we could no-till soybeans in seven and a half inch rows instead of 30 inch rows. Those two things made a real difference in no-till in the early days.

Mike Lessiter:

I've heard you and others say that when John Deere came out with their own equipment specific for no-till, that's what legitimized it in a number of people's minds, right?

Frank Lessiter:

Yes, no doubt about it. If John Deere's going to do it, it must work. They haven't always lived up to that promise, but that's what people thought in those days. Weed control was tough in the early days. I mean mainly, well, you had Paraquat and Paraquat was a burn down and that would kill whatever's growing in the field then you could no-till into it. The other ones that were really used a lot was Atrazine and Princep. Another one that was used quite a bit early on was Dicamba, but Velsicol had it in those days and it kind of went away. Now Dicamba has come back in the last three or four years, although there are certainly some problems with drift with it. Hopefully we'll get that solved.

Dennis Michelson:

Frank, we know that ag producers are creatures of habit. Years ago at a seminar at Purdue that I was helping out at, they asked a farmer, it was early eighties, the lotto had just started and they asked the farmer, they said, "Hey, if you guys win the $2 million prize, the lotto prize, what are you going to do with it?" A guy raised his hand, he says, "I'd farm until it was all gone.

We see so many ag producers sticking with the same methods that were used year after year after year. One of the biggest problems I see is at the coffee shop they're going to start talking about you or they're going to start talking about how your fields look if you do something different than what everybody else is doing. In the early days of no-till, what was the chatter like for the first pioneers of no-till there at the coffee shop?

Frank Lessiter:

Well, it was mainly that they accused them of trash farming. A lot of the early innovators were smart enough to put their first no-till couple crops back away from the road so people couldn't see it. Then the coffee shop thing is the no-tillers would go into the coffee shop and then there'd be a table of farmers there, see them come in, they'd start laughing. The no-tiller might sit alone in the back of the cafe because they didn't want to sit at that table. Early on, a lot of guys said to me, "I quit going to the coffee shops. I didn't have anything to do with it."

There's an interesting story early on out of a North Carolina State Mental Hospital. A farmer went by one day and they were, I think it was first year they ever tried no-till and he was planting it in the sod. The farmer saw this and he went up and he asked for the general manager of the mental hospital and he met with him and he said, "Hey, you got a crazy guy down there planting corn in the sod, you better check on him." Then the administrator said, "Yeah, I will." But he knew what was going on. Then two or three months later, the farmer came back and he says, "You know, that's working down there. Maybe I shouldn't have told you to do something about the guy with some mental problems."

The other thing is you mentioned earlier the innovators, and no-tillers were definitely the early innovators. It reminds me of a story, and I think this was in maybe the late eighties or early nineties. Caterpillar came out with the Challenger tractor on tracks and a awful lot of no-tillers were buying these tractors on tracks. I couldn't figure out why they were doing it because they didn't really need it in their no-till situation. I finally decided the reason they're doing it is they're innovators. They wanted to try something new.

Mike Lessiter:

Lots of examples like that. The no-tiller who had the first Fastrac JCB tractor. There's a lot of those stories. Michael, you got your book in front of you, right?

Michael Musselman:

Yes.

Mike Lessiter:

Look on the first page and read Frank's dedication. That kind of hits with Dennis' question, I would say.

Michael Musselman:

Yeah. "This book is dedicated to the no-till pioneers that sat alone in the back of the coffee shops to avoid being laughed at by the die hard, moldboard plowing fanatics who ridiculed no-tillage's ugly fields and lazy farmers." That's the introduction, dedication in Frank's first book, From Maverick to Mainstream, A History of No-Till Farming by founding No-Till Farmer editor. It's a great book, and I actually have the privilege of having a signed copy. Thank you, Frank.

Frank Lessiter:

There you go.

Michael Musselman:

That was given to me when I worked at Martin-Till Industries. Appreciate that. This was written in 2018. From Maverick to Mainstream, A History of No-Till Farming is your first book out, written about six, seven years ago. It's a really good compilation of many of the people that made no-till what it is today, the pioneers. I mean, you see these black and white photos, you see these old stories. There's lots of projections. You've got into the numbers and so forth on no-till farming, and I really appreciate and respect that. Tell us about how you decided to write a book, even though you'd written for 40 some years. How did you decide it's time to make a book?

Frank Lessiter:

Well, the book is really a compilation of what's been in No-Till Farmer over the years. There's very few original things in there that I wrote just for the book, because we went back and picked them up. One of the neat things, and we get asked why we don't do this anymore. One of the neat things was all the modifications and adjustments made to equipment in the eighties and seventies and early nineties. Because farmers, they didn't like anything that was on the market for no-tilling, and so they would go to their farm shops and put things together.

We did a story on a guy who converted a combine into a no-till planter. The reason we don't do these stories today is we've got better equipment and it's coming that it doesn't need to be modified or adjusted, so we've kind of gotten away from those old stories, photographs about how they fixed these up in their own farm shops.

Michael Musselman:

Well, what I like to see is the innovation that came with that, and this is what's very interesting. There's two sides to innovation at times I see in the industry, and let's just take equipment for example. One side of the innovation is the farmers say that they need to do something and they do it in the farm shop, and then other people follow that. Then even the equipment people come along and say, "You know what? That looks really good." And they borrow or take the ideas and so forth and learn from them.

The other side of it is when the implement people, the manufacturers have brought on some innovative people within their organizations that say, "We're going to design equipment and get ahead of the game and lead the farmer into it." Often what we see is a farmer's ingenuity and innovation to say, "Let's do something." And that sparks the idea for the rest of the people. Mike, you had a comment.

Frank Lessiter:

Interesting enough, early on, this was in the sixties before I was even involved with no-till, but you look at corn planters those days, and both Case, IH and John Deere adapted planters that were built in farm shops.

Mike Lessiter:

I was just going to add, Michael, Dennis, one of the coolest comments I got about the book, we had it on a podcast ourselves years ago, was Dr. Steve Savage, who's done a lot of work in agriculture, he's a PhD, he's written for Forbes. He told us that the story here in this book, this is a story that not just is relevant to no-till, but in all of ag and in any industry for that matter, because he said it shows how change is still possible. That there was a blueprint here of how to change even in an industry as well entrenched as ag was. That always stuck with me. Thinking he's right. If you read this, you get into it, you can see how that change happened, and it was a monumental change from the 1960s on.

Frank Lessiter:

Well, up until no-till came along, the biggest improvement or advancement that took less time was seed corn went to hybrid varieties, and no-till caught on even faster than hybrid corn did.

John Dobberstein:

That's it for this episode of The No-Till Farmer Podcast. We'd like to thank Dennis Michelson and Michael Musselman for taking the time to interview Mike and Frank about the history of no-till practices and where we stand today. We also want to thank our sponsor, Yetter Farm Equipment, for helping to make this podcast possible. A transcript of this episode and our archive of previous podcast episodes are both available at notillfarmer.com/podcasts.

If you're interested in the books Frank Lessiter has written about no-till, go to our website at notillfarmer.com, visit the store section and go to the book section. For Frank and Mike Lessiter and our entire staff here at No-Till Farmer, I'm John Dobberstein. Thanks for listening. Keep no-tilling and have a great day.