Making Money on the Farm: Andy Popp's Cover Crop & Grazing System

0:08 Everybody talks about the basis of their operation. That's the basis of my operation. It's my wife, two kids. I got a 13-year-old girl which needs a lot of help with and an 11-year-old boy. They're very active in sports.

0:25 I've never did sports growing up really, and now I've learned to coach softball and baseball for the last five or six years. I learned a lot, mostly about kids. I don't know if I really learned that much about sports. I watched a bunch of YouTube videos to kind of figure out how to do it. And I think I'm just an unpaid babysitter sometimes with a bunch of people's kids. But that's my wife — she's very active. She works full-time as an accountant and she works quite a few hours.

1:01 I was working at factories straight out of high school. I went to work factories for about 12 years. It was not going to have time to do a lot with kids because I was, you know, you get told when you are going to work overtime when you're not. We always had a family farm, always worked on it some, and my father got to his age and life that he was wanting to retire and was going to rent it out. I was like, you know, factories — it's a very boring, monotonous, beat-down style. I really enjoy now not working with nearly as many people on the farm because some of those people in the factory will drive you crazy. And so we changed over and had the chance to do this.

1:49 My original goal was I was going to do it. I said my goal is I will always make sure that I make as much money as I would have if I would've stayed in that factory or, you know, gradually increased. I was not going to accept the fact that some years were just, you know, all I've ever heard growing up is you need to go work somewhere else, you need to go to college, you need to go get a.

2:13 Job somewhere else, you can't make money farming. It's just a very negative thing that you're pretty much in any coffee shop in our area. I know how it is everywhere else. But I said my goal, as if I'm going to do this, I want to make a living at it. I'm not just going to do it to kill time. And my wife don't make that much that she let me just kill time. She's an accountant. She will keep track of what I make, and anyway, so that's kind of the basis of how I got started.

2:42 We did conventional farming. We always plowed. My dad was notorious for, there was two weeds in the field, I'm pretty sure he always made sure one of us got on a tractor and went and plowed that field. He didn't, it, and it does look pretty. I mean, we'll say it's the prettiest fields, a nice plowed field. If you have, if you know nothing about everything that you learned today, a ploughed field out there all uniform, you know, it looks pretty disastrous in long term. We've all seen pictures of that today and yesterday. But so that's what I grew up with.

3:16 When he passed away five years ago—I know I guess be six years ago—and about the time I was kind of making transitions on that, we also did a lot of. We bailed off. I guess when we grew wheat, we'd bail off the straw and we'd sell the small squares of straw, mainly to Halloween market. A lot of people use that for their decorations in the Metroplex. We took every bit of forage or every bit of materials off of our place constantly, ended up with a lot of alkali land. Noble Foundation I met with them, and that can. I was kind of asking about the alkali, and they said, well, you know, you need to put some material back, organic matter back in your soil, and that'll fix that. It's like, well, how do I do that whenever I'm trying to get.

4:08 Make sure I make money. I want that straw to sell and shortly after that Jason Garros, our local NRCS guy, he moved into our area and he kind of started asked him, mentioned about cover crops and no-till. NRCS had a program about it that paid money that caught my attention. It was going to pay me, not the ground. Well, okay, well that caught my house. Like have some guaranteed money every year. I think at the time I think it was $25 an acre for a five-year plan per year. And then on top of that that he had, he said well we can do, we can do some payments on if you'll be interested in cover crops.

4:57 First introduction to cover crops, he tried to explain it. He's, who's gonna mix together like a minimum of eight to eight to twelve seeds together in a mix in a drill and put out. It's like, how all I've ever done is we was supposed to clean wheat seed and make sure there wasn't anything besides wheat seed in a drill or we're supposed to have Milo seed or whatever seed had to be clean. You didn't plant two things at one time. And so that was, and then that come with the meeting Nathan Hale that had the talk about how all this is going to work together, these plants going to feed each other and all that. I was very ignorant to all that. It sounded like a lot of hippie talk as far as plants all working together to feed each other. Just didn't really jive with what I'd ever been, I've had ever learned and stuff. But anyway, is still the driving factor there was money. They was willing to try it. And whenever they said well you can graze it, I was like there's way I can recoup some of this hippie stuff that ain't gonna work. We're gonna plant this and then we're gonna put cattle on it. And one big key to this was Jason's a very good NRCS agent. He realizes he has.

6:13 A rule book to go by but he realizes them rules can be flexed a little bit in order to help implement these practices. If he would have stuck to original, you know, full guidelines that some guy in our office wrote that probably doesn't do it much I don't know exactly how you're in your guidelines are said but that's kind of the rules you come into sometimes. But we was able to flex and work this out to where it was something I could try, it was I could implement it was something that was sure worth trying to try to make some money to do and improve my soil quality.

6:56 Which in the original deal I was trying to fix some alkali land and then it grew tremendously from there. And that the first implementation we started on like we started with fifty acres to begin with out of about three hundred acres of tilled land that I farmed because I was scared. I looked at you know especially when you show the mix of these things and all I've been told is to plow every weed well I'd a sure didn't want to ruin three hundred acres. Had to have some guaranteed income coming in so I had to keep doing what I was doing as I was simplified implementing this to know that you know if this is gonna pay off in three years well I like to eat every year so I still did some of my other practices make sure I had a yearly income which boils down to the account at wife you have to have a yearly income.

7:53 And so we got rolling on it and stuff it's been been very very good for me. This all happened too and I had this started established and doing more and more of this about the same time that the droughts hit and actually I was able to maintain on my cattle because for a change instead of just growing a cash crop I was growing extra forage so that worked out great at a time when a lot of.

8:23 People was really downsizing their herds. I was able to maintain mine by using these forages and stuff to do. So and anyway, so this is one of the ways that first picture. Jason's very trickery with this photography—that's my son holding that turnip there. It's not that huge that a grown man's holding it, but my son was younger at the time. But that's one of the one of our first crops.

8:55 Since then we, the more, seems like the more biomass I get or more ground cover. Unless I've had luck with the turnips and radishes and stuff. The forage collards seem to be tougher and do a little bit more. Also had better luck. See me that the collards have a little better taproot that really break up stuff. My calves kind of figured out also—they pull them out and would eat them. They didn't last, seem to last as long.

9:22 The one on the left side of the slide is a creep gate I kind of come up with. That I had fields that I wanted them to eat, but I didn't want to turn the whole herd in on there. And so I made that little gate and my calves go in and out of there and they can go eat the good quality forage. And I'm pretty tight with my money. The cows I'll make them eat old hay that I buy cheaper or whatever else. And then it's basically like grain feeding a creep grain to your calves. They go in and out of that gate. Takes them a little bit to learn it. Sometimes you'll have to set a small square bale hay there or something. Sometimes some cubes, pala cubes, some other grain or something like that, just to get them. Once they go in and realize that there's a whole field of what they want to eat, they learn it well. They go in and out of that.

10:23 The one key is I always try to angle the gate back out because they're too dumb to figure out to make it round.

10:30 To edge they want you need it to where they can come back out so they don't stand there bawling and never go back to mama. The mama kind of enjoys it. It seemed like they do real well, especially whenever it's a 400, 500 pound calf. They're out there grazing, she's on her own to go eat. They're not slapping her udder trying to get more milk to fall out of her because they feel like that's the only good source of food. They go out there when it comes weaning time.

10:57 If you strategically plant it, you can catch them every one. Small work every cast pretty well in there grazing. Close that gate, run the cows to a different deal. You've sorted them out with half after gather. I'm a one-man operation, so that's a great deal. That saved me a lot of time and headache in a corral trying to sort them off. So that's been an investment for me, a good tool that I really liked. I made several of these so that I can move them to different places. Friend of mine in the cattle business, he actually when he was building his gates on his fields, he kind of liked that idea and he actually just built it into his metal gates for his fields. And then he can open and close that whenever he don't have to move that around like I did.

11:56 Okay, this is just some of my cows. I run mixed cows. I have a good relationship with our local sale barn. I buy cheap cows. I buy just whatever they need to put on some weight and things. I have no preference on any variety that comes. That's a huge drawback sometimes. I end up with some very wild ones. I end up with some that some don't snap out of being in too low a body condition, but a lot of them do. The forages, this is a summer mix here, some millet, soybeans and such. I keep my mixes somewhat cheap. I'll plant a mix in the.

12:40 Spring kind of depends on what I had before. At first when I started this I'd plant, I had intentions of doing cash crops in it. I've got so much value out of the forage that I pretty well just do for forage. I don't do much in cash crops anymore. Raised a little bit of my wheat notes, kind of mainly for my seed. Just the forage deal is just working a lot better for me. So I've got an older combine. I'm tired of praying over it every time it comes time for harvest, so that last makes it through it.

13:12 So and I just went ahead with the forage part of it. I don't have to own as much equipment. John Deere wants a lot of money for it. I don't like paying them for it. So we do more forage based and this is more in one of the drought and I guess got a good picture of where I missed with the drill also there in little area. The grass in the summertime seem to do a lot better.

13:43 See we have here's another mix, one of the grazing cages they put in and stuff, and then down in the bottom corner, some after we grazed it. I have all let whatever grow up then graze it off. At first I used to always worry about every time I planted. I felt like I needed to go. I thought I felt like I had to kill it before I planted the next thing because I'd grow a winter and as it was playing out, I spray roundup, kill it. Let's plant the next thing. Of course in first couple years, I also had some weed infiltration and I was scared. I'd already heard enough from my neighbors complaining about I'm introducing all kinds of weeds, introducing all kinds of junk that's gonna ruin their fields because I'm planting on my place. Kind of ironic, my neighbors used to plant Italian ryegrass and her.

16:45 With the spring and I thought that was kind of odd. I had never noticed it before. I talked to the farmer that farmed it for 30 years. He rented it before I got bought the property and I asked him about that because I know he grazed some on just regular straight wheat and there were conventional farmers. He said no, he said there ain't number on water and that unless it's raining. And so well, there is now and then.

17:08 Later on, after learning more about the no-till, I learned it is allowing the infiltration and that water is absorbing. In a minute it's gradually flowing into that creek that stays wet pretty much most of the time. My kids got some pretty big crawdads they thought was neat out of that, but it stays wet most of the time now. So that's my free watering system that no-till has provided. I don't have to worry about my cattle coming out for water on that anymore.

17:41 This is, I guess, this is another summer mix that we had here. Some of these has been great, some of these disastrous, not are not disastrous but not near as good. This is a winter mix. I think this is the winter mix actually now with that's the forged college wheat and things.

18:07 Some of the things I've learned, some of the things I thought at first didn't work, later on I kind of found out they did. One of the trials we did was sunflowers, son hemp and soybeans mix, summer mix put in front of my house, grew up sunflowers. I thought, look pretty. Some of the neighbors made comments on them. They didn't wasn't too keen on it. Got with a local guy that had a lot of calves. He had a pen of calves and he had a lot of sickness problem and they probably weighed there was anywhere from three weights to five weights to say he had.

18:44 Given him every shot he could, they're just in poor health. I said, 'Well, I need some calves to graze this off. Bring him out, I'll try it.' So we dumped them off the four, just probably at least four to five foot tall. And as he brought him out, well, we discussed this last night on the way home. He said that's home. I was going to mention the story. He said, 'You know, and I brought them out there. He said, 'I thought what the heck. He said I'm bringing dying calves and dumping them off in sunflower field.' He said I thought that was pretty disastrous, but he said I was willing to try it if you wanted me to try it.'

19:20 I thought, 'Well, Andy knows what he's doing, little Dino. I really didn't at the time, but I just needed something to eat it off.' But it straightened those calves up very well. After he called me about two weeks later, it was an agreement he was the responsible caretaker of it and asked me. He said, 'Well, he said I got so tired, it's looking out of my head and looked at him since I dropped him off. He said, 'How are they doing?' I said, 'Be honest, I can't see him. The forgery walking through it's at all. I don't see buzzards, so I assume they're doing good.'' This was in the middle of the summer about three years ago.

19:54 And they, those calves gained one and a quarter to one and a half pounds a day. He was highly impressed. I was pretty happy. That made me a good little gain check on some oddball caves. We did lose one of them, but out of the group of caves, if any of y'all seen him, you'd be embarrassed to have him on your property. It really didn't bother me as long as something makes money. I really don't—well, say that there's some animals I don't want to my place, but as far as these calves, you know, no big deal.

20:28 They did good. There's something with it as far as how it's helping their stomach because I hear a lot of people, you know, will say you can't feed them alfalfa, they'll bloat on that. You can't give them milo or Sudan grass, they're gonna get prussic acid. These cattle, if they have a choice, they choose things to keep them alive. They lived before we were around here trying to put them in a pasture with a fence around them. They figure out what they need, whether it's the sniff, lick test or however, but they figure it out.

21:02 Most of the people that you hear have problems, to bottom don't feed mineral and salt and keep a good salt mineral program. You know, cattle can't range off and go find those minerals on their own, so usually that's where you see a lot of the people that have problems. But this pretty much sums up kind of what I do. It's kind of similar the joys of coming towards the end of this. Y'all have seen and stared at enough of these slides that not many of them look new anymore, but this has been a very informative thing. We're very lucky to be in an industry that we all share our information.

21:43 There's not many industries that everybody is looking out for somebody. I mean, all of us would try to gather more land, run more cattle and stuff like that, but we're in an industry we still help each other out. Very lucky to be in that industry. Very lucky to have a company like this to put on something like this deal because most in most other industries and people, you know, you take their excess seed for the year, they put whatever professional football player that hadn't got arrested in the last month promoting it to try to sell that seed and telling us the best.

22:16 Let you plant it whether you do or don't succeed they don't really care they sold it. These guys I think it's a great asset that they put together something like this to guide us in the right direction. They really do care. Whenever here I first started I talked with Keith on the phone they really actually care and tried to put together stuff to make you succeed and I thought that's a great deal and in this modern society to see something like that that people care about that much about their customers.

23:07 Yes sir well some of mine is that okay, okay somewhat disasters were just mainly stuff I ended up creating and I kept thinking I had to spend money round up and stuff I was worried about the weed infiltration. The sunhemp I thought at first it was a disaster it grows up very tall very fibrous. The sunflowers were in the mix too. The calves come in there is a strip the leaves off leave it all standing. I'm sure the same thing you ran into this trip to Leeds off but you got all that fiber stuff standing up. I didn't know I was still used to the plowed ground planting in. Later on I did find out, I found out going through it you just leave the stuff stand and dry. As long as something is standing material and I drive through it I've sewn through Sudan grass and all kinds of stuff this tall doesn't really affect anything right now.

24:00 I just got a Great Plains. I have, well I've always had a great plains. I tried it to a different Great Plains the 15 foot think it's 15 foot NT. Have some people have the John Deere drill does a very good job too. I went with the Great Plains just because well one it was eight thousand cheaper but it also the John Deere is a is better at placing the seed exactly where you want it I think but it does it with a huge pressure that really it wears itself out quicker.