Holding his ground

SPRING GROVE — When Myron Sylling toned down his tillage 30 years ago, he did not imagine it would lead him to where he is today, farming with no-till and cover crops and instructing others in how to do the same.

“I just like to try to help people and educate people,” he said.

Sylling was raised milking cows on his family’s dairy farm near Spring Grove, the next farm over from where he currently lives. He rented his first farm at 23, continuing to farm with his father and brother at the time.

Sylling handled most of the tillage when he was growing up, and a couple of years after he started renting, he said he got tired of filling in land after washouts, picking rocks after rain and simply watching the soil disappear.

“We don’t have very much ground that is considered not highly erodible,” Sylling said. “Most of our (land) is …. pretty steep. … On the farm I’m currently on, there are 200 acres, and about 145 of that is crop-able.”

After attending seminars and convincing his family, Sylling started no-till farming around 1995. The farming style was not common, Sylling said, so it was not easy to find the equipment needed. The Syllings started with a coulter attachment to the front of their planter, doing light tillage and planting in one pass, but they only did that for one year before buying a coulter cart from southern Iowa.

Sylling also started subscribing to the publication “No-Till Farmer” to get tips on how to make no-till farming work.

“Today, it’s much easier than it was then,” he said. “There are all kinds of improvements we can make for our planters, (and) you don’t need the coulter cart; it’s much simpler than it was back then (when) nobody really had it figured out yet.”

As Sylling started no-till, he saw an immediate reduction in soil erosion, but it was not yet enough for him to be satisfied.

“There was still erosion, just not nearly as bad,” he said. “We went through several planter iterations, but … the erosion wasn’t drastically minimized until 2013, when we started adding cover crops to the mix.”

Sylling said he keeps his cover cropping simple with cereal rye, which works well and does not have much of a cost per acre. The addition of cover crops helped build up the soil’s organic matter much faster than before, increasing it by 1% in three years while also holding the soil together against erosion.

“To me, no till and cover crops really go together if you want to build soil health fast,” Sylling said.

There were still some trials to overcome. Sylling found out the cover crop needed to be terminated early during years that were either too wet or too dry — especially in the latter case, where the crop would otherwise consume the moisture and cause germination issues in the cash crop.

“I’ve planted the 5-foot-tall cereal rye, and that’s not for the faint of heart,” Sylling said. “The crop worked out; people thought we were crazy and there was going to be nothing there, but the beans did yield very well that year.”

Sylling’s cash crops include corn and soybeans, planted into the cover crop when it is green to help weed suppression, water infiltration and carbon addition to the soil. His son, Camron Sylling, is interested in adding oats as a cover crop, and he planted winter camelina this past fall, which he can harvest in the summer. Sunflowers might make their way into the fields as well.

With cover crops and no-till, the Syllings are growing higher-yielding crops on the same or less fertility. Their soil nitrogen is down to about 0.7 units per bushel of corn grown on soybean ground, and they have had fewer problems with winter annual weeds.

“Cereal rye is very good at weed suppression,” Sylling said. “I generally terminate with glyphosate and nothing else, where most farmers are using some kind of residual herbicide, so I have a dollar per acre savings on my first chemical pass. … And my (phosphorous and potassium) applications have been greatly reduced.”

Over his 30 years of no-till farming, Sylling has seen more farms in his area adopt the practice.

“There are still guys who believe tillage is necessary,” he said. “I am not saying to never till your soil, but till it as little as possible, depending on conditions. … There are reasons to till, but I see the adoption has increased on this, which is good.”

Sylling also advocates for the use of cover crops. He is a coach with the Minnesota Soil Health Coalition and Farmers for Soil Health, helping cover-crop-adopting farmers avoid expensive mistakes and turn a profit. He also presents at seminars and other educational events, which tend to take up a lot of the winter season.

“I’m seeing an increase in cover crops; I wish it were higher,” Sylling said. “The no-till adoption has gone up, I think, driven by cost — how much fuel we burn during tillage, how many pieces of equipment we need to make all the extra passes out there.”

In Sylling’s experience, one of the major reasons people start raising cover crops is because they are doing it through a program. They get it established, but there is not much of a follow-through plan.

“If you don’t deal with it and have multiple plans of action, it could hurt you, and we don’t want to see that,” Sylling said. “One farmer having a train wreck, that news spreads like wildfire. One farmer having great success, maybe one or two more hear about it.”

Thanks to programs being offered through governmental and private entities, Sylling said he is seeing more incentives for farmers to decrease their soil fertility costs while maintaining or increasing their yield, and he is ready to help them along that path.

“I learned a lot in the school of hard knocks on what to and not to do,” Sylling said. “I’ve had people help me along the way, and I’m just trying to pay that forward.”