Associate Editor
WISCONSIN DELLS
A first-time entrant to the state corn and soybean contests known as PEPS (Profits through Efficient Production Systems) was selected by the Wisconsin Corn Growers Association board of directors for a new award for sustainable practices.
The very first “Green Fields-Blue Waters” award was given to Steve Kloos, a Stratford farmer, for the innovative ways he protects the soil and water on his Marathon County farm.
Dr. Joe Lauer, who oversees the PEPS contest, said the focus of the contest has shifted over the years. For the first 10 years, he said, it was based on efficiency – cost per bushel. In 1997, the focus shifted to a profitability measurement but there have been mixed results since everyone has a different way of marketing corn, he said.
The contest is now switching back to efficiency, and it has always encouraged soil and water conservation. This year’s new award – which a grower can win only once – is a way to shine the spotlight on growers doing an outstanding job of conservation in their cornfields.
“The award is a way to honor sustainable farming practices, emphasize soil conservation and water quality,” Lauer said. The corn grower board decided they would confer the award on one grower per year combining all the ideas that the PEPS contest stands for – profit or return per acre, efficiency and low-cost production, productivity and yield as well as soil conservation, he added.
Kloos, who farms with his parents and his wife Amy Kloos, has been tinkering with strip tillage on 550 acres of owned and rented farmland. “I do the cropping and my dad Andy handles the 60-cow dairy,” he said Friday (Jan. 29) at the Corn/Soy Expo.
Kloos was singled out for the award because of the many ways he protects his farm’s resources. He does detailed scouting early in the growing season. Before making any decisions he gathers information on the economics of that decision, said Lauer.
The fields Kloos manages have extended rotations including corn, soybeans, wheat and alfalfa. He uses herbicides with different modes of action and applies insecticides only when pests are at threshold levels.
Though he had never attended any workshops or conferences on strip tillage, he did lots of research on his own and decided that the practice would fit his farmland and his personality.
“I think it’s common in the neighborhood for people to wonder ‘what is he up to now?’ because I like to stretch the normal,” Kloos said.
Kloos started building zones and did fall strip tillage. He has also incorporated cover crops, including turnips, radishes and ryegrass, in his program to protect the soil. He applied phosphorus and potassium four to six inches deep in his fall zone tillage strips. He used a commercial zone builder implement and then added a fertilizer applicator to it in his own shop, but he admits the rocks in his fields destroyed parts of it.
New equipment will be part of Kloos’s zone building program this year as he has invested in auto-steer technology that will guide the tractor precisely down his strip tillage zones.
Kloos grew up on the farm he now operates with his dad and is glad his father is dedicated to the dairy operation. The younger partner had no interest in that part of the farm, preferring to look for new and interesting ways to stretch the fertilizer dollar while protecting their mostly silt-loam fields.
“A lot of days he probably thinks his son is crazy,” Kloos said, smiling. “I’d rather be out in the fields any day of the week.”
The ground the family rents is treated as if they owned it, he said, and zones are being built there too. Kloos, who won the corn silage division of the PEPS contest, said the contest was very useful for focusing the grower’s attention on everything that goes into producing a crop.
“We were doing a lot of things already, but this forced us to write it down and take the next step in analyzing what it costs us to grow a crop,” he said. The contest, he said, is a good management tool for any grower who wants to figure out what his costs are.
He said he kind of came up with the new zone tillage system after doing a lot of reading and re-evaluating their fertility program. “We needed to upgrade,” he said.
Their corn is harvested by a custom operator with yield monitoring capabilities and Kloos keeps yield maps for every field.
Next for the Kloos operation is figuring out the best way to fit their dairy manure, from an above-ground storage system, into the zone tillage system, he said. They are already trying to rotate manure applications to fields without a history of manure applications.
Lauer said the new award highlights various aspects of crop production, including transgenic seed, which allows growers to use less – or no – insecticide and fewer herbicides which protects the environment from those chemicals.
