In a year that was overshadowed by unreliable labor and less-than-ideal weather conditions, Ray McCormick is still finding positives to focus on and new theories and strategies to test out next season.

Being a farming veteran, McCormick is no stranger to a rough year — but he knows what it takes to soldier on and shift the focus to next year’s growing season.

“A lot of years are rough for various reasons — this year certainly included. A lot of years you say to yourself ‘man if I had to go through that again I don’t know if I would want to keep doing this,’ but you keep going,” he says.

Timing Is Everything

As spring temperatures remained relatively cool for the Vincennes, Ind., no-tiller and many of his neighbors had already planted much of their crops, McCormick decided to wait longer because he has always been a big proponent of not planting into cold and wet conditions. In April, it was still cold in Vincennes, but soil conditions were not overly wet — at least not yet.

In early May, the weather started warming up and McCormick saw what he thought was a perfect window to plant. Then came the rain and a lot of it.

“Suddenly we got horrendous rainfall — 5 inches in just one night and that wasn’t all of it either,” McCormick says. “That really damaged a lot of our crops and as a result, soybean stands were reduced and waterhemp came in really bad in the non-GMO clear hilum soybean fields.”

Waterhemp has become a serious problem for McCormick’s non-GMO soybeans. He is beginning to question whether he wants to continue growing them next year.

“This was the first year we planted every acre of corn and soybeans non-GMO,” McCormick says. “So every bean acre was of the clear hilum variety and waterhemp was just about everywhere. Not in every field — there were some fields that were clean, but something about the weather and rainfall, the pre-emergent herbicide didn't work. And what we've learned is once that waterhemp comes up, you're sunk.”

McCormick explains that without using strong GMO herbicides, there is essentially no way to kill the waterhemp once it has emerged.

But despite weed pressure and weather difficulties, McCormick says he still plans to wait as long as he can to plant his corn next season because he has seen several times before that perfect, healthy stands of corn that were planted later in the growing season are hard to beat.

McCormick recognizes that his situation is unique from a lot of other growers because he is planting naked non-GMO seeds with no insecticides or fungicides whatsoever. He says he’s doing this to stay committed to soil health and do everything in his power to take good care of his soil.

“Does that make me more vulnerable? I don’t know,” McCormick says. “But what I do know is that cold and wet conditions are hard on corn. Cold and wet conditions with a cover crop on top of the ground is also hard on corn. If you’re farming like I do and letting your cover crops get big, so you're sequestering as much carbon as you can and getting everything you can out of your cover crop, you better be cautious about planting early with cold and wet conditions on the way.”

Lessons Learned

McCormick says another hard lesson he learned this year came from not realizing which fields needed to be replanted. He didn’t know how poor the stand was in one of his corn fields until it was too late. This particular field was yielding 110 bushels per acre right next to a field that was yielding 233 bushels per acre.

He says the field in question had bare spots with weeds in them and no corn at all, but they were hard to see because of his large cover crops.

McCormick says next season he plans to come up with a way to scout those fields better by using a small electric bike or a 4-wheeler because he can’t afford to miss areas that need to be replanted.

“At 71 years old, you can't walk 1600 acres of corn. And when you've had cold, wet rain or when you've had excessive rainfall, you need to run the whole field and scout,” McCormick says. “So, when you have little corn growing in a big cover crop, it's hard to see where there's areas in the field that don't have much of a stand.”

McCormick estimates he could have purchased 10 new 4-wheelers for the replant acres he didn’t catch.

Anything But Boring

McCormick says he drilled a cover crop mix of 100 pounds of 90% triticale and 10% annual ryegrass to be bailed for haylage and then sprayed it with Roundup to kill existing weeds. Then after putting fall fertilizer on it, and essentially treating it like he would treat a wheat crop, and then it is eventually bailed for haylage in the spring..

“We don’t have pasture,” McCormick says. “We have 40 cows and we feed them haylage year round. We will graze them on the cover crop but that’s a pretty short window because we like to get that cover crop really big before we let them out on it.”

But what really struck McCormick as interesting is what he saw from his grazing results in one 22-acre field right near his house.

“We run the cattle on the field behind our house and our barns, and then we put a crossing in so they can cross into that next field,” McCormick says. “And as that cover crop is lush and they’ve eaten down the rest of it, we let them in there and this year we kept them in there right up until planting.”

McCormick says the cattle stayed in that field rain or shine through springtime and he didn’t do anything besides let it green up, kill it with Roundup and then plant the field very slowly with his Horsch planter.

“In other words, it’s 100% cattle hooves and tracks in the dirt and it made 250 bushels per acre,” McCormick says. “So, it’s at the top or will be one of our top fields and we planted it into cattle tracks. There is something about good healthy soils, cover crops and a lot of cattle manure that works really well.”

He says his planter was strong enough to get the seed in the ground but he made sure to go very slowly putting the seed right in there at 2.5 inches. Initially he thought it was going to be so packed down because of the cattle and that the stands wouldn’t be anything special, but the results were a pleasant surprise in a year filled with many unpleasant surprises.

“This no-till and cover crop thing is learn, learn, learn, learn,” McCormick says. “It's just an avalanche of information that you get every year. The mistakes you make, the improvements you could make — I messed up.

“But this one thing worked and replanting certain fields worked. So you make mistakes, you do things that you've learned that work good, but it's certainly not boring. It's very trying. It's very stressful, but it's highly rewarding and it’s anything but boring.”

McCormick also found a lot of success with cover crops that he hopes will soon translate to his cash crops. “If I could grow corn and soybeans as well as I can grow cover crops, I’d be a damn good farmer,” he jokes.

Personal Outlets

While McCormick acknowledges that many years can be stressful as a farmer, he feels it’s important to have other outlets to focus on so that he isn’t burnt out by the stresses of the growing season.

For him, the two projects that continue to keep him entertained are his duck hunting leasing business and his natural pond that he recently had installed on his property. But it’s no surprise that both of these outlets do still play a role in his farm operation in their own unique ways.

McCormick recently had a natural pond installed on his property, which he plans to use as another tool to grow native pollinator plants and attract helpful insects and wildlife. The pumps for the stream are powered by solar panels which are located at the back right of the pond. Mackane Vogel

“We just completed our natural pond with a spring coming out of the hill and a set of waterfalls,” McCormick says. “We use the stream and the waterfalls to aerate the water. And then we use the circulation of the water in and out from the bottom to keep it stirred up.

And then, on each side, we'll be planting wetlands in the water. And those wetland plants are so aggressive that they take the nutrients out of the water so that the algae cannot compete. It can't get the nutrients to survive. So this natural pond will have frogs and fish in it and it'll have grandkids in it.”

McCormick uses solar panels to run the pumps that run continuously to circulate the water and then push the water up to the top of the spring and down the waterfalls. He says that during the day when the sun is shining, he’s not paying any cost to run the pumping system.

On top of that, the wetlands he plans to plant will include native pollinator plants that he says will help attract more good insects to help increase the soil health of his farm.

And as for his duck hunting leasing business, McCormick has duck blinds set up all across his property and does some hunting of his own as well as occasionally serving as a guide and leading others on duck hunt excursions.

McCormick’s dogs have also become quite skilled in retrieving ducks as he and others hunt. But the most satisfying part of it for McCormick is planting trees that will help facilitate a healthy wetland environment that attracts lots of good wildlife and other helpful organisms that will again contribute to the overall system that he farms.

And while duck hunting is fun for McCormick and can provide a peaceful outlet for him, his love for nature and wildlife still remains his top priority. After all, as a no-tiller, he wants to protect the environment and his soil any way he can.

“There has to be some rules you abide by,” McCormick says. “If there’s more than 40 ducks, you don’t shoot at them. We don’t shoot at them at all early in the morning because we don’t want to scare them away and these days we really only do these hunts a couple times a year because the rest of the time the birds get to sit out there and not be disturbed. It’s not about killing as many as we can, it’s about the quality of the hunt and about disturbing the ducks as little as possible.”