How did you do it Jimmy?
When Jimmy and Ginger Emmons got married, it was rainy and they were waiting to plant wheat, so the honeymoon lasted a bit longer and then they came back home to all they know – farming and ranching.
“That’s all we know,” Jimmy said. “It’s all we’ve ever done.”
“He was two grades ahead of me in school,” Ginger said. “We dated off and on in high school. My dad raised cotton when I was a kid – cotton and wheat, some alfalfa hay and we raised cattle of course. That’s about it.”
“It’s like Ginger said, my grand-dad moved here in 1924 and set up a farm and we still have that original homestead he operated on,” Jimmy chimed in. “My folks and I moved there after my grand-dad retired. We raised cotton and alfalfa too – pretty much the same type of scenario as Ginger.”
Jimmy – son of Sonny and Florene, and Ginger – daughter of Jack and Frances Ray, grew up just a hop, skip and a jump from each other – just seven or so miles apart near Leedey, Okla. Thirty-nine years later, the couple is still doing “all they’ve ever done” – as loving stewards of their farm and ranch. They have one son, Beau, who is married to Toni and they have two children. Beau is the Director of the Radiation Department at a hospital in Oklahoma. Karson Leibold is the full-time employee for Jimmy and Ginger. He started working with the family as a young man and is now married to Sydney.
Cover Crop Adventures Begin
Jimmy said he’s “the farmer” of their endeavors and Ginger is the “herdswoman.” In 2010, the duo started to change. He recalled, “Back in 2010, I went to a national meeting of conservation districts and I heard David Brandt talking and it really resonated with me about cover crops. I was interested in how we could do something like that in Western Oklahoma.”
In 2011, Jimmy planted their first ever cover crop, “I talked to the NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service) to help assist me with and the conservation commission and conservation districts as well. Then we became a demonstration farm. We were all working together trying to figure all of this out. The NRCS soil scientist said I needed to graze the cover crops. So, we started to rotational graze. One thing led to another and before long I was speaking and receiving invitations from all over the country. It has been a wild ride.”
“I thought he was crazy at first,” Ginger admitted. “After he had the first cover crop, he said he was going to sow seed right through it and I said, ‘There’s no way it’s going to work.’ But I was sold after that first year.”
The first cover crop was a warm season mix of about 12 different seeds planted behind winter wheat, Jimmy said, “That was in 2011 right in the middle of the drought. But they worked! Our moisture probes we had out indicated there was more moisture in the profile where we had cover crops vs. none. That was the game-changer when we proved that, and we’ve proven they work every year since. The cover crops are keeping the surface cool and keeping the moisture from evaporating. They also increase the aggregates in the soil.”
The species that performed the best in that first cover crop experiment, Jimmy said were millets, brown midrib sorghum, buckwheat, cowpeas, mung beans and forage collards. The couple runs two pivots, but most of their acres are dryland, he added, “I tell people we get – give or take – 20 inches of rainfall a year. But there’s a lot of give and take in that. In 2011, we had 7.8 inches, in 2012 we had nine and in 2013 we had nearly 40. We are in a mainly arid/semi-arid area with primarily Sandy Loam soils. A lot of the hills are red clay and high in iron content.”
“We try to have a cover crop in-between our cash crops (warm or cool season),” he went on about their almost 200 cows they raise over 20-plus miles. “We love to graze cover crops, so we either have cows with baby calves on them or weaned calves, or a combination of both. The grazing really helps our native range. All the land we have intensively graze has really improved.”
The Emmons grow around 13 to 14 crops, everything from wheat, cereal rye, winter and spring barley, sesame, winter canola, grain sorghum, soybeans, sunflowers to even corn. “Corn was just an experiment,” Jimmy noted. “We have a terrible feral hog situation down here so it’s too devastating to the corn. Our main crops are wheat, barley, and rye for the cool season. Then we do soybeans and cowpeas for seed. Sesame has been good to us and some milo too. It all fits in to how we need to manage for carbon.”
Jimmy said he manages carbon by keeping the soil covered and the ground rotated in various crops, “Part of the reason for corn in the rotation under the pivots was to increase the carbon in the soil from the corn. In the rotation, if we have a broadleaf like sesame, soybeans, or cowpeas with very little residue, we like to follow with a heavy carbon crop like grain sorghum or corn. Something like that helps balance the carbon to nitrogen ratio so that when we do reduce that level with a legume, we can replace that carbon back with our next high carbon crop.”
Cover Crops and Cows
Herdswoman Ginger, said adopting cover crops, no-till and other conservation practices means less tractor time for her and she doesn’t miss that at all, “I never run the tractor now. I always ran the tractor before.”
The cattle are looking good on cover crops, she went on, “We raise Black and Red Angus cattle. They slick off and they look a lot better. We run calves on the cover crops, and they grow leaps and bounds. I love to go out and move them and listen to them eat their new batch of cover crops.”
“Ginger buys most of the bulls for us,” Jimmy said. “She’s really good with genetics and our cattle are easier to handle because we are around them more. The docility of the herd has really changed for the better.”
“It helps our relationship too,” Ginger pointed out. “We don’t argue because the cows aren’t so wild.”
“That is true,” Jimmy added. “When we were sorting the heifers the other day, we could just visit and sort. It’s more of a pleasure to handle cattle like that. Better than when they are running all over you and you’re hollering at each other. It’s so nice to get to that level.”
Looking to the future
Years ago, Jimmy was heavily active with the National Young Farmers program and became president of the organization. That role eventually led him to be hired as their program and education manager, followed by a fundraising position. Later, in 2018, after the wildfire hit portions of Oklahoma, then Undersecretary Bill Northey offered Jimmy a post working at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). He did so until the end of that administration and then accepted a job for the Oklahoma Conservation Commission as the Soil Health Coordinator for mentoring.
The team at Elevate Ag is pleased to be working with the Emmons family as well. Jimmy said, “We want to continue to change our soil. We are not where we want to be yet. Now we are working with Elevate Ag actively trying to figure out these bio-stimulants and how they get the soil more active. One of my goals is how to use bio-stimulants only and no synthetic fertilizers. We have cut way back on synthetics, but we aren’t totally there yet. With Elevate Ag, we are learning how to liquify urea and mix with their HyprGrow, molasses and humates to build the biological base of the soil even more. That is a goal and will continue to be a goal for awhile until we get that perfected.”
Jimmy said they also want to change their air seeder to put liquid in-furrow. There is always something new to try and test on the Emmons’ farm and ranch, “I always do side-by-side comparisons. I love when Travis Kraft from Elevate Ag comes down and we’ve had some other producers come by and meet us too, helping us dig up roots. That is a really cool opportunity. During harvest last year, Travis came down and brought a GrainSense tool and the Oklahoma Wheat Commission was there, and some neighbors, and we tested grain.”
“We have a good working relationship with Elevate Ag trying to figure all of this out. As they learn to mix products and develop products, they call and ask how we do something. It has been a very good relationship,” he said.
Cover crops, no-till and an intent focus on soil health has also led Jimmy and Ginger to see an increase of water infiltration on some areas of their farm from a half-inch an hour to eight inches in an hour, he said, “When we get these wild swings in the weather, we have the ability to take that in and store for future use. That is so critical, especially in such an arid environment.”
Mostly, they are enjoying the farm. Ginger added, “The other day Jimmy needed me to shoot a little video for him and he sat down in the rye north of our house and it was a beautiful evening, and we could hear the birds in the background.”
“Things change,” when farming this way, Jimmy reflected. “The wildlife begins to come back, and the ecosystem starts repairing itself. Ginger is kind of quiet about all of this, but she enjoys the wildlife, the deer and the elk that have come back. She took all the grandkids to go and get their first deer and they go hunting and fishing together.”
“The quality of products we are raising has been affected by how we have treated our soil. That is a big hurdle to try and see at first and fully understand. But making changes like these on the farm is a life changer. Once you see it, it’s like, ‘Holy cow, why haven’t I done this sooner?’ Don’t be afraid to fail. I really like that saying,” Jimmy said in closing. “Be afraid not to try.”