If you haven’t had a chance to dive into this year’s Conservation ag Operator Fellowship series with Wisconsin no-tiller Tony Peirick, now is the time. He and many other growers around the country are making plans to get into the field and plant in the coming weeks.
I’ll have more on his planting season very soon but first, let’s get you caught up on his background and some other projects he is working on.
“My name is Tony Peirick. We live here in Watertown, Wisconsin. I farm here with my brother and our sons and families. It's called under T&R Dairy Farm, LLC. We've been farming since the ... Oh, we kind of took it over from my dad in the early 80s already and been farming ever since. So we've been moving a long time. We're a dairy and cash grain operation. We have our own grain facility. We store all the grain on farm. We do milk around just around 200 cows here always. We keep it more of a family operation. Most of the land we own, we rent very too much of it. We got a good base here with a lot of land over the years we're able to buy. And we've been doing covers since the 90s, late 90s, we started with cover crops. So we've been doing a lot of no-till now in covers the last 20 some years.”
“So people just got to try something. You can't not say you're never going to do it. Try it, move forward, and it does work. And like I say, I'm involved with the different farmer-led groups. I'm with Dodge County Farmers. I started that group up. It'll be close to 10 years ago. We got a group of farmers out there that we're pushing the regenerative side. We're doing no-till and covers and strip cropping and all kinds of other stuff. And then also the Fields of Sinsinawa is another big organization we got going down there in Sinsinawa, Wisconsin down by Platteville in the corner down there. That's a farmer learning center. We're going to do a full scale farming set up down there with regenerative agriculture and showing people what it is we need to do as far as the rotational grazing. We got a stock cropper going on down there.”
“There's a lot of different projects, so you can always keep an eye on that down there with ... But one of the important things over the years I got started here was all our farmer-led groups here in Wisconsin. We've got over 50 now that goes to 55 groups in Wisconsin, which Wisconsin has really been looked upon as a leader in these farmer-led groups and getting regenerative agriculture going, which is pretty important. Farmers don't want to try this on their own and they need that group support there.”
There will be much more coverage on Tony as the year goes on but for now, head to https://www.no-tillfarmer.com/conservation-ag-fellowship to see all the stories and videos we have so far.
Watch the full Video of this episode of Conservation Ag Update.
