Jeff Sather was feeling burned out in that special way that only farmers do.
“It was just this is how you always do it,” he says. “Spray this chemical, put this fertilizer on and hope and pray that you get a crop.”
Sather Farms sits in Larslan, in the far northeast corner of Montana. Sather felt like he’d somewhat tamed the ranching side of his business after taking a course in the art of “ranching for profit.” Through that work, his 10,000 acres of pastureland was finally working for him.
What was definitely not working for him? The 4,500 acres of ground he was farming in crops.
He started looking for a solution. He did online courses and went to soil health symposiums.
“In spring 2020, I heard these guys talking about how biology in the soil works and saying how they could cut fertilizer and phosphorus use,” he says. “That was what I wanted to do, so I just went home and told everyone that we weren’t buying fertilizer that year.”
“I knew that was our end goal and I just thought we’d go there now.”
Partnerships to Unlock Potential
Sather had heard about farmers in his area receiving financial and technical assistance from USDA-NRCS to implement conservation on their farms. It seemed like a logical place to start.
USDA-NRCS’s Conservation Steward Program meant that he could afford a no-till disc drill, a tool to plant seed with minimal soil disturbance.
But, the dominos kept falling for Sather. The no-till disc drill could be used with a stripper header that would leave stubble standing after harvest. In Montana, stubble is critical.
“Because we’re high and flat with long winters and the wind always blows, anything that’ll catch snow is in your benefit,” he says.
That’s when the biggest domino fell for Sather Farms. In an effort to find financial assistance for that equipment purchase, he connected with Marni Thompson, then a USDA-NRCS soil conservationist.
In 2020, Thompson enrolled Sather Farms into an Environmental Quality Incentives Program aimed at solving his most challenging soil health concerns.
His path to regenerative farming was now in overdrive.
On 600 acres of his farm, Sather and Thompson got to work. The partnership put these key soil health practices into place:
- Using a no-till disc drill to limit soil disturbance
- Implementing a diverse rotation with no fallow ground
- Planting cover crops
- Integrating livestock through grazing cover crops
- Utilizing a stripper header to maximize organic residue
- Testing soils regularly
Photo: Sather Farms
Betting on Diversity
Of the program principles, Sather is putting his chips into diversity. He calls it intensive cropping of his cash crop rotations.
“We were growing yellow peas and spring wheat before and maybe some lentils,” he says. “Now we grow peas, lentils and spring wheat, durum wheat, winter wheat and hull less oats for gluten-free flour,” he says. He’s done some safflower and flax. He’s looking into adding old-fashioned oats or maybe even another crop.
Montana doesn’t have an extra-long growing season, so Sather has started intercropping to stack those crops into the same field in the same year.
“We are actually growing lentils and flax in the same field, harvesting them at the same time, and then just using a cleaner to separate them,” he says. “Last year, we grew flax and chickpeas intercropped.”
“We are looking at adding a grass, or some kind of perennial mix in the rotation so we can plant the grass, and then it’ll stay in grass for up to six years. Then we would take it back out to farm it again as a quicker way to improve soil biology and organic matter.”
By implementing his rotational matrix, he’s seeing surprising benefits, including an increase in residue material and a decrease in pathogens.
“When we are planting lentils and peas and then putting the flax in with it, it basically eliminates the need to spray a fungicide on it, because you’ve eliminated the likelihood of blight becoming a problem in your in your crop,” he says.
“Now, I don’t have to worry about going out and spraying fungicides in season.”
“Peas and lentils are not a high-carbon plant, and their stubble basically disappears before winter even happens,” he says. “But by adding in flax, when we harvest we leave more residue behind and a higher carbon that will still be there next year.”
Multiple years of experimenting with this mixture is starting to pay off, even with the drought conditions that his state is seeing.
“The cool part about intercropping is it might be a flax year one year and the next year might be a lentil year,” he says. “You end up with two different crops that you can market.”
Reaping the Benefits
Thompson had taken some initial soil health tests prior to the pair’s work. Now, every June, she’s back at it, collecting more data to see the benefits of Sather’s intensive soil health focus.
“It’s tough in Montana because the environment is dry and it’s windy, so soil health moves pretty slow,” she says. “But, we did see some really cool things happening in comparison between are benchmark data and where he’s at now.”
In flake tests, videos show that Sather’s soil is staying intact and the water around is remaining clear, signs that his soil biology is holding the soil together.
“In a PLFA soil test, we are keying in on the increase of mycorrhizae fungi because that is lacking in our area,” she says. “In his soil test, we are seeing an increase in those and that’s huge because they are very susceptible to chemical and physical disturbance.”
“We are seeing the increases because he is bought in to these practices.”
Agronomic Armor
Coincidentally, Sather says that his work with USDA-NRCS seemed to coincide with the tap drying up for his region.
“We went into a drought in 2020 and now we are in a long-term drought,” he says.
Sather knows what the data is showing him for the health of his soils, but anecdotally it’s adding up to a kind of protective armor for his crops, which he can see in every growing season.
“A couple of the years, the guys that use the heavy fertilizer with their seed, their crops really never even grew, where mine put on with biology and fish hydrolysate came up and it looked good,” he says. “It still just ran out of moisture, and so it wasn’t worth combining, but it still looked better than some of the crops across the field or across the fence line.”
“That made me feel good that we were at least on the right path.”
“Now we’re just hoping, praying that one of these days it’s going to start raining again.”
Farming for Profit
Finally, Sather feels like he might be on the track to reaching a profit-centered approach on his farming acres that is yielding benefits not only for his farm but also for his brand, Prairie Roots, a brainchild of his wife Marisa to direct-market their food products.
“I may not have the bumper crop yields that that everybody else might have in the area, but I’m still making a profit on every acre,” he says.
While Sather is concerned about the health of his soil, interested in preserving a legacy and choosing to grow healthier food products for consumers, he knows that none of those interests trump his ability to keep farming.
“Mom and Dad rent me everything that they own, so I need to make profit to be able to pay them rent,” he says. “I need to be able to make a profit to afford to stay here.”
And if the Sather legacy is going to survive in Montana agriculture, he knows that he must make a profit in order to set up his sons for their agricultural future. Along the way, he’s bringing those sons on his regenerative journey with him, hoping that they will learn how to steward the land for the future.
But right now, Sather just has to figure out his crop rotation matrix for next year’s growing season.
“I’m just working on trying to get my system figured out and learning as much as I can to hopefully continue to improve yields,” he says.
Visit www.trustinfood.com/grow to read more stories about how farmers are connecting to opportunity through conservation for their farms and operations.
This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, under agreement number NR233A750004G096
