When Joan Maxwell left commercial underwriting to farm, she brought her spreadsheets with her, AgNavigator reported. She and her husband John run Cinnamon Ridge Farms, a diversified dairy about 14 miles northwest of Davenport, Iowa, which has won the US Dairy Sustainability Award, the Wergin Good Farm Neighbor Award and the Iowa Farm Environmental Leader Award.
Part of the farm's success is close attention to the numbers, drawn from Joan's background in activity-based costing and Six Sigma. The farm runs enterprise analysis on equipment, for example to decide whether repairing a machine is cheaper than buying a new one. "It's not how much money you make; it's how much money you can try to keep," she said, adding that farmers now have to make data-driven decisions.
Technology does the rest, from a label maker for the farm's direct-to-consumer cheese to genetic testing that predicts how much a calf will produce. Cows are milked with an automatic milking machine from Lely, and the Maxwells are exploring virtual fencing, which would allow rotational grazing over large areas and grazing of waterways and filter strips where building physical fence would cost too much.
In the fields the farm uses no-till and cover crops, which improve soil health and help reduce nitrates in waterways, John Maxwell said, and manure from the herd feeds its corn, soybean and hay. But Joan Maxwell warned that these practices cost money, from a no-till drill to paying someone to seed a cover crop, and farmers need to see a benefit.
Her larger worry is land tenure. Some 347.8 million acres of US farmland are rented, and nearly 52% of non-operating landlords have never farmed, according to USDA. Leases typically require tenants to put back the nutrients they remove, she said, but none reward improving the land, so a mandate for cover crops would leave farmers paying while landowners gain. "What we're doing is supporting business and not agriculture," she said.
Photo: Anoek2012 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Source: AgNavigator
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