Baling first cutting June 1, 2025

Aerial view of my farm

Learning to fly my drone allows me to document the seasons on my farm. This April 27, 2025 photo is striking due to the fact that I am the only one in the neighborhood with a “green” farm. We seeded this cereal rye cover crop into standing corn in September 2024 at a rate of 100 lbs/acre. I also put out 4 lbs/acre each of winter camelina and rapeseed. I don’t see the rape (canola) this spring, but there is some surviving winter camelina here and there. The idea with a mix of cover crops is to feed the underground “livestock”. One component of underground livestock is mycorrhizal fungi and another is earthworms. In addition, keeping the top soil from leaving the farm (erosion) with wind and water between October and May when corn and soybeans are not growing is a major goal. A third benefit is enhanced water infiltration. Rather than running off the tilled soil, rainfall on my farm tends to follow the cover crop roots down into the soil and leave my farm more slowly on its way to Alleman Creek.

April 27, 2025

My Kernza® Story

Kernza® is a perennial grain & forage crop bred from intermediate wheatgrass (Thinopyrum intermedium) beginning in 1988. First promoted by the Rodale Institute, in 2003 the Land Institute of Salina, Kansas, took over the breeding program along with a group of collaborators. Currently, Dr. Lee DeHaan is in charge of that program.

On my farm in central Iowa, I consider Kernza® to have potential as a new crop in my farming rotation. We seeded 7 acres of Kernza® in November 2021 at 15 lbs/acre with a no-till drill following corn harvest. We had hoped for a grain crop in 2022, but we planted too late to make that happen. As it was, we harvested the Kernza® for cattle feed in summer 2022. We did not apply fertilizer at planting time but since then I have run Haney soil tests each year and followed the recommendations to apply 50 lbs N/acre and 30 lbs K/ acre, (we are re-visiting this recommendation) less than conventional crops of corn and soybeans. I have not applied any herbicide, in fact by 2023 the Kernza® had out-competed nearly all the weeds that had grown the first summer. My first harvest in 2023 yielded three crops: grain, straw and forage. We pastured my ewe flock on the re-growth for five weeks in late fall 2023.

I am currently marketing three high-fiber, high-protein Kernza® products: raw grain, flakes, and flour. My Kernza® flakes were processed in Nebraska and the grain is milled into flour in Kansas. We have found all three products to be tasty and nutritious here at home and I have sold flakes to two local breweries so far. My plan is to market my 2023 crop locally to brewers, bakers, and individuals through Iowa Food Coop and other local food hubs. Since Kernza® is a perennial crop, we expect a good harvest again in 2024 and hopefully 2025 as well. I am lucky to have neighbors Aaron Lehman and Dylan Reinhart that I can hire to harvest the grain and bale the straw. My colleague Brandon Schlautman of Sustain-a-Grain, where I am a producer, is my Kernza® mentor.

Kernza® is a grain that delivers numerous ecosystem services on my farm including deep roots which increase water infiltration and soil health, carbon sequestration, and perennial cover which prevents surface erosion and wildlife cover. Together, these benefits make my land more resilient to the effects of climate change.

For more information:
https://kernza.org/
https://landinstitute.org/our-work/perennial-crops/kernza/

Fourmile Creek watershed improvements coming

Fourmile Creek, the watershed that my farm is located in, is the largest watershed in Polk County, Iowa. Its 76,000 acres include farmland, small towns, the large town of Ankeny, and the east side of the city of Des Moines. A collaboration of the City of Des Moines, Polk County Conservation, Polk County, and IDALS (the Iowa Department of Agriculture), has begun to put in place conservation measures that may improve the water quality and decrease the damage from flooding.

More Priuses than pickups

Just got back from the 2022 Prairie Festival at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. We camped and were serenaded by “yotes” and Great Horned Owls both Friday and Saturday nights.

Highlights were stimulating lectures, tours of research plots (kernza, silphium, kernza intercropped with alfalfa).

Attendees seemed to be of two groups: graduate students from Midwestern universities and citizens interested in conservation. Not many were driving pickups, but there were a lot of Priuses (Prii?)

Soil testing in my hay field

I have been sampling my hay field soil after first cutting for 3 years now. The hay is a 3rd year seeding of alfalfa/orchard grass mix which I use for sheep feed. For the first cutting, baled on June 17, 2022, we got 22 large round bales or about 22,000 lbs of hay from 5 acres. Factors in the good yield this year are heavy rains and good fertility. We have had 15.25 inches of rain on my farm since March 18, 2022, when I put out my rain gauge. Third, we harvested our hay late (we prefer to cut our hay at Memorial Day) so it was a heavier growth.

Step one: Insert soil probe into soil 6-8 inches. (This might be difficult if the soil is very dry.)

Step two: Pull the probe up and drop the core in the bucket.

Step three: Collect the cores, mix the cores, and send off a sample

to the lab for analysis.

No CO2 pipelines for Iowa!

May 24, 2022
I urge the Iowa Utilities Board (IUB) to deny building permits for the Summit, Navigator, and ADM/Wolf CO2 pipelines in Iowa for three reasons.

First, the evidence from scientists and engineers at the University of Iowa and Iowa State University:
1. Complete capture of CO2 during ethanol production would have very minor effects on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
2. The amount of CO2 captured during ethanol production would be a tiny fraction of what would be emitted out of vehicle tailpipes.
3. Eminent domain used to build CO2 pipelines in Iowa would force farmers and landowners to allow degradation of their fields and forests for very little public benefit.
4. Allowing profits to accrue to private pipeliners using eminent domain would be a corruption of the ideal of private sacrifice for public good and should be prevented.
Source: https://cjones.iihr.uiowa.edu/blog/2022/05/magic-carpet-ride

Second, we have better methods of sequestering CO2 on the land than building expensive, disruptive pipelines. As a Polk County Iowa Century Farm owner, let me describe those better strategies for sequestering CO2, reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, and improving water quality as well. I have put all these practices into place on my farm. They are practical and make a difference:
1. Solar energy generation with electric vehicle on-farm charging,
2. Cover cropping with no tillage, and,
3. Edge-of-field practices: stream buffers, terraces, a waterway, saturated buffers and a wood-chip bio-reactor.

Third, these pipelines pose serious ethical problems:
1. Ex-governor Terry Branstad appointed 2 of the 3 members of the Iowa Utility Board and now works for Summit,
2. Samantha Norris is legal counsel for Navigator CO2 Ventures and was legal counsel for the IUB in 2018 & 2019,
3. Richard Lozier is a current IUB member and was appointed by Governor Branstad and worked for a law firm that represented the Dakota Access pipeline,
4. USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack’s son Jess Vilsack works for the Summit legal team,
5. Bruce Rastetter, CEO of Summit, has donated $124,898 to Governor Reynolds’ campaigns since 2015,
6. Both Jeffrey Boeyink and Jake Ketzner work for Summit. Boeyink was Governor Branstad’s chief of staff in the past, and Ketzner served in the same role for Governor Reynolds,
7. Josh Byrnes, who is a member of the IUB, was appointed by Governor Reynolds, and his daughter Jess is currently Governor Reynold’s executive assistant, and finally,
8. Governor Reynolds has appointed members to her Carbon Sequestration Task Force who are industry insiders: Geri Huser, IUB chair; Debbie Durham, Iowa Economic Development Authority Director; Kayla Lyon, Iowa DNR Director; and Scott Marler, Iowa DOT Director.

How can Iowans be assured that the IUB will make a fair decision when the deck appears to be stacked against us?

For these three reasons, I urge you to deny permitting for the Summit, Navigator, and ADM/Wolf pipelines across land owned by Iowa’s taxpayers. This includes denying the use of eminent domain to take private farmland to build those CO2 pipelines.

Sincerely,
Lee S. Tesdell, Tesdell Century Farm, Polk County, Slater, IA

Let’s see what a sudden 3-inch rain can do

On Earth Day, April 22, 2022 we had two fronts come through northern Polk County in Iowa. The first one woke me up and left about 1/2 inch of rain in the gauge. When I got back from my appointment in Ames, we had water over the road, so I turned around and went home on gravel. The rain gauge had 3 inches in it a short while later.

158th Avenue

In the afternoon I drove around the neighborhood and found the headwaters of my creek, Alleman Creek, a tributary of Fourmile Creek, looking like this:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bhFP1vZrMgtzSNR6Z7aJWyDcx6XOB-3w/view?usp=sharing

Since then, we had another .5 inch at home. On my farm, 1/2 mile south, I dumped out a total of 3.75 inches this morning. My farm got well watered and we lost much less topsoil than our neighbors due to our terraces, prairie strips, no-till, and cereal rye cover crop. The creek buffers helped too.

Rain gauge showing 3.75 inches on April 24, 2022. Alfalfa in the background.

Lambing 2022 is here

Weighing a 10 lb lamb. Her sister was 9.5 lbs. These lambs were born April 10, just an hour after we sheared the ewe.

Shearing time. April 10, 2022. We like to shear before lambing time, so that the baby lambs can find mom’s milk easily.

Lennie the guard llama checking out the first lambs of 2022. Lennie is not overly friendly with the sheep, but he keeps an eye out for them.

Wise words from Paul Gruchow

My undergrad history professor, Dr. Joseph Amato, wrote Jerusalem Artichoke Circus: The Buying and Selling of the Rural American Dream in 1993.

AEFS (American Energy Farming Systems) of Marshall, Minnesota, was a company that employed a mixture of hype, evangelical fervor, and greed to defraud farmers in the upper Midwest in the early 1980s, touting the Jersualem artichoke as a crop that would save farmers from ruin.

Paul Gruchow wrote a forward to Amato’s book and it’s worth a read.