Although wheat-fallow is a popular practice among many farmers in Montana, a large number have converted to no-till practices in hopes of retaining soil moisture and improving yields.

That’s the road Jason Camp and his wife Jodi took in 2000 when they converted their family’s 60-year-old farm to straight no-till. Working in a semi-arid climate that only sees 14-15 inches of annual rainfall and several inches of snow each year, fallow is still part of their management. 

But they’ve introduced more diverse cropping into their operation and are grazing livestock on cover crops in addition to traditional feeding. Researching of the moisture retention and yield increase potential of no-till is what convinced the Camp and the family to make the switch. 

“We were leasing everything from my family at that point, so it was all our decision when we made that step,” says Camp, noting that crop-shared farms are more of an obstacle to adoption. “There would have to be some major disaster for me to work ground again.” 

Camp says crop yields are 10-15 bushels per acre higher now than when their Gallatin Valley farm’s fields were tilled. Snow trap in the winter is better due to standing residue, and the ground is shaded longer through the summer and holds that moisture in the ground, he says, reducing evaporation. 

“When we have big rains you can't believe the number of holes that come up out of the ground from earthworms digging,” he says.

Organic Matter Climbs

The Camps are no-tilling winter and spring wheat and malt barley and running livestock on 7,000 acres. Most of their acreage is dominated by clay loam soils that aren’t naturally high on soil organic matter. They typically crop half their acres and fallow half to preserve as much soil moisture as possible.

He hasn’t chosen to crop every acre like some other well-known no-tilers in the state, mostly due to lower organic matter and precipitation. But after the family had been “tilling anything and everything” for decades since the farm was founded in 1940, Camp has noted steady improvements in soil aggregation, earthworm populations, soil organic matter and water infiltration. 

Most of his farm ground sits at about 2% organic matter, with some spots as high as 3.2% — compared to about 1% that was the norm when the family was tilling. His farm data shows his healthiest soil to date is where he had two consecutive years of cover crops, preceded by a cash crop. 

There was a learning curve to adopting no-till, he notes — especially with residue management. “We were running a single-disc drill, and you can get hairpinning with your straw and have uneven stands. But we learned how to manage it,” Camp says. 

Camp combatted this by spreading straw out as far as he could during harvest and putting weights on his no-till drill to keep the opening the discs in the ground. He set the seed openers deeper as well. The Camps used to heavy-harrow fields after harvest to break up residue but discontinued it after deciding it was no longer necessary.  

“When we check seed depth in our no-till fields, the fields with the most residue on the ground is where the problem will be. That's where we go check our seed depth to make sure that seed is getting into the soil,” he says. 

Some no-tillers in the western U.S. use a stripper header to harvest grain and leave the maximum amount of residue standing. But Camp opted against it after a custom harvester tested it on a field and they witnessed too much grain being thrown out of the machine, Camp says. They are sticking with their Deere combines with choppers to do most of the work.

He doesn’t find there is a lack of residue in most of his fields, so his challenges are different than those who might use a stripper header. 

Seeding Machine Switch

Another major change the Camps made 2 years ago was purchasing a Bourgault hoe drill. The machine has mid-row banders with discs for placing urea in between the seed rows at planting for winter and spring wheat. The new machine requires Camp to cut stubble shorter, which is the opposite approach employed for disc drills.

LESS HASSLE. Two years ago, Camp switched from a Deere 1890 disc drill to this Bourgault 3335 QDA air drill to reduce maintenance costs. He’s started mid-row banding urea for winter and spring wheat with the drill at planting to reduce how much product he uses and cut down volatilization. Photo by: John Dobberstein

The Bourgault has a ¾-inch opener he finds disturbs more soil than with a disc drill, but disturbs less than the “spreader openers” used by many growers in his area. He’s found the scales on the Bourgault’s tanks indicate exactly how much seed he’s using — a setup he says is “way more accurate” than the calibrated tanks on the Deere 1890 disc drill he’d been using. 

Camp applies N, P and K with the seed at planting, but he bands urea between the rows to prevent seed from getting burned and to reduce volatilization. He says a Montana State Univ. study of this approach has shown growers can save about 10% on product by banding urea at planting instead of simply topdressing. 

Camp plans to split some fields this year and measure the yield impact with this approach, but earlier observations of winter wheat harvested this past summer showed protein levels of 11.5% to 12% and up to 100 bushels an acre.

Cows & Covers

The Camps’ cow-calf operation totals 450 mother cows. Eight years ago they moved calving to May/June instead of March to cut down on labor and feed costs, and they noticed improvements in animal health. 

Camp isn’t attempting mob grazing or intensive grazing yet, as his cattle are on pastures. They graze on residue in the fall and then cover crops in November and December. This year he’s using a winter grazing mix that includes vetch, pea, sorghum-sudangrass, Millet, corn, turnips, collards and sunflower.

He has one 40-acre field where a local resident interested in wildlife maintenance purchases cover crop seed and Camp seeds and grazes it. 

“That’s kind of where I saw how well my cows did on it,” notes Camp, who is now grazing about 500 acres on covers.

He can’t speak to any improvements in animal health with cover crop grazing specifically, but it does cut back on the amount of feed needed on hand and it spreads animal manure and urine across the ground, improving soil health and plant life.

One of the management practices Camp is investigating is swath grazing cover crops to keep the relative feed value a little higher. Swath grazing is the practice of cutting hay, small grains or forage crops and leaving them in windrows for livestock to graze during the winter months. 

Rather than having the expense of baling the hay, moving it off the field and feeding it in the winter, the feed is left in windrows, and cattle are allowed access to a limited number of windrows at a time to reduce winter feed costs and increase soil fertility, according to an informational article from South Dakota State Univ. Extension. 

Swath grazing has its benefits in the Midwest, where colder temperatures and snow accumulation regularly occur. If utilizing a small grain crop, such as, but not limited to, millet, sudan or sorghum, swath grazing may provide an additional opportunity to utilize the forage. 

Camp tried this on 30 acres this year and will be testing the feed in the windrows vs. the standing covers to see if there are benefits. 

Mulling Regenerative

Camp has researched ahead of many of the changes he’s made on the family’s farm, and his latest topic of interest in regenerative ag. On his farm, that would mean moving away from fallow toward continuous cropping, along with potentially more aggressive grazing practices for the livestock.

“I'm tired of high fertilizer inputs, but it’s got to work, too. There's not a whole lot of room for error. You can lose a business in one year if you mess up,” he says.

Another factor is having landowners with some fields he farms that are on crop share, which is a different situation than with cash renting. In some fields where he’s used cover crops, he’s seen major yield hits due to insufficient moisture for the following cash crop.

But on the land his family owns where he leases the ground he is trying to go regenerative at some point. The goal would be keeping a living root in the soil every year, cropping all acreage and utilizing livestock in the rotation. 

“I’ve read a lot about it, and I know what they’re doing with it, and it's just a matter of figuring out what we can do with it. Cattle is a huge component of it,” he says. “All these guys I've read that are doing regenerative, the yields might be less, but their net incomes are higher per acre because the inputs are less.”