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Discovery Farms Profile: Putting nutrients where crops can use them

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Brian Herbst

Brian Herbst collects data from his Discovery Farms monitoring equipment.

Written by Jonathan Eisenthal

Brian and Cindy Herbst figure that 15 percent of their farm fields consistently yield about 275 bushels of corn per acre.

These top performing parcels are no accident. The Herbsts identified them using grid soil sampling and careful yield monitoring. Add the “pure gold” of manure from their hog finishing operation and the soil in these spots reaches its true potential as a cornucopia.

“We tend to under apply (manure) for the crop needs and then we can come back and side dress our nitrogen or do whatever it takes to bring it up to the right levels. The plants in our best fields can make use of every drop.”

This kind of information and stewardship are the keys to overall farm yields above 200 bushels, Herbst says. They grow corn and soybeans and raise contract finishing hogs. The hogs add an additional revenue stream and provide manure to supplement crop nutrient needs. The corn is marketed to a local ethanol plant, feed mill or specialty non-GMO corn outlet.

“One of my pet peeves is people who are aren’t in the know think manure is just a waste product,” said Brian. “They think we’re just throwing it out there to get rid of it. That’s about as far from the truth as can be.”

The Herbsts have a passion for land stewardship that goes hand-in-hand with management to maximize crop yields. With university degrees in diversified agriculture (Brian) and agricultural business (Cindy). When they saw the chance to get good, hard data on sediment and nutrient runoff from their tile line and from surface water they jumped at it.

And that’s why they joined Discovery Farm Network, a program where agronomy experts install equipment to monitor sediment, nitrogen and phosphorous in surface water and tile drainage. So far, 11 farms in Minnesota have joined the program, giving a good representation of the differences to be found in farm fields across the state.

“Today’s farm runs on good information,” said Brian. “Being a good steward of the land, and taking care of our stream, those are priorities for us. The way I look at it, regulations are going to be a part of our life. With good information out there, I can say ‘I am applying hog manure on this land and I am doing it in a very productive manner. Having this monitoring station can also show people that we are not leaching nutrients into the groundwater.”

You can’t be all about farming, all the time. Brian’s other passion is basketball, and Cindy likes to share her joy for music.

“I left the farm this morning at 5:45 a.m. to go and play basketball,” Brian said. “At age 58 that’s maybe a little surprising. Basketball has always been a passion. I played it in college and I just love the sport. My boys play basketball. The back end of our shop was just cold storage, so about five years ago I poured concrete in the back and made a basketball court. We put geothermal in the floor and made a real nice gym out of it. Two years ago I happened upon a school that sold itself out to a construction plant and I took the floor, which was only a few years old, and now we’ve got an absolutely fantastic wood floor.”

Herbst bball

The Herbst family basketball court is a great place for a quick game of hoops on the farm.

Being that their farm is just a mile out of town, the Herbsts frequently open their court to local kids who want to get in a game of hoops.

Cindy is the main motivator behind a teen Christian Rock group, known as The Mountain Movers, based at South Zumbro Lutheran Church in Kasson.

“We play during services once in a while, and we also go to the American Cancer Society Hope Lodge in Rochester and serve a meal there and sing for them,” said Cindy. “The county food shelf concert happens twice a year and our group always goes there to sing.”

The Herbsts have now gotten one full growing season of runoff data from the Discovery Farm monitoring equipment, and they are looking forward to building up a database over a number of years to see how changes in the crop rotation, manure application and other adjustments in management impact nutrient and sediment levels. Weather is also a primary mover when it comes to nutrient and sediment transport.

“I was fortunate to have a father who taught me good stewardship of the land,” said Brian. “We don’t own it. If we have a mortgage on it, we are basically not going to take it with us. It’s God’s piece of ground and that’s the way it’s going to stay, forever and ever. That’s why stewardship is so important. If I have a leaching issue with nutrients traveling to the tile line, and I’m not able to utilize that nutrient in a cropping situation, I’ve lost that nutrient and the value of it, and why wouldn’t I want to know that?”


 

This post is part of an ongoing series to highlight Minnesota corn farmers participating in Discovery Farms Minnesota, which is a farmer-led effort to collect real-world, on-farm water quality information from different types of farming systems.

You can learn more about Discovery Farms here and here. Click here to read the first Discovery Farms Profile in this series, click here to read the second, and click here to read the third.

Look for other Minnesota corn farmers participating in Discovery Farms to be profiled in the near future.

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