(bright music) - Hello and welcome to "Farm Connections."

I'm your host, Dan Hoffman.

On today's episode, we attend a seminar in Rochester hosted by the Land Stewardship Project and discuss the mission of the project with member Shea-Lynn Ramthun.

Landon Plagge joins us to discuss the Green Acre Mill project in Albert Lea and the benefits he sees in crop diversification.

All here today on "Farm Connections."

(bright lively music) - [Presenter] Welcome to "Farm Connections" with your host, Dan Hoffman.

- [Announcer] Farm Connections premier sponsor is Minnesota Corn.

- [Presenter] Programming supported by Minnesota Corn, working to identify and promote opportunities for corn growers, enhance quality of life, and help others understand the value and importance of corn production to America's economy.

(vibrant music) - [Announcer] Additional support from the following sponsors: - [Presenter] Programming supported by R&S Grain Systems, a family owned business serving its customers for 50 years with leading designs in the manufacturing of grain handling equipment and grain storage systems.

You can call in for a quote today.

- [Announcer] Programming supported by EDP Renewables North America, owner, operator of Prairie Star and Pioneer Prairie Wind Farms in Minnesota and Iowa.

EDPR wind farms and solar parks provide income to farmers and help power rural economies across the continent.

- [Presenter] Mower County Farm Bureau Association, a KSMQ broadcast sponsor, advocates for agriculture based on the policies and beliefs of its members.

It's dedicated to making the voices of its members stronger.

You can learn more about membership benefits at FBMN.org.

- [Announcer] Programs supported by employee owned AgVantage Software Rochester, Minnesota, celebrating their 50th year designing and developing agribusiness software for grain elevators, feed manufacturers, producers, fertilizer and chemical dealers, co-ops, seed companies, and fuel distributors.

(uplifting music) - Welcome to "Farm Connections."

We traveled to the International Event Center at the Rochester Airport to visit with somebody about the Land Stewardship Project.

And with me today is Shea-Lynn Ramthun.

Thanks for joining us.

- Thank you for having me.

- There's a nice event happening here today.

What's going on?

- So this is our winter workshop.

It is called Beyond Exports: Rebuilding Our Local Markets.

- Why is that important?

- As a soil health organizer with the Land Stewardship Project, I work with farmers in the community about what it is, the challenges that they're experiencing and what could make the farming system better and work for them.

And over the last couple years, we have been working with farmers that keep talking about the importance for soil health to diversify outside of corn and bean, the typical commodity crops.

What farmers were finding is that the challenge really became where can we market these crops to?

And so without having a viable market for farmers to sell into, it's really hard to have them grow diverse crops.

And so this workshop is bringing together eight different speakers, all local farmers in this region that have done something quite unique where they are working together, farmer-to-farmer cooperation to build different markets for farmers to sell into.

- Extremely important to diversify.

- Extremely important.

It's the best thing for the soil health, for water quality.

And also when we think about economics for farmers, it helps diversify their portfolio.

If you think of it as an investment, not all their eggs are in one basket so if maybe corn is down, the oats will be higher and there might be some years where the corn is actually carrying them and the oats are a little bit lower.

- Beyond that, biologically, what's the problem having monoculture in our environment?

- So with monoculture, what's happening is it's starting to pull too many resources out of the soil, and so it's degrading the soil.

Then when you have the same crops growing in succession with each other, you have a higher likelihood of disease, pests, et cetera.

And so then we're going, as a farmer, you're having to put in more expensive inputs.

The more inputs you put into your crop, the less that you're gonna get profit per acre.

A lot of people want to look at what is my yield per acre?

And that's all fine and dandy, but when we are coming to the money side of it, we actually have to look at how much are we making per acre and when we're having to do all of these different passes to accommodate for pest and having to put more nitrogen in the ground to make up for just growing the same thing over and over again, then it really starts to dig into the profit.

- Shea-Lynn, you come from authenticity, you come from a farm.

- I am a sixth generation farmer outside of Canon Falls, Minnesota.

- Is it the family farm?

- It is the family farm.

And we are a small farm, about 300 acres, and we grow some traditional row crops in addition to food-grade oats, some other experimental alternative crops, and then we also run a herd of beef and sheep.

- And trying to raise some kids.

- Yes, we have two kids.

- On an average day, what's your farm life look like?

- It is a juggle between my farm work and I work full-time at the Land Stewardship Project, so it's a balancing act of trying to keep everything together, but I have a lot of really good help with my husband and my parents.

- Yeah, thanks for sharing about that.

No man, no woman is an island, right?

- No.

It's all about cooperation, whether it is all the farmers together or families helping.

- So it seems like you're all about community building.

- Yes, community is extremely important and it was really encouraging to hear the farmers today lift that up.

So one of the things that LSP does is we host these farmer-to-farmer networking groups and we have four different hubs where they're hyper-local and farmers can meet together on somebody's farm.

Whether it be like, I would really like to get a group input on where I should put my water lines.

And so everybody comes to the farm, offers different ways of thinking about things, trying to come together and solve a problem.

Some of the farmers are speaking to, it can even be like it's been a really bad drought year and things aren't looking great, I just need to be with another farmer and have that connection with somebody who's also going through the same thing.

So that community for the farmer to have that experience, that's the way farming used to be.

Like when you go into our family farmhouse, you see pictures of cooperative farming where it's neighbors are helping each other.

It's the oat harvest and so everyone's gonna come to the Johnson Farm and help, and then the next day, they're gonna go to the Samuelson Farm and help.

And that's the way things are done and we're hoping that we can keep bringing that connection back because community and cooperation is the way forward.

- How long have you been with LSP?

- I have been on staff for two years, but I have been involved for many more than that.

- So Land Stewardship Project stands for doing what?

- We are a grassroots nonprofit organization that is member based and we organize around a fair and just food and farming system.

So I work in the soil health department, so we're working with farmers in making sure we can establish good soil health practices and support farmers through that.

We also work on markets, farm to school, and we do policy where we make sure that the local, state, and federal government can help support these practices.

- And if our audience wants to find out more, do you have a website?

- Yes.

You can visit the LandStewardshipProject.org.

- You balance a lot of things and your days probably can get rather long, but if everything goes well, at the end of the day, how would you describe that day?

- Magical.

It's pretty great getting to grow food-grade oats and know that I'm selling it for my community, as a farmer, that's what I want to do.

Then I get to go in my day job and help other farmers find those markets and sell other food-grade products and it's a dream come true.

- Back to your soil hub, when you talk about that, what's an example of a meeting that you remember that went really well?

- We were at a farmer outside of Zumbro Falls, Minnesota, and he was looking at different ways that he could adjust his pasture.

And he also grows Kernza, which is a perennial wheat established by the University of Minnesota.

And he wanted help to figure out where was the best place to put the fence to put trees for barriers, and then also going from Kernza, what should he do next?

And he was recently organic and several of the farmers in the hub were also organic and so he was able to get real-time feedback from farmers and they continued to stay in touch after the meeting and help each other through that.

And then as a group, the farmers worked together to make sure, like did you think about the bluff line and what if you need to get a tractor and make sure things are spaced?

So it was really helpful to see a farmer being able to get real-time feedback.

- Peer to peer.

- Peer to peer.

- What's your greatest hope in a lifetime of farming, in a lifetime of working with Land Stewardship Project, what's your greatest hope of what happens?

- I hope that we continue to build on the success that we see in this region with the Oat Mafia Green Acre Milling amongst other things.

And I hope to see us move away from the monoculture of just selling a commodity and working towards selling healthy, sustainable food for our families, for our communities that will then not only make healthier people, it makes healthier communities.

And the more farmers that we have on the land, then we have more kids in schools.

The more kids we have in schools, we have grocery stores in the town, and the more we have grocery stores and it starts to snowball and communities come together.

It's all about the community.

- Thank you, Shea-Lynn.

- Thank you.

- Stay tuned for more on "Farm Connections."

(uplifting music) Welcome to "Farm Connections."

We traveled to the International Event Center at the Rochester International Airport, and with me today is Landon Plagge.

- Nice to meet you.

- Landon, thanks for joining us.

We're at a great event today.

What's happening?

- Alright, we're here today to talk about expanding our markets for locally growing crops for food, and to help our farmers get farther down the supply chain to maximize profits on farms and have healthier food for consumers.

- Worthy goals.

- Yes, it's ambitious goals, ambitious projects.

I'm specifically a farmer from Latimer, Iowa, about an hour south of Albert Lea, Minnesota.

And I grow corn, soybeans, oats, radishes, turnips, livestock of cattle, hogs, chickens at a fairly large scale.

It would be considered a large scale farm operation.

Last year I grew 2,000 acres of oats.

And we're growing food-grade oats, and then our farm operation is 100% cover crop, 100% no-tilled, and 100% three crop rotation.

So a little bit unique in that area, and that's what we are doing.

So I'm also the founder of Green Acres Milling, which is why I'm guessing we're talking today.

- Well, that's one of the many reasons.

And of course, you've verified you're an authentic farmer and you've got many enterprises, that's great.

Today we're talking a little bit about beyond exports and building the local markets.

Why is that important?

- Yeah, like I said, we're a fairly diverse farm operation.

I mean, I chored pigs this morning before I came here, but we've also seen a number of different, been involved with a number of different projects.

I've owned a grocery store for eight years, I've done multi-family housing.

And I just see the problems in our communities could be solved by farmers getting more dollars.

If we'd have more dollars coming into our communities, add more value to our communities.

Currently with the commodity system, we're exporting all of the value from our farms at the cheapest price possible.

Our whole goal is production at the lowest cost, lowest price.

We're not looking at what consumers want to buy and we need to be doing that.

You can take example of oats, which we're involved with at our Green Acres Milling project in Albert Lea.

Right now, if a farmer sells oats, typical yields, we're selling about $500 an acre from our farm operation.

If we sell oatmeal from our farm operations, we're selling that for $1,500 an acre.

And you think about those dollars being in our local communities, in Albert Lea, in Austin, in Latimer, Iowa, in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota.

And that additional dollars, I mean, some of it is staff at the mill, but the majority of those dollars will come back to the farmers and the shareholders being local to our communities.

- I think we have a lot of examples of that within the biofuels industry.

Would you agree?

- Yeah, it's similar to the biofuels industry.

The biofuels industry is very interesting.

It started out with similar goals, I would say, with farmers banding together to build their markets.

My thought on that though is they were still pushing a commodity and they were still trying to develop the market.

So the ethanol market has had to be subsidized.

It's had to be developed with food.

People are already eating food.

That's just what they do.

We all need to eat.

Every single day we need to eat.

With a product like oats, the United States per capita consumption is about 5.2 pounds per capita.

In Europe, they're eating 12 and a half pounds per capita.

The US oat market has been growing 8% annually every single year.

So the market is growing without farmers being involved.

So let's grow something that has a market that doesn't need subsidies, doesn't need anything else.

We don't have to develop the market, we can just sell into the existing market and work with existing players in the market.

We don't have to steal market from the big companies that are already out there.

We can just sell into the market growth as the per capita consumption increases in the US.

- Landon, if we go back into the 1960s and 1970s in rural northern Iowa and southern Minnesota, really the Midwest, there was a lot of oats produced and there was also a lot of oat farmers.

What happened?

- A big reason why our landscape has changed is because of the lack of a viable market for the oats.

There's mills here, but they're not paying farmers a fair price for their oats.

They've moved to importing oats from Canada.

In the 70s, 80s, there was some quality issues with oats grown in southern Minnesota, northern Iowa.

New varieties have since been developed, new production practices have been developed, and we can grow high quality food-grade oats here in southern Minnesota, northern Iowa.

But the mentality of farmers is we can't do that here and we have to retrain farmers in that we can grow high quality food-grade oats here in southern Minnesota and northern Iowa.

So that's part of the problem, part of the problem was the shift in feed needs.

As larger farms, it was easier to grow corn and soybeans and just feed animals corn and soybeans instead of diversity.

As smaller dairies disappeared, economics of production, the economics of scale came into play.

What we've seen though, is by reintroducing oats to our rotations on our farm, we're grazing 1,000 head of cattle on our farm.

You know, one head per acre.

We can get three pounds a day of rate of gain on those cattle for 100 days.

And that's what makes our farm viable.

That's what makes it successful.

So interestingly, oats disappeared because of economics, and now oats are coming back because of economics.

We've seen a reduction in input costs on our farm of corn following oats of about $170 an acre.

And that's moving away from fungicides, moving away from insecticides, going to no-till production, and then also non-GMO seeds.

And with the oats, the cattle grazing the oats after, or a double crop of soybeans or a forage crop after, we've been able to add another two to $300 an acre of income per acre in the same year that we grew those oats.

And so that really changes our farm economics.

You know, a farm right now may have a goal of making 50 to $75 an acre.

If you can add two to $300 an acre to that goal of 50, all of a sudden we're making 250 to $300 an acre over top of our land cost.

And it's a whole lot easier to farm a 50 acres and make five times as much per acre.

So that's where we're at with oats.

Our mill project is unique in that we're tying the price that farmers get paid to the grocery store price.

We've owned a grocery store, like I said, oats from a farmer currently are getting sold for about 14 cents a pound.

There's the processing, the lost in processing.

Their mill is costing them about 20 cents a pound for those oats.

The time that gets to the grocery store shelf, the premium brands, they're selling it from three to five to eight to $10 a pound.

And there's so much opportunity there for farmers to even make an additional 10 cents.

That's all we're trying to do.

We're trying to sell our oats for 30 cents a pound instead of 20 cents a pound.

And that has such a profound impact on our farm's profitability if we can do that, sell 'em for 30 cents a pound to the mill, the mill sells them for 50 to 60 cents a pound, that's what's going to make our farm successful.

And by the farmers owning the supply chain, we can do that.

- Landon, you obviously went through a checklist or some kind of process to find a place to add value to oats, to add value to farmers that produce oats, and you picked Albert Lea, Minnesota.

Why?

- One of the reasons we settled on Albert Lea, Minnesota as our final location.

I've been involved with economic development boards with different projects we've built, and Albert Lea had the transportation logistics with I-90 and I-35.

That's a big factor, but honestly, the biggest factor was the city of Albert Lea being welcoming and ready to work.

They had a shovel ready site that fit all of our needs.

They were willing to work with us.

The city officials have been great to deal with and the state of Minnesota officials have been terrific to work with.

Tom Peterson from Minnesota Department of Ag is tremendous.

He is a great advocate for value added projects like this.

So the state of Minnesota is very welcoming, the city of Albert Lea is very welcoming, and then transportation logistics.

We have growers, our primary grower network is within about 120 miles of Albert Lea, Minnesota.

Growers in Southeast by Rochester where we are today that are working with karst and watershed improvements, reduction of nitrates in the drinking water.

We have growers out in western Minnesota.

We have growers all the way up to Baudette, Minnesota actually.

And then my farm is an hour south of Albert Lea.

So logistically it just made sense to have those supply networks.

Albert Lea also has a lot of existing infrastructure from the former packing plants, the industries that have been in Albert Lea that really tie well with what we're doing, frozen food warehousing and trucking logistics.

- Upon completion of the mill, how many employees directly and then also indirectly do you anticipate?

- The mill will have approximately 25 direct employees and they'll vary from warehouse workers all the way up to head millers.

Pretty good payroll increase for the city of Albert Lea, about two and a half million dollars of payroll for the city of Albert Lea, and those are the direct jobs.

They also have about 47 indirect jobs through the studies that we've done.

And that's truckers hauling oats in, hauling oats out, farmers growing oats, the agronomists, the seed dealers, everything that goes along with oat production.

So overall, it'll have about a 75 people impact on the job market in southern Minnesota.

- Fantastic.

And you've actually gone out to farmers and others and worked on investment in this as well.

It's maybe a co-op model?

- It's a bit.

The model we went with is a bit of a co-op model.

It's very interesting and it is actually our biggest strength, is the farmers owning the supply chain and the story of our farmers being the ones producing your oats with a traceable product.

We can have one of our guys' smiling faces on a bag of oats, or a brand can have that with a QR code that traces it back to the farm it came from and what practices were used on the farm.

Part of that is having those farmers have ownership in the mill.

That's a key part of it.

Those farmers are going to be tied to producing the highest quality, the best oats, and the practices that brands want to see.

And it also allows us to be very nimble to what a brand wants.

If a specific brand wants certain production practices, we can do that and we can provide that very quickly for a brand.

- If this plan goes according to the plan- - (laughs) Yep.

- What's it look like three years from now?

- Well, as you're well aware, nothing ever goes according to plan.

But yes, if it goes according to plan, we have our existing farmer network right now that have about 40,000 acres of oats that are gonna be supplied to it.

We will possibly look at maybe a sister location in another area or expanding the current location.

We feel the market growth is there.

We don't have to compete with existing players 'cause we have a differentiated product that they can't supply.

And we can work with those existing mills even.

We're open to selling a product, that'd be great if we can all work together, you know?

If we can support our communities as a greater goal than maybe just corporate profits, that's really what makes our rural areas successful.

- Certainly sounds like crop growing, but also community building.

- Yep.

Yes, it's very much community building as well.

I mean, there's the beyond farm impact of it, the financials beyond the farm.

It's good for our farm financials, but it's also good for our communities.

And that's what we are growing as well.

You know, our kids, our grandkids, the people in our communities.

If they can have healthier food in a more vibrant community with a main street that has businesses on it, that's good.

That's better for everybody if we can have that kind of thing and more dollars coming into our farm operations are a way to do that.

So while the financial impacts for a farm are huge, the financial impacts for a community are just as big.

It's harder to quantify those dollars, but they're there and that's rebuilding rural America.

- So well said, Landon.

Thank you.

- Thank you, Dan.

- That does it for now, I'm Dan Hoffman.

Thanks for joining us here on "Farm Connections."

(bright lively music) (bright lively music continues) (bright lively music fades) - [Announcer] Farm Connections Premier sponsor is Minnesota Corn.

- [Presenter] Programming supported by Minnesota Corn, working to identify and promote opportunities for corn growers, enhance quality of life, and help others understand the value and importance of corn production to America's economy.

(vibrant music) - [Announcer] Additional support from the following sponsors: - [Presenter] Programming supported by R&S Grain Systems, a family owned business serving its customers for 50 years with leading designs in the manufacturing of grain handling equipment and grain storage systems.

You can call in for a quote today.

- [Announcer] Programming supported by EDP Renewables North America, owner, operator of Prairie Star and Pioneer Prairie Wind Farms in Minnesota and Iowa.

EDPR wind farms and solar parks provide income to farmers and help power rural economies across the continent.

- [Presenter] Mower County Farm Bureau Association, a KSMQ broadcast sponsor, advocates for agriculture based on the policies and beliefs of its members.

It's dedicated to making the voices of its members stronger.

You can learn more about membership benefits at FBMN.org.

- [Announcer] Program supported by employee owned AgVantage Software Rochester, Minnesota, celebrating their 50th year designing and developing agribusiness software for grain elevators, feed manufacturers, producers, fertilizer and chemical dealers, co-ops, seed companies, and fuel distributors.

(bright music)