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Halfway back. Restoring soil health helps triple yields

Rocky Bateman figures he’s got his farm’s soil halfway back to what it was like before his great, great grandfather broke the sod.

Rocky Bateman

Rocky Bateman has made progress on restoring soil health. As a result, he has tripled some of his crop yields and reduced his breakeven costs.

Bateman, New Salem, N.D., is one of eight Soil Health Champions from the Northern Plains region identified by the National Association of Soil Conservation Districts.

Bateman says he and his family – spouse, Nancy Jo; daughter, Jessie; and her husband, John Pfaff; and daughters Ashley and Libby – raise grain and cattle on some of the worst land he says he’s ever seen in the Northern Plains. The terrain is rolling to rugged. The soil is light and sandy.

Breaking the sod with the plow may have been one of the worst things to ever happen to it, he says. But for five generations, the Bateman family has run a cow herd on the worst of the land and tried to farm the better ground.

By the time Bateman started farming in 1974, there was little topsoil left on the hilltops. Organic matter content on many of the farmed fields had fallen from about 8% when it was native prairie to .7-.9% by the late 1980s.

In 1998, Bateman came to a tipping point.

“I had to change the way I farmed or quit,” he says. Input costs kept rising and yields didn’t keep pace. “I couldn’t make it anymore.”

Following the lead of some other farmers in the northern Great Plains, Bateman switched to no-till in an attempt to at least reduce his operating costs. It wasn’t an easy transition. His banker didn’t go along. He had to find a new lender. He was supportive, but only gave him one or two seasons to turn the farm around.

“I was at the edge of the cliff,” Bateman says. “I couldn’t make any more mistakes.”

Bateman turned to several no-till farmers and Don Tanka, a researcher and no-till advocate with the USDA Agriculture Research Service’s Northern Great Plains Research Laboratory in Mandan, N.D., and Jay Fuhrer, North Dakota Natural Resources Conservation service soil health specialist, for help. He also sought advice and technical assistance from his local county soil conservation district and NRCS field offices.

“I really haven’t had an original thought or idea about no-till or soil health. I went to the best people I could find asked for advice,” says Bateman, who now serves on advisory boards of Northern Great Plains Research Laboratory and the Morton County Soil Conservation District.

Bateman was very open to new ideas and willing to try them, Fuhrer says.

“He would attend a soil health meeting and then go home and apply another soil health principle. Over the years, he applied them all,” Fuhrer says.

Bateman didn’t see a big increase in his yields the first few years with no-till, but he was able to cut his cost significantly. Because he wasn’t doing tillage, he didn’t need as much fuel. Machinery repair costs dropped. Eventually he sold tractors, plows and disks.

“I didn’t look back,” he says.

To his wheat, barley and oat rotation Bateman gradually added corn for grain, sunflowers, soybeans, canola, field peas, alfalfa and cover crops.

He learned to focus on the biological life beneath the soil surface rather than the vegetation on top of the soil surface – the “unseen instead of the seen” Bateman says.

He reintroduced livestock to the cropland by turning cattle back out on cropland to graze cover crops and crop residue.

After four of five seasons of no-till, crop yields began to increase, slowly at first, and then dramatically over the years

“We’ve tripled our proven wheat yields since the 1970s,” he says.

Bateman attributes some of yield increase to advances in plant genetics, but most of it to soil health.

The soil now holds more water than it did 20-30 years ago. More organic matter is created and mineralized each year, which reduces the fertilizer he needs to apply. The crops themselves seem to be healthier and more vigorous, which has reduced weed, disease and insect pressure.

As a result, the farm is more resilient. It is more able to recover from drought and stress than it was 20-30 years ago, Bateman says.

Times can still be tough financially due to low commodity prices, but Bateman says he is a better position now to ride out market cycles than ever before. His breakeven costs have never been lower.

 “There is still more that we want to do improve the farm, and there is a lot more to learn about soil health. I feel as if have barely scratched the surface,” Bateman says, “but the soil is halfway back to what is was when my great, great grandfather started farming and that is pretty exciting.”