(gentle music) - Hello and welcome to "Farm Connections".

I'm your host, Dan Hoffman.

On today's episode, we discuss crop rotation, nitrates, and oats with Kevin Connelly of Minnesota's Oat Mafia.

(upbeat music) And we visit with Megan Roberts to discuss the merits of succession planning.

All here today on "Farm Connections".

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - [Narrator] Welcome to "Farm Connections" with your host, Dan Hoffman.

- [Narrator] "Farm Connections" premier sponsor is Minnesota Corn.

- [Narrator] Programming supported by Minnesota Corn, working to identify and promote opportunities for corn growers, enhance quality of life, and help others understand the value and importance of corn production to America's economy.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Additional support from the following sponsors.

- [Narrator] Programming supported by R&S Grain Systems, a family owned business serving its customers for 50 years with leading designs in the manufacturing of grain handling equipment and grain storage systems.

You can call them for a quote today.

- [Narrator] Programming supported by EDP Renewables North America, owner-operator of Prairie Star and Pioneer Prairie Wind Farms in Minnesota and Iowa.

EDPR wind farms and solar parks provide income to farmers and help power rural economies across the continent.

- [Narrator] Mower County Farm Bureau Association, a KSMQ broadcast sponsor, advocates for agriculture based on the policies and beliefs of its members.

It's dedicated to making the voices of its members stronger.

You can learn more about membership benefits at fbmn.org.

- [Narrator] Program supported by employee-owned AgVantage Software, Rochester, Minnesota, celebrating their 50th year designing and developing agribusiness software for grain elevators, feed manufacturers, producers, fertilizer and chemical dealers, co-ops, seed companies, and fuel distributors.

- Welcome to "Farm Connections".

I'm Dan Hoffman, and with me today is Kevin Connelly to talk about oats.

Kevin, thanks for having us.

- Thanks for coming, Dan.

- Kevin, agriculture's dynamic and things are always changing.

What's changing on your farm?

- You're right, Dan, there's a lot of things changing in agriculture in general, and here on our farm, what we're seeing change is we've started to pick up planting food grade oats.

We started six years ago with a small group of us that started doing a little bit, and we're looking at having that as a third crop in the rotation.

We've looked at a third crop for a long time, or tried to find one, and now, especially since our dairy is being phased out, oats are gonna pick up the place of the hay in the forages.

- Well, there's an example of change.

Many of our dairies suffer from lack of good pricing, and so they've changed and looked at other things.

Has that been an influence?

- Yeah, the price, the labor.

The farms are getting bigger all the time, and it's where we're at, and with age and labor and everything, it all played a factor.

And dairy's been a very good life for us.

Our family's done very well.

We're very happy to have been dairy farmers our whole life.

- Why are you looking at a third crop specifically?

- I think we need a third crop for a lot of reasons.

We need just to get more diversity into the rotation.

I think that's gonna help us a lot with the erosion, with water infiltration, with soil health, and just the health of the corn and beans, if we put a third crop in the rotation, it's gonna spread that out for, like, extended diapause and so on, and the diseases in the beans.

- You talk about corn and soybean rotations.

Some people only plant a monoculture.

How is three crops or two crops better than just one?

- Well, just this whole soil of diversity and different roots in the ground, and they go into different stages, and they all use different nutrients.

And like your oats, for example, they're not gonna need the nitrogen to grow, and the oats are gonna go scavenge some of that, that maybe the corn, which is a more inefficient plant for nitrogen, corn requires a lot of nitrogen, but it's not very efficient with it.

The oats can go in and scavenge some of that nitrogen up in the soil and bring it back up and use it.

- How does oats in the rotation improve soil water quality?

- It does a number of things.

First of all, oats go in really early.

And in our case, we'll have 120 pounds of oats, almost four bushel an acre, so you're gonna have a lot of plants in there, which it's gonna help the quality because you're gonna have less erosion, that plants can be growing early, and it's gonna stop some of the erosion.

The tillers are gonna go down and the roots are gonna go down and take in a lot of nutrients to open that ground up and let the water come in.

Instead of the water running off, it's gonna have some infiltration to it.

It'll soak up some of the nitrates that maybe the corn didn't use.

And then we're also planting a clover, underseeding a clover with that oats, so we can go in, and what we'll do then the next year is plant corn in there, and we've already got nitrogen in, we don't need all the synthetic nitrogen.

And that nitrogen, to me, it's a better form, because it breaks down, there's more available to the plant later in the season.

- And when you speak of the nitrogen, Kevin, you're talking about nitrogen fixing plants like clover?

- Yeah, yep, soybeans do that too, to a lesser extent, but the clover will come in with the alfalfa, and that'll fix... Kind of depends on where you read, but we give it 80 pounds of nitrogen, we give our next corn crop 80 pounds of nitrogen credit from the clover, and we're doing some work that I think we can maybe even get closer to 100 pounds of nitrogen.

- And what's that worth in dollars and cents?

- Right now, UAN nitrogen is worth 72 cents a pound, so if you've got 80 pounds, you're looking at short of $60 an acre just coming from that crop, coming back to put on our balance sheet for our corn.

- That's substantial.

- Yes, very much substantial.

And then our soil and water district in Olmsted County started a groundwater protection program, and they will give us $25 to plant clover with our oats also.

- So somebody made a good policy decision to help farmers make good decisions and then reward them financially.

- Correct, yeah.

That all started at the county level back during COVID.

One of the county commissioners, the county commissioners received money from the federal government for COVID, and they took some of that aside.

One of the county commissioners was a well driller, and he had said every year, they have to dig a well seven feet deeper to get the same safety level for the nitrates in the water that is safe drinking standards.

And they're digging seven feet deeper, so he went to the county commissioners, told 'em that, and he said, "Let's take some of this money, let's challenge our soil and water district to come up with a solution for this, see what they can do."

The staff at the Olmsted County Soil and Water District came up with some ideas and some solutions.

They brought it to the table, brought a handful of us farmers in and said, "What do you think?"

And it made it very workable, let's say, for both parties.

- Awesome.

- Yep.

- Why is soil and water quality important?

- That's our legacy.

At the end of the day, what we pass on to the next generation, the generation, that is our land.

And if this is washed away and it's down the river... Soil, how do I wanna say this?

Soil, top soil, the top soil is only manufactured, it is about 100th of an inch a year.

Not very much of it.

And it can be eroded with water erosion and wind erosion much faster pace than that.

If we don't take care of it, the example I like to use is if you take a dime, turn it on its side, the width of a dime is four ton an acre of soil erosion.

So you take a width of a dime across a whole piece of ground, that's four ton an acre, is the width of a dime.

- Worth protecting?

- Yeah, absolutely it is, yes.

- And of course, farmers are intelligent business people.

They know that the water they drink is important to their family, their livestock.

- [Kevin] Yep.

- And they also know that's what other people drink.

- Yep.

As farmers, you know, we live on the land, we breathe the air, we drink the water.

You know, this is important to us too.

- Absolutely.

- Yep.

- Kevin, you talked just a moment ago about the seeding rate of about 120 pounds of oats per acre, correct?

- Correct, yep.

- So, when we think of corn and soybeans, it's a row crop with soil in the middle of the row that's exposed.

You put 120 pounds of oat seed on, is it broadcast?

- It's put under the drill like the one behind us, Dan.

And that goes on.

Our drill is eight inch row, so the rows are eight inches apart.

They grow in, and it's really fun to watch that come up.

That whole field will turn green.

- Why is that important on soil and water quality?

- If you've got all those roots in there, you're just not gonna get that water erosion, you're not gonna get the wind erosion like you can see in the spring.

If you get a good wind come up in the first week in May, and the corn and soybeans are just in the ground, I think everybody's seen that, you know, the dirt blown across the highways, you get those oats, and they can be... First week in May, they can be six, eight inches tall.

That's gonna hold everything in place.

- So let's move forward on that oats.

- [Kevin] Yep.

- Why did farmers not raise oats in the past?

- Well, as we like to say, these are not our grandfather's oats.

I mean, I remember the first time that I told my dad six years ago that we're gonna plant some oats, for food grade oats.

And I would go see my mom and dad every day for breakfast, and he'd, you know, kinda wanna know what was going on on the farm, and I told him that one day, "Well, what do you plant in this field, in this field, in this field?"

And I told him and he says, "You forgot two fields."

And I said, "Well, I wanna put oats in."

He said, "You're gonna put oats in as a nurse crop for the alfalfa?"

And I said, "No," I said, "We're putting in oats to combine for food grade oats."

He looked across the breakfast table and as an old Irishman would do, slammed his hand on the table and he pointed right at me and he says, "You can't grow oats up here, Mister!"

Well, I think we can.

But we never used to treat 'em as a crop.

And now we treat 'em as a crop.

They were just something that came with a hay.

And you got 45, 50 bushel an acre, and it was a 25, 30 pound test weight.

And now we're getting 100 to 150 bushel an acre and we're getting a 38 to 40 pound test weight.

Test weight is very important for the mills.

The mills have to have a test weight.

If they've got a 32 pound test weight... We've been told by mills that if you've got a 30, 32 pound test weight, they don't even want it.

You can give it to 'em free, they don't want it, because it's just so inefficient to mill it.

So we've had to go around, we've had to do some different stuff, use some different plant health products to make this work.

But you treat it like a crop.

You know, we used to seed a bushel and half an acre.

Now we seed four, you know?

We make sure we got the right fertility.

And one of the things, fertility-wise, probably the most important nutrient, to me, is nitrogen.

And you want nitrogen in your corn, you see people taking it up all the time, which I think there's a plateau you should be at.

But in my case, with oats, I'd keep dropping it.

Oats don't require a lot of nitrogen.

And we've taken care of our soil over the years.

We've got really high organic matter, so we don't need much nitrogen at all.

If we put too much on, the oats go flat.

- Definitely goes down.

- Yes.

- My dad was good at growing oats, and I remember the year he got 100 bushel oats and heavy, clean straw.

- [Kevin] Okay.

- What's straw worth per acre for bedding?

- Oh, anywhere from 60 to $110 an acre, depending on your yield with your straw.

Some of the oats we put in aren't very tall.

Some are taller.

So, 60 to 100 dollars an acre.

- So, at that time, we saw farmers move to corn and soybeans because there was a better economic payback.

- [Kevin] Correct, yep.

- Oats just didn't gross enough breaker to have enough net left to give you an incentive.

But it sounds like you and some of your colleagues are trying to work on changing that.

- Yeah, I mean, if you want to go to a local feed mill, you're gonna get three, three and a quarter bushel.

If you go to these food grade mills, they're gonna give you more.

You have to do some things different, you have to treat it like a crop, like I said, but you can do that.

And that's one of the things we've changed.

There's a number of us around here that are investors in the Green Acres Mill.

Allows us to control our own destiny a little bit and allows us to build local economies.

- Tell me more about that.

- About the local economies?

So if you go to Albert Lea, they've employed a lot of local people just building that mill.

They're gonna employ people to work in it.

And it's gonna spread our workload out.

So we're gonna employ some people in August to haul oats there or to store 'em, and it's just all around, we're gonna create local jobs.

- So in addition to that, we've got employees paying payroll tax, employers paying payroll tax.

What about real estate taxes?

- Yeah, the mill's gonna have real estate taxes on it, obviously, and that's gonna go back into the local community down there, yeah.

- So what's happening with this group?

Do they meet once in a while?

How do they form?

- As far as the group of farmers?

- The initial investors and the group that's putting forth this plant.

- It's kind of been a couple different groups that have formed to come together.

One would be our Byron area farmers, when we get together, and there's three of us, in 2000, wanted to do things a little different, so we decided we're going with some food grade oats, and those are three members of the Byron area farmers, and then that's kinda how the Oat Mafia started.

And then that continued to grow, and we've got about 6,000 acres of oats up here.

And then, of course, nowadays, everybody is a little more connected than we always used to be, and we got connected with Landon Plagge down in Iowa, and we all kind of got together, and he was a couple steps along the way with putting a mill up, and boy, that was kind of our plans too, is to, how can we take this to the next level?

And Landon was already taking it to the next level, so we've just jumped in with him, and more and more people have done the same.

- What's your vision for, say, three to five years out?

What do you hope this looks like?

- I'm hoping that we see... Right now we've got 6,000 acres up here.

I'm hoping to maybe triple that around here.

I don't know why you can't.

I would like to see that also lead to more livestock on the horizon, 'cause I think if you've got livestock, you can graze them behind the oats.

You can make some forages.

If you wanna put your livestock out there the 20th of August and leave them until whenever the snow is too deep.

I talked to a young lady on Wednesday, and she's still grazing livestock.

She had enough growth.

- How fantastic is that?

- Yeah.

So you can put that back out there, and those animals are taking that, taking whatever you had grown back there, whether it's clover or a brassica or whatever, and they're obviously eating it and they're hauling, they're spraying their own manure, you know, and that's kind of the natural way that it happened, let all that happen.

So that, to me, is I'd like to see a lot more oats on the horizon, a lot more cattle come back to the horizon.

- Well, if our audience goes to the grocery store, there's already a lot of products on the shelf.

- Yep.

- With oats in it.

- [Kevin] Yep.

- How does this product fit into that market?

- We have a very niche market down at Green Acres.

The goal there is it is gonna be a very traceable product, so that you can go to the grocery store and you can take your phone out, and if it comes through one of the buyers, one of the CPGs from Green Acres, you can scan that code and it's gonna tell you what farmer produced it.

And I think the options are wide open for where those products are gonna go, whether it's a powder, whether it's a flake, or exactly what it is.

But I know in talking to Landon, they have a huge amount of interest from a number of companies because this is very traceable.

It's very sustainable.

There is little to no chemicals involved in it, where most of us are no-till.

And at any given time, our stories are all gonna be present on Green Acres' website.

You want to come in and you wanna see where your oats came from, it's got a picture of Kevin Connelly's family out here in Byron, we'll have our story.

And if somebody wants to come to our farm, they're more than welcome to come to our farm to see it.

- So, currently, if we're getting oats from far away, how is that good for our environment with all the trucking?

- Well, from what I know, 92% of our food grade oats come from Canada.

And obviously, that's not good for anybody down here.

We are able to produce oats, you know, and we get up.

I would think some of these companies that, you know, as this gets bigger and bigger, I would think some of these other companies are gonna want to jump on board with that, 'cause I would think these CPGs are gonna support local.

I mean, that's kind of what we've been talking about in America for a while, is buy local, you know, support local people.

You know, I'll support you, you support me.

- Well said.

- Yeah.

- We've heard this referred as Oat Mafia.

What is that and why?

- (chuckles) The Oat Mafia is kind of a fun term we use.

I'm not 100% percent sure on the origination, but I'm 99% sure, and myself and Tom Pyfferoen, who is one of the... We're two of the three original food grade oat growers down here in our part of the country, or our part of the county here, we had gone to West Concord one day, and we were gonna meet with Tom Peterson, the Commissioner of Agriculture from the state of Minnesota.

There was eight or 10 of us in the room, and everybody's introduced themselves, and I introduced myself, and Tom Pyfferoen introduced himself, and he looked at and he says, "Oh, you guys are part of the Oat Mafia down there, aren't you?"

And we kinda chuckled and laughed about it a little bit.

And that was the first I knew of it.

And then from there, it just kind of grew, it's got its own Facebook page now.

- A bit of a fun name.

- Yeah, yeah, it's just fun, and it kind of gives everybody that grows oats in the area a little part of it.

And we've even got our own stickers now and whatnot.

So if you're growing oats down here, you're part of the Oat Mafia.

It's all a good thing.

- And certainly, Kevin, your vision of being local, local support, grassroots, has other examples in the past, like co-ops or ethanol.

I wish you every success possible.

- Thanks very much.

Yeah, we are very local.

I mean, I think about our dairy farm here.

You know, I came back to the farm in 1990.

We've hired over 200 kids to work here.

So we're very much local based, you know, very involved, hands-on.

So this whole thing with the oat mill and growing food grade oats and the Oat Mafia, that is right up our alley in what we do, and I think it's kind of what a lot of people do.

- Kevin, good ideas take time to incubate, germinate, and turn into something even bigger.

Tell us a little bit about the journey that's taken place to get us to this point.

- The whole oat thing started for us in 2000, and there was three of us, and now we're over 6,000 acres.

And it started... I mean, we were looking for a third crop on the rotation.

We're looking for the economics of it.

And we're also looking at, as a Byron area farmer group, we'd started sampling, or we had the University of Minnesota Extension, actually, starts sampling our tile lines for nitrates in the tile line water.

And what we had noticed was, these crops that had, like, like your winter rye, your cover crops and stuff, the nitrate levels underneath that ground and the tile line and the water were incredibly below safe drinking water standards.

They were at three, four, five parts per million, with the safe drinking water standard at 10.

And the tile lines that had the tillage on 'em and more of the synthetic fertilizer and so on, you're seeing more of that at 20 and 30 parts per million.

So we just knew we had to make a change.

And when you look at what oats do for the nitrate levels in the water, the nitrate problem, it's real.

We've gotta do something about it, you know?

And all changes start small.

And just with some cover crops and then with the oat journey that we're on, we really feel like we're making positive changes.

- Kevin, thanks for having us today.

- It's our pleasure.

- Stay tuned for more on "Farm Connections".

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) Welcoming us today is Megan Roberts, an expert in succession planning for farm families.

Megan, you've got a lot of work to do.

Tell us about it.

- Well, we know, coming up, there will be more transitions between generations in farm families than ever before.

We have a lot of baby boomers that are reaching retirement age, or if they don't wanna retire from farming, they're certainly thinking about what might happen next.

And it's really important to keep farms operational.

There's a big economic impact on communities, and certainly, economic impact on the families themselves.

- Our entire state, our nation, really, is based on agriculture.

- Certainly.

We see a very strong economic impact of agriculture across Southern Minnesota.

We know that having small, medium, large-sized farms in our communities is important to rural main streets.

And we know that there's an important family and lifestyle importance of having farms in our communities and transferred through generations.

- You mentioned earlier the steps in the transition succession planning process.

What's the first step?

- I think for educators and folks that are more on the educational side, like I am, not the legal side, it's really about goal setting.

Can you identify what it is that you want to happen to your farm in the future?

Or if you're the incoming generation, what's your vision for that future of the farm?

And then can you articulate that in a way that a legal professional or a tax accountant professional can then work you through the steps, the paperwork side of things?

But from a family perspective, the very first thing is goal setting.

- So from goal settings, it sounds like you're bringing some other team players in.

Why is it important to include those team players like the CPA, the accountants, or the bankers or farm management instructor?

- It's because while a farm is a oftentimes a very important family aspect, there is a business aspect of the farm.

And many farms have assets that they need to think about how they would transfer to that next generation.

Are you going to buy, sell, gift, what have you?

And from that perspective, you need to have those legal and tax professionals involved.

- Well, it sounds like every action that's taken has an outcome or a consequence, like taxation, right?

- That's true.

- So, what do we do on the tax side?

'Cause that seems to loom big in ag producers' minds.

- It does loom big in tax producers' mind.

I think, you know, the number two questions, the number two questions I get about farm transition are taxes and then probably nursing home concerns.

"What happens if I need long-term healthcare?

Will I lose my farm?"

And there's no easy answers to either of those two questions.

I like to bring people back to maybe some of the bigger picture.

Let's not lose the forest for the trees.

What are your overall goals?

And then once you identify them, how can we move it to the nitty gritty of be it taxes, long-term healthcare planning, retirement planning, et cetera?

- That's a lot of things to keep balanced and talk about.

- It is.

- Tell us about the people you bring to the table inside the family.

Obviously you talked about the exiting farmer or the retiring farmer and the emerging or beginning farmer.

How about spouses, family members?

And when I say spouses, it might be a male, it might be a female.

- Absolutely, so I like to advocate anyone that is actively involved in the farm operation is at the table, including their spouse.

So, if a daughter is farming actively in that operation, maybe her husband is not out there doing the farm work, has an off-farm job.

Because of that spousal relationship, it's key to bring people in.

That's my opinion.

At the end of the day, everyone knows their family better than I do, right?

We're all experts in our own family.

And so I do leave that to the discretion of the individual farm families.

What do they feel are the key people to be at the table?

But I do lean a little bit more towards inclusion and extra communication than excluding folks.

- Understandable.

And sometimes, we get into strife situations.

Do you find that having a moderator or a person outside of the family helps with that?

- Certainly.

Sometimes, when, whether it's grief, whether it's a financial issue, whether it's just a family disagreement, it can be really helpful to bring in outside experts.

That might be a mediator, a formal process of mediation.

In the state of Minnesota, we're really fortunate to have rural mental health specialists, and they are getting more and more calls related to spousal issues and then farm transition issues, and so that can be very helpful.

I also sometimes find that, at least from the financial standpoint, you know, not sometimes, I definitely find from the financial standpoint, farm business management instructors can be a really key part of the conversation for families.

So, it might vary from situation to situation, but certainly, bringing in outside facilitation can be very helpful.

- Megan, you've referenced farm business management instructors on several occasions when we visited.

Where can a farmer or a family go to learn more about an individual or an organization they can reach out to?

- Absolutely.

Here in Southern Minnesota, you can check out the Southern Agricultural Center of Excellence website, centerofagriculture.org.

(upbeat music) - That does it for now.

I'm Dan Hoffman.

Thanks for joining us here on "Farm Connections".

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - [Narrator] "Farm Connections" premier sponsor is Minnesota Corn.

- [Narrator] Programming supported by Minnesota Corn, working to identify and promote opportunities for corn growers, enhance quality of life, and help others understand the value and importance of corn production to America's economy.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Additional support from the following sponsors.

- [Narrator] Programming supported by R&S Grain Systems, a family owned business serving its customers for 50 years with leading designs in the manufacturing of grain handling equipment and grain storage systems.

You can call them for a quote today.

- [Narrator] Programming supported by EDP Renewables North America, owner-operator of Prairie Star and Pioneer Prairie Wind Farms in Minnesota and Iowa.

EDPR wind farms and solar parks provide income to farmers and help power rural economies across the continent.

- [Narrator] Mower County Farm Bureau Association, a KSMQ broadcast sponsor, advocates for agriculture based on the policies and beliefs of its members.

It's dedicated to making the voices of its members stronger.

You can learn more about membership benefits at fbmn.org.

- [Narrator] Program supported by employee-owned AgVantage Software, Rochester, Minnesota, celebrating their 50th year designing and developing agribusiness software for grain elevators, feed manufacturers, producers, fertilizer and chemical dealers, co-ops, seed companies, and fuel distributors.

(gentle music)