Speaker 1: Agricultural techniques that have developed in California’s Great Central Valley are some of the most productive in the world. A number of factors including a Mediterranean climate with rain-free summer growing seasons, developed water delivery and infrastructure for irrigation, and advances in productivity technology, have contributed to the phenomenal productivity of the region.
In this video series you will learn about conservation agriculture cropping system alternatives. These principals include minimum soil disturbance; preservation of residues that provide permanent soil cover; diverse crop rotations; use of cover crops; integrated pest management; reliance on precision, highly effective irrigation; and controlled or limited mechanical traffic over agricultural soils. Conservation agriculture aims to achieve profitable and sustainable agricultural systems and improve the livelihoods of farmers while conserving natural resources.
Fritz: I’m Fritz Durst and we are in a local area here called Hungry Hollow, which is 40 miles northwest of Sacramento, and I’m a 5th generation farmer here. My transition into no-till and conservation farming started back when I was in my late teens. The ag depression hit in the late 80s and some used no-till equipment came up at a reasonable price. I leased my own land and I dedicated it to my process.
Garth: My name’s Garth Williams. We are in the middle of a dry land barley field in northern Yolo County. For me it was being I started off farming from scratch, we didn’t have the disk or any of the other equipment your traditional farmer had. As we started buying equipment, we just bought no-till equipment, which included drill and a sprayer for the most part – so no-till just made sense.
Will: No-till is exactly how it sounds. No-till would be to use as minimum amount of soil disturbance as you could afford. That introduces a whole new way of thinking about how to do agriculture.
Fritz: I saw a bumper sticker one time that said “Stop treating your soil like dirt.” That’s kind of been my mantra now is I look and what does my soil need and that’s what we try to do.
Speaker 1: While Durst and Williams are employing a no-till conservation tillage system, other farmers are using minimum tillage as a conservation tillage method.
Alan: Minimum tillage comes underneath the umbrella of conservation tillage. Just less tillage, less expense, and trying to adopt strategies that still give us the same yields.
Monte: Over time, though, as people have gotten used to that, they’re seeing soil quality improvements. They’re seeing actual forage quality improvements, which translates to long term better soil health, long term better herd health in the case of the dairies. Not only is there an immediate cost reduction and profit improvement but there’s long term quality building factors.
Dan: With conservation agricultural systems we’re integrating both soil management and water management practices. One of the things that we’re finding is that by preserving residues on the surface, we’re actually decreasing the amount of evaporation substantially during the season, thereby increasing our water use efficiencies.
Will: You increase that biological diversity, you increase the size of the biology in the system, and that biology then embodies those nutrients and keeps them within a living pool and doesn’t allow them to escape as easily as it would in a more disturbance-based system that revolved around tillage.
Fritz: This crop we’re standing in right here are garbanzo beans – they’re chickpeas. I’m trying to grow my own nitrogen right now. What we have right here are the rhizobacteria that produce nitrogen. These nodules harvest nitrogen out of the air, provide it to the roots of the plant. The plants are then nitrogen-rich, don’t’ need to be fertilized. After the crop matures and dies out there’s residual nitrogen in the soil. These are what I’m shooting for.
Ron: I think it all starts with looking at conservation tillage as objectively as possible. If a farmer is interested in conservation tillage they really need to research it. The other part of it is to go around and find those farmers who are successful in applying conservation tillage practices.
Phil: You have to have the innovative growers out there. You have to have those growers that are willing to stick their neck out and make it work. A lot of people think that the systems are going to work the very first year. It takes several years to get a conservation tillage system really working for you.
Dwayne: In agriculture right now 80% of our inputs are fossil fuel or energy related. In 150 years we won’t have fossil fuels so how are we going to make that transition? You start looking at the California system where it’s just huge inputs of water. Are you going to be able to access that much water 150 years, or 50 years, or 20 years from now? It becomes a real issue.
Monte: I think the biggest limitation that we have is that distance between our ears and being open to change, open to ideas, and experiment and find out what works out on your farm. Because that’s what makes a difference, is what applies to your situation. Test and try, test and try, continually test and try.
Fritz: It would have been easy to give up, move on, do something different, go back to the way I was farming, but if I stopped and looked at the way I was farming, I had lots of failures there with the way I was farming. I had fewer failures with my no-till.
People say “Well what do you mean by failures, Fritz?” Well, failures in the sense that all my soil was washing off my land. Failure in a sense that I couldn’t capture all that rainfall that fell. God would give me 22 inches of rain and 6 inches of that rain ran off. I didn’t realize it but I was living in a world of failure. I’ve now realized it can be a lot better. I challenge other farmers to start to think outside of the box, to think the same way. How can we make that system better?
Speaker 1: This six part video series will show you what’s being done to develop conservation agriculture cropping systems right here in California. Additional information about these innovative conservation agriculture systems is available on the Conservation Agriculture Systems Innovation website.