Regenerative agriculture continues to gain momentum as more practices and offerings become available for both growers looking for additional revenue streams and companies looking to reduce their Scope 3 carbon emissions. Dustin Madison, who manages the agronomic, conservation, and fertility operations of the Engle Family Farms in Virginia and North Carolina, is part of the Perdue Sustainability Program, in collaboration with the ForGround by Bayer program and using regenerative farming practices to keep the farm both productive and sustainable.
We’re installing practices here that fit our way of farming and have a positive impact on the environment, whichever part of the environment that may be. I normally kind of center everything around no-till and cover crops. There’s probably some other stuff that fits, but these are the two big ones, right? They’re the catch all for everything. So we do no till, we do cover crops. We’ve been doing both of them for several years now. Now it’s probably across the majority of our acres.”
Madison says you have to be willing to experiment to find what works on your fields.
“Here in the last couple years, we’ve really kind of narrowed it down to a lot of rye, a lot of wheat. Separately this year, we put a pretty good sized bet on mixing some clover in with some of those ryes to see if we could fix any nitrogen before going into the corn next year.”
And he’s seen results.
“We can say over time we see bigger organic matter numbers. In Virginia, our our fields could be anywhere from two to 4% organic matter. And I think over time, if I take seven or eight years worth of soil samples, we can see them go up to that five or six number, as long as we’re sticking to a pretty good plan here. Those are things that we can measure. Other than that, it’s a lot of anecdotal stuff. I feel like we get a little less weed pressure when we get a good cover crop established. We get a little extra time bought when it’s when we get those hot and dry spells in the summer, and we’re seven days away from a drought on a lot of our dirt. So anything that can buy us a little bit of time on a hot, dry July is a good thing.”
Madison is particularly pleased with the soy crop following covers.
“When we can get them into a good dry cover crop, even wheat, but rye’s a little bit taller, my guys always fight me, because I let the rye grow a little taller, and then they got to plant to it. But at the end of the day, those beans really turn out nice. We don’t see those disaster crops at 20 bushels per acre, 30 bushels per acre. You know, even on a tough year, now it’s maybe 40, 45.”