BRANDON – Every time Gabe Brown pulls his old JD 750 no-till drill into a field, he already has two or three marketing options in mind for the type of crop he is seeding that day.
That marketing strategy was in force in December of 2002 when Brown seeded his 2003 spring wheat crop. During his presentation to the 25th annual Manitoba-North Dakota Zero Till Farmers workshop in Brandon last week, Brown said his marketing plan is simple.
“I would not seed a crop unless I knew for sure I had at least two different markets for it. Three or four markets is better,” said the no-till farmer.
Read Also
VIDEO: Green Lightning and Nytro Ag win sustainability innovation award
Nytro Ag Corp and Green Lightning recieved an innovation award at Ag in Motion 2025 for the Green Lightning Nitrogen Machine, which converts atmospheric nitrogen into a plant-usable form.
Brown, who runs a 3,300 acre mixed farm near Bismarck N.D., has a 250-cow purebred Gelbvieh foundation herd plus 50 to 200 yearlings each year. He says he always considers his overall land management and cropping system and the needs of his cattle before deciding what to plant.
“I try to plant things that will increase soil fertility and soil health, but also leave me with options for that particular crop,” said Brown, who has had some fields in a continuous no-till system for 20 years.
“Whether it’s grain or forage, I want to be able to put it up as feed, graze it, or harvest it and sell it as a cash crop. I never want to be tied into one single marketing plan. That includes my cereals and my corn.”
Brown’s corn is cut for silage some years. In others, it is combined and sold as grain corn. In dry years, he might save it for strip grazing his cattle into the winter.
“We’ve done the same thing many times with our cereals,” Brown said. “When we have dry conditions like we have now, you look at the high cost of buying feed. It makes more sense to run my cereals through my cattle instead of through an expensive combine process. I use cereals for silage, green feed, grazing or as a grain cash crop.”
Brown said a lot of farmers seem to have a traditional mindset against feeding cereal crops directly. They feel cereals must go through a combine. Many of those same cereals are then sold as feed grain. Brown said that from a nutritional and economic point of view, it makes more sense to run the crop directly through the cows.
With a busy calving season every spring, dormant seeding in November or December has become a major component of Brown’s strategy.
“In December, I went out and seeded all my spring wheat for 2003 Ð all my small grains are usually seeded before Christmas,” he said.
“I have what I call a no-till antique. It’s one of the first 750 John Deere drills ever built. It’s just a 15-footer, but it does 800 acres of small grains for me every year, plus we custom no-till another 1,000 acres. For winter seeding, I set it at a half-inch and I always get very good accuracy.”
The ground usually doesn’t freeze in winter during a dry year so Brown gets excellent seed placement and depth control from his old drill.
In years with normal soil moisture, there is almost always a warm spell in November or early December when there is little snow cover and the soil surface is soft enough for good seed placement.
“If a person has their seed and equipment ready when the conditions are right in late fall, you can get your spring seeding finished up before Christmas. On our farm, that means that when spring comes, I can concentrate on calving and on seeding my corn, peas, legumes, millet and custom seeding for other farmers.”
Brown said if there is no mid-winter thaw, his winter-seeded plants emerge before the weeds in the spring.
If drought conditions continue, those cereal plants will get first crack at available moisture and get a jump on weeds. He has successfully dormant-seeded wheat, oats and barley, all without a seed coating.
“I haven’t tried peas yet, but I could probably winter seed them also. As it is, I always seed peas in late March or early April. Their growing point is low on the plant, so they can survive a couple of freezes. Even on the cereal plants, the growing point is low enough that they can be frozen a couple times. It’s just the leaves that freeze.
“When I seeded my wheat fields last month, (December, 2002) I already had the options of early spring grazing, cutting for silage or hay or combining it for grain if we get some decent rain. It all depends on the weather.”
Brown said this kind of flexible thinking has to do with harvesting sunshine. He tries to work out his cropping plans so that each acre of land is productive every day it sees sunshine. Photosynthesis drives his decisions.
That’s why he uses fast regrowth crops like hairy vetch in his rotations. They make maximum use of available sunshine and give him up to three harvests per summer, even in dry years.
Brown said putting legumes into his rotation increases deep rooting and litter depth, lowers soil temperature and increases water infiltration.
Is no-till necessary for Brown’s cropping system to work? Absolutely.
In an area of central North Dakota where precipitation averages 400 millimetres per year, Brown has grown 180 bushels per acre corn without irrigation. He said that kind of yield would have been impossible with a conventional seeding system.
The other factor that makes no-till essential on the Brown farm is the integration of cattle and crops. Brown grazes his cattle on the fields as late into the winter as possible, sometimes into January. He calculates that the fall/winter grazing value of hairy vetch is $26.46 per acre and the fall/winter grazing value of his corn aftermath is $37.80 per acre.
