We rotate in cover crops like clover, rye and buckwheat in addition to strategic tillage all to do our part to help support the soil food web. When these crops die, they’re decomposed by the fungi in the soil. This helps build up the soil’s organic matter content, or anything that’s carbon based (living things from nature) and supports a stable ecosystem of critters to boost plant health. Cover crops are also covering the soil so it doesn’t dry out. This of these crops like eating your vegetable & putting on sunscreen!

This practice just means we let the land rest and take a break from producing. What we do is seed a diverse range of cover crops tailored to address whatever that field is lacking. For example, one seed mix we might use will help to smother thistles if that field is especially thistle heavy. Practicing Sabbath isn’t required for our organic certification, but we feel it’s a good practice.

Each plant needs different levels of nutrients from the soil in order to grow to its maximum potential. When soil is forced to grow the same crop year after year, it can get really depleted in key nutrients. This normally forces the farmer to add synthetic fertilizers and expensive inputs to boost production.

Instead, we rotate our crops every year across all of our fields and have a variety of grasses and broadleaf to build up nitrogen and feed the microbial ecosystems in the soil. Not only does this look aesthetically pleasing for us and those driving by, but the plant diversity means lots of different bugs which help the ecosystem too! You don’t eat the same thing every day, right? Just like your diet changes everyday, so should the soil’s!

Tilling, or the practice of breaking up the soil to dry it out or disrupt weed growth, also has some negative consequences. Breaking up the top soil leaves it vulnerable to erosion from rain and wind, especially with our prairie landscape. While we don’t believe tillage is evil, we do try to minimize and manage the downsides.

One method we use is strip tilling. This is where we plant one cover crop to aid in the production of the second crop that we’ll harvest. The first crop nurses along the second crop until it grows enough. Then we strip till that nurse crop and let the second grow freely.

We started transitioning the farm to organic in 2014 and while it takes a long time to move 4,100 acres to organic, it has paid off. Being certified organic means all of our seeds are Certified Organic, anything we put on the soil has to be as well (one of the only inputs we use from off the farm is poultry manure.