For Oklahoma farmer Matt Moreland, the work that goes into implementing soil health practices has clearly paid off. But he’s the first to talk about the balance required to make the effort meet the expectations.
“Our number one measure of success has to be yield and profitability. And not just maximizing yield, but the yield for the amount of inputs applied, trying to get that right mix,” he says. “We may use the same dollars of inputs, but we place them in the field where we get a higher rate of return, and the timing of how to apply them too.”
Decisions that have delivered environmental, yield and profitability benefits have been a 30 year process at Moreland Farms.
Moreland says a focus on the long-term gains are key, but you have to manage the business in the moment. He quotes a fellow farmer friend who said, ‘It’s hard to be green when you’re in the red.’
Moreland shared his perspectives on regenerative ag during a panel hosted by the Danforth Plant Science Center in October.
Also joining the panel was Stephen Nicholson, Global Sector Strategist for Grains and Oilseeds at Rabobank, who sees the same pattern from the lender’s side.
“On the balance sheet, it shows up in lower input costs, particularly on the fertilizer side, which is where we see it first,” he says. “Generally you then also see it on the yield side, on the production side. You start to see those yields go up if they’re making that conversion.”
A focus on soil health has been foundational to the practices Moreland Farms has adopted.
“One field right by South Haven was one of the first we tried no-till on, and consistently it’s some of our best-yielding ground. You can plot that yield versus the number of years in no-till. There’s no better data feedback for me,” Moreland says.
That kind of record-keeping is what Nicholson looks for when he visits farms.
“Are they keeping that data? Are they taking the data and getting information out of it to make better practices down the road?” he says. “We also look at whether farmers are making progress. Do we see progress in the broad base of soil health? Are they building organic matter? That should be reflected in their cost of production.”
No-till farming in conjunction with land improvements have brought strong returns.
“We spend a lot of money fixing farms that we take on that have been washed out. We have a big tractor and a giant 30-yard scraper, like you’d see on the side of an interstate project. Anytime we can improve our soil and infiltration and decrease the washing and damage to these farms, we don’t have to deploy those tools,” Moreland says.
And it’s brought greater resiliency to the unpredictability of weather.
“I think it’s a hedge against the weather. We’re dealing with a violent climate. Some of the windstorms that we get in the spring have been just tough on our soil, and we’re trying to actively plant these cover crops to help hold it,” Moreland says.
Dr. Allison Miller, Vice President of Research at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, says cover crops can also pay in ways beyond soil protection.
“When you have something that’s covering the land all winter long, it makes it tough for other things to grow,” she says. “That is a real potential source of reduced cost for farmers, in that there’s less need for intervention in that particular phase.”
Some winter cover crops can even be harvested and sold.
“This [pennycress] is one of our most famous examples of a cover crop that can be harvested for seed and used for oil,” she says.
The why behind farming this way
Moreland started farming in 1988 with 400 acres and a moldboard plow, turning that dirt black. Today, their operation spans 21,000 acres in Oklahoma and Kansas, has 22 employees, and expanded and diversified to bring three sons into the business.
“It is tough, but it’s one of those things where you need to pull the Band-Aid off and start the change,” he says. “There’s a lot of talk about the lag time when someone converts from tillage to no-till regenerative practices, and I don’t see that. The right time to start your conversion is now.”
Nicholson sees the same long view from the lender’s chair, with a note of patience. “It doesn’t work the first year. It probably doesn’t work the second year, maybe not the third year, but as you get to that fourth and fifth year, you start to see things change,” he says. “And we need to help. There needs to be financing.”
He says rules can get in the way of rewarding the practices.
“Let’s say he does all no-till, and we ask, does he get 10 basis points off his interest rate? I can’t do that under fair lending law, because everyone has to be treated the same,” Nicholson says. “So there needs to be some thinking about how we provide that incentive for farmers.”
Moreland credits their no-till practices and focus on soil health as what brought growth and greater profitability to allow for four families to be part of the farm.
Moreland explains, they tilled until 1996 when the Freedom to Farm bill led to a change in their crop rotation, which also coincided with the introduction of Roundup Ready crops.
The adoption was in stages—a few acres at a time. Moreland had to prove it to himself and his grandmother who had the original 400 acre land holding.
The dual benefit of decreased wind erosion plus double cropping soybeans after wheat accelerate their adoption.
Nicholson points to that kind of added diversity as one of the quickest practices to scale. “You double-crop wheat and soybeans. First of all, you’re bringing more different plants and roots into the soil,” he says. “You’re getting double the revenue, which somebody likes. Those are things we can scale really quickly.”
What regenerative means to him
“I hope it’s bigger than those catchphrases. To me, it’s all about rebuilding the soil. As soon as the soil was first turned over, we started mining it. We have mined out the nutrients, and farmers really never want to mine it,” Moreland says. “Either we didn’t understand what was being removed with each crop, or we couldn’t afford to replace it.”
Over time more benefits and understanding have been gained.
“My new theology is that a growing plant out there removes much less water while it’s growing than what it protects against losing through blowing wind, and it increases infiltration rates when it rains,” he says.
He continues: “It’s not just chronological time, it’s not year by year that we’re healing. It’s how many different plants can we have? How many different things can the microbes in the soil eat on and be happy with? That’s what speeds up bringing back the soil.”
Miller says plants are the engine behind that process.
“It’s plants, through their roots, that are doing that regeneration,” she says. “It’s making pores in that soil as it’s growing with its roots. It’s the pores that are how water flows. That’s where microbes live.”
She adds that the science on year-round roots is clear: “Those cover crops and other types of year-round plants on the field, roots in the ground, are the engine of this regeneration.”
Adding livestock to the mix
“It’s amazing what putting the cows back out there does, letting them pick up the residue from the crop. They have built-in manure spreaders attached to them, so we don’t have to pile the manure and haul it out,” Moreland says.
And he’s looking for new ways to amplify the benefits.
“There’s some neat new technology where they’ll put a collar on the cows, and when that technology gets a little more affordable, we’ll be able to variable-rate fertilize our field with a cow,” he says. “In the dead of winter, when it’s very cold, our cover crops and the microbes that are shivering underground get a little burst, a little warm blanket, in those spots.”
Fundamentally he says the physical disturbance the cattle provide has its own benefits.
“Even down to the hooves, there’s something about following what the buffalo did: the hooves going across the soil, breaking the residue and mixing a little of it with some soil to help it break down.”
Nicholson says diversifying with livestock can also show up as a payment. Ethanol plants want low-carbon-intensity corn, he explains, and they measure a farm’s practices to get it.
“I can think of several clients who have diversified their operation, and because of that they have a lower carbon footprint, a lower carbon intensity score,” he says. “So they get paid a premium for their corn going to the ethanol plant.”
Beyond that, he says, payment for regenerative practices has been “scattered.” Bringing livestock back to the farm is also among the more scalable steps.
“That’s a big jump for some people, but those are things that are easily scalable quickly,” Nicholson says.
How it’s changed what success looks like
“When you’ve been a tillage guy, your self-worth is built around how many hours you sit on a tractor all summer,” Moreland says.
The focus on regenerative practices has expanded Moreland’s perspective with the impact his farm has beyond its fields.
“We have to build our communities back. For years, people would take a job in our little town and then drive to Wichita to the aircraft plants. Now we have six people who leave Wichita and come down to work on our farm. So we’re winning that back,” he says. “Two workers recently came to our farm because they know that we work really hard, but we have time off. We’ve got young workers who need time with their young families.”
That openness to change is what Nicholson says he looks for in a farmer.
“How curious are they? Are they going to just do the same thing they did last year and the year before and five years ago?” he says. Some of his clients skip the Florida vacation to learn from other farmers. “They’ll go to someplace like Mississippi or Texas where someone’s doing something they’ve never thought of before, and ask, ‘Can you teach us about that?’ And then they’ll take that back home and try it.”
He says lenders value it, too. “They want a customer today, and they want a customer tomorrow, and they want a customer five years from now who’s going to be in business.”
Honesty and the long view
“People who go out there and greenwash and say, ‘If you plant my mix and get a more vigorous cover mix, we can cut in half the time it takes to improve that soil,’ do no good service. Just be honest that change is small and incremental, but you must start today,” Moreland says.
He continues,“I hope in 20 years we’re looking back like, ‘Wow, they made that change.’ We have a way to test that soil, and that grain is a healthier grain than what we knew.”
Nicholson agrees the buzzwords get in the way. “Today it’s this buzzword, tomorrow it’s a new buzzword. Can we get away from that?” he says. “Can we get down to the nuts and bolts, and what’s going on in the dirt?”
Miller says the next gains will come from crops designed for these systems. “The plants and the crops that we’re growing today have been developed and optimized for a set of practices that we are looking to shift,” she says. “Current corn has been bred to germinate in a tilled field, a clean, blank field. What we really want is corn that can germinate in a field that has some stubble in it, in a field that maybe even has some leftover cover crop in it.”
She points to nitrogen-fixing cover crops as one example.
“If we can develop a cover crop that serves the ecological purpose of covering the land and simultaneously deposits nitrogen naturally in that land, then the cash crop, the corn that comes after that, won’t see a yield penalty. It will see the opposite,” Miller says. “It will actually yield better under this regenerative practice.”
She is also candid about the hurdles. Her team studies perennial crops, whose deep roots build soil faster than any other option, but yield is the problem.
“In the perennial wheat relative that we work with, it’s about a third of the yield of a short-lived wheat,” she says. “Our challenge in that crop is to increase the yield as quickly as possible while simultaneously retaining the part of the plant that matters for the soil, which is the root.”
Looking 20 years out, Miller hopes science will explain the soil itself. “I hope we know how roots actually make soil. We know it happens, but we don’t know how,” she says.
