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Mackane Vogel:

Welcome to the No-Till Farmer Influencers and Innovators podcast, brought to you by SOURCE by Sound Agriculture. I'm Mackane Vogel, assistant editor of No-Till Farmer. As we continue into the new year, listen back to the episode that our listeners have enjoyed the most so far. In our most popular episode to date of the No-Till Farmer Influencers and Innovators podcast, brought to you by SOURCE by Sound agriculture, Frank Lessiter chats with no-tiller Scott Day from Manitoba, Canada. Scott, the director of agronomy at Farm and Farm Technology Investment Company Fall Line Capital talks about how to approach extreme weather in the prairies of Canada and why choosing a diverse mixture of cover crops has been so successful for him.

Frank Lessiter:

Scott, tell me where you are in Manitoba. You're pretty close to the US border, aren't ya?

Scott Day:

Well, we're only about 25, 30 kilometers from the US border from North Dakota and about 50, 60 kilometers from Saskatchewan. So I'm-

Frank Lessiter:

Okay.

Scott Day:

... straight north of Minot, North Dakota, about an hour and a half. My family's been in the area for about 120... since agriculture started here in southwest Manitoba.

Frank Lessiter:

You went off to school then came back home?

Scott Day:

Yeah, I went to university, and then I actually traveled for a couple years working on farms in Australia and Ireland, and then I came home, and that was a great experience. And I came home not sure what I was going to do. Our farm was really quite small. It was a livestock operation. I ended up buying a piece of land beside our farm and getting a job as an extension agent for the government on the same day. So I've had essentially, two careers ever since I decided to focus on agriculture, and that's why I still farm today. Yet, I've had other jobs along the way.

Frank Lessiter:

Yeah, so how many acres are you farming today?

Scott Day:

Well, it's just my father and I, and my father just turned 80 last week, and we farm 1,650 acres. We used to farm a bit more than that and had a hog operation as well. But my work keeps me very busy, and I travel a lot, and so we've consolidated the farm to be a little over 1600 acres; essentially in one block around our farm yard.

Frank Lessiter:

Sure, right. So what crops are you growing up there? I think you got a real diversified rotation, don't you?

Scott Day:

Yeah, well I was an extension agent, and I managed a research farm looking at crop diversification. So I was always involved in no-till, but also looking at new farming methods and new crops to grow, and I'd often try and implement that on our own farm. So we've grown sunflowers, and marrowfat peas, and lentils, and flax, and oats, and a variety of other things. But now we've settled on growing canola, wheat, malt barley, soybean beans, and dry beans. I've had to keep my farming side of things relatively simple because of my other work commitments. So I probably would be growing corn and sunflowers and those crops, but they take so long and take me well into the time of year when I'm usually in the United States working. So I don't grow crops specifically for what's best for the farm. I grow crops that fit into my schedule a little bit.

Frank Lessiter:

There you go. Soybean production in the US is, I mean, North Dakota and South Dakota have really gotten on the soybean bandwagon in the last few years, and apparently, you're making soybeans work up where you are too.

Scott Day:

Yeah, we've been very fortunate with soybeans. I was involved in helping usher in the crop along with a lot of us with the department and the industry. But 15 years ago I think there was less than 10,000 acres of soybeans, and then we hit close to 2 million acres in 2017. So that was a very rapid increase, and that had a variety of things. You had better harvesting equipment, you had better varieties, you had better crop protection products, and so on. But ultimately, we're able to access varieties that could mature in our climate. So I grow double zero soybeans, and last year I grew a triple zero soybean, and they yielded quite well.

The problem that soybeans are having in Western Canada is that they don't handle lack of moisture in the last half of the season. When our crops like wheat, and canola, and barley, and those crops are maturing and getting ready for harvest, that's when soybeans still needs some rainfall, and we haven't consistently got that. So this year will be interesting with the drought as to how that will affect the soybean yields again. The peak in soybean acreage was a few years ago, and lately, that's tailed off because there's lots of areas where they just don't get enough moisture to grow a good soybean crop late in the season. But we loved having that crop in the rotation.

Frank Lessiter:

What's it do for you in the rotation?

Scott Day:

Well, most of our canola is LibertyLink or even Clearfield. There is Roundup Ready canola that makes up a significant acreage, but for the most part, we don't have a lot of Roundup Ready crops in our rotation. So putting soybean in allows us to use glyphosate in a different way, and we don't have widespread glyphosate resistance yet because we have had a lot of variable of options in the system, primarily because we had mostly LibertyLink canola rather than exclusively glyphosate canola. And being able to grow soybeans, you plant them a little later, you're using a Roundup Ready system or an extends to provide a different way of using herbicides in your rotation, and then you harvest them later as well. So they fit really well into your schedule, adds the right type of diversification to your rotation. So farmers like growing them, it's just getting the yield and income compared to say growing another crop of canola has been a bit of a problem.

Frank Lessiter:

You mentioned weed control and Roundup Ready and LibertyLink. Quackgrass was a big problem for you people before you were no-tilling, right? Can you elaborate on that?

Scott Day:

Yeah, that was one of the things I learned with the no-till group is that my grandfather had always been supportive of soil conservation, as had my father, but you just didn't have the tools to go no-till back then. And so when you went from full tillage to conservation tillage or less tillage, you had the worst of both worlds, where you had some of the weeds that were left from the tillage era and they were doing really well in the no-till. And one of those that was really a problem when you made a half an effort towards no-till was quackgrass. I remember those first few years of us transitioning to reduced tillage, we were almost going to give up because there was so much quackgrass. If you make one or two passes, you're just dragging the roots around the field, so you're spreading it around that way as much as seed. With no-till, stopping tilling, and stop dragging the roots around, and then with glyphosate being used in the fall and just being used judiciously, I can't point to a quackgrass spot on our farm anymore.

And it's like a lot of things. Nature will adapt to whatever you're doing, and if you just halfway move from one system to another, you end up probably having the worst of both worlds for a while. So this was my message to other farmers as an extension agent was, "If you're going to do try this, then do it. Don't go halfway and then blame one thing or the other because it's not working. It's because you will probably end up having problems from both systems if you just go halfway." And what I mean halfway, you were still cultivating prior to the drill or you were using aggressive tillage while seeding or that sort of thing.

Frank Lessiter:

I thought it was interesting where you said you're basically using glyphosate or roundup on soybean beans but not on your other crops because you're using LibertyLink and Clearfield Canola.

Scott Day:

If you look at the numbers, there's probably the most canola is the LibertyLink, and in that region where corn is grown, grain corn is grown, then a lot of that corn is Roundup Ready. But our other crops that we grow like wheat, and barley, and teas, and lentils, those crops are not herbicide tolerant. They're not genetically modified. So we have quite a few crops in our rotation that we have to use conventional weed control on. With the canola, that was the genetically modified crop that had herbicide tolerance, and Liberty...

There was a couple things. First of all, the varieties were quite good. They yielded very well. And then the Liberty was very effective in our climate. They're saying the guys in Australia haven't had great success with Liberty and weed control there as much as we've had, but Liberty just worked very well in our climate so that we had that option always in our rotation for most of us anyway. And so introducing a Roundup Ready crop like soybeans is actually adding variability to most of the farming systems here on the prairies. With the FlexDraper headers that we're using for peas already or lentils, they're just a natural fit for soybeans as well.

So you are able to include soybeans in your farm without any modifications to any of your equipment, which is certainly a different thing when it comes to corn, and we plant soybeans with our air seeders. The only problem is we have to up the seeding rates or seed costs are a little more than if we had a planter. But as far as the crop stand goes, it looks fine.

Frank Lessiter:

So on these triple zero soybeans, what kind of yield would you like, and how many days of a growing season do you have up there?

Scott Day:

The triple zeros got hailed but they still yielded about 40 bushels the acre, which I thought was great considering-

Frank Lessiter:

Sure.

Scott Day:

... it had hailed. The first year I grew soybeans with the double zeros, we had really good luck. They yielded about 50-60 bushels to the acre, and you plant them about the end of the third week to the end last week of May, and you harvest them the 1st of October.

Frank Lessiter:

Sure.

Scott Day:

We have a bit of an advantage with day length, but it's not that much farther north. So I don't think it's that extreme difference, but it's an interesting experiment in that these fields are truly virgin soybean fields. There's no disease, and there's even thought that the inoculant that you're putting with the seed is more aggressive than what is commonly found in the corn belt. It has an ability to produce more nitrogen than the native populations you find in established soybean areas so that we have this benefit of having really clean fields when it comes to fresh soybean, and maybe over time our yields will start to go down as root diseases and other things prevail. And there is in the Red River Valley of Manitoba, some of the common disease issues that are plaguing soybean producers further south are starting to show up in the odd field here and there.

Frank Lessiter:

Are you planting totally spring crops, or do you have any winter-seeded crops?

Scott Day:

It's entirely spring crops. We did have, maybe 10 years ago, there was a pretty big increase in winter wheat, and it just hasn't been consistent in providing more income per acre than spring wheat. Winter wheat should yield more, but it doesn't always do that, and then it is not usually worth as much as spring wheat. We also have the problem of harvesting and seeding at the same time. And we have a pretty tight window there. So that's a bit of a issue. Where I am in southwest Manitoba is where a lot of rye is produced, fall rye that then goes to the US to be used as cover crop seed. And so the fall rye is planted primarily on fields that are difficult to grow spring crops, like really sandy areas and poor quality soils is where fall rye usually is planted now.

Frank Lessiter:

You bring up an interesting question here because we've got more people wanting to try cover crop seeds, and apparently, seed production was not that great this year, and seed's getting expensive to buy and hard to find. Were yields in your area down on rye seed or not this year?

Scott Day:

What I can tell you is that is the drought has affected just a massive area. And normally, things get wetter as you move further north in the prairies or further east, and it's almost the opposite's happened in some cases. With rye, the few fields that I know of in my area, the yields were okay, but we were an area that did get a rain in a critical time. So there was a couple of things. First of all, the drought, but then last fall it was extremely dry, and not a lot of rye was planted. I would say that it's likely that quality seed will be hard to come by if you're looking for fall rye.

Frank Lessiter:

In the story we did back in 2012, we made the comment that you're farming in one of the harshest climates on the globe near dead center on the North American continent, but snow accumulates for six months a year and melts maybe two weeks before you start seeding in the spring. That's pretty short.

Scott Day:

Yeah, well for us, normal is just the average of the extremes. There isn't really a normal. We hit -50 and we hit +43 this year in the Celsius scales. That's -60 to +110. We can have... Well, we have an extreme drought this year, and two years ago, we had probably the equivalent of all the rain we've seen this year in one 24-hour event. We do have this challenge of a fairly tight production window. So you manage things differently when it comes to fertility, or planting, or crop choices, and that sort of thing. Most farmers have a plan B in mind at seeding time that if things get late, you switch crops because you don't have a lot of time to make those adjustments when seeding's actually rolling. You move to maybe barley or oats as you get late in the season.

It's not dissimilar to a lot of the northern plains, but we are in the very center where we seem to have the most extreme. I'm in this weird situation where we've had seven hailstorms in the last 11 years, and that's not normal. A yield map for my farm is totally useless because nothing has been relative to what I've planned in the spring for seven of the last 11 years, and we had hail again this year. And that's always a wild card now it seems.

Frank Lessiter:

So do you have a crop insurance bailout for hail like we have in the states in Canada or not?

Scott Day:

Yeah, it's different. The crop insurance program is specifically run by the government administered by the government. You don't have private hail, sorry, you don't have private crop insurance providers, but you do have hail that's provided through private insurance. But because we've had so much hail, they don't even really want to insure you. They say, "We don't want to sell you a policy," by the cost of their premiums. But we do have hail insurance through the government's program as well, and they use a lot larger risk area which keeps the premiums reasonable. However, this year, even with the drought, we would've preferred a good crop than collecting it through hail.

Frank Lessiter:

So up in your area, zero-till or no-till pretty it's pretty much become conventional?

Scott Day:

I was so lucky to be involved in this movement near the beginning. It was because I was asked to be part of the Manitoba-North Dakota Zero-Till Association when I was 23 or 24. And I remember these guys that had started that group in the early '80s, late '70s were heroes of mine. And when I was asked to be a farmer director, I was very honored and I said, "But I'm not a no-till farmer." And they said, "Well, that doesn't matter because you will be." And sure enough, our farm quickly changed, and it hasn't gone back. And in Manitoba and western Canada all the way to the Rockies, it's predominantly no-till except when you get into the Red River Valley. And when you get into the heavy clays of the Red River Valley, they've adjusted so they do a lot of direct seeding in the spring, but it is not an area where they can avoid tillage. They till the land a little bit in the fall, but I know very few no-till farmers in the Red River Valley now.

In our particular area, it's one-pass seeding. In my specific area, it's usually one-pass seeding with anhydrous ammonia as your fertility. And when I say one-pass, all the fertility's going on while you're seeding. And we're fortunate because of the diverse crop choices we have, I think that is the key to making it work so well, and having such a long-term legacy here is you're planting wheat into a low residue crop like canola, and you have these cool season barleys and warm grasses, and we could grow winter cereals. It did fit into the system. So having that diversification really helps make the system work as well.

Frank Lessiter:

Over the years, I've been to a couple of the Manitoba-North Dakota meetings, and I also remember one summer going up and spending a day with the farmer who pretty much started zero-till in Manitoba. And I can't think of his last name, but it was Jim. He was one of the real pioneer.

Scott Day:

Jim McCutcheon was-

Frank Lessiter:

Yes, that's who it was.

Scott Day:

He was one of these people that I admired a great deal when I first started farming. And felt that's why it was honored to be asked to be part of the group. And Jim did farm in the Red River Valley per se, but he did have soils that were lighter on the edges of the valley there that were more of a loam or sandy loam. And he was such an innovator in trying different openers and seeding systems when there was no infrastructure to support him other than his own initiative. Yeah, he was one of the original creators of the MANDAK zero-till group.

And they went on to have such a profound impact. You look at many of the other no-till associations even in Australia that they came to see how MANDAK had been created and then went back and emulated that in other parts of the world. I had a friend working in Mongolia, and he went into a state extension office, an ag office in Mongolia, and there was the Manitoba-North Dakota zero-till production manual translated into Russian. And I was in rural Ukraine a few years ago, and I was in an office of a farm there, and there was the Manitoba-North Dakota zero-till manual translated into Ukrainian.

Frank Lessiter:

It was really popular.

Scott Day:

Well, and you take that for granted, and then you realize how that book, I think it was translated into eight or 10 different languages; had an impact all over the world.

Frank Lessiter:

So what happened to this group? I mean, everybody started zero-tilling and the group's faded away, isn't it?

Scott Day:

Yeah, I can't tell you where it is exactly today. I know I was last involved with the group in the early 2000s, and there wasn't as many people coming to the conferences because everybody was doing it. And I know that they evolved into being a little more focused in the US on cover crop use and that aspect of farming, and then I'm not sure where it is today. Those original farmers that I knew that started the group, they were happy with how things evolved. You get to a point, and then maybe it's not needed anymore. And so they were philosophical about, "Well, it's run its course because look at how things have changed." Be interesting to see if there will be another revolution in agriculture that'll cause that much of a grassroots effort or create that much of a grassroots effort. I don't think that will be the case.

Frank Lessiter:

So this year where you are, would you really be in rough shape if with the drought if you weren't zero-tilling?

Scott Day:

It's hard to say because there's hardly anyone that tills anymore. So there's not a lot of reference to what it could be like without. But suffice it to say, we are so much better off. A couple of ways: first of all, our crop came up relatively even, and that's because we didn't till. And if we had tilled with it being as dry as it was and then we never really had a rain until the third week of June, our crop would've been various stages as of emergence. That being said, we still had uneven emergence because it was so dry.

But that was one of the things that surprised me at the beginning of this no-till experience was planting canola no-till worked so well, and most of us had the thought that it wouldn't because it was such a tiny seed, and a precarious plant; that you would no-till your wheat, and barley, and peas, and those big-seeded robust crops. But the canola you'd have to cultivate to make sure the seedbed was perfect, and there wasn't a lot of residue for the canola to emerge through. Well, it turns out that if there was a crop that was great for no-till, it was canola because you could seed it close to the surface as the moisture would be there in a no-till situation, and then the crop just took off from there. That was the initial hesitation, I think, for a lot of people thinking, "Well, we won't be able to no-till canola," and then that just took off. If we had been cultivating our land and trying to establish canola in this really dry spring, it would've been very ugly.

Frank Lessiter:

Yeah. So let's talk about where you were when you first started the no-tilling. Walk through the changes in equipment you had. You started out with disc-seeding units, didn't you?

Scott Day:

That was Jim McCutcheon had a famous quote that the one regret he had in his career was not being able to make a disk seeder work. There'll be articles online of some of his history, and he built cultures to go in front of double discs and so on. We had the John Deere 750 drills. We rented them out of the ag office, and they worked quite well. But they're small in relation to our big farms here. Flexi-Coil, Morris, and Bourgault were the three prairie companies that were innovative and responded to this need faster than the other companies. And of course, Conservapac was there at the beginning, and that's now the 1870 John Deere drill.

The farmers that were using disc drills at the beginning, they worked well 80%, 90% of the time, but then you had these times when they didn't work well at all, and you can't afford that in farming. So this part of the world predominantly uses a time seeding system. There's a few people that now have the new Bourgault disc drills or the odd John Deere disc drills, but if you're going to see a new seeder sold in my part of the world, and this probably goes all the way to the Rocky Mountains, they predominantly will be a time seeding system, maybe a Bourgault with a disc fertilizer injecting opener, but the seed will be placed with a spike in the ground, and have some sort of a perilink independent unit on each of the openers.

I bought a seed hawk early on when you could only buy them directly from the factory. I mounted in an anhydrous tank on the drill, and that's actually still the system I use. It's been modified a few times. It's indicative of how a lot of seed is put in the ground here. Either a dual knife system like a Seed Hawk or a Seed Master or even the John Deere or the Bourgault system where you have a mid-row bander, usually a disc system, and then a timed seed application.

It's pretty hard to beat that system because they've been developed on the northern plains. So there developed two plant canola for instance at two pounds per acre. So you have a, let's say any of these units, you can buy them 80 to even 100 feet wide, yet they have the ability to meter a product at two pounds or three pounds per acre across the width of that unit. It's pretty hard to beat that. We're a relatively small farm for the prairies. So my seeder' 35 feet wide. It's a little small for the farm as well, but it just works so well. It's been completely rebuilt, and with the new products and so on, it works well. A new one is horrendously expensive so I'm keeping the old one going for now.

We usually put less than 200 hours on our tractor every year. That includes the grain cart, and any land prep, and harrowing and that sort of thing. I can see it about 10 acres an hour, I think, maybe 12 acres an hour, everything included stopping and that sort of thing. This past couple of years we've seeded fence row to fence row with it being dry, and that makes it so much easier. We're in pothole country for the most part. So in a wet year, you're driving around circles all the time, but when you're planting fence row to fence row, that makes it a breeze. But it also means that you're in a dry season. So this way it's a one thing or the other.

Frank Lessiter:

So when you got potholes, will you go back in and seed those areas later or just ignore them?

Scott Day:

That's a good question. It depends on how you're feeling at the time. Because you will put the effort into seeding potholes, and the next day you get a big rain and it's all underwater anyway. But of course, if it does work, those are your best yielding parts of the farm. So it has to do with your anticipation of how wet the year is going to be. And we've been farming them long enough now that if you do farm them, they generally do not stay flooded for a long period of time. But it is one of the quirks of farming in this part of the northern plains with potholes because there's always a decision to be made as to how much rainfall you think you might have as to whether it's worth it or not. And those darn potholes are... So our number one soil quality issue here now that we've addressed and mitigated any form of soil erosion with no-till, the current soil quality issue is salinity and salts.

Whether no-tills contributed to that a little bit or not, you know hear people say that. I don't know. Because we've captured more moisture, there's more moisture then percolating to the surface, leaving the salts behind. But with potholes, if you have a period of standing water often over a course of so many years, you have a ring around that pothole is where the salts have come to the surface and been left behind. So now you have dead areas near these potholes that you can't do anything about. This soil quality issue because of salts is my main concern and headache right now, and there's not much I can do about it other than to make sure I try and keep things growing as long as possible.

Frank Lessiter:

Do you soil test on a regular basis?

Scott Day:

Yes, I do. Although it's been interesting how it hasn't really changed over the last number of years as to what I need to apply each year. It seems to be pretty static. But I do soil test on a regular basis. And my farm is part of a new agronomy system where it was mapped entirely by an EM38 using RTK guidance for elevation as well.

Frank Lessiter:

Okay.

Scott Day:

So the farm is mapped in relation to its electro connectivity because like I mentioned, our number one soil issue is salt. So I'm variable rating to the salt content. With the hailstorms and potholes and so on, yield maps aren't really all that relevant because I just haven't been able to produce quality data because of these extremes. But the salt content, it's relatively stable. That's what I variable-rate my nitrogen to is these salt maps that probably will not need to be updated for another 10 years or so. And they found a really strong correlation between salt levels and specific elevation in the field as well. So I've just started doing this. I'm having some problems getting my actual controller to variable rate properly, but the maps themselves, when I have them loaded and I'm traveling in the field, you can obviously, see salt levels because of residual vegetation or even color. They're very accurate. So I'm pleased about that.

Mackane Vogel:

We'll come back to the episode in a moment, but first I'd like to thank our sponsor, SOURCE by Sound Agriculture for supporting today's podcast. SOURCE by Sound Agriculture unlocks more of the nitrogen and phosphorus in your fields so you can rely less on expensive fertilizer. This foliar application has a low use rate and you can mix it right into your tank. Check out SOURCE; it's like caffeine for microbes. Learn more at Sound.ag. And now, let's get back to Frank and Scott's conversation.

Frank Lessiter:

One of the things that we talked about in this story we did in 2012 is how you had bought the second half of the home farm now in '89, and it was an organic operation and I'm fascinated, let's talk through what you learned as you switched that organic farm to zero-till.

Scott Day:

Well, that was actually the farm I bought the same day I got to be an ag rep for a county agent. So that was the beginning of my ag career. And the farmer, he is a neighbor. He's a guy I knew well, and he was an organic farmer, which at the time was a real exception. And he was a eccentric person. He smoked and drank but he didn't apply pesticides because he didn't want to catch cancer, and then he ended up catching cancer, and so he was retiring at the time. And so his farm had been always organically farmed with clover and cover crops and fish guts. He used things 35 years ago that people still talk as being innovative today. But when I bought the farm there was essentially zero phosphorus there and that was after he had applied fish guts, and barrels, and he would use manure, but he didn't have a lot of manure.

And it was just, to me a very clear example of what happens if you can't replenish the nutrients that you're exporting off the land. Our farm had seen a gradual reduction tillage. We had manure from our hogs a little bit. Not enough to cover the whole farm, but certainly more than the adjacent land. And that organic land, despite being farmed with the best methods available at the time, its organic matter was about 1/3 less than what on our side was.

Frank Lessiter:

Wow.

Scott Day:

And this phosphorus being almost zero was a huge obstacle to overcome. I remember the lab at the time was run by the University of Manitoba, and I contacted soil scientist there. And they said they hadn't seen a soil sample that low ever on the main clay loam soils that we have. The nitrogen level was actually excessive. He had been growing legumes and that sort of thing and as his summer-fall crops. So his nitrogen levels had built up to higher than anything we had on our farm. But the other nutrients had got so low that he was hardly producing any yield. Here we are over 30 years later and there still is a marked difference in the production on that farm versus our home half. Looking back, I wish I'd set it up as more experiments because it was such a great cross-the-fence sort of opportunity, but I just didn't have the resources or the time at the time.

Frank Lessiter:

So this is Fall Line Capital and you're working with Clay Mitchell who was a no-tiller in Iowa for a number of years. He's spoken at our national no-tillage conference, and I think you and Clay were at one of our conferences four or five years ago.

Scott Day:

So this is all a result of zero-till is that in 2006 Clay and I were both speakers at most of the no-till events in Australia. So it was about a month where we traveled together speaking at the various no-till farmer events across the country, and that's where we got to know each other, and become friends. And Clay and another friend had decided a few years later to create a company that invested in agriculture in farmland and the focus would be managing the farmland with the soil conservation ethic. And then from that came a focus to invest in technology. So when Clay and his friend came up with the idea, Clay gave me a call and asked me to be involved. So I've been one of the two original employees of the company. But like I said, I've had two careers ever since that one day back in 1989, and I wasn't quite ready to give up farming with my dad.

I love it here. And so I wasn't quite willing to give that up, and I asked if there could be some arrangement here where I'd lived in Canada in the summer, and lived in the United States where I had offices in the winter, and that's what we've done. This is my 10th year of being back home on the farm. And each winter, my wife and I move to the head office in San Mateo, California and work out of that. And I find that living in Manitoba hasn't been a handicap at all because I live near Minot, which is a fairly large airport, and I can get to any of our place, any of our farms, or anywhere I need to be in the United States just as quick or even quicker and less expensive than if I'm living in San Francisco in the winter. So I've been amazed at how easy it has been for me to stay completely engaged in the company, but living in rural Manitoba.

Frank Lessiter:

So let me get this straight. One of the detriments to this, what you're doing is your wife and yourself have to move out of this -60 degree winters that come to the States, right?

Scott Day:

I had no plans to be a snowbird, but this is the ultimate snowbird thing where you get to work in the winter. So like I said, it's been a great opportunity, and it's a real privilege to be able to come home and farm each summer as well, although it keeps me very busy. And also I mentioned my dad's 80 years old, and he's getting younger every day it seems. And that's a big key to me being able to continue to farm as well. He's just fully engaged in farming, and the markets, and that sort of thing. So there's a whole bunch of people that make the system work for me, and that's how I get to continue to do this. But yeah, it is isn't a hard winter.

Frank Lessiter:

I'm a typical US guy. I don't understand centigrade versus Fahrenheit. And I remember being in Regina one winter and got in a cab, and it was really cold. And I said to the guy, "Man, it's so cold but I can't convert to Celsius to Fahrenheit." And he said, "Well you're in luck today." And I said, "Why?" And he says, "It's -30 and that's pretty much the same in both."

Scott Day:

Yeah, I think it's -40 where they're the same temperature.

Frank Lessiter:

Yeah. Okay.

Scott Day:

I was born in '65 and I was that first generation that never grew up with Fahrenheit in Canada. So I have a trouble my dad thinks in Fahrenheit, but I have trouble identifying with it. I have to retrain myself every winter.

Frank Lessiter:

Gosh, I guess I didn't realize that Canada was Fahrenheit at one time.

Scott Day:

We switched in the mid '70s to metric. And at the time, the plan was to switch cold turkey. The premier was, I think Trudeau was the premier and he said or prime minister, and he said that we're just going to do it 100% cold turkey, and that caused a lot of grief. So we have a hybrid system like the British do now, where I only think in liters and kilometers and that sort of thing, but we think of acres, and feet and inches, sometimes meters and centimeters, others. So everybody adapts to whatever. But as far as Celsius goes, that's the one I know.

Frank Lessiter:

At Fall Line Capital tell us what's going on in that area, and how you're finding people to farm it, etcetera.

Scott Day:

When we last talked, I guess several years ago, our company was just getting started, and our focus was buying farmland, improving that farmland in whatever way was practical, and then renting it to local farmers with the emphasis on what we call asset preservation, but really it's preserving the topsoil. And so we own farms in essentially, three or four regions of the United States, the Pacific Northwest, the upper corn belt, and then in the south. And in all areas, we have bought farms where we've put in tile drainage, put in irrigation systems, put in better grain handling facilities, introduced new crops, but we always work with local farmers. And part of I think our unique attribute is the diligence we put into buying the property in the first place, and then finding the right tenants to work with. And like I said, we have this focus on soil conservation, so that has to be at least an important component of whichever tenant we want to work with.

Now, in some cases we're finding tenants that are interested in making the switch to reduce tillage but aren't implementing it on their own farm. And so if they work with us, then they have to implement it on our farms. And it's been great seeing how this has evolved with some of our farmers that they've made the adjustment working with us as opposed to coming in fully trained on their own. The leases are almost always unique to the farm and the farmer. We have a template, but there's so much variability within a region, not to mention variability across the regions, and so we're pretty flexible when it comes to how the farm is leased and the terms of that lease.

But we are always trying to be practical in what's possible or what's effective in a local region. So in some cases cover crops are a requirement. In other areas like Northern Montana where a cover crop is pretty hard to establish, it's not a requirement on that farm, but then they're doing full no-till anyway, and that's getting us to the goal. But we also have farms that produce potatoes. That was one of the jokes that when I was with the no-till association, there was some prize if we could figure out a way to no-till potatoes, but in that case, we require a cover crop immediately after potato harvest, and those sorts of things.

I imagine many of your listeners would really find this work fascinating where you travel around looking at farms, looking for ways to improve them, and then having the ability to actually purchase the farms and implement those changes. That's been great. It's been really interesting. Farmers are farmers no matter where you are. Like I said, I've worked in places outside of North America, and we all deal with the same issues when it comes to inputs, and prices, and weather, and so it's a universal language farming. The fact I'm coming from just outside the US doesn't seem to have had much of a handicap when it comes to visiting and talking with farmers.

Frank Lessiter:

One of the concerns we hear these days is about firms like you or other people buying up land and squeezing farmers out of the market. I mean, one of the big concerns right now is Bill Gates has got so much land, etcetera. What's he doing in this business? You're probably bidding against some local farmers, but then at the same time, you're giving them new ideas to farm. How's that working out?

Scott Day:

I think we're a little bit different with our focus on long-term ownership, and soil conservation, and farm development. So we obviously, know about Bill Gates' group, and they're buying ready off-the-shelf farms, and he has his own reasons for investment and diversification. We are generally... We're very unlikely we're going to be setting the market in any area. It's most likely the neighbors are going to see more value in a perfect farm. But we're buying land, for the most part, it's going to require some further investment to make it top production. And we're also in areas where farms are available that many of the local people that don't have the capacity to purchase a big track of land that was once part of a family operation and now actually is appreciated to the value that not a lot of local people could purchase.

So we're not in direct competition for a lot of local buyers that you would see with some of the more prominent or visible land investments like you've mentioned. Most of our acquisitions lately have come from within our network, like our tenants that want us to buy a purchase or purchase a piece of land that then they can farm. That's actually where some of our expansion is. We want to be in a community for a long time. We have a fund that has a very long timeframe associated with it. If you're looking at this from a long-term perspective, we want the whole region to succeed because then that will impact land values as well. So we've had field days on our farms. We're wanting to promote some new ideas and hopefully, add more value to the whole community.

Fall Line buys these farms, but actually we do a lot of activity in technology investment. That's a big part of what I do for the company now. I had this role of agronomist for the company, but I also am involved with helping the team that works on technology investments, and that's been fascinating, and that's actually growing as a component of our operation. We've invested in companies that are developing mRNA technology for pest control. Now, they are also able to make vaccines, and this has been an incredible year and a half with them and their discovery of that, but the promise and the potential of this technology for impacting agriculture is incredible just as it is for human health.

We're part of companies that are creating new ways to develop new crops or new varieties that are exceptionally precise and efficient, and that's really interesting as well. We're invested in companies that are creating new protocols for communication within equipment. That's fascinating. We're involved with a company that's based in Canada that has created a pathway optimization software for farmers, and it also will take into consideration elevation. So if you send them a map or details of a field, they'll send you the direction you can go to maximize the efficiency of your equipment, which sounds simple, but it is incredibly complicated when you start to put a few obstacles there. And then they expect to be able to layer on topography so that you could not only create pathways that are most efficient for the general direction, but also best suited to reduce soil erosion in relation to water transporting on the soil surface.

Well, the fact we have farms and the fact we're farmers, really helps us when it comes to ag technology investing because most of the people that do investment in ag technology that have the resources to do that don't have that connection directly to a farm or a farmer, and we're able to provide all that to our partners.

Frank Lessiter:

Well, that's great.

Scott Day:

So I'm very, very excited about the future of agriculture.

Frank Lessiter:

Yeah, that's great.

Scott Day:

And I feel very privileged to be where I am, and I think it's a great career. And I encourage anybody that has an inkling to have a career in agriculture to be sure to go for it.

Frank Lessiter:

Hot area right now is carbon sequestration and carbon credits. Are you going to get involved with this?

Scott Day:

It definitely is a hot topic, and it's definitely something we've seen a lot on the tech investing side of it as well. Various companies that think that they're going to be the tool that is used to measure the soil carbon or the protocol that's used to monitor it. And this is all good. This is probably good for the whole industry, and at this point, we haven't done anything specifically because this is still in its infancy as they're sorting things out. And going back to this congress that was based out of Switzerland a few weeks ago, a number of the presentations in the session I was involved with talked about the benefits of no-till in South Africa and in North Africa as far as water retention better yields. But they said we didn't see much impact on soil carbon. And that was just an off-the-cuff statement.

And this is something I've seen time and time again even out on my own farm, long-term no-till that the nudge in the value of the organic matter has been very, very hard to track. So there's that side of it as well, where you're trying to make sure that we're not signing up to something that we can't deliver or that can't be measured properly. We're going to do what we're going to do as far as protecting the soil, soil cover, reducing tillage, and then if this carbon market becomes something that's very tangible and secure, then we expect that we're in a very good position to take advantage of that. But at this point, we haven't done anything specifically in regards to that.

Mackane Vogel:

That's it for this episode of the No-Till Farmer Influencers and Innovators podcast. Thanks again to our sponsors SOURCE by Sound Agriculture for helping to make this series possible. You can find more podcasts about no-till topics and strategies at no-till farmer.com/podcasts. A transcript of this episode will be available there shortly.

For our entire staff here at No-Till Farmer, I'm Mackane Vogel. Thanks for listening. Keep on no-tilling, and have a great day.