Montana Agronomist Explains Why Farmers Leave Fields Empty and How Cover Crops Change Everything

Kate Vogel [00:00:00] You know buildings out there, they had sand, silt and clay particles that were all stacked together, giving you a room for that soil biology for air and water and nutrients to kind of thrive. And when you run a tillage implement through it, then you're basically just crushing that. So it's like a natural disaster, a hurricane or a tornado or something that's crushing all those aggregates. And so before anything productive can go on the end, those that soil biology needs to build that back up so that they have a place to work.

Vance Crowe [00:00:24] This is Kort Winneke, a marine surveyor living in Seattle, Washington. And you are listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we talk with Kate Vogel of North 40 Ag. Kate is an agronomist and she advises farmers in this dry frontier land of Montana about how they can diversify their crops and plant crops that some of them have never tried before and have never been grown in the land where their parents and their parents' parents have grown crops for years doing so. It is a very interesting conversation. I learned a lot about drought and about making soil choices and what is changing in the great northern land of Montana. I hope you'll stick around to check it out. Kate was great. Before we get to the interview, I wanted to remind people about a project that we've been working on called the Connections Prompt. This is a project where I was working in the Articulate Ventures network saying, Hey, maybe you wanna connect with an old teacher or you wanna reach out with a relative that you used to be in contact with but you just never did. I know Coronavirus shattered so many of our social networks and have prevented us from being in the kind of contact that allows you to know what's going on in some of the people that are important to me's lives. So what we did was I started writing connections prompts once a week. If you sign up for the prompts, you'll receive an email from me that says, write a person like this. And then I give you an example, a person that I have personally written that way.

Vance Crowe [00:01:56] And then at the end it has a little bit of a writer's tip, something that makes writing emails a little bit easier. I know my wife loves to write emails to express how she feels about people, but she gets hung up on how do I start, what should I say? Why should I even tell them that I'm writing? And so those writer's tips are things that make this process go easier and help you get better over time. We've got 52 connections week, our list has been growing and growing and we would love to have you. So if you're interested in doing this project, go to vance crow.com/connections to sign up and get those prompts. We're gonna head to the interview now with Kate Vogel of North 40 Ag. Kate Vogel, welcome to the podcast.

Kate Vogel [00:02:38] Thank you.

Vance Crowe [00:02:40] So you are with North 40 Ag and you are in Montana and a lot of people that have never been to Montana, but they have this kind of rugged west idea of it and it's kind of the idea of the frontier. Do you think Montana still is the frontier in this modern day and age?

Kate Vogel [00:02:57] A lot of ways, yes. Like especially when you're looking at some of the ad community and the the spaces between. But we have seen it seems like an influx in the last year of more people coming in. There's a little bit more traffic on the roads and some of the towns are getting a little bit busier.

Vance Crowe [00:03:11] What do you think is drawing people to Montana? Are they going out there to be farmers or to start their ranches or why are they heading there?

Kate Vogel [00:03:19] Like you said? I think that people have a big view of they just wanna be out west and Montana's kind of that last place. And so with people being able to work from home a little bit more, I think that they can go ahead and travel and find their secluded place and kind of join the community.

Vance Crowe [00:03:36] And so where is North 40 Ag your company located in Montana? I really don't know the geography of Montana very well.

Kate Vogel [00:03:44] Yeah, so we are just east of Billings. So Billings is in the south center part of Montana. Basically, you know, 50, 60 miles, 70 miles from the border of Wyoming. And Valentine Montana is where we're located. So that's about 20 miles east of Billings. There's Billings is the biggest city in Montana. We're just over, I wanna say like over just over a hundred thousand people, 120,000 people. So we are near the biggest population

Vance Crowe [00:04:13] Center. So you came across my radar when I was going out to Twitter saying I wanna do an ag series and I wanna talk about issues that are going on, what are farmers facing right now? And when I came across your website, I realized you're running a company that I didn't really know existed, which is that you guys give advice on what cover crops people can plant and you even create like the mixtures of seeds for people. If you were explaining your business to somebody that does not understand agriculture cover crops mean are no different than regular crops. How do you explain this to them?

Kate Vogel [00:04:49] Yeah, so especially in Montana, a lot of the cover crops are used as forage crops kind of in place of another crop or in place of fallow. So Montana's dry lands has a lot of crop fallow, so that means that they grow a crop one year and the following year don't grow crop at all. And the idea of storing water for the following year, what they found over time is, and so through research that really you're not storing as much water as you're hoping. And so now a lot of guys are kind of changing that mindset to growing their crop every year and using that off year to potentially graze use on their livestock or to add just diversity to their rotation. So we do a lot of custom blends either for grazing or to try to fix some of the other problems that are in the field.

Vance Crowe [00:05:33] That's such a weird turn of phrase. Like they, they would store water in the ground like that. That doesn't even compute in my Missouri mindset where we get 40 inches of rain,

Kate Vogel [00:05:45] Right? So our average annual precipitation across the state is pretty variable, but it's anywhere from 12 to 15 inches a year. And so they're trying to store enough to grow that following year's crop. But what research has shown is that in the best case situation, you can only store about 25% of the moisture that falls in that fallow period. So if you're fallow for a year and you have 12 inches of annual precipitation, the best case situation you would be storing three inches of additional moisture. The rest of that's either lost to evaporation or deep percolation or runoff. But there, you know, in the older mindset that that was enough to grow, you know, a better crop.

Vance Crowe [00:06:24] And so when you're putting this, you call it a forage crop, this is like hey, we're gonna put it in there and then the year that we're not planting crops, we're gonna let like cattle go in there and feed or we're gonna just have it to wildlife. What does that actually mean in practice?

Kate Vogel [00:06:38] Yeah, it's both. So some, some guys are doing it crop, you know, putting it strictly in place of that fallow. Some guys are diversifying their rotation in addition. So you see peas, lentils, vets, some of the pulse crops are starting to really come into Montana. It goes back and forth between Montana and North Dakota as being the largest pulse grower in the United States. So it fits really well in a wheat rotation. But then these cover crops fit also and so they'll plant a cover crop and typically the guys, especially like in Eastern Montana, use them for grazing and they can use 'em to graze mid-season maybe to defer off, you know, some of the range lands. They can rest that rangeland a little bit better or a lot of 'em have been using it for kind of a storage crop so they don't have to feed as much hay. You know, the idea of Montana, we do get a fair amount of snow and so in that winter period when they would normally be feeding, if we can plant a scorge crop that's gonna stand up tall, the cattle still prefer to graze over be eating hay. So you can put something out there that stands that they can still go out there and eat, has great nutrition for 'em, and that defers having to roll it into a bale and roll it back out and feed them. You can do it with something that you just kind of stockpile for them.

Vance Crowe [00:07:44] I, I'm struck because like I'm a Midwestern kid and you know, worked at Monsano, so I kind of think about crops in terms of them being in rows. You plant a seed and then you go a little bit further forward, you plant another seed, but there's space in between those. But pulses they don't really, do you do you plant pulses in rows in the same way that you do like corn and soybeans,

Kate Vogel [00:08:06] You don't use a planter, you use a drill on all your pulses, your cover crop, your wheat or anything like that. So they're gonna be in rows depending on the guy's plant, you know, situation, they're gonna be anywhere from seven and a half to 10 inch spacing on average. So they're still in rows but they're just not as, you know, defined. You know, you're not gonna have the exact row space in between that you do with a corn or a soybean.

Vance Crowe [00:08:27] And what does that mean, a drill? Is that because you're doing something different than just like carving a hole in the ground to drop it in?

Kate Vogel [00:08:34] No, so on your on corn, corn uses a planter and so what that has is that has meters that are gonna measure exactly where that plant or that seed is falling. So it's gonna be a pretty exact planting method. So it's gonna, you know, you're on 30 inch or 24 whatever rows facing it is and then you're gonna set that exact population of what you want that plant, that population to be. So it has diss disks inside that a lot of times are vacuum. They'll suck that corn plant or corn seed up and then it's gonna drop it on a schedule or a certain rotation so that those plants are gonna be a certain spacing within your row with a drill. It's not as precise, we call it kind of a controlled spill. So rather than saying we're gonna have 1 million seeds per acre of wheat, we know we're gonna have probably 60 pounds an acre, a bushel or 60 70 pounds, whatever we decide that seeding rate is. And so we're calibrating on a pound weight and so you're, that's gonna suck it up and it's gonna blow it out but it's not gonna blow it out as for precise. So you might have, you know, wheat that's right next to each other and then you might have a little gap or something like that. It's more of a controlled spill that you're planting with so you don't get the precision you get with the planter.

Vance Crowe [00:09:39] And so, I mean I used to work for a seed company and so I'm very aware that you know, each year they come out and say, oh this, this one has a new stand, it's gonna get a little bit taller. We've actually got another, you know, it's gonna get a half a bushel more per acre or two bushels or whatever that is. Does that go on in the pulse market? Like what is it that farmers are buying when they go out to buy pea seeds or whatever, whatever. I don't even know what all fits into the pulse world.

Kate Vogel [00:10:08] Yeah, so corn is pretty unique. Corn and soybeans is kind of that market you're talking about. You have a lot of tech involved in making those seeds or kind of breeding up those seeds. So there's going to be a turn over each year of like, you know what other problems are coming up. They have, they're, they're invested in, you know, making those varieties better. Continuously pulses are gonna be more similar to wheat. So pulses fall under the category of peas, lentils, chickpeas, all anything that's kind of those cool season legumes are a lot of your pulses and those are bred mainly by universities still. And so a lot of the seed is, some of it's older so you're using some, you know, seed that's not protected and then you're also using seed that's, you know, being br bred by universities that are going through their programs. And then there are some new private seed companies that are coming out with some different genetics out there to kind of fit the market of what it's going into. So the breeding, you know, does have some disease and packages like that, but it's also going into having a more consistent product for dog food or for people or whatever so that they can keep that protein level at a certain level so it doesn't vary as they're putting it into the end product.

Vance Crowe [00:11:18] I remember being struck, I one time I was in my late twenties probably and with my brother he was grazing some cattle and we went over to look at the corn and I was like, why does this corn look like it's sick? And he was like, well it is right, they can get fungus, they can get these diseases. And it had never dawned on me that a plant could get sick and that you could, you could create resistance, you could give genetics that would be like, no, this plant already knows how to get around this sickness. But I think that's like something that people living in the city don't have any concept of of like a blight. It's, it's just something that is not a part of their life. So explaining it to them is really hard to wrap your mind around what sort of blight is, is a danger to the types of crops that you advise your customers on.

Kate Vogel [00:12:08] So you know, the pulses can have quite a few different challenges. So there's some different fungal issues. So Ask Aska is one that's can be a challenge, it can be seedborne and get into the soil and then there's also

Vance Crowe [00:12:22] And what does it do? Asda

Kate Vogel [00:12:25] Akta

Vance Crowe [00:12:26] Aska, what does it do to you? To the plant?

Kate Vogel [00:12:28] It basically, it aborts, it kills some of the, the tissue. You start to see leaf spots and then it will, it's probably the major disease of peas in kind of our region and being soilborne, what happens is if you get that into a field or seedborne I guess you can potentially affect the crops in the following years. So if you don't have a long enough rotation between your peas, you can kind of shoot yourself in the foot where you can basically read this disease up to what makes it hard for you to grow peas in the future.

Vance Crowe [00:12:57] So tell me a little bit about why a farmer needs advice on seeds. Because I think the general conception would be like, I've got some land, I want to grow some food here that I'm going to sell at a good price. Why? Why is there somebody that comes along and says we can give you better advice than what you, you would just make on your own?

Kate Vogel [00:13:18] 'cause farmers do a lot of jobs. So I was actually just talking to a group the other day and we were talking about how, you know, as a farmer, I'm sure lots of people have heard this, you know, they're, they're meteorologists. They have to know when the weather's coming, when to plant something, what that soil temperature's gonna be to make sure that they're putting that plant in at the exact right time. What weather events are gonna have effect on that crop. They're also on mechanics 'cause they have to make sure that all of their equipment is in working order, that they can get out into the field that they, they do have a breakdown that they can manage that to continue doing their job. You know, we have irrigation so you know, that's a whole nother component. You have to be a marketer so you have to know what the markets are and how to get, you know, move your crop. And so you have so many different jobs, sometimes it's easier to take a portion of that job and that somebody else who's going to be doing, you know, more research, staying on the forefront of some of those issues make recommendations for you throughout that growing season. So you can keep up on all of the other jobs that you have going on as well.

Vance Crowe [00:14:15] So when you get into the world of doing, you know, a agronomy and helping farmers choose your seeds that like I it feels like a trust business, right? Because you're selling them something that they can't actually see. They have to like put it in the ground, make an investment in it, and then hope that what you're saying is true. How do you get those first couple of customers to trust you?

Kate Vogel [00:14:39] Yeah, so Wes, when we built one 40 Ag, the, I guess we went into it from kind of that side. So my husband farms with his family and he had started getting interested in cover crops and some of these ideas and the first year he had planted it, you know, we had something out there that we didn't select. There was a radish that was in that seed mix that we didn't know what it was and we had a really, a drought year we had six, our average annual precipitation is about 13 inches here. And that year we only had about six inches of annual precipitation and there was this radish that was out there that was the size of a regulation football. So I mean we grew this giant rads on essentially no moisture. So we were like ecstatic in trying to repeat this. And when we took that seed or you know, took that rads and I plop it on the counter where Mark got the seed and I said, you know, what is this? They had no idea and they called where they got the seed from and they had no idea. So it was a little disheartening that we couldn't reproduce it, but it was even scarier that what was next, like what could be the bad thing that comes in that mix that we

Vance Crowe [00:15:40] Can't, oh yeah.

Kate Vogel [00:15:42] And so Mark had come from a line of most farmers, right, where he's trying something new and sometimes, you know, if it doesn't work then they're never gonna do it again. I'm an agronomist. And so we thought, you know, we believe that there's a lot to offer here and that if it is not done right the first time, that guys aren't gonna come back and do it again. So we knew that we could offer some education with this. So to bridge the gap of people starting to believe us and trust us, one, we do a lot of it on our own place, but two, we do a lot of education events, we do workshops and field days and round tables in order to get guys to understand it and go out in the field and look at the neighbor's stuff that you don't usually have an opportunity to see to make yourself feel a little bit more comfortable with the idea.

Vance Crowe [00:16:22] So you used a term that for in agriculture everybody's heard this, but unless you've actually been around it, you, you have no concept of what is an agronomist, right? And so you actually were referred to me by one of my favorite agronomists, the Danica Kth and she said you would be a very interesting person to talk with, but what is an agronomist and what separates, you know, one from another as far as what they know or what they specialize in?

Kate Vogel [00:16:51] Yeah, so Danica has to say that now 'cause she works for me so she,

Vance Crowe [00:16:54] Oh she does? I didn't know that. Oh

Kate Vogel [00:16:57] All right.

Vance Crowe [00:16:57] Good job Danica for I'm getting your boss on.

Kate Vogel [00:17:02] Yeah, but agronomists can kind of mean several different things. Typically we go to school and study soils and crops or soils and plants, but depending on where you are, you can become a little bit more specialized. So in your region of the world you'll probably know a lot about corn and soybeans. Montana is pretty unique because we have so many different crops which can be challenging. You know, we have just right here we have corn, soybeans, sugar beets, malt barley, winter and spring wheat. We do have some of the pulses around here, safflower, sunflower, alfalfa, there's flax and then there's a whole list of others that are still out there that I haven't been named that are grown across the state and even realistically in this you know, hundred mile region.

Vance Crowe [00:17:49] And so when you give people, hey I'm gonna help you figure out your pulse mixture, you're gonna grow sunflowers this year, like this is gonna match what you have going on in your fields. You gotta harvest those, but then you gotta find somebody that wants sunflower seeds or oil or wherever. So is there just a ton of milling going on in the state of Montana or do people have to truck it all over the country in order to be able to get it processed?

Kate Vogel [00:18:14] There's a lot of trucking. So there are certain things the pulses are all kind of getting set up where they have locations that they can go to and a lot of those contract with specific, you know, a lot of it's international investment that's going to different places. You know, a lot of the pulses, lentils are going to India or you know, different locations that some of these crops are going sunflowers. Like I know we've grown 'em and they get trucked either in North Dakota or out west for bird seed or oil. So it's a lot of times when we're making recommendations and working with a guy, I'm not necessarily doing all that marketing research for 'em. I might have some, you know, some leads on where they can look but we're looking at that crop and what might be the best for them. So what I'm trying to do is make recommendations kind of looking at their personal goals and I think that when we're talking about farmers, we really have to look at what's important to them and what do they have in order to, to accomplish some of those things. So when I sit down to make recommendations with somebody, I'm looking at you know, what is their economic need, what do they need to make off this? You know, sometimes we work with guys

Vance Crowe [00:19:14] Isn't the answer always I wanna make as much money as possible.

Kate Vogel [00:19:17] It is, but not when you set it if a, a slew of other goals. So like what do you need to make off of it? What do you want your quality of life to be and what do you want the place to look like? So you might wanna make a lot of money but then you also want weekends off to go watch your kids play basketball. So that's gonna cancel out maybe the potential you have to make a ton of money, you know, so it's kind of looking at that spectrum you might make, wanna make a lot of money and weeks really high right now, but you've had some, you know, disease issues or maybe wildlife's really important. So you know, it's important to maybe add another crop into that rotation to you know, keep it looking like how grandpa had it or whatever. So it's when you start to stack all those three ideas on top of each other, then you can make a better recommendation for a person on what they should be growing and that economic side might have. What sort of equipment do they already own to make this transition to adding something else in their rotation easier?

Vance Crowe [00:20:08] It's, it's just so interesting because it, like in Illinois and the I states it's really, there's not much choice about what you grow. Certainly you get to choose which corn seed you plant or if you wanna do corn or soy, but this idea that you could completely change the crops that your farm is raising is like hard for me to, to wrap my mind around. When you think about the why differences between what the goals are of the farmer, like what's the, what's the, what's the divide? I mean we talked about make as much money as you can and go to basketball games and keep the farm in line with the way granddad did it, but what are other considerations that that people have that somebody in the city wouldn't even be able to guess?

Kate Vogel [00:20:54] You know, going back to how the complexity of farming, so you know when you grow something like wheat or you always grow corn, it makes it a little bit easier. You know, you kind of set your mind at ease. You have, you know what to do. There's not an unknown of adding a whole nother type of crop in there. So sometimes that's kind of a, you know, concern. But what we are seeing is, you know, we are only growing wheat or growing wheat fallow or you know, you don't have a lot of other things in rotation. You can start to see issues from a disease component from you know, not efficiently using all the moisture that we're getting that we're seeing some seep issues, pests that are might be coming in. So we are looking at adding in cultural practices in order to, you know, being a rotation and other things in order to fix those issues. So you know, a lot of guys would like to just grow wheat and wheats is a base and that's what we've grown but we're seeing as we don't add some of these other cultural practices or adding rotation and we're starting to see issues with what's going on in some of the fields.

Vance Crowe [00:21:52] You had mentioned that there are pulses that are moving further north or they're changing where they're grown at. Why is that? What, what makes it so crops that used to not be grown in Montana are now possible?

Kate Vogel [00:22:05] I think some of it is like the adoption of no-till. So where we can, you know, store, you know when you do full width tillage you lose a lot of that soil moisture. And so when you're looking at that fallow period, maybe water storage is a little bit more important because you would already, you know, you lost so much just to get that plant that crop planted now where we have no-till drills that you know, essentially do no disturbance at all and you're leaving that residue on the soil surface, you can start to plant another low residue crop. So you can take a wheat crop that's pretty high residue and follow it with a pea crop that's really low residue has a very low carbon nitrogen ratio and you're not gonna see, you know, you're able to store that moisture in there longer. One that on our dry land for example is we'll grow two years of wheat in a row and store all that residue up and then follow with corn on the dry land. And that corn where we typically don't get a lot of moisture or rainfall in July and August, that residue can hold that corn in so that we can at least get a good, you know, a yield off of it later 'cause it's using stored soil moisture and it's not evaporating off. So it's using different management practices to get those crops to work.

Vance Crowe [00:23:10] So let's talk about soil moisture and just basically rain in general right now. Do you go out and just like grab a clot of dirt and then test it for how much like, you know, water is in it? Like how does this even work for you to judge how much moisture there is in a field?

Kate Vogel [00:23:27] Yeah, so if you look at, you know, historic when everyone knows when it rained lasts and all of that, but we'll also go out, anytime we go out to field, we always have a shovel, we're gonna dig a hole and just use the feel method. You can usually feel what that soil moisture is, you know what, what category it falls in just by touching it, feeling it and you know, know making it form a ribbon or not. Right now I could say pretty much across Montana it's dry. Like I don't even have to dig a hole to tell you what it is. It's been really dry across the entire state.

Vance Crowe [00:23:56] So let's talk about what that looks like in reality for a farmer because I think people hear about drought and every experience that we've ever had is, oh I heard they had a drought and yet I still have all the groceries I need and the pineapples and the pears and peaches and everything that they want. So drought is basically meaningless to the people living in the city unless they're, you know, if their grass turns a little brown.

Kate Vogel [00:24:20] Well when you look at, we play on such a world market now that, you know, for example I think Montana grows, I don't, is it Montana or Kansas? I don't remember the stat but 9% of the world wheat. So it's not playing, you know, a huge role into it. So if we have drought in Montana, we're not gonna have a huge role in the wheat markets, you know, across the entire world. So we're still gonna have bread if we don't have enough that's coming outta Montana, we'll pull it from Russia or somewhere else. So there's such a large global market that you might have a bad year somewhere but somewhere else is having a good year. So it's not gonna affect what you're gonna see at the grocery store. But what it does affect is I think more of your local economies. So you know, when we have a dry year in Montana, ag does is a pretty big sector and so you'll see less spending in some of the, you know, on some of the bigger ticket items and so that money's not gonna trickle down and move through the economy as much.

Vance Crowe [00:25:11] Yeah. You had an interesting line on your, on your website, stronger soils build stronger communities. What do you mean by that?

Kate Vogel [00:25:19] So as you have, you know, as you start to do things, some cultural practices, as you start to add more diversity, as you get more cover on your soils, as you keep more living roots out there, you're really focusing on that soil biology and soil biology, you know, in some ways is going to keep us going. So I've heard a term like you kind of can make your own droughts or your own floods. So I mean and that's, you know, loose obviously. But if I go out there and I take and I till a bunch of my, you know, fields up, I'm gonna open that up to evaporation. So we're gonna lose a lot of soil moisture that might be stored there. When we do get a rainfall event, what's gonna happen is all those particles that, that used to be soil aggregates, they were kind of, you know buildings out there. They had sand silt and clay particles that were all stacked together giving you a room for that soil biology for air and water and nutrients to kind of thrive. And when you run a tillage implement through it, then you're basically just crushing that. So it's like a natural disaster, a hurricane or a tornado or something that's crushing all those aggregates. And so before anything productive can go on again those, that soil biology needs to build that back up so that they have a place to work. If you've done tillage, you lost a lot of evaporation, but then when you get your rainstorm, it takes those individual soil particles now and they can be dislodged and moved and if there was an area for water to move in, it's now crusting over and water can't infiltrate as much so you're losing a lot more of it to run off and evaporation. So you know, just one event of not not having soil cover and doing some disturbance, you can basically cause a drought that might last a while or cause a flood 'cause you're rushing water off the field.

Kate Vogel [00:26:51] So how we manage our soils and how they store and function can definitely cause some other issues offsite.

Vance Crowe [00:26:58] How bad is the drought right now in around where you're at or with where your customers are?

Kate Vogel [00:27:03] Yeah, it's pretty bad. We haven't really, normally may and June are our wettest months and I wanna say which is like two or three inches of rain in the month of June and we've had I think like a quarter inch, something like that. So it's dry. Yesterday we had guys out in the dry land who were going to, you know, the basically our winter wheat isn't going to fill so there's not gonna really be anything to harvest out there. So they were gonna try to take some for hay 'cause hay is really short right now. And just going out and running the swather across the field started a fire,

Vance Crowe [00:27:36] Started a fire,

Kate Vogel [00:27:38] It's dry. Wow. Wow.

Vance Crowe [00:27:40] Well talk about this like you're talking about something that you're like wow it started a fire. I mean for most people this is like an impossible thing to imagine without somebody saying it's possible.

Kate Vogel [00:27:50] Yeah, so basically you know you have all this equipment out there. I mean even just, we'll probably get here within the next week or so, I'd say we're gonna get to the fire danger where you're not supposed to drive a pickup through a field after one o'clock in the afternoon 'cause that's when it starts to get really hot just like your cataly converter, you know, hitting a rock is enough of a spark with it being so dry for grass or a crop to start on fire right now fireworks have obviously already been outlawed for 4th of July and so it's just, it's dry out there so there's just not a lot of production and everything that is normally still be green is dry and brown.

Vance Crowe [00:28:29] Did you grow up in the environment where you had to care about whether it rained or not? Is this something new for you?

Kate Vogel [00:28:36] I grew up in an ag community. My parents weren't farmers but I grew up in an ag community so we saw it, you know, in in the community how everybody else was reacting. But definitely marrying into a farming family, it makes a huge difference.

Vance Crowe [00:28:52] Yeah, it seems to me that if you don't have any relationship with something like farming or that, that you need it to rain, then like you really are kind of disconnected not just from the seasons but from like the pulse of of the earth. And so I think it's a, a weird thing when you all of a sudden start paying attention to the rain and it actually matters to you whether or not it rains. Things like prayer seem to make more sense in that context because you don't have anything else you can do other than

Kate Vogel [00:29:23] Right pray

Vance Crowe [00:29:24] That this thing happens because if it doesn't happen all could be lost.

Kate Vogel [00:29:28] Well and I even like kind of a funny add on to that is my daughters were at daycare the other day and they came home with like a little sign that said rain, rain go away. And I was like, we do not sing that song in this family like you.

Vance Crowe [00:29:43] Were they surprised by that? I mean that had to be like a cultural lesson for them, right?

Kate Vogel [00:29:48] Well they weren't 'cause they were only like two and seven months. But like the daycare was a little bit surprise.

Vance Crowe [00:29:53] So, so if you did not grow up on a farm, I mean clearly you married into it but, but like why did you choose agronomy? This seems like a thing that, well Danica did a similar thing where she was not in farming and decided to go towards it, but why, how did you get drawn into this?

Kate Vogel [00:30:09] So I went to college, I knew I loved science so I actually have a bachelor's in chemistry and I had done all sorts of research. I know I loved chemistry, but when I started to work as an undergrad into some labs, I realized I didn't see any, anything outside. I grew up in a very small town. I graduated with 18 people, I was in eastern Colorado and so I was just not feeling that sense of home of what I knew. I grew up doing four H and showing pigs and horses and cows and everything. And so I started to look outside of the chemistry department to try to find what I wanted and I ran into the soil and crop sciences department and immediately fell in love with it. It was basically all of the same hardcore science, but it was an applied level where you could, you know, look at it how like some of those general principles of science, how they work in the actual world and you know, add that people factor in and so it fit really well. So I had, I just added that major as as an agronomy major. And then I also did some grad work as an agronomist too.

Vance Crowe [00:31:11] And so you go to graduate school and you're going outside and shoveling up dirt and looking at it like what do you do to, to study agronomy at the graduate level?

Kate Vogel [00:31:20] My, I, so you do a project and my project was looking at runoff and erosion and no-till dry land systems. And so we looked at systems that were wheat, fallow, wheat, corn, fallow wheat, corn, it, wheat, wheat, corn, mill it. And so we were looking at the effect of those different systems and intensifying that cropping rotation on run runoff on erosion. And so what we found is that's where that fallow number comes from is that as you intensify that cropping rotation you use water more efficiently. And so you, you start to change, you know that how much water is used over time, you know, by going away from wheat fallow.

Vance Crowe [00:31:57] What do you think is the, the difference between what farmers that you're working with that have been doing this day in and day out, what they believe is true versus what you've come to conclude as true? What, where, where is the difference lie?

Kate Vogel [00:32:13] So it's really hard farming's a completely different profession than a lot of other professions. You know, it lines up a lot more with, you know, tradition or you know, families or anything like that. It's not always treated as much as a business because it's something that's a lot of times passed down. And so what, you know, what they might believe to be true might be something that they've done for a period of years and they haven't ever tried anything else. So one of the examples that I use when I'm talking to a group of farmers is, you know, I've heard a story that there was a pastor that came into a new church and when he sat there, you know got up on the pulpit to church to preach the whole entire congregation of the church was on the left hand side of the, of the chapel. And about halfway through he gets through all the announcements, gets a little bit through the start of his sermon and everybody stands up and moves to the other side of the church and he is kind of perplexed so what's going on? But he is a new guy, he doesn't really wanna raise any stink. And so he does this for a couple weeks in a row and then he goes, you know, I have to ask. And the first few people he asks had no idea. But what happened was historically that church was all heated by a fireplace or by, and so when they first got to church it was really cold. So everybody sits on that one side of the church to warm up but by the time it gets to the sermon it's too warm and they all have to stand up and move to the other side of the church. Well even though the fireplace was taken out, it still became tradition and what they did and nobody asked why you just come in there and that's what you do. You follow the masses. And a lot of times that's what happens in farming. I mean I look at the, the technological advances we've made, even from things that, you know, we can talk crops or seeds or genetics or we can talk even things like a no-till drill or you know, the invention of a stock trailer verse throw loading your animals in the back of your pickup.

Kate Vogel [00:33:53] So you might move animals across your, you know, your property based on, you had to get to a certain load out point so that they could get into the back of the pickup. Well we invented stock trailers and now you can load 'em anywhere. And so no one's asked those why questions to see why we should be doing things differently on our operations. And so when you're in the middle of it and you can't see from an outside view, that makes it a little bit different of how they react.

Vance Crowe [00:34:18] I mean I think if you go look at basically any, any work or anything that's being done and has been done for more than a single generation, you begin to lose why do we do this? And it becomes just like this is what we do because the human mind can't handle all of the decisions that you have to make every single day. And so having habits or having things that we just do makes it so you can keep your head above water but you can ima I I guess like as you're describing as technology changes and as yeah, the the what I mean hell the as trade routes change and what you can sell and who you can sell it to changes all of a sudden options open up and if nobody comes along and points that out to you, you just don't know.

Kate Vogel [00:35:02] Right? Yeah. And if it is your boss that tells you one thing, it's different than if your dad tells you because you're not gonna necessarily argue or put up a stink as much with, you know, some of your family 'cause you grew up knowing dad knows best. Right. So

Vance Crowe [00:35:15] Well, and I bet that in a way, like you being the agronomist, somebody has to choose to bring you in. But it may also be confirming what the younger generation or what somebody wanted to change. I, I remember Temple Grandin and I were talking one time and she said to me, you're never a prophet in your own land and you shouldn't try to be, you know, like the, the people that you're around all the time, they don't think all of your new ideas are so great. And so sometimes it's good to have another prophet come in and say, let me, let me show you a different way of doing it because you know, the people that you're around all the time aren't always as receptive and particularly if you're talking about a business where it's run as a family, right? They were, remember you when you were in diapers or when you

Kate Vogel [00:35:55] Right.

Vance Crowe [00:35:56] You know, were jumping off trees and doing all kinds of crazy stuff

Kate Vogel [00:35:59] For sure.

Vance Crowe [00:36:01] So tell us what is on the horizon? What changes do you think are going to come to this kind of high, high desert planting over the next five, 10 years? Where do you think things are headed that they aren't right now?

Kate Vogel [00:36:17] I think things are kind of inching that way. So I see guys doing a lot more diversity into their cropping rotations. I think I could see even, you know, a lot of guys are no-till, but they are no-till with maybe still some, you know, in the mindset of they do still a little bit of disturbance, it's just planting at one pass. And so I think that they'll be doing a little bit less disturbance as they're planting and then maybe even incorporating livestock into and some, some of these areas so you can kind of start to stack those enterprises a little bit more.

Vance Crowe [00:36:48] So as we wrap up, I'm, I really did not know you were Danica's boss. Tell me a little bit about how you're staffing up, how do you make decisions about bringing on agronomists? Because you're essentially extending trust to those people and saying, Hey go out and talk with these clients or these people that have been shown interest. How do you make your decisions about who to bring on?

Kate Vogel [00:37:09] Oh, that's tough. So as we've been growing, we've made a lot of mistakes over the years, but now we're kind of going to the point where, you know, Danica was actually our first intern back in 2017 and then we have a lot of like overlapping, like her advisor was my advisor and you know, she's ended up going to school the same place I did. So we had some overlapping things which made that a little bit more comfortable to hire her 'cause we already know where she's coming from on some of the other people. It's kind of the same thing. We try to like overlap with different people. So kind of that word of mouth of knowing other people in order to know that we can trust and you know, bring them in. And then the other part would be, I think we, we do a very intensive interview process. Like we bring you out for a couple days and we take you to dinner and we make sure that we're all gonna fit in and have some of the same goals before we send somebody out. 'cause they're basically an extension of ourselves. They're representing us and we wanna make sure that they have the same mindset of how to treat our customers that we do.

Vance Crowe [00:38:08] Yeah, no, no doubt. Particularly, I mean like to me it appears that your business is trust in, in a way that like, kind of like investing is, but it's different, right? Because it's so somebody's farm and what they're putting in the ground, like you said, like you all of a sudden had radishes that were the size of footballs in your, in your property and you're like, why is this here? What did we do here? And so I think the level of trust that people have to have to work with an agronomist has to be really extraordinary,

Kate Vogel [00:38:38] Right? And you, I mean at the, at the end of the game, end of the day it's in somebody's giving you advice so you, you can take it or leave it. So it's not like they're out doing something in your field, they're just going to be making recommendations. And so, I mean trust is important but you can always make that decision to not follow their advice to.

Vance Crowe [00:38:55] So I don't know if Danica ever did a presentation for you in the last couple of months, but she took this class that we did in this network about how to introduce herself and Danica went from being like a pretty good introduction to being like this wildly good introduction where she explained what agronomy was to people that didn't know. And if she hasn't shown that to you, I highly recommend you ask her to do it because it was awesome.

Kate Vogel [00:39:19] I'm going to ask her to do it. She has not done that

Vance Crowe [00:39:23] Well. Kate Vogel of North 40 Ag, this has been a lot of fun. If people wanted to learn more about your business or like they've heard, hey, maybe my child would be really good at agronomy and we never thought about that, how would they go about finding you and learning more about what you do?

Kate Vogel [00:39:41] They can go to our website. It's north 40 ag.com, so north four zero ag.com and they can get in, contact us with any of us from there.

Vance Crowe [00:39:51] Well, all right, I, I know what it is to be working and have a small child in the world, so I'm sure you are exceptionally busy. It was so nice to talk with you. Kate, thanks for coming on.

Kate Vogel [00:40:01] Yeah, thank you.

Vance Crowe [00:40:02] Thanks for checking out this podcast. This is a great time With Kate Vogel, you'll notice that we talked about a woman named Danica Klu who is a member of the Articulate Ventures network. She signed up and participates in many of the activities. The one that I was most impressed with was she participated in a speaking gym where she decided I wanna get better at introducing who I am, what I do and why I do it. And so she participated in a five week class and if you sign up and you want to take a class on introducing yourself, you can do that by going to store Articulate Ventures and you can take the exact same class that help Danica improve her ability to communicate or you can join our network so you can be connected with people that are interesting and exciting like Danica and like other listeners of the podcast by joining the Articulate Ventures network. That is where so many of the classes happen live. It's where we discuss different issues and it's also where we do book club and movie night and we really are building a digital neighborhood. It's small, it's well connected and we really would love it if you, a listener of the podcast would be interested in joining. You can find out more about the Network by going to Network dot Articulate Ventures. Thanks so much. And we will be back next week with another ag podcast in this ag special. Talk to you then.