Fresh Growth
Fresh Growth
Watershed Ranch: Fungal Compost to Improve Soil Health in High Desert Colorado
Former Chicago science teacher, Rick Bieterman now farms in the Colorado High Desert, growing hay. Watershed Ranch has an annual precipitation of 11 inches and sits at 8,000 feet in elevation – providing about 90-100 frost free days per season. Add in poor soil quality, and farming becomes a challenge.
Rick got involved in Colorado’s STAR program which focuses on soil health practices. When prices of synthetic fertilizers soared during the COVID pandemic, his goal was to figure out how to move away from their use and improve soil quality. He found compost to purchase and later received a Western SARE grant to learn how to make his own.
Listen in to this conversation as Rick discusses the unique challenges of farming in a high alpine desert, the importance of community connections, and innovative practices he’s trialing. He also reflects on the learning process, embracing failures, and the continuous quest for improvement in farming.
Also watch Rick's YouTube videos on fungal compost
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Thanks for listening to Fresh Growth! To learn more about Western SARE and sustainable agriculture, visit our website or find us:
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Contact us at wsare@montana.edu
Hello and welcome to season five of Fresh Growth, a podcast by the Western SARE program at Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education. I'm your host, Steve Elliott, alongside co-host Stacey Clary. Thanks for listening for the past four seasons, and we're excited to sit down with more innovative producers this year. Just for background, Western SARE is funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture. We promote sustainable farming and ranching across the American West through research, education, and communication efforts like this podcast. Fresh Growth highlights producers and agricultural professionals from around the West who are embracing new ways of farming and ranching. They'll tell us about their experiences adopting more sustainable practices and the challenges and benefits they've seen. Today's guest is Rick Bieterman of Watershed Ranch in Colorado's Upper Arkansas River Valley. Watershed Ranch is a 168-acre agricultural property comprising 60 acres of irrigated hay pastures, 70 acres of forest, and two homesteads dating back to 1886. Rick, welcome and thanks for sitting down with us today. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 00:To start us off, please tell us a little bit more about Watershed Ranch so we can learn about the location, the climate. And when did you get started?
Speaker 03:Yeah, absolutely. So the Arkansas Valley, Arkansas River Valley is centrally located in Colorado, deep in the mountains. We are at the headwaters of the Arkansas River, just below Leadville. And our farm watershed ranch sits at just over 9,000 feet elevation. Right behind us, we've got the third tallest mountain in in the States, in Mount Harvard. And our water just comes rip-roaring down those creeks right to the farm. It is a high alpine desert, which is kind of interesting and unique. I'm not totally sure why people decided to farm there. Our climate is, you know, pretty darn cold and dry. Here we are on June 2nd, and... Our water coming off the creek is still mid 40 degrees. So farming in our neighborhood is a treat. I'm right there along with cacti. So yeah, not only is it cold, but being a desert, we've got some interesting conditions to grow and farm. But that's what I do. And I feel like I do it fairly well.
Speaker 00:With all those challenges, climate and all that, how did you come to farm in that location?
Speaker 03:You know, I would say farming was almost an afterthought. I hate to say that on a farming podcast, but the beauty, the nature that I grew up loving was mountains. Every chance I could go find a mountain, I wanted to find it. And so the Arkansas Valley is chock full of mountains. My wife grew up in Indiana and is generational farming. So I would say the farming piece is more on her end, but over the last nine years of farming... I've learned a lot and kind of figured out how to do it and how to meet the smart people that know how to do it better so that what we call a 50-year project turns into a good one.
Speaker 01:So tell us a little about what you grow. And I like the... finding the smart people who know how to do it better. I mean, and how you've incorporated that into making that challenging location work.
Speaker 03:Yeah. Well, I mean, I think first and foremost, most farmers would say you start learning by doing and you start learning by talking to your neighbors who, who love to talk. And I've got farming neighbors who have been here for five generations who know the land so well. And, um, you know, just over a cup of coffee or a weekly morning breakfast. You get to learn from them. Being about two hours away from any bigger city and having, I grew up in Chicago, and I felt like one thing that was missing from rural Colorado here was a connection to academia, right? And so that was a connection that I'd been searching for, especially over the last five years, six years. How could I make those connections with the scientists? My background prior to this was teaching. So I was a high school physics teacher, environmental science teacher, and I'm always trying to get that sort of competitive advantage from tapping into those super smart science people. That's kind of what I've done over the last five years via NRCS grants, via National Forest Foundation grants, obviously the SARE grant here, and then the STAR soil program as well that's put on through our conservancy. That's all led to these wonderful connections with scientists. And currently right now, I could send out an email and within 10 minutes be connected with an agronomist out of CSU, Colorado State University, who's been out to the farm and understands the operation. So, yeah, I feel like it's taken almost a decade, but I have the local connections and now I have these awesome scientists that are willing to help for virtually nothing. Just the whole idea of Let's save the planet.
Speaker 01:Yeah, well, it's their job. Has the local connection gone the other way as well now that you've made the connections with CSU and some of the other academic kind of programs? Are you able to share some of what they teach you to your neighbors? Oh, 100%. I
Speaker 03:have a wonderful cohort now that we've formed over the last four years through our Star Soil program. One of them is the local fruits and veggies farmer who runs the CSA. Another one is the superintendent of the golf course. And another one operates a dude ranch. And we meet monthly, both in and out of season. And we are always bouncing ideas off of each other. The CSU... grant that I just became a part of this last year was actually handing out these really nifty handheld probes that allow you to probe the soil for moisture, humidity, temperature. And so we have eight of them now in the valley that the four of us are shuffling back and forth to each other. Currently, I teach at the elementary school, so I've got 400 little kids that have their hands on these CSU probes that are they're just doing it in their little Dixie cups of beans and peas that we grow in class. But I'm showing them that I'm doing it on a grander scale on the agricultural acreage. And then my cohort here is doing the same. So yeah, it's been very transferable. And it happens to work out real well that I do most of mine during the teaching. And then I hand off these devices to The farmers who are growing as well in the summertime and the dude ranch who has thousands of kids in and out of their 400 acre facility. So I feel like the power of SARE, the power of these bigger picture supports and grants has definitely trickled down to our little valley. And what I've realized is I am not just surrounded by 80 year old fifth-generation farmers who are, you know, they can put their finger in the soil and know what the temperature and humidity is. I'm surrounded by a lot of people who are intrigued and inspired to learn more and more what's out there.
Speaker 01:So the part that we've sort of skipped over is what do you grow? What's your farm like? Oh, yeah. Well,
Speaker 03:we've got about 90 frost-free days where I'm at. So... We're keeping it kind of simple up here, at least on our farm anyway. We've got hay, we've got alfalfa, we've got clover. I do a three-acre pollinator habitat that was an NRCS project, and I'm still picking weeds like crazy two years into it. But it's turning into a pretty magical space that ultimately the grant was given to. cut down on on usage of water in certain areas that weren't thriving and so I'm sort of seeing that scientific piece of okay conservation how do you create a beautiful space and use less water doing it and I feel like that's what a lot of Colorado farmers are trying to figure out I don't know if you're aware of sort of Colorado water law but it is it is a wild beast I mean We get an email every day, and there's a born-on date to it, and that date tells you whether or not you can use your water. And so we are at the mercy of the state and how a lot of reservoirs further south of us are in terms of storage and fill, and also Kansas as well because water flows downstream, and when Kansas demands it, they get it in priority. So being at the headwaters, we can see all of this beautiful runoff But some days we are forced to run it off. Just watch it go. Just watch, say goodbye. Yep. So yeah, we do hay. The other thing that we do on this farm is hydroelectricity. We've got two hydro power plants that we have what's called a non-consumptive right on. So we can run our creek water through those power plants and then it can go into the river and on down to, you know, wherever it needs to go. So that's kind of a piece to the property too you know I think all farmers are trying to figure out how to diversify their income and we produce the equivalent of about 30 average homes in terms of energy use and we don't obviously use that much energy but we sell it back to the grid and you know we've had some kind of ideas here and there about what else to do with it maybe we channel it into a bigger greenhouse operation. When we bought the property nine years ago, we were getting good money for it, about seven cents on the kilowatt. And it amounted to about $20,000 a year. So it was quite a, I would say, mildly passive income. I mean, the thing breaks all the time. But now, because, and this is a good thing, because renewable energy is easier to get. That $0.07 dropped to about $0.01. And so we lost that nest egg of funding. We still produce the exact same amount of energy. Our local co-op charges us $0.15 a kilowatt for it. They give us one. So projects like this, we're trying to figure out Is there a win-win in something
Speaker 01:like
Speaker 03:that? Is there a
Speaker 01:way to use it on your farm?
Speaker 03:Yes. So partnering with other farmers, you know, the fruit and veggie guy that I was talking about that runs the CSA, he would love to have more hothouses to be able to do his thing and expand and develop. Because as I said, the growing season is just terrible out here. And the soils are terrible too.
Speaker 00:You also mentioned watching water, and I know you're doing a lot of different projects on your site. What are some of the things you're working on that helps you be more efficient with water use?
Speaker 03:Yeah, well, I can tell you the guy we bought from, his name was Franklin, and Franklin had been here for 50 years. He bought the place at 450 acres and slowly subdivided. He was a builder. and an engineer. His dad had invented all kinds of farming implements when he was a kid back in Texas. So, I mean, this guy could do just about anything, probably at about 10 years old. So one of the amazing things that he did was he put all of our water in pipe all the way to the head gates. Now, what that means is that we have seven miles of underground pipe that run five feet deep underground. all the way through the forests. We butt up to the national forest. And then they meet the creeks that we have our water rights on. And so I think Franklin is the guy to thank for water efficiency. I mean, there is zero infiltration into the soil. It's virtually, well, fairly a friction-free system. It's just running down through PVC pipe. And there's no evaporation. And so... You know, if we have four cubic feet per second of water starting at the head gate five miles away, we're one of the few farms in the valley that's actually getting all of that water once it hits the farm. Everybody else is in an open ditch and they're less than 50% of their take. So I guess from an efficiency system, what that means is we have the ability to take more water I think the criticism comes into play with Franklin because in doing that, sure, his farm got more water, but all the creeks that ran through the forest are now underground. So, yeah, I always talk about efficiencies, conservation, and preservation, too, but I feel like... The efficiencies began with Franklin putting seven miles of underground pipe, and nobody would do that today. It would cost millions and millions of dollars. But it was an NRCS program that he somehow finagled his way into also being the general contractor on it. I don't think it works that way anymore. Paperwork in the 70s was, you know. You added proposition, you know. But it all comes down to our farm. And from there, we've got about 50 acres that are pivot irrigated. We recently upgraded those pivots. They were over 70 years old. This is another testament to Franklin for being able to keep everything alive forever. But in upgrading with that NRCS grant, we're using far less water than what those 70-year-old pivots were doing. Everything's metered, and gosh, it works so much better. I mean, we do have about 20 acres of gated pipe, but I can tell you just from working the fields, I mean, I can irrigate 50 acres of land specifically more efficiently than I can two acres of gated pipe. And I think anybody who knows farming knows that those inventions have been life-changing. Except for when the filters break seven miles up and you've got fish shooting out of your sprinklers.
Speaker 02:Ouch.
Speaker 03:You've got to deal with these things. It's fun. It's fun. I fail every day, but I'll tell you what, it builds character. And I have a seven-year-old and a four-year-old, and they're out there with me going, Dad, isn't this dangerous? I usually say, no, it happens about a dozen times a year. It's okay. We're going to figure it out.
Speaker 00:Nice. Well, you mentioned specifically a Western Sare grant. And it is related to what you're trying to do as far as building soils. So tell us a little bit about that work and how is that turning out for you?
Speaker 03:Yeah, this has been a grant that began from the STAR program. And then our conservancy said, hey, I know a lady who got a SARE grant and she's loving it. You want to give it a go? And I said, absolutely. Absolutely. Tell me what to do. And together we wrote the grants and we are in year three now of SARE grants. And what it amounts to is building large, no churn compost piles, everything on site. So we're not talking about fancy fertilizers. We're talking about just kind of going back to your old roots of wood chips, you know, layers of wood chips. We use Aspen up here or Cottonwood up here. Followed by manure. We've got plenty of it. And then followed by hay. And I've got two piles going. Both of them are about 20 yards long and about 10 feet wide and about 8 to 10 feet tall. One of them is that layered system that I was talking about. A soil scientist out of New Zealand, she does a lot of consulting up in Montana. Nicole Masters is her
Speaker 02:name.
Speaker 03:And I met Nicole at a conservancy event and just kind of picked her brain on how do they do it in Montana? God, that seems like a terrible place to farm. And she just said, I'll tell you what, they all make about $20,000 to $30,000 just turning out compost. And I just said, well, tell me how it's done. And she just said, well, here's the easiest one. You don't even have to turn this thing. And what it is is a high fungal compost that you really just let sit every day. And you keep it at a certain moisture, about 70% moisture. And that's basically grabbing a handful and squeezing it. Maybe a little bit drops out, a little liquid drops out. So you're watering it daily. But then in Montana and in Colorado, there comes a time where everything freezes over for five months. And you just bundle it up under a whole bunch of hay. You introduce worms after that thermophilic phase, which is about two weeks into it. And surprisingly, the last two years when I've uncovered my piles, man, these worms are just thriving. And the black... compost that you produce from this. Oh my gosh, it's amazing compared to what goes in, which is usually dry as a bone and I'm watering it for weeks and weeks and weeks just to get it to that 70% moisture. But it has been a game changer and it's actually, for me, replaced all synthetic fertilizer on my farm. Typically what I do is I turn this compost into a liquid and just by placing it in a giant vat with a bubbler, and I bubble it for about four hours. And after I bubble it, I feed it into a sprayer, filter and feed it into a sprayer, kind of like making a tea. And I'm either spraying off my truck and tractor, or I'm injecting into the pivots. And year one, I think I mentioned this to you, Steve, terrible, terrible yields. I mean... I was doing synthetic side by side with the organic compost and synthetic was grown five times the rate of what the organic was. But I've kept at it. Now I'm in year three and just applying onto the fields now because, of course, temperatures of the soil are just hitting 55 degrees here in June. Yeah. But I am extremely hopeful based on last year's results of yields. Last year was one of my best yields yet. So what I've learned is, and I know other people that are doing this in the San Luis Valley, is there is a bit of a lag time. That first year, they didn't see any results either. But year two, three, and four, they're starting to see their fields catch up to what was happening synthetically. So yeah, my quest to get off synthetic fertilizers, It began the year COVID hit when fertilizer prices went through the roof. And that's when I started my STAR soil program. And so I am in year four now of the STAR program, and this will be year three of the SARE. And yeah, I know the grant sort of expires at the end of this year, but I plan on continuing these practices as long as I can. I mean, it's virtually free where I was having fertilizer bills of, you know, $7,000 a year.
Speaker 01:How did your piles over winter this year? Did they get through without freezing over? Yeah. So
Speaker 03:year one, I had some freeze in that pile that wasn't southern facing as much. Year two, they did not freeze. And one of the things I did was I... Right. Right. Right. Which is pretty amazing. And that is another side hustle there, too, figuring out how to sell the worms and the
Speaker 01:vermicompost. That was going to be my next question. Are you seeing a market for that yet, other than what you're using on your own farm? Are your neighbors interested? Are you finding some way to monetize it?
Speaker 03:Absolutely. The worms, I'm selling them. I'm an elementary school teacher. Kids love nothing more than worms, right? Right. So I do all these activities in class that are tied to farming and soil and plants. And, you know, the kids go home and they tell their parents, oh, I got to play with these worms. And so that component of education that is, you know, paramount in the SARE grants too, has also led to this, I wouldn't call it an industry yet, But I would say a little bit of a side income on selling the worms. Now, as far as selling the compost, most of what I've done so far is just give it away to test. I feel like two years in, though I'm getting some good soil samples and compost readings and fungal growth looks great and ratios look great. I want to continue to trial it on my farm. I don't want to sell somebody a phony product. So that cohort of four that I mentioned to you, I'll bring it over to them in my trailer and dump them off a big old pile so they can do their own tests with their fruit and veggies and in certain areas to check out growth. And once I can see that, yeah, I do have a good product, then yes, the hope is that I am selling these piles because I'm making a lot more than I need on my farm. When you do the liquifying, a little goes a long way. So that's been my main application. I've also applied just the raw compost in little 20 foot by 20 foot squares that I'm monitoring too. So far, I haven't seen any super significant differences in those spaces. But again, maybe there's a lag year. I just started doing it last year, so maybe this year I'll see something dramatic. Time will tell. Like I said, it's a 50-year project.
Speaker 01:It's a
Speaker 03:long
Speaker 01:game. Are your neighbors liquefying it when they apply, or are they spreading it? It's up to
Speaker 03:them. I
Speaker 01:sell it to
Speaker 03:them in little five-gallon buckets that they come and pick up. A five-gallon bucket, that's about 30 pounds worth. That can produce you about 100 gallons. if you're doing it on a scale, grand scale. So they just keep a bucket in their garage and they put it on their smaller fields. Now with the bigger farm fields, I'll bring my dump trailer over and dump them more masses. And they're liquefying. Okay. Yeah, and that's what most people in the San Luis Valley are doing, too. Most of them all have the injectors right into their pivots. Into the pivots, yeah. It's just pretty slick as long as you are able to filter out the gunk.
Speaker 00:Well, and you love education. I know you've got a video series. I did. How did you choose to do the video series, and how's that going?
Speaker 03:Yeah, so I've got a couple of friends who are YouTube sensations, and... I'm still not set on the YouTube world, but I'll tell you what, it has been an education for me being two hours away from any kind of big city. So I am definitely somebody who's learned how to farm and fix tractors from the 40s and 60s that I'm still using by getting on YouTube and finding the right guy. And so I thought I would piece together these little YouTube video clips and I did that on year one, did a couple edits on year two. And then here over the next four months, my plan is to take those little clips. Some of them are one to three minutes long, which I actually prefer watching the quick video, but I'm going to blend them all together to kind of tell the story of the two and a half year Sarah project and what I've learned. And then I'll also embed diagrams and visuals. And I hope that, you know, people like me are getting on and finding them. Because like I said, it is a huge help. You know, before I started the Sarah Grant, I was all over YouTube watching people compost and, you know, making compost in North Carolina where it's 90% humidity is a little different than making compost here where it's 10% humidity. And so, you know, understanding that and taking those videos with a grain of salt or being able to be flexible with your recipe is really important to your success.
Speaker 00:I did have one question. You've mentioned the STAR project quite a few times, and I am familiar with it, but could you briefly describe what the STAR program or project is in Colorado? Yeah, so STAR...
Speaker 03:I got connected through STAR through our Central Colorado Conservancy. And they were picking about seven farmers to join in the program. It is tied to, I believe, NRCS grant funding. And basically, you form an experiment and you trial that experiment on your field and you make a three-year commitment to it. You have a cohort. That cohort meets virtually every Or they meet together, depending on how far away y'all live. And you're just consistently bouncing ideas off of each other. And so my cohort of seven, I still stay really close to three of those. They live within a 15-mile distance of our farm. And, you know, I'm trying things that they tried out. You know, whether that's planting radishes to help impacted soil. It's just one of these things. I'm lugging my compost up to a friend's farm there in Leadville to try it out too. So I feel like what it has done is just connected me with a whole other world of people who are willing to try new things. That's what I was going for. And yeah, I'm just looking for that next thread to pull. But that's where I started, and it was very low stakes. Your project was yours to pick, and my project had to do with also the fertilizers, trying to get off those synthetics. And so that kick-started this SARE idea of growing my own. I was going down to a guy's farm in the San Luis Valley and buying compost, and it was an eight-hour round trip, and lugging it out. And I wasn't sure if this stuff was just dirt from the ground or if it was legit and doing it myself has empowered me to DIY, do it myself, but also saved me $5,000. And so that self-sufficiency is, well, it's at a whole new level once I started being connected with these formalized programs. Great, thank you. Again, not to say that my neighbors don't know what they're doing, because I do think they do, but it's also been fun to watch them ask me more questions and come over to my farm and take a look too, because my first five years of farming, I was living over at their farms going, wait, what does this thing do?
Speaker 01:You mentioned at the beginning, and I'm going to circle back, to something you just said. You mentioned at the beginning that like you fail every day, but then you're just talking about learning to be self-sufficient, which is going to require failure. I mean, that's sort of the, if you're going to try something new, you're going to learn things and you're going to learn what doesn't work more than, you know, what does. For somebody else who's just getting into farming, how do you let them know that this is the process? This is how it's going to be, you know, and staying afloat while you do it.
Speaker 03:Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it was a blessing that we bought a farm from a guy who lived here for 50 years who tried not to replace a thing. He tried to fix it all. And I shadowed him for about two months prior to buying the place. And I just said, you got to show me how to do everything. I am going to break my phone out and videotape you every minute. And, you know, this is how I'm going to learn. I'm going to go back and I'm going to watch the videos. And in doing that, you know, that was a head start. But still, every day I lose. Every day I fail. But, you know, I've been telling my students that for 20 years. It's all a process. And the stakes may be higher on your farm when you're working with heavy equipment. But you just move slow. You learn from what you did. Even today, I mean... irrigating with my gated pipe, I learned a better way to irrigate my field. Nine years later, and it saved me three hours. I've been burning three hours at the daylight for the last nine years doing it wrong. And I wish that Franklin was still around. He passed away a few years ago, but he would come up and visit a couple times a year. And I just have this list of, you know, a hundred things I had to ask him because It is time that makes you more efficient. You know, as a teacher and being mentors to younger teachers, I just said, man, the first three years, we all stink. Like, you're going to figure it out. You're going to put a lot of time in and you're going to figure it out and how to do it well. But anytime you do something new, you're just not going to be good at it. Right. You know, I always tell the kids, if you are, holy moly, maybe you found your career path. Right. But you can still be even better at it. And that's what farming tells me every day. Whether it's a four by four foot patch of grass that for some reason isn't working, you know, or if it's a hundred thousand dollar pivot sprinkler that broke on you. For some reason it isn't working. Yes. Yes. Well, because I learned how to fix the 70-year-old one for nine years, I now know how to operate and fix the new one, you know, five times as fast. So, yeah, it can be stressful. Farming can be lonely, especially during those times. And what I would say is I talked about my cohort that kind of fired up and got stronger and stronger during the SARE grant. Like during those times where I used to cry those first five years in a field alone, I send those guys a text message and we commiserate, you know, and we kind of brainstorm through it. Or at the very worst, at the end of the day, maybe we meet up for a beer or a coffee and we laugh about it. I think that's how you get through life.
Unknown:Yep.
Speaker 00:I really appreciate your taking time and talking us through. I really enjoyed hearing about how you're all learning together and how your emphasis on the education, the self-sufficiency, sounds like you're doing great work and learning every day. And I think that's a lot of good advice to remind people that it takes a while to get there and there's going to be failures and you're learning and it's going to work out. So
Speaker 03:thank you. It's an awesome experience. There you go.
Speaker 00:Well, thanks for joining us today. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 03:For sure. Thank you, guys. Thanks, Rick. Appreciate it. Absolutely.
Speaker 01:Thank you. Okay. Bye.
Speaker 00:Thank you for listening to Fresh Growth. We hope you enjoyed this episode. For more information on Western SARE Grounds and our learning resources, visit westernsare.org.
