The Auer family, near Broadview, has been managing change on their farm for generations. Switching to no-till and adding alfalfa to their crop rotation has led to improved soil health and decreased input costs. Read more in the Changing Farming Practices Improves Soil Health ArcGIS Story Map or in the text only version below.
Find high-resolution photos of the Auer farm.
Changing Farming Practices Improves Soil Health in the Broadview Basin
As the saying goes, “the only thing that is constant is change.” Managing change can be daunting, but it can also lead to surprising results.
Mitch Auer is the fourth generation on the family farm near Broadview, Mont. He has seen the operation change significantly over time. One of the biggest changes was when Auer’s dad made the switch to no-till in the 1980s. Now, Auer is leading a change to a more diverse dryland crop rotation that includes dryland alfalfa.
“We noticed that since we were predominantly summer fallow-winter wheat, our winter wheat yields started kind of decreasing. We needed to change,” said Auer. “So, we started growing a different rotation.”
The first crop added to the dryland farm was corn, a warm season grass, in about 2009. A few years later, malt barley was added, as well as spring wheat and sunflowers. Around 2013, alfalfa joined the rotation. Alfalfa is a perennial legume that fixes nitrogen in the soil, which has helped cut their nitrogen fertilizer use in half. Historically, nitrogen fertilizer has been their largest input cost.
“You can see some of these little rhizobia bacteria and that’s the little manufacturing hub where the plant is taking up atmospheric nitrogen and it’s turning it into a form of nitrogen that the plant can use. This top part gets harvested off. This root with a lot of nitrogen is still sitting there in the soil and as this breaks down it releases nitrogen that can then be used for the next crop,” said Susan Tallman, Bozeman area agronomist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
“Susan helped coin the phrase ‘perennial cover crop.’ It’s going to be there every year and it is doing the same benefits of a cover crop: breaking up the soil with the deep roots, taking care of the hard pan spots because we have hard pan soils in here, and fixing nitrogen. It’s been really beneficial,” said Auer.
The Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) helped the Auers get started in annual mixed-species cover crops. After experimenting for a few years, they found that perennial alfalfa was a better fit for their operation and rotation. Auer says, “The CSP program allows you to think outside the box and then be able to take the money that you get from that program and apply it.”
Through CSP, operators are rewarded for conservation projects that they have already been doing on their own and the program helps to build upon that and take their conservation to a higher level.
“We always encourage producers not to be shy about the great things they’ve already done on their place. We definitely want to hear about that,” said Shalaine Watson, NRCS district conservationist for Yellowstone County. “Also be thinking about the future and what improvements you want to make, your long-term goals and how the program could help you to reach them. It makes the operation that much more sustainable for the future.”
That’s just how the Auers have used the program. Working toward their goal of increased diversity, CSP funding allowed them to try cover crops by mitigating the risk of failure. Cover crops can be risky at first, because the farmer is working to find the best seed mix and seeding techniques specific to his or her farm. They have far-reaching benefits, though.
Increased crop diversity does more than lowering the fertilizer bill. “There’s more to it than just nitrogen,” said Auer. “It changes the soil structure.”
There are a lot of lab tests that analyze soil and provide data about various soil components. Both NRCS conservationists also recommend learning to recognize healthy soils by look and feel. “Calibrate your fingers and your eyeballs and know your ground over time,” said Tallman. “Nothing can take the place of digging a hole and getting a close-up look.”
When you take a shovel into your field, you can see, feel, and smell healthy soil characteristics. Healthy soil will have aggregates that look like cottage cheese, contain healthy living roots, have a sweet rather than sour smell, and may have evidence of earthworms.
“You want to look for aggregation in the soil. These are really the building blocks of your soil. They add structure to the soil. They add porosity so that water can infiltrate and then be held in the soil profile like a sponge. Out here, every drop of water is precious on our dryland farming systems. We want to make sure that water gets down to the roots so it doesn’t sit on top of the soil where it can evaporate or where it can run off. We get these aggregates by putting carbon into the soil. And the way we put carbon into the soils, is that we don’t disturb it. So, we don’t till, we leave a lot of residue on the soil, we keep living roots in the soil, we put a lot of crop diversity in the soil, and when we can we add livestock,” said Tallman.
Adding a perennial such as alfalfa to an annual crop rotation improves the soil by keeping a living root in the soil throughout the year. The additional root growth of a perennial can add more carbon to the soil over time as well as at deeper depths than an annual cover crop.
Using dryland alfalfa in annual grain rotations has several positive resource management benefits. Tallman sees alfalfa as a possible tool to help with soil acidification issues. Application of nitrogen fertilizer in the Golden Triangle and other parts of Montana has led to acidic top soil. Research from North Dakota has indicated that perennials may help mitigate this acidity. In addition, alfalfa requires no nitrogen fertilizer, thereby decreasing the total fertilizer applied in the rotation. “I would love to see more dryland grain farmers experiment with alfalfa, to see if there are potential opportunities for remediating acidic soil environments,” Tallman says. “One challenge with this technique is closely monitoring soil moisture, as alfalfa can use more soil water than annual crops. This will be of even greater importance in a dry year.”
Alfalfa can also be used to prevent or reclaim a saline seep by planting it in the upland recharge area. This is especially important in the Broadview area. The parent material of the basin is inherently high in salinity. This means that water that is not used by plants can accumulate soluble salts as it percolates through the soil profile. When that water emerges near the down-slope soil surface, it evaporates and leaves the salts behind, creating a saline seep.
The Broadview basin was designated as a priority area for salinity control and the Conservation Reserve Program has been utilized to get perennial forage planted on many acres that had the potential to make saline seeps worse when farmed.
“Saline seeps are not productive and not valuable to the farm operation or wildlife. Continuous crop is a tool for that. Cover crops can be a tool for that. The perennial alfalfa is a great tool for that,” said Watson. “Just talking to producers that have been around for 30, 40 or more years, they have seen a lot of the white spots [indicative of saline seeps] either completely gone or at least diminishing quite a lot in size, so that’s a positive thing.”
