Rosmann Family Farms

Rosmann Family Farms

Rosmann Family Farms

Ron and Maria Rosmann run Rosmann Family Farms along with their sons, David and Daniel, and Daniel’s wife, Ellen (not pictured). Credit: Rosmann Family Farms.

In the last three years we’ve had these huge amounts of rain in late May and June right when we’re supposed to be doing field work like weed control and planting cover crops into standing corn. We can’t get the job done. We can’t get decent weed control and so on because the window of opportunity for getting into the field is so small. So then labor becomes an issue and you have to put in incredible long days when the opportunity arises.

Ron Rosmann

Rosmann Family Farms

Midwest Region | Harlan, IA

Main Product: Livestock & Grain

Scale: 700 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Diversified crop/livestock production, on-farm retail store, local foods café in nearby town.

This story is based on a 2013 interview.

Rosmann Family Farms is comprised of 700 acres of rolling prairie lands near Harlan in west central Iowa. With help from their children, Ron and Maria Rosmann produce certified organic feed and food grains as well as beef, pork and poultry on land that has been in the family since 1939, when Ron’s father established the farm. After graduating from Iowa State University in 1973, Ron returned to manage the farm when his father retired. Ron farmed for commodity markets for about ten years, but became uncomfortable using chemical fertilizers and pesticides because of concerns about impacts to the environment and his family’s health. So Ron reverted to crop rotations that were common when his father started farming, and found that the farm could be profitable and productive. Ron went on to become an early adopter in his region of more sustainable production practices such as diversified crop rotations, intensive grazing and the Swedish deep bedding pork production system.

Today, the Rosmann Family Farm is a certified organic crop and livestock farm. The farm integrates beef cattle and swine into a diverse five-year crop rotation designed to produce the feed needed by the livestock operations, plus feed and food grains for sale. Corn, oats, soybeans, rye, barley, turnips, pasture and hay are grown on the farm. Intensive grazing practices produce grass-finished beef from a heard of eighty-five cows and calves, and a farrow-to-finish operation produces pork from thirty sows in a Swedish deep-bedding system. The organic waste produced by the farming operations, including the manure from the hogs, is composted and returned to cropland. Ron has not purchased nitrogen fertilizer since 1982, instead getting nitrogen for his crops through crop rotation and compost. Rock phosphate is applied about once every four or five years according to soil test recommendations. Beef, pork, feed and food grains are sold through wholesale and direct markets, including an on-farm retail store, managed by Maria, that is stocked with a variety of Rosmann Family Farm products as well as goods from neighboring farms.

Thinking about the effects of weather variability and extremes on farm performance over his lifetime, Ron says that there have definitely been some changes in recent years. More heavy rainfall and extreme weather, particularly extreme temperature swings in winter, more wind and a longer growing season, have created some new management challenges. “Anything involving variability in precipitation generally is a challenge,” according to Ron, “but the worst for us is excess moisture because it means you can’t get your work done, whether it’s baling hay, cultivating, planting, harvesting, planting cover crops, you name it. Of course, that’s an ongoing problem for organic farming anyway, but it’s just been exacerbated by the increased variability.”

Other changes in weather include more wind and more extreme storms. “We never used to have tornados,” Ron explains. “I saw my first tornado when I was forty-four years old, in ’94. I’ve seen two, three, four tornados since then. And hail. We never used to have hail very much, maybe once every seven years. Now we get it a little bit nearly every year. We’re in what’s come to be called a hail belt.” Another change is that temperature extremes have become more extreme. “If you come from the Midwest or have lived in the Midwest,” says Ron, “you know we have extremes, but the extremes have gotten worse. An example is last Monday [January 2014], it was 18 below zero temperature with a 25-mile-an-hour wind. We had a 40 below wind chill. Five days after that it got up to 48 degrees.” Looking back, Ron thinks the greater temperature extremes may have started in the early ’80s, when it was common to have weeks of 50-below wind chills and huge amounts of snow. Still, the worst snow that Ron has ever experienced was in the winter of 2010. “Our cattle were out in the fields. We couldn’t get out there and when we eventually did, we had no place to feed them,” Ron recalls. “It took some pretty big equipment to get through that kind of snow because it’s the wide-open prairies out here.”

Besides such physical challenges, Ron thinks the recent extreme swings in temperature are creating novel stress for his cattle. “What is the effect of temperature fluctuation and extreme weather changes on rates of gains?,” he asks. “ I think there may be more challenges for ruminants like our cattle with weather fluctuations. It used to be that the cattle could tank up on feed because you could count on the cold spell hanging around a couple weeks,” Ron explains. “Now we’ve got 50-, 60-degree swings in a matter of days, plus you throw the wind in. That’s the biggest change I’ve seen in my lifetime. Yes, we’ve always had those variations but not happening continually. You’d have longer periods in between. These extreme swings are hard.”

Longer growing seasons have increased weed management difficulties on the farm too, particularly with one weed species, giant ragweed. It has been a long-term challenge in the low-lying areas of the farm, but in the last five years or so it began moving up the hills on parts of the farm. Ron thinks wetter weather in May and June, combined with earlier spring warm-up and the longer growing season, work together to promote the spread of the weed. He explains, “We use a ridge-till system, which is a minimal tillage system. We don’t do any spring tillage until we are ready to plant. We historically are not even thinking about planting corn until May 1, but now the giant ragweed are already getting big by then. They are a tough weed to take out with cultivation.”

Ron says that many neighboring farmers are also increasingly challenged by changing weather conditions. Giant ragweed is even more troublesome on their farms and more narrow windows for fieldwork are creating other challenges. Many of his neighbors, most of whom are industrial corn and soybean farmers, have abandoned best management practices in an effort to get their fieldwork done at all. Ron explains, “Now every farmer in this region, just about, gets all their nitrogen fertilizer put on in the fall because they’re worried about it raining all spring. They have got to get the work done when they can because they are farming huge numbers of acres with huge equipment. But the data says between 40 and 60 percent of the nitrogen that they put on their ground is lost every year to the ground water.” Ron also says that many farmers in his region are upgrading and expanding tile drainage systems in an effort to move standing water off their fields after more frequent heavy rainfalls. This increased drainage capacity will likely wash even more nitrogen out of the farm system.

Ron is concerned about adaptations like these, which many industrial farmers are making to address current climate challenges. He fears many such farmers are focused on addressing the symptoms of climate change rather than looking for root causes such as federal support for large-scale industrial agriculture. “They keep working on genetically engineered crops and so forth, without ever looking at what caused the flooding or extreme drought in the first place. They just don’t consider the big-picture issues or how the system is creating these issues.” Ron goes on, “I found that out loud and clear this past fall [2013] when I was on a panel about the World Food Prize. There was a big biotech farmer on the panel who suggested to me that our farm system isn’t sustainable because it can’t be scaled up. I found out later that he and his brother were paid $2.3 million in farm subsidies over a thirteen-year period, which was the most of any farm in that county. And he has the audacity to say that his system is sustainable.”

Thinking about his farm as a whole, Ron says, “A testimony to the resilience of our farm system is the fact that we have never lost a crop to pests in thirty years now of no pesticides. We have never even come close to having insects or disease or anything destroy our yields. We’ve had stable, very good yields during all that time. That’s always something that people tend to look at you with, ‘Huh? I find that hard to believe.’ People don’t believe it. Of course, I’ll be the first to say we have a lot of things we could be doing better, but still, overall, the resilience shows itself in our system. Our soil quality shines here. It really does. And we work to enhance those ecosystem services, as they’re called, by continually planting more trees, more shrubs, more crops for pollinators, more windbreaks and more wildlife habitat. The diversity is what will continue to play a big role for us.”

In the future, Ron would like to move away from annual grain crops and incorporate more perennial nut, fruit and berry crops, both as food and as forages for livestock. He is inspired by Mark Shepard’s work adapting perennial cropping systems to Minnesota prairie landscapes. Ron explains, “That’s the kind of thing I would ideally like to do. But right now I’m going to put an emphasis on more water quality buffers, increasing the diversity of our headlands, getting more pollinator plants out there and planting more trees. Right now we have two and a half acres of managed woodlands, a diverse plantation that I planted with eleven different species on it.”

Over the years, Ron has engaged with diverse audiences on sustainable agriculture and rural community issues and the Rosmann family have welcomed numerous tours, visitors and research collaborators to the farm. Ron is a founding member of Practical Farmers of Iowa, a farmer-driven research and education organization, and has been active in the Organic Farming Research Foundation as a member, board member and president. In 2006, the Rosmann family received the Spencer Award for Sustainable Agriculture, which recognizes Iowa farmers who have made significant contributions toward the stability of Iowa farming. In 2012 the Catholic Rural Life Conference presented Ron and Maria with the Isidore and Maria Exemplary Award, which honors a rural couple who exemplify fidelity to a vision and vocation of rural life that combines family, stewardship and faith.

 

Maple Spring Gardens

Maple Spring Gardens

Maple Spring Gardens

Ken Dawson and Libby Outlaw, Maple Springs Gardens, Cedar Grove, North Carolina. Credit: Debbie Roos.

The frequency and intensity of extreme weather seems to be increasing, which presents all sorts of challenges, the unpredictability of it. The last year that I remember as what I would consider a really good growing season was 2001. Since then, we’ve seen it all. We’ve had the driest years ever and the wettest years ever and the coldest winter in decades and the hottest summer in 100 years. The extremes are just becoming more extreme.

Ken Dawson

Maple Spring Gardens

Southeast Region | Cedar Grove, NC

Main Product: Vegetables

Scale: 14 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Shift growing season, drop sensitive species, shift to heat tolerant cultivars, add protected space.

This story is based on a 2014 interview.

Ken Dawson has raised organically grown vegetables for more than forty years in the community of Cedar Grove, North Carolina, located about twenty five miles north of Chapel Hill. Ken and his wife, Libby Outlaw, established Maple Spring Gardens in 1983 on leased land and moved their farm business to a worn-out tobacco farm in Cedar Grove that they purchased in 1990. Their long experience growing for high-value markets and using sustainable practices like composting and cover crops to build and maintain soil quality swiftly transformed the badly neglected land into a productive and profitable farm.

Today, Ken uses crop diversity, crop rotation and cover crops to maintain soil quality and reduce pest pressures and insectary plantings and OMRI-approved pesticides, when needed, to manage pests and diseases. Maple Springs Garden has a 5-kW photovoltaic array tied to the grid and ample water for irrigation from a pond and a well on the farm. With the help of a seasonal crew of six to eight fieldworkers, Ken and Libby grow more than eighty different varieties of vegetables, cut flowers, small fruits and medicinal and culinary herb starts on 6 acres of seasonal production rotated through 14 acres of cropland. They market their produce through direct sales to a 200 plus member CSA and at farmer’s markets in nearby Durham and Carrboro, and to local businesses.

The Southeast has always been a difficult place to grow vegetables. Poor-quality soils, fluctuating winter temperatures and hot, humid summers encourage pests and diseases and reduce crop yields.“It’s my perception, and I certainly don’t have the weather records to document it, but my perception is that the variability is becoming greater both in temperature and precipitation. Obviously the variability in precipitation is always a challenge, but the more extreme it gets the more of a challenge it is. For, example, in 2002, we had the driest year in a hundred years in central North Carolina. In 2003, we had the wettest year in a hundred years in central North Carolina. In 2007, we had the driest year ever recorded in central North Carolina. This year, we had the coolest, wettest season anybody living can remember.”

“Likewise in temperatures. The winter of 2010 was the coldest year in thirty years here and that summer was the hottest summer ever, with July and August just constantly setting temperature records for most days … hitting 105 for days on end here and the most 90-degree days ever recorded. Variability is always a challenge, that is a given in farming. It’s not like we’re seeing things we haven’t seen before, just more so. The high temperatures, the heat waves, it’s all just seems to be becoming more extreme. The extremes are just becoming more extreme.”

Hotter temperatures and more frequent heat waves have begun to interfere with crop production on Ken’s farm and others in the region. “Flowering, pollination and fruit set had never been an issue for us prior to 2010. In the 2010, ’11 and ’12 growing seasons we had very poor fruit set on our late tomatoes due to excessive heat in July. That’s something I had never encountered before. Early September, when we normally have a lot of late tomatoes, there just weren’t any. They were great-looking plants with nothing on them.” The late crop of tomatoes is an important crop for many growers in the region, including Ken, but many have now given up on the crop. Ken is thinking about trying some heat-tolerant cultivars for the late planting.

The increased summer heat may be the reason Ken has had to adjust the seasonal planting schedule for tomatoes. “I have worked for years with essentially the same timing of my tomato plantings. We do one hoophouse planting and then four in the field. That’s intended to give us tomatoes to harvest from June until mid-October. What I’ve noticed in the last four or five years is our late planted tomatoes that we have for years targeted with putting in the field around the twentieth of June, that planting is too early. Those tomatoes seem to be growing faster and ripening earlier, whereas we always wanted that last planting in tomatoes to begin being ready for harvest in early September. So we’re starting to plant them later than we ever have before.”

Like many other growers around the country, Ken has had to adjust his crop mix and planting plans to adapt to warmer and more variable spring and fall temperatures, though the length of the growing season does not seem to have changed in his area. He has found opportunity in season extension and has been successful in increasing cool-season crop production on the farm by expanding greenhouse and hoophouse space. But more variable temperatures in spring and fall, plus falling market prices led him to drop one of his major crops. “For about twenty years lettuce was our main crop. We used to grow it for the wholesale market. We don’t grow much lettuce anymore. It was always susceptible to hot spells early in the spring season, or too much rain, or too early a cold spell in the fall and so forth, whereas other crops are not nearly as sensitive to that kind of variability.”

The well-documented earlier arrival of downy mildew, a devastating disease of melons and cucurbits, has required Ken to adjust his plantings of crops like cantaloupe and winter squash. Downy mildew spends the winter down south in Florida and moves up the east coast as summer temperatures increase. “It used to be that downy mildew would appear in eastern North Carolina in early August and then move westward. We could safely grow susceptible crops up until sometime in August and then those diseases would come. In the last three or four years, downy mildew has started appearing in North Carolina in June. In response to that, we shifted our plantings of susceptible crops earlier by at least a month because if we plant it later, it all dies before it matures.”

Ken is fairly confident that under current climate conditions, he has the resources he needs to continue to farm successfully. “There’s really a lot of variability here in central North Carolina, probably more so than in a lot of other parts of the country. We kind of take it for granted that there’s going to be wet periods and dry periods and unusual hot and cold here. We’re kind of used to it already. It just seems like climate change will require us, at least in this part of the country, to kind of up our game of adaptability and diversity and so forth. I think the reality is we’ve got to recognize changes are happening and adapt to them. It’s high time that we take that seriously and get on with it.”

Ken has served the Southeast for many years as a respected leader in sustainable agriculture and local food systems. In 1993 he was named Carolina Farmer of the Year by the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, a regional sustainable agriculture organization serving North and South Carolina.

 

Straus Family Creamery

Straus Family Creamery

Straus Family Creamery

Albert Straus, Straus Family Creamery. Credit: Straus Family Creamery

In 2020 and 2021, we have not had any significant rain at all. It’s been the driest year on record. It’s never happened before that we haven’t had any rain, and it looks like we’re going to continue to have extreme shortages into the future.

Albert Straus

Straus Family Creamery

Southwest Region | Petaluma, CA

Main Product: Livestock

Scale: 500 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Shift to intensive grazing, add processing/retail marketing, growers’ network, carbon farming.

Albert Straus returned to his family’s dairy farm in the late 1970s during a time of dramatic change in the dairy industry. Small family dairies were under increasing pressure to either get big or get out of the business. Returning home after earning a Bachelor’s degree in Dairy Science, Albert thought he could see a third option, one that put new best agricultural practices to work saving the family farm. In the early 1980s Albert and his father, Bill, implemented no-till seeding of crops to prevent soil erosion and reduce fuel consumption. They were already farming without herbicides or chemical fertilizers.

Despite these innovations, falling milk prices continued to threaten the economic viability of their dairy business and Albert wondered if the growing consumer interest in organic food offered a solution. He began to imagine a new kind of market for his milk, one that reflected the true costs of production, promoted responsible land stewardship and offered a viable, principled and sustainable business model for small dairy farms. Albert realized that going organic would allow him to fully embrace his deeply held belief in land stewardship, while also addressing the challenging economic realities of family farms in an era of intense industrialization.

Inspired by these ethical and economic considerations, Albert transitioned his farm to organic production in 1993 and founded the Straus Family Creamery in 1994. “How do you create a viable farming system?” Albert asks. “That’s the challenge we’ve tried to address with certified organic production and collaboration with the 12 family farms supplying our creamery. What I’ve tried to do is create a sustainable organic farming model that is good for the Earth, the soil, the animals and the people working on these farms, plus helps revitalize rural communities.”

Want to read more? You can find the full version of this story in the Second Edition of Resilient Agriculture, available for purchase here.

Fillmore Farms

Fillmore Farms

Fillmore Farms

The Fillmore Family, Fillmore Farms. Credit: Fillmore Farms

Ryan Fillmore

Fillmore Farms

Southwest Region | Gridley, CA

Main Product: Fruits & Nuts

Scale: 230 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Shift to organic, added cover crops and winter irrigation.

STORY COMING SOON!

 

CS Ranch

CS Ranch

CS Ranch

Julia Davis Stafford, CS Ranch, Cimarron, New Mexico. Credit: Julia Stafford.

We have several rivers that run through the ranch and during all of my childhood and young adolescence the rivers were always flowing. You could count on them as a source of water for livestock. That has definitely changed over the last few years. The rivers now routinely dry up in stretches and that has been devastating in terms of pasture use. So we have had to really scramble to address our water system where always before the rivers ran through most of the pastures.

Julia Davis Stafford

CS Ranch

Southwest Region | Cimarron, NM

Main Product: Livestock

Scale: 138,000 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Holistic management, dynamic stocking, shift to no-till and to multi-use perennial forage species in irrigated pastures, add local foods café in nearby town.

This story is based on a 2013 interview.

The CS Ranch is located on 130,000 acres of upland shortgrass prairie at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northeastern New Mexico. Cattle and quarter horses have been the focus of production since the ranch was established by Frank Springer in 1873. Today, Julia Davis Stafford and her five siblings, Springer’s great-grandchildren, work together to manage cattle production and marketing, farming, hunting and quarter horse production.

Julia was raised on the ranch and has actively worked with her family to manage the cow/calf and stocker enterprises for more than thirty years. She takes the lead on strategic planning and water resource management for the ranch, and manages cattle production on the headquarters division near Cimarron. Julia uses planned grazing practices to raise cattle on native grasslands and improved hayfields, which are irrigated from the Cimarron River.

For many years, the cowherd numbered between 2,500 and 3,000 head, but fifteen years of continued drought have forced Julia to destock the ranch, and today the herd is down to about 850 head. CS Ranch sells cattle mostly into wholesale markets with some direct sales locally.

Over the years, long-term weather challenges on the ranch have included variability in precipitation, dry periods and drought. Because grassland production depends entirely on precipitation, either as rain or snow, dry periods and drought are challenging because the grasslands are so responsive to variations in precipitation. Wind also creates some challenges, because it tends to both dry out grassland through evaporative loss and cause soil erosion. Variability in winter snow is particularly challenging because the snowpack that builds up over winter in the mountains is the main source of river water on the ranch.

“New Mexico is very arid to begin with and cyclical drought is very common here, so what I think of as our average annual precipitation is about fourteen to sixteen inches of rainfall,” Julia explains. “That’s what we hope for. Most of our ranch is upland shortgrass prairie, and we have a little bit of irrigated ground along the rivers that we mostly use to graze and raise hay for winter feed. Keeping the hayfields alive in times of drought is really tough. So that’s led to us selecting varieties that are drought tolerant and trying to minimize tillage so that we can increase soil organic matter and develop better soil health to make the most of what moisture we do get.”

The hayfields used to be flood irrigated, but over the years water-efficient, center-pivot irrigation has been installed in most of them. The water supply on the ranch is almost entirely from surface waters fed by meltwater from the winter snowpack in the nearby mountains. “The winter snowpack has been slim to none over the past ten years,” said Julia. “Over the last decade of drought, the flood-irrigated areas have received water only sporadically. So a lot of the improved grass species, the bromes and orchard grass and those sorts of species, have disappeared, because we simply run out of water and can’t irrigate enough to keep them alive.”

Julia has noticed many other changes in weather in the past decade or so, particularly more variable precipitation and more extreme drought, warmer winters, and more wind. “Over time we tend to go in about ten-year cycles,” she explains. “But I think this drought has been longer than the last recorded cycle.” Julia has also noticed that winters have gotten warmer since she was a kid. “I couldn’t tell you exactly how much warmer in terms of degrees or anything, but it does seem that the winter temperatures have gotten warmer and we have less snow. Summer temperature is possibly warmer too, but that hasn’t struck me as being as noticeable as the wintertime temperature changes.” Winds, always a part of life in northern New Mexico, are different these days as well, according to Julia. “It seems like when I was a kid that wind blew mostly in the spring and the month of March was always very windy, but now it seems like the real strong windy times have increased and are more common throughout the year.”

These changes in weather have caused Julia to make some adjustments in production, most notably the reduction in herd size, but also in the management of the irrigated hayfields. “We’ve shifted very much over to a no-till type of approach under the center pivots,” said Julia. “Before, when we would plow up an alfalfa field, we would plant wheat and graze it periodically before planting a hayfield again, but we are going now to less and less planting or plowing, just less soil disturbance overall. We have shifted more to no-till and we are using perennial varieties that are good for both grazing and for making hay. The more that I’ve learned about soil health, the more obvious it has become that the less disturbance, the better. Having a permanent crop is better for the soil, better for the water, just better all the way around.”

Julia says that other ranchers in her community perceive many of the same changes in weather. Talking about the drought is “the first and automatic topic of conversation,” she says. “Everybody is bemoaning the drought. I would say that besides the drought being of tremendous concern, other ranchers also agree that that we just don’t have winters and the snowpack like we used to. And everyone is complaining about the wind. There is a very definite feeling of anxiety among other farmers and ranchers and townspeople around here about the lack of water, because many of the towns are facing water rationing and dwindling supplies and that sort of thing. People are leaving towns in this area and moving to metropolitan areas. I’m sure that weather is a factor in this because as agriculture decreases, business and prosperity in the area decline. There is definitely the perception that this is the worst drought that anybody has ever experienced.”

Julia says that the continuing drought has created some concern about the future at the CS Ranch. “I’d say there is anxiety over wondering, ‘Is this the new normal?’ There is just a real awareness that if you continue to destock, at a certain point, how can the ranch keep going with fewer and fewer cattle? We are also concerned about the impact on our livelihoods and on our employees. We haven’t really done any thinking ahead ten years and asking the question, ‘What are we going to do if things keep going this way?’

Thinking about the future, Julia feels fairly confident in the management practices she uses to reduce the risks of weather variability and extremes, particularly planned grazing, soil health, water conservation and the use of drought-tolerant forage varieties and cattle that are well adapted to the region. Julia says that if climate change continues to intensify, she’ll likely just continue to destock the ranch, figure out how to cut back on the need for irrigation and how to supply water to the remaining stock if surface waters were to fail.

Julia also plans to keep learning how to improve existing management practices and about new practices through participation in groups like the Quivira Coalition. “What is always tremendously encouraging to me is just the networking at these various agricultural gatherings, talking to people, and going to listen to them speak,” Julia explains. “Sometimes, particularly just after I get home from a Quivira Coalition conference, I feel we’ll be able to sort through this and go on just fine. And sometimes I feel really anxious about how we will keep going on if these same patterns — the drops in moisture and increasing temperatures — continue. If they continue to play out on those same paths, it’s going to be very tough in not very long.”

Julia has been actively involved in community-based governance of regional water issues for many years. She has served on the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission, as a board member of the Cimarron Watershed Alliance and as a member of the Western Landowners Alliance. She is an active member of the Quivira Coalition.