Building Soil While Cash Cropping with Loran Steinlage

Hi friends, this is John and this is the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where we talk about the agronomic science and cultural management practices that regenerate plant health, soil health and public health. My guest for this episode is Lauren Steinlage, who I had the privilege of meeting last winter at a conference. Loren was kind enough to host us at his farm for our first two day course. Earlier this week, I had the privilege of getting to meet him and his family, spend some time on their farm and learn more about some of the work they're doing to rapidly regenerate and rebuild soil health and sequester a lot of carbon and grow some really healthy crops. Lauren, I'm really happy to have you here in the podcast. You've had an interesting story, personal journey with your own family, and health challenges that has then led you to begin farming very differently and adopt some practices that were not at all being considered in mainstream agriculture at that moment in time. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and story and what brought you to some of the things that you're working on today? Lauren, what is the history of relay cropping on your farm? When did you first begin adopting it and how did that come about?

Thank you for having us, first of all. Yeah, our history has just been kind of one of evolution, I would always call it. You know, we early in the game, me and my wife always said it seemed about every time we get to the point we thought we had things figured out, we'd have to re engineer ourselves, just redefine what we're doing and you know, that goes all the way back to short. History is I was, When I was 14, I was hit broadside by a semi. And over the years, scar tissue led me to the point where I can't be around livestock because I can actually pick up livestock disease and stuff like that. So growing up thinking I was going to be a livestock farmer kind of was thrown out the window pretty quick. And I had the realization that I had to try to make it grain farming in our area, the land rent, that's pretty competitive. So we always had to figure out our little niche to try to make things work better. You know, about time we thought we had that figured out. Picked up a lot of custom work. At one point we were probably doing 1500 acres of our own work and another thousand acres of custom work through the custom planning, custom harvesting, crop care, all that stuff. At one point I'd probably say I was confirmed workaholic. And then 2008, my wife convinced me to finally Take a vacation. I've never truly wanted to work since. I just at that point I learned I had to work smarter. You know, a fresh mind is way more competitive than a tax help mind. Which was fortunate because six months later, my son Rollin was diagnosed with a brain tumor. And suddenly we had to figure out how the farm was going to run with or without me, because high priority was focused on our son. Through that period, we kind of learned what it was like, you know, what people were really like when you were in your worst of times. You know, we started losing land just for the simple fact landlords didn't want us to be overworked. Which is a little scary because I never really thought I left off, you know, I never backed off doing what we were doing. And you know, we tried to persevere, but we just had to get lean and mean and survival mode continued, I guess is the way I always refer to it. And currently now our farm, strictly a row crop grain farm, but we do corn, beans, wheat, rye, barley, buckwheat, got sunflowers this year, had some oats too. But then, you know, as history would show, Mother Nature tends to throw us curveballs this year some of the relay cropping and that. We've had to pull the plug on a lot of that. Even the interseeding, you know, we had to pull the plug on that. Just mother Nature's got bats last as a lot of people like to say.

So this year you're not doing any relay cropping, but in the prior years when you have been, what has your relay cropping been looking like? What crops are you relaying with each other? What does your overall relay rotation look like, if it can be called that?

It was kind of part of the evolution from we started interseeding.06, I believe it was in 2012. The whole farm was strong corn on corn back in them days. So interceding was kind of my way into cover crops. We started through some of the people I was meeting and stuff like that. I was introduced to a guy named John Coutts and then another guy out in Nebraska that I was focused on was Shane grieving out there and just started open a line of communication with them. You know, we had the equipment to intercede while it's the same equipment we needed to set up for the relay cropping. And that John up there, Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin's been at it. I'm gonna guess he's pushing 15 years now that he's been doing it. You know, started looking at his system and quickly Decided, you know, that was the guy was truly gonna follow. Ended up even borrowing his original blocker guards. Started seeing what was happening there in our undulating terrain. Having steel out in front of the cutter bar was not a good option for me. So I quickly converted over to plastic pushers that we just made with drainage tile. Then I converted over to a bolt type bolt on type blocker guard. But even that was limited because you start realizing we can't push the soybeans down. Now as of last year, we brought in the row crop head and was planning on running that this year. But as I said earlier, Mother nature kind of made sure we didn't have relay cropping this year because May 15th all our cereals were froze brown laying flat on the ground. Biggest thing with relay cropping is it builds options into what we're doing. I guess that's what I like to reinforce to people.

You mentioned just now that you're growing the rye for seed. And in our conversation the last couple of days you described that the way relay cropping is sometimes done, it doesn't produce a high enough quality crop to be produced for seed because it doesn't have enough uniform germination and so forth. What are the important characteristics in your mind to make sure that rilly cropping does produce the same type of crop quality that just straight cropping might?

The simplest setup is, you know, every fall all our acres has twin row cereals, either winter wheat or rye. If we don't get the acres covered, then we'll consider like a spring malt barley or even the spring oats. We've relayed soybeans into all of them now as winter unfolds, then we'll start monitoring stands, stuff like that. If it's not a good stand, we'll just roll that right over into corn. If the stand's good enough, then we'll go in and install the soybeans pretty much at a normal time. I've used the same drill to put the beans in, but that's evolved. Now we're just using a 30 inch planter to put the beans in because it gives us more room for the combine and stuff like that in spring there we'll monitor, see what the, you know, if there's any herbicide needed. Usually with cereal rye. Generally I like to cereal rye just because it's simple. And you know, we have a very good market for cereal rye around here with COVID crops. You know, we'll come in and installed soybean about July, usually about this week is when we'll be starting to harvest. If we have winter wheat that usually goes first, Sara rye will go the following week. Malt barley will go about another week or two. Then if weather dependent, if we get a window, then we'll slip buckwheat in there. But that window is about July 15th to 20th for me. And then we'll harvest the buckwheat and the soybeans together if we get that window.

When you think about producing uniform germination, obviously you need uniform seed maturity. How does relay cropping sometimes fail to deliver that?

Well, to pay the bills here from day one we decided we had to focus on seed quality, food grade quality, and every guy that's hardcore on something like that, you know, the first thing they start telling me is, you know, the uniform emergence is critical. And then that plays all the way through harvest. If you watch your heads as you're coming to harvest, you want them all to mature about the same time. And then we, we will actually push harvest and try to catch the cereal as it dries down. We will try to catch it on the way down to harvest it because from what everybody has showed me and told me from the testing we've seen, once that cereal crop dries and re wets, you start losing your quality and germination. So that's why we seeding rate wise and that we tend to push the limit. I mean, I'd much rather sell, you know, our malt barley there. For a couple years we were seven or eight dollars a bar.