The stock cropper
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Bill:
Zack, you're known as The StockCropper on YouTube and can be found on Twitter at zebulousprime. Also you're on Facebook, you're on Instagram, you're doing all of the social media activities to tell people about your farm operation and we'll get into that a little bit more, but first kind of tell me just a little bit about the history of your farm, how you got started, and tell me just a little bit about the Smith farm.
Zack:
So my family has been farming in Winnebago County for probably over 120 years and I'm the fifth generation now. My dad retired in 2013 and I took over in 2014 operating on just about 305 acres up to this point. My farm has been rooted in conservation practices since I've kind of taken over strip till cover crops. And those interests have kind of led me to what we're talking today about the Stock Cropper Genesis about 18 months ago.
Bill:
So the stock Cropper is I think one of the most fascinating things that I've seen in agriculture in my 30 years in this profession. It's kind of hard to just sum up in a minute or two, but kind of just tell me what Stock Cropper is.
Zack:
If I have to put in one sentence I'd say Stock Cropping is the reintroduction of livestock and row crops back together in the field happening dynamically at the same time. And so to expand out from that we used to have a lot more diversity on landscape and on farm operations and we've become highly specialized and substituted the benefits of having crops working with animals with technology brought to us by the agricultural companies that provide them.
Zack:
And what Stock Cropping is trying to utilize the technology that we have at our disposal now in 2021 that my grandfather and great grandfather didn't have 70 to 100 years and put a new twist with biodiversity to try to provide a system that is better for the land and more importantly better for the farmer and the local community than what we have with our current paradigm in the business.
Bill:
Zack, let's boil this down a little bit because there's a lot to what you just said and I kind of want to take it back to five generations ago when your ancestors were farming. I assumed that like many farmers they came to Winnebago County, they settled on a quarter section, they had their families, they had crops, they had livestock and it wasn't necessarily producing corns or soy beans. It was producing different crops, also incorporating the chickens, the sheep, the pigs and the cows. That's a big assumption on my part.
Zack:
Oh, you're right and that's what it was for sure.
Bill:
But your system right now, the Stock Cropping system is basically duplicating that, correct?
Zack:
It's not an exact copy because in those days they maybe had a 20 acre field of flax and a 20 acre field of barley, and maybe a hay field and kind of a menagerie. And what Stock Cropping is that I really didn't explain in that first explanation is it's really utilizing principles of strip intercropping. So where you plant a different crop or pasture type every say 20 or 30 feet and strip that across the field. And then what we're doing is we're growing crops in between strips of pasture that we have built an autonomous multi-species grazing system that moves in between and has a lot of benefits to the land as well as the crop next to it.
Zack:
And the idea is we wanted to create a system that is just kind of self-feeding, where the animals were there to fertilize the land for the next year. And then we just simply rotate and put the animals where the crops were and put the crops where the animals were. It sounds complicated, but it's a really, really simple premise and we've been having a lot of fun developing it over the last 18 months.
Bill:
I think you're right. It's hard to explain, but it is a pretty easy concept. Folks who log onto YouTube and look at your Stock Cropper page on YouTube can see very clearly what you're talking about. But essentially as you said, it's a strip of cover crop, a mix that you've planted. You have these mobile barns that once the crops get tall enough multiple species of animals are slowly progressing through that cover crop mix. But then on either side you've got corn planted, correct?
Zack:
Correct.
Bill:
And then also in addition to growing the animal protein you're trying to boost yield of corn through, well, I'll let you explain that.
Zack:
Yeah. So we're trying to boost corn production through the power of the edge effect and giving full sunlight penetration on the outside rows. And that's something that almost anyone familiar with agriculture can understand because if you drive by a field of corn the end of August you see these big monster silo ears that are popping out the end of the husks and everybody thinks it looks like 400 bushel corn. Well, it is probably 400 bushel corn on that outside row. But once you get into the field and you have less light yield drops off correspondingly to that. And so we're trying from a positioning standpoint to arrange things, to boost the corn production and as well as the corn actually provides benefits to the animals in producing shade for them and then hot afternoons.
Zack:
And so I talk about this dynamic cross leveraging between the two entities working kind of hand in hand synergistically to benefit each other. And it's all free, right? It's just you're not having to pay for that. It's just utilizing what nature gives you in that arrangement to provide more benefit to the farmer's bottom line.
Bill:
As I said I think this concept is one of the most fascinating things I've heard in a long time in this profession, but I kind of want to just back up a little bit and learn how you came to this Stock Cropper concept.
Zack:
A lot of this stuff started about 11 years ago now with friendship that came out of me getting interested in strip-till with a guy that lives about 30 miles north of me by the name of Sheldon Steven. And Sheldon is a really brilliant and creative individual that helped me in my path in a strip-till and was also playing around with this inner cropping idea.
Zack:
And we had kind of just brainstormed back and forth over the past decade or so about different kind of out outside the box concepts to find ways to bio hack our way into higher production levels, lower costs of doing business just to increase profitability for being a smaller scale farmer. And speed things up to 2020 right before the pandemic hit, corn was 270 a bushel, lowest to had been in a long time for us, lowest in my farming career.
Zack:
And we were working hard trying to figure out ways of how do we get out of that hole without having to try to just do what the machine says, which is you just need to scale and add thousands of acres to get to those efficiency levels that allow you to somehow figure that out at 270 corn. We thought, well, we didn't want to do that. We wanted to figure something else out.
Zack:
And so we were playing around this inner cropping piece and brainstormed with another individual named Lance Peterson, another strip-tiller up in Central Minnesota. And one night he had this idea with the strip intercropping and said, instead of just doing row crops what if you put livestock in between? And what if you just put it in a penny sheet?
Zack:
That was the original idea and that kind of set off a brainstorming session of, well, what if we did multiple species of livestock and everything was segregated and we had an order to it and we had all this biodiversity because we know that we need more biodiversity. So not just biodiversity in plants, but biodiversity in animals and we could make it solar powered and we could make it autonomous and it would collect its own rainwater. And it was just this rapid fire of ideas on Twitter DM session back and forth.
Zack:
And that's where it all started February 7th or 8th of 2020. And three months later we had a working prototype in the field and now a year later from that we have three mobile barns out demonstrating different sizes and concepts and animal mixes and a new manufacturing relationship with Dawn Equipment that we partnered with. That's kind of how we've gotten to today, but it's been a whirlwind and a hell of a lot of fun. And that's how I'm here talking to you today, Bill.
Bill:
So 18 months then from basically a Twitter conversation, not even actually on Twitter, but through the direct message function on Twitter, 18 months from the first real discussion, I guess, then to actually having manufactured barns not just by you, but another company on the ground in the field performing kind of what you dreamed that it would do, be autonomous. It would have solar power, it would be run wirelessly. It would have an inverted roof, a V-shaped roof to collect drain water to feed multiple species of animals within the same unit. That's pretty incredible.
Zack:
Yeah. When you say it like that I guess it is. It doesn't seem, I mean, for me, it's a big race against time kind of up a mountain and it's never fast enough for me, but it is something what we've been able to do. But a lot of it's been empowered by the power of the Internet and connecting people that otherwise I wouldn't have been connected with and that's driven a lot of what has happened and why we've been able to go as fast as we've had in the last 18 months.
Bill:
Zack, let's back up a little bit because you mentioned that you took over for your dad's farm after he retired and you had some acreage then that you were strip-tilling and I presume you were growing corn, soy beans then in those acres.
Zack:
Yeah. Corn, soybean rotation, you bet.
Bill:
And did you have cover crops at that time?
Zack:
Yes. Ever since we learned about cover crops in the great flood of 2013 for the first time. And after what I saw the first year with that I decided I wanted to use that on all of my farms. So since 2014 I've had a cover crop on 100% of my acres. I've seed it in the fall and then terminated the spring.
Bill:
What was the impetus then behind the cover crops?
Zack:
When I got into the strip-till thing it wasn't about soil health. Soil health hadn't become sexy and in vogue yet like it was an efficiency thing to me. But when I started to see the differences that our soils were taking on with increased biological activity and water infiltration, and it's like, damn this is pretty cool. How do I do more of this?
Zack:
And so then the cover crops were becoming more of a thing and I learned and the benefits that they have to jump starting biology and increased water infiltration and deeper penetration down through the soil profile. And it's like, well, why wouldn't I add that? Because I like what I've seen there and so that's what I've done and it hasn't been always perfect. Cover crops are not the end all be all, but they're part of my system and it's how I farm now.
Bill:
One of the things we hear about cover crops a lot is that that is one part of a more holistic soil health system. But that livestock is kind of the cherry on top of the Sunday, if you will. If you can figure out a way to implement livestock that seems to be what really makes things work.
Zack:
Yeah. I think what I'm trying to do with this system is how do we grow commercial food and try to mimic nature like what we had on the landscape here a few 100 years ago before we showed up to take it over. We had grasslands and herds of bison roaming and doing what they do to manage the landscape, having biodiversity not just from plants, but from animals where we have that spread across the land rather than concentrated in pig barns or cattle feed lots and then having to spread them in on its own, let the animals do the work for you and not have to have them inure spreader.
Bill:
So, Zack, in 2020 when you and Lance and Sheldon were having these online discussions, you kind of took the idea then of an eight row corn strip within a field and then 20 feet of the cover cropping and livestock. And I think you said that your first idea was to have sheep, correct?
Zack:
Correct.
Bill:
Yeah. So how to kind of morph from having a pen of sheep that would graze this 20 foot strip of cover crop into a portable barn or a mobile barn with sheep and pigs. And then as I understand you followed that up with chickens behind in a separate chicken tractor behind the sheep and the pigs, correct?
Zack:
Correct.
Bill:
Yeah. I mean, I just think that's fascinating. How did that idea progress?
Zack:
Yeah. So that's a great question. And just one I don't explain enough probably well enough, but the first idea was a pen of sheep. Well, a pen of sheep would be great, but you got to look at the value of what you're producing. And we were trying to figure out how to produce more in that space in between corn than what we would have if we just intercrop corn and soy beans.
Zack:
That was the initial major thing we were trying to figure out. Well, there's not a really active local sheet market here in Northern Iowa. And so it's, well, but we still need to have something to mow this pasture down. And so let's go with sheep and goats and let's just see how that works. And then let's put the animals that can generate revenue like pasture raised pigs and pasture raised poultry, which are very easy to sell in our market or the markets around and basically stack enterprises in the same space and not just with each other, but they all have a special purpose in the order. So the sheep are out front, they are lawn mowers. The pigs come behind, they're kind of our soil instigators with their snoots and doing rooting activity in their hooves and the chickens come behind and kind of go through the manure that was left from the previous animals and eat fly larva and then kind of finish things off because there's a lot more of them.
Zack:
And so they kind of even the manure distribution across the whole strip and we're left with all this wonderful manure evenly distributed and then kind of finished off with the tractors in the back. And then the great thing is, is that the manure instead of just sitting there on top of dead soil in the fall like what we do normally in Northern Iowa, we're doing that into a growing cover crop.
Zack:
So it starts to regenerate and come back again and the system repeats. So that's kind of the thought process that went into doing it. And then it was just a matter of figuring out how do you actually build that? It's one thing to draw it up on a marker board, but it's a whole other thing to build a four ring animal circus on wheels and make it happen.
Bill:
But you did that. So tell me a little bit about how this barn came together in 2020 and the whole process then of putting animals out in the field and progressing that barn through the field during the season. Just give me some statistics on how long your runs were, how many acres you actually covered with the grazing and we'll go from there.
Zack:
Yeah. So the process was, we drew up all these plans in March and Sheldon and I did a lot of that work together because we were the closest of the three and then we planted our crop and then Memorial Day weekend we got together. And the beautiful thing about Sheldon is that he's got his master's in egg engineering and had access to a metal shop. And so he was really the glue that made the whole design and execution of building the barn work well. So we had a really good machine right off the bat.
Zack:
So we launched the barn about the 15th of June into these pasture strips. Our pasture was about probably 24 inches tall when we did that. The barn if you're trying to visualize this, if you haven't seen it before, the barn is split into three separate compartments. There's a grazing compartment out front that was 11 feet deep by 18 feet wide to fit in the 20 foot strip. And then there was a central barn that was covered that had a roof that was split in two so the sheep and goats could have covering and feeding water inside on one half and the pigs would be on the other half. The pigs would go out the back of the covered barn into their grazing area, which was the same dimensions, 18 foot wide by 11 foot deep. And we would essentially move that barn 11 feet twice a day.
Zack:
So morning and night the barn would move. And so the animals always twice a day had the ability to move into fresh ground. And so they would never lay in their manure or get really dirty and we'd have a constant equal stream of manure coming out the back of the system onto the land. And we did that last year.
Zack:
We didn't have the solar powered autonomy package figured out, but we just simply used an electric wind off of my strip-till fertilizer cart and we just hooked that to a tractor at the end of our 300 foot pasture run that we set up for that first year. So the idea was we were operating this barn on about an acre of land on three different strips that were about 300 feet long if I remember correctly. And that was kind of the setup of last year.
Bill:
2020 then this was a fairly small plot of land overall then that you had the grazing and then the corn runs also. So at the end of the season then you had one cycle of lambs and one cycle of pigs. And you also had chickens. Did you have to have more than one batch of chickens or did you just finish those out? Kind of tell me how the chickens worked.
Zack:
Yeah. So the chickens we had two batches of them. I think it was about 300 birds that we raised last year. And so when you take those numbers, when you take 300 chickens and then add up 10 pigs and then seven or eight lambs or goat kids that we had as we got a combination of both goats and sheep in the mix, and you multiply those times average pasture USDA meat prices, there's a lot of value in those numbers assuming that you can find a market for that.
Zack:
And much more so than what corn or soy beans would be in. So when I did my final numbers at the end of the year to kind of compare the analysis of, is this an economically viable system with what we're able to produce? The answer was a very resounding yes. I think by my math last year it was seven times more profitable than if I just would've grown corn across that field in comparison to the acre of animal production with the stacked enterprises.
Zack:
And that's the one thing I don't think people understand is if you don't think about how can you stack enterprise in the same space in a time that's really where the advantage is. If you're just going to want to do one species I don't think this thing works, but there's a reason people did a lot of the different stuff and had diversity. It was their hedge, right. They didn't have crop insurance like what we do now to bail them out. And so they had to have a bunch of everything to make sure if something failed and that's kind of the same premise with this system too.
Bill:
I think one of the fascinating things I find is the whole processing part, which here in the COVID era we found across the corn era, across the country just a tremendous lack of processing space, locker plant space, no butcher capacity at all. That was the problem for you. You did a lot of that yourself.
Zack:
Yes, correct. We did. I've been doing my own processing just kind of as a fun hobby on the side and that's kind of built into this thing as well. At least for one barn we were able to handle. We did send some of the pigs to a walker to take the pressure off us during harvest last year when we were trying to manage all the other things that we do here on top of this. But we did process all of poultry and I did butcher the lambs myself. But the processing piece is really the biggest hurdle to moving this forward in my opinion going down the road.
Bill:
How about as far as having the supply of meat available what do you do with it? I mean, 300 chickens. That's a lot for one family to consume in a year's time. So are you selling that, or are you giving it away, or what's the plan?
Zack:
We sold it to friends and family and people in the community and folks that were fans of our content online, YouTube, Facebook reaching out and that's at least how we did the first batch and how we'll probably do the stuff we're working on this year as well. But eventually if we're going to actually scale it we're going to have to really ramp up those efforts and come up with some creative solutions to deal with this because this isn't just like raising pigs in a hog barn and they magically go off to the processor and you get a check. It's a lot more to it than that and there's a lot of challenges to try to make this a scalable business that we haven't got to yet.
Bill:
Let's move to 2021 because obviously this must have been successful enough for you to proceed into this current year with new ideas, new designs, and even a little bit more capacity to pursue the Stock Cropper initiative. Can you tell me just a little bit about what you changed for 2021 as far as the machines you used and the animal diversity and kind of ramping it up a bit?
Zack:
Yeah. So we had a lot of input from folks over the last fall from our field day that we hosted. And then in the winter I spoke at a lot of things virtually for different conferences about what we'd worked on. And I got a lot of input that just said, I've got to test a lot more things to find out what it is that we really need to be building. And I had people that wanted to, well, can you incorporate cattle into this system?
Zack:
And how would that look like? So we wanted to build a barn that had a cattle component to it and so we did that. And then the other thing I was trying to figure out is there's going to be different avenues for this type of technology, not just in row crop fields, but other avenues like save vineyards or acreage owners that maybe don't want to intercrop, but they just want to have something to manage a few acres of pasture that they don't have to build fence and necessarily tour the animals every day. And so we kind of developed this spectrum of size and uses and animals, animal inclusion and we wanted to just figure out how do you do this in all these different formats. And so that was kind of the concept I had. I wanted to make a couple different sized barns. So this year we have a 10-foot wide barn, a 20-foot wide barn from last year and then a 30-foot wide barn.
Zack:
And then within each one of those, we have different assortments of liveStock species that are all little bit different twists on what we did last year to see kind of how things behave and make observations this year and then we'll tweak it and do it again next year. So that was kind of the input that I got and the thought process I had and what we invested and threw money into to try to develop for this year to take a look in the field.
Bill:
It's easy to become a fan of what you're doing because it's so unique, it's so futuristic thinking, but you have people who you've worked with some fairly big names in this industry. Dawn Equipment has gotten on board with your vision. So kind of tell us how that partnership is taking Stock Cropper to another level, if you will.
Zack:
Again, it goes back to the power of the Internet. And one of the guys I want to give credit and props to in this journey was Jason Mock, who a lot of people in agriculture know through his Twitter presence over last five or six years. He really gave us a boost last year when we launched this and tweeted out to all of his followers what we were doing, and there was a significant uptick to our traffic after that.
Zack:
And last winter when I was trying to find ways to move ahead with a more scaled manufacturing, he's like, you really need to reach out and talk to Joe Bassett. Because he had worked with Joe on some other with his project out in Indiana with some of the really cool things he's doing with relay wheat. And so that's how that came to be.
Zack:
We went and met in Milwaukee last January and we sat in a little towny bar with a white board and markers, and we had all these people in Milwaukee wondering what the hell we're doing. And it was three guys geeking out with a marker board drinking some Coors Light and drawing pictures of barns and animals. And we kind of looked a little bit wonky, but we had a heck of a great day just brainstorming on the possibilities.
Zack:
And we got Joe interested and he decided that he had interest in wanting to find a way to work together through what he had available with engineering and design and manufacturing capacity. And so we've entered into a partnership for him to basically provide that for Stock Cropper and then Stock Cropper Inc. will market those barns once we get to that point of commercial viability and availability.
Bill:
Dawn Equipment is pursuing this project through its Underground Agriculture venture and they have built some prototype barns for you and I believe you have some that are kind of in the field right now.
Zack:
Correct. So to make 2021 a little bit clearer, I had our big barn that's 30 feet wide. We call that the Cluster Cluck Max9. I had that fabricated at a shop this spring in Iowa. And so they built that one for me to have this bigger version. And then I wanted Dawn when we kind of came to the Genesis of that relationship, I wanted them to focus on a smaller version that would be a little bit easier to manufacture and then really start with this whole idea of integrating the full autonomy with solar power and electric wheel motors and autonomous guidance.
Zack:
And so they've built a version that we call the Cluster Cluck Nano, which is I think about 96 inches wide. So eight foot wide by three pens or barn segments that are eight foot deep. And we debuted that at Jason Mock's Constant Canopy Field Day in July and demonstrated that thing moving under its own power through the sun with onboard batteries, with electric motors, and we drove the thing with a wireless, I think Xbox or PlayStation controller that controlled the components, which was kind of a dream come true for a kid that grew up playing Mario Brothers.
Bill:
I mean, to me, just it boggles the mind. So this is the wireless thing. You have this Xbox controller hooked up to the barn and you're just able to pretend you're playing Mario Brothers, but you're not. You're moving a barn filled with livestock.
Zack:
Yeah. We hit a button and it goes a predetermined set of feet and steps. And then the new barn has airbags on it just like with Dawn strip-till bar would have for down pressure. So we have the ability to lift the barn to move it and then set the barn back down. So the fencing is tight against the ground to limit predators coming in. And we do it all with the freaking Xbox controller replace. I can't remember which one it is. But it's just unreal the first time I got to sit there and steer that thing and do it all considering 18 months ago, it was an idea on a whiteboard.
Bill:
So, Zack, Underground Agriculture built a barn that was at Jason Mock's field day in Indiana in July. What is the path forward than having a marketable barn then for farmers to purchase and put on their own farm?
Zack:
Our plan moving forward is that we're going to continue to collaborate and iterate on the designs. The COVID situation and all the supply chain disruptions have made that process tough. Just getting simple components like motor controllers that you used to be able to have in two days, take two weeks. And so the whole COVID craziness of the world has kind of slowed that up right now. But we've still made great progress and Joe and his team have done a fantastic job. Our hope is that we're going to continue to make tweaks. We're going to use the barn in a couple different environments this fall to learn more about what we need to change and we'll continue to iterate through the fall into the winter season. The plan, at least now, initially is that we will have at least five Cluster Cluck models out at Jason Mock's new venue in Indiana, this wonderful new regenerative ag paradise. If you haven't seen that, you should check it out.
Zack:
We're going to have Stock Cropper barns that are featured. That for sure will happen. And then depending on how things go this fall with our advancements, my hope is that we will have some form of a commercial iteration available potentially next spring or summer for people that are really interested wanting to utilize this technology and try it out on their own acres and then hopefully within another year or so, we'll be ready more for a bigger commercial launch available to the public more in mass.
Bill:
As I sit here and I'll listen to this, as a farmer, it just really blows me away. And I didn't hear this from you, but a farmer friend of mine about a year ago told me, you know bill, I don't want to grow commodities anymore, I want to grow food. And I've thought about that almost every day and just kind of how that's your mindset too, right? I mean, your acreage isn't huge. You have 305 acres or you did when you started, but we're reaching out to farmers in this podcast of large acreages. So how do you see the Stock Cropper movement fitting in with commercial agriculture today?
Zack:
Yeah, it's a good question. I think when we started, I thought this would be great. We could just replace everything with this and sell kajillions of Stock Cropper barns. But in reality, that's probably not practical as badly as I'd want that to happen and the potential impacts to communities and injecting a lot more farmers back out here. But what I really see going forward in agriculture is there's going to be two paths.
Zack:
There's going to be the path of commodities and scaled production with fewer and fewer participants and fleets of AI tractors going across the field without people in them. And that's fine. I have nothing against that path because the reality is we still have to produce a hell of a lot of food to feed the world at this point. And that system exists and that's going to do a line share of the work. However, there is a growing concern for people that are more worried about where their food comes from in the consumer class and there is a growing demand for systems to be put in a place to deliver products that aren't produced in that manner in the conventional pathways. And so I'm really hoping to create a system or inspire ideas for other systems that fuel into this other path of divergence for an alternative future in agriculture where more people are involved, there's more biodiversity, it opens up hopefully more opportunities for other supporting businesses and local communities rather than just what I call the desertification of the Midwest, which I'm been watching my entire career.
Zack:
And that's one of the driving forces is I just didn't want to sit back idly and watch it happen and just say, well, that's just farming. There went the neighbor and nobody was there to replace him. So somebody else swallowed up and get another X9 combine to cover it and we'll call it a day. When I was 20 years old, that was probably what I thought was great, but the older I get and I see the impacts on our local populations and school districts and the businesses and in towns, it's a slow erosion over time.
Zack:
It doesn't just happen overnight, but until you do something to put something else in there, you can't expect change unless you're willing to stand up and be the change. And so that's what I'm trying to clumsily attempt to do.
Bill:
What do you think are the big obstacles to making this Stock Cropper movement really take off in the countryside?
Zack:
I think the biggest obstacle is probably mindset, the gray matter between the years for people to see and understand it and get the concept and see how it's different and how it offers opportunity. I think that's probably one of the biggest things first and foremost. Second biggest thing is the path to market for processing because, like I said earlier, I know that within a few years, we're going to have this thing figured out pretty well on how to move this four-ring animal circus across the field and do what we want to do.
Zack:
But the next step is how do you... There isn't a place right now where a farmer can take 400 pasture-raised pigs and get them processed and then have a way to deliver it easily direct to consumers and eliminate some of the middlemen along the way. And that's really what you need to do if you want the farmer to have more in his pocket at the end of the day.
Zack:
And so something has to give there and some of those things have started to happen with Secretary Vilsack announcing some big dollars coming into regional processing, plants, and initiatives, but those things are going to take time to do. And so until that starts to happen and we start seeing more of those things start to spring up, that's probably, from a logistical standpoint, the biggest obstacle we face right now is processing access to a smaller scale.
Bill:
Zack, when farmers respond to you, and they have in rows. In fact, I'm going to read some of the quotes that have been posted on YouTube replies or comments. Zack is on the cutting edge of innovation for the ag application of the future. Zack is using amazing common sense, another commenter fascinated by this project. So you have a lot of people who are following you and who are in interested in this, people from small farms, people from large farms.
Bill:
And I think the content that you post each Sunday or Monday is extremely well received. And so you have a lot of people pulling for you and a lot of people who are interested in duplicating what you're doing. How do you get the people who are interested in this concept, how do you get them on board and be part of this Stock Cropper movement? In other words if, say Bill Spiegel wants to try to have my own Stock Cropper situation in Kansas, then how do I learn how to move forward from a technical standpoint, from what cover crops to plant, where to get the barn and specifically kind of what you alluded to earlier is the whole processing standpoint. Do you anticipate collaborating with a bunch of small processors across the country and have kind of a Stock Cropper stamp of approval or a Stock Cropper brand for the meat products that are produced?
Zack:
I guess I hesitated the first time in answering that because to be honest with you, I'm not there where I feel like I can look Bill Spiegel in the eye in Kansas and say, Bill, I've got all the answers and you should come spend money with me. And I'm very, very conscious. I don't want to be a snake oil salesman and just sell people blue sky and good feelings about having a cool autonomous barn. I want to have a system in place. And the reality is it's just going to take some time and more partnerships with people to come online. And I know that Joe at Dawn and Underground Agriculture has the same commitment and we don't want to rush things. We want to make sure we get it right. We want to create something where people have success with this and have a path where as these other things come online, they can start to scale.
Zack:
So if people are interested, I think maybe the first thing I would say is while we're getting up to speed is just try and experiment with some of these simple things. A lot of those stuff that I'm doing, you can build your own little mini Stock Cropper with some animals and yank it around in a small space and just start to observe and learn and play around with your own stuff, at least initially. We've done it on a little bit bigger scale, but this next week, we're going to be building some new experimental, very small animal tractors to go in between 60 and 90 inch corn.
Zack:
I would really encourage people with any of this stuff, in order to break out of the commodity mold or that mindset, don't be afraid to take some chances and play around with some of these ideas. And as Jason Mock would say, farm in a way when the neighbors drive by, they're like, what in the hell is that guy doing now? And I thoroughly have gotten far more out of the last 18 months doing that than just putting my normal field of corn out there.
Bill:
Zack, those are great points and I do want to reiterate, and I think it's something that maybe you and I have talked about before, but we certainly didn't talk about today. This is a very intense type of endeavor. It's not something you can just sit on the couch and press your Xbox controller and have it move autonomously. You never have to go to the field. This is something that takes quite a bit of discipline and effort, I guess, from your perspective.
Zack:
Yeah. I think I want to be careful with how I frame the autonomous piece up because I don't want to have a system that, say Smithfield could just come by Stock Cropper barns and put them out on a field and call themselves sustainable. What I want is I want the farmer to actually be doing the work. And not all, but a lot of the situations like livestock production, there's a farmer that puts up a barn for the manure, but doesn't do the chores. He has somebody else take care of that.
Zack:
Well, that's not the way it used to be. My dad had hogs and he did all the work. And I think we've lost something from that too. I'll say it myself, just being a crop farmer is not the same as doing livestock. It's a hell of a lot easier in a lot of ways. And I think I want to design a system where the farmer is required to be out there, but not necessarily yanking devices around.
Zack:
Use the technology to do the movement, but let the farmer be the artisan of learning how to take care of animals on their own and care for them, and put the time and attention into that and the choring aspect and enjoying being outside doing that. There's a big difference of choring outdoors in the sunshine and the fresh air versus walking into ag barn. It's not the same sensation for sure.
Zack:
So that is definitely one of the things that's paramount to me is I want the farmer to be doing the work and being rewarded. Eventually we want the consumer to be tied back to each one of the individual animals and the farmer themselves that is potentially raising meat for a Stock Cropper meat's brand or something of that nature. We want to have transparency all the way back, and we want that farmer to be part of that transparency story.
Bill:
One of your initial goals was to produce more corn too, right? And I'm curious what you found out after the 2020 season where you had the Stock Cropper barns and then the idea then was to use those animals to provide fertility and then plant the following year into those Stock Cropper strips. And so I'm just kind of curious as far as the effects of grazing and the manure and the urine on the fall year's corn crop.
Zack:
Yeah. I'll start with the analysis from last fall. So we were in a pretty major drought last year in 2020, but still with that arrangement and using the edge effect, we grew 262 bushel corn on corn in our Stock Cropper corn strips. So we definitely got a bump out of that arrangement.
Zack:
Now, you follow it up with this year with plant and corn back into the strips of animal manure that we put in from where the barns went last year, I don't have that quantified with a number yet as far as the difference, but it has been substantial since the corn came out of the ground. All year long, my best looking corn on all of my acres is where that barn ran last year. And it was probably a foot taller right out of the gate. It just looked like it had more available energy.
Zack:
I'm not smart enough in the soil health biology space yet to explain all that other than there's definitely an advantage to having the goodies that come out the back end of the animal and the benefit of having other species of plants too predicating a corn crop coming in. A lot of people talk about the benefits of planting corn after oats and how much better it is in that area where you do that, and I think that probably has something to do. So bottom line, anecdotal observation is that biodiversity is a good thing.
Bill:
So this year's, 2021, Stock Cropping area is in a different location. And so after this season will use soil tests where you've had the animals? And will you be able to kind of offer some more analysis into the benefits you get from grazing on these strips? And then next year, as I understand, you're going to take where the animals grazed and then plant corn in that strip.
Zack:
Correct.
Bill:
So I guess I'm kind of curious how you plan to analyze and scrutinize and all kind of stuff to see what the after effects are on the Stock Cropping, if that makes any sense at all.
Zack:
Yes. So we plan to do a full soil test analysis. We're going to do it earlier this summer before we started, but it was so dry. I was a little bit worried about the accuracy of the test. Just in the last 24 hours, we've gotten like five inches of rain. So we finally have some soil moisture again. And so I will have a baseline test across the areas where we had crops in our plot versus where the animals went.
Zack:
And we're going to try to track that and test that each year for the next three or four years in this demonstration plot to try to get a baseline and see what differences that we're getting, not only nutrient levels, but levels of organic matter and the different types of carbon that you can test for and overall soil biology levels to try to see if it's more than just the anecdotal, hey, the corn looks really nice. What are we actually doing underground? And what are those? And what does that mean for the long term, potentially?
Bill:
Zack, you've pursued Stock Crop now for 18 months, you've committed a good part of your farming career to Stock Cropper and I know you're committed to this long term, and I guess from a soil health standpoint, you're kind of at the nexus of reduced tillage and cover crops and animal implementation. So what do you think? What's the future like?
Zack:
Well, I hope it's more of this because, like I said, I started this journey not knowing much or understanding soil health 11 years ago, or 10 years ago, or whatever it was. And each thing I've added to this journey, I've just seen these very obvious benefits too. I mean, you can pick up any farm magazine and you see soil health stuff. It's just everywhere. But you go out in the countryside and you see not a ton of practices actually utilized if everyone is being honest.
Zack:
And so I hope that even if people don't want to Stock Crop... It's one of the things that Sheldon and I talked about when we first came up with it, maybe people don't Stock Crop or maybe they take things or principles from what we're doing and apply it to more of the conventional agricultural systems and we just chip away at some of these benefits to help open people's eyes up to sometimes when you get out of the way and just let nature do its thing, what is possible. And maybe just in fact, you can make more money doing that. I think there's a lot of folks out there that have this idea that they're going to lose something. If they plan a cover crop, they're scared of no-till or strip-till, they're going to go broke and it's possible if you really screw it up and you don't do your homework on doing that, but I've been doing it for 10 years now and had a lot of personal success with it.
Zack:
And from a production standpoint, from a profitability standpoint, it sure isn't hurting what I'm doing. I hope the future is bright with more people taking chances at what levels they're going to feel comfortable at and take a stab. And some people are going to want a Stock Crop and some people might want to try no-till or strip-till for the first time. And the message I have is just do something because I would never go back to what I was doing prior after doing this for 10 years. I think I would rather quit farming. And that sounds probably vain and brash to say, but it is the truth because when you see these benefits and you have family owned ground, like I farm, I want to farm my family's ground in a way that leaves it in far better shape than when I took it over. And I know that by doing this stuff, I'm on a better path to that than when I started this journey. So that's what I would say to that.
Bill:
I guess we'll end it at that because I don't think it can get any better than that. But I do want to mention that you have a wife and two kids.
Zack:
Well, I have my wife, Mandy. We've been married for 18 years and we've got two beautiful daughters that are 15 and 16 years old and teaching me all sorts of lessons, being girl dad to teenagers right now in patience and humility. But they have been extremely supportive.
Zack:
When you tell your wife, hey, I'm going to take some of our money and invest it into some sort of contraption that rolls four types of animals through a cornfield, that's kind of a big leap of faith, but she's been great in going along for the ride and it's been fun for her to see the connections and the relationships and she's been able to be a part of that with some of the traveling we've been able to do.
Zack:
My girls don't have a ton of interest in agriculture right now, but the fact that their dad is on YouTube, they get some major street credit from their friends who watch it and think that that's pretty neat. So I take what I can at this stage in life with two teenage daughters, but they like coming over to see the animals and the barns and following up with stuff. And you got to have support when you're kind of flying out in the blue yonder of crazy land in ag. I'm really lucky, both with my wife and my girls, my mom and my dad and I got a great family to back me up on all this stuff.
Bill:
Zack, thanks so much, man. I appreciate the chance to visit with you and to learn more about the Stock Cropper project and I hope that we can continue this dialogue because I'm excited to see what numbers you come up with at the end of 2021 as far as net profit. Hopefully, it's at the black. We'll keep watching the progress of Stock Cropper in the years to come.