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!

 

White Oak Pastures

White Oak Pastures

White Oak Pastures

Will Harris, White Oak Pastures, Bluffton, Georgia. Credit: White Oak Pastures.

Certainly drought is the most difficult for us to deal with.  My father was still talking about the drought of 1954 when he died in 2000. Drought is not new here, but I do think that the variability of precipitation and temperature is increasing. I don’t have a lot of irrigation, and I’m sorry I don’t. We just don’t and probably won’t have it, because we don’t have a lot of ground water here.

Will Harris

White Oak Pastures

Southeast Region | Bluffton, GA

Main Product: Livestock

Scale: 2500 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Shift to regenerative grazing multispecies pastured livestock production, add on-farm processing, direct marketing, agrotourism, solar farm, carbon farming.

This story is based on a 2014 interview.

Will Harris owns and operates White Oak Pastures located about ninety miles from the Gulf of Mexico in southwest Georgia near Bluffton.  Established by Will’s great-grandfather in 1866, Will is the fourth generation to own and manage the farm.  After World War II, Will’s father, ran the farm using the industrial model. Will helped his father with the farm when he was growing up and then came back to the farm to take on full-time management after graduating from college in 1976.  For the next fifteen years, Will continued raising calves and operating a feedlot using industrial practices, but declining profitability through the 1980s caused him to begin exploring higher-value alternative markets. In the mid-1990s he began to transition the farm from industrial to grass-finished beef production using management intensive grazing practices.

Today, White Oak Pastures produces a diversity of livestock and other products on about 2,500 acres. All the livestock produced at White Oak Pastures are pasture-raised and processed on farm in state-of-the-art USDA-inspected beef and poultry processing plants. The plants were designed by Dr. Temple Grandin, the animal scientist renowned for her pioneering work in the humane handling of livestock.  The whole farm is designed as a zero-waste system and the inedible materials and wastewater from the processing plants is recycled back to the farmland through composting and irrigation systems. The farm is powered by a large solar array that provides about 30 percent of power needs. 

With the help of his daughters Jenni and Jodi, and Jodi’s husband John, Will manages the one hundred and twenty employees needed to make this diverse farming system work. Together they use multispecies rotational grazing practices to manage the production of red meats from a 700-cow beef herd, 1100 nanny goats, a 1000-ewe flock, 150 doe rabbits, and 30 sows, and poultry meats from the 320,000 chickens, turkeys, geese, ducks and guinea hens raised on the farm each year. The farm also produces organic vegetables on five acres, offers education tours of the farm, and recently added on-farm dining and lodging facilities. 

White Oak Pastures sells its products through wholesale and direct markets. The farm has a CSA and an on-farm store and restaurant and distributes fresh meats to grocery stores and specialty markets throughout the Southeast. All of White Oak Pasture’s employees make above the minimum wage, have health insurance and get a yearly bonus.

Drought and heat have long played an important role in shaping the potential productivity at White Oak Pastures.  Will thinks that temperature and precipitation have grown more variable during his lifetime at the farm, but not to such an extent that he has had to adjust any production. Part of this may be due to his long experience raising livestock and to the flexibility of raising livestock on pasture. “If I do say so myself, we’re pretty good cattle people,” says Will. “We’ve been doing it for a long, long time on the same farm. We haven’t made a lot of terrible mistakes in recent years, because we learned how to do it. Our success is mostly at the mercies of the market and the weather and this gets into some of the changes we’ve made.” Will goes on to explain that improved soil quality on the farm has increased forage production and lowered production costs. “When I started changing the way I farm,” he says, “the organic matter in my soil was less than one-half of one percent. Today it’s over five percent. We’re able to grow our own forage and that takes a lot of the cost out of this compared to buying and bringing forage in.” 

Will uses a no-till over-seeding system to produce high-quality forages for his livestock throughout the year on non-irrigated, warm season perennial pastures. For winter grazing, Will overseeds the pastures with annual cool-season forages such as cereal rye, ryegrass and clover. “I either mow or graze very short ahead of the seeding and then broadcast annual forage seed over the pasture with a truck,” he explains. “After the pasture is seeded, I come behind with a harrow that I’ve modified so I do not disturb the soil too much and then an aggressive drag behind the harrow to put the seed in good contact with the soil surface. Then I put the animals through the pasture to walk the seed into the ground. We don’t disturb the turf much this way and I always get a stand. I probably put a little too much seed in there, but I get a stand.”

The ability to control processing on-farm and sell into high-value markets has also made the farming system more stable despite increased weather variability and extremes. “We’ve gone from selling live cattle to pasture-raising and on-farm processing five red meat species and five poultry species as well as organic vegetables and eggs. What we think is probably the coolest part of our story is the way the farm has come full circle in the century and a half we’ve had it. What we do today is so remarkably similar to what my great-grandfather and grandfather did, except we’ve got refrigeration, internal combustion engines and regulations. It’s very similar to what they did, much more similar than what my father did and I did when I was a young man.” 

Will says that other farmers in his region have also noticed more variable precipitation and higher temperatures and most have adapted by increasing their use of irrigation. “There is far more irrigation in my area than there ever used to be. Way more. The only reason I don’t have it is because I’m not on a good aquifer.” Will goes on to share his concern about the waste of water he has seen in his region. “Forever I’ve heard about water wars in the West.  I don’t know too much about them. In the East, there’s always been plenty of water for everybody, and water here is free. There’s some very token permitting that’s required, but there is not much to it. Once you get that, you can dig as big a hole as you want and pump as much water out as you want, and the only costs to you are the energy costs to doing the pumping and also digging the well. As a result, we grossly waste water.” 

Will has seen farmers in his area irrigate in order to moisten the soil to prepare for planting, then irrigate again to water in fertilizers and pesticides, and then water a third time after seeding the crop. “That happens a lot,” says Will, “not occasionally … a lot. We’re now starting to feel a little bit of competition for water with environmentalists and urban communities. I think that if things continue, and they usually do, there’ll be some sort of regulation put on water use in agriculture and that will dramatically affect what we can grow. My system of farming struggles to compete with irrigated cotton and peanut farms, because they are growing subsidized crops and they gross a lot of money per acre compared to my grazing operation. It is very difficult to pay one hundred, two hundred, three hundred dollars an acre annual rent with a grazing operation, but if water becomes scarce, land rents will come down and we could afford to expand what we do.”

As weather variability and extremes have increased, Will says that he has put more time and effort into looking for new opportunities that might come with the changes.  “I’ve read a little bit about climate change,” Will explains. “I don’t know much about it, but it seems that for me, the bad part is more extremes in terms of temperature and rainfall, but the good news is it’s generally warmer and wetter, and warmer and wetter grows stuff. If it’s going to be warmer and wetter, that will benefit some of our species more than others. I have goats, sheep and cattle, and I don’t know that I know what works best, but I’m going to be sensitive to it, to see what does the best. I do know that geese, guineas and ducks handle heat and cold better than the chickens. If the weather becomes warmer and there is more moisture on an annual basis, but it is more erratic, I might change the species that I grow in the pastures, both the crops as well as the livestock. I’m at least taking some notes. I’m still growing more what the market wants than what is adapting well, but I’m sensitive to that. I’ll get the boot on climate change. It’s either happening or it’s not, but I will be watching closely to see if there are advantages we can take of it.”

Will says that if the changes in weather variability increase in coming years, he will have to make some changes, particularly if dry periods and droughts intensify. “Sooner or later, I’ll have to find some way to irrigate,” he says. Will thinks that soil quality will continue to increase on the farm and that will help to buffer more variable rainfall. “The 5 percent organic matter of the soil will keep building,” Will explains.  “It already helps make the land somewhat drought tolerant, not drought proof, but drought tolerant. If the variability stays about like this, we’ll be okay. If it gets a little worse, we’ll have to irrigate. If it’s a lot worse, even irrigation won’t help.” 

Will Harris is active in community and agricultural organizations and has been widely recognized for his innovative production system and marketing practices. He was named the Georgia Small Businessman of the Year in 2011 by the U.S. Small Business Administration.  The Georgia Conservancy named him 2012 Conservationist of the Year. Will was named the Georgia Farmer of the Year in 2012 and in 2014, Will was nationally recognized by the Natural Resources Defense Council as a recipient of the Sustainable Livestock Producer Growing Green Award.

 

Ela Family Farms

Ela Family Farms

Ela Family Farms

Steve Ela, Ela Family Farms, Hotchkiss, Colorado. Credit: Steve Ela.

“I used to say it would be one year in ten we would expect a really bad year, maybe another two or three years we would have some frost. Now I would say we have frost every year. The one-in-ten year with a 10% crop, that still holds, but now we’re having 50% crops many other years. When I say this was a frost-free area, it used to be that growers didn’t need wind machines and other frost protection measures and they got though just fine. Now we have the whole place covered with wind machines.

Steve Ela

Ela Family Farms

Southwest Region | Hotchkiss, CO

Main Product: Fruits & Nuts

Scale: 100 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Shift to direct markets, diversified fruit cultivars, added annuals and on farm processing, added frost protection and more water.

This Story is based on a 2013 interview.

As a fourth-generation fruit grower on the western slope of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, Steve Ela is proud to carry on a family tradition of innovative orcharding more than a century in the making. Ela Family Farms is a hundred acre farm with eighty-five acres planted in twenty-three varieties of apples and twenty-nine varieties of certified organic pears, peaches, cherries, plums, and tomatoes. Located near Hotchkiss, it is in the “frost-free” region known for having the best conditions for fruit production in Colorado: 300 days of sunshine, low humidity, ample high-quality water, warm days and cool nights and a relatively long frost-free period.

Steve and his parents work on the farm with the help of four employees year-round. They also employ up to eighteen people during the height of the growing season. Ela Family Farms produces about 1.5 million pounds of fruit each year, virtually all of it distributed in Colorado through direct markets as fresh fruit or value-added products such as applesauce, fruit butters, jams and cider. Farm products are sold through the Internet and a CSA, at farmers’ markets all along Colorado’s Front Range and to specialty food stores and gourmet restaurants throughout the state.

When Steve returned to take over the management of his family’s farm after completing college in 1990, he began thinking about diversifying into direct markets and transitioning to certified organic production to improve profitability and environmental quality. He also replaced the existing furrow irrigation system with more efficient sprinkler and drip irrigation, to reduce water use, and began transitioning to new varieties of fruit trees better suited to organic practices and direct markets. Steve can’t say for sure if the weather changes he has noticed are just normal variations or a sign of climate change. What he does know is that more variable weather and a lengthening growing season have required him to make some significant changes in production practices to maintain the productivity and profitability of Ela Family Farms.

“The farm is in what was once known as a relatively frost-free area,” Steve explains. “Historically, it has been in fruit trees since the 1920s, but in the last decade we have had some spring frost damage every year now. Five or six of our earliest bloom years have been in the last ten years.” He has also seen the fall season lengthen noticeably. “There are some varieties of apples, like Fuji, a late-season apple that ten years ago we weren’t sure we could grow here. Now we commonly pick them two weeks before the end of the season.”

Although the lengthening growing season has improved growing conditions for some apple varieties on the farm, production risks have increased, particularly in the last decade. “We’re experiencing earlier springs and more variable temperatures in the spring,” says Steve. “As an example, in 2013, on April fifteenth we were at 13 degrees. That is more typical of February or March temperatures. To get below 20 in April is crazy, and we had two nights below that. So it’s not just early blooming, but late, abnormally cold temperatures. April and May are the huge frost months for us. Peaches bloom mid-April, apples bloom toward the end of April. Any sub-freezing temperatures during that time are pretty destructive. Spring temperatures control whether or not we have a crop.”

Variable spring frosts also create a lot of uncertainty in orchard management, because fruit trees are managed to reduce the number of fruits and to evenly space the fruits on a tree to increase fruit size and quality. The final crop load — the number of fruit remaining on the tree to mature — determines the season’s yield potential. “Not knowing from year to year how much frost damage we are going to have means it’s much more difficult to manage crop load,” Steve explains. “If you’re in an area where you’re not going to have much frost, you can prune and thin in the fall with confidence, because there is a low risk of losing additional fruits to frost damage. Now, we never know from one year to the next how much winter and spring damage we are likely to get, so we have to leave a lot more fruit out there during pruning and early thinning. If it turns out we don’t have frost in the spring, then we’re behind the curve getting it thinned off in the spring. It’s this not knowing which way to jump that is really difficult.”

Steve has also noticed changes in summer and winter weather that have complicated management over the last decade. Warmer and wetter summers have increased disease management challenges. Over the last several years, the hottest time of year has shifted from early August to June, when temperatures regularly reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit, sometimes day after day. Rainfall patterns also seem to be changing. It used to be common for no measurable rain to fall between the end of May through late August, but now consistent light rains in July and August are common. This rain is not enough to water the trees, but leaves them moist enough to increase the risk of disease damage. And winter low temperatures have become more extreme. Recently, Steve had to purchase propane burners and use his wind machines to try and buffer extreme cold temperatures. “Peaches are very sensitive to cold temperatures in the winter,” he says. “We bought our first wind machines in 1991, but I’ve never run them in the winter until the last two years. We have been below critical temperatures for peaches in the winter the last three years, at some point or several times.”

Steve has made other changes on the farm to reduce increased climate risk. He has added more wind machines, makes use of microclimates, and is considering adding protected growing space. Steve explains, “We had a couple of wind machines in ’91. They cost twenty to thirty thousand dollars a piece, so we didn’t buy them all at once. We probably put the last one in about eight years ago to finish covering the whole property. We have a hundred acres, so we have eleven of wind machines.” The farm is on a hill about three quarters of a mile long with a number of swales and other landscape features that influence temperature. “I say we live in a frost-free site, but on some cold nights we can have a four-degree difference across the farm,” explains Steve. “I have some ground out there that has historically been planted in trees, but I will not plant trees there now, because it is a cold pocket and the risk is too high. I’m looking at the warmer spots on the farm and that’s where I put my most sensitive crops.”

Steve is also careful to select frost-tolerant varieties, particularly of peaches. “Within peaches, some varieties are more susceptible than others. When evaluating which peach variety we’re going to use, keep or re-plant, I’m looking at that frost sensitivity. We’re certainly finding varieties that are more likely to come through a spring frost than less likely, even though that means we may have to do more thinning.” Steve is also considering adding frost protection structures to his cherry orchards, because of increasing risk of frost damage in the crop.

Asked about his confidence in the future, Steve notes that he is still in business in an area where fruit farms have declined by 75 percent over the last twenty years. He puts a lot of that down to his choice of direct markets. “We started changing that in 2000 because of bad economics and now we direct market 100 percent of our fruit. We’ve completely changed our business model in twelve years. Fortunately it’s worked, we’re still here. But we’ve made a conscious effort not to play in that international or even national commodity market. We have access to a little higher value market, where we have more control.”

The high returns possible with direct markets have buffered the increased production risks the farm has faced over the last decade. Steve notes that direct markets have also opened up new opportunities for him to diversify crops, because his customers are willing, even eager, to try something new. According to Steve, “With the direct marketing, we have a little more control on price, which means we don’t have to hit a home run every year to still be viable. I’ve looked at the marketing as a way to mitigate some of that crop production risk. Can we still make money if we have a half crop versus having to have a full crop every year?”

He goes on to explain some other benefits of selling his crop this way: “Direct marketing provides some additional risk management because it also means we can pick more varieties that maybe aren’t suitable for wholesale markets, but maybe have characteristics we can handle in direct markets — for example, a variety that’s frost hardy but doesn’t ship well. So we can pick and play with some of those varieties that we haven’t been able to before.” Steve believes that the uniform product requirements of industrial commodity markets increase risks in fruit production because growers are not free to select varieties best adapted to their particular farm conditions.

But there is a downside to direct marketing — it takes a lot of time and some additional skills and it keeps Steve out of the orchard. “I now spend 50 to 60 percent of my time marketing,” he explains, “whereas ten years ago 80 percent of my time was growing. I have become a worse grower because I have to spend my time marketing. As a farm, that has been a good trade-off. We are doing much better than we did before. But I would rather be a grower than a marketer. I’m a decent marketer, I don’t hate it, but I would still rather be a grower. Choosing this marketing avenue that takes a lot more of my time is in part about risk management, which is in part about weather.”

Like many growers in the Southwest, Steve has grave concerns about the future of his farm’s water supply, which is renewed each year by snowpack meltwaters. “Water management is always a concern for us because we’re dependent on irrigation. We’re going to look at the snowpack each year to determine how our water management might have to change. Every year it is different. Our average rainfall here is ten inches, and it does not necessarily fall in the summer when we need it. I’ve had people say to me that with climate change, it gets warmer, and you guys will be set. No, climate change is more variable, which doesn’t help us, and if it’s warmer, we have less snow. We’re absolutely dependent on irrigation water in the summer. And if that regularly becomes less, it will definitely put a crimp on what we can do.”

Steve has leased a neighboring farm purely as insurance against drought. “On this farm we’re on we have adequate water rights in average years,” Steve explains. “In dry years we’re short, so we lease a neighboring farm that is largely fallow right now, mostly for the water, just because it keeps me from getting more gray hair. It’s an insurance policy, that’s what it is. And if other water rights that we can access come up for sale, I’m going to be right in there trying to buy them. Water in the West has always been competitive. If it decreases, and especially if we continue to have population growth, there’s going to be greater and greater pressures on that water for domestic use. It’s going to get ugly.”

Because tree fruits are long-lived, Steve is hopeful, but concerned about the nature of the climate risks facing the farm. “We’re investing a lot of money into planting new trees. It costs somewhere around eight to twelve thousand dollars in the first year to plant a new acre of trees and it’s a ten- or twelve-year payback period if we do everything right. So any time you put more risk in that equation, it’s scary. It’s a dilemma. You can’t really quit planting out of fear, because if you don’t renovate, plant and keep moving forward, pretty soon you’re going to have a bunch of old trees, with nothing coming up beyond them to support the farm. It’s a catch-22 and that is unnerving, and that worries me. It’s certainly something I’ve thought about quite a bit. I feel confident that we have access to some of the best tools and information out there, but does that mean we’re going to successfully manage it? I’m not confident of that at all. Ultimately it’s going to come down to what is economic and what makes sense.”

Steve served as board president of the Organic Farming Research Foundation from 2004 to 2009 and regularly collaborates with University of Colorado researchers on organic fruit production research.

 

Shepherd Farms

Shepherd Farms

SHEPHERD FARMS

Dan Shepherd, Shepherd Farms, Clifton MO. Credit: Tim Baker, Univ. Missouri Cooperative Extension.

I’ve been out here for 40 some years, it’s really hard for me to notice any changes in weather patterns. As far the moisture, the drought and the frost and the freeze, we’ve always had those problems. I really can’t see a whole lot of change, even in 40 years.

Dan Shepherd

Shepherd Farms

Midwest Region | Clifton, MO

Main Product: Fruits & Nuts

Scale: 300 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Orchard renovation, shift to disease tolerant cultivars, improve on-farm processing, add custom-shelling operation.

This story is based on a 2014 interview.

Dan Shepherd helped plant the first fifteen acres of pecan trees at Shepherd Farms near Clifton Hill, in north central Missouri, when he was fourteen years old. The pecan orchard was just the first of many alternative crops that Jerrell Shepherd, the farm’s founder and Dan’s father, put into place on the 1900-acre corn, soybean and wheat farm he purchased in the late 1960s in an effort to improve profitability through diversification into high-value specialty crops. Dan continued his father’s tradition of innovation when he took on full-time management of Shepherd Farms in 1985 by adding buffalo and gamma grass to the annual grains and pecans grown on the farm. Dan integrated all the crops and livestock through an innovative agroforestry system featuring alley cropping and management-intensive grazing.

Although the buffalo and gamma grass are now gone and most of the 4,000-acre farm is once again in an annual grain rotation, Dan still manages about 300 acres of mature pecan orchards. Pecans are processed on the farm, in a purpose-built facility that cracks, shells and packages them for direct market sales. Dan markets his pecans and other products through the Internet and an on-farm store open from October through December each year.

Like tree fruits, the production of tree nuts is complicated by variable weather during periods of temperature and moisture sensitivity in the annual life cycle of the plant. Over the years, Dan has learned how to produce a profitable crop of pecans despite the highly variable weather that is normal in his region. Pecans are sensitive to cold weather and frosts during the spring bloom, which typically occurs in late April. Drought in the summer and fall during the period of nut fill can cause small and misshapen nut meats. And although pecan trees are considered flood tolerant, flooding anytime except during winter, when they are dormant, can stress the trees and reduce nut yields.

Dan can’t say that he has perceived any change in the weather over the forty-plus years he has lived at Shepherd Farms. Through the years, the pecan bloom has been hit by frost pretty regularly, about once every four years. Sometimes this actually improves yields because a mild frost will reduce the nut load just enough to improve yield and quality. The diversity of pecan varieties also helps reduce the risk of spring freeze damage. In most years, at least some of the eight varieties grown in the orchard escape frost damage completely and rarely have any of them suffered a total loss due to spring freezes or frosts.

The Shepherd Farms’ orchards are not irrigated, so drought in the late summer and early fall has been a challenge at times; however, Dan says that summer temperatures or the frequency of heat waves or droughts have not changed noticeably at the farm over the last forty years. “Variability in precipitation affects the pecans more than anything else,” he explains; “I need a rain in August, and if I don’t get it, the pecans really suffer.” But pecan trees are tough once they’ve had some time to get established, especially to temperature extremes: “In the wintertime, I don’t care what the weather brings,” Dan says. “These pecan trees, the central and northern varieties that I grow, are pretty tough. The coldest day we’ve had so far this winter [2013] was 17 below, and I’m not worried about anything that’s three years or older. In summertime the heat just doesn’t affect them, it gets up to 100 or 103 degrees, it’s no big deal, they’re made to take that, temperature wise. Moisture wise, they can take a flood in the wintertime, it really doesn’t hurt them, but any other time, a flood does. And dry weather hurts them in the summer and fall.”

Pecans are native to the bottomlands of the Mississippi River basin and are well adapted to the wet conditions and recurring floods. The Shepherd orchard is planted in fertile floodplain soils along the east fork of the Chariton River. The river floods quite often, but the Shepherds built a levee in the 1970s that protects the orchard. “I’ve got a ten-mile levee on this farm,” Dan explains, “and that’s my life blood. My father put levees in, and we built them all ourselves, they’re private levees, and we treat them with great respect. We keep them mowed, it’s our main farm road, and we keep them up. That levee system is my whole life blood.”

“I do have a problem with flooding in my part of the country,” Dan goes on to say. “I’m in the river country up here in Missouri, and I’m on a river that does flood regularly. I’ve seen floods in every month of the year. Some of the worst floods we’ve had were in spring, when the ground’s still frozen. You get a bunch of snow on the ground, the frozen ground, and you get an inch of rain on top, you can have a pretty good flood. Even though we have a levee on the farm, and it’s probably one of the best levees in the country, it still can be topped like it was last year [2013].”

Shepherd Farms experienced unprecedented flooding and drought in 2013. “One of the worst floods we’ve ever had on the farm was in April 2013, and one of the worst droughts we’ve ever seen came that summer,” Dan says. “We got them both in the same year. Flooding really hurt the pecan trees in the spring, being underwater for a week or two, and that really set them back. Then turn right around and June 23 was the last rain we had until somewhere up in the middle of October, so that hurt the fill on the pecans.” Thinking back on that year, Dan says, “We got hit with water both ways in 2013. Too much water and not enough and at the wrong time of the year, that is tough.”

Although Dan has not noticed any clear trends in changing weather patterns, the last decade or so has included several unusually extreme weather events on the farm. He experienced total crop loss from a spring freeze for the first time in 2007, and the levee was breached for the first time since it was built in 1970 by a flood in July 2008, and then again in 2013. Dan can’t remember another time in the forty years he’s been on the farm when there were so many dry summers in a row, like those in 2011, ’12 and ’13. But Dan sees these events, though unusual, as just part of life in Missouri. “I think a lot of this is just typical of weather in my region,” he says. “We’ve got the Gulf of Mexico just south of us, it pumps a lot of moisture up. We have the big mountains in Colorado out there to stop those systems and dry them out before they come. We’ve got Canada up north that can drop a lot of cold air on us. Our weather is so variable that it’s hard to get a grasp on any changes that might be coming down the pike.”

Dan learned a lot from his father about using weather forecasts in farm planning and fieldwork scheduling. Dan explains, “My father was really an excellent weather forecaster. He was mainly in the radio business. He loved farming, but he also ran a bunch of radio stations. He had the first Doppler radar in Missouri in a radio station, right here in a little town nearby.”

Dan also has an interest in climatology and has read widely on the subject of climate history. “Do we have climate change? Sure we do!,” he says. “I can remember back in the mid ’70s to the early ’80s, we were going into a little ice age. Then we were supposed to be burning up and they’re going to call it global warming. And now they call it climate change. I’m enough of a climate history buff to know that we go through these cycles. We have twenty-year cycles, we have two-hundred-year cycles. When the Thames River froze up in the little ice age and when we had the terrible winters of the early 1900s. A lady here in Clifton Hill said that she remembered it snowing on June 6 in 1911, but that was in 1911, and we had global freezing then. Those are weather cycles.”

Thinking about the future, Dan expressed concern about the drought situation in California. “They raise so much of our food that we’re definitely in trouble there. I was just reading something the other day about some of the droughts they’ve had in California, and it wasn’t too long ago, like 500 to 650 AD, that California had a 150-year drought. And back before that, around the Year Zero, there was a 180-year drought. What are we going to do when we get a 180-year drought in California?”

Dan Shepherd’s work developing gamma grass as a native forage crop and his innovative agroforestry system integrating grains, nuts, forages, buffalo and seed crops has been nationally recognized by the USDA’s Agriculture Research Service, the National Agroforestry Center and the Center for Agroforestry at the University of Missouri. Shepherd Farms is one of sixty farms and ranches selected for the USDA-SARE publication The New American Farmer: Profiles of Agricultural Innovation.

 

Red Fern Farm

Red Fern Farm

Red Fern Farm

Kathy Dice and Tom Wahl of Red Fern Farm. Credit: Sustainable Iowa Land Trust

Tom Wahl & Kathy Dice

Red Fern Farm

Midwest Region | Grandview, IA

Main Product: Fruit & Nuts

Scale: 15 acres under management

Featured Resilience Behaviors:

Shift to perennial polyculture, integrate livestock/mob grazing, add irrigation/tree shelters.

Story coming soon!