Iowa farmer Zack Smith uses portable, autonomous animal shelters and solar-gain-maximizing field design to drive innovation
Acres U.S.A. Can you describe your context — did you grow up on the farm? And what does your operation look like in terms of size and what you’re growing?
Zack Smith. Sure. I grew up on a small corn/soybean farm here in Iowa. My dad had about 900 acres, and we had a farrow-to-finish hog operation until I was in middle school. We got out of that when the hog business kind of went to crap, and then we just focused on row-crop farming.
From about the age of about eleven, I loved it. Farming was all I wanted to do. I was very active in helping my dad do everything, from tillage to combining; I even planted when I was in high school — way younger than most people do it. The only thing he wouldn’t let me do was spray chemicals when I was young. I wanted to farm, but we didn’t have enough land — I had four younger siblings that still needed to go to college. I wanted to farm, but I had to go to college and look for other things to do.
So, I spent the first half of my career working in agriculture retail. I was an agronomist and a crop-protection salesman. And then in 2010, when the ethanol boom happened, and my siblings’ college costs were under control, my dad was thinking about retiring. He realized that maybe he had room for me, since there was good money in ethanol. So I started profit-sharing an 80-acre farm in 2010. In 2013, he retired and I took over a portion of our family-owned acres while I continued to work off the farm, and I farmed on the side until 2021. By that time I had a seed dealership and my own ag retail business as well, and I had another gentleman come to me with another 700 acres of land. Between that and my family land, that was enough to justify farming — or at least to take a stab at it.
So, 2022 was my first full-time year as a farmer. I farm 1,200 acres of corn and soybeans. I also made the decision to make room for the Stock Cropper business, which came into existence in 2020.
Acres U.S.A. And you’re in northern Iowa, right?
Smith. Yeah, northwest of Mason City, about 15 minutes.
Acres U.S.A. How much of the operation have you been implementing into stockcropping — and can you describe what that is? Particularly the geometry and how you plan the strips of crops and pasture.
Smith. Sure. All the stockcropper stuff is on a very small footprint. I have about five acres total devoted to it. I call it the playground — it’s a place to experiment with the different concepts. That’s what you see on the YouTube video or on Twitter or wherever.
And then last year I did take the concept of strip intercropping — corn and soybeans in alternating 20-foot strips — to a field-scale level on an 80-acre field, and I successfully demonstrated that idea. Eventually, down the road, if we continue to have success with this, I want to have a field set up for stockcropping at a field-scale level — four or five years down the road.
Acres U.S.A. You’ve mentioned in some of the videos that people have had issues with doing that — with intercropping corn and soy in strips. What are some of those issues, and what did you do differently?
Smith. Well, it’s just not an efficient way to farm compared to the standard monocrop. The biggest challenge is probably herbicide management and weed management, because soybean herbicides are different than corn herbicides. There are some that overlap, where they’re agnostic, but especially with resistant weeds — like waterhemp — that’s one of the big reasons it’s kind of a tough system.
The other thing is that once you get larger than a 20-foot strip, you really start to lose the benefits of the system, as far as getting the yield pop out of corn because of the geometry. A lot of people now have 12-row heads, instead of six- or eight-row corn heads, and so they just don’t have the equipment setup to really get the benefit that I do, being a smaller farmer. Harvesting is also a challenge. Soybeans are harvested first, but you still have the corn there, and so you can’t dump on the go — you have to stop on the end to dump. So harvest is just less efficient; that’s another downside.
But, to me, this is an opportunity for smaller-scale farms that can’t compete on scale. They can’t buy inputs 10 percent cheaper, like the bigger operations, so the only way to make up for something like that is to have a system that out-yields the big guys. You’re willing to put the time in to make that investment — to capture more in revenue across the farm.
Acres U.S.A. And you think that’s possible with just intercropping strips of corn and soybeans — before you even integrate the animals?
Smith. Oh, yeah. 100 percent. But it takes management. And, in my opinion — from my experience, working with farmers for the last 20 years — less than probably 10 percent of the operations have the management skills and the desire to do something like this. Especially now, farmers are making a ton of money with $7 corn, even with input expenses being higher; it’s way better than the $3 corn a couple years ago, when we started stockcropping and when there was no chance to make money.
Especially in tough economic times, people are going to look a lot harder at systems like this. I don’t think we’re that far away from that.
Acres U.S.A. In this system — 20-foot rows of corn and soybeans — you’re getting the geometric advantage in terms of solar gain just with the corn, correct? Can you describe that a little bit more?
Smith. Right. The whole advantage of doing this is that the corn has a significant advantage. Because corn is a tall crop, it has the ability to take advantage of full sunlight on the outside edge rows. Most corn yield, in a regular monocrop with 30-inch rows, is driven from the ear leaf and above, because you can’t get sunlight penetration further down than that. But if you give full sunlight to the leaves all the way down to the ground, and if you have enough space, the corn plant will respond accordingly.
And so, the idea is, how do you create as many edge rows across a field as possible to get that boost of yield in corn? As an example, in our stockcropping plot last year, where we did four-row intercropping — that would be where you would get the highest results from this — we had about a 70-bushel advantage in those four-row-wide intercrop strips versus static 30-inch corn all the way across the field. Our normal yields were about 230 to 235 bushels an acre last year, and with that unique arrangement we boosted crop yield by roughly 30 percent, just by changing the arrangement.
Now, on the flip side of that, soybeans do have an inflection point. In our field where I had soybeans planted regularly outside, on the edge of the field, those beans went 75 bushels an acre, and the beans inside of the strips went 69. So they had about a six-bushel inflection point. The idea is that our corn was 70 bushels more and the beans had a six-bushel hit, but you’re still coming out substantially ahead in those financials when you do the math.
But the key is that you have to manage it in a manner that allows that to happen. It doesn’t work like that all the time as a default. If you’re really going to get the pop to make it worth the effort, you have to manage the corn to a high degree.
Acres U.S.A. Are you planting east to west or north to south?
Smith. This is a debated issue within this space. When I got interested in it, I was told that north-south is the only way — that with corn, north-south is the most efficient way, because of the angles and the passage of the sun throughout the day. But there’s others that swear it’s east-west. I don’t know. I’ve only done north-south on my farm.
Acres U.S.A. Okay. So, you have these strips of corn to maximize photosynthesis by maximizing the number of edges; let’s start to talk about how you integrate animals into this. What are you planting in the pasture strips between the corn?
Smith. In the 20-foot strip in between the corn, we usually grow a five- or six-way mix. It’s an annual forage mix, so it’ll die at the end of the year, so that the next year we can flip back to corn and don’t have to deal with perennial grasses hanging on. It’s a diverse mix of grass and broadleaf species that form a good mix for the animals to graze on.
Acres U.S.A. And you could do either corn or beans as the cash crop in this stockcropper system, correct?
Smith. Correct. But the real advantage in the strip intercrop system comes from corn. The beans don’t necessarily get a boost coming after stockcropping.
Acres U.S.A. Can you describe the stockcropping system in terms of the pens you’re moving and how many animals are able to fit into them?
Smith. The original design was for a barn to go down a 20-foot lane. The barn itself was 18-foot wide, with tires on the outside of that. The barn was designed to carry three different types of livestock initially. There was a ruminant pen up front, to serve as a lawnmower — to take advantage of the forage first. We started with eight sheep or goats the first year. And then we followed up with hogs. We had 10 hogs in the barn that would trail behind, and then trailing behind that we built some Joel Salatin-style chicken tractors. We’ve now made a hitch so that the whole thing is pulled together like a big wagon train.
So, four species, but really three different partitions in the barn, or in the system. All of the animals have the ability to be on the ground, but in the central barn, the pigs also have a raised floor, so that if it’s really muddy, they can be up and dry. We can actually lock them up if we want to, so that they’re not out destroying stuff if you get five, six inches of rain. They’ll just want to play in the mud.
Acres U.S.A. And you’ve got solar power on this. It’s moving at a really slow speed. Can you describe how that works?
Smith. Yeah, we’ve got the current version equipped with two solar panels on top that are connected to two 24-volt batteries that drive the motor system on each wheel of the barn. This is what it will look like; what we’ve developed, and what it will look like in the future — it will have four motors on the barn, for propelling it forward and being able to steer. And then we have a solar charge controller that regulates the batteries and an onboard computer controller device that does all the communicating between the cell phone app, which gives us our programmable movement. How many feet forward do we want to advance the barn? What time of day? How many times a day? We can set that all in the app and move the barn ahead automatically. And the barn also contains multiple GPS sensors to give us semi-corrected GPS signals so that we can go in a straight line through the field.
Acres U.S.A. What’s the scale of this? You talked about the number of animals, but what size farm do you imagine this being implemented on? Could someone theoretically do this on thousands of acres?
Smith. They could; it really depends how you look at it. I mean, the reason this doesn’t scale is because of the monopolization of the meat processing industry. There’s currently no place to take animals, if you’re trying to scale this up, that could handle so many animals.
But as far as land use — when you look at the stocking rates of pork, the numbers go like this: In Iowa, we’ve been at 25 million hogs a year in all the CAFO barns. In the stockcropper system, the per-acre density of hogs on pasture — on roughly 40 or 50 percent of the field — is 15 hogs per acre that you can raise. So if you do that math, we’d need 1.3 million acres of pasture in Iowa with these barns working on them to raise 25 million hogs. When you include in the other half of the acres, that works out to somewhere between 15 to 20 counties in Iowa, out of the 99, being able to produce 25 million hogs. And that’s only in one turn. If you had everything farrowed in the spring and put everything on pasture, you could raise 25 million hogs in 20 counties in Iowa.
Now, that’s kind of a silly comparison, because you can’t process 25 million hogs all at one time. But the argument that you have to do it this way — in CAFOs — and that there’s no other way to do it, it’s a fallacy. To me, it’s just a matter of how you arrange it. It’s possible to raise large numbers of animals on pasture with the amount of land we have — especially when you look at it in the context of the questionability of ethanol in the future. We have way more acres than we need, if ethanol goes away, to produce livestock on pasture.
Acres U.S.A. How do we get more processing capacity? If you’re doing 15 hogs per acre —nobody is going to process 15 hogs themselves on-farm; to direct market those animals we’re going to have to have more processing capacity.
Smith. We’re gonna have to have non-monopolized meat-processing plants open up. More than likely, they’re going to have to be subsidized by the government to get them established — to get them built, and then to allow multiple farms to send product to them, and then to have the ability to distribute.
The problem is that the big corporations have it all tied up. There’s a million constraints, by design, in the current system — to protect them. You have to have people that are willing to challenge that. Honestly, the more I talk about this stuff, the likelihood of it happening is probably close to nothing. When you look at how the Farm Bill is going right now, there aren’t any meaningful changes that are going to come out of it.
But those are the things that would have to happen. You’d have to have courageous people to stand up and fight the corporate takeover that we have in this business.
Acres U.S.A. Let’s say stockcropping is just being used with hogs; are the strips that are planted in either corn or beans sufficient to feed those 15 hogs per acre?
Smith. It depends on the yield. From a corn standpoint, it would be close to being self-sufficient. But you also have to have the rest of the ration to go with it. For the ratios of what you would need to finish animals, I know that you could design the system so that you would produce enough. The problem with soybeans is that they need to be processed in order to turn them into feed. So, I’ve been interested in other crops that wouldn’t require being processed — so the farmer could literally take grain out of the bin and grind it and feed it back to the animals.
Acres U.S.A. I was going to ask that — what would be the total infrastructure required to have this as a self-sufficient system?
Smith. Yeah, you’d have to have grain storage, and you’d have to have a feed grinder. That’s how everybody used to farm, and they walked the value off of the farm in protein. Everybody used to be that way.
Acres U.S.A. Right. What are some of those other options to replace soybeans — so you don’t have to process it to feed to animals? Some kind of field pea?
Smith. Yeah, field peas would probably be the go-to. But there’s not a lot of that grown in Iowa, and I’m not set up for growing it very efficiently. It’s mainly grown in the Northern Great Plains and Manitoba. It doesn’t need as much water; I think that’s why they grow so much, plus we have much more humidity. They have a lot more pulse crops up that way.
But the ideal ration would be a mix of a barley — a starchy grain — and then a field pea for protein. And you can grow the two together, and then harvest the mix and grind it and feed it to animals. But that’s easier said than done.
Acres U.S.A. Yeah, it gets complicated. Can you talk a little bit about your micro design? And also about production — when are these going to be available commercially?
Smith. That’s the hard thing for us right now — knowing what to build first and what’s going to be in demand. When you’re building something that hasn’t existed before, you can’t do a lot of market research and testing. Right now we’re making a backyard version for urban areas — an autonomous chicken tractor to move itself around the yard and that could produce eggs or meat for somebody that wants to have their own protein sovereignty in the city, if it’s legal to do that. It would probably be hens and eggs. We call that the Clustercluck Pico. We’re currently finishing up the design right now. I’m hoping to get a few prototypes in the summer.
And then the Clustercuck Nano is the barn that we came out with that we’ve really been working on for autonomous field-scale autonomous operations. It’s a 10-foot-wide barn, and it’s currently designed for two species: ruminants and poultry. That one’s going to be more targeted to homesteaders who are looking at protein sovereignty. They don’t want to build a shed or put up fence, and maybe they don’t want to battle it through the wintertime, but they want to raise livestock through the summer months and have something to manage their property with grazing. That’d be an option for them.
And then last but not least, a field-scale stockcropper barn that would probably be somewhere between 15 and 30 feet.
Acres U.S.A. What would be the advantages or disadvantages of the 10-foot version versus a 20-foot?
Smith. Well, when you get into the smaller ones, if you’re actually interested in doing this for the purpose of making money from a production system, those barns are not for that. They’re more for self-sufficiency. From a profitability standpoint, you need to have at least three livestock enterprises to make the system cashflow for the farmer, with direct marketing. So, the bigger barns make that easier. The smaller barns are really for the people that are in it for the protein experience and for the market buffer. They want to have food sovereignty; they’re not doing the math on how it’s working out financially. They want their kids to have something to do and to be around livestock. And then the field-scale system is set up for the actual economics.
Acres U.S.A. Is there a philosophical reason you turn toward the homesteader, as opposed to the larger-scale farmer, in terms of adoption of this type of technology?
Smith. Yeah, a couple things. The first is that 95 percent of large-scale farmers will never have an interest in this system. The second reason is that it’s a great system, and it works, but you have to have a market to sell into. If the farmer can’t process it in a way where he can sell it to consumers and capture premium at scale, then that’s not a business at that point.
So, the idea is that we’re going to start where there is a definite business. Backyard chickens are growing through the roof. Homesteading is growing through the roof in these crazy times we live in. This is the initial opportunity where we can get some advantages out of what we’ve developed and then hope to scale the other things. In time, I believe the environment for the field-scale system will improve.
My opinion is that it’s a chicken or egg when it comes to this. Nobody has really put forward a realistic, scalable, regenerative production system. I was just out at the Regenerative Innovation Summit in Chicago, and I won their investment pitch competition. Not because I had the best pitch, in my opinion — it’s because I had something that was real and believable. So much of this regenerative ag thing is, “We have something that kind of fits one of these things, and so we’ll slap a label on it and call it ‘regenerative’ or ‘carbon neutral.’” But nobody’s actually implementing all the practices into one system like this. I think that if you have a system like this — stockcropping — then it becomes easier. You can show it to people that are going to invest in the processing facility and say, “We have something real that we think is going to resonate with consumers.” Then they can choose to invest, so that we can have consistent flow of product and form a network of producers. It’s just going to take time to do that.
Acres U.S.A. And you’re working with Dawn Equipment on this?
Smith. Yes.
Acres U.S.A. Great.
You said earlier that you took over the farm when your dad retired. How has that worked out? You talked about this issue in your opinion article [Acres U.S.A., April 2023]. Is he still involved? Is he pretty supportive? Are you able to integrate all the innovative things that you’d like to do?
Smith. Yeah, getting into this — doing things differently — it was like every other farm. It was a challenge at first. I pushed him very hard in 2011, initially, to go to strip-till, and then eventually to do cover crops on all the acres, and he didn’t like that. He’d been doing things his way for 40 years, and he didn’t want to change. But I basically told him I was doing this with or without him. And when he saw that I rose to the occasion and made it work, he decided to join in.
And now it’s kind of funny because he’s the absolute biggest proponent of those practices. He absolutely loves what it does for his land, and he talks about it more than I do. Once the proof was in the pudding — after we had a couple of things in the first year that really showed that it worked — he was all in. We had a drought, and our strip-tilled crops were substantially better than his system. The improvement in water infiltration too — we could see right off the bat that it was substantial.
So, he became a quick believer, and he’s been very, very supportive. He did what most fathers don’t do, which is that he chose to retire at 62. He realized there’s more to life than farming. That’s a foreign concept for most people. That’s why we have to get agriculture in the hands of somebody young. He didn’t know stockcropping was gonna come from his decision to retire, but stockcropping absolutely came because he got out of the way. He thought the idea was crazy, and he doesn’t like the risk I’m taking right now — putting my money on the line for something I believe in so strongly that’s a long shot. But yeah, he’s very supportive of things. And that means a lot.
Acres U.S.A. Yeah, that’s great. Are you going to retire at 62?
Smith. Hopefully earlier! Hopefully stockcropping takes off. I don’t want to farm forever. I mean, I like farming. But progress comes when you let more innovative people have some control. If I don’t retire, I’ll say this for sure — the control will be passed on to somebody else. I don’t know how these young guys are going to do this in the future without having a significant leg up, so I may still have to be involved. But I’m going to do the same thing my dad did.
Acres U.S.A. I see on your Twitter profile that you have some teenage kids. Are they interested in this at all?
Smith. Zero interest. Which is fine. I didn’t expect them to be interested. Maybe they’ll go off college here in the next few years and meet a nice farm boy, but I kind of doubt it. I think they want to get as far away from here as they can. Living in rural Iowa, you know — it’s not great — I mean, if we’re being honest, from a lot of perspectives. The population continues to decline. The quality of the people continues to decline. The schools are in decline. And it’s for a lot of reasons. But one of the reasons the farming community is declining is because there’s not a lot left of it — everybody’s farming enormous. We don’t have the good farm families that were built around an independent, nuclear business structure to build a community around. A lot of people have come in and out. You don’t know your neighbors. It doesn’t have the bucolic appeal that you see on every Farm Bureau commercial, that’s for sure.
Acres U.S.A. Also from your Twitter page: what does “Can’t died in a cornfield” mean to you?
Smith. That’s a quote my grandmother Smith used to say all the time. It just represents, “Don’t tell me that you can’t do something,” because “can’t” died in the cornfield. If somebody tells you something’s too big to do, don’t believe them. Figure out what’s wrong and figure out a way and prove them wrong.
We have a very large family. My dad had five brothers and I have 31 cousins. Everyone has been extremely successful. As a whole, our family — it’s really a very unique family, and the achievements that have come were guided with that spirit and that attitude. And we’ve been very fortunate.
People told me that Stock Cropper couldn’t be done — that it was a stupid idea. But you figure it out, and you put your head down, and you get it done.
Acres U.S.A. Any other last thoughts on the future of agriculture?
Smith. I’ve got a lot of concerns for the future of agriculture and what’s going to happen in the next 10 years, with the transfer of land and assets and all the constraints on young folks, and consolidation — vertical integration — that’s coming to crops. I don’t believe in that system; I don’t think it’s good for anyone other than the shareholders. I’m going to continue to try to exist in that system, but I’m working on other opportunities — to find alternatives so that you don’t have to farm 15,000 acres to be in this game. I think that’s a reductive future.
Acres U.S.A. Do you think family farms are the goal? Or do you think that retaining family farms is the only way to do this regeneratively? Do you think that corporations that control, say, 100,000 acres might be able to make any difference in actually managing the land more regeneratively?
Smith. No, because I think you have to have individual ownership. But if you have a “family farm” that farms 25,000 acres — and those do exist, and they call them “family farms” — that’s not a family farm. To have enough people to do that, you have one person that has a family name, and maybe that family has been in business for 100 years, and then you have like 43 seasonal employees — H2A visa workers — that’s not a family farm. But it gets sold as that illusion, to keep the whole facade going on that all these bumpkins out here need subsidies and all this nonsense.
What I’m interested in is how we can create systems that have more independent farm business owners — who are sovereign, who aren’t controlled, who aren’t making decisions based off of what a corporation says. They’re independent — they’re independent artisans — because that’s what farmers all used to be.
But today we just fall into this mode where you go to your seed guy, and they make recommendations for seed and fertilizer and chemicals, and you’re just the one that goes through the checklist. You just do what they say. That’s similar to what the hog industry is. Now, you still have ownership of the land, and you have ownership of the crop, but I don’t think it’s too far away till we’re gonna just get paid for acre spaces — where we’re just being asked to be ass jockeys bouncing across the land, not having any real ownership or any skillset in the intellectual capital that it takes to be an independent business owner. I think that’s where they want us, personally. I think they want us to be stupid and dependent on the machine. But I don’t see that that serves anyone but them.
