Episode 2: Farming Inspirations and Aspirations with Josh Riddle
Josh Riddle shows off his cover crop.
About the episode:
Ryan sits down with Josh Riddle, a farmer on the Peone Prairie outside of Spokane, to chat all about his inspirations and aspirations with farming. Josh and Ryan discuss how Josh got started in farming and how he now has 100 landlords. They also discuss Josh’s inspirations for what led him down the conservation agriculture path and his experience with cover crops and integrating other alternative cropping practices like extracts and sea minerals in his cropping rotation. Josh and Ryan also explore more ideas on where farming in the region could go in the future.
Josh is a participant in the FLOURISH on-farm trials.
This is the first 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.
-
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 in 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 back into the FLOURISH Podcast. I'm Ryan Boylan, the host of this podcast where we focus on interviews with farmers participating in the FLOURISH on-farm trials. If you haven't already, be sure to check out our previous episode to learn more about the FLOURISH project. We interviewed Jason Bishop of Living Heritage Farms, all about his idea for FLOURISH and how it all got started. After that episode aired in November 2023, we hosted a FLOURISH participant meeting with all 26 producers that are part of the project. We discussed our first year of trials, the preliminary data and what we're looking for, for the year ahead. At that meeting, it was great because we got a lot of questions, mainly things focusing on extracts and cropping insurance. We wanted to dive deeper into some of these questions with this podcast, so we sat down at the Spokane Conservation District in early December to chat with Josh Riddle, a farmer in the region and a participant in the FLOURISH on farm trials. We got to talking and took a meandering path covering so many topics that we decided to split our conversation into two parts. This is the first part where Josh shares what got him into farming, cover cropping and other alternative cropping practices, as well as some ideas as to where farming could go in the future.
Ryan Boylan 2:10
I’m here today at the Spokane Conservation District office with Josh Riddle from Farm It. Thanks for joining us today, Josh.
Josh Riddle 2:17
Yeah, no problem.
Ryan Boylan 2:18
I was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about your farming operation. Maybe where you farm and how much precip you get.
Josh Riddle 2:23
So, I farm out on the Peone Prairie and then up into the Colbert area, which is known as Big Meadows. My farm’s not your normal farm in the sense of, I actually was kind of going through these questions last night you kind of prepped me with, and I got rid of some land this last year, which dropped me down to 100 landlords. And I’m saying 100. And that's actually land chunks that are so usually there's two people to each landlord I call property. Probably I'm close to 200 people I deal with every day, that are owners of the land. So that's a little bit of a different experience for us than most farmers. Up there, the average size of my ground is 20 acres, so we've got quite a few tracks. I spend a lot of time moving, I'm in the public eye.
I'm a fourth-generation farmer, but I had to start on my own. I moved away, went to college, and then moved away and did some work with youth. Then decided I missed the deer, and the trees, and the four seasons, and said I gotta come back. And my grandparents were like come back. So, when I came back, there just wasn't enough money for two families. My dad couldn't support a whole nother family, and I just been married and had a baby on the way. So, I started out with a tractor, and bought a tractor, and a rototiller, and a bush hog. My business started from there where I went around and took care of all these 10-acre tracts in Spokane that were starting to pop up that no one wanted to farm anymore. And so I would just go in and plant grass, mow them, and it was kind of like a glorified lawn care company is what I told people. I get to drive a tractor and you push a lawn mower. And so just from doing that, bigger clients came along.
There was one family in particular, the Millers, that were really cool. They said, hey, we have 100 acres, we can't get anybody to farm it, we’ll pay you to seed it to grass. And you can just do whatever you want to do. We just want it not to be weeds.
Ryan Boylan 4:33
Were you haying for a while?
Josh Riddle 4:35
So, at that point I hadn't. I bought a harrow bed for a little while. I tried to do some custom hauling. This is like early 2000s, the hay price hadn't hit its big spike where it started like, oh, we're gonna get $150 a ton. We're still back in the $100 range. My dad's operation currently at the time… he's still he's like just tough as nails. They're still out there hand picking the bails. So, as a kid I grew up, I always tell people, I will never do square bales again, because I'm allergic to them. And they're like what you mean you're allergic to bales, and then I say, well, when your dad farms 640 acres of dryland hay, and you and your brothers go hand pick it all. And they had pretty good ground so we were doing a lot of second cutting. And it was a lot of fun in the sense of we had three picking crews. So, we had our buddies out there. And so, we got to really have a good time. But with it was a lot of long days in people's barns. And you're just…
Ryan Boylan 5:34
Throwing bales around.
Josh Riddle 5:35
And the dust and the heat. And you’re like, I just want to go play baseball or something, you know.
Ryan Boylan 5:39
Yeah. So then, when did you start growing wheat?
Josh Riddle 5:42
So back to the Miller family. Kind of the concept was talking to some of the farmers out there that were farming on the prairie were like, we don't want to farm those. But I don't know how you're gonna make any money kid, you should just charge people. And I was like, I can't do that. And so, talking with John Miller was his name. And he's pretty successful businessman in town, he said, you should just you know, see if they'll let you do it for free and see what happens. And so, I just started picking up ground.
He actually had a swather, there at the time, we had one too. And he said here just use this and it's kind of a funny start, but I owe a lot of it to that guy. He just, he would look at me and say keep going, keep going. Now granted, he had a horrible ground. It's like a pH of five, we get like a ton of the acre hay, and it was steep and rocky. And so I just kind of looked back and I still farm their place.
From there, just kind of the dream, I grew up on a wheat farm. We were farming, about, I think at the time, 1700 acres of wheat, and we had these 600 acres of hay. And so, I loved harvest. I mean, there was just it was just a fun time. And so, I finally went and bought a combine one day and put in some oats and said I'm gonna start, you know. My dad thought I was crazy. He's like, there's a reason why we're doing hay, now, you know, wheat prices have been so bad. And so, it was kind of funny, the second year I planted some had some pretty rough ground. So, I knew that I could probably hit protein with DNS. And so, I put some DNS in and it was like second year into farming, I hit the $15 wheat.
Ryan 7:13
Really?
Josh Riddle 7:14
Yeah and I was like, I love this. This is amazing, you know. From there, the land, just kind of slowly picked up more and more small acres and just kept doing it. I had to learn to say no, I kind of shut my custom business down. Because I couldn't do it all. That kind of started into where we would seed all the time. And then we were spraying properties, which is kind of what also led me down this road that eventually we're going to talk about but just spraying all the time. I started to feel crummy. And kind of a side note, I actually went through a battle of cancer and it had nothing to do a spraying come to find out but it was genetic mutation that I was born with. And we just found out at that time to my daughter had it.
Ryan 8:04
Oh, wow.
Josh Riddle 8:05
Thankfully, my families are huge. My mom and dad's families are both families of eight kids. And usually this disease like goes back, you know, they go “Oh, no, so and so's got it.” And it was kind of an answer to prayer, just saying you're the mutant. But with that I realized, like, okay, some of these sprays I can't do anymore. Can't spray Gramox anymore. I sprayed a lot of hay fields. And then I was like, this stuff is not good. And so that led me down kind of the road of like, how do we farm a little cleaner? It was easier to go, hay, you saw perennials, but I didn't love hay, like I do wheat. like just growing something that year and peas and lentils and triticale and I remember growing and triticale out there and everybody was like, what is that? You know? What's that word even mean? Like, actually, I don't really know, either, but it sounds cool. And then so yeah, so I don't know if I'm getting too far off on a tangent.
Ryan Boylan 9:01
On no that’s great. That's a really good segue, actually. So part of the show or podcast is to interview folks that are participating in the FLOURISH project, which again, is just Farmers Leading Our United Revolution In Soil Health. I'm just interested as to why you wanted to join and then maybe you could get into some of the motivations for moving that direction.
Josh Riddle 9:20
Yeah. So, Jason, who had on your last podcast, got me to join because he said, “Hey, can you write in why you're using cover crops?” And to back that up a little bit, Jason, I met at the Joel Salatin conference here in Spokane. Just randomness. There was a guy named Denver Black and Chris Eckhart, you know Chris. Chris is a farmer up in Deer Park and him and I kind of have gone round and round. So, Jason asked us to write for this and I think the first round that you guys didn't get it, and then the second round I don't even remember what I wrote, or why I did it, or wanted to do it. I actually the only reason I did cover crops was because I thought they were cool looking. I just mean, there was a little bit of soil health, but I couldn't see like this 50-bushel gain on my wheat. I didn't have a yield monitor when I first started doing them 10-15 years ago, like where I'd say, oh, I got five bushels more. I couldn’t visually see that. So. And it was just for fun. You know, just like, throw some sunflowers in there. And these radishes, see how big they get.
So that's kind of why I joined. And then talking with Jason, he said you guys got the grant. It’s a grant, right?
Ryan Boylan 10:30
Yeah.
Josh Riddle 10:31
That’s how much I actually know, sorry.
Ryan Boylan 10:34
No, it’s good.
Josh Riddle 10:35
So, I was like, “what's going on? What's it look like?” And he's like, “Oh, it's gonna be great.” I don't know if I should say this, “like, there's no rules. You can plant whatever you want.” And so, Jason knows, I've tried doing some other programs and with some of my progressive ideas, it got me kicked out of some NRCS contracts. There was some pain there that I was like, I don't know if I'm ever gonna sign up for another free money grant. Project. Anything.
Ryan Boylan 11:06
Yeah, there can definitely be a lot of sideboards. But that was one of the motivations and Jason like pushing just to be like, we should just let the farmers do what they can do.
Josh Riddle 11:13
Yeah.
Ryan Boylan 11:14
So, you're right there. I mean, there are some rules. But like, yeah, we're just trying to let you guys do whatever work for your farm.
Josh Riddle 11:21
Yeah, so that's really probably how I got involved. You know, because Jason and meeting him years ago.
Ryan Boylan 11:31
Yeah. So, you sort of touched on this a little bit, but wanting to get away from spraying, so much was like sort of a motivation for like going down this path, or whatever you want to call it?
Josh Riddle 11:40
Yeah. So maybe back it a little bit for further back, going to the health stuff is where things kind of started to come in, right. It's really, it's kind of the perfect storm, I feel like life comes at you in these waves. And it's like, you climb the mountain or you sit there and you don't climb and you don't learn anything. But while that mountain was going on, our local EPA fella showed up and started putting the hammer down on some of the farmers. We had an environmentalist in our neighborhood that moved in on one of these 10-acre tracts, and he made some pretty outlandish statements. Being farmers, we tend to not be very network oriented, where we should have probably, all of us, at the time, gathered together and made a plan and said, “here's what we're gonna do, and these aren't necessarily true statements. And some might be but you know, there's no proof.”
I was pretty scared. I was like, dang, dude. I don't want a $10,000 fine. They were coming in threatening farmers with $10,000 every day there was mud in the water, if they could find any. And You know, it was like, one of the things that, $10,000 would sink me.
Ryan Boylan 12:46
Yeah.
Josh Riddle 12:47
You know. And so, I kind of was like, I can't do this. So, I left actually on a trip back to DC, for health stuff. We, we're kind of lab rats, my daughter and I. We joke about it, but they go poke us and test us and like to see what's going on. So when I was going back there, I’d just come across, I was just Googling like crazy on “how do you find good no till tactics” or “what are ways to not buy fertilizer.” That year also, I’d kind of run into where we'd had a drought the year before. I’m trying to remember, I think this was 2007. Should’ve wrote some notes down but we had a drought. The crops weren't great. And I was like, man, I don't know. I don't know if I want to buy all this fertilizer.
So, we used a bunch of gypsum, and I've been reading articles about gypsum and calcium and plants need calcium. And the year prior, I had 400 acres of wheat just go flat. It was a storm that came in, two inches, blew 30 miles an hour sideways, knocked it over. We had really nice-looking crop, but it just flattened it. And I was like, I gotta figure how to make these plants stronger. Like what is it? You know, like you heard of I think it's Norman Borlaug, he shrunk wheat down.
Ryan Boylan 13:58
Oh, right. Yeah. Of course. Dwarfed wheat varieties.
Josh Riddle 13:59
WSU guy. Yeah. So I was looking at it and I was like, calcium is what plants need to make stronger stems. And I was like, so let’s try gyp. And so, I went out and gypped 600 acres that year and I didn’t fertilize, I just used gypsum, and I raise the same crop I did the year before.
Ryan Boylan 14:18
Woah.
Josh Riddle 14:19
And I was like, what the heck. You know, kind of made my mind explode. But I was going through a lot at the time. And so as I was also googling this guy, Gabe Brown popped up, and I'm talking, it's like an old school video that was on there. I always I tried to find every once in a while, and I'm like, I don't know which one I watched. But I started seeing videos of his stuff and an Elaine Ingham one popped up a couple of times. And they were showing the slides of like organisms. He made some statement in there and it's always stuck with me and it's, “in two handfuls, healthy soil there's more living creatures than on top of all the earth.” And I was like, “What the heck?”
So I called Chris Eckhart who farms up in Deer Park, and I said, “Hey, dude, like, I'm thinking about going no till.” He was like, “Dude, no till no yields,” you know. And I was like, “I know, it's how I feel, too, you know, we have plows for a reason. And these big tractors, you know, let's let it rip.” And but I said, “hey, check this out, I gotta go to DC. Watch this video and just see what you think. Like, I can't stop seeing it. And like, it just makes sense.”
And so I kid you not this is a hilarious story, but I land and, kind of called him because I was like, you know, “Hey, how's it going? What did I miss,” you know, kind of that farmer, like, “what happened when I was gone? You know, what's been going on in the neighborhood? How the crops look?” He's like, “get over here now. Like, you gotta get to my house right now.” And I'm like, “I just landed buddy.” And he's like, “No, I'm serious, like, drive to my house right now.” And so I looked at my wife and kids was like, “Yeah, I'm actually gonna get in the car, and I'm heading out” and they're like, “Really?” And so, I drove to Chris's house, and he's got a microscope sitting on his counter. And I'm like, “what?” he's like, “You got to see this.” I was like, “Really?” and he's like, “it's real.” And so we started, I was looking at his microscope, and he had a camera on there and was up on his screen. And little creatures are going around and eating each other, poking each other. And I'm like, “Oh, wow.” he goes, “So that's the field that it's over there by the fence row down, so and so’s, it's really good land.” And he goes, “here's my other field.” And like, the screen, like had a quarter of…
Ryan Boylan 16:28
Oh, really?
Josh Riddle 16:29
And I don't and it was shocking, like, “where’d they all go?” You know, and, and so that kind of started us down this crazy road of like, “what do we do?” You know, throwing paint on the wall, like, okay, “maybe.” but then still trying to make a living because we had no idea what was going on. And I wasn't going to run cows round all my houses and he wasn't going to put in fence and so.
Ryan Boylan 16:51
Yeah, that's cool that you guys were talking about, like having plows for a reason. And then once you see it, you're like, oh, maybe we should make a change.
Josh Riddle 17:00
Yeah, like or what would just like what do you do with this? How do you even find you know time to research this or what. So that stuff we found out and then when it kind of went on the backburner and now. Because I mean, that was back in 2007. Yeah, so here we are.
Ryan Boylan 17:18
So, can I just circle back really quick, whatever happened? So, you applied gypsum maybe then converted to no-till, but then did the EPA get off your back at some point?
Josh Riddle 17:27
Yeah, so I still stayed under the radar at the time. Actually, I called the local Spokane Conservation District and talked with Ty Meyer. They had bought a no-till drill at that time and so I started trying some no-till. Funny story was, at the time, this is probably 2010, 2013. Times gonna kind of fly by there but, my grandpa sat on the board here (Spokane CD).
Ryan Boylan 17:50
Oh, no way.
Josh Riddle 17:51
And he talked to me about guys like Tracy Erickson, “they went up there and dumped like a whole tanker load of water on the hill and it disappeared,” and like, “you got to try this.” And I was like, “No grandpa,” like, “that’s not gonna work here you know.” that's but that's all I was ever told though too, like every farmer in the neighborhoods like, “that doesn't work here, doesn't work here. Works over there but doesn’t work here.” And so, Ty had a project and we tried it. And it made sense but I was like, at the time I was probably farming 1100 acres could not afford a quad track and a cross-slot drill like, so now what? I kind of lost track of where we were going.
Ryan Boylan 18:30
No, it's okay. So it sounds like…
Josh Riddle 18:31
Oh yeah. So then back to the gypsum, that's what it was. So, we started the Bio Farming group also shortly after this with Ty at the conservation district. And, I was telling my story in there and they were like, well, “calcium.” And so, that kind of led us down this road of like, “whoa, calcium and how do you get calcium?” And I was like, “well, I use gypsum.” And there's a lot of people that say, well, it won't change your pH. And, um, kind of circling back to Gabe Brown. Gabe Brown talks about if your calcium's tanking, your pH is coming really quick behind it. Like, if you can start to see that. And so, I was like, Ooh, this is an interesting concept. Um, but we were having issues at the time also trying to get across the acres with gypsum at 200 pounds and then work the ground, seed it, and then still doing what we were doing. It was like, this isn't very efficient at the moment.
Ryan Boylan 19:21
Yeah, so, and, and then, so okay. I guess like no-till, going no-till was like one step. Gypsum was another one. And then now you've gone like…
Josh Riddle 19:31
Yeah. So, no-till went to no yield for Josh. Um, everybody's like, hang on five years, you know? So during that time, um, I had tried fish emulsion, I got kicked out of NRCS program for that. I had done cover crops, lost crop insurance over that. Um, and been audited a lot. So there's been a, it's been a really, I'm excited for new growers, or not new, but growers that are going now because it's, it's coming. I remember having the crop insurance guy actually got, they audited me and they're like, you're doing cover crops and you did fish for fertilizer. Like this doesn't fall in conventional farming and you don't qualify for insurance. So we were going rounds and rounds, and the guy came out from the Midwest and he was blown away, flying over and then driving through town. He's like, people in the Midwest would go to jail farming like this.
Ryan Boylan 20:25
Really?
Josh Riddle 20:26
And I was like, that's pretty extreme. And I don't, um, I don't ever want to tell people how to farm. I'm really not that way. I think it's everybody's journey and there's totally different styles. And then how do we feed the masses? And you know, so, um, but he said he, kind of basically long story short was like, “hey man, you're really progressive and their crop insurance isn't out this way. Isn't set up for that yet.” And so, kind of adhering to our FLOURISH meeting that crop, you know, they were saying crop insurance is changing and cover crops is now being recognized. And so that part's super exciting for me to see that we're coming.
Ryan Boylan 21:03
So the complications between cover cropping and crop insurance is a pretty common conversation when you have a bunch of farmers in a room. Typically, folks that farm in areas that have less precipitation have bigger issues with this. Regardless, after Josh and I talked about his motivations for cover crops and all the other conservation practices that he is incorporating his rotation, we started to talk more about his motivations to improve food quality as well as the gut microbiome. At some point. You hear me mention a book, I call it, “You Are What You Ate,” and that's not actually the title I was referring to, “What Your Food Ate,” by David Montgomery and Anne Bikle. It's a really good read. It has a lot of cool ideas and we actually started a book club in our office to read through it last year. Josh and I also talked about the disconnect with where our food comes from and how we can get more people onto the farm.
Josh Riddle 21:51
So some of my motivation now is, um, there's a lot of, a lot of it's actually our quality of food. Um, and realizing that food heals is a topic. I would say if you are not sure you believe that, like come talk to me. I'll give you one of my kombucha scobies and you can drink kombucha and make your own style and flavor. And it sounds super cheesy and hippie, um, but, it's amazing when you start to realize your gut changes.
Last night actually, we were saying, this kind of like a side topic, is people are always like, “why do you farm?” You know, I'm like, “well, it's in my blood.” Like, that's why I, you know, it's like I, you know, it's imprinted in my system to like, yeah, go farm. It's doesn't make sense, especially where you are. Like, you should just go try to find a farm somewhere else and work for somebody. But, um, I was actually sitting there going, I wonder if farming's in my microbiome.
Ryan Boylan 22:50
Oh.
Josh Riddle 22:51
Because you start to realize the power of microbiome and we see it in the soil and the rhizosphere. And if you think of a kid, like how much dirt did you suck in and inhale and when you were…
Ryan Boylan 23:01
Like when you were throwing hay bells around.
Josh Riddle 23:02
Its generational, you know what I mean? Like, versus someone that’s families that have been moved off the farm for generations. And so, this is maybe a silly.
Ryan Boylan 23:10
No, I love it. Keep going…
Josh Riddle 23:11
It's a side topic, but the more I thought about it, I'm like, um, this makes a lot of sense. And Chris and I have had these conversations a lot and I feel like he should maybe even be in here maybe another time we can. Yeah, we should grab him.
Ryan Boylan 23:24
I would love to do that.
Josh Riddle 23:24
But, um, there's so much with your microbiome in your stomach, and seeing it just through eczema as a kid to not having it later on to, just really for me, I felt better. Like it was crazy the difference. And then as I started to eat a little bit cleaner and healthier food, I started going, dang, like I tried to go eat McDonald's. And I was like, oh…
Ryan Boylan 23:51
You feel awful.
Josh Riddle 23:52
Like, why would I do this to myself? Like, people can do this, but I, we can change our gut biome, to um, handle that stuff. You know, we evolve. And so I think…
Ryan Boylan 24:04
There is some science behind it too. 'Cause uh, David Montgomery wrote that book. “You Are What You Ate.” I don't know if you've…
Josh Riddle 24:09
I recognize what you're talking about yeah…
Ryan Boylan 24:11
Yeah. And they talk a ton about like, well, soil microbiome and like gut microbiome and how they are kind of linked together. I, and I, I'm not an expert by any means, but yeah, I think there's something.
Josh Riddle 24:23
Yeah. So, I don’t know, that was kind of my, I think maybe that's gonna be my new go-to answer. Like, it's…
Ryan Boylan 24:26
It's in my gut.
Josh Riddle 24:27
It's in my microbiome. It sounds really, sounds cooler than saying it's in my stomach.
Ryan Boylan: 24:32
Totally. That’s great.
Josh Riddle 24:33
I mean, um, and I, to be honest, maybe there's a part of me that hopes that that's a real statement. You know, that if I can get more people on my farm, more people in my cover crop fields, more people out with the cows and just animals and seeing that. I was fortunate enough kind of back up a little bit too, as my great grandpapa on our farm actually had all of the fifth graders in Spokane used to tour were our farm.
Ryan Boylan 24:56
Oh, you mentioned that.
Josh Riddle 24:57
As part of school. Then they went to my grandpa and then there was like a little window where they quit having that happen. And then my dad started doing it. So, I grew up with all the third graders in Spokane coming out and touring our farm.
Ryan Boylan 25:08
Yeah, that's cool.
Josh Riddle 25:09
And seeing now even just, but back then, just being blown away that, um, kids would show up and they would wanna sit in the front yard and just touch the dog and play with the dog.
Josh Riddle 25:20
And then having a teacher like, like you're trying to do this tour and you're like, they won't come over here and then just like, just leave him alone. The kids never pet a dog in his life. And you're like, this is in Spokane, Washington, which I have thought of was pretty rural, still small town. And there's kids that have never pet a dog, let alone a chicken. You know, and we'd have little baby chicks saying, this is gonna be a chicken nugget or where does your food come from? And their answer was always the grocery store. Well, who makes the food? The grocery store. You know, like just that disconnect of being off of the farm. And, and it's for us farmers, like, we have to realize like, that's our job. You know, we kinda get this hermit style where we like, oh, I gotta protect our, you know, our little kingdom and I'm just trying to survive.
Because farming is tough, you know? I don't ever wanna sound like a complaining farmer 'cause that's what some people say. We just complain about the weather, the price, this and that. But there's things that are out of our hands that we have no idea. Like, you know, you can't control the weather. You can't control how much water you get. You can't control the price. And those things we probably need to work on fixing. And you can't, you know, why do we raise so much wheat? Why are we raising this much wheat?
And then we import wheat from Canada. And not to get on these tangents, but like, we just brought wheat into our country. Like is it, 'cause it's the variety I'm sure that we can figure out how to raise that variety. And not to say that anything's bad about Canada, but you know, it's like, well if we have this problem with wheat price being absolutely horrible right now you know, why are we raising this many acres? What if we, what if we create our own supply and demand as farmers and come together and talk about like FLOURISH, you know, like, hey, let's put half of the acres into cover crops. If we're gonna save the planet and move forward by using things like cover crop.
And you know, I don't buy into the whole carbon credit world, even though I have a company that has that in the name of it on the side. But, um, uh, I think that there's, it's like Dr. Jonathan Lundgren, we just listened to talk, um, that I do believe they're gonna measure the life on our farms. I will say with cover crops, um, hedge rows that I've tore out, to putting back, to just letting areas not be farmed anymore ‘cause they weren't worth farming. The life that's there is shocking. Like, uh, the cows now having birds landing on their back, you know, like I don't remember that as a kid. I don't remember digging in our dirt and having worms and now I've got worms out in my fields, you know. And do I have an idea of like how many I should have at this moment? No. You know, there's guys that are doing it, but I think there's things like the cover crops when you walk out there and it's the end of September and it's 19 degrees and I'm still hearing bees buzzing around, which they shouldn't be out there, let alone, I'm like, where did these all come from? They weren't here last year.
Ryan Boylan 28:23
So just like the community of insects that we saw in the cover crop fields last summer, Josh and I got to talk a little bit more about his farming community, specifically the Rouge Farmers. I'll let him explain.
Josh Riddle 28:32
Jason, Chris and I have some funny stories. Like we delivered triticale to the coast while we went to a conference over there about bread making.
Ryan Boylan 28:41
Nice.
Josh Riddle 28:42
And we thought we were pretty cool. And some one of us, it probably was me 'cause I've got some dyslexia, but we wrote instead of the Rogue Farmer group chat, and there was like a couple other guys in it, it was Rouge. So, I'll just take credit for it even though I don't know if I did it. But, um, yeah, so we've just had these like constant things of like the Rouge Farmers, you know, we were thought we were, because we were doing things, that were off the wall and crazy.
Ryan Boylan 29:08
That's awesome.
Josh Riddle 29:09
But that part of it, I believe farmers have to get back to. Whether that happened at the coffee shops. I didn't have that growing up. We were a pretty small community. We were a little bit of a community in ourselves that we had so many kids on the farm working.
Ryan Boylan 29:26
It is interesting. I see like smaller groups like the Rouge farmers, yeah. And like all these different places too. So I think it does happen, maybe not in the coffee shop, but.
Josh Riddle 29:35
So even like at the FLOURISH meeting, like it was actually really fun to be there and the conversation you guys like just let it kind of roll and it got a little sideways here and there. But at the end of the day, 45 for me, kind of midlife. And maybe midlife, well that's is to be determined. But, um, just going, “why am I farming?” Like why am I farming a crop that could be worth really $10 an acre if you took all the subsidies, and crop insurance, and all the inputs, and the overhead, the things that farmers don't even really want to talk about. The cost and the cost of the hours we put in. Um, that I think, what was it, Lundgren that said, you know, you could plant one pumpkin plant in the whole field and you're gonna get your 10 bucks an acre.
You know? It's like, like that. Those things do resonate a little bit. Um, and that, and I know there's some, you know, where I farm and like some, I always call it God's country down in the Palouse, you know? Where you guys can raise 120-bushel wheat day in and day out. Um, that's for me it's like, it's still, there's that question of like, “why are you doing this?” And we, I as farmers, or I should say as Josh, um, probably theology by Josh. Is that like I sat in a lot of meetings and a lot of trying to get my chemical credit hours in every year and just got fed the same stuff all the time and just bought into it. And we all find people don't like to be uncomfortable. And so, you go find the guys you're comfortable. So, you might be in the tillage group, you might be in the no tillage group. You might be in the mid-till group.
But I think that the reality is that farmers, if we look at all these things that are coming down the pipe, farmers are low hanging fruit. And they're easy to pick off and easy to point out and say they're wrecking the world. Like I still much as Kiss the Ground and Big Little Farm and I haven't seen new, the new one Common Ground, but…
Ryan Boylan 31:38
I haven’t either.
Josh Riddle 31:39
So many of these are saying it's farming. Farming's the problem. and I'm gonna go, “it's culturally the problem,” maybe. You know, like we as Americans have come into this country and done what since we've been here. Day one, you know, we made the local indigenous people sick. We tried to farm a certain way, they had to come back and say, hey, here's how you should do it. Saved our butts, you know? Um, and not to get on a totally wild tangent there, but, like, I think there's some things like culturally it's, it's not just farming, it's our culture, you know? Yeah. Like we put these cities together and…
Ryan Boylan 32:15
Yeah. And you're not the only person that I've talked to that says we need to like, get people connected to know where their food's coming from. I've had so many people say that to me actually, and they're like, oh, let's put up signs. And I'm like, I don't know if signs is the, just the way to do it. But like, you were talking about earlier, having those kids come to the farm, and like actually connect to something. They'll probably remember that forever.
Josh Riddle 32:35
Yeah. I was actually, uh, two, two days ago, I was reading some kind of, just going through this, this theme of like, “why am I farming? Or how do I farm? What's the Bible say about farming? Or what's this say about that?” And one of the things in the Bible was kind of funny is they were saying when you fallow, you leave that crop out there and it's for like the poor and the beasts of the earth.
Ryan Boylan 32:53
Oh that’s interesting.
Josh Riddle 32:54
You know? And like that's a, that's one idea, but like, I thought, how cool would that be? Like if every seven years my cover crop on this rotation is designed for people to come, and I don't care if they roll around in it, pick it, take sunflowers. Take radishes. Go make some, you know, like one of the jokes is we made radish bacon, you know, like that was like a whole, daikon radish bacon's like a thing of like, to not eat meat. Like let’s make some daikon radishes for you non-meat eaters. You know, like, but if you actually designed your cover crop to like give away, or just be an educational. The farmer doesn't have to be there to do the education. Like if you're not an upfront guy and you won't wanna be in public like, hey, like your local conservation district or the local school, find the local school teacher that would geek out on this. Or maybe there's some grad students that like, hey, need a project for the summer. And it's like, okay, take people out into these cover crop fields.
Ryan Boylan 33:49
Yeah, we get approached by grad students all the time. Yeah. Really good idea. Um, can we shift gears a little bit?
Josh Riddle 33:55
Yeah. Sorry.
Ryan Boylan 33:56
No, no, this is, this is amazing. Yeah. So, minimizing pesticides was like one of the goals and addressing compaction. And then it sounds like maybe you wanna, uh, minimize other synthetic inputs like any other fertilizers?
Josh Riddle 34:16
Um, so as I look at a lot of the bottom line and you start crunching numbers, you know, does it make sense to put 60 units of N down? And then when I do put 60 units of N down, I'm now spraying for rust, being told I should probably put a micronutrient treatment down, or if I use this herbicide, you should follow it up with these. Um, and then that has led me down to probably where we're gonna go, the road of extracts. How do you farm without that? How do you wean off of it? Um, and I can tell you firsthand, and so can all the local farmers, and the rouge farmers, and, my fieldmen that if you want to shoot your, shoot yourself in the foot with a shotgun, do what Josh did.
Ryan Boylan 35:02
So yeah, lessons learned, this is great.
Josh Riddle 35:03
Because is trying to go back to, um, fish and that, you know, I thought, okay, I'm all in. And that's kind of my style, um, is I just get so pumped about something that I want to carry the world with me and tell everybody about like, this is gonna be the best thing ever. And there was some big crash and burns, with going fish. Now knowing what I know, when I, I say fish, but it was with sea minerals fish biologicals in there. Um, I dampened off a field of canola, about 300 acres, came up, got about two inches tall, and then just rotted off.
Ryan Boylan 35:47
Oh, no.
Josh Riddle 35:48
I had crop yields that were nowhere near they should be like just embarrassment.
Ryan Boylan 35:56
Were you just experimenting on it or were you going like…
Josh Riddle 35:59
I was like, I am, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm not paying my local co-op for all that nitrogen. And, and I knew at the time that this is way healthier. Um, let alone it's like, this is like what we were doing back in the day. We were putting like fish in the furrow. And then, then you like, you know, you're putting all these different things, sea minerals. I could just, I could just envision it like as we as these cultures moved on and actually kind of researching Mayan soils, um, that this is pretty normal. Bone meal and biochar and, trying to wrap your head around like, I can't get biochar in my field, so, um, I gotta try these other things. And so, they were expensive. Um, but I saw some things happen in those couple train wreck years where it was like worms came back on my farm pretty quickly.
I didn't necessarily see it with no-till. I'd actually kind of done kind of back to some min-till because we had some really wet years of the no-till and we just just tore 'em up with big ruts and getting stuck. I think the one year we got our sprayers stuck, I think it was 65 times trying to get between fertilizing, top dressing, and then, spraying the fields. Like it was just, it was, it was a miserable year. So, we'd gone back to some tillage, but the worms were there and I was like, this is interesting.
Ryan Boylan 37:30
What were those things that you mentioned that you did learn from those train wreck years?
Josh Riddle 37:34
Um, that I actually, I had really had some, I had some wheat, so I did some trials, and my trials are pretty all-or-nothing, so to say. I didn't have a field, like a check. Yeah. I went back to the gypsum, put down some fish, and had wheat stalks that were like just thicker than thick. And I haven't fact checked this, but at one point somebody said that wheat is actually a, should be almost a hollow stem. I mean, not hollow should just be like a stalk. There should be no hollow stem in the wheat.
Ryan Boylan 38:07
Oh, interesting.
Josh Riddle 38:09
So, um, I haven't fact checked that, but we've gotten some pretty thick stalks now out there in the wheat. And some guys can tell you that. I also saw nutrient cycling happen. I didn't have the terminology, but I was like, man, that field has no straw in the spring left on it. Like you could see the standing stubble, but in between there it was like, that stuff's disappeared. Like where'd it go? Was, was it, was the yield not there? Did the combine do a really good job by blowing it up? Or like, what happened here? You know, like, so those things were starting to like in my brain go, okay, there's some changes here.
It was a fun story kind of going back to them in the public, um, to be able to say, this is fish. You know, like, what? It stinks really bad, but this is fish, you know? Um, and, and there's things in farming, and this is probably hopefully just for farmers, but when we pull the hose off the sprayer or we pull the hose off the seed drill, like you lose liquid. And what is that pile that hits the ground? And when you're like, this is a hundred percent safe, healthy. It's not gonna be a dead spot next year in the field. Um, those are things that like, you can just go, okay, like this is, I can go home with this. My kids aren't gonna get sick from this. The neighbor kids. The neighbor dogs. Um, the birds, the animals, you know, seed treats been one.
I actually kind of back it up to, I started pulling seed treat off my seed almost 10 years ago. Oh wow. But I would have to buy it from the local dealers because we'd run out or we didn't have enough to clean that year. We'd have pink seed treat back on our seed and the canola, we had it on there, the lentils we bought, had it on there, things like that. But now knowing what's on there, you're like, man, you know, that shouldn't even spill on top of the ground. You know what I mean? Like, and I hate saying these things because it could the wrong ears that falls on.
Ryan Boylan 40:05
Like you were saying earlier, though, everybody has their own situation and like, I don't know. You're deciding to go down that route and I think it's a good, for good reasons.
Josh Riddle 40:12
Yeah, and I just think of the, our farmers, you know, like a lot of guys have a pretty rough end of their life because of cancers or this or that. Alzheimer's. And I, my hope is that this newer generation will be like, wear rubber gloves with that stuff. Wear a mask, you know, I don't know how many years I didn't wear a mask and you're filling the drill and you're back there, you're about to run out. So, your head's in the drill and the dust, you're just sucking it all in. You're not, you're just jumping in outta the tractor. And so there's a lot of that stuff that just being naive that we had no idea, um, that how bad it was or could it be bad? Or can we, you know, my hope is we can start changing some of this, you know, we can detox our bodies hopefully, you know. As science goes, like if food is healing, which I, I do believe now that can we be doing things like fermented kefir and you know, just fermentation, whether it's even our, you know, they're talking about fermented, um, composting and, you know, teas and like, if you can start growing these things and getting our guts back in order then, you know, can we start detoxing our systems or healing?
Ryan Boylan 41:23
No I like, yeah, I do like that idea of yeah, healing ourselves through the food we eat. And I think that's like one of the biggest motivators from what I've been hearing too. But one is like, you wanna leave the soil better. A lot of people say like, leave the soil better. It's just like maybe the right thing to do, but then also like growing better food is another good way to go.
That was the first part of our conversation with Josh Riddle. We'll be releasing the second part in a couple weeks, so stay tuned to learn more about 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.
Conclusion
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 inwflourish.org. Thanks so much for listening, and keep an eye out for our next episode.
-
Resources:
DNS - Dark Northern Spring Wheat
Gabe Brown - Regenerative Rancher
Elaine Ingham - Soil Microbiologist
Johnathon Lundgren – Blue Dasher Farm
Kiss the Ground - Film
The Biggest Little Farm – Film
Common Ground – Film
Extracts - Regenerating Soil Biology through Liquid Compost Extract