Minnesota farmer Steve Fresk has taken us on a journey through his farming operation—an operation that he started as a second career after decades in the seed industry. In his last article, we’re going to wrap up with a final look at his philosophies around making improvements on his farm, as well as the importance of “Godincidences” and his journey with CarbonWorks products. 

Incorporating New Practices on the Farm

I’ll let a guy like Nate Firle, with AgRevival, do the way-out-there research. Before I try something on my farm, I’ve already got a pretty good idea in my head that it’s going to work. If someone like Nate says something has really good potential, I’ll likely consider incorporating it in my operation. 

As farmers, a lot of our ideas, though, aren’t necessarily new. Some ideas are just slow to get adopted. A fun aspect of my seed career was seeing so many different farming operations and what worked or didn’t work for them. From there, it’s all about asking why. If someone told me, “this was a great hybrid,” I’d ask why. Okay, so it yielded great. But how did you use it? What was your tillage program? What was your fertility program?  And it was the same process with someone who told me they didn’t like a particular hybrid. Because if you don’t learn from a situation, you’ll probably repeat it. 

Godincidences

George Sims and Nate Firle both say that there is no such thing as coincidences, just Godincidences. I think Mark Twain once said that there is no such thing as a coincidence, just God’s way of remaining anonymous. Picking Nate out of a bunch of college intern potentials—that was a Godincidence. Nate then met George on a hunting trip and George eventually came up North to work with him. 

Me hiring the young man that I farm with—that’s another example. He was working as a hired man for a customer of mine. I thought, this kid’s brilliant, what’s the rest of his story? I discovered that he hadn’t had an opportunity to farm on his family’s operation. Instead, he went to get a diesel mechanic degree and was working as a hired man on a customer’s farm. I told him that he has a lot of potential and should be selling seed, so I hired him to be a full-time seed salesman. And as the world turns, many years later he’s helping me play farmer. 

I never worked for Pioneer seeds, but one of the guys in our farming consortium was a huge pioneer dealer. People sometimes would ask, how do you get along? We always respected each other. I bring faith into my relationships. It’s easy for me to become part of the Fellowship of Christ-Like Growers because the Lord has been so good to me through the years that I’m more than willing to share with others. Formerly, I was a certified lay minister in the United Methodist Church and did a lot of pulpit supply. Like everything else, I needed continuing education to remain certified, which became difficult to keep up with together with my family life. Even so, I still do pulpit supply once and a while. I like to listen to people’s life stories, learn from them, and share the love of Christ with people. I think that’s how George and I got the tie that we have. 

Focusing Farm Improvements on Soil Health

When it comes to seeking out improvements for the farm, I like to think in terms of soil health. What does soil health mean to me? One thing that comes to mind first is the ability for water to infiltrate, both uniformly and rapidly. As I’ve discussed, I have some land that tends to pothole after big rains. And, for whatever reason, we’ve tended to get some big rains lately. One of the things I’ve noticed versus some of my neighbors is that standing water on my low spots tends to disappear sooner, even with the same amount of drain tile. 

That’s the increased sponge factor of my soil working for me. With better structured soil, it holds more water before it gets “full” and the water starts to pond or run off. I also seem to get less erosion of my topsoil than some of the farmers in the neighborhood. I’ve used turnips and radishes more than I probably would have liked to, but they do such a good job of opening up the soil structure. We get more pore spaces in the soil, we get earthworm tunnels—it all helps the soil to hold more water. And, we don’t do tillage, which helps preserve the soil’s porosity instead of filling up those pore spaces again. 

That’s my idea for soil health: It drains. It has good water holding capacity. And it has good internal drainage—that it can get rid of excess water while holding an adequate amount of water. With all this, the soil becomes workable sooner in the spring and sooner after a rain without being compacted. And it just supports life better. I’d like my soil to be able to weather extremes—to go from excess rain to drought and still keep a viable crop out there somehow. 

Steve’s CarbonWorks Journey Begins

When I first met George, when he first came north to Minnesota in February, he probably remembers it better than I do. I thought he was a likeable quack. He was so enthusiastic. He knew about carbon and energy and about biochemistry—all the technical aspects—but didn’t have a lot of experience with the North or our row crops up here. Being from the South, he didn’t realize that, for one thing, our soil freezes up here, sometimes to a depth of three feet. 

What really endeared me to him is that he started asking more and more questions. How could CarbonWorks be incorporated in your agricultural system up here? It’s not just someone telling me what to do—he’s learning just as I am. And one of the things I remember most about our first conversations was him sharing with me that our agricultural system is salt-based. At George’s suggestion, one of the first changes I made after I met him was to begin using a low-salt starter fertilizer. That worked well for me, so then I added in a CarbonWorks product along with my low-salt starter fertilizer. 

When I did that, I didn’t really see any gain. But George didn’t give up; he told me to just try the RSTC 17. And so I tried half of the planter with just RSTC 17 and water and half the planter with the low-salt starter. The RSTC 17 out yielded the starter fertilizer. In terms of profitability, the low profitability was the starter fertilizer and RSTC 17 together, the next one was just fertilizer, and the best was RSTC 17 by itself.

The Importance of Asking Questions

After we saw these results, we had to ask why. Well, we’re introducing carbon combined with hydrogen and oxygen and introducing it to the soil to create sugars in a more usable state for the little seedlings out there and the mycorrhizae that are going to help break down the nutrients to make them available to the seedlings. 

That was the beginning of my CarbonWorks journey. I understood the concept, but we had to figure out how to make the products work—to move beyond the theory. The same process happened when we started using George’s acidifier in our very high-pH well water. Everyone knows that herbicides work better in lower-pH water; you get more activity with them. All of our well water is very high pH, so we always used a lot of AMS, Hel-Fire, and other things in our spray. And then, all of a sudden, along comes George’s product. It’s pure enough it could be classified as organic, and it drops the pH of the water faster than anything else while increasing the oxygen concentration in water. 

So when we started using the CarbonWorks product in our spray solutions, the viability went up, the crop damage went down, and the cost remained the same. There again, I thought, “okay George, you proved that to me, what’s next?” Well, I never had livestock pits, but Geroge has a product that you put down in the pits to help break up solids. Some other people started using that and realized that, wow, this stuff really works. 

These products and concepts that George was bringing forward just started working better and better and better. The science behind them is so solid, but what really makes them work for people is asking why—understanding how they function and fit into your plans. 

I think it’s exciting that we have a fraternity now, a fellowship, through which all of us can talk to each other. It’s been a real joy to talk shop with George over the past fifteen years. And we have Nate up in Minnesota contributing by doing all the hard research into these products. 

Mindset Matters

If you’re going to try something new, you have to have a different mindset. “We’ve never done it that way” or “I don’t think it will work” or “I don’t like you” just doesn’t work. You have to have more of a mindset of “I wonder why.” Be curious about how something works and why it works. Along with that, it’s so important to find a trusted group of your peers that you can bounce ideas off of, which I feel is one of the big opportunities for the Fellowship of Christ-Like Growers. 

When it comes to my own farm, I try to always focus on what’s best for the long-term health of my farm. Do I need to get something out of a product today? Sure. But maybe I’ve become more patient with age. I want to leave the farm better than when I found it versus just thinking about maximizing profitability in the short term. For example, I can circle back to my CRP land. Planting fourteen acres of CRP in the middle of a relatively flat field wouldn’t make sense for a lot of guys. But I looked at my crop maps and realized that, when planting a crop on that ground for ten years, I had only harvested it four times. I’m not all that fond of government programs, but I went with the CRP because it was more profitable long-term than what I had been doing. And now, it’s really fun to see the pheasants out there or a doe and a fawn get up and run across the soybean rows. While I didn’t make the decision for those warm-and-fuzzy feelings, I enjoy it now after the fact. 

I think the opportunity to mentor the next generation is exciting too. And that’s another reason why I’m one to try things. If I can help somebody down the line, that’s great.