By Twilight Greenaway for Civil Eats.
Broadcast version by Mark Moran for Iowa News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Last August, Zack Smith welcomed a group of farmers, agricultural researchers, and investors to his mid-sized farm just south of the Iowa-Minnesota border for a field day. It was warm out, shorts weather, and around 35 people sat on straw bales listening as the young, fifth-generation farmer—who has gained a devoted audience through Twitter and YouTube and welcomes curious visitors to his farm every year—spoke about a critical turning point in his thinking.

The shift took place nearly three years ago as Smith—who was working off the farm for a fertilizer company at the time—was talking with the Minnesota-based farmer Sheldon Stevermer. “Corn was $2.75, beans were $7.25. We’re small farmers who don’t have a lot of acres. [We were asking ourselves,] ‘Is it worth staying in business?’” Smith recalls. The two were exchanging ideas and Stevermer asked a third farmer, Lance Petersen, what he thought. “He bounced it off Lance and he said, ‘What about putting a pen of sheep in between the rows?’”

Stevermer has an engineering background and he and Smith decided to run with Peterson’s idea. They got to work designing a farming system that involved growing alternating rows of corn and strips of pasture that were wide enough to move a mobile barn through. The plants in those rows also get exposed to more sunlight than a standard canopy of corn or soy, resulting in higher yields per plant. They called the result—a solar-powered barn that separately housed eight sheep in the front, 10 hogs in the middle, and a 125 chickens in a trailing chicken tractor—the ClusterCluck 5,000. They coined the term “stock cropping” for the larger idea to have, as Smith puts it, “plants feeding animals, and animals feeding plants.”

Since then, Smith has dedicated 5 acres on a plot of land Smith rents to trialing the stock-cropper system. And he has worked with Illinois-based Dawn Equipment to design a second, much lighter and more nimble iteration of the barn: The ClusterCluck Nano runs on solar energy and can be moved with a phone app. Now, Smith and Dawn Equipment CEO Joe Bassett are working on a third iteration and actively pursuing outside investment.

The hope, says Smith, isn’t just to build a new type of farm equipment—it’s to help farmers build soil health, cut down on water pollution, and usher in a new approach to farming in the Corn Belt.

Iowa is famously home to more hogs—25 million—than people, and a sizable number of concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. As a result, massive quantities of manure get spread on the same farmland repeatedly, typically during the cold months when there are no roots in the soil to absorb it. That often leads to nutrient pollution in the waterways (and dead zones in places like the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico).

Stock cropping, on the other hand, involves rotating crops with pasture strips so that a smaller numbers of animals leave behind just enough nutrients on the land to help corn grow there the following season—replacing the expensive, leaky fertilizer systems used by most commodity farmers. Meanwhile, the animals themselves live in less confined spaces, eating the plants and insects in the pasture strips. Smith has calculated that if there were 1.4 million ClusterCluck Nanos operating on about 1.9 million acres of forage strips within 15 of Iowa’s 99 counties full time, they could theoretically replace that state’s CAFOs.

“What is progress in ag?” Smith asked the crowd at the field day last August. “If you go down to the Farm Progress show in Boone, [Iowa,] you’re going to see one version of progress, and that’s big, wide, fast farm equipment that’s designed to do more with less people involved,” he said. But Smith, whose somewhat flat speaking affect belies his deep knowledge of agronomy and a stubborn dedication to farming, has other ideas. He points to the fact that even though corn and soy prices have gone back up over the last year, so have the prices of the inputs most commodity farmers rely on, such as synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides.

“It’s the same thing that’s happened three other times in my career. We get a pop and the machine responds, and the pop becomes not very fun anymore. But the concepts we have out here could be very useful as we move ahead into whatever is going to be next. [It’s] not going to be next year or the year after that, but the pattern always comes where [farmers] drain the tank and come back to a break-even proposition.”

Instead of this familiar boom-bust cycle, Smith hopes to see a network of farmers across Iowa, Minnesota, and beyond that can afford to stay on the land while farming at a smaller scale by cutting their input costs radically and selling higher welfare, grass-fed meat into local markets and directly to consumers. And while doing so will require more than just a grassroots effort, these farmers are hoping that their out-of-the-box ideas gain traction with investors who can help them scale up.

‘Escaping the Dead-end, No-win Ag Treadmill’

During the first Stock Cropper field day three summers ago, Smith started by pointing to the land next to his home farm and naming all the farming families that had sold or lost their land. The land hand been consolidated into a few larger farm operations, he told his audience, and as a result, his community had changed. Like in many rural areas, there were fewer schools, fewer neighbors to farm alongside, and it now requires a much longer drive to get to the grocery store or hardware store.

Even with an automated barn, he says, the stock-cropper system still requires farmers who are more hands-on than most other modern commodity farming, a fact that, if it were widely adopted, would result in a reversal of the population loss so many rural counties have seen.

“The whole idea of this system is that it will require a lot more farmers,” said Smith during a phone call last fall. “Because even though the barns are going to move themselves, somebody still needs to chore them, somebody still needs to do the daily husbandry. And you don’t have to try to farm half the state of Iowa to make a reasonable living.”

Ricardo Salvador, the senior scientist and director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (and a Civil Eats advisory board member), had Smith as a student when he taught at Iowa State University in the ‘90s. He has attended two of Smith’s field days and sees the work as potentially transformative.

“He wants to escape the dead-end, no-win treadmill [agricultural] situation where all that you can do is choose from a very narrow range of options, which always make the farmer the person who takes the ultimate risk, earns the least, and is dependent on government [subsidies] in order to make ends meet,” says Salvador. By selling the highest-value final product—the meat itself rather than just the grain to feed the animals—Salvador adds, he’s found a way to do something that has “become out of reach for farmers that decades ago bought into the idea of specialization.”

The hope, says Smith, is to create a system that’s more resilient in the face of climate change because it relies on fewer inputs.

Eventually, he says, “we could probably cut nitrogen use by 75 percent compared to a conventional corn acre. And I think we could completely eliminate the [added] phosphorus and potassium and use the animals to cycle it back into the soil.”

He is also looking at other crops that might make good animal feed, like barley and field peas, which would diversify the operation further. “The whole idea is that we want to increase the amount of biodiversity in the field within this system and build resiliency that way.”

Dawn Equipment’s Bassett got on board with stock cropping and started collaborating with Smith several years ago. Bassett had been making small-scale farm equipment targeted specifically at those cutting down on tillage and planting cover crops after he took stock of the nitrogen problems—and resulting regulations—in the Chesapeake Bay and the Des Moines Waterworks lawsuit.

“At that time, [it looked like] the government was going make farmers start doing something to preserve water quality and topsoil, “ he said. “I thought, ‘Surely, there’s going to be a groundswell of momentum that sort of gets farmers to change their practices.’” And while didn’t happen right away, he says that part of the business has grown in recent years.

Bassett sees much of the recent wave of ag technology as furthering, rather than solving, the most pressing problems with commodity agriculture—and he wants to do something different, even if it can mean a slower ramp-up to profitability.

“Agriculture is very high-tech now, but it’s not actually any different,” he says. “We have high-tech tractors and combines, but what they’re doing is exactly the same. Now [farmers are getting] robot tractors to plow the fields, so they’ll just plow even more.”

Bassett is personally motivated by the climate crisis and believes having animals on the landscape are key to sequestering carbon in the soil. “A stock-cropper system of intercropping, where you are rotationally grazing in between rows of cash crops, will probably be the most regenerative farming system possible. And it will produce the highest yield per unit of fertilizer of any system.”

Dawn Equipment is working on more prototypes, and the company’s ability to manufacture its first round of commercially available ClusterCluck barns will depend on the level of investment Bassett and Smith are able to attract. Together they have bootstrapped the project so far, and they are hoping to attract venture capital to keep scaling up the project. But Smith isn’t interested in the typical model.

“A lot of people just want you to come in and do this and then flip it in three years and sell it to Cargill. I’m not interested in that. We need to find the right investor that is bought into the merits of what we’re trying to build and is going to give us the rope and the leeway to get there,” he says.

And while the barns were developed for corn and soy operations, Bassett hopes to see them reach orchardists and vineyard owners interested in grazing animals as a way to build the soil between their rows in other parts of the country.

A Processing Bottleneck

While Smith hasn’t had a problem finding a market for the meat he’s produced so far with the stock-cropper system, the lack of meat processing infrastructure for small scale producers is a well-known challenge.

Keaton Krueger, another Iowan who is farming with his wife on 80 acres purchased from her family, while working full time in the field of precision agriculture (most recently for WinField United), has been following Zack’s progress and says he’s very impressed with what he and Bassett have done in the last three years. The focus on soil health aligns with his approach and, on paper, the system promises the kind of steady income that would allow him to gradually transition to full-time farming.

“Right now, farming is like a second job, but it would be great someday if a system like the stock cropper could allow us to make a living farming without having to become a giant consolidated grain-farming entity. I think there are a lot of people like he and I, who are still in agriculture professionally, that probably could access a few hundred acres of land and would be happy to go home and work hard on that land to make a living.” But working at that scale isn’t possible within the current system, he adds.

And yet Krueger hasn’t committed to buying a barn because he says the meat processing infrastructure isn’t there yet. The Kruegers raise hogs for themselves and their family members, and he says, “We have to schedule a year in advance for just a few hogs a year.”

But he’s optimistic that more demand could help pave the way for more processing. “I think that will probably be an area that gets solved either through the stock-cropper vision or through somebody that’s supporting the vision,” says Krueger.

Krueger, Smith, and Salvador all point to Jason Mauck’s work as an inspiring example. The Muncie, Indiana-based, self-described “maverick grower” farms row crops in strips to collect optimum sunlight like Smith and raises hogs that he sells himself through Munsee Meats, the meat processing plant that has been in his family since the 1950s—with the recent addition of automated self-serve meat lockers.

“[Mauck] is trying to retain as much of the food dollar as possible, which means that he’s in charge of production, processing, and distribution,” says Salvador. “He’s got this small USDA-certified meatpacking plant. But then his sales are through what are essentially these high-tech vending machines. And he controls the whole thing.”

At the field day in September, Mauck bought a ClusterCluck Nano and brought it home to Indiana, where he has been sharing photos of it in action.

And when Smith envisions networks of producers working together to build a supply chain using stock cropping, he thinks the region around Mauck’s processing business is probably the most logical place to start.

“It’s going to take regional hubs outside urban areas, and then farms positioned around those hubs rather than, for instance, growing pork here in Winnebago County, Iowa, and shipping it to Sioux Falls to be killed, and then shipping it to Washington, D.C., after that. We’ve got to do a better job of nesting the production around where the people are.” He also sees pasture-based systems as inherently easier to locate next to cities—because, unlike CAFOs, urban dwellers “can actually come out and see and participate in it, and it’s 100 percent transparent; the farmer has nothing to hide.”

The USDA is also in the middle of rolling out a sizable grant program that is intended to support small-scale meat processing infrastructure—as part of the Biden administration’s response to consolidation in the meat industry—but it’s not clear whether those grants will work in tandem with efforts like Smith’s.

Swimming Against the Tide

It is far from easy to envision and follow through on building an alternative to commodity agriculture, in part because the companies behind it wield so much power in the Corn Belt.

The depopulation of rural areas—and the sheer number of miles it has put between people—hasn’t helped. But social media has done a lot to help outliers like Smith and Mauck build networks that have bolstered them in the face of the status quo. “Maybe 10 percent of farmers are open to these ideas,” says Smith “That’s the community space that we’re aiming for and trying to build a coalition around right now.”

At the end of the day, Smith is clear-eyed about the fact that what he’s doing may struggle to gain traction because it threatens the powers that be in the commodity agriculture industry.

“You’re not going to see John Deere, Corteva, or Bayer supporting something like this. I come from that world,” he told his field day audience. “I was a Pioneer seed rep and chemical dealer.” Enabling farmers to work in a closed-loop way that harnesses the power of nature isn’t good for those companies’ bottom lines, he added.

“Changing the arrangement of the use of plants and animals in this way, it is a significant threat [to the existing industry],” he added later on the phone. Not only does the stock-cropper system require much less synthetic fertilizers, but “it’s going to take us less seed. We’re getting more yield per seed, and that flies in the face of everything I’ve done up to this point. . . . It’s a potential threat to significantly reduce the things that we’re told we have to farm with in order to survive.”

“A lot of farmers just wouldn’t dare try this, because the fear of looking strange,” says Salvador, who adds, “the people who will pooh-pooh it or make it sound like it’s strange are the industry and the folks who want to be comfortable just farming corn and soybeans, and getting checks from the government when they can’t make ends meet.”

“But,” he adds, “I see a slow-brewing, quiet revolution out there.”

Twilight Greenaway wrote this article for Civil Eats.


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Native grasslands are the most threatened ecosystem in North America.

A South Dakota advocacy group hopes its educational campaign will reach a wider audience after receiving a regional award. The South Dakota Grassland Coalition's recent television public service announcement, part of its "Where Good Things Grow" campaign, recently won an Upper Midwest Regional Emmy award.

Quality grasslands help clean air and water, sequester carbon, reduce erosion and provide wildlife habitat.

Ron Nichols, one of the campaign's creators, produced the television spot.

"The television spots in particular are designed to help people understand that we are all connected to the grasslands and that they're definitely worth protecting and improving their health," Nichols explained.

He said it was "affirming" the film's message resonated with the region and met the high standards of an Emmy Award. Nichols also hopes it will educate people about threats to grasslands including conversion to cropland, woody encroachment and the effects of poor management.

The one-minute film features footage of rancher Kelsey Scott and her nephews caretaking land on the Cheyenne River Reservation. Nichols emphasized he appreciated the opportunity to film a local rancher practicing good grassland management.

"Rather than going out and trying to get an actor, these spots are genuine," Nichols stressed. "They really reflect what's happening out on the land in South Dakota."

Along with the rancher's cattle, the PSA includes images of sage grouse, buffalo, pronghorn and a diverse sampling of grassland plant species.

Joe Dickie and his son, Charlie, filmed the scenes and images featured over several years traveling through South Dakota's grasslands. He is glad to showcase the results of regenerative ranching practices.

"Running cattle, resting the land, not overgrazing, being really aware of riparian areas along water," Dickie outlined. "Really just doing the right things for the environment."

The PSA aired more than 4,000 times this year.


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Ocean advocates are hailing a federal judge's decision that deemed a nationwide permit for industrial aquaculture structures unlawful.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' approval of the permit for finfish nets and cages was found to violate several environmental laws.

Center for Food Safety Legal Director George Kimbrell called that a win against corporate interests pushing to industrialize the open ocean.

"It's an important victory protecting our oceans," said Kimbrell, "their native ecosystems, and the communities that rely on them."

Still, Kimbrell said the court ordered both sides to return to court later this month with a plan on how to remedy the matter.

The ruling comes as an increasing number of Maine communities adopt emergency aquaculture moratoriums, but backers of large-scale aquaculture say it's needed to meet a growing seafood demand.

Maine's abundant coastline and working waterfronts make it an ideal place for an aquaculture business, and numerous small-scale shellfish and marine plant farms are boosting local economies.

But commercial fishermen say the growth of large, foreign-owned fish farms endangers both the ocean and their livelihoods. Kimbrell said a battle to privatize the ocean is underway.

"Taking parts of the ocean and saying, 'you can't fish here, and instead this is going to be an area we're going to allow a corporation to use exclusively for a certain number of years,'" said Kimbrell. "In this case, these are 10-year permits that would have been established."

Kimbrell said federal courts covering the Gulf of Mexico previously struck down efforts to establish industrial aquaculture there.

He said despite intense lobbying efforts by proponents, Congress has never passed a law authorizing large-scale aquaculture in federal waters.





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By Lauren Kobley for Cronkite News.
Broadcast version by Alex Gonzalez for Arizona News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Jesse Garcia was first introduced to farming in his grandmother’s garden. As a child, he recalls not quite understanding the true purpose of growing and how important it is.

It was in high school that he first started taking an interest in farming and agriculture. After graduating, he had a number of jobs, but he did not feel passionate about any of them. It was then that he found the Ajo Center for Sustainable Agriculture.

Arizona farmers are aging. With a hope to sustain farming practices in the state, particularly within Indigenous communities, the co-executive directors of Ajo CSA, Sterling Johnson and Nina Sajovec, are training the next generation of growers through their beginning farmer apprenticeship program.

As of the 2017 Census of Agriculture from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 59% of farmers in Arizona were Indigenous, more than any other state. The vast majority of farmers in the U.S. are over the age of 35, with an average age 57.5. With the average age of farmers increasing, advocates say it is important to train the next generation of farmers to maintain the state’s agriculture industry.

“Arizona did things backwards. We became a state. We created a job force. But, we didn’t include farming,” Johnson said. “The wrong assumption was that farming was going to stay within the family, but things have changed. The ways of thinking have changed, the way we do things have changed and there’s no one else to take over.”

The Ajo CSA program trains three to five aspiring farmers like Garcia each cycle in Ajo and on the Tohono O’odham Nation. The eight- to 11-month program allows apprentices to visit local farms, establish their own growing space and attend workshops to learn about local sustainable farming techniques.

The apprentices practice growing and harvesting different varieties of crops each season, including lettuce, tomatoes, chiles, squash, beans and corn. Because the farm is a teaching farm, the produce is not sold, but the organization saves the seeds to distribute throughout the community and use for later growing periods.

Johnson was born and raised on the Tohono O’odham Nation in a ranching and rodeo family. He has overseen more than 40 apprentices and youth interns, 70% of whom are Tohono O’odham.

“I’m very excited that we get to teach them (the apprentices) our ways, and we get to promote our ways. Not just to the outside, but to our people. They should be proud of who they are and where they come from,” Johnson said.

On the Tohono O’odham Nation, the apprentices practice climate-smart agriculture and dryland farming. The three main objectives of climate-smart agriculture are to sustainably increase productivity, adapt to climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Dryland farming is the practice of producing sustainably by using the soil’s own moisture and limited irrigation to plant and grow.

“The soils are the key factor in order to have a good nutritious crop. If you overtax those soils, you lose all the nutrients and all the natural things that are in the soils that would be healthy for us as people,” said Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a Hopi farmer and professor at the University of Arizona.

Indigenous farmers have developed and practiced these sustainable farming techniques for generations and they were almost lost, he said. One of the reasons they are successful is because of the adaptation seeds have undergone through the years to grow in desert-like climates.

“Our seeds are like us. They are human beings to the same extent that they also need to be out and adapt to these different environmental conditions. You have organizations … and they’re just holding on to those seeds. They’re also not raising them in the places where they’re from, so they’re losing their chance to adapt,” UArizona’s Johnson said.

Opportunities like the Ajo CSA apprenticeship program give young farmers the chance to get hands-on experience to develop climate-smart agricultural skills and get in touch with Indigenous culture.

“Farming’s a tradition, just like Grandma’s recipe. You don’t want Grandma’s recipe to die out and go away. You got to pass it on,” Gilbert Villegas Jr., an Ajo CSA apprentice, said.

Not only does the apprenticeship build their skills, it prepares them to farm their own land and grow on a larger scale.
Since finding Ajo CSA seven years ago, Garcia said he has learned invaluable information about farming that he has been able to apply to his own farm on the Tohono O’odham Nation.

“Working with Ajo kind of gives you the whole insight of how to run the business: How to apply for grants, how to get partners, how to use those partners, how to organize events – anything that can kind of help your business grow,” he said.

He said building his roots in farming has been a challenge, but he has had incredible mentors like Sterling Johnson that have helped guide him along the way. Garcia now comes back to Ajo CSA as a volunteer and mentor. He hopes to have an impact on those who are in the program now.

“It starts with you as a person. You have to want to change and try to bring everything (the farming techniques) back. If you don’t see the big picture then what’s the point of you trying to spread it?” Garcia asked. “There’s always somebody out there you can go and keep passing it on … hopefully somebody hears.”

Looking toward the future of the program, Sterling Johnson hopes that Native American traditional agricultural practices are given their proper recognition, acknowledgement and respect.

“This is our way of keeping our traditions alive. … We pray for those who are on the ground and those who are on top guiding in this modern world as we need agriculture to have a future for all of us,” Johnson said.


Lauren Kobley wrote this article for Cronkite News.


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