Farming on the contour in the south metro

In 1928, on the cusp of the Depression, a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) soil scientist warned that soil erosion was a “national menace.” Millions of tons of topsoil were being lost each year to wind and water erosion.

In the intervening years, farmers and consumers have certainly become more aware of the menace that erosion poses. Yet this awareness by itself hasn’t solved the problem.

In Carver, Dakota, and Scott counties in the Twin Cities metro region, as elsewhere, most farmers currently practice large-scale methods suited to make a living from the land if not conserve the land. Farming more land with larger equipment, that is, does not conserve soil and water the way that smaller-scale equipment does and such conservation practices as contour farming, stripcropping, and waterway creation.

But contour farming, a proven way to control erosion and increase productivity, has fallen out of favor in recent years for several reasons.

For one thing, farms have gotten larger over the years, equipment has gotten larger, and profits seem just as tight as they’ve ever been. So farmers tend to use huge machines to cover as many acres as possible as quickly as they can.

Also, because fewer farmers raise dairy and beef cows, farmers don’t need to stripcrop — that is, alternate strips of grasses (like alfalfa) and small grains (like oats) grown for their animals, with row crops like corn and bean.

Yet it’s small-scale and, apparently, old-time conservation practices that best stave off erosion and increase productivity.

Contour farming, which founding father Thomas Jefferson used at Monticello, involves tilling and/or planting in contours with the lay of the land, not straight up and down an incline; this contouring makes earth dams out of every row, and so slows down the flow of water into waterways and allows it to infiltrate into the earth and be stored. When soil rushes into streams, it pollutes the water with sediment as well as the pesticides and fertilizers it carries. It thus threatens aquatic life and human enjoyment of waterways also.

The Kelzer, Ratzlaff, and Chamberlain farms
Among contour farmers in the Carver, Dakota, and Scott counties are Clarence Kelzer, 82, who farms 300 acres outside Chaska, in Carver County, and learned contour farming during World War II and has been doing it ever since, now with his son Steve; Quentin Ratzlaff, 68, in the Belle Plaine area of Scott County, who farms 185 acres; and, in Dakota County’s hill country, near the Mississippi River and Hastings, Kevin Chamberlain, 50, who farms 265 acres.

All of these men speak about their love of the land. Yes, contour farming may take longer than running huge tractors “fence to fence,” as Kelzer puts it; and it sometimes, even now, draws curiosity and criticism from other producers. Ratzlaff says other farmers “laugh at the way I farm because they think it’s so old-fashioned. All they think of is corn and beans; they want to drop that sixty-foot-wide planter and just go uphill, downhill. And if they have gullies, they plow ‘em shut and work right through them till they wash out again the next year.”

Chamberlain, for his part, attests to the beauty of his rolling hills and the crops they bear — corn, alfalfa, and barley (the small grain, in his mix), all of which he feeds to his 110 dairy cows. His farm, he says, has been in the family since 1854 and his father started contour strips in the 1940s.

Erosion control practices
As an alternative to contouring, some farmers address erosion by planting “grassy waterways.” If water is cutting fissures into hilly fields, farmers can enlist the aid of their local Soil and Water Conservation District (SWCD), a branch of the USDA, which will help them lay out the troublesome area and seed it with grasses.

Brad Becker, with the Dakota County SWCD, says they “put in from 10 to 30 erosion control practices a summer, including waterways. Farmers come to us to do the survey of the land and design the practice, and we provide cost sharing in most instances, paying 65 to 75 percent of the cost of the bulldozer to come out there and do the earth work, and pay for a portion of putting the seed in the ground.”

The next time you glance out your car window and see beautifully contoured strips, or grassy waterways, think a bit about the extra love and effort the farmer is putting in. And the extra benefits, in productive soil and clean water, that we’re all getting out of such practices.

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Thanks to the contributions of Clarence Kelzer, Quentin Ratzlaff, and Kevin Chamberlain, the farmers with whom we talked for this article; and to Soil and Water Conservation District specialists Greg Graczyk of Carver County, Darren Carlson of Scott County, and Brad Becker and Todd Matzke of Dakota County.

For a more extensive discussion of contour farming on Clarenze Kelzer's farm in Carver county, see this related article.