 Hello, everyone, and welcome to Farming Matters. I'm your host, Erin Schneider. I work with the Most Central Asian Cereprogram, and I'm here today with Marie Flanagan, our producer of the show. Hello, everyone. So I'm really excited to be here today with Anna Timmer with the cornucopia. And Anna is going to share with you all today more about her on Cerefarmor Rancher Project. Anna, welcome. We're glad you're here. Thanks for making time. Thanks for having me. One thing I wanted to ask is for the viewers who aren't familiar with the cornucopia, can you describe the cornucopia and where it is? So the cornucopia is about a 10-acre farm located in Sioux Center, Iowa. So it's basically smack dab in the middle of Sioux County. Sioux County is a lot of row cropping, and it's a lot of feedlots. And it's a lot of hog confinements. And so what we're doing here is very outside of the box thinking, but we grow, oh, boy, depending on how you count, anywhere from 40 to 80 different kinds of vegetables per year. We have about an 80 to 100-member CSA program that we're running, so community-supported agriculture. We go to four farmers markets a week. We do sell some wholesale. It's mostly retail. There's a couple colleges that are local that we like to work with, but they've had a lot of turnover in chefs the last couple years, which has made it a little bit more difficult to figure out, like, what do we need to have an inventory that works better for you? And there's a couple restaurants that we also sell to. We raise about 200 to 250 laying hens and about 20 ducks. So we bring eggs to market, and we raise about 3,000 broiler chickens on pasture every year. And what's your role at the cornucopia? I am the field team leader, which means that I coordinate all of the transplanting that happens at the farm. It's my job to know how much space this certain planting is going to take up and where it's going to go. And let's see, I work a lot with the summer employees that come out, so I teach a lot of harvesting techniques, sweetening techniques, a lot of what we do at the cornucopia. We're not certified organic, but we follow all organic practices, and so we're always looking for new and better ways to do things and to improve our growing practices and to improve the quality of the product that we're offering to people. And so I guess in 2020 and in 2021, the farm saw tremendous growth in sales. And so the demand was there for us to have more and to offer more, but then that means that we needed to grow more, which means that you're dealing with more weeds. And so we were just kind of at this point where we didn't really know what to do anymore about all the weeds. And we were really battling perennial weeds, like thistles, that we could just not get a handle on. And so on the way to the farmer's market at 5 o'clock in the morning on a Saturday, my boss and I were just kind of talking about what are some of our options, what are we doing well, what are we not doing well, what are some solutions to solving these problems that we're having. And I thought to myself, well, farmers in Northwest Iowa burn their ditches on a regular basis. And prairies get burned on a regular basis. And why is that? Why are they doing this prescribed burning? And I knew that part of it was for weed control, right? Like you kind of just burn the weeds and then they can't produce a seed head and just to kind of maybe get a little bit of a better handle on that. And so I started looking into it. And I realized that there isn't a lot of literature at all on prescribed burning in terms of what is it actually doing to the soil? Is it benefiting the soil? Is it actually hurting the soil? What's happening with annual weeds? What's happening with perennial weeds? Kind of just anything like that. And so the more I looked into it, the less I was finding. And so then that's when my boss suggested that I apply for a SARA grant to do some of this more in-depth research just to see what kinds of things were happening and not happening. And so this project would be what I would call phase one. And we just wanted to make sure that we weren't harming the soil health at all. And so we basically, I did a soil test before planting a cover crop, like an annual perennial cover crop. I did a soil test while the cover crop was growing. And then I did a soil test after burning just to kind of see what was there before we started, what nutrients are being taken up by the cover crop. And we did a perennial, or yeah, we did winter rye. So something that we could seed in the fall that would come back in the spring that we could let grow for the summer and then burn off after that. And so then I was able to sit down with a professor of agriculture from Dort University, which is located in the town that the farm is in. And then he was able to kind of teach me how to read a soil test, but also kind of talking through what was happening. You can go to the next slide. Yeah, so this is kind of just the timeline that we use. So I seeded annual or winter rye grass on September 27 of 2022. So I was approved for my grant in the spring of 2022. We watched the grass grow the summer of 2023. And then we mowed it a couple of times to prevent some of that reseeding that winter rye can do. If you let it go to seed for too long, we didn't wanna end up with another weed. We didn't wanna just end up with another weed that we were gonna have to deal with this coming year. And then on November 10 of last year, then we burnt the grass with the help of the local fire department. You can go to the next slide. Anna, I'm sorry. I don't know if you're gonna cover this later, but are you gonna talk about like working with the fire department at all? Yes, yep. Yep. So this is just kind of a really broad overview of the soil test results that we had. And the main things to look at would be so the first three, so the phosphorus, the cation exchange capacity and the nitrate nitrogen, there is not really a big difference between any of those numbers, which is what we wanted to see. We wanted to make sure that we weren't losing a lot of that kind of a thing. And there is, I guess with the nitrate nitrogen we did, we went from 72 to pounds per acre to 31 by the time we were postponed. But when I sat down and talked with the agricultural professor, then he said that the nitrate nitrogen is water soluble, meaning that it can get taken up in the air with evaporation or it can wash away very easily if you have a hard rain. And so that's more fertilizer, that nitrate nitrogen is in the form of fertilizer. The organic nitrogen and the organic carbon, that's soil fertility, like that's long-term soil fertility. And so those are the kinds of numbers that we wanted to see change and which they did. So as you can see, the organic carbon went way up there kind of towards the middle. The organic nitrogen also went way up. And so when we started our carbon to nitrogen ratio was 102.3 to one. So 102.3 carbon to one nitrogen. And you want that ratio to actually be closer between eight to one and 25 to one. So by the time we were done, I actually was able to get it down to 21 to one instead of that 102. So that part of the project worked really well. The other thing that we noticed was an increase in our one-day CO2C burst, which is the amount of soil microbials that are active. And so that's a measurement of like how active are those microbials along in the soil. You can go to the next slide. So some of the outcomes of this were, we learned that we should have probably used a different cover crop. When you drive on that winter rye grass, then it dies. And so, but we had to drive on it to mow it. Like we mowed it pretty high, but it would have been better if we could pick a different cover crop that we didn't have to do any of that with. And now we know from learning through this process we should use something like a sorghum sedan or something else kind of like that that would mimic the height and density of prairie grass but something that we didn't have to mow throughout the summer. Our carbon to nitrogen ratio improved significantly, which means that we have more natural microbial activity. So there's more decomposition happening. There's more nutrients available to the plants. We have better long-term fertility because of this. We got just better long-term soil health. When I was doing my research for this, some ecologists believe that the reason that the soil in Northwest Iowa or why the soil in Northwest Iowa is so rich is because of these prairie fires, which is also part of the reason why I was inspired to do this. And so what happens is fire travels close to the ground when it burns. And so the plants get cut off, like that grass gets cut off at the bottom and falls on top of the fire and kind of smothering it out, which creates this really nutrient rich charcoal, which they call biochar. And you can actually buy biochar to put on your gardens for increase, like as a fertilizer basically is what you can do. And so part of this then was also trying to see if we could recreate that biochar naturally so that we had better long-term soil health. We had hopefully better weed management and we didn't lose any nutrients. That was the other thing that I really wanted to check up on was to make sure that we weren't losing nutrients in any of the smoke. I can go to the next. So some of this future application would be, we're planning on for this coming year, we're gonna use a way more diverse blend of cover crops and we're gonna try more heavy crop rotation, like throughout the entire season. We're trying to get more towards having long-term fertility as opposed to using fertilizers, even if they are natural ones. And then a future study would be on the effects of fire and weed control and what kind of an effect does fire have on weed seeds and some of those Pringle weeds. And with the fire department, then Sioux Center, the town where I'm at has a volunteer fire department and there's, actually it's very common in Sioux County for farmers to burn their fields. And so this is like, this is something that they do on a regular basis where they do prescribed burning for other farmers. And so that was a really easy way for us to just say like, oh yeah, hey we have this plot that we would like to burn and then, yeah, and then it's good practice for them and yeah, all that kind of thing. So. Oh, thank you Anna. So burning like conditions need to have a sweet spot, right? Where did you, would you like stick to a fall burning? Is that pretty common? Or would you wanna like tweak with maybe spring and then direct seed right after that because you have that like helping with the seed prep thing or what would be some tips there? I think the reason that I picked fall burning partly was because we weren't quite sure how this was gonna go, right? Like this is like you can plan, plan, plan and that doesn't mean that it's gonna happen. And so part of that was then we were, we kinda had a little bit more flexibility with a fall burn as opposed to a spring burn and I really wanted everything to be dead and it's more likely that it'll be dead in the fall than in the spring. And then if we did end up with some weird fertility issues then it wasn't gonna necessarily affect everything that we were gonna try to plant right after that. And we do like to leave different sections. We kind of have a rotation of sections of ground that we like leaving fallow for sometimes a year, sometimes six months kind of depending on how things are going. And so the section that I did my project on was the one that we wanted to leave fallow. Especially since the year before we had onions there and the weeds were like 10 feet tall over my head. And so we were like, this looks like a really great spot for some cover crop and for some burning. So we'll see how many of those weeds actually come up again this year. I don't know, we'll figure it out, but. Any advice for other producers who might want to start doing prescribed burning? For people that wanna do this, kind of like timing is everything. And so like being flexible, like I've only tried one cover crop and we're, if we do it again, we're gonna try a different one and just kind of doing personal research and like having that like personal growth mindset. I think at least in some of the conversations that I've had with other producers about my project or just other producers in general, sometimes there's a little bit of this fear that like what if I fail? And like honestly what has benefited us the most is the spirit of curiosity and this like the idea and the spirit of like being okay to take a risk. And you know, like it might pan out really well for you, but it might not and being okay with accept, like you have to accept both aspects of that. So you also mentioned like one thing that revealed was sort of like a healthy hone in on the cover crop mix you wanted to plant this year. Do you feel like you'll keep like burn burning in your sort of your management life cycle as a result too? Or you're kind of like, I don't know or yeah. Yes, I think we will probably, we'll definitely choose a different cover crop probably sorghum sedan. And then we'll be able to like, we like using the natural method, like the natural processes that are already like in creation as opposed to buying it. Like there's, we buy like an organic fertilizer and like it's a cow manure base, but we don't necessarily need like all of the phosphorus or all of the whatever that's coming along with that. And so this kind of like plants really need a lot of nitrogen. They don't necessarily like, they take out phosphorus, but not nearly as quickly as what they take up nitrogen. So we're also trying to like find ways of adding that nitrogen back in without adding like way too much of something else. Cause then you can get disease problems and pest issues. And so we really like the rebalancing that this actually did. So yeah, I think we plan on, I mean we'll see how the summer goes, but we do plan on bringing and if anything, like we've, we are planning on using cover crops, like a way wider variety of cover crops than what we've ever used before to just kind of try to like work with more of those natural methods and weed barriers and like planting buffer strips for beneficial insects and just kind of like trying to, yeah, do more with that. Thank you and a pleasure. Pleasure is all ours. I appreciate your time and just wish you all well. So I'm happy burning this was fun. I do that. Oh yes. May or may not be a pyromaniac in heart.