Interview: Relay Switch

Indiana farmer Jason Mauck shares his system of relay cropping, which maximizes what plants need: sunlight, water and CO₂

Acres U.S.A. Can you explain your context — where you’re farming and what your operation basically looks like?

Jason Mauck. Yeah, that context is important to understand. Both sides of my family farmed, and both sides were very successful and owned big blocks of land. They never spent a dime unless it was on land, and they never took on debt — which has worked out very well, because we own 1,800 acres now, and we farm a total of about 2,600. And then we built hog barns in the last 20 years. We’ve built four barns, so we have about 12,000 pig spaces and about four million gallons of hog manure a year, which we distribute on our land base around the barns. So, it’s a unique context — we get about 45 inches of rain, and I have unlimited fertility, and that creates its own problems, with phosphorus tie ups and things like that. 

I went to a small school growing up, and I had my eyes set on making decent money out of college, so I went to Indianapolis and sold insurance for a couple years and learned the business side of things. But I just hated being cleaned up, so I started a landscaping business and grew that till I was 28. 

And then my dad got pancreatic cancer. I watched him go from very healthy to passing about four months later. But he had shown me how to do everything that he did. So I was transplanted out of this freedom of running a landscaping business into farming. I had a good relationship with him; it was just such a life change for me. I poured everything into work. I shut off my past life to really immerse myself into understanding farming, because I didn’t want to fail, with that responsibility. So I really got into the industrial ag mindset.

Acres U.S.A. When you were younger, had you envisioned coming back to the farm? 

Mauck. I eventually thought that would happen, yeah.

Acres U.S.A. Was the farm able to support another salary at the time? Was that the reason you didn’t stay?

Mauck. Yeah, the salary part hasn’t changed! But that’s created the path to do other stuff. I mean, there’s plenty there, and that’s always been my mindset — that the land is this amazing asset. If I would just change, then I can reflect what I do on that land. So yeah — that’s always been a focus. 

But after my dad died, my uncle Lewis kind of became my second dad. But then he got a big brain tumor and passed very quickly at 53, just a few years later. That created this void. It’s not hatred — but I don’t really like industrial ag, and I’m trying to figure out how I can change things — to change the soil and then change the lifestyle. 

Before I came back to the farm, I took my landscaping business in a completely different path. I was a marketing major, but I always thought advertising was a waste of money. So I would do these things called living billboards where I would grow flower arrangements in front of properties. And I would manage people’s landscapes and turf like I was farming. I understood that I could plant a summer annual in mid-April — pretty early — and I wouldn’t have to plant many plants. So I started intercropping my annual summer flowers into my spring bulbs. This would allow them to root down and get established so I didn’t have to water them all summer. I just found the plants that were really resilient and kept my bouquets within 12 to 15 different flower species.

Acres U.S.A. So it’s really your landscape background that’s informing your thought about timing and space for row crops. 

Mauck. Yes. Everyone else would listen to the salesmen and the retailers and go spend all this money to get a big flower right then. But I’d just harvest my canna bulbs and was able to charge people $500 three times a year and have less than $100 in plants. That was a super moneymaker for me — not only as individual entity, like how Joel Salatin talks about looking at each entity as a profit center — and it had a lot of intrinsic ancillary benefits.