Macauley Kincaid - "Doing What Comes Naturally"
okay hey i want to say something before i start you all have been great very engaged in conversation and this has been a fantastic
group of people i mean late night talks and hearing these guys talk about what they're doing i mean it's this is a really engaged
group so this is a picture of my family uh before we add another one to our herd so we got three now that's my son jax and my daughter emma and my wife kayla uh you
know this is really my context of why i want to farm you know i come from a big farm family but i kind of knew that there wasn't really going to be a complete place for me
there but i wanted to farm so i pursued my dream and i want to leave something for my son and my
or my girls if they'd like to farm so here's my background i'm in jasper which is 30 miles north of joplin so like colton said about 98 miles from here uh i farmed 650 acres and i've got 80 cow-calf pairs and
i'm happy to say that i own them now uh i custom graze another 150 cow calf pairs that brings that's about a third of my income a year and i graze some cattle on perennial
pastures but most on cover crops i've got some laying hens i always like to make the joke that my laying hands are a non-profit organization i don't make a lot of money on that but i enjoy it and then i also peddle
some cover crops inside so how i got started the farm i have now i inherited and it was passed down from my great grandpa dean right there and
my dad there in the middle passed away when i was 19 and i was able to inherit that first 60 acres so i started off with 60 i'm at 650 now and i have an opportunity to run
another 350 in this next coming year so my farm i really like keith was talking about and darren i really try to focus
on principles i don't focus on practices or products what i mean by that is i don't really get too caught up in interceding and certain things like that in relay
cropping i know that that's trendy and a lot of guys like that stuff but let's not get away from what's really important which is the
principles when we focus on soil the products that doesn't make soil the principles do plan the cover crop yes it's a product but that has to be part of the
principle system so i'm not gonna go over the principles very much but they are the most important part and so you're gonna see them all here and all of those right there are what we really need to focus on our apartments we want to be profitable i'm
going to show my farm economics and some of the things i've done i've had i've had better yields
on some farms i've had more profitable acres of some of some acres but i just really want to show what we can do so i started a
no-tilling in 2012. uh that's my boy jax again um i started with soybeans that's the simplest thing to know till no telling
soybeans is a no-brainer it just works it doesn't fail it just works the soybeans in that picture made 54 bushel and i'm okay with
my son standing out in my fields i don't have any post application sprays on my farms so my kids can go out there in my fields or anyone else and i feel completely comfortable with where they're at my first
cover crop was in 2013 it was a prevent plant situation uh the previous year i went to an organic conference they were talking about cover crops and i got inspired so
happy that we had a really wet summer at the time i was raising double crop beans i planted a cover crop and it got pretty big i mean those radishes were pretty crazy i strip tilt some corn in there and
this is kind of what we got so 2016 the biggest thing in my area is okay you can no till or soybeans but you can't no-till corn so i no-tilled corn
this wasn't into a cover but this was from the previous year wheat and double crop beans once again i was still in that wheat
double crop being corn rotation if you call a rotation no cover across between there they said it couldn't be done and maybe
to an extent they were right everyone else was corn around me made 120 and mine barely pushed over 90.
and i was doing everything by the books that the university was telling me to do i was putting on all the action i need to put on
multiple applications of fungicides insecticides me you know neo-mix on my
corn doing the whole nine yards and it wasn't making any money i lost my rented farm so i was having to do a lot of work on
the sides to make my farm bed i found this in a bathroom one time so i take a picture i have no idea who jillian michaels is but
when i failed you know i read this it's not about perfect it's about effort and that part first part there is really key because none of us are going to
be perfect by any means but we just have to keep trying to do our best and what's so great about soil is god gives us the
foundation to look at soil look at the native prairies you know the timber we've all talked about that and i'm sure we've all heard that that's what we need to focus on
try to have biomimicry mimic nature so i'm kind of like this i was kind of like this cow i wasn't making very much money so i was stuck and i had to change i happened to
meet these guys right here rain uh ray archlead gabe brown they changed my life 100 i could not have done this without these guys but i'm not smart enough gabe the first time i've heard him on a youtube video i
thought this guy doesn't know crap about farming turn that off two or three months later i was still researching about how to get no-till to pay because i couldn't afford tillage equipment of course and ray was talking
and he mentioned gabe brown again and i said that name sounds familiar so i googled gabe brown and the second time i heard him talk it all just clicked with me so i was 100
committed by fall 2016 finances were tight and i started changing dramatic changes on my farm if i wanted to farm double crop soybeans gone we don't need greedy
soybeans greedy beans every acre was covered and i've been that way since 2016. if there's not a cash crop growing there's a
cover crop growing i stress my rotation i no longer have this two year rotation of wheat double crop beans corn there's other crops there's a lot of crops out there i adjusted
planting dates i started planting soybeans earlier in april and i started planting my corn later in may to maximize nitrogen production from the because when you're when your legumes bloom they've
essentially hit peak nodulation i changed my maturities on the corns i went with shorter corn maturities i went with longer soybean maturities planted earlier i created
a farm budget this was key my wife was not very happy with where we were financially and the bank wasn't either um so i had to change i had to make a farm budget start
realizing what i was actually inputting on my farm and start understanding what i was losing on my farm diversified my cash crops and i started building
fence on all the land i own now at 650 acres i own everything but around 100 acres well i'm partners with the bank uh so we started building fence on every on every farm but
one i have fence on now to graze livestock and this it's a cheap fence system two high tensile wire fiberglass posts it's not in a fancy system you know one i know one
water source is isn't ideal but that's what i've got and i became intentional i started thinking about things
differently i wasn't just gonna go with the normal i started i started i became intentional that's very important and then i went to daily news with cattle and that has been the biggest bottom line for my my
livestock production you know i truly feel like a fifth grade a fifth grader can tell me more about how ecosystem works than most farmers we as farmers
think that we need to use you know this nema stripe to take care of the nematode but we're causing all these problems after that when we make a decision on our farm it
impacts everything you know i'm going to steal one from dr allen williams everything we do has compounding and cascading
effects regenerative practices save my farm and this is how i make them work every acre has been planted
green since 2018 where i'm at southwest missouri we get a crap ton of rain in the spring we're wet so my covers i let them take up moisture they're
pulling moisture in the soil so i can plant my cash crops this is what it looks like after i plant uh this is ideal for me this one i want
to plant into and for the most part i don't really have anything special on my planter now i'm totally with keith and some of them
on on some of the attachments and stuff but i have a very basic planter and drill my drill's a 9411 drill i've got a affordable
tractor that i can run this right here i just want to show you something here this is some research that's been done about the
cost of tillage and then no-tilling i'm going to call baloney on the top part there because the no-tilling actually costs less per acre
because i can look at my fuel consumption and if i do custom planting or help another farmer plant their crops i can see their fuel consumption on conventional ground
compare the no-till ground and that 20 that 1990 that 19.90 an acre on a tillage pass is so true because just think about it you have another tractor you have a dish you have a digger you have a rolling basket you have a chisel you have all this equipment right all this steel and you're always sending that
money back aside to buy the next piece so are you really putting that money back in your pocket guys tell me oh i have my turbo till paid for and i always ask them are you
gonna buy another one and the answer is when this one's worn out so you're putting that money back aside so that has to go in your cost per acre as well as your insurance on that taxes your fuel consumption
machinery wear and tear it gets expensive folks really expensive that's my fault tillage annual rye grass everyone thinks you need brassicas though to break compaction you
want your grasses first those grasses can find those micropores and expand them out if you have a big tuber like that that's a good indication that you probably hit some
compaction so i just wanted to show that most people think that you want to alleviate the faction brassicas are
the complete way to go no you need the grasses in there this was a storm we got in 2018 the picture of these fields are right
across the road from each other if anybody wants to come tour my farm i'll show you where these are at top right picture if you
want to raise catfish that's a good place to do it that chisel ground if you want to infiltrate some water that's how we do that okay that that right there is big that was a
warm season cover crop mix that i grazed went back to a cool season mix to go back to cattle now you might be wondering how i make that financial effect i'm going to talk
about that a little bit later okay worms this is the first time ray come to my farm and he's like mack you got so many worms and
you know how ray is we both have adhd i'm pretty sure so conversations between me and ray they get pretty wild worm castings
this is analysis on some worm castings if you notice what's the largest piece in that carbon okay we're going to come back to that too there's quite a bit of stuff that revolves around carbon also look at the
percentage of nitrogen hot ash phosphorus calcium here's a five year study done by joe lauer i probably mistake his name probably said his name wrong but this is showing the importance of diversity remember i said i
stretched my rotation i've got a lot of cover crops growing right okay so if you look at the bottom there okay just from a corn soybean just by adding wheat to reduction this is
without cover crops these would be higher in my opinion with cover crops but this is without cover crops by stretching the rotation from corn to soybeans to corn
soybeans wheat look at the increase and this is a 10 year study this isn't just a one year study so we look as diversity increases and our rotation gets better look at wheat yields over there the wheats the green on on your guys right uh i mean wheat on wheat 30
bushel corn soybean wheat the wheat falling after the legume okay so here's some of my diversity on my farm i probably missed a few things but i typed this up last night as quick as i could i raised a lot of
different cash crops like heath was saying cool season and warm season crops the cover crop species there you know just try
out what works on your farm i'm not too far away from you all so probably a lot of stuff i use can work on your farms and nobody's really talked about this but understand your resource what you're trying to accomplish with a cover crop i'll say that so you know where that's nitrogen fixation erosion
control really really try to understand what you're trying to do with the cover crop this is another part about becoming intentional right grazing i like to say this the key to no-
till's cover crops and the key to cover crops is cattle because if you want to turn those covers into cash that's the way to do it here's some uh this is how we can save on mp and k i've reduced my mpk by about 80 of my
farm okay doug and i were talking about yesterday about some phosphorus and stuff the more we learn
about these things we're inputting on our farms it's pretty scary stuff guys uh and we can we can do this and i'm going to show you how i do this how
how i've reduced these are just a few ways how cover crops the main key component is here is a living root
okay that's the key component you know we talked about the root x dates coming out right that's a very key component the living room and then
also maximize biomass let the cover crops grow if your planting and cover crops are this tall it's going to take 10 years to gain 1
organic matter in our environment if you're planting cover crops this tall you just set it up five times for this fast okay and also think about the amount of nutrients and that biomass is nutrients and as that's decaying
down that's going to be returned back to your gas crop as well um i don't believe anybody's talked about carbonate ratios i'm going to plug this
in real fast very important i understand going to corn you want a low carbohydrate ratio because you're wanting that nitrogen to be returned back
to corn quickly so i like to be on my farm i want to be around a 40 to 1 carbonation ratio when i'm planting but for some of you guys getting started out let's keep that lower even that because
you want those nutrients to be returned back a high carbon type cover crop would be like cereal rye it's about 80 to one at full stage and then a low carbonation ratio cover crop would
be hairy veg so hair investigates a lot faster than fully mature cereal right nature is powerful this is off my grandfather's farm
uh this has been paid since he believes by the civil war but my family's owned since the 30s it's never had any synthetic fertilizer applied on it it's had lime applied on a few times and every single year it produces the
same timers now do the math how many how many years were they pulling nutrients off that and it's still producing and think about prairie species very fungal dominant species right
okay so let's start using fungal dominant species and our cover crop as well oats barley legumes things like that they can break down rocks so here's the hand test
results off that i want i pulled the hanging sensors like i want to see what's in this in this prairie soil it got a full health score of 25. on my farm i'm an eight right now so that's pretty
damn good uh percent back organic matter is 3.9 percent our row crop ground in our area is easily one point eight two percent that's that's pretty common uh there's the
nutrient value this is the nutrient so i took i cut some prairie hay i went sent off a nutrient sample of that that's what's in the prairie itself the tissues of the prairie and then that right there shows what it's
deficient in it's high in calcium okay think about that too we've got a lot of limestone rocks i say that's the reason why but
everything else in it it's deficient according to all the tests we're deficient in everything but now how is it producing the same biomass every single year okay so grandpa bought this in 1934 i cannot or my great-grandfather i'm sorry in 1934 and my
grandfather mack inherited this he believes it was hate since the civil war calling bundles we're not 100 sure but we do know it's been hay since 1934. so really how much fertilizer do we need now that you kind of see that start thinking about your row crop ground because hay is a high removal
situation and that's happening every single year that's removing a lot of nutrients so here's a good buddy of mine uh dr buzz clue he did a study uh 420 pounds of kto applied in a three years this is a three year study not super long but it gives you the idea look at
the zero application rates here wow the corn in 2016 yielded higher that's weird i'm pretty sure every almost every agronomist will tell
you that can't happen but why is that on these farms here buzz was mimicking nature using cover crops between his cash crops
constantly he wasn't even crazy means so we can do better things with grazing in the average cow path there's point two four pounds of nitrogen point one eight uh
pounds of p and point two four uh pounds of uh so taking all this in i just wanted to just try it okay so this is uh this is what i call the weedy beans it was not a prescription cover crop but i had a bunch of weeds that grow
on this farm johnson grass and pig weeds this tall that i planted into okay uh so there's no such thing as weeds i took tissue samples on the weeds out there this is eye-opening
look at pigweeds okay 35.8 parts per million boron all of these quote unquote weeds are bringing something to your system and
guess what guys cows will eat every one of those i've seen them so you can just see the difference in the plants your soil is trying to cure itself these annual weeds are trying to tell you what you need on your farm and
what's wrong with your farm now i know we all want to go out there and spray every bit of johnson grass we can and spray every pig when we can but if you've just got i'm not saying leave weeds out there i'm just saying really think about not only the
economics but the ecological effects of going out there and spraying let's say extend right on all these pigweeds you have if they're not at an economically devastating threshold then why are we spraying just really
evaluate that who cares if your neighbor thinks that oh man he's not taking herself he's got like eight weeds out there who cares so here's some of my economics i hope your alls are better than mine uh i put i put
everything i could think of on these so i've got my land payment 140 an acre property tax i put in miscellaneous expenses because that goes into my any soil test that goes into if i grab a tube of grease for a piece of
equipment if i just i just put that in there just as safe security if i forget something because i obviously forget stuff crop
insurance to cover crop seed on that farm with zero dollars for those weeds i was telling you about uh zero and pink added by any mpnk on there and since i've owned that farm i've now applied no ambi on there
since i've had it uh 22 my knowledge emo soybeans i raise all non-gmo soybeans uh non-gmo corn i don't need them on my operation i don't have any neonics on my
corn and soybeans i i've eliminated that for my my program you can find those non-gmo numbers out there okay if you guys could take just one thing off of this look up the indices foundation about neonics on corn and i hope that changes some hearts and some mines i planted green i put that at
twenty dollars an acre how i put those prices in is i take custom grazing rates or custom application rates in my area and i put that into my bottom line because even
though my tractor and my drill are paid off i just want to make sure i'm covering all the bases herbicide past 25 that's going to be eliminated because i have a roller crimper on some of this stuff uh combining hauling
35 and i only sold those soybeans non-gmo soybeans at the time for 11 which was which is a pretty decent price the time net income is 208 dollars i've raised higher yielding beans i've raised 62 bushel beans i've raised more profitable beans but what i want to
show you with this is we can raise soybeans and corn with not as much fertility your fertility can come in different ways your cover crop residue breaking down like i
talked about let biomass get biomass out there and also we're giving the wildlife that you want i had a buddy send me this on this deer camera that's some scary ride
underneath them um i've got some pretty darn good deer on my farms so you know this right here this is a daniel he on something i call my mom's farm that's the one i heard from my dad he shot some big
gear on that farm and he says he hunts a lot of places as mac there's not very many deer like this around our county uh also had a buddy this year shoot two does on me he
said those are the fattest does i've ever seen so those are pretty big compliments from these hunter guys okay switching gears a
little bit here uh this is what i utilize on my farm adaptive multi-padded grazing to me it's the best description of how to graze in nature's image okay what i mean by that is with adaptive multi-pack grazing we're not
getting set in set stock density i'm moving the cattle daily i don't keep the cattle in the same rotation every single like you know they're not going to be here in 30 days and
40 years in 40 days or whatever i'm looking at my forages and i'm adjusting to that i'm being very adaptive nature is not stagnant nature is constantly
changing let's not try to get let's try to get out of a rotation and guys god gave cows four legs not standing hey bug they're out there to graze okay i've got a few different ways you
can do that there's uh grazing some stocks um i don't have this part memorized but in 150 50 bushel corn there's 100 pounds of
nitrogen 37 pounds of phosphorus and 145 pounds of potash in just the residue and moisture phosphorus is in the corn cob
everyone wants to talk about removals a lot of that's being cycled back okay we're not removing as much as we actually think we are um so yeah
i mean a lot of different ways this is uh this is some stockpiled fescue you know pasture not as much as i'd like to see but that's that's january we're getting all there by then uh over in the top right hand corner that's a
million pound stock density uh these right here are my south pole cows i i like south poles on right now i feel like south poles are probably the best best genetic animal um and then you know what's that grazing
stocks so with these high stock density grazings these cows will start eating things that we thought they would never eat they act different nature sometimes can be a tad
bit competitive so i took away a mineral for my cows for six months and i noticed when i put them in these high stock density grazing that the consumption of weeds was going up they would go out there and they would
mow a thistle down okay this will do a good job of bringing iodine up from the soil i don't know if they were after iodine in the thistle i'm not sure dandelions bring calcium up pretty well but they were they were
attacking those weeds and i would stand for me to the screen here and the cow would be chomping down with thistle over this other picture here uh you can see how i move my cows just like doug was talking about we do with poly wires it's super simple to unroll folly water it takes me about 15 to 20
minutes i don't have huge long quarter mile stretches though i've got a perimeter uh high tensile wire going on the center of my farm so that way i can branch off both sides of the water tanks underneath that that makes
sense and then also there's my fly control uh see the dragonflies i don't use any fly control mineral
i don't use any porons and i never have i was kind of ignorant when i come into the cattle thing and not supposed to do all this
stuff i've never vaccinated for a black leg i've never done that stuff and i really haven't had any issues knock on wood uh do we really need to feed hay for six months i know guys in my area that are big
established farmers and they start feeding october and don't get done until march is that making any money i mean seriously i don't own any hay equipment either i buy my hay and import those nutrients onto my farm is that where you guys want your meat to come from your beef to come from
yummy that looks delicious so that's the standard practice in southwest missouri how to feed hay you get that area next to a creek and you
just feed a bunch of hay there this is the way i feed hay now this year i fed seven bales of hay to 80 cows that i own and i did that by grazing my covers and the only reason i
even fed those seven bales was because of the minus 22 we had with the ice i wouldn't offend those seven it wasn't because of that but if i gotta feed hay i'm gonna think
smarter not harder let's pre-determine where we're gonna put our hay out and let's bail greens so here's some economics of my bail grazing i pay a neighbor i paid a
neighbor a dollar a bail to come set up my 80 bills this is last year i wouldn't have fed this much hey last year i would have got stuck with some custom grazing animals 30 days longer than i wanted to but anyways average cost of 35 a bell i paid him a dollar bail to come set them out because i don't
have a loader on my tractor and so he made 20 dollars an hour because that's about how long it took him he made 80 i fed those 80 bills the total cost is 200 30 cows cattle
winter feed caught cost of 36 ahead how i do that super simple i got one poly wire set up i take the poly wire over pop it over set it over the next bail my cows get the next veil it's really quick and easy simple um and like i
said it will be less than the future i truly feel like in our environment here in the southern environment we can go 365 days without feeding any hay so i like to turn covers into cash uh the best way to do that is through the cow uh here's 2019 grazing uh some
warm season covers now this year i didn't have enough stock density that year i didn't have enough stock density or i didn't have a high enough stocking rate to keep up with forage you got out of hand you don't want to gray stuff you try to put on pounds that that's mature you want great stuff that's
about like this you're trying to put on pounds but uh i took that picture because it's like a jungle out there i don't know how tall it was but the egyptian wheat and the sorghums they were pretty well dominant i gotta say uh i understand what your next
cash crop is too what you're going to because it's very important i've got legumes in there that you can't see and that that field there went to corn um so you know the sun hit it's not bloomed out that time but there is some cowpeas and different things like that in there to balance the c to n ratio so here's some pretty basic economics of how i you know how i do custom grazing doug
peterson gave me the best advice always have a contract because i got stuck with cows for 30 days longer than i wanted to and i had to feed a lot of hay to my own cows did not make money on that deal i charge a
dollar per animal per day i like to graze cows with newborn calves on them because that 60 pound 70 pound calf is still worth a dollar just like that cow so it's essentially two dollars a cow and i always charge two
dollars of bulls steers and steers and heifers i'm around 1.40 and we weigh these animals in at my local co-op on the scales and then we weigh them out so if you want to sell this to somebody sell these registered guys
pounds because they're all about pounds you know some of these registered breeders are like the angus and stuff like that they're about pounds so sell them pounds don't sell them your forage
and show them that with data weigh them in graze them weigh them off that's how i do it and then there's just uh so i put a 74 head for 93 days on 59 acres 682 are six thousand eight hundred eighty two dollars which is about 116 dollars uh gross so i put that's
another hundred dollars an acre i don't have sixteen dollars an acre in expensive i just wanna show you that you can add another hundred dollars an acre to your even corn soybean crop or rotation just by grazing livestock pretty good money uh highly productive soils one of those
yesterday tend to have a fungal bacteria ratio of one to one when i first got cattle my my real crop plan was the first time i'd seen mushrooms i'd never seen mushrooms and they were popping up like everywhere
there's something that happens in the rumen and i've actually never took a cow pat sample to see what the fungal bacteria ratio is but i say it's pretty darn good okay so
austin campbell he's from missouri he did the study here and i want to show you why no tilling isn't good enough why we need cover crops look at the percent increase in moisture in the tissue samples compared
from no-till to cover crops 41 increase in the moisture 41 increase that's pretty huge okay that was those are corn tissue samples and soybean tissue samples just by having the
crop cover crop underneath there you have 44 more water that's huge i think are y'all in about 36 rainfall environment here in iowa i'm in about a 44 42 44. um so but we still get kind of dry you know
the rain comes in the spring and fall and we get a little bit dry this summer but let's capture let's capture that moisture let's keep that moisture so here's 20 20 that's where we're at now i told you guys i failed no-till corn this year i'm i finally got it to work
where i felt like okay i'm doing better so we had over 40 inches of rain until june 3rd this year then it cut off till october 20th nada zero from june 3rd to october to october 20. that corn on your left had over 20 inches of rain on it the corn on the right and i'm not
going to tell you whose is whose but the corn on the right it had three inches on it after it was planted okay is there a visible difference these farms here are less than a
third of a mile away same soil type different growing conditions here's the economics on this i'm not going to go over everything there but if you see anything i missed let me know i do have
a litter cost in there litter in my opinion is just as bad as effect fertilizer if we use it too much i've seen some i've seen some soil samples of 450 parts per million phosphorus now your fungal hyphies and stuff can't function as well as they they need to with
that much fosters in your soil it's not a race guys we're not trying to have this big number on p and k that's a bad thing we need balance uh 399 total cost production once again i raise non-gmo corn that's why my c cost is probably cheaper than most 39 dollars an acre um i'm not planting super high populations i i'm not big in the
interceding thing guys to be honest with you that's that's a practice i think there's a great place for that north the reason i don't believe in it is because if you can tell me that that
three-inch tall annual rye grass is capturing as much sunlight as another corn plant right next to it i would highly disagree with you um net income was 401 dollars an acre this
year i had a farm net almost close to i had a farm net over a thousand dollars an acre the corn made 160 bushels to the acre and
everyone else in my area was picking 60 and 80 bushel corn so that was a difference almost twice as good i'm not gonna say i can do this every year but that thatch that res that two inch residue underneath there is
how i make that work that's my soil my right hand that's the soil on the left those holes are five feet apart is there a difference a little bit visual difference why is that soil darker carbon remember look think about the worm casting 26 carbon think about
those tissue samples anywhere from 35 to 45 carbon let me ask you a question this is how we treat our row crop fields and let's put the perspective of our body if i give you a vitamin pill and it has every essential nutrient you need can you live off that one little pill no one's gonna answer it okay
answer's no you can't live off that little pill why is that has every nutrient we need we're putting every nutrient we need in our body we're missing the main one folks carbon carbon is the largest percentage okay organic matter we all talk about organic
matter i hope this is something you all have heard organic matter is approximately 50 to 58 carbon okay plants release carbon in the soil we'll keep a living plant there as long as we can there's my phone number there's my name if you don't spell it add me on
facebook if you want to follow me come to my farm i have an open door policy on my farm i'd love to show you my farm thank you
yagaltime
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