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No-till practices still have plenty of room for growth in Alaska, and at Alaska Agro Alan and Mark Boyce are converting their 5,600-acre farm near Delta Junction to no-till so they can produce small grains more efficiently and sustainably.
To make that happen, Wichita, Kan., based Quality Grains and Walt Pene Trucking out of Texas are hauling two John Deere air seeders and a Hagie sprayer 6,000 miles to its final destination.
In this No-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Bio-Till Cover Crops, we’re sharing the conversations we had this week with Quality Drills and Alaska Agro about the logistics of this long haul, the no-till retrofit project, and hear more about the no-till field coming up at the farm.
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No-Till Farmer podcast series is brought to you by Bio Till Cover Crops.
Bio Till cover Crops, a pioneer and leader in cover crop seeds, represents a complete lineup of seeds suitable for use in diverse soil types and growing conditions. Our focus on cover crop and regenerative forage seeds sets us apart from suppliers invested in other markets. Dealers in our distribution network are committed to your success by providing local resources, education and guidance to ensure you have the correct foundation for success. With over 50 years of experience in production, processing, packaging, and shipping, you won’t find a better fit for your farm.
Full Transcript
John Dobberstein:
Hello everyone. I'm John Dobberstein, senior editor at No-Till Farmer, and welcome to the latest episode of the No-Till Farmer Podcast. No-till practices still have plenty of room for growth in Alaska, and at Alaska Agro, Alan and Mark Voice are converting their 5,600 acre farm near Delta Junction to no-till so they can produce small grains more efficiently and sustainably. To make that happen, Wichita, Kansas-based quality drills and Walt Penney Trucking out of Texas are hauling two John Deere air cedars and a Hagie sprayer 6,000 miles to its final destination. In this podcast brought to you by Biotill, we're sharing the conversations we had this week with Quality Drills and Alaska Agro about the logistics of this long haul, the no-till retrofit project, and you'll also hear about the no-till field day coming up at the farm. To kick off the story, we're going to share a conversation with Stefan Alderson, president and owner of Quality Drills in Wichita and Devin Marcin, the company's operations manager, as our convoy traveled north toward Canada and eventually into Delta Junction Alaska, carrying two large John Deere no-till air seeders to Alaska Agro.
Well, thanks for joining me and really appreciate you taking the time with a cool project you guys have going. Tell me a little bit about your company and how it was founded and what you guys do.
Stefan Alderson:
2016 is when quality drill started. So 2026 in November will be our 10-year anniversary. I was working for an agricultural service company, and one of the services that was provided from that company was services on John Deere, single disk, no-till drills. And I took a real liking to that particular piece of machinery. When I started to learn about agriculture, I really took a passion to no-till sustainability, regenerative ag, and I understood the John Deere single disk drills really intimately. So I viewed my knowledge of the single-disk drill as a way to provide value in the regenerative or no-till space. When I was talking to growers and going to visit farms throughout the years would notice a common stumbling point when it came to no-till, when it came to minimum till or anything other than conventional agriculture. And it was always the equipment that made it possible, that was the stumbling point for growers.
So you talk to a guy who's transitioning to no-till or he's been no-till in three years or four years or whatever, and it's always the drill that is the cumbersome piece of it. When you compare a conventional drill, a sweep or a double disc drill, a ho-drill to a single disk drill to a no-till drill, because a no-till drill is doing so much more of a high demand job in planting an undisturbed or minimally disturbed soil, you need a much more robust opener and they have more moving pieces and they're just more complex than their conventional counterparts. So saw that as an opportunity to provide value to growers who were trying to no-till in understanding the tool that makes it all possible.
John Dobberstein:
Tell me a little bit about how this whole deal came about with this farmer in Alaska.
Stefan Alderson:
Yeah. So many years ago, Devin and I decided, Devin, my business partner here, decided that we wanted to get in on the right side of the deal. So as a collective, as a company, what we had spent the first few years doing was going out looking at machines that people already owned and telling them what was wrong with that machinery. Maybe they had owned it for 10 years, maybe they had owned it for three months. Either way, we were always the bearer of bad news. We were always the people telling them they had to spend way more money than they wanted to. So we decided to start getting in on the right side of the deal and selling the equipment to the grower so that we could be transparent in the buying process and make them fully aware of what they were buying before they bought it so that then somebody like me or me wouldn't have to go out and tell them all the things that was wrong with their new piece of equipment.
So in doing so, over the years, we've accumulated a pretty vast list of offerings. We have 70 plus pieces of machinery on our tractor house page. So we get calls all the time from all over the world, really, about the acquisition of equipment. This call came, I believe it was March 14th. Grower called, said he had bought a machine from Alaska, had a deal already worked out from Kansas to Alaska, had a deal already worked out and the deal had fallen through. He was looking online, noticed that we had a number of machines and just thought he would call and see what we were all about. An hour or two into that conversation, we established what he was looking for. I sent him three machines to choose from, option one, two, option three. Pretty quickly, he got back to me, said, "Hey, I want to move forward with option one.
That's a great machine." I believe that was two, three days later. It was over the weekend. I was pretty excited. Got a call back from him the following Monday, and he said, "You know what? I think we better get two." And he's quoted a pretty good quote that I'll remember for a long time. He said, "Farming in Alaska is like farming on the moon. You have what you brought with you. Bring two. If you have one, you have none."
If you were going to go build a cabin in Alaska, you'd probably want two chainsaws, just in case.
John Dobberstein:
Yeah, I spent a little time ... I think I watched every single episode of Ice Row Truckers. The stuff that people deal with up there trying to get supplies, it's a challenge.
Stefan Alderson:
So basically the other thing that he said that I thought was really good insight, he said, "Unless you're trying to move fish or petroleum in or out of Alaska, it's a logistical challenge. You can move fish, you can move oil, anything else sucks."
John Dobberstein:
Yeah, yeah. It's not for the faint of heart. It's definitely a challenge. So he-
Stefan Alderson:
They figure rather than get one out there, break down and be screwed, I'm going to just have a second one. And their ambition is also, they bought enough drill to do what they're doing now, but the ambition is to grow the farm out there to a number of acres over the next few years. And as long as that happens at the trajectory they have anticipated, they will be needing this second drill almost right away.
John Dobberstein:
Right. Okay. So you got the deal done. Why are they going to no-till?
Stefan Alderson:
So Alaska presents not only logistical challenges, but also just challenges that the average grower doesn't encounter. One of those, almost a blessing and a curse at the same time is the fact that they have a very, very short window of growing season. Farming in Alaska is going to be similar to farming in parts of Montana or North Dakota or Canada where they only have really the growing season for one crop. So 151 day growing season, if I'm not mistaken, and it begins mid, early May. The ambition behind getting no-till drills out there is to get in the field sooner. At the end of the day, what dictates a lot of how the barley does, because they're fortunate enough to have really good dirt and good moisture is how many days it's in the ground. So the growers that we're working with view no-till as a way to enable them to get in the field sooner so that they can capitalize on that growing season a little bit more efficiently.
Pretty much all the farms up there are conventional tillage. There's what I would call an entry level no-till drill up there. You may be familiar with this being in the space, but oftentimes you'll run into water conservation districts or soil conservation districts that will have some sort of drill that they rent out to people in the area to use. So there is a double disk seed master box drill up there already, but the ambition is to get in the field sooner. And these drills will be the first John Deere single disk drills, which really professional grade no-till drills, real no-till drills. Also, I haven't been told otherwise, and I've talked to people who I would believe are the people who would know, but these tools will also be the largest pieces of farm equipment in the state of Alaska. So not only are they the first real single disc no-till air drills, but they're also going to be the largest pieces of equipment in Alaska period.
John Dobberstein:
Wow. Tell me what your team thought of this assignment when you got it and what the longest was that you've ever hauled equipment before.
Stefan Alderson:
Yeah. So I would say that if there was anybody in the country you could call to do this project, Quality Drills is better suited than anyone in that. We do this kind of work all the time. No stranger to introducing no-till to a new county or a new region or bringing drills far and wide. If I had to really think, I would say the farthest move we've done prior to this would probably be a machine that went to Washington. We've sold a number of machines into Washington and Oregon, the Palouse Valley, the Klamath Valley and Oregon all around. And those are often pretty long hauls, but nothing compared to Alaska.
Devin Marcin:
Right. Now, something else that's kind of a funny little nuance. So Stefan is actually originally from Alaska. He grew up there until he was 16, 17, so there's nobody better suited to have gotten this call than him.
Stefan Alderson:
And you'd think that, oh, well, he got that call because he knew someone. Nope, not at all. The guy who called, we didn't know each other. We didn't grow up together. We lived 600 miles apart from each other. He called because we had tools listed and it just so happened to be that I'm the only air cedar guy in the world who grew up in Alaska. So for me, this project, a lot of people, John Deere dealers or potentially other people that would've gotten involved in this would probably view it honestly as a bad thing because from a business standpoint, logistically it's a nightmare. It's very expensive. We're not upcharging our services to go work in Alaska. So the way that I view it, obviously my accountant probably isn't too savvy of this, but it's really a labor of love. We're doing something that's really important.
Alaskans pay the price of their remote living, of their solidarity at the grocery store. They pay a premium for milk and bread and all of the things that you and I take for granted every day because they're dependent on logistics to get those things there. So growing food in Alaska is not only a profitable business venture for growers if they're willing to put in the work and make it happen, but it's also a philanthropic mission in my eyes where we're actually doing some good in helping create less dependence for Alaska. The crops that we are directly contributing to oats and barley go to feeding cattle, which I believe has a pretty direct impact.
John Dobberstein:
Right. And yeah, any kind of thing you can do for people to be self-sufficient, that certainly makes sense. Tell me a little bit about the team that you have assembled to do all this, the transport and the work you have to do when you get there.
Stefan Alderson:
Absolutely. Yeah. So Alaska will be a culmination of efforts from probably over a dozen different people from my team logistically. Obviously everyone from Devin and I out here with the convoy be in the boots on the ground to tell the story of bringing the farm equipment to Alaska. But our service team will also be joining the machinery in Alaska. We're going to be flying three of our mechanics and field technicians from Denver, Colorado to Anchorage, Alaska. They'll be getting a rental in Anchorage, driving six hours to Fairbanks where they will be, sorry, six hours to Telta Junction, where they'll be linking with Devin and I, who will then rebuild the machinery. So the machinery's coming to them and as is condition, they've purchased it in field-ready conditions. So we're going to go up there, do the work on location at the farm. That presents a really great opportunity to take some time with the guy that will be using the equipment, show him what it is, show him how it works, and help him get acclimated to the tool, as well as acclimate the tool to his tractor.
So far, we've involved five, six people, but the trucking team is a whole nother venture. I've used one trucking company out of Plainview, Texas consistently for probably my last 100 moves. It's Walt Penney Trucking. He's the best in the business at Long Haul, oversized loads. Have a drill loaded for me in two hours and on the road to where it needs to go. And I know when it gets there, it's going to be there in one piece. We've got the lead vehicle not oversized, the two seed carts, the two 350 bushel tow behind 1910s. Behind that, we have the first toolbar and then behind that, another toolbar. So right now we're running in a convoy with Walt Penney Trucking. He's got three trucks, three drivers, and three trailers making this all happen. The route is another probably three, four people on his team. Not to make this any more complicated or crazy than it already is, but the farmer who bought the drill, Alaska Agro LLC also and a spray trailer and a semi that he is driving to Alaska.
So what we are doing is he is meeting us in Minot North Dakota to join the convoy and piggyback off of our flag cars and pilot cars.
John Dobberstein:
Oh, man. Well, the highway patrol's going. Love you guys.
Stefan Alderson:
And then when we get there, after we rebuild the drills, we're hosting a grower's clinic, what I believe is probably the first of its kind. Basically an Alaskan Farm Show, they may do something of that nature, but this is going to be really focused on large ag, on sustainable ag, on no-till and the equipment that makes it possible. So what we've done is we've put together a band of people who care about this and Alaska and being able to help Alaskan growers. We're having a clinic on April 25th where we're going to have a number of these companies actually flying out to Alaska from the lower 48 to present their knowledge and their products to the growers of Alaska, all in hopes of showing the growers in the region that they do have support. There is companies out of the lower 48 willing to go the extra mile and help them succeed in whatever their goals are.
John Dobberstein:
Right. Are these companies, what's the relationship of the companies that are the mission partners?
Stefan Alderson:
Yeah, so we have a couple different types of partners. Some of the partners that we have are pretty directly correlated to no-till drills, as in people that make parts for these machines or are directly involved in helping them out. A lot of the other companies that we're working with are either local companies that want to show Alaskan agriculture that, "Hey, we're here to support this, " or companies within the agricultural space that want to put their name behind a solid mission. Sponsored so far, companies like Prescription Tillage, which they make blades out of Iowa, Dakota Ag Innovations, Ryan NT. A lot of the sponsors that we've got so far are product suppliers, but we're also really looking to just present the growers with whoever's willing to do the work to help them succeed. So I'm sure there are some people we haven't thought of yet, but yeah, things are happening quick.
This clinic is the 25th and we're not usually trying to execute things so quickly, but this is the God-given timeline. Cool story on where these drills came from. So one of them came from a really large farm in North Dakota that grows potatoes for McDonald's. Obviously, this drill is not what they use to grow potatoes, but that's the operation that it was growing on. So in some way, shape or form, this drill here that's going to Alaska contributed to your McDonald's french fries. It didn't plant them directly, but it was a part of the operation. And the other machine comes from somebody, if you wouldn't mind putting this in your story, the people would really appreciate it. So this other machine is a machine that we actually rebuilt for a farmer two years ago, and right after we rebuilt it, before they had an opportunity to use it, the farmer passed away.
And we've actually had it listed for the last 18 months for this operation to try to sell it. The operation is Howard Turner Farms out of Wagner, Oklahoma, and they were actually really, really excited about the fact that this drill was going to be the first no-till drill in Alaska. And anyway, it was a really cool story. It'll be a part of the broader video. But if you end up writing or publishing anything about this, if you wouldn't mind including Howard Turner Farms out of Wagner, Oklahoma, I know that it would tickle Dorothy to the end of the moon.
John Dobberstein:
Biotill Cover Crops, a pioneer and leader in cover crop seeds, represents a complete lineup of seeds suitable for use in diverse soil types and growing conditions. The focus on cover crop and regenerative forage seeds sets Biotill apart from suppliers invested in other markets. Dealers and the company's distribution network are committed to your success by providing local resources, education, and guidance to ensure you have the correct foundation for success. With over 50 years of experience in production, processing, packaging, and shipping, you won't find a better fit for your farm than with biotill cover crops. Not long after we spoke with Stefan and Devon, another large truck and trailer joined the convoy with a haggy sprayer going up to the farm near Delton Junction, Alaska, which is owned by Alan and Mark Boyce who will put the equipment to use on their 5,600 acre operation. They're working with Alaska Agro Farm Manager, Clayton Griffith, as they convert the operation over to no-till practices to increase the efficiency and sustainability of the farm.
Tell me a little bit about your farm and when and how you were founded and what you do.
Clayton Griffith:
Yeah, so we farm roughly 5,600 acres of tillable land, primarily grow barley oats, hay, and grass seed. We will have some new crop this year as far as experiments go. We're trying to grow anything and everything that we can possibly grow in the state of Alaska for food, for cattle. Alaska lacks a lot of protein feeds, so it's important that we're kind of on the progressive side of mitigating that and getting more protein into livestock producers' hands through that. I believe we are the largest producer of agricultural commodities in the state currently. So our markets go all the way from
Delta Junction all the way down to Homer, Alaska. We put up around 20,000 straw bales that go all over the state as well. As you know, Alaska's cold, so straw is a pretty big commodity for us as well. We purchased this farm last year, so this is our second growing season there. Last year, we did not plant the crop, but we harvested it, and this year's our first planting season. So in the late 1980s, the Schultz Brothers bought this farm. It was a barrel forest. They cleared all the land on it and slowly brought it up to production to where it is now. So yeah, they've conventionally tilled in there through the years. Yeah, they slowly conventionally tilled basically barley, oats, and hay as well, primarily.
John Dobberstein:
So you've made the decision to go to no-till, is that what I'm ...
Clayton Griffith:
Correct. Yep. So getting in the fields, a couple of reasons why getting in the fields early, we have a short growing season. And currently right now, there's still snow setting on the fields, so when it dries out, you can't have an actual target date for planting. So it's very important that you get the seed in the ground as soon and efficiently as possible. And with that, we can do some variable rate seeding, herbicide applications, and fertilizer, correct. Yeah, fertilizer right with the seed and have better control of our crop and our growing conditions that way. But the mitigation tool that is to go no-till is get all of the seed in the ground as soon as possible. When you're conventionally tilling, we would have to till it all up, possibly spray it, and then go into till. So it could be a three to four-week deal.
With no-till, we're planning on less than a week.
John Dobberstein:
Wow. How did you decide on the machines you wanted to use?
Clayton Griffith:
Yep. So I did a ton of research from our soil conditions. Some of it can be wet, but we are primarily dry. Like I said, all the snow's going out, so we have some wet spots in there. So I wanted less drag. That's why I went with a car machine on that. I went in single disc opener. Originally, I thought we needed double disc openers to move material out of the way, but single disc is perfect for us because we're going through straw material and be softer conditions. And then again, the cart on the back, less drag rather than having a unit on the machine.
John Dobberstein:
What do you think you'll put down with your cedars when you go out to plant everything this spring? What fertilizer do you think you'll end up putting down with it? So
Clayton Griffith:
In Alaska, we use straight urea and phosphorus and a dry form.
John Dobberstein:
Okay.
Clayton Griffith:
So that's about the only thing that's available in Alaska. So we're kind of limited on fertilizer, phosphorus of what we can applicate on there. So we got three compartment containers so we can do those. I'm planning on putting all the phos down with the seed and fertilizer all in one application.
John Dobberstein:
Do you have a support system and people around you to help you going to no-till as far as issues you'll have to deal with, the ground changing a little bit? Have you found a way to address that?
Clayton Griffith:
Not really. We do that. We take care of that all ourselves on the farm. I'm pretty familiar with these drills. I've ran these basically my entire life, so it's not a foreign concept. For us, definitely training employees to be able to hop in it and run and understand what the machine does and how it works is going to be the educational piece there. But as far as mitigating any breakdowns and issues with being the only drills in the state, I think with stepping into quality drills, coming to rebuild the second drill up here, we'll know a lot more about these things and have a hands-on approach to being able to fix them and what breaks, what wears out, what extra parts we need to get all those out of hand.
John Dobberstein:
Right. What does success look like for you if no-tilling this land goes well and the equipment works great? What looks like success for you? What do you want to be able to say to your customers?
Clayton Griffith:
Yeah, well, we want to have the best quality barley in Alaska and we want to keep that standard in Endo and all the products that we have. We want to have the best quality for all of our customers. I think they deserve that. There's not a lot of great seeds in the state or feed commodities in the state, just because the conditions that we're farming in. Some of the neighbors don't have the tools that we have or can't get in there. And then the population of the farmers in Alaska are slightly older than the national average. So success looks for us. We're trying to build long-term fertility in the soil. Alaska lacks a root cluster that's dense as far as plants availability. When you're planting barley and outs for that, I think it's important that we build the soil, build our pHs, and then we can build long-time fertility into the soil and then have even yields going forward and consistent crops.
John Dobberstein:
So you have an event coming up a field day and what, 10 days, less than 10 days?
Clayton Griffith:
Right. Yep.
John Dobberstein:
And so that's going to be a no-till workshop at your farm?
Clayton Griffith:
Right.
John Dobberstein:
Tell me a little bit about what you guys have going on with the event and what you're hoping people will learn. Yeah.
Clayton Griffith:
Well, Stefan was a great tool for that. With him being there, he wanted to make sure that it was an educational piece, show what the drills are, what they do, bring the companies that support these drills and their education to them, to what benefits no-till has in general and what it can provide for the state of Alaska.
John Dobberstein:
What do you think the attitude about no-till or reduced tillage in Alaska is like? Are you finding a lot of negativity or are people Pretty open to it, do you think?
Clayton Griffith:
It's almost like a fifty fifty. Like I said, a lot of these guys in Delta, where most of the farmland is, built their farms in the 80s. They're a little bit older people, and change is hard for a lot of older farmers. And technology might not be the best thing for some of those guys either. But I think it's well receptive to and understandable for the younger guys that understand there needs to be change. There hasn't been change in 40 years. And that to build a more sustainable local food system, you need change and efficiency is a big thing as well.
John Dobberstein:
Right. Excellent. Yeah. Well, we can certainly say no-till's done in all 50 states and it can be done in a lot of environments. Not that there aren't challenges, but I guess that's what makes farming fun, dealing with the challenges.
Alan Boyce:
Yep. I adapt to your environment. This is Alan. So on the no-till, a couple other comments. So we're on the north side of the Alaska range, so it's kind of a desert up there. I mean, on average, we get 12 inches of precipitation a year. Yes, there's some ginormous rivers that come out of the Alaska range and the mountains to the north. That's all snow melt from higher elevations where they get more precipitation. But we're generally a pretty dry place. And down in where we are in Delta, the soils are pretty light and they have a lot of very high soil carbon. And we did 500 soil samples last June, so we've mapped out all the fields. And the thing is, when you till light ground in a place where it doesn't rain very much, what we do have is we have wind and you're running the risk of drying your soil out too much and having it blow away.
Devin Marcin:
Or
Alan Boyce:
Say it another way. A lot of Alaska is underneath all those trees is sand that blew in from somewhere else. I'm not kidding. There's really a lot of that. So to preserve our soil and our soil moisture, no-till is a key. It's kind of hard. People's brains ... When you're in Western Kansas or places in Argentina, for example, which are good soils, but pretty dry or the Canadian prairies, people can understand no-till. We have the same issues, if that makes sense.
And I really don't want our topsoil to blow away. And we want to preserve that soil moisture. We don't have irrigation. We have some neighbors that have got a couple pivots and they get much higher yields out of that, especially in dry summers. Preserving that soil moisture is a real key to us. And then as Clay said earlier, we don't have that long of a growing season, but it's also not that short either. It's like 140 days. Veries every year. This was a cold winter, so the soil might not dry out and warm up as soon as it did last year. But with no till and whatever the planters we've got and in our spray rig, we can get the whole farm planted way faster. And that's a way of extending your growing season. Or to say it another way, the best way to farm in the '90s, which is what the guys that we took over did, it took them three weeks to plant everything.
We think we can get it done in five days. I mean, it kind of depends on how much coffee you can drink. So if you do get those optimal conditions, we just extended the growing season by more than two weeks, just by changing some equipment. So I think that's a huge advantage. And we've got with the two planters, we've got the ability, haven't exactly figured out how to instrument it yet with our neighbors to provide some custom farm services. And maybe they still want to be in charge of dealing with weeds and harvest and all that. But the key here is to get the crop in the ground as soon as the ground is ready for the seeds to germinate. You could beat that. You've got a shock absorber. And the thing is, winter could arrive in the middle of September. Last year it didn't arrive till the middle of October, but when it did, it was big change.
If your crop is still out there trying to mature and dry out and a big snowstorm comes, you might not get to that crop until the snow goes away the following spring and then it's garbage. So it's kind of a race. We're at 64 degrees latitude. We got different weather than farmers in the 40s.
Experience in agriculture. I mean, my brother and I started in Indiana. They do some no-till there, but not as much because the ground is heavy clay and stuff, and you actually need to till it to get it to dry out. And they get plenty of rain in the summer. But I've farmed in drier places, Canadian prairies, Argentina, Uruguay. And in those places, no-till was adopted a long time ago. So it's not modern technology. The 50-year-olds, that's all they know.
So I'm feeling pretty confident about this. Yes, we'll probably make a few mistakes. Clay's got a bunch of different experiments that he's going to run. We're going to try some different kinds of barley, molting barley, for example. And we're also going to try spring wheat and we've got some short cycled corn. If we can figure out how to grow corn in Alaska, that's way better animal feed than the small grains. And I'm pretty confident. And the days are already getting pretty long in the middle of May till the middle of August, basically the sun, it doesn't get dark. And so if you've got good soil moisture, the growth rate of the plants in the field is spectacular, which is places in the upper Midwest and Minnesota and the Dakotas where their growing season isn't that much. Guys in the Intermountain West and some of those high elevation valleys, they got 90-day growing seasons.
So it's not like we're insane for doing this at higher latitudes, but we're trying to get whatever. We're pretty confident that this is going to work really well. But then one other thing, Alaska's a big place and there's not many people. And where we are, there's not a labor pool. It's a labor puddle
And we're competing. We need skilled workers to operate all this equipment and maintain it, and we're competing with people that can pay a lot. So the whole North Slope oil and gas maintain the pipelines, constantly drilling, they pay pretty good. All the gold mines, the military bases, there's pretty significant military presence in the Golden Valley. So we're next to Fort Greeley, which is the anti-ballistic missile base for North America and Carlson Air Force Base, which is freaking ginormous in Fort Wainwright and whatever, a lot of civilian contractors there. And then I could go on and on about the unfortunate competition for labor, but the Trump administration has green-lighted the Ambler Road project and there's this big mining district, what is it? 800 miles north and west of Fairbanks. They're going to put a road through there. And all these mines for critical minerals, cobalt and Timony and all these other things, we have to be almost labor efficient.
Again, we are substituting capital for unavailable labor and the chances that our labor thing gets better is I'm assigning a zero probability to that.
There's still guys around us that do the tillage and older equipment takes a lot more hours. That's like a family operation and that doesn't look like a sustainable business to us. And we've been buying farmland, setting up farm companies since the '80s we started in Indiana, but we've set up a lot of farm companies over the years. Not all of them have been successful either. And at one point we had set up the biggest rice and corn grower in Miller in East Africa and this awesome place, the Killeenbaro Valley in Tanzania with a railroad to Dara Salam and everything. And after a decade and spending money, we quit. We just walked away because not because of the agronomy, but the government of Tanzania was run by a really well-organized bunch of thieves. And the things they asked us to do are called felonies in the United States, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and all that, and whatever.
But me and my brother were Eagle Scouts. You hear that word felony in it, how fast to run, not walk to the nearest exit. And somebody sticks their hand out and says, "Pay me.
" And whatever, our adventure in Saskatchewan and Alberta was okay, but not great. I mean, we thought we were big enough that a hundred thousand acres up there might not even be big enough because it's the really big integrated guys that make the money. The business in Argentina, I mean, I started that one in 2002. That's a pretty big company now, very successful. And that one's listed on the New York Stock Exchange. AGRO is the symbol, so you can go look it up. We farm a million and a half acres across Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, and we are the biggest and most efficient in everything we do there. So we're the biggest and most efficient dairy operation in Latin America. We're not probably the third biggest, but certainly the most efficient sugar cane to ethanol and electricity and sugar producer. The list goes on. And that one, we were super keen on no-till at the beginning, and a lot of people in Argentina laughed at us 25 years ago.
John Dobberstein:
Of course.
Alan Boyce:
And now it's like you can barely find an implement that moves the dirt, but back then this gringo was coming down every month telling people he didn't want to see land dist up or you were going to get fired. And then after a couple trips, you'll fly in on some king air and fly around the farm and see somebody out there plowing around. And when you assemble all the workers, it's like, okay, you're all fired because some of you plowed and the rest of you didn't tell us and they were shocked, but it didn't take fire and too many sets of farm managers, so the word got out.
And the thing is with no-till, so if you started with conventional ground that had been tilt for a long time, and you know all this stuff, but I'm just restating the obvious, you have released a lot of the soil carbon that you started with. So when you switch from those carbon with those carbon dinuded soils to no-till, actually takes quite a while to get the soil carbon built up, so you start noticing the improvements. So we're starting with pretty high carbon soil. So I'm thinking that we're going to see the improvements right away and whatever. The easy button is we could get the crop in the ground way faster.
Clayton Griffith:
And on another note to that, being in Alaska, fertilizer's expensive, it's more expensive here times a lot, more expensive herbicides, everything. So I believe we're going to be the only variable rate company farming in Alaska. So that is a reduction of cost as well on utilization of fertilizers and chemicals.
John Dobberstein:
Yeah. Clearly you don't really have a choice. You have to be efficient because you don't have a easy supply.
Clayton Griffith:
Right, exactly. Yeah. And Alan, head on the nail there with the gashation exchange that we're going to build there. Ours is kind of low and with no-till, we'll be able to build that, keep soil moisture in and have a more even crop throughout the year.
John Dobberstein:
Yeah. It's interesting hearing your story about Argentina. We've had a number of people come to our conference that have no-tilled since the '60s, and one of them, he was a grower for Chiquita and his farm manager basically had to lie on one of their forums about no-tilling because they said, "You have to plow it. " And he's like, "I'm not going to plow it. " And you talk about being the unwashed for a long time before it was accepted. So back then they didn't have all the resources that we have today with the research and equipment and everything. And so it's come a long way. Yep,
Clayton Griffith:
Absolutely. Yep. And we're not recreating the wheel here. We're just the first one to do it here.That's the
Alan Boyce:
Thing. The nearest agriculture to us is basically Peace River Valley. So it's like Grand Prairie, kind of north and west of Edmonton, and they're all pretty keen, no-till guys there and have been for a while. So I farmed there for a little bit. So it's just that that idea didn't make it up the Transalaska highway, but Peace River Valley is at the other end of the trans. So we're at milepost 1300 and they're at mile zero. So it's 1300 miles with very, very, very little in between.
John Dobberstein:
Your sprayer, what kind of spray rig did you buy?
Alan Boyce:
Yep. So we got a
Clayton Griffith:
Hagie STS-10.
Alan Boyce:
John Deere bought Hagie, so John Deere's new sprayers are based on that design. Now that John Deere's got the sea and spray technology, which is very expensive, but if you're doing a lot, a lot of acres and don't have a bunch of labor, it's pretty darn efficient. So we haven't advanced all the way to that, but Higgy will be a massive improvement over ...
Clayton Griffith:
Yep. The Hagie's definitely a massive improvement for efficiency blow rates, like we were talking about, and also it comes with a Cummins engine. We have to work on everything that breaks down ourselves. We can't call a mechanic. We can't call the parts dealer. There is a John Deere dealer here, but they sell lawnmowers and lawn tractors and heavy construction equipment for the mining and oil and gas business. There's no resources for any agriculture equipment, so we are the resource. So we have to be able to get equipment, but be able to work on it and get the right equipment so we can work on it too.
John Dobberstein:
Well, that's it for this episode of the No To Farmer Podcast as we share this unique story of bringing no-till to the final frontier in Alaska. I'd like to thank Mark and Ellen Boyce, Clayton Griffith, Stefan Alderson, and Devin Marson for sharing this story with us. We also want to thank our sponsor, Biotill Cover Crops, for helping to make this podcast possible. A transcript of this episode in our archive of previous podcast episodes are both available at no-tillfarmer.com/podcasts. For Alaska Agro Quality Drills and our entire staff here at No-Till Farmer, I'm John Dobberstein. Thanks for listening. Keep on no-tilling and have a great day.
