Fields of Sinsinawa’s first annual Soul of the Soil conference, held September 23-24, is in the books! It was a fantastic event, with plenty of learning, sharing, and networking between farmers, conservationists, landowners, and others interested in understanding the connections between functioning soils and healthy crops, people, and communities.
By holding our event in September, attendees were able to touch the cover crops that were planted after wheat harvest, feel the softness of the soil beneath the covers, see how the grazing cattle are knocking back weeds and allowing desirable grasses to flourish, witness the water infiltration of different farm management practices, and hear directly from the tenant farmers who are nurturing crops at Sinsinawa Mound.
Thanks to everyone who joined us, and thanks especially to our sponsors who made the event possible. It was a fantastic experience and we’re incredibly grateful that we had the opportunity to spend time with everyone who attended and introduce them to the soil care practices being implemented at the Mound.
Read on for a recap and of the event.
Day 1
To get things going, we first heard from the tenant row crop farmers, Bernard and Simon Runde and Aaron and Troy Liebfried, who shared some insights from their first growing season with Fields of Sinsinawa.
We then broke into groups for tours of the property that included seeing a rainfall simulation, hearing about early results from water testing that was done on the Mound this spring, learning about the adaptive management grazing that has been started on the property, seeing the biological primers (cover crops) that were interseeded into corn this summer and seeded after wheat harvest, hearing from two of the growers raising produce as part of the Collaborative Farm program, and more.
After the tours, participants visited the Leibfried Organic Dairy to see the robotic milkers in action and then headed to the Chestnut Mountain Resort for dinner, entertainment, and networking.
In keeping with the day’s focus on soil care, the evening’s entertainment was Minneapolis musician Bret Hesla and his band, Six Feet Deep. A multifaceted entertainer, Hesla has an entire set of songs devoted to soil, food, and sustainability, some of which were inspired in part by attending a field day at Tom Cotter’s farm in Austin, MN, and written for the Land Stewardship Project.
To get the flavor of his style, here are the lyrics from a crowd favorite, Back to Soil:
- Well if you study history, then you’ll know
The empire falls when the topsoil goes.
The signs today are pretty clear to read
Soil’s looking bad and we’ve lost six feet.
But here’s the news, we could build it back
And I heard about farmers with a plan for that.
So I paid one a visit, we sat to chat ‘n that
one cup of coffee set me on a whole new track. - I went to no-till, let the soil be still.
I quit fighting what’s on my side.
Then it was cover crop, covered every bare spot
with the armor of a thick green hide.
And when the fields turned into gaudy buffet
I put new ways to graze in place.
Now I’m working with nature, “Halleluya!”
The dirt’s coming back, back to soil. - I keep living roots, year round living in the soil
Pulling carbon out of the sky.
They pull it down underground, then it’s shot right out
To feed the little microbes, mycorrhizal fungi.
[x] I make ’em happy, and they send back
all the nutrients that I was paying money for.
I’m building back black. “Halleluya!”
The dirt’s coming back, back to soil. - It takes a lotta swag, to buck big ag
Still farm and keep the family fed.
You gotta first find a mentor that you respect
You study mother nature, and scratch your head.
I made a lotta mistakes as I was changing things
But one day I noticed all the rain soaked in.
Best of all, my money stopped eroding
all the way to the Gulf of Monsanto. - And its joy, joy, there’s a certain kind of joy
I feel when I’m down on my knees.
Joy, joy, when I grab a chunk of soil
And it crumbles like cottage cheese.
I know I’m on the right track, standing near
‘Cause it smells like a good cup of coffee.
Here’s a little cup for you. Halleluya!
One sip and I think you’ll see
Why the soil’s got me singing, “Halleluya!”
One sip and I think you’ll see
Why the soil’s got me singing, “Halleluya!”
The dirt’s coming back, back to soil.
The dead dirt’s coming back. | Here’s a little cup for you.
I hope you like it black.
You gotta admit – there’s probably not another song in the word with the words “mycorrhizal fungi” in the lyrics! But why not treat yourself and go to www.brethesla.com and listen to the songs yourself?
Day 2
After an introduction by Fields of Sinsinawa chairman, Tony Peirick, we got centered with reflections from Sisters Julie Schwab and Sheila Fitzgerald. Sister Julie set the tone with a deeply moving welcome:
“Tony has thanked us for coming here, and I’m inviting us to be here, in this moment, in the beauty of this place, with the opportunity to be with this combination of people that will never happen again. We can, if we are so inclined, acknowledge this as a blessing.
“I also invite us to bring to this space the same intentions of finding the sacred that we bring to the mosque on Friday, the synagogue on Saturday, or the church on Sunday.
“With that, may we cultivate connection rather than separation, promote diversity rather than conformity, and aggregate love rather than contention. When we do this, we align ourselves with the sacred. This is our work. This is the work of Fields of Sinsinawa.
“So, when we kneel in the mosque, temple, church, forest, or field, may we find awe and wonder in that hallowed ground. After all, said Henry David Thoreau, ‘Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.’”
Sister Sheila then reflected on why the conference was called ‘Soul of the Soil,’ saying, “You have soul. I have soul. All things have soul. Soul is what allows life to flourish. Soil is life. Fields of Sinsinawa is about nurturing the soul of the soil. We know this is sacred work. In tending to soil we are tending to life.”
She wrapped up her piece with an appeal: “We invite you to join Fields of Sinsinawa and help connect the ‘U’ of ‘soul’ to the ‘I’ of ‘soil’ –you and I, intertwined.”
It was a very moving way to begin the day!
We then watched a short video about David Brandt, whose vision for a farmer-led learning center at the Mound was the impetus for launching Fields of Sinsinawa. The video, shared by Dave’s son, Jay Brandt, was from the Ohio Agricultural Council, which inducted Brandt into its Hall of Fame earlier this year.
Finally, our featured speakers had their chance to shine. Below are some lessons learned from the talks.
Dawn & Grant Breitkreutz: Manage for What You Want
As former conventional crop and cow/calf operators, Dawn and Grant Breitkreutz now call themselves “farmers of life for life” and run a multi-enterprise family farm in Redwood Falls, MN. Among other topics, they explained how they used animal integration and cover crops to heal their soil, extend their grazing season.
As an example, they showed photos of a field on a rocky slope along the Minnesota River, ground that got broken up before the 1985 Farm Bill but was unsuitable for farming. “It should never have been broken up,” Grant said. “But it had been farmed for a lot of years – probably more than 100 as far as we could tell — before we put it back to pasture.”
He explained that once he and Dawn gave up on growing corn, wheat, and soybeans on that ground, they seeded it to alfalfa.
“We figured if we could get two hay cuttings a year off this poor piece of land, we would be happy with that,” he said. “And as I was learning about grazing management, one thing I learned was to manage for what you want. Obviously, we wanted grasses to grow there. So, we would graze the alfalfa, but we could see the grasses coming underneath the alfalfa. Nothing was seeded out there – the latent seed bank was coming back.”
To encourage the grasses to flourish, Grant said they made sure the cows never took more than one bite off the grass before they were moved. Seven years later, they had a beautifully renovated pasture that is one of their highest producing fields on their operation.
“If we were to do this again, I would introduce seed,” Grant said. “But I wanted to prove we could do it. And we did it. And the land went front yellow clay sand to really, really rich soil.”
Adam Lasch: Biological Capital and the Young Farmer
As a first-generation, younger farmer, Adam Lasch, who farms with his wife, Betsy, near Lake Geneva, WI, is worried about the future of agriculture. Sharing demographic trends, market and land price statistics, and socio-economic realities, he highlighted several key points: About two-thirds of U.S. farmers are over the age of 55, they hold a huge amount of land and wealth, and the younger generation is struggling to get a foothold in today’s ag economy.
Looking back on the post-1980s world, Lasch points out that a multitude of factors helped today’s older farmers get established, take advantage of Federal Reserve cost of capital manipulations, and come out ahead.
“I’m not saying it wasn’t hard, that it wasn’t stressful,” Lasch says. “But this has worked. And I don’t know if it’s going to work for my generation. They’re not making any more land. Land prices only go up.”
His comments underscored the fact that farmers who want to take care of the soil while also raising their crops are in a challenging position. Why? Because modern agriculture doesn’t reward biologically driven systems, what he calls “biological capital.”
“One thing we never talk about is biological capital. It doesn’t show up on the balance sheet,” he says. “And as a young producer, it absolutely matters to my operation. It helps produce a crop in tough times. It makes me a little more resilient. Maybe I can farm another year.”
But Lasch has some ideas about how to level the playing field a bit. Watch his full presentation for his suggestions on how we can support the success of younger farmers and those who want to be good stewards of the land.
William Thiele: Cover Crop “Twofer”
Necessity is the mother of invention, as the old saying goes. But when the result turns out great, why complain?
William Thiele, who operates a dairy farm with his family in Butler County, PA, wasn’t complaining when he shared details about a time when necessity turned into a surprisingly positive practice, what he called a ‘cover crop twofer.’
He explained that it was 2020 and the season had been very dry. “We had very little hay, to the point that we thought we needed to buy some or do something different,” Thiele says.
It was mid- to late-October and they had a cover crop growing, containing forage oats, buckwheat, sunflowers, radishes, and several other species, all of which was about knee-high. They had grown the cover crop simply for ground cover to help combat erosion on their hilly ground but asked their dairy nutritionist if he thought it would make good feed.
“We said, ‘You know, there’s a cover crop out there. What do you think about mowing it and wrapping it up?’ because we were low on hay and we needed to do something,” Thiele says.
The nutritionist encouraged them to try it and find out what would happen. So, they did. They mowed it, baled it, and wrapped it, then had their dairy nutritionist analyze the forage quality. They were surprised at the results, which showed a very favorable IVDMD (in vitro dry matter digestibility), which came in at 81%, starch, and calories, among others.
“Our nutritionist looked at this and asked, ‘What are you going to feed this for?’, Thiele says. “We told him we were going to feed it to our breeding age heifers and calves.”
But the nutritionist advised they should feed the baled cover crop to their milk cows, which have considerably higher nutritional needs than heifers and calves.
Besides the high-quality nutrition, it turned out the milk cows loved the cover crop bales.
“It was like kids eating candy,” says Thiele.
Since then, they have continued baling their cover crops even when they didn’t need to, getting top-quality milk cow feed plus all the positive soil health benefits – a real cover crop ‘twofer.’
Mobile Livestock Barns Promote Soil Health and the Bottom Line
Zack Smith, the creative force behind the Stock Cropper, has been working on finding ways to scale up animal integration onto crop land. Over the past five years, he has designed and implemented several systems, all of which demonstrate the viability of the Stock Cropper concept, which features strips of cropland alternating with strips of pasture where mobile barns housing grazing livestock pass through.
At the 2024 Soul of the Soil conference, Smith explained the system and shared financial figures that indicate that not only is this system of animal integration good for the soil, it’s also good for the bottom line.
Utilizing the ClusterCluck 5000 as an example, Zack shared the following financials from 2023.
One ClusterCluck 5000 operates on three-quarters of an acre, grazing the same land twice throughout the season. With the single device, he can raise ten hogs, eight lambs or goats, and 300 chickens (150 each in two growth cycles).
The animals raised represent $15,000 per acre of pasture-raised gross revenue. The pasture strips were nestled between strips of corn, which averaged 305 bushels per acre (about 60 bushels per acre more than his conventional corn production).
The protein and crops were raised with 75% less synthetic nutrient inputs than what he uses on his conventional acres. And most importantly, Zack says he’s increasing his biodiversity by a factor of ten.
All of this results in a net profit of $2,200 per acre, which is a far cry from the normal return for corn and soybean acres!
