Episode 3: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Farming the Peone Prairie with Josh Riddle
Josh Riddle on his farm on the Peone Prairie.
About the episode:
Join us for the second part of our conversation with Josh Riddle, a farmer on the Peone Prairie outside of Spokane. Ryan sits down with Josh to chat about his experiences on his farm and with the FLOURISH on-farm trials. In this episode, hear all about seed treatments; the good, the bad, and the ugly of extracts; and Josh’s experience with roller crimping, worm castings, and other cropping practices.
Josh is a participant in the FLOURISH on-farm trials.
This is the second in a two-part series of conversations with Josh Riddle.
About the podcast:
Welcome to the FLOURISH Podcast, where we at the Palouse Conservation District interview farmers, ranchers, and researchers on topics related to conservation agriculture. FLOURISH, also known as Farmers Leading Our United Revolution in Soil Health, is a farmer-led conservation innovation project to support the widespread adoption of soil health practices by integrating cover crops and livestock into farming operations in the Inland Pacific Northwest. The ambitious purpose of FLOURISH is to not only regenerate our soils, but also our rural communities by creating opportunities for younger generations to return to productive, sustainable farms. On this podcast, we bring you updates from on-farm trials, research, findings, and advice from farmers.
The views and opinions expressed on the FLOURISH Podcast are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Palouse Conservation District or the USDA Conservation Innovation Grants program. Any content provided by our Guests are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.
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Introduction (00:10)
Introduction
Hello, and welcome to the Flourish Podcast, where we at the Palouse Conservation District interview farmers, ranchers, and researchers on topics and conservation agriculture. FLOURISH, also known as Farmers Leading our United Revolution in Soil Health, is a farmer-led conservation innovation project to support the widespread adoption of soil health practices by integrating cover crops and livestock into farming operations. The ambitious purpose of FLOURISH is to not only regenerate our soils, but also our rural communities by creating opportunities for younger generations to return to productive sustainable farms. On this podcast, we bring you updates from on-farm trials, research findings, and advice from farmers.
Ryan Boylan (1:03)
Hello. Thanks for tuning into the second part of our conversation with Josh Riddle. He's a participant in the FLOURISH on-farm trials program. We sat down with Josh in early December and had such a great conversation that we decided to split it into two podcast episodes. This is the second part. In this part, we discuss seed treatments, the good, the bad, and the ugly of extracts, as well as learn about Josh's experience with roller crimping, worm castings, and other cropping practices. If you haven't listened to the first part of our conversation with Josh, make sure to check it out before tuning in to this episode. Thanks for listening, and let's go ahead and jump into the second part of our conversation with Josh.
Ryan Boylan (1:37)
So, I just want to go back to seed treatments really quickly. You got rid of seed treatments completely, but I think you mentioned you're still treating the seed with something, right?
Josh Riddle (1:46)
Yeah, so we got rid of 'em. I was told I couldn't do it. “Bad idea.” I had even one outfit I sold to that threatened not to buy our wheat. I had gone organic also. I actually did some organic farming for two years, transitioned to a hundred acres into organic, realized I was going broke only because I was a terrible marketer. I was more geeking out that I grew wheat and peas together at one time and then harvested 'em. And I just...bad marketing, you know? Just not doing it right. Joel Salatin’s got a whole idea of farmers that, that we gotta work on some of that stuff.
But I started treating. The first I was like: we did it. I saw some wireworm damage that made me say “Urgh, there's some patches out here. There's some rhizoc, there's some things that are happening that I can't control.” I'm just always trying to weigh if this is the right benefit, still not knowing how toxic the seed treats were.
So, we started doing things like trying to put diatomaceous earth on the seed. You know, like, “Okay, maybe we can kill these worms if we put enough of that on there.” Now I don't know if that was a really bad idea too, because you could be killing the microbiome and then soil and anyways. So, with seed treats I was like “Okay, I gotta figure out something to go that go on this seed to help protect it.” My idea was to go to wood vinegars, which are used in other countries that are smaller, and realizing that that is probably not something Josh can pull off in a year while trying to farm and being a dad. All you farmers need to be dads and grandpas. Please go meet with your kids. (Laughs). That's huge. If you want 'em to come back, you gotta invest in them. And I want a lot of kids to come back. I want more than what's out there, even, coming back.
So, the wood vinegar was an idea, but it was super expensive. Watching more videos, sitting in more meetings, just realizing there's gotta be another way. And I started researching extracts. So, trying to compost tea was kind of a big buzzword. Elaine Ingram was running around with that, people were saying it's gonna save the earth to some degree. And I don't wanna be sarcastic about that, but how does that work? I actually had a conversation with a few pot growers about it that were using it. They're going “Okay, that's cool, but I can't brew for 18 hours, especially on if I'm gonna go put down 20,000 gallons in two days, 'cause it's only got this much time.
So, I started researching extracts again and then realizing that there's maybe a way to take worm castings and put 'em on the seed. Chris was doing this early too, so I always, you know, hats off to him. He was like, “Johnson-Su, Johnson-Su,” you know, and “bioreactor”. And once again I was like: “I don't know if I can. My bandwidth is tapped out. (Laughs) But he was doing it in the fall. He started putting some worm castings on a seed. Found a local worm guy. He's like, “I'm seeing huge differences.” And I was like, “I don't know, what does that mean, can we quantify this?” And farmers are bad scientists. Chris is always is like “we're the worst scientists in the world,” which is so true.
So, he was doing that, and I thought that there's gotta be a better way. And then he was telling me about some brews, and I'd been researching too. So, we were trying to put worm castings in buckets and then adding air and then putting some molasses. What you do is you extract the worm casting microbiome off into a water solution, then you can just put it on the seed. And Johnson-Su has a bunch of research on this, and if I try to tell you about it, I will fumble through it and I will not do it justice.
If you watch maybe a couple of videos, look up Johnson-Su Bioreactor. They're like an hour and a half. For some of you guys that have never done this before, if you're listening, it might be a rough go, but I would challenge you that you might not be able to unsee what you saw. If you're open-minded. So we were looking into that, doing that. I had actually looked at another extractor that I ended up not buying. It was a lot more money than the one I bought. And this spring I had Mike Nestor with Sterling Ag come out, he's an agronomist that's going this route. This is his jam, I would say. I hired him to come out and do some work on our farm.
We put a lot of worm castings through his machine. I had ordered one. I was waiting for one to come. After seeing the simplicity of it, I was like, “this is in a farmer's bandwidth,” even if for a guy that wants to just dip his toe in it. And, I kind of wanted to prove this concept. I'm kind of at a point where I gotta prove this works. I know it works on paper, per se, and through all these videos and people showing their microscope, so how do we make this work? This transition has to happen. And that's kind of where I jumped in this spring. And so, I bought my own extractor. We had a local worm guy, I ran him outta worm castings...
Ryan Boylan (7:08)
He's probably stoked. (Laughs)
Josh Riddle (7:10)
(Laughs) He was stoked. So, we were buying some castings outta California. Mike had some coming from back east and Midwest. And so, Mike would look at him under a microscope and say, “fungal dominant, not fungal dominant, anaerobic; where are we at? What's going on?” And so, it's been a big trial this year. I saw some huge results. I also had some huge crash and burns. The good, the bad, the ugly; you're gonna see it all. You're gonna have it all.
Again, it's kind of fun. This machine's pretty simple. You just take your buckets of worm castings. We were scooping out of a super sack. You dump 'em in there and so you get one pound of castings per five gallons of liquid. The idea was I wanted it on the seed. And then my mentality is, like a lot of farmers, “good is good; let's do more good.”
So instead of saying “this works with five gallons,” I'm like: “I've got tanks on the front of my tractor, I've got tanks on the back of my drill; I wonder if I could add another tank.” I'm actually willing to not seed 50 acres, I'll seed 30 just so I can come back and refill if this stuff's that good. And so, my first probably 800 acres this spring, I seeded it. I said it needs a food source. So it's a whole other world.
I had kind of transitioned out of commercial fertilizers to where I was down to using 50% of normal. So, I would say transition yourself. Don't do it all in one year unless you have to, or just feel you have to. I mean, it works, it’s just the process is a lot slower, especially if you've really messed up your soils. And I we say messed up. There's a lot of guys that are really trying to do a good job and didn't mess 'em up. But we've lost the microbiology in the soil in a lot of ways. So I added a food source that, I found out after the first 800 acres, probably killed three quarters of the biology. I had just put in furrow. (Laughs) Because it was all natural. I was using some fish and sea minerals and I thought “more is better,” but I was smoking it 'cause I changed the pH of the water and they can't live in it.
So I saw some results, but it was not what I hoped. And we hit the craziest drought ever this year. I live in what is a normally 16 to 18 inch rainfall zone. By harvest, we were down four inches. And then we got these crazy rains in September, but I was above county average. And so, I was like: “Hmm.” You know, it's 30 bushel wheat, 35. It was thinking “this did not perform like it should. I no till. I had moisture in there.” You can go out and dig in my fields. I still have moisture. But it just wasn't going. So, I believe I smoked a lot of it. We also used a lot of chicken manure. Perfect Blend is a sweet product, but it’ll burn your clothes.
Ryan Boylan (10:29)
Really?
Josh Riddle (10:30)
Yeah. We put it in the drill, we had to sift it all to get it through my seed drill. I mean, air drill. And to get it to go through there without plugging all the time, we basically had to hand screen it all. And I remember the first few times, I think I just died. (Laughs) I think I probably took five years off my life. Talking with Mike, the amount of stuff I was breathing by the end of it...if you're gonna do it, do a cool life hack: go buy a Tyvek suit, or a couple of them, at Home Depot. (Laughs) Because you can take that sucker off and it's amazing. Your clothes don't stink anymore and you go there.
Ryan Boylan (11:13)
Wait, so you're still applying some traditional fertilizers, but as like a starter?
Josh Riddle (11:19)
No. So this spring came, and I saw the bioreactor, the one I wanted. I have the Hiwassee extractor. The guys that invented that are super cool dudes. Give them a little plug. I looked at the Bio-5, but I think somebody even said the Bio-5's not even being serviced anymore. They don't even produce it anymore. But there'll be more to come now that the technology's here. People are gonna be jumping into this. So the Hiwassee was the one I picked, super simple. And at this point I told Mike I want to be a hundred percent synthetic free if possible. I said, I know I probably got at least another year or two, but the goal here is to not put any more synthetics down. I wanna do covers to replace whatever I think I need to be. And I need to.
And I've kind of sat down and said, if this doesn't work, I will probably quit farming. And that sounds extreme, but we'll have this conversation with Chris---and this is something that people don't know--but farmers’ stress levels come from all angles. And one of 'em is...I'm a fourth generation farm. I just didn't get to farm on the ground that we have. I'm now picking up some of the ground that we used to farm. But having that stress of being the fourth, fifth, sixth generation farm, and then it's not working and you're selling or you're getting out. I can't imagine.
But life will go on. And, you know, you hear just tragic stories. And so that stress load is being brought home. It's being put on these guys. And that's where this hopefully will give you...you're putting life into your farm, which will bring life back into your life. For me, I want to prove not only that this works, but I wanna prove a paradigm shift. We have to be family oriented. We have to be healthy mentally, physically, spiritually, wherever that comes from. But those things are being stripped really quickly, just like our soil microbiome is. Auto steer, synthetics, technology. As farmers, we’re even backing out of having our hands in the dirt. You know, some days I can go 100 or 120 acres and not get out of the tractor. And that's when we're doing some minimal till. And I still do a little bit of tillage. I think there's a time and a place.
Ryan Boylan (14:03)
Do you think that shift is occurring in subgroups of farmers in the region?
Josh Riddle (14:13)
Yeah. I mean, the FLOURISH meeting was super exciting. You know, even just...as I'm getting gray hair, I realized I want to know more of like what the “gray-hairs” know. There's some books in life that have been kind of fascinating, but one's by John Eldredge and it’s called Fathered by God. And it's...not to be spiritual about it, but it talks about stages in life, going through as a man from childhood up. And then as you go through life, I do believe--whether you take it that way or not--as you get older, your kingdom is changing. When you're young, you're kind of a wild cowboy. You feel like you can take on the world. Then you get a kingdom, and then you try to build your kingdom, and you spend in the middle of your life building this farm, or your acres. So I built a farm. But then it's like, “oh man, now what?”. Is my son gonna take it over? Or is there a neighbor kid that we can hand this off to?
Ryan Boylan (15:11)
That’s another stress load, too.
Josh Riddle (15:12)
Yeah. So it's a different thought. We kind of got lost here a little bit. But yeah, I think that the paradigm needs to change. I hope it changes. I hope that guys find hope, or that we don't find our identity in just being a farmer or that I have a quad track, or that I've got three John Deeres. That’s what we've kind of been told is cool, when what's really cool is if you have a really healthy family, your kids are outside running around your grandkids, your cousins want to come to the farm to visit. They don’t know why, they just want to come. And the neighbors, too. I’m probably am a little skewed 'cause I live right in the city, in the suburbs here. And, you know, people drive by really high fast andthey honk at me or flip me off. I get screamed at, like “what are you spraying?” It's like, “well, actually I'm seeding.”
Ryan Boylan (16:19)
We’ve touched on it a little bit, but maybe we could talk about extract a little bit more. You mentioned you had purchased an extractor.
Josh Riddle (16:27)
Yeah. That’s maybe question number five there: “dry versus liquid”.
Ryan Boylan (16:32)
Yeah. So what are dry versus liquid extracts?
Josh Riddle (16:36)
Your dry extracts are gonna be more like, say, compost. They way I look at it is a dry extract is something that's dryer. Liquid is... we're taking our worm castings. It's not extracted yet, so it's still not an extract, but it's a type of soil biology that, if we could probably put it on our soils at a large scale, it'd be really cool. But I don't think that's gonna be feasible until there's a million worm farms. And if somebody wants a great idea to start a business for their kid.
Ryan Boylan (17:09)
I heard there's a big one in Royal City.
Josh Riddle (17:11)
Could be, I, I would need to probably figure that out sooner or later. My, my local guy is sweet, but he's at his max capacity right now. So, my definition is...there’s your compost teas, which are something brewed. So you're adding a food source, you're putting some air to it, and you're trying to grow the little critters that are in there. You know, all of your microorganisms. You're trying to grow that population. Jonathan Williams came along with research about furrow, which is kind of where we're focusing, because we gotta get the roots going. Jonathan Lundgren talks about this too. It's something that really fascinated me because I've got these pH issues and I wanna lime, but I can't afford lime because lime's not feasible on dry land farming. Especially if you're in like a 40-bushel to 55-bushel average area, which some of the guys are here. That's kind of our average across the farm. You can't afford to put down three tons of lime to change your pH.
So, what we're finding out is that in the root rhizosphere, or what we call the dreadlock roots because I always think of the Avatar movie world, you can actually change the pH by two points. So you can move from a pH of 5, to a neutral pH of 7 if it's healthy. And there's a lot of work done on that. And it's true; just from seeing the roots of the plants we dug. So it can create its own little world there, which is pretty fascinating. That's kinda what's led us down to this idea of doing extracts. And so what we use is just an extract, we're not doing a tea. And Jonathan Williams said that they're finding out that extracts are safer in furrow, so that's where we have chosen to do extracts in furrow. And then that kind of leads us into maybe our conversation we were having off mic.
This past year I decided to seed some peas from the year before; I seeded some peas in an area that I could not spray insecticides, it's impossible and I wasn't willing to. I was past the threshold by probably a hundred times for what you should be with weevils. So I was left to harvest them. Even with crop insurance I knew this was not gonna be good. So I harvested them and I was at probably 50% weevil damage on this crop. I put it in the bin, because I couldn't even sell it like it was, didn't really want it. I told my local buyer and he said he really didn’t want it. He said I could probably find a feed outlet for it and make more money.
So these peas sat in the bin all winter. I pulled them out at the end of spring, I was kind of doing all my cover crops and I was telling Mike Nestor that I think I'm gonna try a green manure. Grandpa used to green manure peas. I remember that a little bit as a kid. So I thought, well, let's try a green manure plow down. And when we cleaned the peas, we cleaned 'em with our little fanning screen and they were so full of weevils. Weevils were still crawling out of the peas themselves, or the holes they drilled. They were everywhere. I was filling my drill with weevils.
So I seeded this field, and I used my extracts at this point. We had the extract figured out. So I had my food source dialed in, extract in furrow, 10 gallons acre of this stuff, um, with a gallon of food source. Actually nine, we went nine in one. So, we put it down, and we ran out. I actually had to leave town, so I told my employee at the time to just use my business as usual, which is really healthy. It's um, some sea minerals, some foss that's super healthy. I told him to put that in the rest. I wanted something in furrow. And I had these totes sitting around, so let's just burn 'em up, you know? Let's use it. So we did that, peas came up. We seeded the field at an angle, and there was a six-inch height difference in the extract peas versus the business as usual, which was still considered really healthy. And it did have a little bit of super foss in there. But otherwise, there was still no fertilizer in there. No micronutrients either, other than what was in the sea minerals and fish.
I seeded these May 29th, which was crazy late for this year. And we were green manuring them because everybody said you should never seed peas that late. But Mike said, “dude, you gotta take these to harvest.” And I was looking at him going, “yeah, those are cool, but I don't need another really crappy crop to harvest.” But I said, “all right, fine.” So I went out there, and I put down 20 gallons more of our extract. I didn't do a brew, I just put down what I was making across the whole field.
Ryan Boylan (23:13)
Just with a foliar?
Josh Riddle (23:15)
Yeah, foliar. I didn't even stream it on, actually. I just put it on. I fan it on. And there's some things you gotta figure out with all that. Like, below volume; you have to have high volume and low pressures. You can blow these little guys up. You can blow 'em to smithereens. So you have to change some of your operations as you go this way on a farm. And it's actually almost easier, which is really fun. I ended up buying some boom buster nozzles that are on 60-inch spacings. Normally we're like 20 inch and so these shoot out a giant flood stream and it goes everywhere. There's no screens, no plugging, so you just go for it and you just drench everything. It's kind of fun to know that it's not damaging a thing in the world or it's gonna drift anywhere.
So I told Mike, “okay, here's the deal, though. I'm seeing weevil already. And he's like, “well, you know, you could maybe try some stuff.” I said, “how do we make these plants as bulletproof as possible?” And so, I knew that we had to get the bricks up, because I've always heard these plant-sucking bugs are diabetic. And so I said, let's get the sugar as high as we can. We came in...I need to probably go back through these notes...but I'm pretty sure it's close to three gallons of molasses. The rest was extract, and we're pushing the envelope of pH on that. And then with a little bit of cobalt and molybdenum in there, we sprayed across the field, took it to harvest. And it was crazy, the difference.
So with the first half, that was a little over half that we had that diagonal line on. You couldn't find weevil damage if you were just in your combine looking back in your back window, but you would find probably one in a thousand, two in a thousand seeds. Hit that line, and we went back to 25% weevil damage. And that was one of the big ‘aha’ takeaways this spring, let alone the root mass. I mean, I've got some pictures, I did start documenting some things to see if there’s a difference here. And with the root rhizosphere, I've never seen pea roots like this. Now, guys can raise some really giant peas, and these were not giant. They end up going 12-1500 pounds on the good side, the bad side dropped 800.
Ryan Boylan (25:32)
Whoa. That's crazy.
Josh Riddle (25:34):
So a lot of that, to me, goes back to Johnson-Su, these guys that are kind of preaching this stuff. You gotta start these plants off right, and get all the synthetics out of the soil. Again, I'd say that’s theology by Josh. You know, just realizing that what happens when you pour salt on a slug. In your garden, these fertilizers have salts in them. You have so-called “slugs” in the soil, and the little guys in the soil are way smaller. So what dose actually causes problems? What if we cannot cause problems?
Ryan Boylan (26:15):
So then are you going to, moving forward, apply those same...not for just peas, but the extracts in furrow, and you're moving in that direction?
Josh Riddle (26:22):
Yeah. So spring wheat this year was, like I said, we had the drought which felt like a little bit of a struggle. We're doing SAPs, we did total soil sampling. So we have total soil analysis going on to see what's actually in the soil. I have enough of everything I ever need to grow wheat crop sitting in that dirt. Now is it tied up? Yes.
Ryan Boylan (26:47)
Can I go back to that really quick? Did you sample all your acres or...?
Josh Riddle (26:49)
No, I sampled until I wore Mike out (Laughs). It was a lot of money, I will say that. And I don't know if I'm the expert to quantify it other than he helped me figure out what's there. Is there enough there? What do we need to supplement? So fast forward a little bit, we got the wheat crop in, we're coming in. I was like, “I gotta get some tea down. This is there, you should do tea.” And Mike said, “let's see what's going on.” And I said “let’s do some SAPs.” So we pulled some SAPs.
Ryan Boylan (27:19):
To audience:
Let me just quickly tell you a little bit more about SAP testing. SAP testing is a new-ish laboratory analysis that a lot of farmers are using. Essentially, you're measuring micro and macronutrients that are typically applied to agricultural products from an old leaf and a new leaf. And if you look at the differences between those two, you can get an understanding of what the plant might need. So essentially what this is doing is pushing farmers to apply fertilizers foliarly. So, spraying it on the plant in the spring.
Josh Riddle (27:51)
And max that I needed on a field for nitrogen--and mind you, I put down 50 pounds of perfect blend--the amount of nitrogen that's in that is next to nothing. On the scale of nitrogen, when you put down like 50 pounds in furrow, I don't think I'm even getting three pounds of end down. In your conventional end world, it might be an 8-0-0-5 or something like that. It’s pretty low. I needed two or three pounds of AMS...Foliar. So now my manganese was jacked up. Different fields had some different issues, some molybdenum.
So those were some things where that's a quick fix. And I wouldn't have believed this had I not...to go back a few years when I did the fish thing, my fields were really ugly and they said, “let's pull SAPs.” This was before I was even into SAPs, SAPs were something I heard they did in the orchards. The guy pulled some SAPs and said, “you need manganese.” We went out with a $5 manganese application and my fields greened up overnight. So, they were still hurting for units of N, but it was really that the manganese was so far off. And you're gonna find that with different soils if your calcium started getting tied up. That's the part of farming that I'm like, “man, I wish I would've paid more attention to chemistry” (Laughs). And then I don't know if I would get anything done if I knew all that stuff, I'd probably be too worried about what's not in it.
Ryan Boylan (29:36)
How frequently are you SAP testing?
Josh Riddle (29:39)
Right now we're just doing once a year. And that's gonna be a farm challenge. It's hard. Going back to the family farm or that idea of having neighborhood kids get involved or something, which feels daunting. But there's not enough guys around that can go around and SAP test. So if you could teach your 15-year-old, your 16-year-old, to go pull me a bunch of leaves and tell 'em to throw his hat out in the field in random spots or throw a hula hoop out there. Then go pull, pull, pull and fill zip locks. And this is your job for the day. You're keeping the little family tree going, with money in the circle. But you're also giving them something to do. And then eventually they're gonna have some curiosity of what's really happening.
Ryan Boylan (30:30)
What'd you guys find?
Josh Riddle (30:31)
So we're doing it once a year right now, which is kind of probably how I see it happening in dry land. I do a little bit of hay now, so we're gonna maybe hit those twice a year. Maybe in the spring, or maybe even spring, summer, fall. I would love to be able to SAP cover crops to see if maybe this cover would put more root that it's in the ground if we hit it with a shot of molasses, or maybe it needs a shot of cobalt. And again, that kind of defeats the purpose of maybe keeping it simple on the farm (Laughs). So, those are questions for the intriguing minds. That's stuff that I think, if you're treating a cover, it’s next year's food source or your next three years...sitting in the FLOURISH meeting, the guys that have done 'em from a cover crop have seen seen results three years later.
Ryan Boylan (31:33)
Yeah. Looking at it more as like an investment. So with the extracts, do you think you'll be doing more tests? I know they're SAP testing, but you're not gonna soil test every year? Or will you soil test every year?
Josh Riddle (31:48)
No. So hopefully we're gonna get these baselines in the total analysis of what's in my dirt. And then I just wanna make sure we're not mining the soil. So there is a potential for that if you're not SAP sampling and you're maybe not still feeding micronutrients or seeing if you have some holes. If you need to put some gypsum down if your calcium's way off, there's things you can still do; your normal farming practices still do apply. You can't just say, “I put down extract and it's supposed to solve the world's problems.” You're still gonna have to fix your problems, and that's gonna be through crop rotation. We hear that now more and more. And that's probably where you just need to still pay attention to those numbers, find somebody that can help you with that, and then kind of move from there.
The idea for me is that I can understand that world but also not spend so much time there that I don't get to be a farmer or don't get to enjoy my kids or life. So I think you gotta be able to tell a story with it. And the story is maybe learning what's going on soil, and that's a good story to share with people. Because it's pretty fun when you see or when you tell people this year when they would come over. With all the landlords, I see all these gardens everywhere and I'm like, “hey, come over here.” And they're like, “what?” And I'm like, “here, put some of this in there.” At first they're really like, “Nope, not to not on my garden.” And then you tell 'em what's in there and they're like, “really?” And then the stories I would hear from just gardens, you know, you're kind of like, “whoa, this is crazy.”
Chris will tell you, if we were to say one thing, mycorrhizal fungi is a huge part of this whole system. And I hope they don't wreck the word, like ‘organic’ or ‘regenerative’ or ‘sustainable.’ But the fungi world, that is in a worm's gut. So we did a lot of dry treatments to back it up. So in the past I was using the dry mycorrhizal treatment on the seed, and if you wanna dip your toe in and start, or even before you get into extracts, go get some mycorrhizal and try to find a good source of that and put that on there. Do some trials. Chris and I go back to, and he loves it 'cause it's an easy story to tell, but I've got some pictures of some fields that I candy cane striped throughout the whole year. And I did them in a palce for all of the mass public to see. But those are the biggest lessons you learn. I think people say, “well what would you say if I were to start a cover?” I would say I'm always fascinated with radishes and turnips because they're super easy to grow. Throw some of those in there. Put some sunflowers in, 'cause your wife will love 'em. The neighbors will love 'em and then kind of pick it from there, you know, like what you want.
We use some lentils, just to try to knock the biomass down a little bit so that I could try to seed through it. Mm-Hmm. But if you put those next to the road, you can't not see it every day. And neither will the farmers. And that's gonna come with some complaints. I've been turned in, you know, coming to find out partly why I've been audited so many times from my crop insurance company is that I was being turned in by other farmers for practices. And not to say that your neighbor's a bad guy, but like, that was like something that had never come across my mind. Because I got to the point where I was like, “why am I being audited? What did I do this year?” And she's like, “well this is probably why.” And they gave me a heads up, like, “somebody's saying your practices aren't conventional enough or normal enough.
Ryan Boylan (35:45)
Interesting, because you didn't jump on the bandwagon
Josh Riddle (35:47)
(Laughs) Yeah. But I would say, in hindsight, I think in the FLOURISH meeting I talked about this a little bit as we had that conversation, but what's fascinating is the public is learning and there's enough stuff out there you can say, “Hey, this is what I want to do. Go watch this film. Go watch Kiss the Ground, go find some Gabe Brown stuff, David Brandt stuff.” Because my last farm I picked up was actually 22 houses. It's 140 acres. I didn't really wanna throw my name in the hat. They asked me if I'd come. “What would you pay, cash, rent.” And I was like, “I don't know, I don't really wanna do it.” But I was really close to my house. And so I thought, “okay, if I want to do this the way I really want to do this, then cover crops are hard.” And there was no FLOURISH program.
And mind you, the efficiency of this field, I found out right away too, the farmer before said, “Hey, just plan on having a lot of overlap.” And the first year I seeded it was 190 acres with GPS. So, “that's crazy,” I said. So long story short is I came back to their board and I said, “here's the deal. I'm gonna do cover crops every third year and I'm not paying you cash rent. And if you want extra amount of sunflowers 'cause you didn't like the amount in there or things that you think you wanna see out in your field to look fun and cool, then we can talk about it, and maybe it might have a little extra cost.” And I got a phone call back the next day saying, “we're going with you.” And my cash rent was $20 less an acre. And not that I'm not trying to undercut these people or anything, but I pitched soil health. And I want a healthy crop. I wanna leave this ground better than what it is right now. I would love the David Brandt model, where somehow he said, “we're gonna do a soil test right now and then if you kick me off the farm, this is what you're gonna pay me at market value.” But that kind of motivation, if that was really how the market was going, would that not motivate the farmer to really take care of the soil?
Ryan Boylan (38:01)
And I think a lot of people out there are doing a really good job. You know what I mean?
Josh Riddle (38:04)
Yeah. And I, I don't want to come across as if it's doom and gloom. But I think there's a bunch of things I didn't know, and I don't know if it's getting around fast enough. And we're going against some pretty big giants that don't want this market to change to happen. Or they wanna figure out how to get us bugs in a jug, and bugs in a jug have a place, kind of. But you're not getting the whole gamut. And that's the problem. So they're trying to already--I mean, you can buy 'em. I bought 'em. When I first started doing it, I was buying bugs in Jug.
Ryan Boylan (38:39)
Yeah. I was gonna say, I feel like that's like part of the progression, right? (Laughs) That led you down this...
Josh Riddle (38:43)
Yeah, that'd be a part where you just gotta figure out what you want to do. But extracts are simple. Like if one of you guys goes in, like a farmer in the neighborhood buys one...my 15-year-old niece came over and ran it for me. And I think this spring we've put now...first round was 13,000 gallons, so we're over 40,000 gallons of extract on our farm this year. And so mine does about 700 gallons an hour. So we've got quite a few hours on there. But it does a great job. And I kind of paint a little picture of our setup. It's kind of funny 'cause the guys that I bought this from were like, “send us pictures of that. That is the most wholesome, coolest story you told.”
But my little niece, I called her and I said, “Hey, you wanna come down and make some worm poop sauce for me?” (Laughs) We always call it worm poop and everybody wiggles. But, she was like, “I don't know, does it stink?” And I said no. So I brought her down and we got this giant super sack of the most coolest black dirt. If you’ve ever been around worm castings, it's got a cool vibe. (Laughs). And I told her to smell it. She's said no. And so she smelled it finally. She's said “that doesn't stink. Smells like really good dirt.” (Laughs) And I was like, “I know.” And so the first day she just rocked out. I took my little DeWalt radio down there and I gave her five batteries and I said, “I'll be back like every hour on the hour and just rock out to whatever music you want.”
And I showed up, and she had tried to make a little tent 'cause the sun was getting a little hot that day. It was probably like 95 when she was doing it, but she had a little tarp up and I said we need to get a tarp now. But she had the tunes just ripping and was totally into it. And I was like, “dang, man, this is awesome. This is what’s kind of fun: that a 15-year-old can do this.” And she was happy. There was no worry to wash your hands really quick right after you get this on you, or you're worried kind of about the dust. There's so much stuff that I would always like...I don't have all my kids involved right now 'cause it's maybe not totally healthy. And this is totally healthy.
Ryan Boylan (41:12)
Josh, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about any surprises or things you learned from the FLOURISH cover crop trials that you planted this year?
Josh Riddle (41:21)
Yeah. So, one of the surprises was actually you guys. (Laughs) As the program got going, having soil monitors out there, and I said, “man, they're showing up and they're like, ‘Hey, can we come out and check the field out today?’” And the follow up was really fun to hear. And then when we went to the meeting and then seeing all of the graphs, whether it was kinda a weird year for everybody 'cause of the drought. But that was a huge surprise.
Cover crops, for me. I've been doing 'em for a while. Probably my biggest surprise is...I've screen seeded a lot, but I've never pushed them to the final days of “we're gonna roller crimp these.” Which kind of leads us to the next next segue, but this realizing this year, “okay, I'm doing this, and how do I terminate these without chemicals?”
Ryan Boylan (42:15)
And your situation was a little different. You decided to seed your cover crop later in the summer, right?
Josh Riddle (42:19)
Yeah. So we did some work with some biochar. On this field it has a pH of 4.7. And it was screwed up with some other supplements that were used on it earlier before I was there. And we've never been able to get decent ground or crops off the ground when it's really good ground, but they've just messed up the pH on it. And so we tried the biochar thing. Actually, I tilled the field before we put the biochar down, 'cause they wanted it in the ground at three inches. And then we came back and tilled it again. By that point we knocked a lot of moisture outta the ground and then the crops kind of stalled out. I mean, when you were out there, they were knee high at best. The ones across the road were shoulder high by the end of the fall when I was roller crimping. I mean seven feet, eight feet tall.
Takeaways from the roller crimper, which was the conservation districts were, there was a lot of things. First I filled it up too full water. We were actually plugging a little bit with these cover crops. Kind of dealt that part of it. Trying to figure out what's the weight you need in there to get a good crimp. And the big takeaway for me was realizing that as these cover crops get going and if you do a good job at or if you have better soils, especially in my better soils this year with rain, they were enormous. Yeah.
Ryan Boylan (43:34)
Yeah. You said it was almost above your head.
Josh Riddle (43:37)
Yeah. I mean seven, eight feet tall. I actually probably one of the takeaways is that I couldn't see through some of 'em. Just didn't happen. I have 380 acres that were unseeded because it was too thick. It's too thick. Too tall. Cover crimped it too late. So, some of the stuff I did when we got the crimper, it's just like any farmer and kid. You're like, “oh my gosh, what's this thing gonna do?” It’s super fun 'cause it's another thing. It's not complicated that you're gonna wreck something on the farm. This equipment we have now--this is part of my beef with farming--is it's gotten so expensive that I don't want to turn my neighbor kid out in my combine because it's complicated. And then the damage is way bigger than it used to be.
So anyways, roller crimpers. So we were out there messing around with this. We crimped parts of the field and what we found is the stuff that we crimped earlier...you can double crimp a field and it makes it much more manageable. And that stuff that we crimped early on that was still knee high to waist high was gone a month later. The biomass was just disappearing. But it still regrew. So you have this living root and the idea is with these, you can do all the extracts you want, you can do all those things, but you gotta keep a living root in the ground. And that's not me, you know, from this is other people explaining that to us. So that's what's kind of cool, is you have this low impact piece of machinery that is simple to use, simple concepts. And roller crimping is something that with two passes, we were cooking. We're doing six miles an hour, seven miles an hour. Now, we were using a 15 foot one, but on our farm we did hay and this is gonna be like running a swather but twice as fast to some degree.
Ryan Boylan (45:24)
So you would just do it earlier?
Josh Riddle (45:25)
I would do it earlier. I don't think you can. But that's the cool part about these cover crops, is if you have multi-species, you have some forgiveness in there, you know what I mean? You might smoke one of 'em, but then another one's still growing, or another one didn't mind it. So those were the things I learned. So, I would say that, yeah, roller crimping was a huge part of it. And then eventually it’s “how do you manage this biomass?” So that was probably one of my takeaways, was that it wasn't that you're necessarily...the field that we seeded with you guys turned out great, but some of my other ones that we let it go with the late rains, we ended up getting almost four inches of rain from September to the end of October. And so those cover crops went crazy and we had above normal temperatures. It was like so warm. 80 degrees at the end of October.
Ryan Boylan (46:21)
Another quick question. Do you ever treat cover crop seed with mycorrhizal...?
Josh Riddle (46:26)
Yeah. That’s another thing. I used to think I had this cool secret, but I’ll just tell it 'cause now it's not a secret anymore. But I found out when I was down getting peas that there were bins and bins. I tried to buy some peas as cover crop, and it was way too expensive. And so we got these lentils, and the lentils were way cheaper. Lentils were awesome. I would say lentils should be in cover crops. The thing I've learned from growing lentils is they suck to combine. But in a cover crop... and in the Lentil Underground book, you start reading there's something going on with lentils. It's a special crop. But my lentils were the screw up. They had mixed two of the wrong varieties. And so they have bins and bins and bins and bins that they don't know what to do with, and most people don't think of green manuring lentils. So I bought bins and bins and bins and bins, and the story's dragging on, but they're all treated.
And this is where it gets worse. I started spraying my cover crop seed with my extract and I think I just made the slurry re-slurry. And so, I started seeing pink everywhere, covering all the cover crop seed, and we were like digging up depths and I was like, okay. So I used up the rest of my lentils, but I didn't seed my cover crop, and I didn't spray my cover crop with extract. On the seed itself, I would recommend it, I think it's a hundred percent. We did throw worm castings in there. To do that part of it, to actually just try to get it, they'll stick. Worm castings are almost 30% moisture. So it's amazing what they'll do. Just sticking. I think Jason even did some this year. He didn't have an extractor. He didn't have a way to do it, so he just started putting worm castings in his furrow with the seed, so in the seed box.
That's another takeaway that took me this long to figure out. “Oh yeah, those cool lentils that you were so pumped about are probably causing a lot of damage going on there.” So maybe somebody can figure out how to wash seeds one day. for all these bins of seed that're sitting around. Where do you put that stuff when you wash it off? I don't know.
Ryan Boylan (49:01)
That's a whole other issue.
Josh Riddle (49:03)
Yeah. So, the exciting things that are coming from FLOURISH and talking to the guys. I mean, there were some big growers in there that have done a lot of different things. I always ask Chris, “am I still a farmer? Do you think of me as a farmer?” Because it’s almost like I’m a glorified hobby farmer, but I'm really trying to make a living. I'm worried, you know? I have a one income family. But I feel like I don't have that consecutive 500 acres of ground or a 200 acre field and another 200 acre field. I've got one of those. And even Chris up there in Deer Park, he's farming quite a few fields that are just all put together.
But the guys in that room, they're seeing a difference. I think that they wanna make a change. And for some of 'em, maybe it was new, maybe it wasn't. And I think that's the thing I'm hoping for when we have our field trials. We've talked about “how can we invite neighbors like that?” This isn't a closed group, you know? And we haven't got there, some people may say, “no, I don't wanna do that.” But my idea is: instead of making that farmer lean over the fence and see how far he can lean in there to see what's going on, let him walk around, pick some of it up, let him say, “I don't believe in this,” or whatever he wants to do. But get him out there. You can't unsee this stuff.
Ryan Boylan (50:30)
Yeah. Thanks for bringing that up, actually. We are planning, for everyone's information, some field tours this summer, and I think it's taxpayers' dollars that are paying for the project. So we'll spread the word and invite people out to most of the places.
Josh Riddle (50:43)
And that's the exciting part about this whole thing. Like, I mean, you guys are rocking on this thing. That's the energy, the excitement. When we left that first meeting, I was already on the phone with Jason. “Dude, this is amazing.”
Ryan Boylan (50:58)
That's really great to hear, 'cause this summer we were scrambling. (Laughs)
Josh Riddle (51:03)
Yeah. And that was okay. There was no judgment there. Like I said, you guys were out there saying, “can we come check and get in your field?” And so, I don't think I even knew what kinds of things were happening until I saw the data that was showing up there on the screen. It'd be kind of cool to see what the difference is, or could we have left them in longer or not? Or do you leave em in the same field or...anyway, that's for you guys to figure out.
Ryan Boylan (51:25)
Yeah. And it’s really nice to get feedback. And I would love at some point to spend more time looking at the data as a group, because I feel like that's good discussion. I was presenting slides and you guys were like, “oh wait, who's that? What's going on there?”
Josh Riddle (51:39)
You could see the dips and the doodads and like, “what did happen?” And there's a whole other world of...”do you graze these things?” Which, you guys had some farmers grazing them. I don't know if I'll ever get there unless we start re-fencing Peone Prairie and a million houses. But, that's probably about it. And probably one of the other surprises is how many people go, “what's going on? What are you doing? Why? When are you gonna harvest that?” And we're not. Those cover crops bring up a lot of questions. And some of you guys say, “well, I'm in the middle of nowhere and nobody's gonna see it.” But get a drone, fly over it. Drive through it. Send kids out there. See who can find the biggest radish, the biggest turnips.
I showed up at one landlord this fall and, it was pretty funny, they had like my purple top turnips sitting on their stairs to their house. And this was a weird year, but I'm not kidding you, these things were 10, 12 inches in diameter. They looked like mini pumpkins out there. And I was like, “what's up with those?” And they're like, “well, we sent the grandkids out there and they were like, ‘look how big this one is, and look how big this one is.’”
Ryan Boylan (52:55)
Did they carve 'em?
Josh Riddle (52:56)
They didn't carve 'em, but they were just out there. It was such a great activity, 'cause we were actually worried about getting stung because there were so many bees like in those. They were all full blooming in October. So that part was cool. One of these days I should send you guys a picture, maybe we can do the plug for this podcast, but it's my dad holding up one of the radishes we grew. And I wish David Brandt had one of his competitions going for who can grow the biggest one. Because there's one that my dad...I sent him out the first year we did this eight or nine years ago, and there was no way I was seeding through 'em. So, we decided to mow this field of radishes and turnips and lentils and sunflowers. And my dad wasn't coming back. And I was like, “what is he doing? Where's he at?” And finally, he comes back and I'm filling the drill. I said, “I need you over here mowing this field.” And he's like, “my mower is covered in these radishes. (Laughs) And he is getting out, picking up the next biggest one, and then the next biggest one. And he starts showing me all these radishes. And it's one of those moments where you're like, “oh my gosh.”
Ryan Boylan (54:03)
It's amazing.
Josh Riddle (54:04)
But, and now I wonder how much is in one of those by volume, these things were four feet long, 9 or 10 inches around. He's holding them up and they hide his whole face. So there's just fun things with the cover crops.
Ryan Boylan (54:21)
Yeah. That sounds like a really fun day of farming.
Josh Riddle (54:23)
(Laughs) Yeah. You know, you start seeing other things. You're growing. I mean, I think that's what's fun: can you grow milo? Can you grow millet? Can you grow buckwheat? What are these other things we can grow? And maybe we don't need to grow wheat as much, or in a different way.
Ryan Boylan (54:42)
Well this has been great, Josh. I think we'll call it for now. Stay tuned for our next episode in a couple weeks to a month.
Josh Riddle (54:52)
Thanks for having me.
Ryan Boylan (54:53)
Thanks so much.
Outro
This podcast was brought to you by the Palouse Conservation District. Funding is provided by USDA's Conservation Innovation Grants program. To find out more information, check out the FLOURISH website at iwflourish.org. Thanks so much for listening and keep an eye out for our next episode.
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