Christie Apple, AKA CropScout Christie, joins us this week. The agronomy and soil health specialist is a farmer at heart.
She’s also a self-proclaimed ‘soil nerd’, who works with growers to improve their soil health and plant nutrition.
When she’s not working with clients, Apple works on her own farm with her husband and 5 teenagers in central Michigan.
On this edition of Cover Crop Strategies, brought to you by La Crosse Seed, Apple details how cover crops have impacted soil health on her farm.
She also shares success stories from various clients. Looking to plant covers this summer? Apple gives us a few options.
The Cover Crop Strategies podcast series is brought to you by La Crosse Seed.
Solving the SOIL HEALTH Puzzle? La Crosse Seed Has You Covered.
La Crosse Seed has put together a leading conservation seed platform by offering respected cover crop and native seed brands, plus practical support along the way. Quality products, helpful tools and expert advice make La Crosse Seed a strong partner with the pieces you need to succeed in this growing market. Dealers: Learn more at soil1st.com, or call 800.356.SEED.
Full Transcript
Noah Newman:
Hello and welcome once again to another edition of the Cover Crop Strategies podcast. I'm your host, Noah Newman, Associate Editor. Before we get started, let's thank our sponsor, La Crosse Seed. Solving the soil health puzzle? La Crosse Seed has you covered. Cover crops are an important piece to future profit, but it takes work and is puzzling at times. La Crosse Seed delivers quality Soil First cover crop products, plus training and tools to help you succeed. Whether you're looking to grow your cover crop seed business, get product tips, or find a local Soil First dealer, La Crosse Seed is ready to help. Learn more at soil1st.com. That's soil 1-S-T .com or call 800-356-SEED.
Noah Newman:
All right. This week, we're catching up with Christie Apple, AKA Crop Scout Christie. The agronomy and soil health specialist is a farmer at heart. She's also a self-proclaimed soil nerd who works with growers to improve their soil health and plant nutrition. When she's not working with clients, Apple works on her own farm with her husband and five teenagers in central Michigan. So on this edition of the podcast, Apple details how cover crops have impacted soil health on her farm. She also shares success stories from various clients. And if you're looking to do something with cover crops this summer, Apple gives us a few options. So without further ado, here's Christie.
Christie Apple:
Hi Noah. Thanks for having me on today. I'm Christie Apple. My husband, Jason Apple and myself, we're both agronomists actually by trade and farmers at heart. We live on our farm in central Michigan. We're a small operation and over the last couple of years, we've been really aggressively transitioning our farm to more regenerative practices, trying to work with the equipment that we have without going overboard. We raise traditional row crops in our neck of the woods. This year happens to be a corn rotation for us. We no-tilled that corn into a rye cover that was a residual from last year. So we're trying some new things on our farm this year. We have a lot of soil diversity where we live and farm and the farmers that we help as well, and so there's a lot of challenges that are presented in making cover crops work in our neck of the woods. So we're excited, I'm excited to be experimenting with different techniques to try to improve crop resilience, keep water where it needs to be, and see if we can do this this year in a whole new way.
Noah Newman:
Yeah. Before we get into the details of that, I was curious what your background is and how you got into agriculture and how you became an agronomist?
Christie Apple:
Yeah. So my agronomy journey for me started out as a young girl, wanting to become a pharmacist. I loved science, I loved math. When I was very young, that's what I dreamed of doing. And as I kind of grew through my teenage years and into early college, I realized that pharmacy really wasn't the right path for me. In fact, I was much better at building relationships with people and communication. And so I spent my twenties, the majority of my twenties, working in the business realm in different sales and marketing roles.
Christie Apple:
I was introduced to the agricultural realm, as far as an industry, when I was 28 and basically jumped in from there. I learned a vocational agronomy experience. So all of my training has been hands on, working closely with universities. So my educational background is business, not agronomy. So I translated my ability to build relationships and my childhood interest and passion that never was extinguished, even though pharmacy wasn't the right direction for me, I have always been interested in biology, physics, anatomy, physiology, and really agronomy is the marrying all those things. It's just in the plant and soil context.
Noah Newman:
And so tell us, what does a day in the life of Christie Apple look like? As an agronomist, I'd have to imagine you're talking to a lot of people on the road a lot maybe even?
Christie Apple:
Yeah. I don't receive mail to my pickup truck, but some days I think I probably should. I do spend a lot of time on the road. I spend a lot of time on my phone and I also spend a lot of time on social media, trying to educate and advocate and elevate people's exposure to what agriculture really is. And as far as the day of the life of what Crop Scout Christie looks like, my day to day is spent building relationships with farmers and deepening those relationships with other agronomists to help them have a soil health focus in their recommendations. That soil health focus is something that we are kind of missing. It's a missing element in our traditionally trained agronomy world. People making recommendations for fertilizers and for pest management products out there are really underexposed to the vernacular and to the concepts of soil health. Or maybe look at soil health as something that'd be a nice to think about or nice to talk about, but impossible to implement.
Christie Apple:
And so much of my energy today is spent trying to elevate that education, whether it be with my fellow agronomists or whether it be directly at that farm level in talking about things like water infiltration, understanding what problems farmers are facing and coming up with solutions that are oriented to affecting soil quality as a means to resolving those problems. Instead of always diverting or defaulting to a pesticide or a fertilizer application to overcome something, we may be just slightly out of balance in the soil and need a little help in that direction. We just overlook that a lot. So that's a very contemporary thing for me. Although it's very old fashioned principles, it's just not something that's discussed enough in my opinion. So this has been very helpful for me to have a different approach in my agronomy training.
Christie Apple:
When I started out with my agronomy training, it was with a soil health focus. So I didn't learn old bad habits or institutionalized norms such as the traditional N, P and K approach or the traditional liming approach to fixing soils. I learned about soil biology, I learned about soil physics, and I learned about how those things were interconnected. And that us as farmers and as stewards of the land, get to play a role and get to play our part in how that works. So we get to farm on that ground. And if we do it the right way, the soil will work with us and we can leverage and harness its natural dynamics of nutrient release and functioning, right? So it's not terribly complicated, but sometimes you got to start from somewhere, right? So that's much of what my days are spent doing these days.
Noah Newman:
And so, what would be some tips or maybe some advice you would share in terms of how someone can improve their soil health? And how big of a role could cover crops play in that?
Christie Apple:
My number one question I like to ask a farmer is where do they feel the most vulnerable? Where do they feel like they have the most room for growth on their farming operation? And based on the response, I can almost always draw a direct line in soil quality back to that problem. Soil quality has everything to do with water infiltration, with keeping soil and nutrients where it's supposed to be, with cycling and sequestering carbon and nitrogen and other nutritional that are required for plant life, but also supplying enzymes and other co-factors in the soil that support biological life. And all of those things equate to better soils when we can get it right.
Christie Apple:
So regardless of what that farmer's key problem is, I can promise you there's either a cover crop or a cover crop combination that could resolve that problem. So that's where I like to start. My number one tip to farmers is to really take a eyes wide open self-assessment to say, I'm doing this well and here's some areas I need to improve upon. And if you don't know how to resolve those in your means right now, get ahold of somebody like myself or other soil health focused consultants that can support you on your journey and help you come up with real strategies to make a real difference for your farm.
Noah Newman:
Yeah. Can you speak, think of a specific case or a client who maybe had some issues with soil health and then you talked to them and then you saw some improvements down the road? Or can you think of a specific example?
Christie Apple:
Yeah, absolutely. I'll actually use our farm for example. One of the problems that we were having on a lot of our soil, because it's lighter, sandy in some areas, then we have the extreme opposite heavier clay in other areas as we were struggling to retain soil moisture in a majority of our farm. And one of the strategies we were considering had to do with cover crops, right? We were trying to figure out a way to hold moisture in the soil. So over the course of multiple years of using composts and light incorporation, we decided to add in a cover crop or just reduce our tillage after a wheat crop so we could have some volunteer wheat come back and give us a little bit of light cover on the soil.
Christie Apple:
One of the most surprising things we found was this particular spring, where we had cooler soil temperatures, we had a lot of challenges getting the corn planted in the ground. That little bit of light cover actually provided us with some early season weed protection or weed suppression that we weren't expecting, right? It also gave us a really nice seed bed to plant into instead of planting into powder, like we normally do on a sand and into absolute concrete on our clay, we had a lot less variability in actual soil texture and soil temperature, right? Our sandy soils tend to get cooler faster and hotter faster. We were seeing a lot less variability in soil temperature, which can make a lot of difference when it comes to germinating seeds and adverse weather conditions. So I'll say that that's already a success story on our own personal farm.
Christie Apple:
As far as clients that I'm working with, I have a client that I've been working with for many, many years, and as they were transitioning to organic production, they were finding they were having to use a lot of mechanical tillage in order to maintain weed control at acceptable levels. So this year or recently, we decided to implement a rye strategy that we're planting in the fall after their dry beans come out. And then no tilling into beans into the following season, into soybeans for the following season. We're really excited to say that our roller crimping process went well and we learned some really important things through that process.
Christie Apple:
But most importantly, what we were seeing was the weed suppression we were looking for after we crimped that rye and then also having minimal damage done to those soybeans while we were crimping. So we're excited to keep moving the ball forward with farms like this, people trying to do better with the soil and solve the problem using cover crops. And it's actually solving more than one problem, right? That's been really exciting for me to see and to be able to quantify at the farmer level and help to turn those decisions into actual return on investment for that farmer.
Noah Newman:
Take a quick time out, back to the podcast in just a second. But once again, let's thank our sponsor, La Crosse Seed. Solving the soil health puzzle? La Crosse Seed has you covered. Cover crops are an important piece to future profit, but it takes work and is puzzling at times. La Crosse Seed delivers quality Soil First cover crop products, plus training and tools to help you succeed. Whether you're looking to grow your cover crop seed business, get product tips, or find a local Soil First dealer, La Crosse Seed is ready to help. Learn more at soil1st.com. That's soil 1-S-T .com or call 800-356-SEED. Now, back to the podcast.
Noah Newman:
So we do a cover crop benchmark study and for three years in a row, cereal rye has been the most popular species. That's what everyone seems to be using. Can you think of another species of cover crop that you've had experience with, or that might be proven to be beneficial to some of your clients or maybe even your farm?
Christie Apple:
Yeah, certainly. For several years now I've been implementing multi-species blends. So a lot of times when a farmer is trying to tackle a problem, like say water infiltration, it could be because of a couple different things. You may have variability in soil. You may have some sub soil compaction from excessive tillage over the years. You may have more than one issue that you're dealing with. And so sometimes these multi-species cover crop blends can actually help you to resolve multiple things. For example, I have a favorite blend of mine. After a wheat crop comes off, I farm and work here in central Michigan, this is often late July, early August when we're harvesting wheat. So we have a really nice window before a killing frost to establish some type of cover. So we'll take a cover crop blend, including something like a brassica that could penetrate the soil, like a tillage radish of some sort.
Christie Apple:
We like to take a oat and maybe even an Austrian winter pea to help restore soil quality, encourage biological diversity, suppress some weeds, and keep that soil green all through the course of the growing season. All of those will naturally die off in the winter, so no tillage in the fall is required there, which also gives our field a break from tillage that may be counterproductive to what we're trying to do. So there's a great example of using multi-species to resolve the compaction, put some nutrients, and encourage something to be green and living on that soil, kind of touching on multiple aspects there of improving soil quality. And when that farmer comes back into the spring, he could potentially no-till into that or some minimal tillage to reduce whatever residues are remaining from the previous crop and onto his next rotation.
Noah Newman:
Yeah. And also talking about that study that we do, we saw a lot more respondents say that they plant green. I think it's up to 70% in our survey at least said that they planted green in some fashion or another. Have you been noticing that trend in Michigan as well? And what benefits can come from planting green?
Christie Apple:
Yeah, I definitely have noticed planting green in Michigan is gaining in popularity. And so depending on what your termination plan is for that cover crop will kind of dictate what you're actually planting into and how long you allow it to grow. So I have seen that increasingly. I think there's a lot of benefit to that. For example, many people utilizing rye will wait till it is flowering or at antithesis to terminate that so that you can actually get some release of nutrients in this cropping season to feed the crop that it is in companion with.
Christie Apple:
Other people are just utilizing something that dies very easily or isn't growing very tall and just terminating that with a typical herbicide so that we can hold soil down, right? That's very popular in some of our soils that are highly erodible or are very coarse soil structures that want to pick up and move with wind events. So we see different purposes for these cover crops and planting green, but what that's doing is providing some armor for the soil to extend that window for the farmer that may need extra time before he can get that field planted or to maybe mitigate some of the environmental issues that that farmer may be facing year after year on that particular piece of ground.
Noah Newman:
And as far as cover crops go, we're in the summer right now. What can growers do in the summer? Do you recommend a specific species or there's one that you could plant in the summer possibly?
Christie Apple:
Yeah. I know something that's very popular here in Michigan and other geographies where there's a lot of livestock in the mix, it's something very popular in our neck of the woods is to take a first cutting of hay off and which usually is off by the end of May, and then plant a sorghum-sudan mix grass after that. Allow it to grow to just about heading and take a cutting off of that, allow it to recover and take a second cutting off of that. So we're keeping something growing on the ground. We're removing some of the residue, but that plant has the ability to recover. And then whether you do or do not take a second cutting, it still provides some soil armor there. It does very well in the summer months.
Christie Apple:
Again, that blend that I suggested earlier with something that needs some time before a killing frost can go after a crop like that. Pickles is a short day crop here in Michigan, pickling cucumbers. And so sometimes farmers will plant a rye of some sort to keep that soil clean and covered until pickles can be planted. Then 45 days later after their harvest, they'll immediately plant back a cover crop behind it to help that recover that soil. Pickles is very damaging to the soil structure because it's so mechanical harvest intensive. So whatever the purpose there, it goes back to, what is the problem that we're trying to solve for the farmer? And I promise you that there's a cover crop solution to get you there.
Noah Newman:
Now, do you have animals on your farm?
Christie Apple:
We currently do not have any livestock. Over the years, we've had feeder calves, as well as sheep for several years. We've not yet been able to implement rotational grazing, but it certainly is a dream of mine at some point. I do have many clients that have started to implement some grazing and alternative foraging, utilizing their cover crop space or their fallow ground, so that we can continue with the biodiversity and to stimulate from the chewing and the hoofs. The hoof action on that farm can sometimes stimulate some really neat soil responses there. Again, solving a different type of problem, but I know people that are doing it very, very well, and I'm excited to learn.
Christie Apple:
I love to stay a student in this area because there's so many innovators in the cover crop space that have been trying different things over the years. And they are just such an open book to share. I think it's a really neat farmer to farmer mentoring type of scenario, which you don't see a lot in modern agriculture. But certainly in regenerative practices, it's becoming what's dominating the educational streams for regenerative agriculture cover crops and figuring out these systems of how to do better with their soils.
Noah Newman:
Yeah. It seems like you're always learning something new. That's what I really enjoy about these interviews as well, it's people talk about their learning experiences. And I might be putting you on the spot here, but can you think of something you've learned recently maybe? Whether it's about cover crops or soil health or anything you could think of?
Christie Apple:
Yeah. Actually I just recently attended, in fact, I was the host of a recent soil health event in Washington County, Iowa. And I think one of the key learnings that came out of that or something that was really eye opening for me was farmers establishing alternative markets for their crops. Finding other sources where they're not utilizing mainstream global marketing chains. They're growing unique crops that have a unique market. Like for example, some of the blue corns and open pollinated corns, rice produced in regenerative agricultural systems have a very neat or unique channel direct to market. I just, that's something that's really opened my eyes and that I've started to jumping down rabbit holes to educate myself so that I can help support my farmers think outside the box as far as how to leverage and market the crops that they're growing with these unique growing environments or regenerative practices that they're implementing. And how to bring that education to whoever may be buying their grain or their agricultural product from there.
Noah Newman:
Gotcha. Well, before we let you go, I know you're probably busy, so I won't keep you for too long. But is there anything else you wanted to add or any kind of advice you'd want to offer to our listeners out there?
Christie Apple:
Yeah. I think one piece of advice that I could just hopefully impress upon anybody up on this journey, whether you're implementing any type of soil recovery strategy or soil health principle of any kind, is to get good data. If you don't know where you're at today, how will you know how to measure your results in the future? So one of my favorite tools and resources that I like to leverage in that is a data management software tool called Top Soil. And leveraging the Haney test and the soil health analysis with the Haney methodology, I just think that that just gives us such a nice well rounded data set that helps us to understand where are our microbes and what does our soil quality look like from a data perspective. So that as we implement practices over time, we can go back and sample those things again and see, have we actually made any change?
Christie Apple:
And oh, by the way, when we can document change like that and we can assign value and connect that to our actual balance sheet at the farm level, that's how we calculate whether or not these practices are genuinely producing return on investment. The goal is not to just confuse and make the farming experience a hassle. The goal here is to improve soil quality so that we can keep farmers in business. If you ate today, you need to thank a farmer. And if you want to continue eating, we need to support movements in the direction of soil quality, soil health, and simplifying these processes so more and more farmers can continue to adapt.
Noah Newman:
Great stuff there from Christie Apple. And before we go, let's once again take some time to thank our sponsor, La Crosse Seed. Solving the soil health puzzle? La Crosse Seed has you covered. Cover crops are an important piece to future profit, but it takes work and is puzzling at times. La Crosse Seed delivers quality Soil First cover crop products, plus training and tools to help you succeed. So whether you're looking to grow your cover crop seed business, get product tips, or find a local Soil First dealer, La Crosse Seed is ready to help. Learn more at soil1st.com. That's soil 1-S-T .com or call 800-356-SEED. And once again, thanks to Christie Apple for joining us this week. For more, you can catch her on Instagram @cropscoutchristielee or on Facebook at Cropscout Christie. And remember, for all things cover crops, head to covercropstrategies.com. Thanks for listening.
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