- Hello, and welcome to Farm Connections.

I'm your host, Dan Hoffman.

On today's program, we talk to farmer and podcaster, Mitchell Hora about the current state of agriculture and the importance of connecting with an audience.

Do I allow her share with us a story about her ducks as she welcomes new additions to her family.

And the University of Minnesota Extension provides us with a new best practices segment.

All here today on Farm Connections.

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

- [Female Narrator] Farm Connections made possible in part by.

- [Male Narrator] Absolute Energy.

A locally owned facility produces 125 million gallons of ethanol annually.

Proudly supporting local economies in Iowa and Minnesota.

Absolute Energy, adding value to the neighborhood.

The Agricultural Utilization Research Institute, collaborating with businesses and entrepreneurs to foster longterm economic benefit for Minnesota through value added agricultural products.

You can learn more at auri.org.

- Hi, I'm Dan Hoffman, host of Farm Connections.

Welcome to the show today.

Today we have Mitchell Hora from Washington, Iowa talking about Continuum Ag and his business, FieldWork podcast.

Welcome Mitchell.

- Hey, thanks for having me on.

- Well, it's great.

And to have somebody in the agriculture field, especially in your age group, talking about agriculture is exciting because we need you.

Tell us about your business.

- Yeah, so Continuum Ag is a soil health data company.

We've built the first data platform to be able to integrate in soil health data.

Which really just means we're looking at the soil, not just as a chemical system, but as a chemical, physical and biological system.

And helping farmers to gather the data that they need to be able to understand their soil as a living system.

And that's especially important if they are looking at adopting these quote-unquote, "Sustainability practices or regenerative systems."

And integrate things like no till cover crops, more diverse cropping rotations, more diversity into their systems, things like that.

It really changes the soil.

We wanna help those farmers to get some data so that they can improve their soils, but ensure profitability while we're at it.

- Tell us about how the data's collected and how it's presented to the farmers.

- Yeah, so we start with soil data.

So six inch deep soil testing.

We really like to use the Haney soil health test, okay.

The Haney soil health test allows us to quantify our plant available nutrients.

We're looking at nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, micronutrients.

Just like we typically do in soil testing, we're looking at our pH is, our organic matter, but we're also looking at the carbon that's in the soil, and that's the microbe food.

We're looking at the microbial activity itself through CO2 burst.

So we're better understanding the interactions within the soil.

And we then are interpreting that through the software that my company has developed actually, it's called TopSoil.

It's an online analytic system that helps us to understand that soil function.

And we're understanding what is happening in that soil today.

Cross-reference to how that soil changes over time, to get a better understanding of more, a better predictive analysis of what will happen based on the weather then of course, it's gonna be a huge driver of that.

But we can get a much better understanding of how to manage fertility.

What we've seen is we've been able to reduce our synthetic inputs by about 50%.

- Sometimes when you educate or try to be progressive there's naysayers, have you found any and what do they say?

- Oh gosh, there's plenty.

I mean, we've been doing the things in agriculture that we've been doing for generations and for decades under the mantra of we have to feed the world, we have to feed the world.

We need to raise production, raise production, raise production.

Well, we just sold corn yesterday off the farm for $3.12.

'Cause we've just been raising production, raising production, raising production, and now we're being forced to sell like under the cost of production, 'cause we've got to get these bins empty.

That's why we had to get something to move.

We got to get the bins empty.

We got to keep cash flow going.

And the bit of grain that we still have there, that wasn't marketed ahead of time.

It's like, obviously we'd never would have predicted COVID and in the situation that we're in, that has been one of the causes of poor crop prices for our area.

But I have a lot of business in Southern Africa.

And last time I was down there, I opened up my talks to the farmers, saying that, yeah, you know the Midwest farmer, the Iowa farmer, believes that it's their sole job to feed the world.

How many of you believe that that's the case, that it's the American farmer, it's the Midwest farmer that's gonna feed the world?

And they just laughed.

And they're like, "No, we're raising more production too.

"We've got production right here.

"We can feed people in Africa.

"We can continue to feed more people around the world too."

These guys down there, they had terrible soils and they were raising 180 bushel corn, day in day out too.

And they're raising the same pile of numbers that we were growing up here.

Same John Deere tractors were running across the field.

Like they've got the same technology as us.

We have to move the focus away from max production and the only reward for farmer being, how many bushels can you produce?

And how cheap can you do that?

We have to shift away from a focus being only on bushels, to a focus being on profitability, and the focus being on, how do we maintain better quality product produced in a quality manner?

Where there are multiple environmental benefits, there are health benefits, there are a lot of contributions that the American farmer can bring to the world.

Not just more and more and more production that sits in bins and hurts our own prices.

Now we need to continue to raise production, of course, too.

I know that, and we need to continue to raise production.

And we do have to feed the world.

But that can't be the only sole focus to just continue to hurt ourselves.

- You've done some work with podcasting in a company called Fieldwork podcast.

What caused you to take that journey?

- Yeah, so I was approached, after speaking at an event by the folks from Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media through initiative called The Water Main.

And out of The Water Main, they were working on how we connect with farmers better.

So they found me as a farmer, and my cohost, Zach Johnson, who is known online as the Minnesota millennial farmer.

And they brought the two of us together.

We'd never met before.

We got in the studio on day one, hit record, and often away we went.

And we were talking about the various options available to farmers surrounding the term sustainability.

And here are lots of different ideas.

Here's other farmers that are implementing these ideas.

Here's experts on these ideas.

Here's the resources.

Here's where you can go to get more resources, but as a farmer, as a landowner, you have to make your own decision.

There's lots of different ways to skin this cat.

Lots of different ways to be more sustainable and make your own decision.

Farmers are CEO's.

Farmers are entrepreneurs.

And I think we have to remember that, that they are in the business to be able to make their own decision.

They're running their own company.

They wanna do their own thing.

Well, hey, here are lots of ideas.

Here's places you can go to make your own decisions.

Here's how you can get a better understanding of how to tweak those new ideas for your farm.

And we're gonna talk about that on the Fieldwork podcast.

And yeah, it's been phenomenal.

We just finished up season two.

In planning process right now for season three, there will be a season three.

Plus we have a variety of some other special projects that are kind of in the works as well.

Now, Fieldwork has been amazing and really appreciate the opportunity, and I appreciate what it's been able to give me in my career too.

- Tell us about the audience for that program.

- Primarily, it's looking at farmers.

We talked about it, it's by farmers for farmers, but we're looking at regular, normal, large scale production agriculture farmers.

Zach and I are very normal farmers.

Exact farm operation is over 2,000 acres.

Him and his dad, multi-generation corn soybean operation in Minnesota.

I'm seventh generation, dad's sixth, 700 acre farm Southeast Iowa.

Primarily, just corn and soybeans.

Yeah, last year we had wheat on the farm.

This year we have five crops.

We're harvesting corn, soybeans, barley, rye, and mustard.

So we are now really diversifying out and we have a lot of different trials and luckily, dad and I are both too curious for our own good and get a little carried away and crazy sometimes with experiments.

But, we wanna be able to show, here is a regular farmer going in approaching this.

And other regular farmers that are figuring this out and if we can figure it out on our farms, everybody else can too.

But we do find that there's a lot of food industry in Ag industry, people that are listening, a lot of landowners that are listening, and I would love to connect with more consumers and stuff too, that wanna understand where their food comes from.

- Mitchell, tell us about the future.

- It's going to be extremely data connected.

It's going to be extremely transparent between farm to folk.

We're going to have to be able to show the consumer here is what we're doing, why we're doing it.

Here's the data, here is everything that we have going on.

In my concern there, as we do, be more transparent that some of the things that we're doing do not have a great perception in the public right now.

So we need to really get proactive.

We need to be able to have those conversation with the consumer to show them here's what we're doing, here's why we do it, and here's the data behind it to show this is why it's good for you.

And it's good for you in terms of it's nutritional, it's safe, it's helps you to be healthier, and getting that message to be more connected to them.

- Mitchell Hora from Washington, Iowa, and Continuum Ag, thanks for joining us.

- Hey, thanks for having me on.

- You bet.

Stay tuned for more on Farm Connections, - [Male Narrator] Farm Connections, best practices brought to you by.

(upbeat music) - Hi, this is Bruce Potter, integrated pest management specialist with the University of Minnesota Extension.

And this is best practices segment.

So as we get into spring here in July here, towards the August, people are paying more attention to soybean aphids in their soybean fields.

And, what we're going to talk about here today, is a little bit about how you can help make a better insecticide decisions, avoid unexpected problems and minimize the chances of resistance.

One of the things we're worried about with spraying insecticides is a development of resistance.

There's a publication, you can get from Minnesota Extension.

It's a publication on managing soybean aphid resistance, but simply if you don't need to spray the aphids, don't spray them.

If you do spray, do it right.

Use the right volumes of water, right.

Spray pressure, right.

Nozzles.

If you spray, check again, three to five days after you've applied, make sure that insecticide is working like you expected to.

And then finally, if you have to treat a field more than once in a year, alternate insecticide groups.

As far as resistance management, if you look at the pyrethroids by themselves, because of the widespread resistance we've seen in Minnesota, we're not advising using those alone.

Neonicitinoids, by themselves, they're not quite as effective as a mix of what we do want, not wanna see as following a neonicitinoid seed treatment early in the season with a foliar containing another neonic.

Pyrethroids pre-mixes with our neonics mix can be okay, but I'll caution people that if you have resistance in the field, that pyrethroid right is not doing anything and all your insecticide control is based on the other compound.

If we look at the newer products.

These are really good at maintaining a predator and parasite populations.

They're real specific to sucking insects.

The Sivanto and Transforms, even though there is no documented cross resistance to these insecticides with neonics, we still advise caution following in the neonic treatment.

And if you do mix something with these products to broaden the spectrum, say, for example, take care of caterpillars at the same time, that reduces all your benefits for keeping those natural enemies in the fields.

And then Sefina works the same way as far as maintaining natural enemies.

It's a unique group.

It acts a little bit slower.

But again, if you mix another product with it to broaden the spectrum, you're gonna have take that benefit of controlling natural enemies away.

There are some documents available from Minnesota Extension also kind of walking you through some different rotations with the second side resistance.

You can find that on the crops website.

This is today's best practices, and I'm Bruce Potter, University of Minnesota Extension.

- You've heard the saying, you can take a girl out of the country, but you can't take the country out of a girl.

This little story I'm going to tell you started about 17 years ago, three days before Easter, when I was trying to find a baby animal to use in my children's sermon at church on Easter Sunday.

I asked everyone, "Do you have a kitten?

"Do you have a puppy?

"Do you have something?"

And one of the girls said, "Well, I don't have anything, "but I heard that the farm store in town sells baby ducks."

Oh my goodness!

Baby ducks, that's perfect!

I drove out to the farm store on my lunch break.

And in the back of the store is a coating, you've seen them, filled with straw on either, and a heat lamp, and inside, dozens and dozens of day-old ducklings.

I just stood there, looking at them.

The clerk walked up to me and said, "Well, hello ma'am, how many ducks would you like?"

And I said, "One."

And he said, "Oh, no, no, no.

"If you're going to get one duck, you have to get two ducks "because they're going to be lonely if you don't get two."

"Well, okay," I said, "but you know, I can't choose out of all these, would you choose for me?"

He reached his hand down into the straw and pulled up a little fluffy, yellow duckling with an orange beak and orange feet.

And then he looked in and he said, "You need a black one."

So with his rough farmer hands, he brought out a little black duck with a black beak and black feet.

He puts them in a box and said, "Here you go, enjoy your ducks."

Well, my lunch hour was over.

I had to return to the fourth floor of the Guggenheim building at Mayo.

And of course, those little ducks had to go with me.

All those peeps brought everyone to my office.

Two of the laboratory technicians, named Sam and Sonia, stepped in.

They were in throb with these tiny little baby ducks.

And so Sam picked up the black one, Sonia picked up the little yellow duck.

And I decided to let them, Okay, that's what I would name them, Sam and Sonia.

Well, a few months later, I went out to the garage where I kept Sam and Sonia.

I went out like I did every morning, of course, and something was quite different.

Sam had laid an egg and Sonia, well, his voice had deepened quite a bit.

And then I realized that Sam was the girl and Sonia was the boy, but I couldn't change their names of course, because they knew their names.

And I thought, "Oh, well, somewhere in the world, "there's a girl named Sam and a boy named Sonia."

Well, I got another surprise a few months after that, because they're out in the garage, stood, proud father Sonia looking at Sam who had just hatched 11 baby ducklings.

The secret was out.

All those quacks and peeps coming from my yard brought all the neighbors, brought all their kids, every day to see the ducks.

And I became known as the duck lady.

Well, there was 11 baby ducks grown as big as their parents before I really decided I had to give them to someone.

My veterinarian took them.

He lived in the country.

I moved from Rochester to Minnesota to a lovely little acreage out in the country.

And on my pickup seat, right beside me, of course traveled with me, Sam and Sonia.

After a few months, they hatched three more babies.

And then I decided since I had so much room for ducks, I would wait or something.

So I ordered two little black, Indian runners, and I named them Eleanor and Isabel.

Someone from town heard that I had ducks and called and said, "My mom says we can't have these ducks "anymore in our yard because ducks aren't allowed in town.

"And so will you take my ducks "because my mom says, if you don't take them, "we're going to eat them."

And I said, "Bring them to me."

So I have a lot of ducks.

But of course I had one favorite.

Sam, had always been my favorite duck.

She loved for me to hold her.

I kind of hold her like a baby and she would wrap her long, thin neck around my neck.

And she went with me to tell stories, wherever I went.

To the nursing home, to schools, to libraries.

She went with me to church so we could do more children's sermons.

She would just sit in the basket on the pew beside me, not say anything at all.

Sit through the entire preaching of the sermon and everyone in the church was astonished, as well as the pastor.

Well, Sam, last summer had grown old.

She was 17 now.

Her black feathers were mixed with so many white feathers.

She wasn't black anymore.

And one day, even though I could not believe it was happening, she died.

As I held her in my arms, my Sam, my Sam, my therapy duck, my calm, my heart.

I have to tell you something pretty exciting is going to happen in a couple of weeks.

There's a mother duck who was sitting on a nest of eggs and two of those little ducklings when they're hatched will come to my house.

I've already named them, oh yes.

Mabel and Odors.

That'll be another story.

You know how the saying goes, you can take a girl out of the country, but you can't ever take the country out of a girl.

- [Male Narrator] June Dairy Month celebrations held on working dairy farms are longstanding tradition across the country.

Activities typically include, interacting with the dairy farm family, watching cows being milked and learning more about how milk is produced and showing the benefits of dairy in our diet.

With restrictions from COVID-19, many events have been canceled across the country, but in Goodhue County, Minnesota, the event went on with some changes.

- Well, we were called by the committee to have it because they actually said our barn was kinda set on a little bit more in the open where people could drive through it.

So then with that, we just kinda thought about it and started working on it and thought we probably had good traffic flow on our particular facility to make it work.

So we just kinda come up with a plan and hope it would work and it seems to be working all just fine this morning.

We're driving through our free stall barn, literally down the feed alley.

So we got cows in each side of them and driving in the feed alley.

So they got to feed the cows in there.

And then they saw where the feed was stored.

And then they came back up here in the front yard and got their dairy treats and whatnot.

And then kinda right behind us here is where they're getting that.

And then, behind the camera man, they are gonna drive in through the calf barn where they can see the calves.

- People are getting creative and getting out there and sharing about their daily farms and their daily stocks.

That's been pretty special.

I've gotten to talk to a lot of people.

There's been a lot of children.

I had one family that came through and there was 11 people in their vehicle.

And it was their first time visiting a dairy farm.

So I'm really excited that people get to visit daily farms.

I grew up on a dairy farm and I will kinda do my family stay farm.

So I'm so happy for people to get a chance to come out and see a farm like this.

- One thing about farming and agriculture, it's always an innovative industry.

And we're seeing that today with June Dairy Month on the farm, a drive through experience in Goodhue, Minnesota.

This is Lynn Ketelsen reporting.

- Staying informed about the world around us has become even more important these days.

Make sure to take the time to check in with your friends and family and stay connected.

I'm Dan Hoffman, thanks for watching Farm Connections.

(upbeat music)