On the farm my wife and I operate in Western North Dakota, the history of rotation goes back to the days before humans had anything to do with it. The system that nature has for land management is one we can learn a lot from. The corner stone is rotation. Now I'm not going to go into the hundreds of different plants, insects and bacteria that abound in the native prairie, but I will ask you to remember back last spring when that native pasture started to green up. The cool season grasses and broadleafs led the way with a thick and nutrient rich cover. As the weather warmed and the season changed, the warm season grasses and broadleafs came on the scene to finish the year. Now every year the selection of plants can change, with climate and harvest (grazing or fire), but the one thing you can bet on, is the diversified rotation will stay the same.

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When humans came to the country things didn't change all that much. The first people here knew that mother nature had a pretty good thing going. Our Indian brothers knew that to live off the land meant not to change the land but to take what it gave to live on. The early nineteen hundreds came along and my great grand father and grand father came to Western North Dakota, along with others to settle the west. Now this is when the government got into the picture. I don't know about you, but it always seems to me that when the government wants to help, the outcome might not exactly be what we were looking for. Part of the process of gaining ownership of the 160 acres that one family could get was to turn the sod upside down and plant a crop on it. Just think how much different things could have been with a sprayer and a no-till drill.

The grand dads did the best they could with the tools they had, and without knowing it they did maintain the rotations that were needed to keep the land in good shape. Crops such as: flax, corn, oats, wheat, hay and large gardens with vegetables supported themselves, the horses for work and transportation , the livestock for food and the people in town. This maintained a pretty sustainable system. During that time period, the boys in Washington had other agendas, plus the communications system had things to be desired connecting the northern plains. At that point in time, no one had come up with the fatal terms: breadbasket, corn belt and cotton belt.

This is when the term specialization came into play. My dad moved the farm into a wheat farm that would feed the world. Without knowing it, he had adopted a monoculture system. It was dependent on:

1. One market for price

1. Chemicals and tillage for weed control
2. The whims of government for policy.

At first this worked well, because the land was still working with organic matter that was made in the days of native prairie and the government was fairly new to this game. The land began to retaliate, it started with crusting and developed difficulty in holding seeding depth constant. This was handled with advancements in equipment and new techniques to make these symptoms of erosion and lowering organic matter a non issue. Now have come the things we are dealing with, such as:

1. cool season grass weeds (wild oats, green and yellow foxtail, etc., etc.),
2. high fertilizer requirements,
3. seed born diseases
4. foliar diseases
5. saw fly
6. midge and Russian wheat aphid

These problems are not as easy or cost effective to take care of, couple that with the changes in government policy, and the monoculture system that was good to my dad and sent me to school no longer makes sense to maintain.

Now comes myself on the picture, and all the farmers attending this workshop. The reason we are here is to learn to take home information that will make our farms more profitable. When we started with rotations, rotations weren't cool, in fact we were penalized on government payments because of it. The saying was: if you raise those goofy crops like flax, peas, alfalfa, and mustard long enough you'll run out of seed and go broke. Freedom to farm changed all that, and forced us all to deal with our farms as a production system rather than wheat farms that survived on green checks and whatever we could get in town for the crop.

Look at us now. We are talking about things that would have seemed to most as a foreign language just a few years ago. Canola contracts, exporting peas overseas, high quality alfalfa for dairies in the east, nitrogen fixation, high oil corn, dry beans, integrated pest management and a host of other topics that make us sound more like agribusiness managers than just a bunch of farmers complaining about the weather. While wheat holds a major part in the rotation on our farm, it's looked at more as an ingredient in the making of bread or pasta than as just a few truckloads that I haul to town to see what they will give me.

The Raisler Farm and a lot of the farms around it have begun to look more like an ornamental patchwork than a monotonous sea of wheat stretched as far as the eye could see. Along with this have come the opportunities and frustrations of weaving this patchwork into a profitable and sustainable way for us to make a living. We are doing what we love and that is farming in Western North Dakota. Its been worth the fight!!