John Bayes, a regenerative farmer in Willsall, Montana, grows 1800 acres of peas, lentils, wheat, and ancient grains. He cut fertilizer costs in half by switching to no-till farming and using seed inoculants and plant tissue tests. His crops now show stronger roots, less pest damage, and bigger grain heads.
Questions this video answers
Approximately 1800 acres.
Peas, lentils, wheat, barley, mustard, flax, and some ancient grains (also wheat berries, farro, split peas when milled).
Previously about $100 per acre; currently about half that (~$50/acre).
Biokoat Gold and Rejuvenate (seed inoculant).
The SAP test.
Chapters
Oh, man, we. We had the prettiest fields this spring. After that long, hard winter. It was like, all right, we're on the right track. And the reward is going out there and digging and finding mycorrhizae in your soil. That's. That's one of the rewards is, man, we're. We're actually doing it. I'm John Bayes from Willsall, Montana, and 1800 acres, and I grow peas, lentils, wheat, barley, mustard, flax, and some ancient grains. You know, I guess I like to think that I'm growing a healthier food product. Going to the farmer's market and selling our products and talking to the people that are buying it. That's cooking up a loaf of bread. That, man, that really changes my outlook on the crop and getting the crop grown. I want to grow the best, healthiest product I can.
We eat the food that we grow. We're happy, grateful to get to eat the food that we grow because we know, you know, the nutrient content of it is good, and it isn't containing chemicals that aren't great for your body, disrupt your hormones and things of that sort.
Being able to work with my wife and daughter, we make a great team.
He put me in a car to help move combines when I was like, that tall and said, okay, I'm letting my foot off the clutch. You just shut it off when you get there kind of thing. And ever since then, I've been either in a vehicle or in the dirt. The markets for regenerative products are definitely growing. We see a lot of people coming in and ask all the time, what does that mean? What does regenerative mean? And we're more than happy to explain it to them. And most people have no idea. You know, they kind of put it in this black and white. Either you're eating organic or you're not, or you don't care or whatever. And the amount of stuff in between is huge. Like, there's a lot going on with food and nutrition and all that stuff. We grow a lot of different grains and legumes, and we started milling five years ago and taking that to farmers markets and the grains themselves for, like, wheat berries and farro and split peas and things like that. We also sell on a little bit larger scale to some restaurants and then in some stores, and then we have our own farm store.
We didn't like seeing the erosion that mechanical tillage was doing, so we started doing no till. Well, then we started hearing about fertilizers. Being hard on the microbiology and start working on that using Biokoat Gold and cutting back on fertilizer, we're just being kinder to the earth. We were spending close to $100 an acre on fertilizer, and now we're about half that. But we need to do some more tweaking. Time will tell. Watching through the growing season where we're. We did our nitrogen experiments this year was a really good year for doing that. And we got to see a lot that made us feel like the AEA products really did a good job. Before we seeded the winter wheat, we treated our seed with an inoculant of Biokoat Gold and rejuvenate, planted our winter wheat, and boy, it had a really nice root system. Got up two or three leaves and went into winter and had quite a bit of snow. And it stayed till the middle of April before it melted. And by the 1st of May, our winter wheat fields were just this nice uniform green fields. And the neighbors fields were kind of splotchy and had some spots. You could tell it just the snow had. Had killed them. Those dead spots will fill in with weeds. Ours looked really nice and we had some neighbors call up and ask, hey, how. How come ours don't look that good? So I would have to say that big healthy root system that Biokoat Gold and some of these other products really did the trick. John says use Biokoat Gold number one thing. If you don't do anything else, use that. And so, okay. And it's easy, easy to do. Just sprinkle it on your seed. And so we started out with that, but then Jason worked up a plan to do a foliar application. So we put on the rejuvenate forage foliar accelerate seashield. AEA taught us about doing the SAP test. Instead of just dumping a whole bunch of fertilizer on and guessing, we are seeing what the plant needs or what it has and then adding just what it needs. And so we started doing the SAP test and then looking at the results and then coming back with another foliar application that would address problems that were there.
We're out on a field of wheat that had received the advancing ECOAG soil primer. And also the seed was treated with Biokoat Gold. It's really awesome to see the amount of fungal activity in the soil. We came out here and we started digging in the soil and there's just all this fungal activity on the root zone. Also the soil texture. We could smell and feel and see that there's a lot of microbial Activity that's been activated. The reason that is important and the amount of bacteria and fungal activity that we're seeing here, the reason that excites me so much is when you shift from. In conventional agriculture, the crops are basically growing as a hydroponic. They're dependent on water soluble nutrition in the conventional model. And when we shift into a regenerative agriculture concept and we get our natural nutrient cycle functioning where we're depending on bacteria and fungi to deliver the nutrition to the plant, now all of a sudden, the plant is no longer dependent on water for its nutrition, which improves our drought resilience. It improves many aspects of how the plant is able to function, especially in arid climates where water is a limiting factor.
Well, this year it seems like our head size is. They're a little bit bigger than what we'd been seeing on the wheat. And we noticed that our flag leaf, they're enormous flag leaves. And so they must have been feeling pretty good.
Crops that are healthier, they become less susceptible to insects. And on this field right here, the grasshoppers were here. They were sitting on the stalks and stems, but they were not chewing on the plant. They were not doing any damage. But the neighbors field across the drive here, across the road, there was grasshopper damage and the neighbor had to spray for grasshoppers. John didn't need to spray for grasshoppers here. And then also up in the greenhouse on the vegetable crops this year, for the first time, there's no aphid pressure. So that's very encouraging to see the plants are resistant to aphids and are no longer a food source for those insects.
You know, we've put a lot of work into this and it does bring a lot of pride and joy.
