Brittany Bartak, CCA

You own a section of land. ±640 ac. Historically cropland. Corn and soys. You want to improve your soil health. NRCS-types recommends you to no-till/strip-till, add small grains and cover crops where possible to meet conservation crop rotation, and they also want you to adopt nutrient (and pest) management concepts, which gives you 4/5 key soil health practices. A nice change. Will take 4-5 years to make it through the transition, but it’s doable and after year 4 you’ll be off and running. Your weed pressures and management level has changed - it’s perhaps more mental now than reputations labor, but it can work. You’ll generally see small annual increases in your soil organic matter, and overtime you’ll see the positive changes in your soil. But I think we need to get to the next level. Sure, we have a hard enough time selling people on the concepts above, but what about this: You skip the massive equipment. You break your 1/4 sections into 80’s or even 40’s again, and you fence the entire thing. You put a well in the middle (or as close to it as you can), and you fence in access to water for every field. You might plant shelter belts/windbreaks again. You design it so you now have 8-16 new fields and now you really start designing. Now, instead of 4 opportunities in a given year to grow a good crop, you have 8+. But instead of keeping all the fields cropped, you pick 2 of your 80 acre fields and you plant them to pasture in the fall of Year 0. Year 1, you’re grazing 160 acres, and aftermath grazing 480 acres. You’re figuring out your new management, and you’re hiring a few local folks (maybe your family) to help manage it all. You carry on until year 10. In that year, you till up one of the pastures (you hire a high school kid with a good back to do that job), and meanwhile you’re planting another 80 into pasture again. You leave the other established pasture in and you keep managing it for another ten years. That’s 20 years total. A generation. And now it’s time to reap what you’ve sown in the soil, and you till it and put it back into cropland until the next cycle. You keep doing this every 10 years, cycling the 20 year pasture out, keeping the 10 year pasture in, and you keep moving this system around, but the entire time you’re fertilizing your entire 640 and you’re ensuring production for every generation that follows. You’re also hedging your bets every single year. You have grains and cattle. You have perennials and annuals, but you’re always growing and always building soils, heavily so on at least 25% and slightly so on the rest. But you’re managing a nearly complete system. You can’t hardly fuck this up. You’re building a model, a legacy, and it’s for today, tomorrow, and for 100 years from now, too. I’d argue we should do this with half our acres - planning and rotating pastures as much as any crop - and managing your herd in a way that mimics nature - with migration patterns that existed way before people were people. This is my ultimate goal. For now we’ll keep building our 10 acre farmstead and we’ll work to find the opportunity to find our 640 (the real size doesn’t matter), but we have enough cropland in America that 546,875 (350m ac / 640 ac) farms could do this tomorrow, and the country would be better off for it. Grain prices would be higher with 25% of the cropland put back to pasture. Cattle would be higher because people would be buying to start their herds. Jobs would be available in and around your communities. Families would have opportunities. Rural schools would be filled. Main Street would be busy. A local butcher shop might open up. The local farmers markets would be busier. And our roads and bridges would be fixed with the increased tax base. Some say this is crazy or utopian, but it’s doable. This isn’t crazy. It’s achievable . This could be incentivized through USDA policy, and enhanced with anti-trust - breaking up any entities that fight it. Enjoy the day! 🇺🇸 Godspeed.

Opened the field I have been waiting for, this is the field with only 30 units of N applied to the soil. ROI field, learning to get better is always the goal. I can definitely say this is how we will farm now! Two years in a row, low inputs, better management has paid well here in SD!