Zack Smith snapped an ear of corn in half from an end row on his northern Iowa farm. It was a scorcher. A sun obscured by distant wildfires north and west started to cast a pink glow in the September afternoon. Smith counted the kernels and judged their size, quickly ciphering that this row likely will yield more than 340 bushels per acre.
Mind boggling. That’s 50% higher than the best neighborhood pre-harvest estimates tested by a tenacious drought creeping east from the Great Plains. His Winnebago County farm had half as much rain as normal — whatever that is anymore — this season, just 8.5 inches from January through August.
That ear, kerneled in maize to the top, was a thing to behold amid this parched backdrop. Especially considering it sprouted from Smith’s real-time experiment in using plant diversity and livestock to make farms more resilient, in the here and now, to months of drought snapped by a six-inch torrent rain three weeks ago.
“We’re using things that are free. That’s why this is so disruptive,” Smith said.
It’s an eight-acre test plot Smith showed off to neighbors as far away as Fergus Falls, Minn., interested in his unique approach to conservation agriculture in an era of extreme weather: planting corn in four widely spaced rows for maximum sun exposure next to a pasture strip of equal width sown with eight varieties of forages, from sweet peas to kale to Sudan sorghum grass. An autonomous barn full of goats and chickens crept along the pasture strip, powered by solar panels throwing off excess energy that could be used to power farm buggies or the homestead. The goats mow down everything, stimulating the soil with their hooves, while the chickens cluck behind picking out corn left from last season. A larger pen hosts cattle. The beasts fertilize the field for free. They create pathways to the underground, along with earthworms, to sponge water and hold it. The following year, the row crops and pasture switch places, keeping the subsurface biosphere in tune.
On the rest of his 500 acres, he anticipates moderate yield losses, maybe 10-15% of potential. He is not wrenching his gut. “I know what I am doing is working,” he said.
Over the past 11 years, Smith has converted the farm that’s been in his family for a century to using minimum soil tillage and planting winter cover crops like cereal rye after the corn harvest, so the soil is not laid bare to winter wind and spring runoff. He has reduced his fertilizer use by 80% and dramatically cut his use of herbicides as cover crops stunt nascent weeds, while holding plant nutrients in place.
Then he came up with this notion to put livestock in moveable feasting barns, which completes the cycle of using the sun’s energy to produce protein.
His father Raymond wondered at the time, but rolled with it. The boys down at the Buffalo Center coffee shop may cackle about meat goats bleating in a solar barn, and giving up prime Iowa Black Gold to kale — kale! — when you could grow corn.
“I’m happy to provide them entertainment,” Smith, 42, quipped of his skeptics.
To top it off, he just quit his job as a Pioneer brand seed corn dealer and chemical dealer. That turned some heads. It’s a highly lucrative business that accounted for 80% of his income.
“You don’t just give them up,” he said.
In Iowa, it’s radical.
“But I wanted to wake up in the morning feeling good about what I do. One driving factor for me is that the family farm has been going away for a long, long time. To survive, you have to think 100% different.”
“I don’t think he’s crazy,” said his wife, Mandee, a gracious host to about 50 guests interested in keeping their farms and families whole through flood, drought and wild commodity market rides.
This year sort of bears him out.
Smith will do okay in the worst Iowa drought since 1988 and the hottest summer in history.
In fact, he thinks he can thrive. He says that his “Stock Cropper” system with “Cluster Cluck” mobile mini-barns will allow him to make seven times more per-acre than just growing corn after soybeans. It’s because he is making more efficient use of photosynthesis than farmers who pack in corn and crowd out light from the full plant. After that recent six-inch downpour, his fields weren’t puddled and washing away soil when others were. A pitchfork revealed Smith’s soil, dense black from carbon and teeming with worms, was moist and crumbly just like the agronomist ordered.
“I’m proud of him,” said patriarch Ray, 70.
He, too, could barely believe how good the corn looked.
It’s almost ready. The combines are rolling nearby. A lot of folks in this, the buckle of the Corn Belt, will suffer yield losses of a third or worse. Scientists at the Goddard Space Institute at Columbia University believe this drought that fuels wildfires from California to Minnesota could last decades, the worst in 1,200 years.
Smith is doing what he can to adapt.
Weeds appear to have no regard for drought. The chemically dependent are sweating it. The Roundup doesn’t kill the waterhemp anymore. It’s a bane in soybeans.
“Never seen waterhemp resistant to a goat,” Smith said.
One rolled by, munching on a lamb’s quarter so sweet before it goes to seed as a weed.
The Smiths and friends closed the day by butchering a fresh five-pound chicken, and then some, fed on pasture while the wildfire haze set the sun early.
Art Cullen, managing editor of The Progressive Populist, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in his day job as editor of The Storm Lake Times in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He is author of the book “Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” A documentary film, “Storm Lake,” on the challenges of running a rural biweekly paper during a pandemic, will appear Nov. 15 on the Independent Lens series on PBS. Email times@stormlake.com.
From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2021
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