For 30 years John Aeschliman has been pioneering the art of soil and water conservation on 4000 acres in eastern Washington’s Palouse region. Take a soil sample just about anywhere, anytime from the land he farms and a few things are clear even to the untrained eye. Underneath a thick layer of decomposing straw and residue, the soil is soft and dark like well-aged compost. Worms and worm castings can be found in literally every handful of soil. A soil probe driven into dry ground slides easily down to six feet, and at that depth the soil is moist, which isn’t what you’d expect in dry country that averages a mere 18 to 20 inches of rainfall a year. Moisture is not readily available here; John doesn’t irrigate, and his wells have to be dug 150 to 200 feet before they reach an aquifer.

Because of the unusual amount of moisture in his soil, John has been able to produce a rare crop for this arid region. “We grow dryland corn, which is unheard of here, and we have been state yield winners for four years,” he says. “Our soils are deep and the moisture is retained. The standard yield for corn is 220 bushels an acre under irrigation; we are raising 150 to 160 bushels with no irrigation, and we are doing it with water we save from our direct-seed system.”

John delights in letting people see for themselves the beautiful soil he has built over three decades of direct-seed or no-till farming. He likens his soil to the duff on a forest floor, and seeing is believing. “Soil that has never been farmed is granulated and black from the earthworms and the microbiology,” he explains. “You can dig in it with your fingers. Tillage greatly reduces earthworms because it disturbs their habitat.”

John and his son Cory grow wheat, barley, peas, lentils, canola, and corn on hilly, steep ground that John’s grandfather farmed. On the hillsides above the Aeschliman’s land, where their neighbors conventionally farm, the contrast is dramatic. Conventional wheat farming relies on “summer fallow” which means that soil is left bare and regularly tilled with a plow to knock back the weeds and prepare it for fall planting. From John’s perspective, finely tilled bare soil is anathema to soil health, and leaves the soil prone to erosion from heavy rains. It is hard not to agree with him once you see the dark rivulets of mud from his neighbor’s fields that have washed downhill in deep channels onto John’s stubble-covered fields. “It’s just sad. They lose their water, it destroys the field, and takes it down to hard dirt,” he says.

John tells a story about a piece of farmland he leased from a retired farmer over 30 years ago, when he was first experimenting with no-till farming. One day he was out replacing fence posts that had been buried over time, and the owner, then 85 years old, stopped by and told him that there were two fence posts below each one that he was replacing. “That was how much mud had washed down in his lifetime,” explains John, “probably six or seven feet of mud!”

John’s enthusiasm for direct-seed technology is matched by his frustration with conventional farming. “Direct seeding allows you to go in and plant a crop without disturbing the ecosystem,” he explains. “It’s just an awesome thing and it wasn’t possible before. We never had the technology or the machines, and we didn’t understand so many things.” John exclaims, “We know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the first 12 inches of soil in our fields. A healthy handful of soil contains as many microrganisms as there are people on the face of earth: six billion, and only about 20 or 30 of them are named, maybe only 15 are understood.”

John continues, “As you learn to work within the system Mother Nature has established, it works better, more efficiently, quicker; it’s the way it should be. Grandfather would have done it in a heartbeat, but this stuff wasn’t around. But now there is no reason to continue this old system that is so highly destructive.” John knows that agriculture is a management intensive business and that you have to be tough to survive in it. He contends, “If you are tough, it can be hard for new information to sink in. We plow because our grandfathers did it that way, our fathers did it that way, and that’s the way we do it!”

John is not totally unconventional with his farming. He takes soil tests and before he plants a new crop into the stubble of an old crop, he sprays glyphosate or Round Up to kill the plants that would compete with the new crop. For John the use of chemical inputs is an economic matter. “We could stop fertilizing now, but yields would be less,” he says. “Hey, give me six or seven dollars per bushel for my wheat, and I’ll cut back on farm chemicals. I would be able to do a lot of things differently, but I can’t make it profitable with my costs – combines are expensive, diesel is at two dollars a gallon, labor costs are high. This is what the consumer needs to understand, it’s very hard to stay in business if our costs continue to rise yet what we sell goes down in price or stays the same.”

There are some promising economic incentives being developed for direct-seed farming. The Pacific Northwest Direct Seed Association has sold carbon credits to energy producers. Direct seeding keeps the carbon dioxide that plants have sequestered from the air in the soil, whereas tilling accelerates the decomposition of plant material, releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. John also sells some of his wheat to a new regional company that is marketing the benefits of supporting local no-till farming.

“When you no-till, your fields are covered with residue,” says John, pointing to a field of straw. “To me that looks great, but to a farmer that does conventional farming, it is ugly. But that straw protects the soil from erosion and provides cover for the birds.” John sees lots of wildlife on his land — deer, three or four species of owls, hawks, badgers, porcupines, pheasants, chuckers, quail, and coyotes. John reports, “We have some land in the Conservation Reserve Program, and it’s full of wildlife. People that hunt here say this is the best bird hunting in the country, and that is because of the direct seeding that we do. The birds never get disrupted, they just move out of the way when the tractor goes past.”

John knows that making the switch to direct seeding is a daunting challenge for many farmers. “It has to be your calling,” he says. “You have to have the tenacity. People say it’s too hard, it’s too much work, and it won’t pencil out. For that guy it will never work because he has already made up his mind. For the guy who wants to look at it, work on it, and figure it out, it will work.”

John reports, “People always ask, ‘what do your neighbors think?’ I usually reply, ‘Oh, some probably think I fell off the last turnip truck that went through town and bumped my head!’ But you know what, they are doing now what we were doing 20 years ago, it’s becoming acceptable. You soon learn that if you are an innovator you are usually 20 or 30 years ahead of the pack.” He continues, “Thomas Edison went broke three times before he invented the light bulb. It doesn’t always work the first time, you’ve got to stick with it. With the Lord’s help providing the rain and the natural systems to make it all work, perseverance will conquer all.”

Contact
JEA Farms, Ltd.
John Aeschliman
201 Aeschliman Rd.
Colfax, WA 99111
jeaesc@colfax.com