Kate Vogel: Cover crops, Montana drought and running North 40 Ag

About this episode

Kate Vogel, co-founder and lead agronomist of North 40 Ag near Billings, Montana, gives Vance an on-the-ground tour of dryland farming in one of the country's most agronomically diverse and precipitation-starved regions (roughly 12-15 inches of annual rainfall, and as low as 6 inches in the current drought year). She explains the counterintuitive economics of the traditional "crop-fallow" system — leaving fields unplanted every other year captures only about 25% of that year's moisture — and how her company's cover-crop and no-till advisory work is nudging farmers toward continuous cropping, pulse rotations (peas, lentils, chickpeas), and livestock grazing on cover crops instead. A personal origin story anchors the business's credibility problem: an accidental football-sized radish that grew during a severe drought convinced Kate and her farmer husband Mark that cover-crop blends had real value, but they couldn't even identify what had produced it — a formative lesson in how much unearned trust farmers must extend to an agronomist selling invisible, below-ground outcomes. The conversation's most memorable set piece is Kate's parable of a new pastor confused by his congregation moving seats mid-sermon — a habit outlasting the literal fireplace that originally caused it by generations — which she uses to explain why farming, as a tradition-bound, often multi-generational profession, is especially resistant to "why" questions and especially receptive to outside experts (echoing Temple Grandin's "never a prophet in your own land"). Kate also details the acute, visceral reality of the 2021 drought — a swather starting a grass fire simply from summer heat and dryness — as a corrective to the disconnect between urban perceptions of drought (still full grocery shelves, thanks to global wheat markets) and its real local economic impact on communities like hers.

“You have to be a marketer... know what the markets are and how to get, you know, move your crop... 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 more research.”

“It's a trust business, right? Because you're selling them something that they can't actually see. They have to put it in the ground, make an investment in it, and then hope that what you're saying is true.”

“One event of 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.”

Key moments

• ~10-16%: Crop-fallow water-storage myth explained — only ~25% of a fallow year's precipitation is actually retained for the next crop.
• ~35%: Kate's framing of farming as requiring meteorologist, mechanic, marketer, and agronomist skill sets simultaneously — the practical case for hiring outside advisors.
• ~40-44%: The football-sized drought radish origin story and the explicit "it's a trust business" framing of agronomy advice.
• ~55-58%: The soil-aggregate/tillage-as-natural-disaster explanation of how mismanaged soil can "cause its own drought or flood."
• ~62-64%: Vivid, unscripted account of a swather starting a grass fire from ambient heat — grounding the abstract idea of "drought" in a concrete, alarming image.
• ~80%: The pastor-and-the-fireplace parable illustrating tradition surviving long after its original rational cause disappears.
• ~85-88%: Discussion of why farming resists change more than other professions (family-run, tradition-bound) and why an outside "prophet" (agronomist) can introduce ideas insiders can't.

Notable quotes

“Even though the fireplace was taken out, it still became tradition... nobody asked why. You just come in there and that's what you do. You follow the masses.”

“Just going out and running the swather across the field started a fire.”

“One event of not having soil cover and doing some disturbance, you can basically cause a drought that might last a while or cause a flood.”