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Past Podcasts

Noah Newman:

Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Strip-Till Farmer Podcast. I'm your host, Noah Newman, associate editor. Thank you to our sponsor, the Pluribus Lite from Dawn Equipment. Well have a message from them later in the podcast. Today we are headed out to Tipton, California to catch up with West Coast Strip-Till pioneer Tom Barcellos. Let's jump right into the conversation. Here's Tom.

Tom Barcellos:

Good morning. My name is Tom Barcellos, the owner of Barcellos Farms and T-Bar Dairy, and partner in White Gold Dairy and Oak Valley Farms. Barcellos Farms is a diversified farming operation farming about 1800 acres of owned and leased property, mostly raising feed for our two dairies, and also with a little bit of pistachios and citrus. It's come in the last several years as a reason for diversifying. We milk 2,000 cows between the two dairies, and our milk goes to Land O'Lakes, which primarily ends up in butter at our local plant, and the balance ends up in powdered milk. We have about 45 employees in total between all the facilities. We've been doing conservation tillage since the year 2000, which seems like an eternity ago.

Noah Newman:

It's hard to believe that's 22 years. How did you first get into it? What were your motivations for adopting conservation tillage practices?

Tom Barcellos:

Well, it's a strange story, because we were right in the middle of beginning our double cropping behind our wheat forage, getting ready to plant corn for silage, and we were running nine tractors in all the different fields preparing, and one of our main tractors went down. There was no rental tractors available. The neighbors were all running theirs busy. A very good friend of mine who was in the seed business, and I had purchased corn seed from him for years, had mentioned that, well, there's this no-till planter they're talking about that was north of here. And I says, "Well, that sounds interesting. I'd be interested in looking at it." He said, "It's not doing anything. We can bring it down."

So, that no-till planter showed up, it was a 10-row John Deere MaxEmerge, brand new. It had only done about 80 acres, and we started in a field that we had irrigated, and since we hadn't been able to get to it was starting to dry up. We put this thing in the ground, made three rounds, and they said, "Eh, maybe this is not going to work. This ground is a little dry, it's a little tight." I looked at it and I says, "Keep going." We finished planting that 80 acres, and we started water right behind it. Actually, we had enough to germinate the seed, as it came about two inches to three inches out of the ground 10 days later. We started water, and at the end of that crop we were just amazed by it, but we ended up planting 320 acres that first year, and that first crop, that first 80 acres, yielded 27 ton of the acre, which was more than that field normally did because of the type of soil, our ability to get water across it timely. And it was a done deal. I was sold.

Noah Newman:

Wow, right away, year number one. What about your soils out here that make something like no-till beneficial for your operation?

Tom Barcellos:

Well, one thing that we have is every soil type you can imagine, and you don't have to go far to get this variation. But primarily we're sandy loam, that's what the bulk of our soils are. But we have these sandier streaks that come through it because we're in a valley, we have mountain ranges just to the east of us about 10 miles away, and there were slues and all kinds of different things. And over the years, the land has been leveled, laser leveled, and you can look at topographical maps of crops and you can see where those little slues snake through many, many fields.

We have a considerable amount of alkali soil, high pH. We need to adjust that down. That's what's been so beneficial with the dairies in this area, because we use its natural organic fertilizer. We spread this manure on these fields at agronomic rates, and we're deep ripping trying to get the soil broken up and getting the manure worked down into deeper depths, and we're raising very good crops and really improving the soil. But between every crop we were doing 8, 9, 12 passes of tillage of some sort, whether it was discing, floating, sometimes plowing, putting up levees, little borders and things. We just always had tractors running.

When I determined that this no-tillers was going to work that first year, we only ran one tractor ,and the second year I had bought a planter and I planted 3,000 acres-

Noah Newman:

Wow.

Tom Barcellos:

... between mine and my neighbors that all wanted to try it. Sadly, a couple of them failed, but it wasn't the planter or the operation's fault. It was the grower's fault for not being out in his field and irrigating and thinking that, "Hey, wow, this is easy." You still have to spend the time with it. They didn't irrigate in time and just had some challenges, but it has flourished since; everybody's got it figured out.

And the soil types, we basically strip-till everything now as far as... Not a hundred percent no-till, there's a little bit of that. We do wheat or oats no-till into our existing alfalfa when it's time to take that alfalfa crop out. When you do that, when that crop comes off, that soil is so mellow as opposed to trying to tear out a hayfield that's just tough. So, there's benefits all across the board in different fashions, in different ways, for every operation that we do.

Noah Newman:

You started no-tilling in 2000. Now, you mentioned you strip-till as well. When did you start strip-tilling, and what's your experience been like with strip-tilling?

Tom Barcellos:

Well, the strip-tilling, we actually started the third year, and that was because it basically gave us more of a cushion. When I was running really hard on no-till, we were basically running the planter 20 hours a day, and most of those hours were at night, because come 2:00 in the afternoon, the soil starts tightening up, the sun is baking down on it, and the no-till is just... the planter penetration was different. Then you shut down for four to six hours. After dark, you could go back and go again, and it's back to the way you'd like it. So, the strip till with that soil tillage in just that small strip just made it a lot easier.

Granted, we're running another tractor, but on certain soils we would get the corn out of the ground sooner and better. It wouldn't be so tight that you'd get better initial root development. So, there was a purpose. Over time, the soils improved because we weren't beating them to death anymore. So, the no-till still has its place. But again, everybody leaned more towards the strip-tilling because easier water penetration and more cushion, more flexibility on your planting that the timing wasn't quite so critical.

Noah Newman:

A lot of the strip-tillers we talked to in the corn belt area, a lot of them build their strips in the fall; some do it in the spring as well. What's your schedule like out here? Are you strip-tilling in the fall, spring, both? What's it like out here in the Fresno area?

Tom Barcellos:

Oh, it's way different.

Noah Newman:

Different ballgame out here, completely. Completely different.

Tom Barcellos:

California we're kind of animals of our own. But what happens, in November, December, we're planting our winter crop. Let's just say we're planting wheat, and we're going to forage it off. So, we get it planted, we get winter rains. If you have a dairy, you have a certain amount of lagoon water, dairy water, that you need to dispose of. You irrigate that crop, because we get on average about nine inches of rainfall. Most of it comes during the winter. By the end of February, 1st of March, the rain is over and it doesn't come again until late October, sometimes November. So, we have to irrigate.

We get to April or so; if you want to take the weed off in a boot stage for forage, you're taking it off first part of April. If you're going to let it go to a soft dough, you get a little more tonnage. Everybody has preferences. Sometimes you do it just for the sake of being able to get it chopped off and ensiled because you have a lot to do, so you take some off it. Boot, you get started strip-tilling right then, and then you pre-irrigate, and then you go plant in your strip till.

More recently, some people, because of tight water, were actually flashing water over the field and then strip-tilling and planting immediately. Sometimes now because of water situations being difficult, some people are flashing water over the field, then strip-tilling and planting immediately as soon as you can get back on the soil. That again, with plenty of moisture to get the seed up and going, you don't get as much water penetration, so you may have to irrigate sooner, but that's just a management deal that you have to do regardless. You have more time to watch your crop because you're not sitting there running all this equipment.

So, by April, May, all of the wheat has been chopped off, has already planted back to corn. Then off you go. In July and August the corn starts coming off, depending on when you got it planted, and some guys, they drag their feet because it's just too easy, and we're still finishing up chopping silage right now. Sorghum, actually; most of the corn is already done. But it was also strip-tilled as well, because it came in behind a later crop, because actually one field that we're going to be chopping soon was strip-tilled into an alfalfa field that needed to be rotated out.

Noah Newman:

What about your nutrient management plan?

Tom Barcellos:

Well, we put down a starter, and it's based on what the field requirements are. It's a basic NPK with micronutrients, some guano. Again, it's a full-spectrum starter fertilizer. If we have dairy lagoon water available to irrigate with, naturally we'll cut back considerably on our nitrogen, when we get the nites 60 days into the corn cycle, we're side-dressing UN32 or a blend. All depends what's really necessary. But the fact is, it takes it in so quick with our flat surface irrigation versus our little row irrigating, things just seem to work better. Of course, then you're looking at your pesticides. We have less pesticide pressure because the plant gets such a quick jump start, and earlier in the season. Fertilizer program is basically the same as anyone else, but in California we don't put on winter fertilizer and plant in the spring; we put it on at planting, and then we'll do a side dress as needed.

Noah Newman:

Then how do you determine how much is needed? Do you do soil sampling?

Tom Barcellos:

Yeah, everything is soil sampled, or you'll do a leaf analysis, petiole, different things, depending on what crop you're dealing with. But we only put on what we need when we need it anymore. Like everybody else, it's just too expensive not to manage that program as close as you can.

Noah Newman:

Strip-till and no-till in this area, you were one of the first ones to do it if not the first, correct?

Tom Barcellos:

Yes.

Noah Newman:

What are the trends you've seen over the years? Are more people doing it now, or when you first started doing it, were people like, "What in the world is he doing?"

Tom Barcellos:

Yeah. Well, the first year that I did it, everybody thought I was nuts, but I'm used to that. It's nothing new. But we had so many people coming by looking at it that first year, and like I said, I did 320 acres that first year. I was sold on it after we did the first three rounds, says, "Park all the other tractors. This is what we're going to finish out with," and our yields were as good or comparable to what our conventional was with one pass versus nine, getting it worked up and planted. Plus, I think a big difference is the fact that we had it in two to three weeks earlier. We took the wheat crop off, and here we are, we're planting corn, as opposed to working soil for two and a half, three weeks, pre-irrigating it and getting back in there. I think that had a lot to do with it as well.

The second year, I bought my own planter, and doing 3,000 acres, everybody took for granted that it was that easy. That's why there was a couple of failures by different people. I tried to coach as much as I could, but I couldn't get around to everything. So, some guys started knocking it, they quit doing it. But about three or four years later they're back doing it, and doing it right, because they saw the successes their neighbors were having on those different soil types and everything.

Acre-wise, I know that Jeff Mitchell has done some calculating on how many acres are under conservation strip-till, and it's a lot. It's a lot. All of my neighbors do it to some degree, not on a hundred percent of their ground, but on some. So, I say it's been very, very successful.

Noah Newman:

Let's burn a time out, thank our sponsor the Pluribus Lite from Dawn Equipment. Dawn is bringing today's innovative farmers a new strip-till product from the regenerative ag-focused underground agriculture brand. The Pluribus Lite is priced like a strip freshener, but it offers the features and performance to be used in the fall or spring as a primary strip-tiller or strip freshener. Check out the Pluribus Lite at dawnequipment.com. Now, back to the conversation.

Let's talk about equipment. What are you using no-till planter-wise, strip- till wise? Just give us the rundown of your arsenal of equipment.

Tom Barcellos:

You pulled in, and I think you probably figured out that I'm a John Deere guy.

Noah Newman:

I saw that. I got that vibe.

Tom Barcellos:

A big reason for that is because my John Deere dealer is only four and a half miles down the road, but they've had the good equipment. I've been farming for 47 years, and my first planter was a John Deere planter, and they've always had excellent units. So, my no-till planter was a John Deere. We had the cleaners on the front, the wavy coulter for penetrating the soil, and it was already the MaxEmerge, and I've got 10-row and eight-row configurations. We have the mounted fertilizer coulter on as well. So, we do everything in one pass, and it really works well.

Our strip-till bars. I have a Orthman 1tRIPr that I've used since the third year, and I can't even begin to tell you how many acres it's got on it. And we also have a Bigham Brothers strip-till bar, and we find that different. They're configured a little differently, but we actually find that one works better in certain soils than others, and that's because of their wavy coulters, because of their little chisel point and the things that make it happen. So, we have places that we use one and other places we use the other. That's it in a nutshell.

Our side dressing rigs are the John Deere liquid fertilizer coulters, the same as we use on our no-till planter. The reason for that is because you only carry one set of spares; it just makes it simple.

Noah Newman:

You're faced with a lot of regulations out here in California when it comes to water specifically. What kind of challenges does that present to you, and how have you had to be resilient over the years to be successful?

Tom Barcellos:

Well, up until '92 we had lots and lots and lots of water, and then the federal government passed a law, the Central Valley Project Improvement Act, which diverted some of our surface water to environmental uses going out towards the delta and San Francisco Bay, and ultimately ending up in the ocean. The surface water is what actually made this area, because we only get nine inches of rainfall, and we get it in the wintertime. So, it's completely different than the Midwest, where you have rain mostly at optimal times, and sometimes not. But we're not really working hard to try to keep residue on top to hold moisture because we had surface water. As the surface water dwindled down depending on what year type we had; our surface water comes from snowfall in our mountains directly here to the east. So, we were pretty well flush with water, like I said, until '92. Some of it then started getting diverted back down certain rivers and out, so we had to get a little more creative, would become more water-efficient.

But in recent years, based on a couple of droughts, 2014, 2017 and recently now, we haven't had any surface water during our irrigation times, and actually about 15% of our ground went unplanned this summer because we just didn't have water available. The state has implemented three years ago a proposition passed by the people called the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, so now we're limited on what we can pump out of the ground, and the costs are starting to get pretty high. It's really taking shape this year, because the programs that we have to meet; short acronym SGMA, Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, limits the amount of groundwater we can pump, and it comes at a severe cost if you go over.

You do have some flexibility, but at the end of the day there's an adjoining district that has a plan that if it receives no surface water and you wanted to farm your typical crop that takes, say, three acre-feet of water to produce, it's going to cost you $800 an acre in water costs.

Noah Newman:

Wow.

Tom Barcellos:

And that's what you're paying for the water. That doesn't include your utilities for pumping, getting that water moved around, labor or anything else. That's just $800 an acre, and I know guys in the Midwest are going to say, "What?"

Noah Newman:

Yeah, definitely.

Tom Barcellos:

... when they looking for the rainfall. But it's going to create some real challenges, it's going to create ground that's not farmed. Thankfully, I'm in an irrigation district with surface water, but I don't have to drive very far to get to some neighbors that are not part of an irrigation district and have no surface water. Their only source is pumping, and there are places that are being sold for that reason.

Noah Newman:

Have you noticed a lot of dairy operations having to relocate out of state?

Tom Barcellos:

There's quite a few that have moved out of California. California is not a very agricultural-friendly place to do business, because we've got regulation after regulation after regulation, and specifically our feed costs have gone up considerably in the last couple years. We have guys that have just said, "I can sell my dairy operation and open land to an investor group that wants to plant almonds or pistachios for a tremendous amount of money, and I can go out of state and buy for half," not unlike the exodus out of Southern California in the early '80s when the dairy business in the Chino basin was selling land by the square foot and buying it up in this area farther north by the square mile. Just, economies change and opportunities present themselves.

I have a friend that dairies in Nebraska that used to be here. I have one that was just west of Fresno, is now in Tennessee. Many have gone to Texas, many have gone to Idaho, several in Utah. They just decided, "I can get this for what I have here, and I have no ties." Myself, born and raised here. Most of these guys were transplanted from someplace before they came here, and it's no big deal to transplant again.

So, there's a lot of history here, and like I said, all of my family is here. My kids, I had three girls, and one of them is partners with us in one of the dairies, and my son-in-law is farm manager and does a tremendous job. I have grandkids who are already running equipment, bailing hay, running GPS tractors, doing stuff. My other two daughters are within miles of here. We get together every Sunday.

Noah Newman:

It makes it hard to leave when you have all the family here.

Tom Barcellos:

You can't just pick up and run. Not for me.

Noah Newman:

Well, the conservation tillage practices, do those help you be resilient and handle some of these challenges that you might face?

Tom Barcellos:

Huge; it's been huge. Just the cost of fuel in California, by being able to run two tractors, one on a strip-till bar and one on a planter. We're paying $7.19 for diesel fuel today. Not long ago it was $4.00. We run low beds for hire too, we move our equipment, plus we haul for neighbors. We haul commodities to different dairies locally, and we have to put a fuel surcharge on. Otherwise you're going backwards.

Labor has just gotten difficult. There's too many opportunities for people to stay home. They keep extending and increasing unemployment benefits. Somebody can go work a job for a week and manage not to do a good job and get laid off saying, "I'm sorry, but it's just not going to work out," and all of a sudden now they'll go file for unemployment again, and that's their plan. There's a lot of people that just don't want to work. So, it's challenging. There's too many handouts in California.

Noah Newman:

It sounds like you're dealing with a whole different set of challenges than a lot of the farmers we talked to back in the corn belt area.

Tom Barcellos:

One of things that has some bearings too is that we need labor. I have a friend in the Midwest that actually works for a John Deere dealership, and he farms on the side, and a lot of acreage. But they'll go in with a eight-wheel-drive big John Deere tractor and a 60-foot disc or harrow or something, and boom, he knocks out section after section, and puts somebody on it at night, somebody on it during the day, and they basically farm part-time, because he'll work two weeks and have the crop in, and then he goes back to the dealership. Here it seems like we're working year-round, and we do multiple crops. In California, there's over 400 agricultural crops raised, and if you go to Kansas, what is there? Four?

Noah Newman:

Yeah, that's all that I can think of.

Tom Barcellos:

So, interesting that I had bought a spray rig out of Illinois, and the farmer that I bought it from had three major pieces, said he traded one each year: a sprayer, a combine, and a tractor. Each year he'd trade one of those off in a cycle, and he'd get his crop planted. He's get his wheat, his soybeans or his corn, and that was his three crops, and he had a rotation of some sort with that. So, it's a different world, but I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Noah Newman:

It seems like busy season never ends out here, right? Back in the corn belt in the Midwest, you have the winner, but here it seems like it never stops.

Tom Barcellos:

Yeah, and we have the weather that makes us do that. People freak out when I tell them that we'll get eight cuttings of alfalfa every year, and the first one may be green, chopped off and put in a bag for feed, but every 28 to 30 days after that we're cutting and baling hay. You can't grow that crop that fast in most places. You just go over the mountain range here to Nevada, and they all get three. We have a lot of things that are great, and we have a lot of things that causes stress, like being too busy all the time.

Noah Newman:

It was interesting that you said you harvested pistachios. Tell us a little bit more about that, because that's unique. We don't really hear about that a lot.

Tom Barcellos:

I had a pistachio harvesting business for about 12 years with a friend of mine. He finally got old and retired. I told him I'm not that old yet. We had some acreage, plus we did a lot of outside harvesting, and we were actually doing prunes; primarily started out harvesting prunes. We have the shaker that goes up to the tree and wraps around it and shakes the fruit off, captures it and elevates it into a four-by-four bin, and then you unwrap and go to the next tree. When the bin is full, it kicks it off the back and starts loading another one. Then we have bin carriers that deliver empty bins to the harvester, and then picks up the full ones, and then the full ones get loaded on a trailer. In the pistachios, they get dumped into a set of grain hoppers, but on the prunes, the bins themselves would go to the dryer and get unloaded and dumped there, and then we'd bring empty ones back.

But that was a multi-man operation too. We were running four shakers and three bin carriers. The prunes we started, were in August, and as soon as we finish the prunes, we reconfigure them a little bit, change the pads for different-sized tree trunks, and then go do the pistachios in late September, and be done mid-October.

Noah Newman:

Well, anything else you'd like to add about your operation that you think people should know, or lessons learned about strip-till, no-till over the years?

Tom Barcellos:

Well, one thing that I've learned, and I learned this early on in life even before I started my own business, is that every year is different, and I think that's what keeps us engaged and makes it interesting. We look at different ways to make things work. We've got so many options of what we can do with the equipment that we have available and the technology, because I'll have to tell you, what really made the strip-till work here in California when it came was because we were able to plant Round-Up ready corn, and because we weren't doing any cultivation. Everything that we did prior to that was in furrows: plant the corn on the beds, and then we'd furrow up for wheat control, and we didn't have that option of chemical cultivation. We ended up using less harsh chemicals for weed control. Our timing was much better, because with the irrigating methods we were able to get across fields faster with water, so we could get back on them quicker and really make our timing work. The one constant is that things always change.

Noah Newman:

All right, that's going to do it for this week's edition of the Strip-Till Farmer Podcast. Thanks once again to our sponsor, the Pluribus Lite from Dawn Equipment. Head to dawnequipment.com to learn more. Thanks to Tom Barcellos for taking the time to chat with us. Thank you, of course as always, for tuning in, and remember, until next time, for all things strip-till, head to striptillfarmer.com. My name is Noah Newman. Have a great day.