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1. Farm Foundation’s Meet Your Farmer Podcast with Klaas Martens
45 Plays28 days ago
Farm Foundation’s Meet Your Farmer podcast featured Klaas Martens in season 1, episode 1. Klaas is a third-generation farmer in New York. He operates Martens Farm and Lakeview Organic Grain Mill with his wife Mary Howell Martens and their son Peter. On 1,600 acres, he produces numerous crops, including corn, soybeans, spelt, wheat, einkorn, emmer, triticale, buckwheat, oats, barley, rye, cabbage, dry beans, and hay. He’s been farming since the 1970s and shifted to organic farming in the 90s. Klaas is a Farm Foundation Roundtable Fellow (since 2015) and also serves on the Farm Foundation Board of Directors. He also serves as a mentor in our Young Farmer Accelerator Program.
In this episode, Klaas discusses being the son of immigrant farmers, how his farming practices changed over the years, and one of his favorite things about wheat. He also shares some stories of how he has helped young farmers get into farming and the importance of community.
Video presentation referenced in episode: My Organic Grain Journey with Klaas Maartens (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsR00Y1N6Yg), recorded at the 0Grain 2024 Winter Conference.
Music: "Country Roads" by Sergii Pavkin from Pixabay
Reach us at communication@farmfoundation.org.
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Transcript
Introduction to Meet Your Farmer Podcast
00:00:04
Speaker
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Meet Your Farmer, Farm Foundation's new podcast. I'm your host, Naomi Mijen. If you don't know Farm Foundation, we're a nonprofit located in the Chicago area working to promote understanding at the intersections of agriculture and society. We've been accelerating solutions for agriculture since the 1930s, but this is our first podcast.
Introducing Klaus Martens, Today's Guest
00:00:31
Speaker
The goal of this podcast is to help folks know just a little bit more about American farmers who are producing the food, fuel, and fiber we all use every day.
00:00:43
Speaker
I'm very excited to welcome Klaus Martens to the show. Klaus is a third generation farmer in New York. He operates Martens Farm and Lakeview Organic Grain Mill with his wife Mary Howell Martens and their son Peter.
00:00:57
Speaker
On 1600 acres, he produces numerous crops, including corn, soybeans, spelt, wheat, einkorn, emmer, triticale, bug wheat, oats, barley, rye, cabbage, dry beans, hay, and class will have to let us know what I'm leaving off the list.
00:01:18
Speaker
He's been farming since the 1970s and shifted to organic farming in the 90s. He has been a Farm Foundation Roundtable Fellow since 2015 and also serves on the Farm Foundation Board of Directors. And he also serves as a mentor in our Young Farmer Accelerator Program. Class, welcome to Meet Your Farmer.
Transition to Organic Farming
00:01:40
Speaker
Oh, thank you. I'm excited to be on this program. I think we really need to build a bridge to our urban and non-farming neighbors.
00:01:49
Speaker
this This is a place where agriculture can can learn a few things. I'm excited for this conversation and to get to to learn along with the audience. So from the introduction, did i what did I miss? ah You didn't miss anything. My like family was immigrants and my father actually immigrated as a boy in the late 1920s and came here just as the dust bowl started and I grew up ah here in New York because they lost everything in the West and came East again. okay And our family had a dairy farm and it was a very normal, traditional dairy farm. I went through the land grant ah university system, learned how to farm in the modern way. And I always thought my parents were somewhat backward. They were they were a little slow to adopt technology and I was fast to adopt technology.
00:02:48
Speaker
And I was probably an unlikely candidate to become an organic farmer. And what happened was we were in the 80s, and some of us remember the farm crisis, not very fondly, when agriculture was not doing well, and a lot of farmers were ah struggling. And we started looking for alternatives. And we had a lot of ideas. Most of them were lousy. Most of them didn't work.
00:03:16
Speaker
But in the 90s, we found that there was a demand for organic food. And originally, we assumed, well, of course, this isn't going to work very well, but the prices are so high, let's give it a try. And the one thing we did that really made us set us up for success is we went to our Lane Grant University. We went to Cornell.
00:03:40
Speaker
And we started asking questions about how did farmers do this before we had all of the materials that make modern agriculture. And we also asked other questions, things that we observed in the field. And we found that there was a lot of help. And our land grant university, i I just can't give them enough credit for the help we got from them and the role they played in our success in becoming organic farmers and I would argue that organic farming is not as much, is more a marketing system and a set of how to farm. oh Most of conventional farming and organic farming, if we're using best management practices is the same. It's taking care of our soil, taking care of our livestock and doing things pretty much right. The difference is that we have some tools as organic farmers that we can't use.
00:04:36
Speaker
And we have access to markets that are conventional neighbors and that we didn't have when we were farming conventionally. And I think there are a lot of misconceptions about organic farming on one side. And there are probably a lot of misconceptions about conventional farming. And that the the similarities are a lot bigger and a lot stronger than we think. And the differences are probably a lot less significant than we think. and That's a good point.
00:05:07
Speaker
Well, you have um anticipated a lot of my questions, but um i will I will still loop back
Farm Life and Vocational Training
00:05:14
Speaker
a little bit. And that's a really great ah setup for understanding ah where where you ended up and kind of that overview. So you said that yourre your farm you're you come from um immigrant farmers, dairy farmer. So what was that like being a kid on the farm? Like what what was your childhood like? Our childhood was,
00:05:37
Speaker
based around the seasons, based around hard work, and every day was centered on what the cows needed. and that was And in that way, we were you know very much like all the other farmers on our street. um yeah But there was also a lot of stress, a lot of financial stress. And there there was That was a time in the 60s when I was growing up, was a time of a lot of changes. A lot of new technologies were being adopted and the shape of agriculture was changing. So the the stress of the 80s was not something entirely new. that The farms were getting bigger. Farms were specializing. And not all of those changes were comfortable for the farmers who were there. Now some of us embraced the changes and wanted to be you know wanted to be part of the change.
00:06:32
Speaker
and others resisted him. And I'm sure that's the same in all other communities. And I was one that went through BOAG. I had a really brilliant vocational agriculture teacher who had a tremendous impact on my life that the system of vocational agriculture in school and FFA was another thing that really shaped farming and a place where I was
00:07:01
Speaker
you know I really gained a lot by the education that was available and also the experiences and the leadership training that I got through the vocational agriculture system. Yeah, one thing I've observed from the little that I know of of the people that have been through FFA, for example, is that That it's, it's such a, I wish I had gone through that. It's just the training that they're just so much better prepared to be in the world. I feel beyond egg, just, it's really impressive. The kind of just preparedness.
00:07:36
Speaker
The leadership training that we got was really unique. And you know and it's we keep being told that in the 50s, at least at our high school, there was civics was being taught and a lot of these things were covered. But by the time I was in high school, there was no other curriculum that taught parliamentary procedure or it taught speaking public speaking or some of the other issues, some of the other things that we learned in BOAG class.
00:08:07
Speaker
And today, vocational agriculture in FFA is ah dominated by female farmers. And that's a big change that's happened. I was in the group that voted to allow the first female state officer. That was not even allowed when I started in FFA. So things have really changed since those days. Yeah. Yeah. I i wonder, ah did it feel like a really um consequential decision? it It really did feel like a consequential decision, but it it felt like, why did we have to make this decision? You know, that we gained so much from the skills that the at the time, the first girls who were in FFA contributed. And it really made me wonder why why weren't they invited in before? You know, why didn't they have access to the leadership training?
00:09:07
Speaker
But it it was a decision that was made and it was a very good decision that has paid big dividends since then. Excellent. um So I'm still going to pick on the thread of of childhood and kind of early those early career decisions. So it sounded like. Well, you tell me, did you did you always want to be a farmer? Was that always that was always the path that was? Yeah, I kind of knew that I would be a farmer.
00:09:37
Speaker
My father didn't. My father actually said that he very much pushed me to get a good education and then decide if I wanted to be a farmer. Oh, he didn't know if he wanted you to be a farmer. Right. Okay. He also wanted me to have options. and He really stressed education. And he had had he had not had more than six years of education himself. And I think he saw the need that You know, as an immigrant, he had to go to work very early, but he saw that the opportunity that his kids had would be so much better if we took advantage of all the education. And he always said, get all the education you can before you start.
00:10:24
Speaker
that's That's good advice um ah for anyone. So one thing that I've um learned as I've worked here at Farm Foundation ah is that when you meet a farmer they will always tell you what generation farmer they are. So I'm curious about that because other there are other you know professions where you know their dad is a lawyer and they they might be a lawyer, but I don't i don't hear that too often to say yeah I'm a second generation lawyer. um So I think it's really made me wonder about this generational aspect of farming and why, what what does it mean to you to be a third generation farmer?
Young Urban Farmers and Their Challenges
00:11:06
Speaker
It's actually part of our identity. And it's it's a really interesting question because I don't know of any other occupation where your identity is so tied up
00:11:18
Speaker
in your family's business, you not not as much as in agriculture. And maybe part of it has to do with the difficulty in acquiring land. you i'm I'm finding that today being a farmer is a privilege. Not everybody has that chance. And I'm also seeing us at a crossroads in that way because a lot of farms don't have a new generation. you know We've got a lot of farmers that are aging out.
00:11:48
Speaker
And we have a lot of farmers, children who took what my father's advice was and got all the education they could and found a job that paid better and aren't doing what the previous generation did. That said, what we're seeing here in the East, I think is ah is a major sea change. We have got hundreds of young people who want to be farmers who came from from the city and that's You know, this is this is one of the big social changes in trends that's going on. If you look at the Hudson Valley, for instance, which is the eastern part of New York, there are just a handful of traditional farmers. Most farmers didn't need an exit plan because their farms were worth a fortune for development. no There was so much money coming up from the city wanting to buy land.
00:12:43
Speaker
that any farmer when they retired, their kids couldn't even afford to buy their farms. ive A few of my friends who I was in college with who went, who came from the Hudson Valley were able to sell a small farm and come to the western part of the state and buy a big farm. with the But what is happening in the east now is there are land trusts, there are investors who moved there because it was agricultural and now are seeing that it's changing and they want to have farms around them.
00:13:14
Speaker
And we've got this generation of young people who came from all different walks and have discovered that they want to be farmers. And to me, this is a really new area to be in. a lot Traditionally, we learned how to farm from our parents. This was part of our identity.
00:13:33
Speaker
you know that you you knew how to milk a cow if you grew up on a dairy farm. at just There was no such thing as you don't know how. But yet for these people who this is new to, they're they're having to learn a lot of things that some of us took for granted as basic knowledge. And there are programs, for instance, this the Stone Barns program, which is on the Rockefeller estate, has an annual conference for young farmers.
00:14:03
Speaker
where they're actually teaching basic skills of farming and basic information. And these programs are filled up before there before the number of people who want to go there are all are all signed up. People are waiting in line and waiting until next year to participate in this. And this is a big change.
00:14:26
Speaker
and So there's something that I hadn't thought about this before, but of those farmers coming in who are going through these programs and of course are going to get a whole wealth of ah of knowledge, ah they're still going to have to go through the school of hard knocks to kind of, you know, get their feet under themselves. But there's they're missing, they're going to be missing so much that you just learn through observation, casual observation. Like you weren't you didn't even realize you were learning it as you were learning it, growing up along your dad and the people farming on your farm. And I just had never before this moment thought about that gap, that what that intrinsic knowledge that's being lost um because they don't have that ah ability to you know grow up with a farmer.
00:15:15
Speaker
Yes, you're you're absolutely right. Now that said, these young people who have decided from all different other areas that they want to become farmers have such an intense interest that they're somewhat making up for it because this they're so excited about choosing farming as a new career. But they also are having to be very creative in getting this basic knowledge.
00:15:41
Speaker
And they they take their hard knocks for not having had what I took for granted that was given to me you know in growing up on a farm. We've actually started a couple of young people on our farm. And we're in the process of selling a small piece of our farm to a dairy farmer, young couple. ah One day he was a rising star in Walgreens managing a chain of drugstores. Oh, wow.
00:16:09
Speaker
He had a very good job and one day he said, I'm done. I'm not gonna do this anymore. And he walked out, quit a very good paying job. oh A week later, I gave him a chance to milk cows in our dairy. But dairy is was a small part of our operation at that point. We had a very diversified farm and he was hooked. yeah After milking cows one night, he wanted to be there the next morning.
00:16:39
Speaker
And he and his wife both loved doing it. And yeah they they became dairy farmers. And it was a little bit, sometimes a little bit amusing and sometimes it was stressful because they had to learn so many things so fast, but they had such a positive attitude toward it that they more than made up with enthusiasm. And having access to neighbors,
00:17:05
Speaker
And they they made their opportunities to learn so that I offered to help, but it didn't take them very long. And they had suddenly gotten to know all of the neighbors who had dairies. And they were checking if everybody told them the same story. you know Not everybody had the same attitudes and opinions about the right way to take care of a cow that I did. But they they were going out and getting that knowledge, getting that experience anywhere they could.
00:17:34
Speaker
that's that's fast How were you connected with them? were they it Some things are meant to be, I think. yeah because that We had a ah young man who was working with my son, who knew this this young couple, knew that he had just quit his job and said, well, there's there's an opening at this farm because we had just had somebody quit who was working there. So we had one of those crises that happens where I'm suddenly a dairy farmer and happy.
00:18:04
Speaker
Yeah, I had to be there and make sure those cows got milk because I didn't have anyone doing it. Yeah. So the two, it all fit. Okay. And hey it was amazing how quick he went from unemployed to wanting to be there for any milk. That's a, that's a great story. That's a great like origin story for a dairy goodness. Not all of them are that I work that smoothly over that. But that this puts a new generation on the farm. yeah And this this is the a group of farmers who we're not really aware of, especially in the Midwest. i I feel like we're kind of on the edge. We're in Western New York. It's very much like Midwestern farming, but we're also close enough to the city that we see this trend and we see this problem of who's going to farm the land. And it's amazing that there are people stepping up and saying, I'll do it.
Farm Diversification and Biodiversity Benefits
00:19:04
Speaker
thank
00:19:06
Speaker
So you you grow a lot of different ah grains and vegetables. And ah i I don't know that I properly got the whole list of everything. Did you always grow that wide diversity of of um food? Well, part of my ah younger experience was that my parents had a more diverse system than our neighbors did because older farms, older farmers, at least in our area, had a wider range of crops. You know, the farms in our area were traditionally quite diversified in this modernization of agriculture and the of increasing of size and the consolidation included a lot of specialization. You know, where dairy farms went to just growing forages, many of them.
00:19:59
Speaker
you know and having a lot more cows and grain farms grew a lot more grain but tended to just grow the program crops. So I had this more diversity and in my experience when I was younger, I got rid of the diversity as we modernized the farm. But what I had learned in my early years of organic farming and what we learned with our work at the university, with Cornell University helping us was that a lot of the pesticides and fertilizers we use are being used to support monoculture. And that's not right or wrong. That's just the way it works. And because of our farm program being the way it is, it rewards the monoculture. So in order to grow corn more than one year in a row, we we have to be putting nitrogen on.
00:20:51
Speaker
But when I was younger, my father always would plant his corn after either an alfalfa field that was plowed down or a clover field that was plowed down. He supplied nitrogen from legumes. What I've found as I've been farming organically more is as we lose some of the tools that we were used to using, we we can actually use new tools and the new tools have to do with biodiversity.
00:21:17
Speaker
and the the problems of agriculture are much more predictable and less random than they appear to be. so that when we were back to only growing corn after a heavy legume crop, because that's the only spot in the rotation where there's enough nitrogen not to have nitrogen be a yield limiting factor. who We found, and and actually all of New York found, for instance, that dry bean yields started to collapse in our state. We were growing too many dry beans, too many legumes on our farms, and we started having a disease complex and nematode complex move in.
00:21:54
Speaker
ah We found that if we have more brassicas in our system, it kills those disease organisms and we end up with less pressure. so we've had to In order to farm successfully organically, we had to use intellectual inputs in the place of some of the synthetic inputs, some of the off-farm inputs. We actually had to diversify our system in order to maintain a healthy soil.
00:22:22
Speaker
that would allow us to grow crops without some of the aids that we were used to having. So the system kept diversifying. as we you know As we were dealing with our agronomic problems, we kept learning why that diversity used to be there and having to use that tool more heavily than we used to.
00:22:45
Speaker
is Is your farm more diverse than your parents farm was or your neighbors growing up or or is that the kind of diversity that would have been, that level of diversity that would have been kind of normal? We're actually a little more diverse now because the university has taught us some things that made us want to add even more diversity. We've actually gained some we've gained some things.
00:23:10
Speaker
okay A quick example on that is by diversifying our dry bean system, we were we actually doubled our yields. The improved soil health that we got from a more biodiversity and ah and it's not just having diversity for diversity's sake, but having crops having the correct crops in the right slot in the crop sequence was providing was actually producing soil health benefits and agronomic benefits to our crops that raised our yields.
00:23:42
Speaker
susan So it's it's not just that we're trying to have more crops. like's not That's not the right reason for it. It's just as science is moving ahead, it's telling us that there are advantages to having this this higher diversity, but it it's a focused diversity. So that reason, we're more diverse than our parents were. We also understand why the farming systems why we're doing what we're doing better. It's not just because this is what everybody does or what we've always done, but we're doing it for reasons that have been validated and that we understand better.
00:24:19
Speaker
When I was um trying to prepare a little bit for this conversation, I i came across a really fantastic um presentation that you gave back in March. And I and i haven't watched the whole thing. But um in the beginning, you you said something that just I found interesting. um You talked about how you you know you go off to college and you get your your degree and you know you know the right way to do things. um you know, in your young mind, and you come back to the farm and you're you're farming with this, this this new way, um the
00:24:53
Speaker
the the site the scientific kind of um strategies that you learned. And the way you said it was that your your mother said like she allowed you to use she allowed you to use the chemicals, but as long as you kept good records and and were observant as to what was happening. um And I thought that was fascinating. like It made me wonder, um ah what did did she Did she kind of expect that that strategy was was not going to be successful and she was just going to let you learn it on your own? Or um that was just kind of how you know farmers are meticulous and careful and they are ah scientists in the field and and doing experiments all the time. like It just was an interesting dynamic. She's like, I'll let you do this, but keep track of how it impacts stuff.
00:25:49
Speaker
Well, that was one of the best things she ever did. The problem was I didn't own the farm. My parents were still owning the farm. And I think i think she was relatively optimistic about the new practices, but this was just good management. And she was uncomfortable with a lot of change without good observation.
00:26:14
Speaker
So this peasant wisdom says you keep good records, you evaluate what you do, and you see to it that that money you spent was well spent. And that really did help me. And obviously she was right. wrote the cheese <unk> This is another piece of this multi-generational farm. I would define her in in a group that we used to call iron grandmothers.
00:26:43
Speaker
And it's probably on English farms too, but German immigrants, the grandmother has a very powerful position in the family. And and she just, she occupied that position. It was kind of a break on. and It was a break on too much progress. it It was, you know, any progress we made, she wanted it to be solidly researched.
00:27:08
Speaker
well-documented. She kept unbelievable records. We found, since she's passed away, we found records of every calf that's been born on the farm in the last hundred years. Wow. quite a hundred years yet, but it's it's amazing the things that she kept records of. yeah and Really neat handwriting, all in German. Wow. That's special. I hope I'm sure they're well well um preserved somewhere, those records.
00:27:35
Speaker
Yeah, and these and I think this this is part of this family structure of a traditional farm.
Community Support and Sharing Practices
00:27:40
Speaker
the These traditional farms were multi-generational. They were an education system. you know There were a lot of characteristics to these farms that made them strong, made them resilient, made them able to survive stress. Yeah. So ah you and you've kind of talked a little bit to this um and some of the other things that you've been talking about. But I'm wondering, what do you What does your farm mean ah for your community, for your ah for the surrounding area, like the community as a physical environment, the your surrounding area, and also the people? you know the people and We feel that we're part of a community of farmers. And we need our neighbors. We want our neighbors to succeed. And they need us.
00:28:32
Speaker
And it's, it's one of those situations where we all do better when we all do better. So just to illustrate that, we had a disastrous fire here in the fall of 2017. Uh, we, we had an old barn that we added on to, added on to and added on to until it covered a half acre. And, uh, late one night there were flash flashing lights outside and my wife checked what was going on and yelled the barns on fire.
00:29:03
Speaker
and we had a million dollar blaze plus it completely leveled our main barn. ah We had more than a hundred neighbors stayed up all night in addition to the fire department. ah We saved almost all the animals. wow The next morning this place was a mess and one of our neighbors said we've got this, you've got farming to do.
00:29:32
Speaker
They cleaned up the mess. A month later, a new barn stood there. Oh, wow. ah There were 200 men on the roof one at one point.
00:29:45
Speaker
ah This is an heavily an old order Mennonite community, okay which is part you know part of that system. But there was the idea that if it happens to one of us, we've all got your back. And if it happens to us, you're going to be there for us.
00:30:03
Speaker
And of course that took what could have been a really devastating disaster. And it still was, but it sure made a difference to have the support of our neighbors right when we needed it. Yeah, to know you're not alone. Yeah. Wow. Yes.
00:30:20
Speaker
and And it was really powerful to be told. Our next door neighbor, who had been a builder, took over the building. He consulted with me every day as to what needed to be built or how it needed to look. But he organized all the different people to get the job done. And they organized the barn raising. And ah the barn that they built was 186 feet long and 120 feet wide. What?
00:30:49
Speaker
It was a lot nicer than the one that it burned down. It was the same size, but it was much nicer. Wow. You must be a very good neighbor. Well, we try to be part of a community. you know and that's I think one of the risks we have with the extreme competition that sometimes sets in is it's hard to be a neighbor to someone who's your takeover candidate.
00:31:17
Speaker
you know And this this feeling of wanting our neighbors to be successful and them wanting us to be successful is really important and needs to be guarded. he Along with this is teaching. So when we have something that works, we share it widely. you know When the neighbors have something that works, they share it widely.
00:31:39
Speaker
And again, it it's for the we end up it looks like it's silly to give away it something that made you a little more successful or gave you an edge. But when we all do it, we all benefit you know and we all come out ahead. So so a lot of the agronomic things that I learned farming organically are being applied on the conventional farms up and down the road. They don't use organic certification.
00:32:04
Speaker
but they've started growing cover crops on all of their farm, on all of their fields. Because it worked, it made them more successful. When the soil health movement started, they were already doing a lot of this. Because they they saw it it worked on your farm and they could trust. Yes, and they talked to us about it. And you know then a few of them would try it. And then pretty soon there there were other ones because it worked. ah One good example of this was the corn silage.
00:32:34
Speaker
Corn silage is a very high yielding crop, but we were following it with triticale and ryegrass or triticale and winter peas as a winter crop. and They noticed that the corn silage yield was the same, but the triticale yield was almost as high as the corn silage yield. with they were getting a double They were actually getting twice as much production. and Their soil was better because it was being it was covered all winter.
00:33:02
Speaker
who the erosion rates went down and you can't let a neighbor get ahead of you. If you see somebody getting twice the yield, well, pretty soon everybody's out there doing that. yeah so so theres you know Things that have worked have spread from one farm to another. yeah Another example, and it it wasn't me that did it, but there was One of our older Mennonite neighbors was looking at the erosion on his farm. He had fairly steep slopes and he said, you know, I can afford to lose that soil that my grandkids can't. And he started doing some really interesting work with no-till on a soil type where no-till had caused bankruptcies in the past and where it was not very successful. It was very difficult. and He figured out a system that worked. And you see that spreading rapidly from farm to farm.
00:33:56
Speaker
That's awesome. We end up with a much stronger, more resilient community through that sharing of information. Exactly. Exactly. It also helps with the relationship between organic farmers and conventional. There are a lot of organic farmers in our area, partly because of our markets, because we've been very successful in doing it.
00:34:17
Speaker
But we really don't see an us and them at all. And we're quick. If we see a practice that we can use, that we can borrow from our no-till neighbors or our other conventional neighbors, they'll they'll be happy to help us learn how they're doing it and adapt it. And if they see something that we do, we're the same way. So we really really are seeing this more as a marketing tool that I'm able to use.
00:34:44
Speaker
But the farming practices are things that we share widely. Everything that works well, you see catching on and spreading very rapidly. That's fantastic. One of the questions that I had prepared, but I don't know if if we've already answered it, like, is there a thing you you do so much that's wonderful on your farm? Is there one particular thing that you are like, especially proud of having achieved?
00:35:12
Speaker
Well, the most recent one, there have been a fair number of them. But we we noticed that because our seasons are longer, the climate's been changing. and Our season is actually six weeks longer now than it was when I graduated from high school. Really? Frost free season. Yeah. And our wheat is ripe at about two to three weeks earlier.
00:35:36
Speaker
Buckwheat used to be a minor crop in the area, but it was always planted very late. and You could count on a frost to finish it because it's an indeterminate plant that doesn't ripen uniformly. It needed a frost to finish it. the Buckwheat had stopped growing because our seasons were long enough that the buckwheat wasn't being ripened by the frost.
00:35:55
Speaker
Also, because it was such a short season crop, it really made no sense to use it on your land when you could grow more profitable crops that produced higher yields. But I noticed that our wheat just was coming off early enough so that it's when we used to plant buckwheat. So I had the idea, why don't we double crop buckwheat after wheat? And buckwheat doesn't need tillage. Buckwheat controls its own weeds. It doesn't need any herbicides because it ah it seems to outcompete the weeds. And the buckwheat roots loosen the soil.
00:36:27
Speaker
I noticed this spring we started doing that and it worked. It actually got rid of some of our pest problems. We were able to get rid of a few major weeds because of the change in our system by adding adding diversity to it, adding buckwheat at the critical point.
Innovative Farming Techniques
00:36:42
Speaker
Things like quackgrass went away. In fact, the old farmers used to plant buckwheat if they had a quackgrass problem because it would make it go away. Well, this was a side benefit of adding adding a second crop after our wheat. Also, because the buckwheat loosened the soil, it really set it up set up no till to work better. We were able to plant another crop without tillage, and able to follow that with a fall cover without tillage. That saves a lot of money. okay But there it must be a thousand thousands of acres of buckwheat now being grown again in an area where the crop had stopped, but it's all being used as a double crop.
00:37:24
Speaker
So can we do a little bit of AG 101 kind of definition for for the people that might not know? What does that mean, a double crop? So a double crop means that we're growing two full crops and harvesting them in the same year instead of one. So corn would be a single crop. And as our season got longer, we were able to grow longer season corn, which has more yield potential. But wheat is normally harvested in the summer. And because as the season got longer,
00:37:53
Speaker
there was time to grow another crop. If you moved a little further south, wheat would be harvested and soybeans would be planted after the wheat so that they would harvest two crops. And there's a common crop sequence in the southeast where they'll harvest wheat and then harvest and plant soybeans and harvest soybeans. And then the next year they'll grow corn. So they'll harvest three crops in two years.
00:38:18
Speaker
We're right on the edge of being able to do that, but the soybeans take kind of a yield penalty if we if we do it here because we're so far north. But we are able to get a full yield of buckwheat. We're able to get a full yield of wheat. We're able to do the three crafts in ah in a two-year period here by using buckwheat as the third crop. But we're also getting so many soil health and agronomic benefits that help the rest of the farming system.
00:38:45
Speaker
that adding this extra crop, it it's pretty much all gravy. The the profit we make on the buckwheat is actually enhancing the profits we make on our other crops. And it's helping our local mill who used to buy buckwheat locally and then started bringing it in from further and further away. Then there were back-to-back crop failures in Manitoba where they'd been buying it.
00:39:07
Speaker
and they discovered that it really makes sense to have some local supply. This was about the time I was working on double and the double crop system. So they encouraged farmers to do it. and They actually got a grant from New York State that helped subsidize some of the seed, but that practice took over.
00:39:27
Speaker
you know It just suddenly it became the standard practice where nobody had done it before. and It also brought a crop back in where with the old niche where that crop used to fit was gone because the climate had changed, but a new niche had opened up. and I feel really proud to have identified the opportunity, you know worked out the systems. Again, back to Cornell. Cornell got a grant.
00:39:51
Speaker
and did some research telling us what the best seeding rates were, what the best management practices were for doing this as a double crop, which made the farmers who adopted the practice more successful because they were able to build on solid university research on production methods. they were able you know They didn't have to figure this out by trial and error because they were able to build on something, some work that was already done.
00:40:20
Speaker
Thank you. Thank you for that. This is a small question, but what is your favorite like geeky thing about something that you produce? Like one little strange scientific fact or just some little quirk or I don't know, something that only like a real insider thing. I don't get a lot of those. What interesting one for me is sweet in general.
00:40:48
Speaker
We look, wheat is wheat. you know you You grow it, you make flour. But we have an opportunity here, because we're so close to really good high-end markets, we've been able to market wheat for flavor. So we found some varieties that have special baking qualities and that have especially good flavor. And I found that the flavor in wheat is largely in the brand.
00:41:13
Speaker
and ah Ironically, ah the brand in most wheat varieties doesn't taste good, which is why people eat quite flour. Doctors are telling us that we should be eating more wheat brand to be healthy. So the geeky thing is if we eat if we can choose varieties that taste better, we're actually getting brand that we want to eat. So we can be healthy and and still eat and and eat something that tastes better.
Marketing Specialty Wheat
00:41:42
Speaker
Is the brand the part that's like the multi flavor? Yes. And it's the part that we take off. It's where the fiber is. It's where a lot of the vitamins and the extra nutrition is. And the doctors are all scolding us saying you need to eat whole wheat. So so what's your favorite wheat for the taste? the The variety that I like best is called Reynan. In France, it's considered the standard of comparison for artisan bread bakers. But in in this variety was bread in France, and it's hard to grow there now because their soil health is not quite good enough. They're having disease issues in it. And we found that this is another benefit to our very diverse system of improving soil health makes us able to grow rain on and our farm without having the disease issues.
00:42:38
Speaker
Is this something where I have to like come to your farm to get it or is it available outside of your farm? That's a really great question. Boy, I'm a shameless salesman here. Well, I'm married to a baker, so he's going to want to know. Oh, well, my son has my son actually set up a a second business. He's running the farm now, but he set up a grain cleaning business and he markets rain on wheat in bags.
00:43:08
Speaker
that artisan bakers are buying from him, but he also sells a vast amount to Wegmans market. And Wegmans, you've made a deal where there's a local flour mill. It's a small, very high quality mill in in the village of Pennian, which is one of the few mills that survived through the consolidation. And they are producing the high end certified organic artisan wheat flour that Wegmans puts in there.
00:43:37
Speaker
high-end artisan breads. this is This is the insider tip that I'm here for. Yes. We do the same with einkorn, which is an ancient wheat. and we do um you know By having this extra cleaning capacity and being able to produce a very clean product, we're supplying a lot of these artisan millers and other specialties, but it's because Wegmans had enough interest to want to have something really special. So I'm going to ask you one last question because my time is running out. um When you think about your great grandchildren, if you, you know, I don't know what your grandchild situation is, but in in the generation of your great grandchildren, what would you want them to to know about you as a farmer? Like what are what stories do you want them to be telling about you?
00:44:34
Speaker
That's a tough question. I've never thought about that. I've got three grandchildren right now and there's a good chance that at least part of them want to will want to be farmers. But I hope that they will remember that I was honest and that I helped neighbors and that I left the world a little better place than I found it.
00:45:01
Speaker
there that there would be things that they can look at that are better because of what my wife and I have done when we were here. I think um and think yeah you stand a good chance that they well they will have those those stories and memories. Well, maybe not memories, but stories of you. Well, Klaus, I could keep you here literally all day asking you questions, but I won't do that. So thank you so much for being a guest on Meet Your Farmer.
00:45:31
Speaker
Oh, you're welcome. And thanks to you for listening to this episode of the Meet Your Farmer podcast from Farm Foundation. Be sure to check out the other episodes in this season. If you have recommendations for farmers we should have on the show or have any other feedback, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you.
00:45:51
Speaker
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