Organic returns home to NW Iowa
This map shows concentrations of organic production, by crop insurance contract. The darker the area the heavier the concentration of organic. Note the dark spots on the northern Iowa border, Kossuth and Palo Alto counties.
Driving the 80 miles from Storm Lake to ancestral Algona makes me queasy for all the black dirt exposed to the elements, running into Pilot Creek on the north side of Rolfe, and the West Fork of the Des Moines River south of West Bend, and along the East Fork at St. Joe. It makes you think that things will never change around here.
But they are.
More than 100,000 acres of prime ground in Kossuth and Palo Alto counties are now in organic production. That’s just a loose accounting by Dr. Michael McNeil, an agronomist with Ag Advisory of Algona who is sort of a pied piper among farmers interested in reviving their soil and improving their profits.
It’s probably a lot bigger than that.
Six years ago, McNeil said, he knew of about 2,200 acres in organic in his neighborhood.
This, folks, is what you call the start of something.
Actually, it started for McNeil during the Vietnam War. He was freshly minted from Iowa State with his PhD in quantitative genetics when Uncle Sam called. His job was to help protect the US food supply from bioterrorism. He learned that the best defense is healthy soil and crops. He went on to become a lead scientist at the Funk’s research lab at Algona. McNeil quit with the introduction of genetically modified crops, coincidentally at the height of the Farm Crisis.
Dr. Mike McNeil
“I told them, ‘That’s really not right. You have opened Pandora’s Box and you have no idea what you are dealing with,’” McNeil said.
He started his own agronomy consultancy, and almost immediately farmers searching for ways to survive started contacting him. He was preaching against chemicals — herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, anhydrous — as soil-killing agents that also lead to human ailments.
“We are destroying the microbiome,” McNeil declared.
At this time, sustainable agriculture was a buzzword and organic was something for nuts. Microbiome? Call in the bean buggies and arm the kids with spray guns.
A farmer working over 8,000 acres came to him with crown rot on his corn. McNeil advised him to stop the Roundup, which he asserted stimulated the process that led to the crown rot. It worked, yields recovered, and about a decade ago McNeil realized: “We gotta change.”
He started speaking around farm country with others considered radical. Crowds of more than 1,000 were showing up.
As soil health improves, so do yields, he maintains. You can stick your hand in the ground with no spade and grab worms. A farmer with 15,000 acres came to him and said he was going broke on rising input costs. He cut back to 5,000 acres of organic and is making money. His son raises grass-fed cattle whose steaks are to die for, we are told.
Cover crops?
“I think I have that figured out. Oats and tillage turnips. They winter kill.” No need for herbicide to kill off the cover crop in a no-till system. Cattle think the turnips are candy. If you don’t buy his advice, there are other answers to weed control with reduced-tillage organic.
Their crops go to organic dairies and to a mill in St. Ansgar.
The growth in organic might have been stymied a bit because of tremendous net farm income the past couple years, said Greg Lickteig of Omaha Grain Exchange, who has been in the organic trade for many years. He happens to have grown up on a hog farm near Algona, which he is transitioning to organic with the help of local farmers. He likes those $28 food-grade organic soybeans.
“It’s good to have people on the land,” said Lickteig.
Just down the road from Lickteig the Shey family — the late Doc Shey knew how to turn a dollar and so does his daughter, Jane — are doing cover crops and no-till, and if she could figure out a way to go organic without cultivating so much she would do it. As it stands, Shey said she is happy with her progress so far and wants to learn more.
Joshua Manske of Algona is going organic with another 300 acres. He is working with young farmer tenants who are eager to get their own land.
It’s not confined to the West Bend-Algona area. Lickteig has a soy facility in Carroll, where he was heading last Monday to check on some new crop. Organic beans from western Iowa are feeding all sorts of soy appetites around the world.
These are old neighborhood names. They wear boots, not Birkenstocks. They drive John Deeres. They are changing. Not fast enough for me or McNeil. He is 81 and is thin on patience. Or Shey. She acknowledges progress. It could amount to a sea change. Because, the Roundup doesn’t work so well anymore, and it’s not as if another chemical war agent will be the new silver bullet. Change is inevitable even here. Someday Pilot Creek might catch a break.
Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.
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I first knew Mike McNeil at Iowa State as we were both initiated into Alpha Zeta, and agricultural honorary.
I agree with most of what Mike says except one thing: ORGANIC if it is done the way most of those farms in his area are doing it as I have observed. Those farmers are tilling10-12 times per year and that is not good for the soil. Tillage destroys organic matter, the most important part of soil biology. Organic Matter in the prairie before farming began was 8-10 %. Many farms now have 2-3% OM. Using cover crops and no till allows us to increase the OM and biology of the soil. We have a farm in that area that had OM levels of 3.7 % when we started with cover crops and no tillage in 2016. We have now raised them to 4,2%. We have also been able to reduce the amount of synthetic fertilizers we use and cover crops are great in weed suppression so we are using less herbicides, no insecticides and fungicides on our crops. The way those farmers are tilling their soil requires a lot more energy than no tilling with cover crops.
A bit of optimism that maybe farm country WILL change?