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. This season is all about mistakes, but mistakes come in different forms. Some take work to recover from, but every once in a while a mistake actually ends up working to your benefit.
It takes an experimental approach and an openness to new possibilities to recognize the opportunities in those mistakes, and it means that you've put yourself in a position to make them in the first place. In this episode, we're talking about happy accidents with Stan Kloc. Well, my name is Stan Kloc. That's the Kloc with a K-L-O-C. I grew up on the farm. It was a dairy farm.
I worked with dad and six brothers, three sisters, and mom, went off to college, got hired into the corporate world, and got stuck there basically. It was, you know, good pay. It was tough to leave, but what it did do is it allowed me to buy my first farm. That was back in '83, and then I bought my second farm in 2001. I knew from a little kid, you know, eight, 10 years old, that I wanted to own a farm and be on the farm, but it just took me a lot
of years to get there. So, I now farm 535 acres organic. This is the first year all of it will be organic. It's been some transition here and there, and I never planned on being 500 acres. I thought that if I could get to 300, I'd be fine, I'd be great. And it just kind of exploded. Word of mouth. People said, well, hey, you know, Stan's farming mine, he seems to be doing a good job, and you're looking for someone to rent, talk to him. It just kind of exploded.
Stan Farms about two hours from Detroit. Well, if you look at Michigan, it's right there. Literally, it's like 45 miles from the shore in three directions. My primary crops are corn, soybeans, and wheat, with a few dry beans thrown in. And I've also been experimenting with peas, field peas. Have not had real good success with those. I'm going to try one more year. You know, three strikes, you're out, and if you get a success, well then you try again.
So that's where I'm at right now. I didn't get any wheat planted this fall. It was really just a miserable year for getting wheat planted. So I've got a few acres that are open yet, I don't have a clue what I'm going to plant yet. So we'll see. It's always a learning curve on the farm. It is always a learning curve on the farm. I mean, when we actually talked to Stan, he was trying to put out a literal fire in his grain bins.
So I don't have my own storage, and the gentleman that I rent bin space from is an absolutely wonderful guy, give you the shirt off his back. So they unloaded three trucks worth of grain right before the snow and the cold spell hit. So I get a phone call, "Hey, can you run over, load out a truck?" Sure, I can go do that. I get over there, well, the pit's got three, four inches of
ice, and I can't load the truck. So, went back over the following day to try and get the pit auger thawed out, and decided the easiest way to do it would be to throw salamander out. A salamander is a type of portable heater. Three hours later, it hasn't hardly done anything. So I went and got a bigger salamander and put that on. Well, lo and behold, that salamander decided to catch fire, and in the process it caught the covering to the pit on fire. I wasn't there when it happened.
I had actually left for a few, get a phone call, "Hey, there's smoke rolling up from the bin site." I carry a fire extinguisher in the truck all the time. Ran over, put the fire out, and ended up having to work around and finally spend another half a day getting the auger pit, not only thawed out, but once I got it thawed out, then I had to clean all the burned ashes out, and get it ready for the next day to load truck. But we got it fixed with, and everything's back up and running now.
Oh, just another day on the farm for Stan, it seems. As you might be able to tell, Stan doesn't mind being kept on his toes. He's a creative problem solver who's always looking for new tools and new methods to improve his organic operation. Which brings us to our story about trefflers. So, a treffler is just a tool. I bought one. And it's been a real learning curve for me, but it's done, in my opinion, it's been a remarkable tool for my final.
It all started because Stan was having some trouble with weeds. I tried peas, I mentioned that I'm planting peas occasionally. I had a field of peas, and peas are planted in not 30 inch or 20 inch rows, they're planted in seven and a half or six and a half inch rows. So I planted these peas. You plant them early in the spring. You can't go in there with a cultivator to cultivate the peas.
So you need another tool. And the tine weeder, which is the treffler, is a tine weeder, is one of those tools. For those who don't know what a tine weeder is, it's nothing more than big fingers, fingers that drag through the dirt and it disrupts the dirt, disrupts the soil, down to different depths depending on how pressure is, and it takes out those little weeds. It flips those weeds over and they dry out.
So because your crop is planted an inch and a half, two inches deep, and the weeds tend to germinate in the top half inch or so of soil, you can run the tine weeder through and take out the weeds. The deeper the weed root is, the more pressure you need to go. Stan has a hunch that a Treffler might be a good fit for addressing the weeds in his pea field, but he doesn't have one. I'm talking to my friend Paul. He says, well go get mine and use it. Okay,
sure. I go over there. Well, he hasn't even uncreated this Treffler yet. It's unloaded right off the truck, still got all the bands holding it together, wood on it. I uncrate it, I hook it up. I go to my field and I start tine weeding the field. So I'm going through this field. I have no clue what I'm doing. Literally, I have no clue what I'm doing. I've never used one of these before. I've never seen a tine weeder before. So backed up my tractor to it, I hooked it up, I went out, I'm
using it. I go a little ways, get out of the tractor, look at the crop, get back in, change the setting, go back, look at the crop, and I made a decision not knowing what I'm doing. To me, this looks like a good setting so that I'm going through the field like that. I'm doing the whole field. But then he accidentally grabs the hydraulic lever.
The reason I grabbed the hydraulic lever was because there was a tiling surface drain in the field, and I needed to raise the whole unit up to go over this tiling surface drain. So I didn't damage it. I grabbed the wrong lever, and instead of raising the unit up, I increased the down pressure on the tines. And I'm in a panic, I'm grab now I'm grabbing levers, I don't know. Anyway, I ended up going about 75 feet with this pressure all the way to the max
in the field. Literally, I stopped the tractor so I didn't run over the tile stand pipe and got my wits about me, raised it up, went over. Then I put everything back to where I had it, and then continued through the field. Not until harvest did I realize that that place where I had took the down pressure all the way to the max was the cleanest spot in the field.
A happy accident for sure, but it was Stan's openness to experimentation, and the close attention he pays to what is happening on his farm and why, that enabled him to learn a valuable lesson from it. And he says it's changed the way he approaches weed control overall. Now, I've got my own machine. I'm out there using it. I go a hundred feet, I get out, I check the crop. I look, you know, did I pull any crops out? Did I pull any soybeans out? Is it taking all the weeds
out? A real learning curve. But what I've pretty much found out is that you almost cannot be too aggressive. Or if you get out and look at the crop and say, oh, it looks beautiful, I'm not damaging any crop, I'm not pulling any crop out, well, then you're not going hard enough. It is really scary when you're going through the field and you look in the mirrors and say, but I can't see the crop. And you start freaking out because, you know, I just took everything out. I just killed the whole
field. But you didn't, the plant is resilient enough, and actually a little bit of stress does better for the plant. Stan says, plants in humans, were not so different. If you exercise, and you stress your muscles, you strengthen your bone density and you strengthen your muscles. If you stress the plant a little bit, you actually make that plant better, as long as you're not killing the plant
or stressing it too much. So, yeah, it's scary when you're going through the field, and you get out and you walk and you're looking at all the crop on the ground and, oh, I pulled that one out, I pulled that one out. Oh man, you, you're freaking out because you're thinking, we're taking out too many. But if you don't take out some, you're not taking out all the weed. It's better to take out a few of the plants, and all the weeds, than it is to leave all the crop and leave weeds too.
Stan has found this approach of losing a few plants to properly combat weeds applies to other tools he uses. I'll give you another example here. I also flame, I use a flamer to take out weeds. So this past year was a miserable year for weed control, in that you planted the crop, it's dry as can be, the crop emerges out of the ground, you're ready to go cultivate, you're ready to go tine weed, you're ready to go flame. But we got rain, massive rain, 22 inches over a period of two months.
So your time in the field was extremely limited. I had two fields I never made it into the field to do any weed control. Had another field that I made it in to flame it, I tine weeded it afterwards, and then four or five weeks of absolutely no access to that field, it was underwater. When it did dry out enough, now the corn's three and a half, four foot tall, and the weeds are three and a half foot tall. And what do you do? You can't cultivate it.
So I took a chance with the flamer, and I turned the burners straight down, raised them off the ground about a foot, and just crawled through the field real slow. Normally you're going three to four miles an hour, you're using maybe a gallon of propane per acre. I was using 17 gallons of propane per acre. There was so much heat coming off the flamer that the corn leaves three, four foot up in the air were just getting a little singed.
But at the end of the day, that field was as clean as a bowling alley because every weed was burned right to the ground. And not only was it burned right to the ground, it was singed a quarter inch down. So I didn't know how it was going to come out. When I did this, I had no clue if it was really going to work. I had never done it before. And the people that I know have flamers had never done this before. But I'm going to get nothing, if I don't do something. So the flamer worked.
I singed some of the corn. I probably cut a few bushels off the yield of a crop in a good year. But had I let those weeds go, I would've had nothing. And instead of coming up with nothing, I got a decent yield for this year. Stan is constantly trying to improve on his inputs and his practices. He's always looking for ways to learn more about his fields and how to use his tools more effectively. I do test plots every year. I try to do four, five, six different seed companies a year.
You're not required to do them, but I want to see, okay, I'm planting corn, I'm planting soybeans, is the seed I'm using, I've been using, is it the best out there? So I do test blocks. I've had some companies come to me and, oh, I've got the best corn seed in the world, you know, you're going to just blow your yields away. And I plant them, and I've come back and, you know, talk to the folks, do you want, do you really wanna come out here and look at how bad this is?
The only way you're going to find out if a seed works for you, is to plant, and one test isn't enough. You got to do multiple tests. And I tried to do multiple years, so. Organic farming is an adventure. It's not a finish line. We are constantly wanting to learn more. And that's the beauty of it, that's the joy of it. There will be mistakes. Sometimes you have to recover from them, but sometimes they reveal a different, and maybe more effective way of doing things.
Thanks for tuning into Season three of The Dirt On Organic, 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 and this episode goes to Stan Kloc of Kloc Farms. 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.