How Giant Pumpkin Growing Teaches Crop Yield Secrets

0:01 Hey everybody, welcome to the Green Cover podcast where we have really interesting conversations with some of the top producers and experts in the regenerative community. Join us as we learn together how to regenerate, steward, and share God's creation for future generations.

0:17 You know, when I was a kid, every fall, one of the things that I look forward to was watching the TV show It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown. I don't know if any of you are old enough to remember that or if you're a fan of old TV cartoon shows, but Linus would sit out in this pumpkin patch and he would wait for the great pumpkin to show up. And the great pumpkin was going to bring toys to all the good little boys and girls and he was always disappointed because the great pumpkin never showed up. And so it was just one of those things that we did, as kids. We'd watch that every year. But my guest today, Mr. Joe Alts from Wisconsin, he grows the great pumpkin. And so this is going to be a really fun conversation because Joe is not only an agronomist but also is in the world of competitive pumpkin growing. So Joe, welcome to the podcast.

1:11 Keith, it's an honor to be here. Thank you for asking me to be on the podcast and I am very much looking forward to diving in.

1:16 Yeah, so for sure. So, you know, I'm going to have you give your background here, but one of the things that I really like about what I've learned about you, Joe, and one of the things I think makes you different is that you refuse to sell products. Your product is your information, it's your advice, it's your experience. And I can really appreciate that. And I also like how you are really driven by data. And I know we're going to get into this. You're going to talk about a lot of the data that you've gathered on soybeans and other things as well. And so I appreciate your willingness to push into areas that maybe kind of confront the conventional wisdom coming out of some of our research universities regardless of what state they're from. So I appreciate that fresh perspective that you bring to that and so I'm looking forward to this conversation, but go ahead and start us out by just giving us a little bit of your background. How has Joe gotten to where he's at right now?

2:14 Yeah, sure. Thanks for the question. So I guess it starts way back in the earliest moments of my childhood. My mom was a teenager when she had me, so I spent most of my time in my early youth with my great-grandmother who grew the most amazing vegetable and flower gardens that I can remember. So that's certainly where I got my green thumb, which has also been coupled with insatiable curiosity and certainly a vein of competitiveness as well. So when you take competitiveness and curiosity and a green thumb and you put them into a blender, what you get is the giant pumpkin hobby, which I'm happy to elaborate on. But then I went to school in River Falls here in Wisconsin, got a degree in biotech. I had hoped to go out and become the world's next greatest corn breeder, but my lovely parents gifted my family three acres of land which was kind of their way of saying hey, stick around rural Wisconsin countryside and build a home if you want. Couldn't say no to that. So of course we gladly accepted that gift and we built a home here in 2002 in the rural Wisconsin countryside which also happens to be on our family's farmland. We own 220 acres of farmland that was a 60-cow dairy. Poor grandpa got squeezed out with the interest rates of the '80s. We kept the land, sold the equipment and that's what we got left to work with. But rural Wisconsin here isn't necessarily the cornbread mecca of the world. I would have had to have gone to Iowa to do that. And so I decided to follow a path to justify my college tuition into the medical world of interest. There happened to be a clinical laboratory in our neighborhood where I went to work for the next 13 years before I answered the call back to agriculture. And when I decided to scratch that itch, it was likely to go to work for a seed company. So I did that, ended up becoming an agronomist for a major seed brand. Did that for 14 years. And when we decided to part ways, it was time for me to go and do this independent agronomy thing. So now I'm going on my fourth year as an independent agronomist serving farmers in northwest Wisconsin with a really strong bend towards soil health and regenerative agriculture just because it fits. I don't know. It's hard to describe the point at which I felt like soil health and regenerative agriculture were an inflection in my past. Perhaps it's rooted in the pumpkins where we've been doing a lot of the things in the region space for many, many years but also I just feel it in my bones. This is the right way to farm and when you see the results of that through soil health and increased productivity and even better margins and circumstances you just realize that this is the right thing to do and perhaps I didn't really have an aha moment tied to it. You just know it's the right thing to do.

4:38 Yeah, no, I love that. And you know, in so many of the farmers that you work with, that I work with, that intuition is a real thing. You know instinctively that it's the right thing to do. Sometimes it's not the easy thing to do, but often times easy and right aren't always the same thing. And so, hats off to you for doing that and for helping your clients go down that path as well. So I want to kind of start out by digging into this pumpkin thing because it's just so different than growing corn and beans, which, you know, let's face it, can get kind of boring after a little while. So to grow a 1,500, 2,500 lb.

5:20 Pumpkin is that's just crazy for most people to think about. So talk a little bit about how you got started into that and where this is going. Where do your pumpkins rank according to others in the space?

5:43 Yeah, sure. So as soon as I graduated college I moved back and built a home right away, married my lovely bride and right away started growing pumpkins. I don't really have a strong memory of why giant pumpkins were the thing that hit. It was just one of those things like I'm going to do this, and so I've been growing giant pumpkins competitively since 2002. We're going to go on our 24th growing season here. It's been quite a ride, and over the years have continued to do things in this competitive giant pumpkin space which are very much like what's happening in the regenerative space where we're bringing in various things like cover cropping and biologicals and trying to reduce tillage as much as possible.

6:20 This hobby which I've referred to before is a cult, and I really think it is just because of the way people are so dedicated to the cause. These people at the very top of the echelon in the giant pumpkin world, they're committing almost entire lives to doing this. The more time you invest in it, typically the better the outcome. The same thing absolutely applies to giant pumpkins in the competitive space. The guys who are growing pumpkins that are now approaching 3,000 lbs are almost living in their patches day and night throughout the entirety of the growing season and even in the offseason, they're also spending time researching, going to meetings, having phone calls, doing whatever it takes just to get another edge to put a few more pounds on the upper end of that.

7:06 What it boils down to is a couple of key factors. For anybody that's listening and is interested in how these giant pumpkins get so big, it boils down to a lot of the same things that would apply to row crop production. You got to have the right climate, you got to have the right seed, you got to have the right soil, and a little bit of luck. Take those four ingredients, put those in the blender, and all of a sudden you spit yourself out a thousand pounds, no problem.

7:28 The biggest thing to focus on right out of the gate is, is it a special seed? Absolutely it is. The variety is called Cucumber Maxima, that's genus species, and specifically it's Dills Atlantic Giant. Beyond that, because you can go to the store and buy Dills Atlantic Giant off the store shelf, you're going to hit a 300lb ceiling. If you want to grow the thousand or the 2,000 pounders, you got to get plugged into this cult of competitive growers that once you're inside the cult, they're just going to give you the seed. So it's not that hard to get connected to the right seed.

7:53 You got to know a guy, huh?

7:54 Yeah, you got to know a guy. It helps to know a guy. And so anybody that's interested, you now know a guy. But once you're inside this group who are incredibly generous people, some of the most generous people I've met in the entire ag space or in this giant pumpkin hobby, we love to share secrets. We love to share tactics. We love to share seeds. So once you're in, you're in. You're very well taken care of. And anybody, literally anybody, as long as you're in a decent growing environment with decent soil with a decent climate, can grow a 2,000lb pumpkin. There's no secret to doing this. It's all hard work, determination, and the right ingredients that I just described.

8:27 That's a big pump. That's a lot of pie.

8:31 So maybe talk a little bit about some of the tricks. I don't want to get hung up too much on the pumpkin thing because it's honestly probably not going to apply to everybody, but talk about some of the tips and tricks that you use on the pumpkins and then how those same things apply to your rowcrop clients that you're working with.

8:54 Great question. There's so much more crossover than one would assume at the surface. For people listening going, 'Ah, these pumpkins have nothing to do with my corn soybean production,' I would encourage you to keep listening because there's actually so much more crossover than what you think there is. The neat thing about a pumpkin plant as a vine crop that grows across the ground is that we got to allocate a lot of space. A typical competitive giant pumpkin plant is going to be about a thousand square feet in its footprint. So that's one plant, 1,000 square feet. Our goal is to fill that thousand square feet with as much vegetative biomass as possible because like rowcrops you need to capture as much sunlight as possible, manufacture as much sugar as possible, and then move that sugar into the developing fruit.

9:37 Typically prune off every fruit except for one. You want all of that plant energy focusing on a single fruit. Usually in the upper Midwest where we're growing these things, often times that pumpkin fruit is set on the vine by the middle to the end of June. At the middle to the end of June, a flower opens up. A baby pumpkin about the size of your thumbnail gets pollinated by hand. From there it is off to the races. Let's just call it July 1st for easy math. July 1st, you're starting out at 0 lbs.

10:04 Roughly, and by the time we reach way off season, which is typically the first of October, they will have reached almost 3,000 lb. So do the math on that. You're talking 100 days to go from 0 to 3,000. It is absolutely incredible. It's mindboggling. In fact, you cannot find anything in nature that comes close to that rate of growth in a plant. I mean, there's nothing comparable from a fruitbased perspective. So they're the largest fruit on earth. A giant pumpkin is the largest fruit that God has made. It is the largest.

10:34 When you figure out the ways to kind of manipulate the system to maximize the growth, it becomes really kind of fun. So in that vein, coming back to the way that these pumpkins are laid out, these vine crops will put up a leaf node every 12 in or so. Everywhere, you know, as these vines spread out and fill that thousand square feet, they're going to put up a leaf, it'll put up a leaf, put up a leaf. And so each leaf is going to be about a square foot in size. So if you do the math there again, there's about a thousand leaves in a thousand square foot plant footprint.

11:03 Now, everywhere a leaf comes up, an adventitious root goes down. And so this is where it gets really interesting from a truly competitive standpoint because we know that if we can do something around the point of where a root goes into the ground, that's an inflection point that we've got a lot of control over using tools from our biological toolbox as well as our fertility toolbox. And so one of the concepts that I love to talk about both in this competitive giant pumpkin world as well as rowcrop world is the use of mycorrhizal fungi.

11:28 I personally believe that they are the most important species on the planet. And I guess we can have a debate whether humans are, you know, come up against that, right? That'd be a fun debate to have. But if we set aside humanity, I believe mycorrhizae play perhaps the most significant role on the planet because of how they associate with plants, the function they perform in grabbing nutrients and water and other goodies from the soil profile and bring them into the plant roots, exchange that for carbon or sugar, and ultimately everyone's happy.

11:58 I like to refer to mycorrhizae as the Amazon of the underground. I'm not talking the jungle. I'm talking the retailer, right? You can go on Amazon. You can order whatever you want and they will go and find a manufacturer to bring it to your home. Mycorrhizae do the same exact thing underground. The plant tells mycorrhizae what it needs. The mycorrhizae goes out and find it, exchange it for some sugar currency, and everybody's happy.

12:17 So I think that's an incredible leverage point both in the pumpkin world as well as the rowcrop world. If we can figure out a way to harness the power of these mycorrhizae above and beyond what we're given in native settings or in agricultural settings, that's where I think significant upside can be captured. So back to the story, everywhere an adventitious root goes down, enterprising growers who are spending way more time in the patch than they are with their families probably are going to go out there and they are going to literally spoon feed mycorrhizae and nutrients and compost and other goodies at every single leaf node junction on a giant pumpkin plant.

12:49 Because you're saying at every leaf node, there's a root that goes down right from there. That's exactly right. And times a thousand, right? Because I said there's about a thousand leaves per thousand square foot plant. And so that's part of what we do. We call it burying vines. And so we're going to take a concoction that's usually compost and soil and mycorrhizae and any other goodies you want to add to that mix and we will literally scoop spoonfuls of soil over the top of the vines to encourage that proximal effect of inoculating the root, burying it in very nutritious, fertile soil and compost and encouraging to do whatever that plant can with those resources we provide it.

13:26 So I personally believe that our ability as a hobbyist to take pumpkins from a thousand pounds around the turn of the century, so around 2,000 or so is when they broke the thousand pound barrier, to now up about 3,000 lbs is a function of what we've done at these adventitious roots. And so the tieback to rowcrop agriculture then is what else can we do as manipulators of root zones to help replicate that. Now, obviously, we're not asking farmers to go out and put a scoop of mycorrhizae around the base of every corner soybean plant, but we have ways that we can scale the application of these types of interventions much more efficiently than a pumpkin grower can do out in the pumpkin patch and try to reap those same types of benefits.

14:09 So basically, Joe, what you're saying is that throughout the course of that pumpkin growing, it's putting on 30 more or less 30 lbs a day into that fruit. And the only way it does that, it has to have a huge pump to do that. I mean, that's a lot. And the root system by itself is not going to be enough, but the mycorrhizae magnify that effect and essentially become all these little pumps that are pumping nutrients into the vines that end up in that one single fruit. Is that what you're saying?

14:42 Yeah, you nailed it. You nailed it 100%. And just to give you some more perspective on the rate of growth. The math averages out about 30 lbs a day if you go from 0 to 3,000. However, growers can measure this at nighttime and that's typically when these pumpkins will pack on their weight is during the nighttime hours. There have been many circumstances where they've measured over 60 pounds of growth in a single nighttime. There have come points where the growth is so fast the pumpkin literally explodes.

15:07 It doesn't send projectiles flying through the air, but it does crack and break open. You can hear it go funk and you see these surface fixtures and that unfortunately the pumpkin splits itself open and it's done at that point. You can't repair a broken pumpkin that has outgrew itself. But the rate of growth has been programmed in these things to be so fast that they will literally blow themselves up.

15:27 I didn't learn that on It's a great pumpkin.

15:31 These are the things they keep behind the curtain. They don't want you to know about that.

15:35 Yeah, that's really interesting. And so to think about that, you know, to transfer that to corn, you know, yeah, we can inoculate corn seed. We do it all the time with microisa fungi. And soybeans, same way. Because that's literally doing the same thing. It's increasing the volume of the roots. It's increasing the capacity of the pump to pump that up in there. And we all know how fast corn can grow too under the right conditions. And I would assume you see those same sorts of increases when you have really good biology in a corn field.

16:11 Yeah. And it's been a focal point of my own onfarm research over the last four years. You know, of all the things in the agronomy space that I do, which I think are all quite fascinating. I think the intersection of cover crops and microisal fungi or let's just call it beneficial soil microbes as a broader category is the most exciting space right now that I think I could possibly be in. So it's both an honor and a pleasure and a gift from God to be able to be in this space. But I also think it's the most lucrative for those of us that are in the soil health world on how can we push the boundary further in productivity and soil health.

16:44 And so, yeah, we can absolutely inoculate row crops with these bugs and I think that they will work out for the best. My own research over the last four years has shown that when you use a quality microisal fungi inoculant on beans and corn, you're going to see between a five and seven bushel response. It's going to cost you about a bushel, maybe a bushel and a half to apply these products, and you're going to get 5 to seven back out of it in the right environments. To me, that sounds like a pretty fair exchange, especially in more depleted soils is where we typically see a better response.

17:16 The one circumstance where I found that it just doesn't work is on high phosphorous soils. These are all very simple, straightforward things where you're like, 'Yep, that just makes sense. We know in high phosphorous environments, there's less of an incentive for plants to associate with microisa. Therefore, for the toughest ground that's out there, low depleted tough soil, this is typically where we can see pretty darn good robust responses of inoculating with microisa.'

17:38 Yeah. I like that. And since you brought up cover crops, you know, a favorite topic of ours as well.

17:44 Talk a little bit about the cover crop program that you are using for your pumpkin acres, but then also how you've seen that translate over into, you know, the corn bean, you know, more traditional crop rotation. What have you learned about, you know, what cover crops can do other than, you know, helping with the microisa? What cover crops are you using and what are you hoping to accomplish with them?

18:10 Sure. So when I'm not playing agronomer by day, I'm playing regenerative hobby farmer by nights, evenings, weekends, and holidays. And so what we've been able to do on our little hobby farm, we grow pumpkins and sweet corn. Not just the competitive giants, but also field pumpkins that we sell at the end of our driveway. And so we have three acres that we work with here. And so one acre is always in a pumpkin rotation, one's in a sweet corn rotation, the other one is purely for the sake of building soil health. In fact, I have chosen to not monetize this acre because I see more value in building soil health that it gets expressed in the sweet corn and the pumpkin rotation than I do in trying to monetize that acre. Tough decision to make, but it's one I'm willing to commit to because I've seen the results and it just has paid back so fantastically.

18:52 So you may be asking, well, what do you do with that acre? So in that acre, we have sorghum sudan. It is the most powerful carbon pump that God has designed. If you plant sorghum sudan at the right density inoculated with microisal fungi you are pumping pure carbon into that soil. And so we very intensively manage our sorghum sudan in that rotation to maximize root density and carbon pumping. Now we also grow our pumpkins on rye. So we're establishing cereal rye in the fall to grow our pumpkins on that mat the following year. I would not grow pumpkins without having that cereal rye mat. It's a godsend that we just couldn't do it without it. And so, in addition to that, after sweet corn harvest, we also come in with a multispecies blend and to get as much plant diversity into that soil as possible. And that's been perhaps the most exciting from an observation standpoint is that when you put a multispecies blend following sweet corn, you create an entire brand new ecosystem in and of itself. That ecosystem obviously plant diversity, it's microbial diversity below the ground, and then you've got animal diversity that you don't see elsewhere in the countryside show up as well. Birds, the bees, the butterflies, the other insects that come in and just thrive in this diverse environment. And so then, you know, typically after this multispecies blend following sweet corn is

20:01 Where I'll put the competitive giant pumpkins because I want to set up the best soil scenario for these competitive giants. And having gotten into this trend here in just the last couple years because I figured this out, we've had our best most productive giant pumpkin years when we put that following that multiecies blend. And so you had asked the question earlier, I'm sorry I forgot to ask that. Where does my pumpkin placement land? My personal best giant pumpkin weighed 1,422 lbs. So I'm less than half the world record.

20:27 Why? Well, I got six kids and a busy job. And again, it comes down to time, right? It's a time function. Could I grow a world record pumpkin? Everything says I could do it here with the right luck. Yep. We got the soil, we got the seed, we got the climates. Do I have the time? No. But with the time, I could probably make a run for it. But 1422 lbs, that's still a big pumpkin. I achieved that last year. And so my biggest pumpkin I've ever grown in the best soil environment I've ever created. I think that there that's not coincidence. I think that's by design. By intensively focusing on the value and the health of that soil, we've been able to have a more robust pumpkin harvest as a result of that.

21:02 Do you have do you do extensive soil testing? Are you seeing the organic matter levels? Are you trying to evaluate your aggregate stability? Talk a little bit about how you've seen that soil change.

21:15 Yeah, indeed. So I love measuring these things. And maybe I'll just riff on this a little bit here. So this whole soil health regenerative arena is the wild west, right? We all agree that this is the wild west. There are so many unique opportunities that still remain so undefined. And as an agronomist as well as a regenerative hobbyist, I'm making the statement that we can just go out and measure stuff. Let's just go out and measure things, right? Because nobody has all the answers, but we got just enough inclination that there's something going on here that if we just keep measuring things, we're going to start to see data aggregate in such a way where trends start to emerge, you go, 'Oh, I see that now. That's really cool. We can take action on that.' So that's the big picture aspect of it.

21:52 Here locally on this farm, yes, we are measuring a whole bunch of things. Prior to me taking over these three acres that we were gifted, this was rowcropped very conventionally, full tillage, corn and soybeans. Organic matter stood at 2 and a half percent. Pretty typical for this neighborhood. We have since taken our organic matter to almost 5% using the rotation, the regenerative rotation that we've now implemented. I love to do the infiltration test because I think it's a great indicator for aggregate stability. And I can swallow 6 in of water using the infiltration test in less than 2 and 1/2 minutes and it's thirsty for more. And so it just keeps drinking and drinking and drinking and it's fascinating to watch that.

22:29 If I step across the road to the conventionally farmed corn and soybean rotation that still uses high-speed discs, full tillage, no cover crop, I'll set the infiltration ring out there. I'll pour water in in just an inch of water. After 4 and 1/2 minutes, I picked up and walked away because I got bored. The water level hadn't budged. So all I had to do is step across the road into an entirely different management system. Same soil. It's the same soil class, but the management system is so drastically different that the water just simply won't move. So those are the good indicators I have that we're making a positive impact here.

23:00 Yeah. And think about how that changes your local water cycle. Think about how that affects, you know, local flooding. I mean that it's a symptom of a broken cycle, you know, the across the road, you know, when it's not infiltrating, it's got to go somewhere.

23:14 And so it's running off. And so now you've got erosion, you've got sedimentation, you've got the phosphorous loading of the lakes. Nothing good happens when water does not go into the ground. It's all bad. 100% agree. Yeah.

23:27 Yeah. So it's been really eye opening to see all these things come together, the cover cropping, the biologicals, you know, the minimizing tillage, all the soil health principles minus the animals have really paid off here in such a way that I've now seen it. I've felt it. I've measured it and I can take what I've learned on our little regen hobby farm out to the growers that I consult for and say, 'Yeah, I've really intensified this and probably accelerated it much faster.' You can do in a row crop system. But the fact remains is that we can move the needle in a lifetime. You can move the needle on organic matter. You can move the needle on infiltration. You can move the needle on worm counts. All the things that lead toward and point towards healthy soil. So it's been really satisfying to take those experiences here at the home farm, bring them out into the row crop world and put them into place.

24:12 And so with your with your clients, with your agronomy clients, you know, are they adopting these principles? Are they utilizing cover crops? If so, how does that, you know, fit into their system? Because you know one of the biggest limitations with cover crops is growing season and the further north you go where you're at, that becomes even more of an impediment. So talk about how they're using cover crops and how you're fitting them into the rotations.

24:39 So my grounding consulting business is quite unique in that it covers a true spectrum a three-dimensional or even four-dimensional spectrum of practices and grower philosophies. And so at one end of the spectrum we have traditional NPK full tillage corn soybean rotation not interested in doing anything but so.

24:57 That's a certain segment of my business. On the other end of that spectrum it's full-on regen organic we're doing all the things we're looking for more ideas to do even more things push the boundaries as far as we go and then everything in between. And like a typical distribution, what you're going to find is the peak of the curve is somewhere in the middle where we have traditional row crop guys doing corn soybean rotation that have started to implement some covers, have started to reduce some tillage and are dabbling in some biologicals. That would be the bulk of the business that I consult with. And I enjoy being at every aspect of that spectrum. It's truly fun to be way out on the either side on in the extremes.

25:29 It's also fun to work there in the middle because you blend all that information and observation together and you learn a few things along the way. So here specifically in northwest Wisconsin, we are north of the 45th parallel. So we're closer to the North Pole than we are the equator, which as you mentioned does present some unique challenges in terms of using cover crops. I'm very lucky in that I'm very close in proximity to Baron County, Wisconsin. That holds significance because there is a pocket of farmers there who have been doing cover cropping and minimal tillage for a very long time. Way before I entered the scene. I just got lucky to stumble across this county that happens to be close to home where I can pick up some business doing things with these guys that fall in line with the soil health principles.

26:08 And so here in our neck of the woods, the most common thing we're going to do cover crop wise is push in cereal rye after soybean harvest. And typically soybeans are coming off the very end of September if we're lucky or typically the first two weeks of October, which gives us a very narrow window to establish cereal rye and try to get something green before mother nature throws us into the freezer and we come back out mid to late April. Watch it green up and grow as quickly as it can, terminate it and then punch our crop in. So cereal rye behind soybeans is going to be probably 95 if not more percent of the cover crop rotation that we have in this part of the world. Now there is an increased adoption in small grain production. All that serial rye cover crop seed has to come from somewhere. So we got a number of farms that are growing rye purely for the focus of using it as cover crop seed for their own farms as well as selling it to their neighbors.

26:54 And so that's when things really get fun from an agronomy perspective is that after a small grain comes off, what can we do from a multispecies perspective to really push the boundaries and make some things happen and you know being able to dabble by putting in some legumes and some other families. We've really been able to watch these grounds start to flourish because you've broken these rotations of corn soy corn soy corn soy added a small grain now added a multispecies cover and boy that really lifts the roof off of things in terms of what we see happen and change in the soils.

27:22 Yeah. And I 100% agree. I've been an advocate for, you know, the whole time of, you know, when you when you look at introducing a serial grain into your rotation, you can't just look at the economic impact of that crop that season. You have to look at what it does to, you know, the whole rotation and, you know, how it sets you up for a better corn crop that you can grow cheaper and, you know, less diseases and less fertilizer needed, all those things. And you know, the people that are making it work are the people that are able to understand that that return on investment is not just measured in how many bushels of that wheat crop or that rye crop, but what does it do for the future production? What is it doing for my soil? And so, do you feel like you have to kind of help people think through that or do they kind of naturally get that?

28:14 Yeah, great point. So, yes, we have to help people work through that and see the benefit beyond what's immediately at your fingertips. And so, that it's particularly true for rye as well as wheat. You know, they call it poverty grass for a reason, right? It's just that wheat isn't worth much, especially up here where we're subject to more disease where you have to take hits on the grain quality side. Can't get the protein, we got the vomiting toxin, blah blah blah. So, you're just you're almost walking away at a loss with your wheat production. But when we step back and look at like you alluded to what are the impacts on the corn soy rotation subsequent to that those those impacts are significant significant enough to justify keeping the rotation in.

28:51 In fact Joe Lower was the corn agronomist for Wisconsin for many years. He retired here just a couple seasons ago. I think some of the best work that he did as a UW corn agronomist was study the impacts of these different rotational structures. And what he found is that the corn soy wheat rotation offered significant yield advantage in the corn and soy part of that three-way rotation that you couldn't replicate in a corn soy rotation or a corn corn rotation. There were meaningful bushels to be captured in the corn and soy when you had wheat in the rotation that you simply could not ignore. Did it economically justify the price hit that you take on harvesting wheat? I don't know. Maybe it was close. Maybe it was close to a wash. But that fails to factor in all the other benefits that you can't put a monetary value on, as we've already discussed here, you know, the things like, you know, simply breaking the rotation from a disease standpoint or an insect standpoint and all the soil health things that you get by having that increased window of opportunity to plant something after the wheat that you could not otherwise do.

29:44 Yeah. Because just like within your sweet corn rotation, early harvest, huge opportunity for diversity. You know, you can probably get eight or 10 different plant families in there and that's what really sets the table for big success the following year because of all that diversity. Have you had any luck trying to get cereal rye established into corn and then plant beans into that the next year? Because you know agronomically beans going into the cereal rye is a better fit than corn going into it. But is it a struggle to get that established?

30:20 It really is. Corn harvest in this part of the world is typically mid to late November. And by then we are literally looking at a week or two away from frost if not ground already frozen. It's not uncommon for combines to roll across frozen ground. And so it's been a real challenge. Now we had an incredible season in 24 where everything dried out really fast. And guys got into corn in September and early October and they were buttoned up. And so that was the first time in my experience where they've been able to go back out and put some rye out and get that established. And it worked. It worked great. So coming into the 25 growing season, guys were able to punch soybeans into a rye crop that they would not have otherwise been able to do. So outside of these anomaly situations, which I don't think are going to continue to keep popping up, we have to get more creative about establishing covers in the corn. There are some work being done at interceding at the early stages, V3, V4ish. I don't have any personal experience with that, but I know others in the state of Wisconsin have dabbled with doing so and they've done so successfully. Likewise, we are looking at using drones to fly rye into standing corn in early to mid-September. And so long as you can pick up at least one rain after that seed hits the ground, usually you can get a respectable stand that justifies having done that. However, if it's a growing season like 23 where we burned up so bad and just did not have any moisture in the harvest arena, any rye that hit the ground just sat there and it didn't amount to much. Now granted, rye being the bulletproof cover crop that it is will find a way to come back and grow that following spring, but by that time you've given up, you know, half of the potential life that it could have done its work on. And you really have to question the validity of it then. But yeah, we're going to keep trying. We're up to the challenge of we want covers to go into corn because, you know, the for the guys that are doing this, they see the value that it brings. They want to have a living cover there after every crop. It's just we have to be more creative in how we get it established in corn because of its longer growth cycle.

32:08 Yeah. And I know Joe from other talks that I've heard you do, you're a big proponent of early planted, early maturity soybeans. Talk a little bit about how that fits into the rotation and what opportunities that opens up for the rest of the rotation as it relates to soil health.

32:28 So the topic you're alluding to was perhaps the most significant thing that I stumbled across in all of my measurement and data dives in the agronomy space. So it's really exciting for me to be able to share this because I don't really see that others have done a lot of work on this and I would encourage others to consider it because if the data that I'm sharing is legitimate, and I think it is, it really opens up a world of opportunity that kind of throws how we go about selecting soybean varieties completely on its head. Especially for those who appreciate having good strong fit covers established that are in the soil health arena. Or for if you're not into covers after soybeans, what if you just want to dip into your corn earlier? Or what if you simply just wanted to go hunting because you don't want to be harvesting crops later on, right? So there's many reasons why you want to consider shifting your harvest schedule earlier in the season. But of course, you don't want to give up yield potential, it because farmers and agronomists alike, we've all been conditioned to believe that fuller maturity, fuller season varieties and hybrids have more yield. That that's just what we've been taught all along the way. I would say that that certainly applies to corn. There is a direct strong relationship between corn relative maturity and yield. And it's three bushels per CRM. I've done the data study here. We know it's three bushels for every day CRM of corn is what you gain by growing longer corn. But when it comes to soybeans, that relationship is not nearly so strong, so bulletproof per se. And so what I did is I went back and I grabbed seven seasons worth of yield measures from plot data in and around the geography in that I operate. And for those that know the region, you know, Green Bay is way over on the east side of Wisconsin. St. Cloud, Minnesota is to the west of me. It encompasses probably 4 to 500 miles of geography north of the Interstate 94. And so I grabbed plot data for that entire data set region and I was looking at soybean data specifically. And what I found when I started to break out soybean yield by planting date as well as soybean yield by relative maturity, I found that when you put those three factors into the number cruncher machine, it showed that these early maturity soybeans were keeping up in their yield potential relative to the fuller season soybean maturities, but only when they're planted early. So let me try to explain that. I don't have my PowerPoint slide to show you here, which would illustrate everything, but I'll do my best to talk you through it. So early planting date for those of us in this neighborhood is going to be the last week in April in the first week of

39:45 Go find that unicorn. You're going to have to reach outside your comfort zone because not a lot of guys are probably growing that 10 bean in that 20 environment. So reach to the north, right? Call somebody to the north, figure out what is the best 10 bean that you have seen in that neighborhood. A seed company at grounds will do this work for you. If you're working with a good seed company guy, they will call their colleagues and say, 'Hey, what's the best one up there?' Then try it out. Put those two next to each other in a field and see what happens. That's how you got to play this game. It's not just, 'Hey, I'm going to select one out of the catalog and hope.' It's I'm going to go find a unicorn in that neighborhood, bring it back to the farm, and see how that performs here.

40:19 I was talking to a customer from western Kansas earlier today and he was talking about a particular variety of corn that they've been using and they in dryland in western Kansas under the right conditions they're seeing 200 bushel yields from planting 12,500 population but it was pretty well limited to this one specific variety which goes to your point that was a unicorn for their area. Now, it may fall on its face if you move it 150 miles east or west, but for that region, that variety was just knocking it out of the park under the right conditions. So you're going to have to do your work. That's really what farming is all about, right? Do the research, collect the data, make the observations, and then ramp it up after you figure out what really works.

41:10 The cool thing about this unicorn hunting is that there's no cost to do that. That's free, right? Because whether you choose a one variety or a two variety, the price per bag is going to be roughly the same, within a couple bucks of each other. It doesn't cost you anything to plant a unicorn. What does it cost you to not plant a unicorn, right? And that applies to every hybrid or variety regardless of what the maturity is. There's so many bushels to be captured just by making the correct seed choices. I realize that's stepping off the path that we're on here, but I think it's relevant to how we do a better job of preserving margin, especially if we're dabbling going down this soil health arena where we're going to have to bring in some new costs. Cover cropping doesn't cost nothing. So where can you make some trade-offs? If you're planting unicorns and you're getting more bushels out of your unicorns, it definitely frees up the budget to do a little bit more neat things like bringing in a biological or planting a new cover crop species. It absolutely ties in and I think it's worth the effort.

42:05 Maybe you're a little too far north for this, and if you're not getting cover crops planted into your corn that beans are going into, this may not apply. But are you familiar at all with some of the work that Aaron Silva with University of Wisconsin has been doing with planting beans into growing rye, bootstage rye, and then rolling it later when the rye is at anthesis and the beans have some growth on them. Have you dabbled in any of that or are you kind of too far north to make that system even feasible?

42:37 Actually work with a producer up here who has been in one of the research sites for doing that, partnering with Rodrigo Weirly who is a scientist that is really spearheading a lot of this beans and rye situation. What also is unique about this Barron County area is that it is a hotbed for non-GMO soybeans and weed control. Non-GMO beans is a bit of a nightmare. He got giant ragweed that just beats everything, right? So we're looking for ways that we can overcome giant ragweed as well as waterhemp. It's a real issue up here. In the non-GMO world, we have to get real creative. One of the producers I'm working with is planting cereal rye and planting soybeans into that cereal rye using various stages of crimping to do so. First year was the first real strong effort to do so, and I would call it a success. There are certainly some quirks that need to be worked out of the system because it's not perfect and there's definitely some things that need to be dialed in, but I do foresee that this is an absolute essential tool for weed management, especially in non-GMO systems moving forward.

43:36 This is where it kind of gets exciting as an agronomist who likes to go down rabbit holes. I think if we did a better job of finding the unicorn rye variety, that same logic applies here. A lot of the rye being planted as cover crop in this part of the world is VNS, right? It's just farmers growing their own, selling it to their neighbors. We know that there are rye varieties out there that have very specific characteristics to do things that are different from standard VNS. You probably know this as a rye vendor. For example, MD Gardener is an amazing variety and especially for us here in the north because it brings some really key characteristics. Number one, it's got some of the best cold hardy tolerance of any of the rye varieties. Number two, it has some of the earliest anthesis that we're aware of. We can get this stuff to anthesis maybe 5 to 10 days earlier than a VNS variety. We've tested that. And lastly, it seems or what I've heard is that it has a higher degree of allelopathy than some other varieties of rye as well. That's awesome. That checks every box of what we would need out of a rye in a soybean system up here.

44:29 If we do a little more diligence on variety selection, I think we can really find ways to make this system start to work.

44:37 Yeah. And if you're able to plant the beans into that rye before you terminate and then roll the rye later. So, yeah, it's a cool system. It's not for everybody, but for where it works and where it fits, it can be a really powerful thing. So, you know, one of the issues, Joe, when you plant corn into a cover crop cereal rye, one of the biggest concerns that many people have, you know, they say, 'Well, that's allelopathic to my corn.' And I think that's almost never the case because a true allelopathy would not let the corn come up. But what they're seeing is they're seeing corn kind of turn yellow or not, you know, look as healthy as they want. And I think that's almost all a nitrogen tie-up issue. How have you seen your clients, you know, work with that nitrogen cycling, you know, within the context of a cover crop, cereal rye, and a corn planted into that?

45:30 Yeah, great question. I'm glad you teed that up. So I'm going to go back to a comment that I made earlier in our discussion in that we can just go measure things and this applies to cereal rye in nutrient tie-up and acquisition as well. So one of the other pet projects I have is going out and taking cover crop biomass samples on cereal rye before corn goes in. I'm trying to amass a database where we can now draw correlations between plant height as well as C to N ratios to truly understand where does that flip to the point where you do believe that you are truly tying up nitrogen—immobilizing, using the proper term—versus rye that is simply just consumed nitrogen that is not otherwise available for the corn crop. Those are two very different things and I think it's really important to distinguish that. What I will say is that when rye is terminated at 8 to 10 inches, I call it beer can height because it's an easy thing to remember. When rye terminates at beer can height, its C to N ratio is typically well below 20 to 1, which means that there's not true nitrogen immobilization, which means that we can feed it a little extra nitrogen and overcome that hurdle. And so I will say that with a certain degree of confidence, having worked with enough producers that have been up against this challenge, is that if there is a perception out there that you can't grow corn into cereal rye and corn together, it's because I don't know if there's enough attention being paid to how to manage it appropriately. I've worked with guys to manage it appropriately and we can get over this hurdle every single time unless there's extreme drought. That would be the one caveat where I say this will come back to bite you because you can't control the variables. However, most of these variables we can control. The cover crop biomass testing I'm doing is showing that in an 8 to 12 inch cereal rye cover crop that gets terminated, you have anywhere between 25 and 35 lbs of nitrogen captured in that biomass. I don't want to say that's tied up because I think that most people mean immobilized, which means you can't get that back out. What I think is the more appropriate thing to say is that the rye gobbled up 25 to 30 pounds of nitrogen that can be compensated for that will help corn get over that hurdle. And when we do that appropriately, I don't see the corn ever show any negative signs of starvation due to the fact they planted into a cereal rye cover crop that was terminated on time. Now granted, you know, you can come back at me with a whole bunch of circumstances. Well, what if you can't get it terminated? What if you don't have the nitrogen? Focus on the variables we can control. And when you do that, you can avoid the obstacles that are typically associated that give that a negative perception. But no, it can be done very successfully.

47:47 And what people need to realize, especially if you are in an area that gets a lot of winter or spring moisture, that that 30 lbs that that rye is sequestering, it might be lost anyway if you have a wet spring because it's likely carryover. It's likely free nitrogen out there. So, what better place to have it than to have it tied up and sequestered in that rye plant and then let it cycle back out through. And so a lot of people don't realize that you know they lose a lot of nitrogen every year, especially if you have a wet spring, you know, through that nitrogen leaching. So yeah, that's a big tool in my opinion in the nitrogen cycle and being able to know kind of have a time-delayed or time-release nitrogen for that corn. So, in that situation then, are your clients using a good starter fertilizer package or how are they making sure that that corn plant gets off to a good start?

48:44 Sure. Yeah. And I'm recommending that anyone who's planting corn into a rye, whether it's killed or green, we're going to bump that. We're going to frontload the early season nitrogen for an additional 30 lbs. That doesn't mean that you need 30 more pounds in the total nitrogen program because like you say, I think some things can cycle back through, but we want to make sure there's 30 more pounds than what you would otherwise do in a non-rye system at the front end of the season. Now, million-dollar question, of course, is well, how much of that 30 do you get back out of the rye? And there are programs and databases and computers that have looked at this. It sounds like at 30 some pounds, you're getting about nine back into the crop. And I don't know how they've gone about to calculate that. I want to peek behind that curtain because you know the question is always well, why not the full 30. If there's 30 there, why don't we get 30 back right? There's some degree of loss.

49:26 Somewhere in the system I don't fully understand. So if you've got 30 in the biomass you're getting nine of that back. That's a pretty good exchange. And here's why I say that is really important point too. We need to consider more deeply second and third order benefits of these cover crops beyond what we can see right with our eyes.

49:42 Guys see corn coming up in rye and go crap that corn's not going to make it or it's going to suffer. However, if we start thinking about second order effects, notably, what is that mat doing for us when the temperature spikes to 110° and it's now 30° cooler underneath that mat and those corn roots are not stressed? How do you put a dollar value on that? You know, those are the things that we need to start focusing more attention to how to value appropriately because I would love to see that rye mat there at late June, early July when the sun is baking down conserving moisture, lowering the temperature, and doing all the things that a rye mat can do that we don't otherwise give credit for. I think that's a big part of this equation that needs to be considered.

50:20 Yeah, that's a great point of you have to look beyond just the immediate benefits and look at the whole system. I want to take just a little bit different turn here. Joe, you mentioned that you spent what 12, 13 years kind of in the medical profession which gives you a different perspective, a different background in looking at some of this. How do you see what you see happening in a regenerative ag? How do you see that helping people's health, you know, both on an individual level, a community level and then even on a national level? How do you kind of see those things play together since you got good perspective in both worlds?

51:00 Yeah, this is such a great question. I'm glad you asked that. And so the regenerative space in the agricultural world, there's an equivalent for that in the medical world or the health world and it's called complementary and alternative medicine. And so it's their version of what we're doing in the farming world where you're stepping outside the box of what's considered normal and you're dabbling in more natural things, things that nature designed, things that God designed, you know, pursuing a path that is more in line with what we feel is the right way to do it versus all the technology and intervention that is the more traditional path. And so I see so many parallels between this complementary and alternative medicine space and the regenerative agriculture space. There's just so many commonalities there. And you know, I'm a biologist by training. And so I boil things down to biochemistry. And when you boil it down at the biochemical level, the nutrition we put into our mouths, the nutrition we put into a plant, the things that come back out of us, these biochemical reactions are almost identical on paper. There's not a lot of difference there. Yeah, there's some different molecular structures, some nuance in that, but biochemistry is a universal language. Whether it's going through a human, a microbe, or a plant, they're all using very, very similar mechanism—its proteins, its DNA, its metabolic enzymes and processes. It's all the same stuff at the fundamental level. And that's why you see so many parallels between what happens in the medical space and in the ag space is because ultimately we're all functions of biochemistry and we can choose a biochemical pathway that's more rooted in natural ways or what man has tried to invent as a superior path to doing so, which we've always realized is in some cases it's beneficial, it's great. Others not so much. We have to question whether or not it's the right path to go down. So from a big picture 30,000 foot perspective, yeah, lots of commonality there. Lots of commonality and it's really cool to see what's happening in the alternative medicine space because what they have come to appreciate are the farmers in the regen space that ultimately are producing the crops that create the foods that they know are better and more healthy for their systems as well. And I think where you find the true crossover is this whole food is medicine movement. That's really where you find the intersection of this alternative medicine and the regen cropping space.

53:00 Yeah. And so, you know, being a food producer yourself with, you know, the sweet corn probably primarily, but your pumpkins as well, do you see have you had that tested for nutrient density and quality? And, you know, have people reported any changes, you know, whether it's in taste or in their health from consuming those?

53:22 Yeah, absolutely. And I know John Kemp did a podcast on this not too far back where he reported on some of the same things where you're having an improved and enhanced sensory experience with more nutrient-dense food that's produced in regenerative systems. I can agree with that. We tested that. So one day I got curious about doing this from a testing standpoint. Again, you can just go measure stuff, right? And so I grabbed a couple cobs of our regenerative produced sweet corn and I drove to the local gas station. I bought some of that cellophane wrapped cardboard that they market as sweet corn. And I sent those cobs to a dairy forage lab and I said, 'Hey, measure nutrient density on this.' And not surprisingly, the sugar value came back on the regen fresh picked sweet corn as off the charts high. I mean, the stuff was just packed with sugars, which gives it flavor, right? Whereas that cardboard stuff at the gas station, you know, it's more like chalk that you got to swallow down with some water just to get it down your throat. So, no surprise there that the sugar content in the regen.

54:16 Corn was significantly higher. But there were also micronutrients that were higher in the regen corn than the non-regen corn as well. And it gave me some degree of optimism that yeah, the things we're doing here seem to be helping put more valuable nutrients into a better produced product. So I'm convinced that we can see some degree of enhanced nutritional value in these crops where we're taking much more effort to produce them that way. And consumers, I'm sure, are going to appreciate that.

54:43 Yeah. And you know, it's interesting that you sent that to a feed lab and I've had people tell me this that sending something off to have it tested for, you know, the human consumption, all that nutrient out, that's very expensive and there's not a lot of places. But they said, 'Send it to a feed lab. You're going to get virtually the same type of results at a fraction of the cost and there's so many more places that will do it. And so don't not test what you're producing. And even if you're just producing, you know, corn or soybeans, that's ending up in the food chain at some point, it's still good to know what you're producing and what's your quality look like compared to others because if there is a noticeable difference, now your challenge then is to go find a market to capture the value that you're already growing and do you have anybody doing that? Do you have anybody that's taking their broadacre crops and trying to get a premium out of them because it's a better product?

55:42 I wish we were there. I think we're getting closer to that point. We're not quite there yet. I don't have anybody other than us roadside vendors just trying to brag about the value of our stuff. Nobody in the row crop world quite yet. Now, a couple things on the horizon that give me some optimism there. I think 45Z, whether you love it or hate it, is a first step in the right direction to help compensate farmers, give them a premium for grain that's produced in a way that we believe is beneficial. Right? So if they're going to pay a premium for cover cropping and minimizing tillage and reducing synthetics, I think that's a step in the right direction. Got a long ways to go, of course, but that is a step in the right direction if it comes to pass. Big if obviously. The other thing that I want to mention that I think is really starting to intrigue me is I've recently dabbled in grain nutrient testing. Same concept as the sweet corn, right? You send a grain sample to the forage lab and they test it for crude protein and all your nutrients. And I'm wondering if this can be a bit of a report card. And I've recently had a conversation with another agronomist who has made the statement that he found that in corn that was raised with mycorrhizae as a seed treatment it was higher nutrient density in the grain sample. And so we really got the wheels turning. It's like okay if we take all these factors all these soil health regenerative things put them into a package can we produce a superior product that shows up on a lab report? It seems to be the inkling that yes we can. And if that's the case and we can build that database of evidence that yep, this stuff is more nutritious and therefore more healthy, someone should start paying attention and pay a premium on that because if we're going to go to work to do it, we should be compensated for it. I truly believe that.

57:08 Yeah. Well, yeah, that's exactly right. And that's exciting to know that that hopefully is the future for many of the best regenerative growers who can both prove that and then also market that. So Joe, as we kind of pull this session to a close, it's been a fascinating conversation. I really appreciate it. What would be a piece of advice? You know, you work with people all across the spectrum, but what advice do you give to that new client that you take on that's just as conventional and as traditional as can be. What advice do you give them to help them, but they want to go down the regenerative path? How do you help them get started?

57:49 The easier point of entree for us is going to be cover crops after soybean harvest. It's probably the lowest cost, easiest to observe, least hard thing to do. And that's the point of entry that I think is really quite easy. When you can also couple that with a program that helps offset some of that cost. That's just cherry on top of the cake. And there's plenty of them out there. And I'm not opposed to using them at all, especially if it's a portal of entry for someone that wants to dabble their toe in it. But I personally believe that cover crops have the greatest impact on soil health measures and to have that also be the point of entree. That's probably the least offensive or most, you know, so difficult to get into. Just that you go drill some rye or go fly some rye after your soybean harvest. Literally hardly anything to it. Yeah. A few dollars out of your pocket. To me, that's kind of the best of both worlds. So that's how I approach this for those that are starting to dabble in this is just go put some cover crop rye in the ground and just touch it, feel it, see it, measure it, you know, experience it because once you do, I can then riff all day long on all the different types of benefits you will get out of that if you're consistent. Do it year-over-year and start to watch things change. I truly believe it's remarkable. Having done this now for going on four years as an independent and many years before that. The impacts that these covers can have on soils is just truly magnificent from every angle that you can possibly approach it from.

59:06 That's great advice and it's way easier than growing a 2,000 lb pumpkin, too.

59:10 Yes, it is. Yes, it is.

59:12 Well, Joe, thank you so much. I appreciate you taking the time to have this conversation and best of luck to you and to your family and here's wishing that you'll break that 2,000 lb pumpkin barrier this year. So, thank you everyone for listening to this episode of the Green Cover Podcast.