(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to Farm Connections.

I'm your host Dan Hoffman.

On today's episode, we chat with Dayna Burtness of Nettle Valley Farm about her environmentally conscious farming practices.

We follow up on farm safety with extension educator Clara LaCanne.

And the University of Minnesota Extension provides us with a new Best Practices.

All here today on Farm Connections.

(upbeat country music) - [Announcer] Welcome to Farm Connections with your host, Dan Hoffman.

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You can call them for a quote today.

- Welcome to Farm Connections.

We have a wonderful guest today to talk about regenerative agriculture.

Her name is Dayna Burtness from Nettle Valley Farm.

Welcome to Farm Connections.

- Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

- What's regenerative agriculture?

- I knew you were gonna ask.

So, first off, I'm not an expert.

I'm a beginning/maybe moving into intermediate pastured hog finisher, but I'm really passionate about figuring out ways that we can use regenerative agriculture principles on our farm.

So with that caveat, I would say, I mean, there's so many different ways to interpret it.

You could talk about leaving a piece of land better than you found it.

For us, it's a focus on soil health and doing that via pastured livestock, focusing on reducing tillage as much as you can with a pig, which is a whole nother subject, using a lot of diversity on our landscape and encouraging biodiversity, diverse enterprises.

And also just having a really ruthless focus on our holistic context and just making sure that we're doing all of this for a reason.

'Cause if you're never asking yourself what's the point of all of this, you tend to, it can tend to creep off in a unsustainable direction.

So, that's a long answer for a short question.

- That was a very good answer and Dayna, with all due respect, that does sound like an expert.

- I am an expert at wanting to know more about regenerative agriculture.

But I think an important point to make about regenerative agriculture is just, it's just the newest term for practices that a lot of indigenous cultures all over the world have been doing for millennia.

So, I wouldn't want anyone to think that regenerative agriculture is some sort of new set of techniques that we invented in the 2000s.

That's, I'm not a, I don't know a lot about that, but that's one of the things that I'm most excited to learn about is indigenous food ways and learning from indigenous food and farming leaders from all over the world.

That's something I'm excited about.

- Well, the zest for learning is something you possess.

- Yes.

- I've witnessed that.

And from your beginnings that were not on a farm.

- No, suburbia.

- Correct?

- Where did you start?

- So I grew up in Coon Rapids, but I'm actually the sixth generation of my, at least my dad's side of the family to farm and live in Houston County.

So, my dad and basically everyone since we got off the boat from Norway has farmed in Houston County.

But my dad, when he was 18, took off for the cities for different and better opportunities.

And so he thinks it's pretty funny that I made my way back to be a pig farmer in Houston County.

But my first foray into farming was when I was 19 on a organic, beyond organic vegetable farm near Taylors Falls, Minnesota.

And that's where I got, within two weeks I was absolutely in love with working outside dealing with new challenges every day.

'Cause I get bored really easily, just like a pig.

Pigs get bored really easily and so do I.

That's one of the reasons why I love them so much.

And it' been a long and winding road since I was 19.

I'm 36 now.

But it's, the vast majority of that has been either working on farms, managing farms, starting a couple of failed vegetable farm operations.

But this is my, this one will stick 'cause this one we have that focus of what's our holistic goal and how are we gonna get there?

- Dayna, it's really ironic.

Father escaped Houston County for suburbia.

- [Dayna] Yep.

- You escaped suburbia for what you said he left for.

- [Dayna] Yeah.

- Opportunities and good things.

And you also referenced we, so there's a team?

- There's a team, yes.

I could not do any of this without my husband.

So my husband, Nick Nguyen, also grew up in the cities.

We met in the cities on Match.com of all places.

Little did we know we'd end up farming in southeastern Minnesota.

He works, he's a computer guy.

And so he does work off the farm full time.

And works on the farm, you know, at least a quarter time, depending on the season.

And he does a lot of the sort of behind the scenes, very unappreciated, largely stuff like bookkeeping and accounting, making sure that during the most stressful parts of the year that I eat and the dogs eat.

And it's very much a team effort.

So, if you were to look through a video camera to see our farm, maybe I'd be the one who looks like they're doing the most farming, but he's doing all sorts of farming, too.

It's just more behind the scenes.

But we're a good team.

- And some important things.

- Very important things.

I could not function without him, yeah.

- Well, the team approach is best, of course.

- I think so, too, yeah.

- When you speak of a team, does it include more than just the team on your farm?

- I love that you ask that.

Yes, yes.

We rely on our neighbors a lot.

We are super grateful.

We have a really great neighborhood full of folks who grew up farming and probably forgot more about farming by the time they were 20 than I will learn in my whole life.

And so even though they're not pasturing pigs or doing organic crops necessarily, they are just a wealth of knowledge.

And so yeah, we think of our team sort of on the farm as the two of us, we rely on our neighbors for a lot of help and knowledge and wisdom.

I hadn't, a pig accidentally ripped it's side on a fence.

And I had yet to give a pig an injection 'cause I just had never had to before.

And my neighbors three farms down dropped everything they were doing.

And they're sheep farmers.

And they came over, chased this pig around in the mud with me, and helped taught, they taught me how to do some basic veterinarian skills, you know.

That's what I love about living in a rural place is like no matter what our, any sort of superficial differences are, at the end of the day, like we are the ones pulling each other out of the ditches when we get stuck in the snow, and helping each other out when the cattle get out, and keeping an eye out for each other.

And then I think of, yeah, just we have a, just the broader community.

We couldn't do what we do without our customers.

So we serve, we sell half and whole hogs to about 100, it'll be, probably be 130 to 150 families this year.

And they are the folks who are willing to pay the full true cost of their food.

So, they're choosing to spend a good, a pretty penny on our super, super high quality pork.

But if they weren't able to value the food that they're eating and value the work that we're doing, we wouldn't be able to do any of it.

So, they're on our team, too.

- Community support.

- It's everything.

- When you reference the pigs, you sometimes talk about the diet.

Can you tell us about that?

- Yeah, we have a pretty unique way of raising pigs.

So, first of all, they're raised on pasture, which is really rare these days.

So, that means they're out.

They're foraging for annual plants, perennial plants, grubs.

We feed them hard boiled eggs as a training treat.

So, they have about eight acres of pasture throughout this season.

So, that's about 10 pigs per acre.

They also eat a certified organic pea and barley ration.

And that's also pretty unique because most folks are feeding a corn and soy ration.

But we, peas and barley is the more old world traditional way of feeding out and finishing hogs.

It gets a firmer fat, better omega-3 to 6 ratio.

I like the flavor.

I also like to think that in some small way it's contributing to demand for more crops other than just corn and soy on the landscape.

And then we also have a partnership with Featherstone Farm, which is an organic vegetable farm in Rushford.

And so, at the end of the year, we trade them a whole hog.

And that means throughout the season, each Wednesday, I go pick up several thousand pounds of their pig-grade vegetables.

So, their best stuff goes to their customers.

The second best stuff that's ugly but edible goes to a lot of different food recovery organizations.

And then the stuff that really isn't human-quality, they save for me and the pigs love it.

What else do we do?

We also spend a lot of time gleaning apples and pears and other things from other farmsteads in the area.

If they haven't gotten around to picking their apples or their pears, we keep some for us.

And then we feed out the wormy ones or the ones with the mushy spot to the pigs and they love it.

And you would have to ask my customers, but at least my own eating experience is that even through double blind taste tests, you can always tell which pork is ours.

In my experience.

- You've also spent some attention to detail on selecting a certain breed, right?

- Yes and no.

So, I think certainly pigs with more heritage breed genetics are better suited for pasturing because they tend to be hardier.

They tend to just still have some more instincts on how to find their own food.

Our farrowing partner, so we don't farrow.

We only finish.

We don't keep any sows and boars.

So, we get the pigs in.

Then we finish them.

But they have a much better luck with healthy pigs working with heritage breed genetics.

But honestly, people sometimes get too focused on the breeds.

Like what's the best breed?

It's like, I think it's the best.

It's the best feed.

It's the best environment for the pig.

I would rather have just a pink Landrace pig finished on pasture and organic feed and fresh air and sunshine then the fanciest, rarest heritage breed pig finished inside on corn and soy.

- What's your favorite cut or serving of pork?

- Oh, okay.

I love this question.

Depends on the day.

I love ground pork for just an every day.

My husband fries it up, wilts a bunch of different vegetables on it, and then we eat it over a bowl of rice.

And it's so good every time.

But for like a fancier meal, I would say pork shoulder for carnitas.

Or just pulled pork.

It's so fatty and so flavorful and you stick it in the Dutch oven or the crock pot.

Or ham hocks are really.

Okay, you're just like asking me to pick my favorite child, (Dan laughs) but I say those three are my favorite.

- Well, those are all great choices for sure.

(Dayna laughs) - I think so.

- And when you talk about ground pork, many people go, oh my, that's too greasy.

I've actually used ground pork and had to add water because it was so lean in preparing it.

- Interesting.

I bet it depends on the pig and the breed and the feed.

'Cause our pork, I mean, you know, the pork industry went through the whole other white meat thing because people were so paranoid about fat.

And I just, I think the, again, not an expert, but I think the science is more moving towards it's not the fat that you eat doesn't make you fat.

It's a whole bunch of other factors like sugar and stress and genetics.

So, at least the folks who we sell to are usually more excited about the fattier cuts and love that our ground pork has a really nice amount of fat in it, 'cause the fat is where the flavor is.

And especially when you have a really nice pork from a nicely raised pig, you want to taste all that flavor.

But if you have some pork that's raised in a condition where you don't necessarily wanna taste it, then yeah, probably lean is your best bet.

But for our pork, we often say we've converted a few vegetarians and we have people who usually cut all the fat off their meat and throw it away, eat it off other people's plates because it's so good.

- Interesting.

- So, yeah.

- Thanks for sharing that.

- [Dayna] Yeah.

- What advice do you have to aspiring farmers?

You're maybe what mid-career or in the first third, would you say?

- I'd say in the first third, I hope.

- Okay.

- I hope.

We don't know what.

- Maybe the first 10%.

- [Dayna] Don't know.

- But what advice would you give to people that don't have quite the experience you do at this stage?

- I would say my very first piece of advice is join up with, like take a farm beginnings class.

Oftentimes, you can, it's for young or aspiring farmers to help you really hone in on that holistic goal and help you set sort of that guidepost for where you wanna go in life and how you're gonna make sure that you're healthy and you're happy.

Defining what true wealth and success means for you.

You'll do all of that in a farm beginnings class.

So, I'd say that's my first goal.

Do holistic management training.

Get connected with networks 'cause networks and community will make or break you.

I have almost quit farming so many times and I've had mentors walk me back from the brink 'cause for anytime you're partnering with nature and nature means weather, nature means unpredictability, you're gonna have really stressful times.

And so, making sure that you have that community support, those mentors.

And there are tons of amazing farming nonprofits like Practical Farmers of Iowa, Land Stewardship Project, Young Farmer Coalition, the list goes on and on.

So, just those would be two different things that I would highly recommend, no matter what kind of farming you're doing.

- What would you like to leave as a legacy to your community?

- Well, Nick and I don't have kids.

And we're not gonna have kids.

So, I am hoping that we can find a creative way to transition our farm and homestead to someone in the next generation in a way that they can afford.

I think we're gonna go through a really big crisis.

Maybe we're in it already with land transition where we have these young farmers who don't have millions of dollars.

I mean, land prices are through the roof.

And they want to be active members of rural communities and useful citizens and grow good food for their community, but they simply do not have access to land.

So, I'm hoping that our legacy will be to help young farmers sort of build their businesses and inspire other people to, you know, you don't have to give your land away.

Although that would be great.

You know, sell a 40, sell an 80 to a young farmer who wants to use regenerative agriculture.

Sell them at a reasonable rate.

So they can, you can help somebody else start their legacy.

And so that's, yeah, that's a part of what I wanna do is hopefully figure out how we can transition to the next generation in a way that makes sense and inspire other people to do the same, I hope.

- Thank you for sharing.

- Yeah.

- Stay tuned for more on Farm Connections.

- [Announcer] Farm Connections Best Practices brought to you by.

(upbeat country music) - Hello, I'm Dean Malvick, Extension Plant Pathologist with the University of Minnesota.

And for today's Best Practice segment, we're gonna be talking about a new disease of corn that's been spreading in the southeastern part of the state for the past two years.

That disease is called tar spot.

It's a fungal disease of corn leaves that can be extremely damaging at times.

So, a little bit of background.

So, before 2015-16, this disease was not known in the United States, nor in Canada.

It was only known in Latin America, such as southern Mexico, Central America, and the northern part of the South America.

But in the last five or six years, it has not only been found in the US, but it has been spreading.

We found it first in Minnesota in 2019.

So, two years ago in southern Fillmore County.

And now, it's been found in a number of other counties in the southeastern part of the state so far that we know of.

But again, we know the disease is spreading.

We wanna try to figure out how far it's spread and that demands scouting, of course.

And so one thing, one point I wanna make in this segment is we send out a request for you to scout your fields, especially in the southeastern part of the state over toward the central part of the state and look for this disease.

This is a prime time now to look for it.

It's been developing more and more later in the season.

So, it's a good time to look for it.

Again, like I said, and why do we wanna know?

Even though it is too late for it to cause an effect on yield, what we've seen is where the disease is developed in the past, it will very likely develop again or at least the risk is higher.

So, a bit more about the disease.

And we will have other pictures maybe to attach to this segment.

But if you can see the dark spots on these leaves, that is all caused by tar spot.

Again, it's a fungal disease, it can be controlled to at least some extent, maybe to a great extent by fungicides.

And there are hybrids also being developed and rated with different levels of resistance to it.

So, we have a couple different avenues we can look at managing this where we have a problem with it.

A bit more about the diagnosis.

It causes these very dark tar like spots on the leaves.

And how you can tell those from other leaf spots is they are kind of oblong in shape, elongated.

They're raised above the leaf surface.

You cannot rub them off with a wet fingertip unlike some other spots that might be on leaves that are also dark and black.

You can separate them later in the season here from rust pustules that can also turn black late in the season by again rubbing your finger over the surface.

If it's rust, you'll often see a little bit of rusty kind of spore residue on your finger.

Here, there will not be.

And you can also see these pustules through from one side of the leaf to the other.

And they're not just on one side.

So, those are a few of the diagnostic features.

Those of you that may be familiar with tar spot on maple leaves.

This is a different fungus, different disease.

Although the appearance is quite different in the color.

Although the spots on corn are usually much smaller than those on maple.

So, those are the key points I think that we have that we wanna bring across to you today.

This is a new disease that's spreading.

It's causing some, you know, significant level of concern in a few fields, but fortunately it's still limited.

And we need to keep a track of it.

So, this is today's Best Practices segment.

- Welcome to Farm Connections.

We're on site in Faribault, Minnesota at the local Kubota dealer.

And with me is the University of Minnesota Extension Educator, Claire LaCanne.

Welcome to Farm Connections.

- Thanks for having me today.

- Well, this is exciting.

You're putting on a program to help people's lives.

Tell us about it.

- Yes, so we're here today at the Youth Tractor and Farm Safety Program in like you said, Faribault.

So, that's within one of the counties I serve, Rice and Steele Counties.

So, we are focusing on safety for youth.

You know, that's the time to teach the young people about staying safe on the farm and just trying to help reduce some of those hazards and accidents that we know happen on farms.

- Well, I noticed somebody wearing a fire department shirt.

He's here because?

- Yes, so we have a volunteer from the local Faribault Fire Department who is actually also a farmer and he is driving the tractor.

He's one of our two tractor driving instructors with the course.

So the youth, as well as having kind of an in-person classroom, hands-on portion, we have them outside working with the tractors, too.

So, they'll practice on the tractor, which a lot of them joke, is a lot newer and nicer than the tractors they use on their farms.

And then they will do a driving test after that to get their certification.

- So, it sounds like you have broad community support if you have the fire department and other volunteers here.

- Yes, we absolutely do.

We have a lot of great sponsors for lunch both of our days.

We have sponsorship from Farm Bureau Insurance, so that's safety, you know, kind of insurance angle in there as well.

And then a lot of community partners, our extension committee help make this day possible.

And of course, our great volunteers who come and speak, we have more representatives from the Faribault Fire Department, some local 4-H volunteers, some folks from Steele County, or Steele Waseca Electric Company will be here and great community participation.

It takes a village to make it work.

- Well, we certainly are enjoying the tractors and the tractor safety portion, but the farm safety is really bigger than that.

And you talked a lot about it.

If you're bringing the electric co-op people in there must be a component on electrical safety.

- Yes, we'll talk about electric safety, livestock safety, grain bin safety, of course.

And we know there's lots of accidents that happen in Minnesota.

We actually had one here locally just a couple weeks ago at a local elevator with that tragically ended in fatality.

So, that's something that we really try to hammer home.

We actually have another volunteer from, so a third volunteer from the Faribault Fire Department talking about grain bins safety particularly.

So, we'll also talk about implement safety.

We talk about maintenance just to keep the tractor up to par that way.

So, we try to make it as broad as possible and really interactive with the youth.

- Claire, you talked a little bit about bin safety.

When there's flowing grain or even just a pocket or cavity in that grain, how much force is exerted on a body if they're trying to get out of it?

- Yes, it's an incredible amount of force that a lot of people think they can muscle their way out of and they just can't.

So, and the flow of the grain happens so quickly that it presses in on your body and sucks you down with incredible speed, really.

And that force can actually cause internal, you know, issues.

- So, the rules are, don't enter a bin by yourself, have a restraining system or safety harness.

- Yes, exactly.

And really not entering the bin whenever possible, too.

Right?

Doing anything you can possibly from the outside.

- In addition to the flowing grain or cavities or pockets or collapse of grain on top of you, there's mechanical systems in there too, such as?

- Yeah, so there's augers that can cause issues if you get tangled up in that.

And of course that helps with the grain flowing quickly.

So, we will talk about grain bin safety later today.

And some of the things like you're saying, the bridging, the crusting have to do with storing grain improperly.

So, that's another thing to keep in mind is prevention in the first place of storing corn at the proper moisture and preventing those crusting and things from happening to begin with.

- Great reminders.

- Yeah.

- You talked a little bit about some of the programming.

How do you fund it?

Do you use grants or what?

Where's the mechanism for funding those?

- Yeah, so this particular workshop is funded by some sponsors and then also at the local level, a little bit of 4-H and Extension funding.

- Do you ever get grants for personal protection equipment or other things?

- Oh, yeah.

So, one of the things that I'm working on in my role as Rice and Steele County extension educator is more for adults but another farm safety project that is exclusively funded by grants and sponsors.

So, that's a partnership with the Faribault Fire Department, community co-op here in Faribault, and CHS.

And so a grant, we have a Seeds for Stewardship grant from CHS is what it's called.

And we have put on an educational workshop.

At that workshop, we ask farmers what personal protective equipment they want.

So, what things would help keep them safe?

We really wanted to focus on gas monitors.

And then they had some other ideas for us as well.

And so, we have grant money to provide those pieces of equipment to farmers here locally.

- More safety is good.

- Yes.

- Thank you very much, Claire.

- Thanks.

- Stay tuned for more on Farm Connections.

Being a steward of the land means more than just taking care of what we have now.

It requires that we respect what was here before us and that we do our best to leave it better than we found it.

Not always an easy task, but one that helps to provide for generations to come.

I'm Dan Hoffman.

Thanks for joining us on Farm Connections.

(upbeat country music) (upbeat music)