Wisconsin is emerging from its warmest winter since recordkeeping began in 1895. This news underscores the fact that climate change is impacting our world.
Farmers have always dealt with the whims of weather. Now, they’re working on adaptation strategies. That includes June Burch Heffernan and her steeply-sloped 110-acre farm an hour’s drive northwest of Madison.
“Three-quarters up that hill is all mine. And then it climbs over there. Then it goes back in the valley over there,” Heffernan says.
She grew up on a dairy farm a hop, skip, and jump from here. “Actually, you could say I’m a fourth-generation farmer because of my great-grandpa, my grandpa, and my dad. We milked cows and baled hay and the whole nine yards,” she explains.
But these days, Heffernan feels compelled to manage her land with unpredictable weather in mind. She learned about a crop new to Wisconsin’s landscape.
READ Wisconsin scientist among growing movement to cultivate perennial grain, Kernza
It’s Kernza, a grain that holds promising, resilient qualities. Kernza can be grown as forage for cattle. But its grain for humans in beer brewing and in the form of flour for bread baking and pasta making. It’s a perennial, so doesn’t have to be replanted every year.
Kernza’s roots are deep and dense. So it holds up both in times of drought and when heavy rains fall.
Last autumn, Heffernan decided to dip her toes into Kernza.
“We were the very last group at the UW study to actually plant so I am a little on tenterhooks wondering if it will take,” Heffernan says.
That study is being led by Valentin Picasso, an agroecosystem sciences researcher at UW-Madison.
Picasso planted Wisconsin’s first-ever Kernza field in in 2015.
Over time, his team has worked with more than 20 farmers. Those partnerships are key in helping Picasso puzzle out, “When should we plant Kernza, what’s the density, what row spacing. What is the value of the forage? What is the value of harvesting forage on the grain production,” Picasso says.
Picasso says Kernza, a close relative of wheat, is already gaining market traction. “We really want to develop a more local network where we can provide farmers with the opportunity to process it locally and consumers in Wisconsin to consume locally-grown Kernza,” Picasso says.
Warming winters are one symptom of climate change.
Picasso envisions Kernza not as the answer but as an element of agriculture that can withstand swings in temperature and precipitation. “We need, really, a large transformation at the landscape level from the major annual crops into more perennial diverse cropping systems,” Picasso says.
A tad south and west of Madison at Meadowlark Organics, Halee and John Wepking are 10 years into growing and milling grains. Halee Wepking describes their work as channeling more regional grains into the food system.
“Our farm is 1000 acres. We grow around 350 acres of culinary grains and then we buy a lot from a lot of other farms. So, we work with about 10 other farms in the region,” Wepking says.
The Wepkings aim to grow their capacity to work with more farmers. “Our vision is to definitely grow in the mill so we can provide more opportunities to more farmers so they’re not just growing corn and soybeans, especially in this region,” Halee Wepking says.
This is the Driftless region, rich in deep valleys and high ridges. But its soils are highly susceptible to erosion, which in turn threatens its groundwater.
“That means that we need to just work really hard conserving our soil and natural resources,” Wepking says.
She says this warm winter leaves farmers feeling they should get ready to plant any time now. “So, we obviously have to do our best to observe and adapt to what’s happening,” Wepking says.
The Wepkings are growing diverse crops, rotating their fields from season to season. Still, only time will tell if warm winters signal more rain and how soils susceptible to erosion will hold up.
Ninety stunning miles to the northwest, Tucker Gretebeck’s dairy farm sits within one of the most dramatic areas of the Driftless — high above Coon Creek.
“It’s a couple hundred feet elevation drop from where we’re sitting now to the bottom of the valley. All this land is classified as HEL,” Gretebecks says. HEL means “highly erodible land.”
Six years ago, a huge storm hit the region, dropping fourteen inches of rain. “It overtopped the whole dam. So it backed up this whole valley. Forty-five feet deep,” Gretebeck says.
The impacts were mind-numbing."You could see ditches in the fields across the valley — that’s how much soil they lost," Gretebeck recalls.
He was luckier than some. A few years earlier, he had transitioned his fields to grasses for his cows to graze. Two days after the storm his fields showed no sign of the storm’s rage.
But down below, the shaded valley he relied on to cool and feed his cattle on hot summer days, "Everything was covered in sand or mud. It was halfway up the trees — the mud was. It will take a long time to heal up," he says.
Gretebeck says neighbors came together and reactivated a watershed group whose roots reach back to the 1930s.
The evidence of blossoming partnerships lines the contours of Gretebeck’s fields where, rows upon rows, 1200 trees planted by just 12 people are taking root.
"Neighbors and a couple of people from Organic Valley and the Savanna Institute brought people. Twelve hundred trees, twelve people," Gretebeck says.
The trees will provide shade for his cattle but still provide enough for his grasses to grow beneath.
Gretebeck’s trees, the Wepking’s regionally-focused grain-milling operation, and people like June Burch Heffernan cultivating deep-rooted perennial Kernza — these provide a glimpse of farmers’ determination to weather the next warming winter and everything in between.
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