No Till Notes: 'Menoken Farm'

The Menoken Farm is located outside Bismarck, North Dakota. This is a farm owned and operated by the Burleigh County Soil Conservation District. The Menoken Farm is a 150 acre educational farm dedicated to restoring the health of the soils on the farm.

The Menoken Farm is a farm every producer involved in production agriculture should visit. The Burleigh County Soil Conservation District team is moving this farm toward sustainability by eliminating fungicides, insecticides, GMO’s, and commercial fertilizer. They are also minimizing herbicides, soil disturbance, and fossil fuel impacts wherever feasible, and focusing on the health and resiliency of the entire ecosystem.

The Menoken Farm is something to see. Obviously they are looking at production agriculture from a different perspective than any of us involved in modern production agriculture are familiar with. I walked away scratching my head and wondering if these production practices will really work on large scale farms. I also walked away from the farm knowing the soils on the Menoken Farm are performing better than the soils on my farm. I’m also wondering how to take at least a portion of what they are doing to restore soil health and implementing these production practices on my own farm to begin regenerating of the soil I work with.

The Menoken Farm team is mimicking Mother Nature and native rangeland with their cropping system. They are using crop diversity of their cash crops and combinations of cover crops and companion crops to have a living root in the soil to capture maximum sunlight throughout the growing season. They have also incorporated livestock into their farming operation to mimic the grazing of native rangeland by the large herds of buffalo, elk, and deer that roamed the prairie prior to modern production agriculture. Native pollinators and beneficial insects are also encouraged in this holistic management strategy of the Menoken Farm.

The Menoken Farm team has designed a cropping system that will rely on Mother Nature to balance the ecosystem both above and below the ground. This holistic approach will build healthier soils and improve organic matter in the soil to supply the cash crops with the nutrients needed to obtain maximum yields. These healthier soils with a living root growing in them for as much of the growing season as possible will also better utilize the moisture received during the growing season.

While I was at the farm I walked through the corn fields that had no commercial fertilizer applied to them. I have to admit it was really good looking corn. I know I couldn’t grow as good a looking corn on my fields without any commercial fertilizer. There is something going on with the soil at the Menoken Farm that isn’t going on in my fields.

I also walked through the fields of sunflowers that had a diverse companion cover crop seeded into the cash crop of sunflowers. The sunflower crop looked like it would have good yield. The sunflowers are using the nutrients in the soil along with other health aspects of the soil to produce their yield.

This approach to production agriculture is so different from the way I produce crops on my farm that it is hard to explain. You really have to tour the Menoken Farm, visit with the soil health team from the Burleigh County Soil Conservation District, and feel their soil to gain an appreciation of what they are doing to improve their soil and their environment.