Archives for August 2021

Harvey Benson had a simple transition plan for the farm that had been in his family since the late 1860s: he would continue living on those 160 acres until he died, and then it would be passed on to his partner, Bonita Underbakke. In fact, when people ask him if he’s lived on the farm all his life, the 90-year-old quips, “Not yet.” Bonita is 16 years his junior and they have grown quite close since they started dating in 2009 or so. Didn’t this arrangement make sense?

When she learned of this proposal, Bonita, not one to mince words, had a response that was clear and to the point: “That’s not a plan.”

What followed was a half-a-dozen years of discussions, some quite difficult, around creating a more nuanced transition plan for the farm in southeastern Minnesota’s Fillmore County. With the help of a young couple who has an interest in farming, community, and land stewardship, the older couple created an arrangement that strikes a balance of allowing Harvey to live out his wishes without putting an undue burden on Bonita when it comes to estate issues. A bonus is it provides a land access opportunity for beginning farmers while building soil health. It required creative thinking, but Harvey is glad he was pushed to think deeper about the future of the farm — it’s changed not only how he views the land, but how he views himself.

On a spring afternoon, as he gives a tour of the farmstead, Harvey reflects on how he has transitioned from being a “failed farm owner” to someone who is successfully passing on a stewardship legacy.

“I avoided even starting to think about passing on this farm because that would change my relationship with the land,” he says. “But ultimately, I’m very happy with this decision.”

Lifelong Learner
Harvey likes to say that “every decade you learn something more,” and it’s clear his curiosity about the world around him is boundless. He was born in the house he lives in now, and while he was growing up the farm was a typical diversified crop and livestock operation. After graduating from the University of Minnesota, Harvey was a social worker in the area. He eventually moved to Finland, where he taught English at the Helsinki University of Technology for 30 years. After retiring, he traveled around the world for a few years before returning to the farm, where he’s lived for the past two dozen years. During that time, the farm’s been rented to a neighbor who grows corn, soybeans, and alfalfa on the land.

Harvey has no children, and when he entered his 80s, he started thinking more about the future of the land. In 2016, Bonita, a long-time Land Stewardship Project member, talked him into attending a series of Farm Transition workshops the organization puts on periodically. The workshops, which are led by LSP staffer Karen Stettler, offer participants access to legal experts, as well as people who can help retiring farmers and non-operating landowners do the kind of goal setting needed to transition a farm in a way that meets their financial and conservation desires.

Harvey says the workshop was valuable, but he still didn’t feel he was in a position to pass off the farm to the next generation, especially if it meant moving off the land.

Bonita, who is a self-identified “pushy person,” along with Stettler, talked to Harvey about how selling to the highest bidder would likely mean the farm would just become one more field in a bigger cropping operation. Harvey started attending LSP workshops that covered, among other things, building soil health through practices like cover cropping, managed rotational grazing, and no-till. He was intrigued that working farmland could be good for the landscape.

“I’ve got that LSP bumper sticker that says, ‘Let’s Stop Treating Our Soil Like Dirt.’ I look at that every day and think to myself, ‘Good for them,’ ” says Harvey.

And through the Farm Transitions workshop and other LSP meetings, Harvey became aware that beginning farmers face significant barriers when it comes to accessing affordable land.

“Young people, unless they inherit the farm, there’s virtually no way they can get started,” he says. “So I wanted young people with good ideas and who were going to take care of the soil. I wanted people who would be in the community, part of the community.”

Community Couple
Enter Aaron and Amy Bishop. The couple live in nearby Harmony and have roots in the community. Aaron grew up two miles from Harvey’s farm — his family owns and operates Niagara Cave, which offers tours of the underground cavern. He also serves on the local school board, and is involved with other nonprofits. The couple is remodeling an old bank building on the Main Street of Harmony, and plan on turning the upper level into Airbnb lodging and the lower level into space for a future business.

Amy grew vegetables and marketed them through the farmers’ market and Community Supported Agriculture models for four years, and worked at Seed Savers Exchange in nearby Decorah, Iowa, for an additional six. It’s her goal to farm fulltime, and she had been looking for land in the area for a number of years. Both are mindful of land stewardship — Aaron has a geology degree and through his experience studying and exploring southeastern Minnesota’s karst geology, is intimately aware of the oftentimes fraught relationship between land use on the surface and water quality underground.

To top it off, the young couple — he’s 30 and she’s 38 — is close friends with their older counterparts (Harvey and Bonita served as their marriage witnesses). In short, they checked a lot of boxes. “Aaron and Amy are the family Harvey didn’t get around to having earlier,” says Bonita.

There’s just one catch: since they had never anticipated being able to afford 160-acres of land, the Bishops aren’t quite ready to take over management of the entire farm. Timing is the great enemy of successful farm transfers. It’s difficult to align when the landowner is ready to move on with when there is a new farmer ready to step in. But the two couples have come up with ways to manipulate the calendar and fit it to their situation.

Back to the Books
In January, the Bishops officially took over ownership of the farm. However, Harvey will continue to live on the land and call it home for as long as he wants. Even though he’s convinced the young couple’s worldview perfectly matches his values and wishes, Harvey says it’s still difficult to realize he’s no longer the owner.

“Joining futures with them was absolutely the right decision, but it comes with mixed emotions that still rise up once in awhile,” he says.

Because of Harvey’s generosity, the transition resembles a family land transfer more than a sale between two unrelated parties, which made it necessary to make certain the legal details were taken care of to deal with issues like probate law and the “clawback” of assets that can occur if a former landowner needs to go into long-term care. The two couples worked with a local attorney who specializes in ag law; the process required many calls, meetings, and e-mails.

“Harvey was resolute when it came to his expectations of the land transition,” Aaron recalls. “There were multiple ways we could have gone about it, but he wanted no mortgage and no interest involved.”

In order to meet those criteria, the attorney had to delve into notes he’d taken during college classes on seldom-used concepts.

Aaron and Amy will make payments on the farm for 20 years, which will likely cover Harvey’s lifetime; after that, Bonita will receive them. Any payments remaining after Bonita’s passing can be donated to charity. In the end, Harvey will have ended up selling the farm to the younger couple for about half the going market rate.

“Essentially, we will be taking care of Harvey and Bonita until then, with paying off the farm to the agreed-upon amount and time,” says Amy. An unofficial part of this arrangement is that the younger couple will continue doing something they’ve already been doing the past few years: provide Harvey support with maintaining the yard, his house, and his garden.

The purchase agreement includes “a right of reentry” — if Aaron and Amy don’t live up to their promise to keep it a family farm utilizing conservation practices and/or if they don’t allow Harvey to remain living on the property, then the older man, or Bonita, can reclaim ownership.

For Now: Stewards, Not Farmers
The younger couple has also developed a creative work-around when it comes to the other timing issue involved — they may not be ready to farm the land’s 145 tillable acres fulltime, but in the meantime they want to make sure it’s stewarded to Harvey’s specifications. As a result, after consulting the lease templates included in LSP’s Conservation Leases Toolkit, they approached the current renter with three options that provide the opportunity to reduce his rental rate by implementing additional soil-friendly practices — the more cover crops he implements, the lower the rate. The renter recently signed a two-year lease, and for the 2021 growing season went with the middle option offered: planting cover crops on half of the row-cropped acreage.

Amy and Aaron based their rental option calculations on the cost of putting in a cover crop. They also provided the renter resources on cover crop cost-share programs available through agencies like the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. Fortunately, Harvey has maintained the fencing on the land, so the renter has the ability to graze his cattle on the cover crops.

“It’s fortunate for us the neighbor is willing and able to continue renting because it’s going to ensure that something’s going to happen under the conservation terms that we worked out,” says Aaron.

The new lease buys the Bishops time to develop and implement various plans for the farm, including returning a portion of it to native prairie. This year, Amy is using three acres on the farm to grow a contracted vegetable seed crop for Seed Savers Exchange and to conduct small grains trials. Meanwhile, Aaron will continue working as a cave guide and substitute teacher.

Harvey is thrilled with this new arrangement. He had previously approached the renter about adopting soil health practices, but the conversations were difficult, with hurt feelings involved. With new owners taking over, it opened up the opportunity to renegotiate the lease without the burden of decades of tradition hanging over their heads. Farm transition experts say that a change in ownership offers a prime opportunity to modify a lease to include more conservation requirements.

Finally, the foursome has come up with a plan to deal with the other bugaboo when it comes to farm transfers: where will everyone live? Harvey has made it clear where he’s residing, and Aaron and Amy will eventually be making their home in a 1950s-era corn crib that is downhill from the house.

After Harvey shows off his tree plantings on this recent spring day, the young couple provide a tour of the crib they are remodeling, pointing out where different rooms and work places will be. They also talk excitedly about future plans for the farm that include the possibility of providing opportunities for other beginning farmers who might want to do everything from rotational grazing to small grains production.

Harvey is excited too. In fact, he asks, why not live a little longer just to see how all these plans work out? “I’m looking forward to this,” he says with a smile.

The depth of soil in the American Corn Belt is legendary. One popular saying is that some Midwestern soil is deep enough to bury a pickup truck in — vertically. In many cases, such images are not that far from reality. But there is a danger of equating soil depth with soil health or soil productivity.

It turns out a relatively small portion of the soil profile is where most of the biological magic takes place in terms of productivity. It’s called the “A horizon” — the darker part of the profile we know as “topsoil,” and it’s full of the living microorganisms and decaying plant roots that create organic carbon. Sitting on top of the topsoil is the “O horizon,” which is made up of dead plants and other organic material in various stages of decomposition. Beneath the A horizon is the subsoil, which normally has less organic matter than the A horizon, so it is generally a paler color. Below that is the “substratum” — a layer of rock and mineral parent material that has not been exposed to much weathering, so is pretty much intact. Finally, in the deepest recesses of the land’s basement is bedrock, or the “R horizon.” All those horizons play a role in making this resource so useful for doing everything from producing food to managing water and storing carbon. But topsoil, despite the fact that it can occupy a relatively narrow space compared to the other horizons, punches above its weight in terms of biological activity. If soil was a car, topsoil would be the gas tank, and without it, that car doesn’t go very far.

That’s why a recent study showing that a third of the farmland in the Corn Belt — that’s some 100 million acres — has lost its carbon-rich topsoil to erosion since we started plowing it is so troubling. The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was based on an examination of corn and soybean fields in Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota, and Iowa. Because the A horizon is darker, scientists were able to use satellites to compare the color of soil with the USDA’s direct measurements of soil quality. In many cases, the lighter col-ored soil they documented contained so little organic carbon that it wasn’t even considered A horizon soil anymore, even though it was sitting where topsoil was supposed to be. In effect, erosion was so bad the subsoil had become the topsoil. The bottom line: the removal of all that rich topsoil has released nearly 1,500,000,000 metric tons of carbon and reduced corn and soybean yields by 6%. This is costing farmers some $3 billion annually, estimate the researchers.

The study found that the greatest loss of carbon-rich topsoil was on hilltops and ridgelines, a sign that repeated tillage is taking its toll. You don’t need satellite imagery to witness some of this firsthand — when you drive by a field that has lighter, tannish colored soil at the top of a ridge, that means the A horizon has been seriously compromised.

This study indicates that we have lost much more fertile topsoil than the USDA has been estimating. Some soil experts have questioned the Proceedings study’s methodology, but acknowledge that even if it is exaggerating the loss, we are still losing that A horizon at a troubling rate. And that causes numerous problems on and off the farm. For one thing, if a field is to remain productive, the fertility benefits provided by a biologically-active A horizon need to be replaced somehow. In most cases, that means adding more petroleum-based fertilizer, which is already a major water quality problem when it escapes agricultural acres. And loss of carbon-rich soil means more greenhouse gas emissions.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Farmers throughout Minnesota and the rest of the Midwest are utilizing regenerative practices like no-till, cover cropping, managed rotational grazing, and diverse rotations to build back soil health and sequester carbon. In fact, recent scientific breakthroughs show that farmers have a much greater ability to send soil health trends in a positive direction than once thought. LSP’s Soil Builders’ Network initiative is working with hundreds of farmers who are proving soil healthy practices can be practical and profitable.

But regenerative practices won’t become enough of a norm to have widespread landscape impacts without public support. For decades, government subsidies and tax-funded land grant research, along with market signals, have made raising corn and soybeans in an intensive, soil-damaging manner just about the only game in town. Stepping out of a monocultural, input-intensive system can be accompanied by significant financial risk. Converting to no-till and managing cover crops costs time and money. No wonder less than 15% of farmland in the upper Mississippi River watershed is managed using no-till methods, and under 3% of Minnesota crop ground is cover cropped any given year, according to estimates.

That’s why the provisions of the “100% Soil-Healthy Farming Bill,” which LSP introduced during the 2021 session of the Minnesota Legislature (some key provisions passed), are so critical. Studies and surveys show that once farmers have transitioned into a practice like cover cropping or no-till, they see higher yields, more profit, and resilient soils. But it takes a couple of years to go from good idea to practical, everyday field method. Bridging the gap to ensure that regenerative methods are profitable in the near term removes financial barriers that often limit farmers’ ability to put in place long-term invest-ments on the land.

States like Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa have shown that public cost-share and grant programs can play a significant role in increasing the number of “soil smart” acres. They’ve committed to helping farmers bridge the innovation gap. It’s time we did the same in other states, before the other two-thirds of the all-important A horizon ends up over the hill.