Let’s Make Farming Fun Again

BURRESS, Neb. – “It’s fun again,” Jordan Uldrich said with a smile on his face.

It’s fun, because Uldrich saw the soil health light and he’s been beaming ever since, “I want to cut all my farm costs by 70 percent. I think – no, I know it is doable. I want to farm with only one herbicide application. That, is an attainable goal.”?

He also wants time to really live and momentarily got choked up when he took a deep breath and said, “My dad worked so much, and we all worked hard together as a family. There were sacrifices that had to be made and dad wasn’t always at the football and basketball games. I get emotional about this. So, I see these new regenerative practices in farming as an opportunity to save time.”

The new practices that Uldrich is talking about are a combination of wisdom from past generations, combined with new ideas. The underlying premise is that soil health, water conservation, and animal husbandry done in tune with Mother Nature are going to not only save the planet, but also save the farmer, his family, and the community. The most recent popular name for this movement is “regenerative agriculture.” But really, it’s farmers and ranchers embarking on changes that work for them and unchaining themselves from all they used to buy thinking they were making their farms better.

“We were killing all the life off the farm,” Uldrich said. “If you take care of your soil, you don’t have to irrigate as much, and you aren’t trying to kill everything anymore with so many chemicals and heavy tillage. You don’t have the seat time you used to have either.”

The pocketbook becomes healthier too, “I really started thinking about making changes around 2021 during COVID-19 when things got ridiculously expensive. We were paying $1,400 dollars a ton for anhydrous and glyphosate was $50 to $60 a gallon. We were paying through the nose and making pennies. It was not a profitable business model at all. Then dad looked into doing this soil health stuff and I also started educating myself on the matter. It became evident that using anhydrous and so many chemicals on the farm was not something we should be doing.”

“Then I saw a video by Eric Miller,” Uldrich continued. “He was sowing twin-row, 60-inch corn and inter-seeding cover crops in-between. Then it clicked because in that scenario you are holding your weeds out and you can put fertilizer in-between those rows and you are also building soil carbon, soil structure, and you have those roots growing down in the soil all year-round.”

All those extra roots are an incredible help to farmers in ways they may not initially imagine, Uldrich pointed out, “You get all those extra roots in the soil and the soil in-turn holds your equipment up better and that reduces compaction. Everything about these practices starts making sense. On Eric’s videos, he also went in-depth about only applying herbicides once a year and I am like thinking to myself, ‘If we can cut our inputs, why wouldn’t we want to figure that out?’ Because – guess what? High prices on everything are coming again and it isn’t going away.”

Uldrich said he doesn’t borrow everything from the bank that he needs to farm, “I do have to borrow some money, but we are very diversified, so we aren’t totally beholden to the banker. We have cows, we farm, the family runs trucks, and we do custom harvesting. We’re busy. You actually are building equity if you aren’t borrowing everything from the banker. Let’s just say I was raised by a family of tight Bohemians. There’s a reason this combine is 30 years old. I know how to work on it, and it’s paid for.”

“The planter tractor on the grain cart is also a 4630 powershift,” he noted. “But that also speaks to the state of affairs of agriculture in general. Why do we have guys farming with era equipment from the 1970s? One reason is because some guys are thrifty. But there are other reasons too. That old tractor we bought for $12,000 we can sell for $25,000 now. But what about that kid who is 24 or 25? That is the stuff you cut your teeth on and it’s out of reach. It’s all getting out of reach.”

Because agriculture in many ways has become grossly inflated and irrational even, the Uldrich family is reining things in with common sense and by learning, working smart, and also raising cows more in-tune with nature, “Along with getting our eyes opened about cropping systems and how we can turbo-charge the soil so it can heal, we also went through the same revelation with the critters. This is the first year we have not de-wormed the cows. I think what we will do is feed pumpkins to de-worm them.”

“Also, if we do not poison our pastures with insecticides, the ecology can start to recover,” he pointed out. “The ecosystem in the pasture should be even more natural than cropland. If you take huge segments of insects out because of applying insecticides, the ecosystem collapses.”

“We also spend just $700 on fencing equipment that includes poly rope reels and fiberglass rods for the corners. We give the cows an acre or two at a time to graze, depending on what our time allows. We try and not have them grazing on a piece of ground more than three or four days. What we have seen with these grazing practices is green, lush regrowth. That regrowth is putting more exudates into the soil that feed biology and capture carbon. When you capture carbon in a meaningful way, your soil starts to cycle again,” he explained.

It's working too. Uldrich loves seeing the proof, “Our area is known as ‘dog town’ because that is where the prairie dogs were. The soil properties here also don’t allow the water to drain into the profile very well. It’s just not as permeable as other places. The guy we custom farm for has a piece of ground that we call, ‘doggy,’ because it’s too wet in the spring and too dry in the fall. I told him to try rye. I just harvested the soybeans where we put the rye cover crop on, and they made 60 bushels an acre during one of the driest Septembers we have ever seen, and these were dryland beans. It was a beautiful field of beans.”

While he is seeing rapid results on the farm and ranch, Uldrich is also seeing his life pick up speed in other ways, “It’s just something how fast all of this has moved for me. I sent a friend of mine, Hank McGowan, a snapchat of me interseeding cover crops into corn with great grandpa’s Oliver Superior grain drill. He told me I should be on the front page of a magazine. I told him I didn’t think so and then he just said, ‘How about you speak at my field day?’”

He took McGowan up on the offer and at the field day met Aaron Sawyers from No-Till on the Plains, an event he had heard about on the radio a lot, but hadn’t thought much about, “No-Till asked me to come talk at their conference. I asked them, ‘How long?’ I was told 45 minutes. I took them up on the offer and it has kind of just kept unfolding after that.”

Most important to Uldrich is taking everything he is learning and putting it into action so the farm can keep going, “I am a fifth-generation farmer. My dad is in that combine over there. Dad and I custom farm together. My parents, Mike and Renee, have both worked very hard. It’s because my mom had a career move and dad had to go work off-farm, that I really started doing the day-to-day tasks on the farm because from a family standpoint it made sense. To be honest, now that I am here, I wouldn’t have traded anything. I have learned so much.”

Uldrich also recently married his wife Tristen, “I am so proud of her. She is a special education teacher in Lincoln. The pay difference between jobs out here and Lincoln you know, it buys the car. She is working on her master’s right now and plans to go on and get her doctorate in special education too. There is just such a growing need, and I think she wants to work in the administration part to really make positive changes. There’s really a crisis going on with our kids.”

It sounds like Tristen has the fortitude to face the crisis too as Uldrich wanted to make sure he mentioned her physical strength in addition to her mental prowess, “She also went to the University of Nebraska – Lincoln like I did. I studied agronomy and integrated crop management there and she was a division one athlete in shot put. She has the Husker Power weight training trophy and won the pound for pound strongest athlete. Yes, she’s pretty amazing.”

What is also amazing is how passionate Uldrich is about not only helping his own farm and ranch succeed, but also wanting to genuinely see his neighbors succeed too. He said even if you’re at ground zero and don’t know what to try, simply start, “Set a goal. Knowing what you’re trying to do helps with understanding the results. Do research. Whether it’s Google, YouTube, or other farmers. Make a plan and implement it. Try it on a few acres of the worst piece of ground you have. Maybe it’s on the back 40 acres that no one can see. Crawl before you walk.”?

Whether you are crawling, walking, or running forward into making changes, without hesitation, Uldrich said, for goodness sakes – “Let’s make farming fun again.”

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