Jack Thomas grew up tilling his family’s land that sits on the banks of the Verdigris River near Lenapah, Okla.
“I did it my whole childhood,” Thomas says. “That was one of the things I did on the farm.”
Inevitably, he’d have to follow those passes with the disk later by more passes, working in ditches that formed when the river overgrew its banks and flooded into the 100-acre bottom land.
After the death of his father, Thomas took over the fourth-generation farm. And he kept on tilling and cropping the bottom land – pass after pass.
“I really feel like some of the things we do are just because that’s the way we’ve always done it,” he says.
The Grind
And so Thomas was managing the 2,000 acre farm and raising 250-head of cow-calf pairs of Balancer Angus/Gelbvieh cross. He found himself in the same grind that his family had been on with the bottom land.
“Back then, you had the mentality of summer fallow, and you think you’re doing good because you are keeping the weeds down so they don’t rob moisture and nutrients,” he says. “You go out there and disk and then you see the weeds coming back. But it also makes it so highly erodible.”
In an effort to raise graze-out wheat on the bottom land, Thomas says he always needed to plant early.
“You’d have to get it in by first of September to get a good wheat pasture and if you did that and got it up early, you could almost guarantee that you would have fall army worms,” he says.
“We were just fighting nature, fighting nature, fighting nature.”
Penciling in Conservation
At some point, Thomas decided to get off the wheel. He started by running the numbers.
“I realized I was doing all this work for maybe $4,000 or $5,000 from the added gain on the calves in the end,” he says. “To me, there were so many reasons to try something else.”
As a member of his local conservation district board, Thomas knew where to turn.
USDA-NRCS programs ensure that growers like Thomas can implement conservation practices on-farm with both the financial assistance and technical assistance needed for investment.
“Forward-thinking producers like Jack assess the big picture to make decisions that benefit their bottom line and their personal inputs, but also positively impact the resources that provide for their livestock and in turn provide for their families,” says Jeanne Jasper, Oklahoma State Conservationist, USDA-NRCS. “Jack recognized that the cost share and technical assistance available through NRCS programs such as EQIP could help to make operational changes easier to implement so that he could experience those benefits even sooner.”
Thomas able to tap the USDA-NRCS EQIP cost-share program to sow the bottom ground into Bermuda grass, which would provide him grazing forage and year-round soil cover to protect against erosion.
“Jack was basically changing his management, going from crop ground to grasslands,” says Julie Lamb, USDA-NRCS program liaison for northeast Oklahoma. “In conservation, you want to be able to slow down the soil erosion and the water erosion by covering that ground up and bringing that soil health back up.”
The Benefits
Through a combination of financial incentives and technical assistance, as well as diligent management on Thomas’ part, the risk paid off.
“He ended up getting a really good stand and I think he’s very pleased with it,” Lamb says.
Thomas points to the overall benefits that the new grassland has yielded, which has led to more profitability and less stress on the operation.
“I went from running 40 pairs on that place to 60-70 pairs and now I have to keep them shut down there on the Bermuda to keep it from getting away,” he says. “I am not wearing out my equipment and I’m not wearing out myself anymore either.”
The Bermuda grass is keeping his cows fed, allowing him to implement more intensive rotational grazing and is keeping the floodwaters from washing away his topsoil.
One day, Thomas saw the power of the grass in action.
“We had a big flood and after the water had receded, I went down and it had just trapped the topsoil from upriver,” he says. “I had parts of our field with two inches of topsoil deposited on top of the grass and the grass just came up through it.”
Thomas sent off the top for sampling.
“It was unreal how high the nutrient content was,” Thomas says. “It was the cream of the crop from upriver that I trapped.”
Living with the Land
The modern-day farm is certainly a departure from its roots. Most likely, Thomas’ father and grandfather never considered that their farm would be a full-forage operation, but he is not looking back now.
After all, he’s finally stopped fighting the land he loves and what Mother Nature provides for it.
“In Oklahoma, our climate is forage friendly,” he says. “In spring, I can almost guarantee that we are going to get rains but then in the summer and fall, it’s going to be dry, which is when grain crops need water most.”
“Oklahoma is forage country,” Thomas adds. “That’s my thinking and I stand by that.”
America’s Conservation Ag Movement is a public/private collaborative that meets growers across the country where they are on their conservation journey and empowers their next step with technical assistance from USDA-NRCS and innovation solutions and resources from agriculture’s leading providers. Learn more at www.americasconservationagmovement.com.
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