Dakota Farmer

Slideshow: Soil Health Summit speakers shift focus to improving their soil systems.

Lon Tonneson, Editor, Dakota Farmer

March 8, 2019

8 Slides

Are you a whack-a-mole farmer?

“Whack-a-mole farming” is Dwayne Beck’s phrase for trying to fix crop production problems by spraying something to suppress or kill it. Beck is a South Dakota State University agronomy professor and director of the Dakota Lakes Research Farm, Pierre, S.D.

He refers to Whac-A-Mole — the arcade game in which players use a mallet to hit toy moles back into their holes — frequently when he gives presentations on no-till and soil health. He spoke at the 2019 South Dakota Soil Health Summit

In the arcade game, every time you hit a mole back into its hole, another one pops up elsewhere. You hit that one and two more pop up.

The same thing happens on farms and ranches, Beck said.

If you kill one insect, another one becomes a problem. If you eradicate one weed, another moves in. “You are just treating a symptom, you are not fixing the problem,” Beck said.

Weeds, diseases and insects are nature’s way of trying to add diversity to the system, according to Beck.

The solution is to put down the whack-a-mole paddle. You need to fix the system, not eliminate the symptom, he said. You need to mimic Mother Nature as closely as possible.

How they do it
During the summit, four farmers — Jesse Hall, Arlington; Gene and Craig Stehly, Mitchell; and Kurt Stiefvater, Salem — discussed how they are trying to change the system on their farms. They all quit doing tillage and are no-till planting. They diversified their rotations to increase biodiversity. They are planting cover crops. Some have integrated livestock into cropland.

Click through the slideshow for six key points that the four panelists, Beck and other speakers at the summit made.

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