As Darren Yanke surveys the thousand acres his family has farmed in central Wisconsin since 1933, two new living landmarks are taking root.
Intersecting the tidy rows of corn and soybeans, one can see the beginnings of a slightly more unruly yield. The first, a pollinator strip straight down the middle of the field, attracting beneficial insects to the center of the action with colorful, varied blooms. Along a nearby creek, a prairie strip acts as a natural filtration buffer between field and water source – working with nature to improve soil and water health.
“There is a huge benefit to having these buffers,” says Darren. “The deep roots [of the prairie strip] prevent the nutrients that sift down the hill from going into the creek, slowing everything down. And the bees and pollinators love all the different species of legumes and flowering plants.”
The Yanke family is no stranger to conservation. Since the 1960s, the family has successfully adopted all manner of consumer-, soil- and water-friendly practices, including no-till farming and non-GMO crops. “The commodity markets are all so similar, you need to find every little thing you can to make the budgets work out a little better for us farmers,” he says of the premiums they can charge on high-quality product.
While conservation practices are becoming more popular among farmers like Darren, others are hesitant to dedicate precious land and resources to edge-of-field techniques.
“The biggest thing is the cost,” says Darren. “If you ask a guy if he’d rather spend $500 establishing a prairie strip, or $500 on new farm equipment, most people aren’t going to stick their neck out.”
Another consideration? For his own strips, Darren had to take an acre of farmland out of production.
To help establish his prairie strip, Darren was a recipient of a Good Idea Mini-Grant to install edge-of-field conservation practices. Mini-grant recipients, which included six other farmers in the Mississippi River Basin, also shared their experiences in videos and podcasts to help other farmers learn about how they could make edge-of-field practices work on their operations.
Good Idea Mini-Grants was an initiative of One Good Idea, an online clearinghouse of videos and podcasts that was established in 2021 and features farmers sharing their ideas and experiences implementing conservation practices.
The goal? Increase the adoption of conservation practices by helping farmers learn from other farmers about how to be good stewards, while also protecting their profitability.
To date, Darren's video on the establishment of his prairie and pollinator strips has been viewed hundreds of times.
The Walton Family Foundation supports the mini-grants, along with a farmer-to-farmer peer learning meet-up series called Good Idea Shop Talks, as part of an effort to encourage the adoption of solutions that work with the power of nature, like cover crops, rotational grazing and buffer strips that can improve water and soil quality in the basin.
Jenny Seifert is a watershed outreach specialist at University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension, which led the creation of One Good Idea. Jenny, whose background is in environmental communications and behavior change, says one goal of the mini-grants and meet-ups is to reach farmers considering edge-of-field practices.
“In any space, there are always early adopters who are willing to take risks, but there are many more people who are more wary about making changes. There is growing effort right now in the basin to help empower farmers who are early adopters of conservation practices to champion these practices that are working on their own land to farmers who might be in that ‘moveable middle,’ meaning farmers who are open to listening or are at the threshold of adopting a practice.”
Jenny goes on to say that when it comes to practice adoption, “Farmers have always relied heavily on their peers. They really care about what their neighbors think. One Good Idea creates another opportunity for farmers to learn about what their peers are doing to improve their operations and their farming legacy.”
More than just direct peer-to-peer communication, One Good Idea is managed by a multi-state team of land grant university extension staff. Each video or podcast is reviewed by an expert content team to ensure the information being shared is evidence-based, whether that’s research or a farmer’s real-life experience.
Darren says filming the video was simple and allows him to show a wider audience – especially other farmers interested in conservation practices – what’s working on his own land. “It used to be that you could talk over the fence with your neighbors about what they were working on. But farmers today have less and less neighbors. We all have more ground to cover than we used to.”
Watch more of the One Good Idea videos.
