We've got ethanol plants in Nebraska, which give us a byproduct to feed to our cattle that comes from corn, once they take the ethanol out. Nebraska is well-situated to be the beef epicenter. Nebraska is blessed because we have millions of acres of grass pasture where the soil is really ideal for growing grass and not for growing very much else. It’s the way Nebraska makes its money it's a very important part of our economy. Lam: Tell me about the cattle industry in Nebraska, and how your farm fits into that landscape.īurkholder: Cattle is the predominant agricultural product. “In Nebraska, cattle outnumber people four to one. I love cattle psychology and implementing ways that we can allow our animals to naturally thrive. Being able to understand my animals and to offer appropriate care at their level is really important to me. I was a psychology major in college, and animal psychology has always fascinated me. I've become an animal-welfare advocate I do a lot of volunteer work within the beef industry to improve care for food animals. I really love being around animals, and taking care of them. I went to work as a 22-year-old with not very much knowledge about agriculture, but I've learned a lot about cattle since then. We are the last stop before the animals go to harvest. We have the ability to feed 3,000 cattle. I have spent 20 years running the cattle feed yard. He also has an alfalfa dehydration plant, where he dehydrates the plant and turns it into feed pellets, so we farm a lot of alfalfa acres. The farm is about 4,500 acres in the Platte River Valley. We've been here 20 years now.īurkholder: We have a diversified farm. I was privileged enough to marry into it. There’s a long history of agriculture and farming in my husband's family they were originally Mennonites from the Ohio River Valley and moved to Nebraska in the 1950s. We always wanted to have a family and to raise our kids in a small town, and so we made a life choice, and farming fit into that. We decided that we wanted to live in rural America and be involved in agriculture. We spent a year on the East Coast before deciding to move back to the farm. I was a swimmer there, and we met on Halloween of my freshman year, fell in love, and got married. He is a farm kid from Cozad, Nebraska, who decided he wanted to see a different part of the country, so he played football at Dartmouth. I met my husband at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Bourree Lam: What do you do for work and how did you get into it?Īnne Burkholder: I am originally from West Palm Beach, Florida. “With the diversity, there’s a little more confidence that the future is going to be there for. “We’re starting to see that, yeah, this is do-able,” Angela says. Angela knows that once they can definitively answer their questions about cover crops, the crop diversification piece will be much less work, stress, and risk. “It’s just a matter of, why not?”Īs part of their SHP trial, they took steps to pinpoint which cover crops and seed mixes work for their farm in an effort to add greater diversity to their crop rotation, rather than going from just corn to beans and back again. “If you get your biology right in your soil, it’s going to pay you back three-fold,” said Angela. That goal of improved soil biology is one of the things that led the Knuths to Soil Health Partnership and implementing an on-farm research trial. We’re hoping to see that continued decrease in our cost of production and improvement in the soil tilth and microbe activity.” According to Angela, “We have been pleased to see no decrease in yield. With the switch to no-till, the Knuths found they saved money on tillage equipment and fuel. “We need to give them something that’s going to make them a living.” “It is a goal for us to leave the boys with better soils than what we had, and it does take time,” Angela says. As third-generation farmers hoping to pass on what they’ve built to the fourth generation, Angela and Kerry are motivated by a desire to leave the land in the very best possible condition for their two sons. Angela Knuth’s journey to improved soil health began back in 2005 when she and her husband Kerry made the move to no-till on their Mead, Neb.
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