Change Is Good

Rick Clark explains why an occasional deliberate disturbance to reset the soil-microbial balance can be a good thing

Acres U.S.A. It’s been a while since we’ve talked — how has this year gone, and what have you changed on your farm?

Rick Clark. Well, I’ll tell you — I have pounded very hard on this organic, no-till thing, and I’m backing off of that. We’re never going to get the masses to move that way. I understand that. I’m not saying I’m going to start using synthetic chemistry, but I think we need to do a little bit of everything — a little bit of chemistry, a little bit of tillage, a little bit of manure — and we need to build a system that we can take to millions of acres. So, I did do some tillage this year.

Acres U.S.A. I don’t think you’ll face any judgment from Acres U.S.A. folks for that. Like you said, if you want to help change things on a larger scale, you have to do what other people are going to be able to implement. And there are sometimes benefits to tillage, depending on the context.

Clark. Yeah, there’ll be some negativity, and that’s fine, but I think there’ll be a lot more positive than there will be negative.

Acres U.S.A. Yes. So, does that mean dropping the organic certification or just doing some tillage?

Clark. No, I think it just means doing some tillage. We’re headed into year eleven of no synthetic inputs and year sixteen or so of no tillage. We do occasionally use some manure — we have some alfalfa, and I don’t know any other way to bring the nutrients back that are leaving the field — in an organic environment, anyway.

We’ve done some great things here over the years, I think. One of the ways that I’ve baselined our farm is through the Haney test. And one of the aspects of the Haney test is the fungal-to-bacterial relationship. When we started our journey, our soil was 90-something percent bacterial — like the majority of farm ground in the United States. As we started implementing regenerative principles and eliminating the inputs, taking this thing as far as we could, our soils are now 22 percent bacterial. We’re extremely high in fungi. 

So, we have done exactly what Mother Nature wants to do. She wants you to resort to a fungal-based environment. But my biggest problem now — it’s a combination of many things, but the end result is native species that I can’t stop. Because we have such a fungal-dominated soil, we’ve got trees growing in our fields now. I’ve gone too far. And that’s fine — we’ve learned a lot on this journey. But now, instead of being way over on the fungal edge of the spectrum, we have to get closer to the middle. And I feel like the best way for me to do this is with a tillage event. 

The perennial weeds that we’re really wrestling with right now are Canada thistle, goldenrod, bluegrass, aster and chicory. Those five have really bogged the system down for me. If you plant corn into a very heavily infested area of chicory, there won’t be a stalk of corn that survives. Same thing with Canada thistle. 

So, I don’t know if tillage is the right answer, but we’re tracking what’s happening with and without tillage through a bunch of different tests. We’ve taken biology tests on the no-till and on the tilled fields, and we’re comparing the two. We’re doing PLFA, Solvita, CO₂ burst, Biome Makers, Microbiometer, etc. We’re collecting all of this data to evaluate not only what’s happening in the system with the tillage event, but how quickly the system rebounds. I think we’re going to have some pretty good data.