Soil Health and Climate Change on a Leading Good Grain Farm
Harold Wilken of Janie's Farm shares his expertise
At Janie’s Farm, Soil Health Proof is in ‘Chocolate Cake’
Those of us who advocate for regenerative agriculture practices believe that they repair and improve our nation’s vital soils, thus providing greater sustainability to our food system. Although defenders of conventional agriculture practices try to throw shade at regenerative ag, many farmers say the proof is how much their own soils have improved in the years since they transitioned their land and employed practices such as no-till planting, cover cropping and eschewing chemical fertilizers.
One of my go-to farmers on this topic is Harold Wilken of Janie’s Farm in Danforth, Illinois and Janie’s Mill in nearby Ashkum, about whom I’ve written before.
Harold began his career with the conventional practices on the farm on which he was raised, but the use of agricultural chemicals became an increasing concern (he suffered health issues after he was accidentally sprayed with pesticide in 1990). He was a rare bird when he began to transition his farm to organic in 2005.
In the years since, Harold has played a key role in the good grain movement, as an exemplar, an advocate, and a recruiter persuading other farmers to go organic. He is partnered today with his son Ross Wilken, and together they received the 2023 Farmer of the Year Award from the Marbleseed organic farming education non-profit.
So Harold was a great choice by Illinois Stewardship Alliance for a Soil Health Week webinar on March 9 at which he discussed his experiences and have they lend themselves as evidence of the benefits of regenerative agriculture.
The program was mostly a Q&A with attendees, and I took the opportunity to ask Harold some questions about the topic. Excerpts from Harold’s informative and detailed answers are below, and include what the “chocolate cake” reference in the headline means.
Q: Since you have the honor of closing out Soil Health Week, can you discuss a little about how long it took you to completely remediate the conventional soils that you started with in your transition? And how would you compare your soil health today, as compared to the way it was when you started transition?
A: It took, I'm gonna say, five years, six years, to come up with what really works to transition to soil health. [Note: The following refers to cover crops planted following the grain harvest.] This red clover, rye after corn program, probably in 2013 or ‘14, was when we finally came up with that.
It took quite a while to get the soil to change because I was taking all the nutrients off in the hay. But once we got past that, it takes about five years for the soil to completely regenerate, where it won't wash [away], it won't blow.
One of the things that's interesting to me is I have no-till neighbors and conventional farmers. They're doing the best they can, I'm not knocking them for it, but they go out and they no-till corn and soybeans ... but when they have a lot of like 4% slope or so, the soil is still cut way underneath residue.
And part of that is that until they change the soil structure by using cover crops and cutting back on the nitrogen fertilizers, they still have erosion. And not saying that we don't have a little bit when like an eight-inch rain comes through. But when I've got soils that are on about 4% to 5% slope and there's no cuts in it, that's when I say okay, we're successful.
You know, the soil is like chocolate cake, it's very malleable. And it's not washing and not blowing.
Q: Can you explain how the microbiome works and how you cultivate it, how you maintain it?
A: When the soil is healthy, it's got the microbiome, it's got all these bugs in the soil that actually break things down, they actually feed off of that residue that's in the soil. And that's what makes it healthy.
When I go out there in the fall, the winter, I can see that the soil is breaking down the residue. In most areas, there's hardly anything left in the last year's residue.
[Note: In the following passage, Bt refers to Bacillus thuringiensis, a bacteria used as an insecticide. GMO, a more familiar term, refers to Genetically Modified Organisms; in the farming context, it involves seeds that are genetically modified to resist applications of strong insecticides and herbicides.]
Well, one of the things that I saw happen with the Bt-GMO project years ago was for the worms out there in the field… the [corn] stalks had Bt and so the the worms won't eat it. These no-till [conventional] farmers actually had so much residue that they had to buy tillage tools called vertical tills to work it into the soil to be able to plant in it.
One of the things I have to tell you is that if you're looking at this, you got to look at it with the eyes of what am I looking at? What am I seeing here? If [residue] isn't dying out there and isn’t being digested, there has to be a reason. Healthy soil will digest the residue that's out there. And that wasn't happening.
Q: Obviously, global climate change is a big issue and a big concern. How has it impacted your farming? Have you had to change any practices or make any adaptations to the fact that our weather is so incredibly unpredictable and quirky? And then specifically, this year, we just got out of our warmest February in recorded history. For the most part, it's been quite warm in March. What does that suggest about how this growing season is going to be? Is it going to be earlier at all?
A: The biggest change we've had is that 40, 50 years ago, we would have a half-inch [rain] shower, maybe an inch and a half. I remember one major flood in 1970, where the water stood on my dad's farm; on 120 acres, there was probably 80 of it under water. And there was a previous flood in like 1958 when there were pigs in water in the backyard.
I mean, we talked about, oh my gosh, the flood of this year and the flood of that year. Now that's happening about every three and four years if not even more often. Instead of two inch or less rains, we're getting four to eight inch rains. And so on our heavy clay soils here in Iroquois County, we've had to rely more on subsurface drainage.
So far, we haven't had an issue with not being able to get planted except, I think it was 2019, we did have one year there where we were unable to plant in the spring. But just a lot more water, a lot less snow.
We're definitely getting changes we're able to adapt to so far. We don't have the extreme heat that we had in the ‘80s. So we haven't had the 105, 107 degree days for two weeks on end like we did then. But we're definitely going into period of adverse weather conditions and not predictable.
Q: The first time that I visited your farm, it was eight years ago, and you held a big meeting for local farmers who you were trying to persuade to transition to organic. It was pouring so hard that day, we would have needed a canoe to visit the fields.
A: I don't think we're in any real danger in the near future. But, what my son's gonna s see by the time he's my age is gonna be very interesting as to how will we adapt as farmers. And this is what I'm really trying to promote with soil health.
Last year, we had a drought in June. And it was so severe in places at times, where my neighbors’ farms’ soils cracked open, the corn looked like it was gonna die. Some of it that was planted early never did recover from that drought. But I was able to go out where we've been organic for a long time. The soil was mellower, it didn't crack open, I was able to find moisture underneath and plant roots there.
I attribute that to the moisture being able to come up from below. We used to have, they called it plow soil. A plow soil was like a seal underneath around about six, seven inches. We don't have that on our farm. So moisture was able to come up from the soil, and then actually feed the plants from down below.
And we had record yields on our farm this last year. I would have never guessed it. In fact, I didn't guess, I even went out and did yield checks before we put our harvest in and told Ross that I've got something wrong with my formula because we don't get these yields. So I feel very fortunate in that. I think the healthy soil is really now starting to benefit us.
Q: So the moral is that nature abides, if you take care of it, right?
A: Oh, you bet. I don't like to go into religious aspects, I don't want to offend anybody. But we can all be revived if we want to, and soils just sit there waiting for us to do that.
Prior to his online talk, Harold recorded two videos. One is from a wheat field that has been organic for a number of years — and includes a sample of what chocolate cake soils look like — and the second is a field in which organic transition has just begun, where the soils look like sand. Click below to view the videos.
Fields Apart Farming Doc: View All Three Segments Now
Last month, Local Food Forum shared the release of Part 1 of Fields Apart: Rooted Together, Illinois Farm Bureau’s new three-part documentary series. The series underscores the shared and different challenges, joys and opportunities for five farms across the state of Illinois.
And today, we are happy to report that all three parts of the documentary are now available for viewing.
The series features rural farmers Matthew Heberling of MJH Farms and Sadie Asher of The Back 20, and Chicago urban farmers Michael and Amelia Howard of Eden Place Farm and Nature Center, Alicia Nesbary-Moore of Herban Produce, and Natasha Nicholes of We Sow We Grow.
The series is filled with inspirational stories, awesome people, and beautiful production values. It is definitely worth your time, and please share with your community members who you think would benefit from watching.
Click the button below to access all three segments.
Bob’s World, and Welcome to It
I saw the signs… of spring. While out on my Green City Market run on Saturday, I had my first sighting this year of flowering and leafing trees.
Can flowers… and goslings… and ramps be far behind?
Meanwhile, Happy St. Patrick’s Day to my wife, friends and others who trace their roots to Ireland.
We're just thinking of different frames of reference. I was involved in the co-op movement in Minnesota in the '70s. There was a co-op Warehouse in Minneapolis supplied by organic grain farmers in Minnesota and The Dakotas. Of course, the organic operations were always a tiny minority. But I believe that they existed throughout farm country..
Here is something about that history:https://rogerblobaum.com/history-of-the-organic-farming-movement-in-the-1970s-in-the-midwest/
We are happy to have Harold Wilkin but, to say
"He was a rare bird when he began to transition his farm to organic in 2005."
This ignores 30 to 40 years of History of organic and regenerative farming. The regenerative term may be new, but the practices are far from new.