Oklahoma farmer Jimmy Emmons discusses using cover crops for drought resilience, how to influence policy changes, and why managing regenerative systems requires more, and better, education.
Editor’s Note: This is an edited version of John Kempf’s interview with Jimmy Emmons on the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast.
John Kempf: Tell us a little bit about your background and what your journey has been like — what brought you to the work you’re doing today?
Jimmy Emmons: I was born and raised in western Oklahoma. We still farm the original homestead my great-granddad brought my granddad to in 1926. My wife, Ginger, and I started no-tilling in about 1995 on our own land. Farming had worked well here because it was carbon-rich soil, and my family members were the benefactors of that. But they didn’t know what they were doing as far as degrading the land — they never would have done that intentionally. We peaked out with no-till in the early 2000s, before I had the big-picture concept of regenerative ag.
Kempf: What types of crops are you growing? What does your cropping rotation look like, and how has that evolved over time?
Emmons: Originally, we only farmed wheat, and a little cotton and alfalfa in the bottomland. Now we’re up to about 14 different crops in about a four-year rotation. That rotation has been upset here by drought over the last year and a half — when you finally exhaust all the water out of the profile, it’s challenging to grow anything.
Kempf: As you’ve made this transition, including different cover crops, including more crops in your rotation, incorporating livestock — what changes have you observed in your farming operation with soil health and with improved crop resilience?
Emmons: Probably the big “aha moment” was in 2012, after we put in our first cover crops for the second year in a major drought — a D4 drought. We had moisture probes and temperature probes in the soil. We kept some check strips of bare soil — like my granddad and dad would have — and we found that where we had cover crops, the following year, our crops showed that big square that we’d left bare, and we actually had more water in the profile to work with where we had cover crops versus where we didn’t. That was a gamechanger for me. I understood the principles and what we needed to do; that was a real catalyst to start moving this forward at a faster pace.
Kempf: I’ve had this conversation a couple of times, and I find it so intriguing that there is this idea that has emerged — and I understand how it emerged — that the best way to conserve moisture for a wheat crop in dryland farming is to have a bare-land summer fallow. But I don’t know how many farmers I’ve spoken to who have used a cover crop and found that they had more moisture underneath the cover crop than they did with the bare fallow.
I had this one remarkable experience at an organic farm in southwest Kansas where kochia got away from them. We chose to do something fairly heretical — we just let the kochia grow to five feet tall, and then incorporated it — knocked it down with a disk, and lightly disked it into the soil. Everything was bone dry that summer, but when they went through with a disk to knock down the kochia, the soil was almost too wet for the disk underneath it. What are we missing here? What are we not getting? Yes, plants do utilize water. But bare soil also loses water — faster, perhaps, than when it’s covered by plants. So it’s really intriguing to hear your experience with that.
Emmons: Yeah, we do that all the time. One year on a rented farm we had marestail get away from us — totally out of control. So I just let it grow until it flowered, and then we mowed that residue down and no-tilled into it. And the moisture was amazing. We had a great crop following that. It’s really amazing to watch how the water recycles in that canopy when it gets dense and thick — with either weeds or cover crop. Nobody wants a solid stand of kochia or marestail, but it does keep the land covered, and it will build water in the profile. It’s amazing what a root can really do.
Kempf: I’ve also observed these plants actually building water in the profile; do you have any hypothesis of how that might work or what might be contributing to that?
Emmons: I think it’s like in the beginning — there was just dew every morning; there wasn’t rain. Plants circulate water — they breathe it in and exhaust it out, as do all the microbes that are feeding on the root exudates. All life forms, like you and I, and a microbe — the major gas that we exhale is water vapor, not CO2. So the more microbes there are, the more water vapor is being exhaled into the soil profile. It does add up. It’s amazing what a living canopy of plants can do. It really turns it into a semi-rainforest, so to speak.
Kempf: In that 2012 drought, we had some farmers planting corn into standing alfalfa that they tried to knock back — not to completely kill it, but to knock it back when they planted into it. And by the time the corn was tasseling out, the alfalfa was four feet tall and in full bloom, and the lower leaves were dying off, and it was starting to go into decline because it was shaded out. It was just this incredible environment, filled with pollinators. Those fields went on to produce an average or higher-than-average yield in the various regions they were in. We observed this on three different farms in three very different locations — at a time when other farms in the neighborhood and the surrounding regions were producing 20 to 30 percent of an average crop because of severe drought.
A few years later, I think I learned what was going on: the alfalfa was actually bringing moisture up from down deep and releasing it into the atmosphere. Corn has the capacity to pick up moisture from the atmosphere and utilize it and actually transfer it back into the soil. It makes me wonder — we know that different plants regulate water in very different ways. Some are much more capable of absorbing moisture from humidity in the atmosphere than others. Is it possible that marestail and kochia and some of these weeds that really thrive in these arid environments are particularly good at getting moisture from the soil? And would we be better off using them as a cover crop than our “cover crops”?
Emmons: That’s what I was talking about when I mentioned how water was recycling. I do believe that plants are pulling it out of the profile down deep, but they’re also putting it back through the cash crop. I think we have a lot to learn yet about plants and their complete cycle — ones that we should be using in dry areas and ones that we should be using in 50-inch-rainfall areas. We tend as humans to categorize and to label certain crops or cover crops that we think should be number one on the list; but are there other species outside that box, like kochia, that can be used in a dry context to help the water cycle?
Kempf: As an example of thinking of plants differently, 15 or so years ago, when I first started doing consulting work, I was working with balancing grassfed dairy rations. At one organic farm, due to high rainfall during critical periods, they weren’t able to cultivate well, and lamb’s quarter got away from them. They had this corn silage field that had a pretty dense lamb’s quarter population, and they harvested when the corn was perhaps slightly less mature than ideal because they didn’t want to let the lamb’s quarter go to seed. And that was the most valuable corn silage I have ever seen. Those cows performed extraordinarily well on it — because lamb’s quarter as an individual plant has something like 23 percent protein; it’s superior to alfalfa in protein content. They had this corn silage that didn’t just have a lot of energy — it also had a lot of protein. It was so amazing that I think there’s an argument to be made for growing lamb’s quarter in corn silage fields.
Emmons: That’s a great point. I was in Alberta, Canada, last summer at a big dairy that was transitioning to a more holistic thought process and grazing the cows out more. And they had put in corn silage with about 12 different species in the mix. When they sent that to the lab, the lab called them back and said, “There’s been a malfunction — could you send us another sample?” They sent another sample in, and the lab called back and said, “What is this? We’ve never tested silage at this level of nutrients, with energy and protein. It’s the best corn silage we’ve ever tested.” I think there’s a lot to that — that we should really be using more species in silage and hay to elevate nutritional value.
Kempf: When you think about the experiences you’ve had on your farm, plus things you’ve observed on the many farms you’ve visited, what are some of the unexpected results that have surprised you?
Emmons: I’m coming from an arid environment — it gets even worse west of me — but the unexpected thing is the amazing ability of multiple plants living together to flourish in a drought, where a single species will either almost die or will die and completely go away. It’s testimony that our whole system, across the planet, is very diverse. Nowhere do you find a stand of trees or prairie with a single plant or species. I truly believe that we should create that atmosphere — that diversity. It always surprises me — the ability of plants to help one another, to cycle nutrients and water to the very optimum in very harsh conditions.
Kempf: I think Ray Archuleta described this in a phrase that I really have come to appreciate. He said that in environments where resources are abundant, where there’s abundant water and abundant nutrients, it’s true that plants will compete with each other. But the moment resources are limited, and you have limited water and limited nutrients, plants and microbes immediately develop this symbiotic relationship to collaborate and to support each other. That’s a beautiful way of thinking about it. Because fundamentally, we are in a resource-limited planet, and perhaps we should behave in the same way.
Emmons: Definitely. Ray has several good sayings like that. He’s most definitely right. We see that time and time again — how when there’s adverse weather, plants are able to survive and help one another. It’s really extraordinary. And like you said, I think we should look at that and work together.
Kempf: One of the pieces that I’ve found really interesting when growers begin using diverse cover crops is observing how those different species express themselves differently in different parts of the same field. I was recently asked to help recover a piece of land here close to home that has been severely degraded by heavy erosion; it’s down to subsoil. There’s lots of things wrong with it. As a starting point, we planted a cover crop with nine or 10 different legume species. Some of them are only growing in certain parts of the field and not in others; there’s quite a broad variation in how these different plants are expressing themselves in this degraded soil. We see this pattern with these native plants that we call “weeds” all the time as well. And there’s a lot to be said for covering our bases with the things that we know that we don’t yet know.
Emmons: I see that in fields as well. And what’s really funny is that next year, if you plant that same mix, you may see different results; in the spot where a certain plant didn’t thrive this year, it may really thrive next year. Mother Nature uses tools like plants to cycle moisture, nutrients and available carbon. I never see the same plant flourish the same way in the same spot of the field every year. It’s in my mix, and sometimes I start thinking maybe I don’t need to plant buckwheat or whatever — it didn’t do very well this year. And then the next year it flourishes. If you really look at Mother Nature, grasses in the prairie are the same way. One year you’ll see Indian switchgrass do better than a little blue or a big blue. I think it’s the ability of Mother Nature saying, “I need you this year to help me here.” And that plant rises to the moment.
Kempf: Jimmy, you’ve developed an interesting perspective over the years. With your recent work within the USDA, you’ve had the opportunity to visit lots of different farming operations. And I approach these conversations from the perspective that everyone knows something that I don’t know — many things, most likely — and everyone knows something that many people would benefit from. What perspectives have you developed? What is your point of view that is perhaps different from what most people are thinking about in agriculture? What is your unique take?
Emmons: That’s a tough one. I think my unique take is that we need to look at agriculture in a bigger scope than we ever have before, especially with all the environmental issues we’re having. How climate-smart agriculture has come along at USDA and other places really resonates with me because that’s what we’ve been trying to do all along — learning how to plant plants that will help us in extreme weather, keep the ground covered, keep a living root growing. How we teach one another and share what’s going on is a greater need than ever. And our legislators are starting to hear that voice and are starting to see the benefits. I believe that we’re closer now than ever to a government starting to understand regenerative ag. Now, do they understand it in the depth that you do, or David Brandt did, or Ray Archuleta? Probably not. But it’s a learning experience — much like going through school or reading books, you don’t gain that knowledge very fast. So, I think it’s up to us to really start speaking to our representatives in the House of Representatives and the Senate, to show them what we’re seeing across the country, and the benefits of diverse agriculture. I think the time is now for us to really step up.
Kempf: I agree with you that the perspective is changing. We saw this in the most recent presidential election, where a number of the Democratic candidates were speaking about regenerative agriculture on a national platform. How significant an effect that produced is probably negligible. But it brought the conversation into the public limelight, and the awareness is certainly growing. How can regenerative farmers best engage? Where are the leverage points where we can have the most significant impact?
Emmons: Never underestimate the power of a conversation, a letter, an email. Talk to your legislators when they come home and do listening sessions. Everybody says, “I can’t make a change,” but you can. They do listen. I have several friends who are legislators in Washington, D.C., and the number one thing that they value is your opinion in their district. It’s one vote, but it does matter. A lot of people try to have their ear — whether it be a lobbyist or a company or a PAC — but one voice trumps all that, and the more voices that confirm that message, the greater that effect is. Reaching out, talking, and sharing — that builds relationships and trust. That’s really the reason for my new position with Farm Journal. Trust in food — that trust factor is what is so rewarding. We have to trust one another and work together.
Kempf: I’m speaking from a place of inexperience here, but it’s my perception from what I’ve overheard and learned from others that the power of individual voices is so strong because so few people choose to do it — that there’s a relatively small number of people that consistently engage.
Emmons: Yeah, one person’s vision can really change the course of a nation when that vision is so strong that people get behind it. It really is critical that we step up and share. If you have the opportunity to watch the House and Senate Ag Committees as they build the 2023 Farm Bill, you’ll hear “regenerative” from leadership and around the table over and over again. It’s a perfect time to reinforce to them that yes, that is the message you need to be saying, but maybe here’s another perspective — to help educate them and bring them along even more in their understanding, because they do have a lot going on; they may be on four or five other committees. We’ve been working in Oklahoma, for example, for years on some legislation concerning eastern red cedar, to try to help get rid of this invasive species that’s taken over — basically because land management has been wrong. It’s not just the cedars — the problem is the land management. If you’re trying to change the law, or trying to get financial help, you have to tell the big picture. If we get rid of the red cedar this year, we have to change our land management practices or grazing management to really keep it at bay. A lot of times we just look at one problem and work on that. But you haven’t solved any of the big problems — you solve one problem for a short period. It’s really critical, when we’re trying to educate and share with our friends at the legislature, to tell the bigger picture.
Kempf: When we think about approaching our on-farm challenges from a bigger context and looking at the macro ecosystem, it’s challenging for us as farmers to take this perspective at times, because we’re so busy in the weeds, doing everything that needs done on a day-to-day basis. It can be difficult to step back and look at things from a 10,000-foot point of view. But from that more macro perspective, where do you see significant opportunities for growers and farmers today and in the near future?
Emmons: First of all, I think for us to gain perspective, sometimes we just have to stop at the break of day, or at sundown, and just sit down and listen and watch in our fields. And I believe that if we do that, then we can start seeing the bigger picture. Holistic thinking can really take over and be a great tool for us to use. And that doesn’t stop in the field — that’s in our lives, that’s in our education process with our legislators, that’s with our customers. We need to relate more of what’s going on at the farm to them. I think we have a great opportunity to educate people about where food comes from and how taking care of the soil can affect plants, and can affect us as humans — more so than ever before.
Kempf: What have you observed with yield trends as farmers have transitioned to a more regenerative approach — incorporating no-till and cover crops and so forth? I’ve been surprised to learn that for some people who are not directly involved in farming, or in the farming community, there is this growing perception that when you first begin adopting regenerative agriculture practices, there is necessarily going to be yield drag effect, and it will take some time to recover yield. I’ve been surprised by that perspective because this has not been our experience.
Emmons: I think the key is learning before you start — understanding what your goals are and understanding that the system is really key. If you don’t do that, I have actually seen some producers experience a little bit of yield drag. But it was due to their error, and their concept, and their inability to plant the right plants to accomplish their goals. I think it’s very easy to make a mistake early on if you don’t do your homework before you start. We assume that we know more than we do sometimes. But if you do set up a good plan, then what we’ve seen is the same yield or higher. And it just gets better as you get better at what you’re doing. I think it’s similar to what a good producer does with genetics and seed selection. The guys who really study what plants they need for the yield they want, versus someone that just buys a sack of seed thinking it’s all the same — I think it’s that ability to self-educate and to learn how to use the tools to your advantage. If you do that, then you’ll see yields get better instead of declining.
Kempf: I like your perspective. Like you said, mistakes do happen. I would say that of the farmers we help — that we’re coaching through a transition — we see a yield loss maybe 5 percent of the time. A clear majority of the time, we expect to see either yield maintenance or yield gains. My opinion is that when we see a yield loss, it’s because of agronomic mismanagement. And I like the additional perspective that you shared — that it can just simply be going too fast. Or maybe a better way to say it would be moving forward without enough information, without enough experience. Sometimes experience is information. But sometimes there’s other information that we can learn from other people’s experiences as well.
Emmons: A lot of people come to me and say, “I tried to plant a cover crop, but it failed, and I’m not going back there again.” And my question to them is, “What really caused the failure? Was it seed selection? Was it planting depth? Was it timing of planting? Was it equipment malfunction? Did you really analyze why the failure happened?” Most of the time, the person will say, “I don’t know — I planted it, and it didn’t work, so I’m convinced cover crops aren’t going to work.” The ones that are successful will go back once again and try to figure out the answers — what went wrong — and adapt and move forward. The regenerative producers we see today who are successful are the ones who learned to adapt, adjust and move forward with a better plan.
Kempf: Using this type of agronomic management and farm management is certainly more management intensive, and it’s a lot more knowledge intensive. You can be lazy when you have easy herbicides and those types of tools that you’re dependent on. I think that many growers who are going down this pathway recognize that they may have those tools in their toolbox if they need them, but they chose to not need them as much as possible.
Emmons: Yeah, I think modern agriculture has gotten into that rut. They know how much chemical they need, what to seed — it’s all pre-planned, pre-thought, every year, with very little rotation. They miss the opportunity of learning out in the field what different species can really do. Again, it’s that whole-systems, holistic-thinking approach.
Kempf: Jimmy, when you think about this different farming system — this different style of thought, in some ways, because you’re seeking to prevent problems rather than simply address them after the fact — what is it that you perceive limits farmers from adopting this different methodology? What limits them from achieving the potential they’re really capable of?
Emmons: I think we’ve been taught to look at an issue and address it with a chemical — a one-thought approach, so to speak. I was talking to a great no-till corn grower the other day about how many pounds of nitrogen he used to achieve this high yield; but he had to use a fungicide several times. I said, “Why do you have to use a fungicide?” “Well,” he said, “because of this disease.” And I said, “Have you thought of why the plant was stressed?” And as we talked, I could see his facial expressions starting to change, because he had never thought about why that disease or that issue of stress was happening, and how it was induced by what he was applying.
Emmons: Some things in stress we can’t avoid. If it never rains, we’re gonna have stress at one point or another. But how do we relieve that early on with good management? We need to really get in tune with what’s going on within plants. Instead of a band-aid approach, we need to look more in depth and see what’s really happening in the plant. And is that something that I could change naturally, instead of chemically? Maybe it’s not. But most times, we have caused an unintended consequence that we later have to address.
Kempf: I think your last sentence is a key. In our consulting work we partner with a lot of fruit and nut and vegetable growers who are often particularly concerned with the market quality of their fruit, whatever that might mean — for some crops that means storability; for others it means appearance or a certain sugar content. There’s a lot more focus and emphasis on those characteristics generally than there is with grain crops. And so when you start really dialing in and trying to figure out what nutritional factors are causing effects that we don’t want — reduced marketability, reduced fruit quality — greater than 80 percent of the time, we find that the negative effects are coming from things that the growers are doing: practices they’ve implemented and products they’re applying that are actually causing and creating the negative effects that they’re most concerned about. It’s pretty remarkable to observe. And in many cases, we’re not aware of it, because we haven’t asked why.
Emmons: Yeah, I think that’s one of the greatest shortcomings of modern-day agriculture — not asking why.
Kempf: There’s this analogy in the medical field — when a person doesn’t feel well, and they go to see a general practitioner, in many cases they’ll end up with a prescription for a drug. And a couple of months go by, and they go back, and they’ve now developed additional complications, and they end up with a second drug. And soon after that, they end up with a third, and maybe a fourth and a fifth. And eventually, many people have a handful of drugs that to varying degrees are just covering up all the side effects from the first drugs, which may or may not have really produced the desired benefit. And what I find so interesting about that whole situation is that at every point, the medical practitioner only wanted what was best for the patient. They did the best they knew with the information they had and what they had been taught. They only wanted the best outcomes. We have this very similar situation in agriculture in which, usually over a period of years, we adopt new ideas, new information or new products into a system that ends up having long-term consequences.
Kempf: For example, many cotton growers apply hundreds of pounds of nitrogen per acre, side by side with anywhere from seven to 13 applications of plant growth regulators (PGRs). They’re driving at 90 miles an hour with one foot on the accelerator and the other foot on the brake! How much sense does that make? And these PGRs will completely shut down a plant’s capacity to photosynthesize for three days, and it takes the plant about 10 days to completely recover, at which point another PGR application is being put on. We’ve had some remarkable successes in cotton by cutting the nitrogen to maybe 40 percent of what was originally being applied and just eliminating all the PGRs. And guess what happens? We get increased yields when we do that, because we’re not stressing the plant with the PGR.
There’s this parallel example in apple production. A major problem for a lot of apple producers is fruit drop just before harvest, which results from trees that have high concentrations of abscisic acid. Roughly 15 or 20 years ago, we started having problems with fruit not coloring very well. Of course, this is a nutritional imbalance problem that can be resolved with nutrition. But instead of addressing the nutritional imbalance, the solution was to just foliar-spray the trees with abscisic acid about six weeks before harvest. That solved the coloring problem, but since it didn’t solve the underlying nutritional issues, growers started also having fruit quality issues — not having enough calcium in the fruit and not having good enough storability. So the solution to the storability issue was to create drought stress and water deprivation the last four weeks before harvest so that the fruit doesn’t grow as large and isn’t as soft — so that it’s firmer.
Well, the downside of drought stress is that it increases the plant synthesis of abscisic acid. So now we’re putting on a spray of abscisic acid, and we’re drought-stressing the tree the last four weeks before harvest, and then we can’t understand why half the fruit is dropping off the tree! We created this.
I deliberately chose these two examples because they’re crops that most growers won’t be able to relate to. We can sometimes see others more clearly than we can see ourselves. But the reality is that this dynamic of accumulated practices over time actually creates a negative response that, I would suggest, is almost universal on most crops and most cropping systems.
Emmons: Yes, it is. And you’re definitely right about the medical field being parallel to agriculture. They test your blood and make a chemical recommendation, without consideration of what that will do down the road to the system. It’s the same thing with soil — we test the soil, and we make a chemical recommendation, and we don’t understand what that outcome will be down the road.
I work with the FreshRx program in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where a medical doctor prescribes food for medicine. He has learned that regenerative ag products are a different form of medicine than a conventional outlet for food. Fresh, locally grown food trumps something that has been chemically altered to store longer. The outcomes of what we do on the land every day have consequences. We just have to figure out whether those consequences are beneficial or negative; and if they’re negative, what’s the solution? Why is this happening? We need to analyze that and find out if it’s something we caused.
I think that this approach can help us down the road significantly as we look at the whole system of soil health, plant health and human health.
