Welcome to season three of the Dirt on Organic Farming, a podcast from OATS, the Organic Agronomy Training Service. I'm your host, Nate Powell Palm. In this episode, we're going to talk about a topic that will come up a lot throughout the season, experimentation. Organic farming is inherently about experimentation. There's no one size fits all and it takes some trial and error to figure out what works best for our
operations. Luckily, many farmers happen to be pretty creative, and enjoy all that tinkering and testing that comes with the job. Andy Hazzard is certainly one of those people. My name's Andy Hazzard. I'm the farmer, miller, and seed smith behind Hazard Free Farm Grains, and I am on about 40 acres in Northern Illinois, very diversified, and I love it. It's very challenging, but I
love it. And my background, I've got everything from forestry to native restoration, vegetable farming, the usual suspects of people, you know, making their way back into agriculture, and have background with 4-H. But it's never a baaaad day for the 4-H Sheep Show. And a deep love for 4-H and the FFA and any program that gets kids outside and gets people connected with nature. Andy started in 2007 farming both grains and vegetables, but she has since shifted her focus solely to grain.
I was trying to run two operations at two locations and that was not going to work. I focus on a lot of different heirloom corn. I also do oats, wheat, rye, barley, and I feel like there's one more. I need to work more on beans, but right now it's just, you know, there's so many other crops to tend to, and with all the seed saving and everything, it's just a little much. And here's a number of practices Andy's experimenting with. I'm non-certified organic.
My main thing the last few years has been incorporating clover and alfalfa into my rotation in that I'm growing it with the grains as sort of a undercover. I'll seed it when I seed the grains. And now I've been doing it a few years, so I kind of am starting to go back and forth about seeding directly into it early. Like right now, I'm cleaning grain to plant I'm, it's a little early, but not really.
The weather's kind of back and forth, but ideally I would be seeding into a mixed perennial crop every year. We'll see how it works. Non-certified organic means that Andy employs organic practices but does not officially certify. Andy sells mostly to local markets, meaning she's probably been able to relate her practices right to her customers. So now to the story, if you grow grain, you also have to dry it before storing or processing it.
Grain dryers can be frigging expensive and many of them are intended for much larger operations. I come at this off of a conventional farm where there's grain dryers and grain bins and all the parts of a regular farm system, but my operation is very small and at the beginning it was even smaller. So Andy had to come up with some alternative grain strategy was a little less than ideal.
It was basically store the grain wet in super sacks, and then put farm fan dryers in them, screw in type, or we played around with different shapes and sizes of, you know, we used corrugated drainage tile, we used a PVC pipe with holes or slits drilled in it and fans everywhere, and it never worked well. I mean, it can be done, and it's hard to get it down to 12. It can be done, but it is a huge amount of work. 12% Moisture is what Andy needs to properly store foodgrade grain.
And you really, if you're coming in with really wet corn, you need to be transferring that tote every couple days because the top, the corn on the top of the tote gets drier and then you end up having a wet spot in the middle or wherever on a corner or something.
And so making sure to transfer that grain to a new tote, which if you've ever done it alone and tried to transfer anything by lifting one tote up over the other and you're the only person there and you don't have a stand or anything, it can be a real mess real quick. It can get away from you, and get grain pouring everywhere. Yeah, getting away from that was key. I can see why grain pouring everywhere isn't what Andy was hoping for.
But like so many innovative farmers, Andy and her dad started to tinker and they built a custom solution. Dad came up with the idea about using an old John Deere barge box. We'll put a false floor in it. We'll be able to run heat underneath, put the grain on that false floor, and then a lid on top with fan to pull it through. Unsurprisingly, there were a lot of kinks to figure out. I mean, I knew that grain does better drying when it's moving.
And the first year of using that system, it took me a while to figure out whatever it is at the bottom, it's not going to be at the top because of the migration of the moisture. And then I realized, oh, there's bounce. What will test 11 at, at drying time when you're done drying will bounce up to like maybe a 12 and a half or even a 13 if there's moisture left in that kernel that migrates from the center of the kernel to the outside.
The other thing I realized is that depending on how inch, you'll see a gradation of dryness from the bottom to the top. So if you have 10 inch layer and you're trying to get to 12, if the bottom's testing at 12, then the top is testing at 22. And so being more comfortable with like driving that down. The other thing I realized is, if I heat it up and I preheat it a little bit, I'll run it for an hour or two before I turn the fan on and start drawing the
air through. That saved a lot of fuel, lifting the lid off and then just getting in and stirring the load, even the tiniest bit makes a huge difference for whatever reason. So, you know, just tricks of the trade and just realizing after a oh, I'm going to have to go back and re-dry all this enough. And just those kinds of little annoying mistakes where it's like, the crop's fine, everything's good, it's a fixable problem, but it's a lot of labor.
And it left me with that taste in my mouth of, you know, don't make the same mistake over and over again and don't make it on a big scale. We are all going to make mistakes, but try to keep them small. This is a recurring theme this season. Make mistakes that you can afford. Make sure to scale your experiment so that the inevitable mistake is fixable. Today Andy is ready to upgrade from that makeshift dryer, but she really appreciates the creativity of designing a DIY system.
Ultimately, I bought a small farm fan's dryer and we've had it looked over. It's just a matter of getting a little roof set up and getting it set up. And then I'll be big time with my itty bitty, you know, I think it's like a 60 or 70 bushel dryer, but it'll work great for what I'm doing for right now. I'm definitely ready to move on to a regular corn dryer, but it's still something, you know, I've known bigger farms, in fact that still use them for small lots.
They're useful for small lots to have something like that, because in a regular corn dryer, they're good sized and if you don't have very much, it's not going to work right. If you have a wagon like that, you can put one together for a couple hundred bucks, and it's not permanent, and you can move it around, and you can unload from it, and all those things. And so that makes a big difference when you're starting out. There's so many costs.
If you can think outside the box, there are certainly ways to save money and get innovative with equipment. Luckily this bootstrapping approach comes pretty naturally to Andy. It was just, you know, come, just figuring out what do we have that could work, and putting the pieces together. I definitely grew up on a farm where, kind of like bailing wire and twine held things together at times. I went on to work in restoration, like prairie and wetland restoration work.
And I worked on the crew, not only chainsawing and trimming and stuff like that, burning, but I also worked in seed collection. So we would travel around with these, load up these old combines, and we'd go to a prairie and some suburb of Chicago, and go combine it, you know. And so I had that I never ran the combine at the family farm. My mom was the one that ran the combine. But it was fun to do it, see it from that aspect.
So when I got into my own farming career and started playing around with grain and stuff, that combine piece was the piece I'm interested in cleaning seed. I think it's fun, and I think that that's a really good personality trait to have if you're going to own a business like this. Because a lot of the work is dealing with the grain, cleaning the grain, making sure everything's good to go, and high quality. So fussing around over all that stuff
is fun for me. And even just, I mean, we have a fleet of Allis-Chalmers All-Crops. We had hoped to find like three of the same kind, but we ended up with like one of each. And it's been fun, you know, taking parts off one, putting them on the other, just making everything work is fun. I think maybe not for everybody, but I'm kind of a weirdo. And I think that some of the best farmers I've ever met are just really creative, and they're open to whatever answer.
They don't really have too many preconceived notions make sure we're making money, but they're open to to doing things differently. When it comes to being able to think outside the box and learn from her mistakes. Andy says that the key for her has been not to be married to one vision for her business. She's learned to be adaptable to new circumstances and opportunities.
I think the biggest thing is just as the business has changed, expanded, and the thing that I think is so interesting about small businesses is how they evolve. And I think when we start them, we kind of have this static picture in our mind of it's going to be this one thing and we're just going to do this thing. And it never seems to be that way, at least not with me. And maybe it's because I can't say no to opportunities that come up, or I don't know what it is.
But it is interesting how the business changes over time. And just dealing with COVID in the last few years has been an eye-opening experience and realizing that our food system is really fragile. It is incredibly fragile, and nobody really talks about it. And how that's going to be pressured more and more as we go through climate change with just erratic climate, disease issues, weather issues, all that kind of thing.
And how important it is that it be decentralized, and that, you know, we want a lot of players on the field. And it's exciting to be building it and to see it coming to fruition after 20 years or 30 years of leaning into these spaces, and finally, we're getting some traction and change, and that's exciting. Thanks for tuning into season three of The Dirt On Organic Farming, a podcast by the Organic Agronomy Training Service.
OATS provides training to agronomists, advisors, and crop consultants, so that farmers will have better access to reliable, science-based advice for their unique farm operation. Special thanks in this episode goes to Andy Hazard of Hazard Free Farm. This episode was produced by Blue Canoe Studios. For more information, go to www.organicagronomy.org. OATS is a programmatically independent consortium that is fiscally sponsored by the Organic Trade Association.
OATS is supported in part with funding from OTA membership companies. Season three of the Dirt on Organic Farming is made Organic Center and FFAR the foundation for Food and Agriculture research under award number TOCFFAR-EXT-002. The content of this publication is solely the responsibility of the authors. It does not necessarily reflect the official views Foundation for Food and Agriculture research. I'm Nate Powell Palm. Till next time, thanks for listening.