By Gene Gaven

Our goal is to return to a prosperous and happy rural lifestyle in order to be able to enjoy farm life. In order to be able to achie'~ that lifestyle we've put together a landscape description that calls for a living non-eroding soil with a high complexity of life and high organic content. Our goals call for an organic content on the cropland of at least five percent and mineral cycling should be high with minimum losses to leaching or runoff. Almost all of the nutrients should be supplied by the soil, life, and atmosphere. The water cycle should be very efficient to minimize erosion. Every precious raindrop should infiltrate the soil where it falls. The water that does run off should be clear. The soil energy flow should be high and sustained by livestock, crops, soil life, and wildlife.

We are using zero till on our diversified small-grains, cowcalf, and feeder calf operation in north central North Dakota to enhance our ability to achieve our goal. We are relatively new to the zero till method as we have only owned a zero till drill for two years; however, we are already seeing positive results from using this method. To us the zero-till drill is just a management tool to help attain ideal soil conditions and the type of rural lifestyle that we desire.

In our operation we employ the use of planned after the grazing. That is we plan the timing of where, when, and how long the cattle will be on the crop land each fall. The concentrated hoof action, to us, is a super harrow. The financial benefit of Planned crop aftermath grazing is after ten years of charting to be from twenty to fifty percent of the actual crop value. A crop land benefit is that we are able to use the livestock effectively on a time controlled basis to achieve organic levels that range from 4.4% to 4.7%. The rest of our crop land averages about 3.2%. These numbers are a large improvement from twenty years ago. In 1975 our organic level was between 1.5% and 1.8%. As the numbers prove almost eliminating black fallow is also helping to improve the health of our soil. With such positive results already showing we are planning to continue our use of zero till.

Our alternative crops instead of fallow are field peas and lentils. We now zero till field peas for seed production on acres that we used to fallow. On government farm program mandated fallow acres we zero till lentils as early as we can and then burn down at ten percent bloom for maximum nitrogen fixation. We are trying to raise the nitrogen level in the soil on our own instead of buying it. We also use peas in combination with oats. This combination is zero tilled at a rate of ninety pounds of peas and thirty five pounds of oats per acre. So far we have not been applying any fertilizer, and we only use inoculant for the peas. The combined harvest in pounds per acre is yielding the equivalent of heavily fertilized oats. The 1995 harvest production tested in at 17.9% protein. After five years of hard work creating our own market for the combination of oats/peas we can no longer meet the specialty feed market demand for the product. The demand has risen to over ten times what we can raise.

The oats/peas symbiotic relationship is working so well that we are now trying a flax/lentil combination. The flax/lentil combination is working but we have not yet fine tuned the process enough to have financial data benefits available.

For our family, alternative crops such as oats/peas, safflower, millet, and flax/lentils are not so alternative anymore. The alternative was declining soil health, going broke, or eliminating fallow and then implementing a crop rotation to decrease and break weed and disease cycles while simultaneously improving soil health. In closing I would just like to reiterate the point that our zero till drill is just a soil management tool that we are using to create our desired lifestyle.