An organic Kansas farmer has learned how to keep his soil in place and productive – while intelligently tilling
The wind blows hard as we stand in a hillside field at Geiger Farm, near Robinson, Kansas. It’s so windy here that Jack Geiger’s pole barn is built with extra support beams and braces on the walls and roof. The builder told him it should hold up to pretty much anything short of a tornado. Wind is part of life on the rolling hills of eastern Kansas, and farmers like Jack just take it in stride.
When Jack plowed this field a week and a half ago, he left the surface rough and bumpy. There’s still quite a bit of crop residue and weeds visible, but they would quickly blow away if the soil surface were smooth. That’s why Jack uses his Sunflower chisel plow to break the soil into six- to eight-inch chunks, which stop the wind from gathering enough speed to blow away soil particles.
“This field is armored for a three-inch downpour or forty-mile-per-hour winds,” Jack says as he stoops down to break up one of the lumps. Inside, the soil is well-aggregated, crumbly, and high in organic matter. “When the winds of April are over, I’ll smooth it out and plant soybeans.”
It takes careful planning to keep the soil from eroding in an area like this, which is subject to both heavy rainstorms and strong winds. Over the years, Jack has learned how to keep his soil in place and productive — organically.
Transitioning to Organic
Jack Geiger’s family has been farming in Kansas for six generations. But Jack wasn’t planning on being a farmer when he graduated from high school. He contemplated enrolling in the engineering program at Kansas State University, but when the engineering and agriculture students split up at orientation, he realized that he didn’t look like an engineer. So he switched to agronomy.
Nobody was teaching organic farming methods at Kansas State in the 1980s. Quite the opposite. Most of Jack’s classes were in Throckmorton Hall, named after Ray I. Throckmorton, who was dean of agriculture from 1948 to 1952. In 1951, Throckmorton wrote an article for Country Gentleman titled “The Organic Farming Myth,” calling organic farmers “cultists relying on half-truths, pseudo science and emotion.”
Throckmorton was gone by the time Jack started college, but his anti-organic legacy lingered. That may be one of the reasons that Kansas, which has more cropland than any other state in the country (28.3 million acres), had only 0.1 percent (27,000 acres) certified organic in 2021.
Jack graduated from college at the end of the 1980s farm crisis. By the time he returned to the farm in 1993, his father was starting to transition the land to organic because he couldn’t afford the skyrocketing cost of farm inputs. Jack started going on farm tours to see how others were farming organically.
In 2016, Jack started mentoring younger farmers. This helped him constantly reassess and improve his methods, and by now he’s developed a successful farming system that works for him and his land — even when the wind inevitably blows.
Cattle and Crops
At Geiger Farm, Jack integrates crops and livestock. He raises thirty cow-calf pairs and fattens steers for beef on his two hundred acres. He’ll never raise pigs because when he was growing up, the land near the house was used as a hog farm and he grew up constantly smelling hog manure. Some rationalize this by calling it “the smell of money,” but Jack’s family wasn’t getting a penny for it.
Jack’s crop rotation includes legumes, small grains, and three years in row crops. He used to do two years of corn and two of soybeans, but he found that the second year of corn burned up too much nitrogen. With just one year of corn in the rotation, yields are high. “My expected average is 150 bushels per acre; if I don’t make 175, I am depressed; and 200 is a ceiling I can go through no problem,” he says.
Most of the corn grown on the farm goes right back into the cattle. The feed ration is a mixture of ground ear corn, oats, alfalfa hay, wheat mid, soybean splits, and a vitamin A, D, and E supplement. By using ear instead of shell corn, he’s able to feed raw soybeans, because the fiber in the corncobs absorbs the soybean oil so that it doesn’t harm the cattle’s rumens.
Since the forages aren’t growing much in early April, the cows and calves are still in their winter sacrifice lot, where they get free-choice hay. Pregnant cows and heifers get a gallon of feed ration a day. “I want them to develop a big udder and be healthy when the first baby hits the ground,” Jack says. All the farm fields are fenced, and he grazes the cows on them rotationally when they’re in legumes or cover crops.
The “fat boys” in the feedlot get feed ration every evening and morning, along with free-choice grass hay. Starting in May, they also have access to one of nine small paddocks that connect to the feedlot. “You are trying to give them a serving of grass every day,” Jack says. “I want their rumens to stay healthy.” His average carcass weight is over eight hundred pounds.
Cows, calves, and steers all have access to free-choice garlic mineral, blended by a local mill. Jack says that when the cows eat garlic salt, he doesn’t have as much trouble with ticks or parasites. He did have a pinkeye outbreak one year — but that was the year he bought an off-brand mineral product that was mixed with dried distiller’s grains. He had no problems after he switched back to his regular, high-quality mineral blend.
Armoring Soil with Tillage
Jack cares deeply about soil conservation, but he’s not a no-till advocate. He points to a series of terraces on the field across the street, originally constructed by the Soil Conservation Service as an on-farm demonstration project back in the 1930s. For twenty years, a neighboring farmer — a good farmer, Jack emphasizes — managed similar terraces on a farm Jack recently purchased, using the best no-till practices.
“I plowed the terraces, and what did I see?” Jack asks. “I saw color and organic matter stratification. The top three inches were black, beautiful. The next four inches were intermediate. The bottom four inches were the ugliest clay I’d seen.”
After managing the terraced field with conservation tillage, cover crops, and forages for several years, he plowed it again. “All eight to nine inches were black,” he says. “You couldn’t see the reddish or yellowish clay.”
Jack carefully selects his tillage implements based on the field and crop. The chisel plow, he emphasizes, “is typically a hill field device. Never use a chisel in wet springs or on wet ground.” On some fields, he uses a heavy cutting disk; on others, the appropriate tillage implement is the field cultivator. “I do not try to be aggressive,” Jack says. “I try to be as minimally invasive as I can.”
Jack uses the soil health principle of “soil armor” a bit differently than no-till advocates, who use the term to mean that soil should always be covered by either living plants or residues. “I think of this as something that armors the soil,” Jack says, patting his chisel plow. By creating a rough, irregular surface, the judicious use of the chisel plow is another tool in the erosion-prevention toolbox.
Of course, Jack does try to keep the soil covered with living plants or residues as much as possible. He used to plant mainly alfalfa, red clover, and small grains as cover crops, but now he uses a much more diverse mix. There’s just one legume he won’t plant — hairy vetch, because it’s considered a noxious contaminant in milling wheat.
Jack follows the Albrecht system of soil balancing. The soils in eastern Kansas are high in potassium, and his cropping and management systems have elevated the magnesium levels. He points out two symptoms of magnesium imbalance in the field we’re standing in — cracks in the soil and an abundance of dandelions. He regularly spreads 500 to 1000 pounds of high-calcium lime per acre to balance the soil properly and improve its structure.
Reflecting on how few farmers in Kansas use organic practices, Jack says, “We need a paradigm shift as a society.” He sees organic farming as a fight against the harm scientific reductionism has caused agriculture. His farm mentorship program is an important part of this. He’s working to change the system — one farmer at a time.
