How cover crops brought farm “from the brink of bankruptcy to profitable enterprise” | Adam Chappell

Hi, friends, this is John and this is the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where we talk about agronomic sciences and cultural management practices that can regenerate soil health, plant health, and ultimately public health. My guest for this episode is a farmer that you may have heard of, but if not, you're about to hear from him now. Adam Chappell from down south in the United States. Adam, it's an honor to have you here. If you could kick us off, tell us a little bit about your farming operation and how your management has evolved over the last couple of decades.

Sure. Glad to be with you this morning, John. I farmed with my brother Seth. We farm about 7,500 acres in cotton Plant, Arkansas. And if you wondering where that is, it's halfway between Little Rock and Memphis. So in east central Arkansas, it's real easy to find on a map. Just follow 40 halfway and then go up about five miles and you'll find us. We farm corn, soybeans, rice, cotton, and some small grains in the winter, mostly wheat and oats. And we've recently integrated cattle in the last few years whenever we can. That's a kind of a situation dependent process. So it's not every year, but it's every year that we can. We started off farming with our dad in 2005 and he retired in 2014 after a series of unfortunate events on the farm. And we've had it full tilt from there and kind of got started on this regenerative path not knowing anything about regenerative ag. I don't know if your listeners are familiar with my story, but if not, I'll just go ahead and tell it to them.

Yeah, please tell us from the beginning. We have many listeners from all over the world.

Yeah, so we started farming 2005 with dad. So, you know, we got in on the tail end of roundups effectiveness and quickly figured out that Roundup was losing the fight to Pigweed. You know, so we started doing everything that we were supposed to trying to reduce tillage. Of course we weren't completely no till then and we're as close to completely no till as we can get now. But we started reducing tillage and just overlapping residuals and mixing up modes of action and rotating, doing everything we were supposed to do. And we were losing that fight to Pigweed. That weed was single handedly putting us in the bankruptcy category. I mean, we were getting closer every year just, you know, refinancing and having to do things to fill up shortfalls because we were spending more than we were making trying to fight that weed. And we were losing. So summer of 2009, things were getting real serious. And we figured we either had to figure out a way to beat this thing without spending more money or throwing more money at it, or we might as well line up and sell because we weren't going to make it. So I got on YouTube and started digging around. And, you know, I'd been all the meetings in Arkansas, in the mid south, and all the answers were the same. You know, more herbicide, more rotation, more tillage. Well, none of that stuff was working. So I started investigating organic farmers. You know, there weren't any organic farmers in our area at that time. There's a few now. Almost all of them I found relied heavily at that time on tillage. And I've got pictures, John, I'm telling you, every time we tilled the farm, two days later, it would be solid green with pigweeds. When the sun hits them, right, you can see the pink cotyledons. And then, man, you got a carpet. It's just a fight we couldn't win with tillage. And I just happened to find a guy named Pumpkinhead81 out of Pennsylvania. And this guy was planting organic pumpkins into big old tall grass called cereal rye. And I had never seen anything like that in my life. You know, the closest thing we'd ever gotten to that's double cropping soybeans into wheat straw, you know, stripper wheat straw, which is really easy. What this guy was doing looked. Looked hard. But, you know, when I watched his videos, I noticed that, you know, he was planting pumpkins in June. And I don't know what kind of weed spectrum they got in Pennsylvania, but I know they got one. But he didn't have any. He. He just had this big, tall, beautiful grass, and he was rolling that down and then transplanting his pumpkins. And I noticed his equipment wasn't too fancy, you know, so that was right up my alley because I couldn't afford to buy anything new. I figured, well, I can make the stuff I got work if this guy can. So that fall in 2009, we scraped up what money we could, which wasn't much, and bought 300 acres worth of cereal rye seed and planted that. And then we. We planted some soybeans and some cotton into it the following spring. And that was our first experience planting anything into a cover crop. We were scared of it and didn't let it get very big, probably 12 to 16 inches, and panicked and killed it. But even at 12 to 16 inches, the herbicide required on that 300 acres was, you know, maybe 50 or 60% of what it was everywhere else. And that was huge. I mean, you know, that put those acres in a profitable category. And, you know, we thought we had a plan to beat this thing. Just started going as hard as we could from then on. And cover crops is what has kept us in business and took us from the brink of bankruptcy to profitable enterprise now.

So bring us forward to today. What does your operation look like today? Are you still killing your cover crops with herbicides? Tell us a little bit about your crop rotation, your use of COVID crops in your operation right at this moment.

Yeah, sure. So back then we were corn, cotton or corn beans, and we grew rice in our bottom ground. And, you know, we'd rotate beans in there once in a while. So one thing that's really changed is our rotations. At this point, we'll rotate all four crops on the same acre, which we've never done before, and we let our cover crops get as big as we can. Now we plant green in most all scenarios, unless we just get pushed out. We got to do something. We try to get the stuff before it starts going super reproductive because we, we don't want it transferring, you know, all the energy it's stored from the roots to the reproductive and seeds and things. We want to save those for our crop. So we will kill if we get to that point. But right now, it's all still herbicide termination. We've got a big flat roller, you know, down here. We plant corn and stuff early enough that crimping is not really an effective tool for us. It's not. Most of our covers don't get to a stage where they can be effectively killed by crimping. So we still rely on herbicides. But the amount of herbicide it takes to kill a cover crop is a fraction of what it was to hit all these weeds that we had made resistant to everything. So I'm fine with that because it's not near the chemical load that it was and it's a lot cheaper.

What happens when we develop herbicide resistant rye?

Well, I don't know. I guess I'll crimp it. If it, if I can't kill it, I'll let it go and I'll crimp it.

But that doesn't seem particularly like you. But just the way you said that, for some reason that flashed into my mind.

Right, right. I'm not too worried about that. You know, we use a lot of different grass herbicides and things and try to learn lessons from the past. I try to mix that up and keep that rye or oats or whatever from seeing the same thing too often.

So you mentioned that you are planting green. How long after your crop starts growing are you spraying?

Normally we're spraying right after planting. So our typical kill will be just like soybeans for instance. We'll plant the soybeans. We do have any kind of bigweed emergence or anything. Like if we had a thin spot in our cover crop, then we'll come back with a light rate of gramoxone and a pre emerge. And if we get a good stand of hard growing beans, you know, there's lots of times we can get by with just that for the year. You know, maybe another post application. But a lot of times if we get a good stand of beans and can shade the ground fast, then that initial application is pretty good.

You mentioned that you're not getting completely no till. What parts of your operation are you still using tillage on?

So really the only time we have to do any tillage is when we have a really wet fall. And down here that, you know, the last few years has happened quite a bit. The last two have been really good. We hadn't had to till anything the last two falls, but 19 and 20 were both terrible. So we had to fix a bunch of ruts. Even with our improved soil structure, we still had ruts that weren't going to rebound we had to fix. And then the only other time that we do any tillage is if we need to do some landforming. We gotta get it where the dirt pans can move stuff around for irrigation and stuff. You know, we're all fur irrigation, so that's pretty important. Down here we don't have a lot of sprinklers or anything like that. So we've got to get it where we can water down the road. So those are really the only two times we do any major tillage. And that's not very often. The only real tillage equipment that we pull every year. I don't know that it would be called tillage equipment really. It's just a furrow cleaner. We just pull a little 4 inch plow and clean out our irrigation furrow just so we can get water to the bottom of the fields. You know, we've developed infiltration rates now that we actually need a little disturbance to get water to the bottom of the field. If we don't clean that furrow out, we're only going to get about halfway down the paddock. We lose all our water. So we'll have, you know, really good crop at the top and dry at the bottom because we can't get it to push out to the bottom. So.

Wow. Now that's a testament.