Steve Fresk’s farming operation is unique in several aspects. Number one, he doesn’t own a single piece of equipment. And number two, he came back to farming late in life after working in the seed industry for thirty-five years. Steve said that he came to farming without any preconceived ideas. So, how does he come to make decisions for his farm?

A Chance Meeting

I met George [Sims] fifteen years ago. Nate Firle, who many of us know through AgRevival, Beck’s, and the Fellowship of Christ Like Growers, was a college intern for me at Legend Seeds. He was so outstanding that I hired him full-time while he was finishing his last semester of college so that he wouldn’t get away.

Nate was on an alligator-hunting excursion to Florida with his brother, who was a videographer for hunting shows. They were out hunting in an orange grove that had a drainage canal running through it. And Nate was wondering why the trees on one side of the canal looked good and on the other side it looked like they had been hit with a flamethrower. The landowner, who was with them, told Nate that he’d have to ask his agronomist. And who was the agronomist? George Sims. 

George started talking with them about salt: how salts were building up in the orange groves because of the fabulous amounts of fertility they put down and also because they were starting to get salt in the irrigation water. 

At the time, George hadn’t had any experience with row crops, so he asked Nate if we had salt problems in the Midwest. It turned into an ah-ha moment. After thinking about it a little bit, Nate and I discussed it and thought, well, maybe we do have a salt problem. All of our fertilizers are salt-based. All of our herbicides, especially glyphosate, are salt-based. Are we introducing too much salt? So we started experimenting with some of George’s CarbonWorks products in row crops and saw great promise with them.  

I’ve known George for fifteen years and I’ve used his products in my own operation for thirteen years. Instead of thinking, ‘oh, this stuff must be snake oil’ or ‘this doesn’t make sense for me because it’s coming out of orange groves’, I thought, okay, what applications could this stuff have for us up here? 

Fertility In Focus

On my own operation, I grid sample and then put the P and K onto the soybean stubble in the fall. Then, I hit the ground very lightly with a vertical till machine, which results in very little soil disturbance. I use the same process on my corn stalks. I just want to slice through the residue to chop it up and throw a little dirt on it so that the residue doesn’t blow away. And then I come back in the spring and plant right into that vertical-tilled ground, which mellows out through the Minnesota winter. I plant right into that seedbed and then I introduce some energy, which for me is [CarbonWorks] RSTC17. I use it on both corn and beans. This introduces carbon, which combines with oxygen and hydrogen, to create sugars.

Learn More: George Sims discusses carbon’s role in soil and plant health.

As far as my nitrogen program is concerned, I come back and apply it with a stream bar at spike (emergence), which is something I learned from Nate Firle. One year we had a wet spring and I couldn’t get my nitrogen on ahead of time. I was wondering how I was going to get it applied, and Nate told me that wheat growers will apply it with stream bars. So we set up a sprayer with stream bars and away I went. Most years we’ll come back and top-dress urea at V5, or if we can’t get that done, we’ll come back with some more nitrogen with Y drops slightly before tassel. We put CarbonWorks CetaiN down with all of our nitrogen. 

I’ve had real good luck side-dressing urea with CetaiN because we’re at twenty-two-inch rows on everything. If I apply it around V5, just so we can get it through the plants to the ground at the last moment, it canopies shortly after and I don’t have the volatilization loss of urea that some people experience. 

Fertility for Soil Health

Overall, you could say that I have a unique program when it comes to managing my soil. I’ve been able to maintain and actually build yields, I feel, by reducing the deep tillage. I’m getting my organic matter built up, and I’m getting the mineralization coming off the previous year’s crop in mid-summer as an extra boost of fertility to the plants. Plus, I believe I have very good seed products. 

While my yields are coming up, all my costs are staying pretty low because I’ve cut out the heavy tillage and heavy applications of fertilizer by doing more “spoon feeding.” Since we’re no-till, we don’t put on any pre-planting chemicals; we come back early pre-emerge with all of our chemicals and we use twenty-eight percent as a carrier for our spraying program, especially on corn, so that’s another source of nitrogen. I don’t want anyone to think that I’m raising big yields without any nitrogen, because that’s not the case. 

Building Blocks of Success

In Steve’s next article, he dives deeper into his tillage and fertility programs and how his program approach benefits his land during the growing season and for future years.