1. Sustainable
ag in Iowa
2. Sweet
corn, melons, squash and soup beans in Kansas
3. Farmer/engineer
in Ohio
4. Sandy
loam and 16" annual rainfall in South Dakota
5. 25
acres of field crops in Greece
6. Already
rolling in Tennessee
7. Trying
to replace mouldboard plowing in New York
Sustainable Ag in Iowa
Dear Jeff,
We are brothers who own farmland in north central Iowa
(Humboldt County) that we rent out. We are interested in exploring
participation in the Organic No Till system project.
Allen Jensen
Vienna, Virginia
Lawrence Jensen
New Hampton, Iowa
Dear Allen and Lawrence,
Thanks for your response to our article requesting
farmer cooperators for our organic no-till project. We are
in the early stages of pulling the working arrangements together.
For right now we are collecting potential on-farm sites and
will be getting back to folks over the next few months. This
will be a three-year project starting this October (2004).
Once we get further along in the project, we’ll be in
touch.
This project will involve approximately
10 farms in at least seven regions of the country. We’ll
be working with regionally based coordinators, who will work
directly with the farms to collect the data. Thanks again
for your show of interest and support in our work.
Jeff Moyer
Dear Jeff,
Many thanks for your response. We learned about your
project through the Practical Farmers of Iowa organization.
My brother Lawrence and I are both ag graduates from Iowa
State, but we went into other professions later. We are very
interested in someway contributing to the efforts that you
and others are making to the broad goal of “sustainable
agriculture.” We appreciate the work you are doing and
look forward to hearing from you or one of your coordinators
at a later time.
Thanks,
Allen Jensen
Sweet
corn, melons, squash and soup beans in Kansas
Dear Jeff,
I’d like to participate in your No-Till collaborative
study. Contact me please. I am interested in growing sweet
corn, melons, squash and soup beans in north central Kansas.
I planted around 15 acres of wheat for knockdown this spring.
Dennis Kemnitz
Dear Dennis,
Thanks for your response to our article
requesting farmer cooperators for our organic no-till project.
We are in the early stages of pulling the working arrangements
together. For right now we are collecting potential on-farm
sites and will be getting back to folks over the next few
months. This will be a three-year project starting this October
(2004). Once we get further along in the project, we’ll
be in touch.
This project will involve approximately
10 farms in at least seven regions of the country. We’ll
be working with regionally based coordinators, who will work
directly with the farms to collect the data. Thanks again
for your show of interest and support in our work.
Jeff Moyer
Hello Jeff,
An organic farmer neighbor of mine may be
interested in a hundred acres or so of row crops. Before I
saw your crimper roller in last month’s New Farm article,
I was planning to sickle mow the wheat next spring prior to
hand transplanting. This is the most exciting innovation I've
seen for organic farming since I started reading Organic Gardening
and Farming magazine around 40 years ago. I've tried a lot
of things from OGF magazines mostly relative to backyard gardening
cause I didn’t have farm ground and machinery then.
Compost tea seems mighty interesting, but I'm not real sure
about it yet. The soil food web should thrive using the crimper
roller and perhaps only a shallow disking and aerated compost
tea application prior to planting wheat.
Best regards,
Dennis Kemnitz
food technologist advocating organic farming and processing
Dear Dennis,
Thanks for the kind words and for keeping
the ball rolling forward. We'll be back in touch soon.
Jeff
Hello Jeff,
I reviewed your slide presentation again
regarding the building of the crimper roller. How and what
machine “twists” the 4” roller blades so
they fit the curve of the roller? You must use a cold roller
of some kind. No rush on the answer, however I am
looking into getting some blades fitted to a 16” pipe
(although I haven’t located one yet). I have some blades
from an old V-blade used in this country years ago, which
might “twist” (and they might not either). I have
some heavy 3-point tool bars from some old 4-, 6- and 8-row
cultivators that could hold the roller.
Thanks a lot,
Dennis Kemnitz
Dear Dennis,
I'll try and explain the process we used,
although it is hard to do it service in words. We made each
blade in two pieces, brought them together in the middle and
welded them together. We put each blade section in a large
press and curved them like a banana so that the 4-inch dimension
is the curved part. It took a large press to do this. Then
we placed the blade section against the cylinder to which
short sections of angle iron had already been welded on a
spiral pattern. We bolted the outside end to the angle iron
bracket. At this point, the other end is sort of hanging out
in the air. We simply (or not so simply) put a large pipe
wrench on the end of the blade, hanging free, and using human
muscle pulled it down against the cylinder. We clamped it
in place, marked the holes against the angle iron mounting
brackets, took it off, drilled the holes where we had marked
them, and re-installed the blade by pulling it back into place
and putting the bolts in. We repeated this procedure for each
half blade; then welded the centers together putting in a
filler piece, if needed, where they meet in the center.
Hope this helps,
Jeff
Farmer/engineer
in Ohio
Dear Jeff,
I see that there is a grant program under
way with the rye roller technology. Have you selected the
collaborative farmers for the research yet? I may be interested.
Joe Woods
Dear Joe,
We are getting tons of requests for information,
so for now we are sending out the little blurb below. I'm
glad to hear you may be interested in the project. I'll keep
you posted.
Thanks for your response to our article
requesting farmer cooperators for our organic no-till project.
We are in the early stages of pulling the working arrangements
together. For right now we are collecting potential on-farm
sites and will be getting back to folks over the next few
months. This will be a three-year project starting this October
(2004). Once we get further along in the project, we’ll
be in touch.
This project will involve approximately
10 farms in at least seven regions of the country. We’ll
be working with regionally based coordinators, who will work
directly with the farms to collect the data. Thanks again
for your show of interest and support in our work.
Jeff Moyer
Jeff,
I can imagine that the response has been
fairly substantial, with a lot of interested people. I plan
on working with a roller regardless, but would be happy to
try to work with you on the project. I'll throw this out in
order to make my bid:
I spent 4 years in my company’s research
and development laboratory conducting industrial testing.
For an additional four years, I was in an engineering capacity
and wrote numerous test reports, both internal and external.
I would believe these skills would be useful in reporting
field data and analysis of results.
I believe that I would be able to include
some additional acres in addition to my own in order to conduct
this trial. My father (a retired vocational agriculture teacher)
is another resource that you may tap into.
Thanks,
Joe Woods
Sandy
loam and 16" annual rainfall in South Dakota
Memo to Jeff Moyer:
We farm in north central South Dakota in
a 16” annual rainfall area, with portions of my farm
acreage under pivot irrigation. My farmland is sandy loam,
without any rocks and is certified by OCIA. This quarter is
planted to winter wheat now; we want to plant back to alfalfa
as soon as the wheat is combined with a stripper header. Often
the stubble is considerable with heavy seeding rates and some
irrigation, however the land is often very dry at harvest
time and tillage time.
Our mentor in organic farming has a large
small grain acreage, with some of the fields having small
rocks. Both the young farmer and his mother are dedicated
to organic farming with grain storage space and a large on-farm
scale used by many of the local farmers.
We would be ideal candidates to evaluate
and report the working of one of the large roller/crimper
implements. Please advise us of the application process and
whether a draft of an evaluation format is already available
for review.
Verne Thorstenson
Rocking Diamond Organics
25
acres of filed crops in Greece
Dear Jeff,
I read with great interest your articles
on organic no-till research in the New Farm newsletter. I
am an agroecology researcher and lecturer, and I am interested
in investigating the feasibility of no-till organic management
of field crops here in Northern Greece. I have a 25-acre farm
where my family used to grow field crops such as alfalfa,
corn, vetch and cotton. I have converted that farm to organic
this year when I started managing it and I would like to use
it as an demonstration/experimental farm where I can educate
local farmers on organic practices. Even though there are
government subsidies to farm organically, there is no technical
support or Extension from the universities, and most farmers
tend to use input substitution instead of using cultural practices
to manage their fields organically.
I had worked with Professor Altieri at U.C.
Berkeley for the past 8 years on ecological farming applications
in California. From the literature, I could not find many
no-till case studies in California, but I think the potential
should be great even in Mediterranean climates such as California
and Greece. I wanted to ask you if you are aware of any such
work and if you have any references. Also, I wanted to find
out if you have published the technical characteristics of
your crop rollers so that we can try to experiment with them.
Thanks for your great work in promoting
organic practices,
Christos
Dear Christos,
Thank you for the kind remarks on my work
and the work of The Rodale Institute and New Farm. We have
not yet published the technical drawings for our roller/crimper,
but with our new grant we will be. As soon as they are completed,
we will make them available. It is our goal to have as many
people as possible working on organic no-till, with as many
different crops as possible.
I don’t see why the system would not
work in a Mediterranean climate. The trick will be to match
the cover crop and its timing to the cash crop. Once that
match is made the rest is relatively easy, since the system
is based on basic biological principles that work anywhere.
If you send me a mailing address, I will send you a CD of
photos of my work from the past two years. I will follow that
up with data later on in the year.
Thank you for your interest in our work.
Jeff Moyer
Dear Jeff,
Thanks for your quick reply! I am looking
forward to reading about the progress of your project in the
New Farm newsletter and about the technical drawings for the
roller as soon as you publish them on your web site.
Thanks again,
Christos
Already rolling in Tennessee
Dear Jeff,
It was great to hear of the grant that Rodale has received
for the no-till experiments in organic production. We talked
by phone at length earlier this year, and in fact we did some
small test plots with corn and soybeans. Based on our findings,
we are interested in looking into the possibility of participation
in your three-year study and would appreciate having more
information.
We made a small roller—23” diameter by 5 ½
feet long—and welded 3/8” by 4” flat bars
every 8 inches. These bars were welded straight across the
roller (not in a herringbone pattern as you had used), and
the roller was pulled with a tractor two times over a very
dense stand of hairy vetch on May 14 and again on May 20,
immediately before planting corn with a 6 row John Deere Maximerge
Planter.
This planting date was 30 to 40 days later than our normal
dates, and we really did not think the stand would amount
to much. Fortunately we had 8/10 inch rain on May 27 and were
able to flame the rows while the dead vetch was wet as many
small weed were emerging in the rows. This was followed by
two cultivations with a Hiniker cultivator with 25 inch sweeps
and a guidance system. This test plot was .49 acre and yielded
139 bu of yellow corn/acre. Perhaps a cover crop of Austrian
winter peas could be planted a bit earlier but probably would
not provide as much nitrogen as the hairy vetch.
We also had a side-by-side plot on spaded ground which was
planted the same day. The yield was 79 bu/acre. We can only
surmise the no-till plot was able to retain moisture, as everything
else was the same. We have also tried our roller on a wheat
cover crop before planting soybeans, but it had little effect
on the small weeds in the wheat and we ended up spading that
ground before planting the soybeans. Probably a 15-foot roller
would be better for us as we plant with six 30-inch rows.
If the roller could be made in two or three sections, it could
compensate for uneven ground. Otherwise, the bars or blades
would have to be wider and with more weight so they would
work more aggressively.
Let us know what you think.
Yours truly,
Alfred Farris
Windy Acres Farm
Orlinda, TN
Trying
to replace moulboard plowing in New York
Dear Jeff,
I am writing to you to request that we please
be considered for your organic No-till Plus collaborative
field testing. I have been fascinated by the work that you
have done on this and, if we could get it to work on our farm,
would be excited to see the benefits of it mount over time!
We are doing a huge amount of moldboard plowing and would
really like to replace some of these passes with something
that builds rather than damages the soil.
We are just finishing our sixth year of
organic farming and have almost completed transitioning our
entire 3,000-acre crop operation to organic (we chased the
“bigger is better” concept up to 3,000 acres conventionally,
in case you are wondering). Our main crops are corn, soybeans,
spelt, sweet corn, peas, green beans, edamame soybeans, and
barley (very similar to Klaas and Mary-Howell’s farm
[see Letter from NY
for more on Klaas and Mary-Howell Martens]; in fact, their
help was critical to our transition). Our soils vary widely,
although we have a disproportionate percentage of poorly-drained
acreage (which would benefit from the drying effects of the
cover crop). With some guidance from you and evaluation of
risks, we would be capable of experimenting on larger acreage
and more variety of soils than many farms. Last week, for
instance, we had 300 acres of spelt flown on to standing soybeans
after discussing the pros and cons with Klaas.
If you already have the collaborators selected,
I respectfully request that you please make sure that one
of them is from New York and is an active member of New York
Certified Organic (NYCO), which is the group that Klaas and
Mary-Howell Martens formed to coordinate the cluster of organic
farms in their area. In fact, Klaas and Mary-Howell, if they
were interested, would make excellent collaborators on this
experiment, and there would be no need to duplicate the effort
on our farm (unless you were looking for an additional location
in our area).
Please let me know your initial thoughts
regarding this.
Brett Kreher
Kreher's Poultry Farms
Clarence, New York
Have some questions to Ask Jeff? E-mail
him directly at jeff.moyer@rodaleinst.org.
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