Episode 111: Questioning Farm Management Traditions with Boe Clausen

Hi friends. Welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. This is John Kempf and I've really been looking forward to the conversation that you're about to listen to. The focus of the podcast has largely been on agronomy because that is what I personally find interesting and fascinating. It's where I find the large areas of opportunities. But also in our work at advancing eco agriculture, we are constantly stimulated by growers who ask us challenging questions and who contribute new insights to the work that we are all doing collectively. And one of those growers is joining me today, Beau Clausen from the Pacific Northwest. Bo, thank you for being here. Why don't you tell us a bit about the context of your operation, what your journey has been like and the scope of the work that you're doing today.

Yeah, thank you, John. Thank you for having me. It's definitely an honor to be here. Little background on my farm and family. We are second generation farmer here in the Columbia Basin of Eastern Washington. My parents started the farm in 1981. They were actually immigrants from Denmark. Met in California in 1965 and they come over the last year so you could come with an immigrant visa rather than a work visa. And they met down there and decided this was truly the land of opportunity and kept pursuing opportunities. And that led to coming to eastern Washington to the Columbia Basin and working on a farms there. And in 1981 decided that they would like to pursue their own farm and started on their own. And so since then we've been farming and started off as a mostly a vegetable seed growing and today we've diversified into mostly alfalfa hay, corn, wheat and still some vegetable seeds, wrinkled seed, peas, beans, wheat, triticale seed and such. We also got cattle side of the operation started. Now we are doing cow calf, about 800 cow calf pairs and about 100 registered Angus bulls on the farm. And we also have a feedlot on the operation and the feedlot on the operation is leased out to another entity. But we maintain first right of the manure on on the facility. And the manure is we call our golden goose. The manure off that facility is what has enabled us to raise common crops together or are surrounded by high end potatoes, onions, higher end crops. But because of the source of the manure, we've been able to get all of our potassium and phosphorus needs for the high use crops such as alfalfa and corn. And that has made us extremely competitive with our neighbors and our environment here. And that is kind of how we come along.

How long has the Feedlot been a part of your operation? How long have you had access to that manure resource?

So my parents bought the feedlot in 89. It was sitting vacant and bankrupt. And bought it out of a scene that added in a paper that it had come up for sale. Somebody had purchased it originally from the bank. It did not go through, and my father did not have the money to make the purchase. But it was something he felt he could not afford to let go. So he went to the bank, manipulated his numbers to make it look good enough to go, and he took a little cash he had on the operating line and put down on it. And basically, my father asked for forgiveness, not permission, and is the best thing he ever did. It's kind of a joke, But, I mean, what he bought it for was cents on the dollar. And it's the old saying, when somebody looks at it from the outside, all they see is a mess and pile of manure out there. And my father saw opportunity, and so he bought a manure spreader, an old truck, and a loader. And we started hauling manure out onto our fields. And the facility had a shop and an old office and a scale on it. And it was close to us. And so we started hauling manure out into our fields. And the manure had not been hauled out for probably 20 years. They literally had board fences and stacked boards higher though the manure was rolling over the fences, probably four to six feet deep. Rather than digging all out, they would add these two by eight boards and extend the height of the fence and raise it up on the steeper slopes of this facility. And there's mounds on there that were probably 20ft tall. Manure in the middle of these pans. And just beautiful manure. And that's one of those deals where people look by and just see dilapidated mess. And somebody else sees opportunity, Somebody else.

Sees a pile of gold. That's a little bit, you know, we. We hear about the. The. The immigrant spirit, and that's a little bit of chutzpah to pull off a deal like that. Yeah. How. How has your operation evolved on the crop side? You described how you had started out being a lot of vegetable seed production, and today you've shifted away from that a little bit. What has that transition been like and how. What were the drivers of that?

Yeah, so originally we started off with vegetable seeds. And a little bit that was back in the 70s. My parents had connections back in Europe to some of the vegetable seed companies and got some pretty good contracts for various crops from kale kohlrabi, mustards, turnips, just all kinds of vegetable seeds. And they were good. But even like they're tough financially because they're like say the carrots, some of those. It would take three years before we would see money return on those. By the time you plant them in the fall and raise them a whole nother season, get them to seed production, deliver it, the, the companies had full control. They clean the seed, process it and decided how to market it. And we typically didn't get paid till they got their money. So the money was tied up for three years. And yes, there could be good money made, but it was tough financially to cash flow it. But we did that up to 89. And once we got the feedlot and the manure, father decided to try some alfalfa hay and a little more corn, knowing that we could grow that cheaper without the commercial fertilizer, with just using manure. And it worked better than other people realized. And for us too, it worked great. So we were able to grow those crops competitively. Might not have been as big a margins, but a lot, lot less risk. And that meant a lot to us. We'd rather have the stability of those crops than the volatility of the vegetable seeds.

It's a very significant resource. Of course you had that, that initial mountain of gold, as you might call it, with the, the manure that was in the feedlot when you originally purchased it. But what do your manure applications look like today? What are your common application rates, how much are you applying and how much of the crops overall nutrition is coming from that.

So in the past, yeah, with the typical spreaders on the back of a, call it a 10 wheeler semi, we were applying between probably 30 to 60 ton an acre of, I call it dry raw manure. It might be maybe 50% moisture, maybe 40% moisture. So and we would apply that at least once every three to four years. And my rule of thumb on the manure was based off of potassium needs with the like, say an alfalfa crop would be removing close to 450 pounds of potassium a season. And so I figured I needed a minimum of between 5 and 8 ton of manure to replace that. So that's kind of where we ran with for many years and try to maintain our ground and stretch our resource out. So we would typically say with a 40 ton an acre spread. I was hoping to get, you know, four to five years out of that if I could.

And how did you, just out of curiosity, because I certainly have some very different perspectives on how phosphorus and potassium behaves in the soil than they're commonly held by many mainstream agronomists. But I'd love to learned. What did you see in your soil profile? On soil analysis with P and K levels, did those remain stable? Did they climb? Did you deplete them? What happened?

No, typically they were climbing over the years. For those rates we were put on especially ground.