#183, In Practice, January/February 2019

Russ Wischover—

Rehabilitating a Farm in Iowa

BY HEATHER SMITH THOMAS

W

hen he retired from his career at the University of Illinois (as herdsman on a swine research farm, taking care of the breeding herd), Russ Wischover purchased a 120-acre farm in southwest Iowa near Bedford, right on the Missouri line in 2011. The farm was to be his retirement career as he focused on taking on a played out farm and bringing it to life with Holistic Management.

third summer—switchgrass started coming up all over the place,” he says.

“The native warm season grasses are kind of special to me. When I saw the switchgrass coming back I realized something good was happening. The environment had been changed for the better, to allow the native plants to start coming back.”

This past summer he had a botanist come out to the farm. “She specializes in prairie plants and in two days’ time, looking at just a couple very small areas on the farm, she identified more than 50 native prairie plants. That was exciting and I am really tickled about that,” he says.

Bringing Life to the Soil

“I became interested in Holistic Management after reading the Stockman Grass Farmer; that’s where I first heard about it. I started reading books about this, including Allan Savory’s book Holistic Management. Then I stumbled onto some classes that were being taught at Hastings, Nebraska so I drove over there for the formal training,” he says.

All of his farm is now in permanent pasture. When he bought it, about half of the land was crop ground and the other half was in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and it had nothing done with it for a long time. “The CRP contract expired just as I bought this place so I started grazing the whole farm,” says Russ.

He planted the crop ground with a standard pasture mix that included cool season grasses and legumes. “I’ve been rotational grazing the whole farm and trying to implement Holistic Management principles to the best of my ability, and it’s going well. Much of this ground was very ‘dead’ and had not had any animal impact for at least 25 years. It had been in CRP for that long, and before that it was crop ground—otherwise it wouldn’t have been eligible for CRP,” he says.

This last summer when Russ had a botanist to his farm she identified more than 50 native prairie plants.

“This is what sold me on Holistic Management. I came out here, walking around on this place to look at it, and found that it was mostly bare dirt. It hadn’t been touched in 25 years and wasn’t growing much at all. I got the local NRCS agent out here and he looked around and shook his head and said, ‘I don’t know what to tell you’. I got Allan Savory’s book that winter and read it, and when I got to the part where he talks about overrested ground, that was a perfect description of my farm! He could have been standing here looking at this piece of ground when he wrote that chapter. I realized this was exactly what was going on here,” says Russ.

Growing Diversity

The next summer Russ started moving cows through that “dead” pasture and now it’s coming back nicely. “It didn’t come back as quickly as I’d hoped, but there’s steady improvement. The first couple of years were frustrating, however, and just about the time I was ready to give up—the 12

Land & Livestock

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January / February 2019

Russ Wischover raises Murray Grey cattle, St. Croix sheep, and Haflinger ponies in an effort to use multi-species grazing to improve the land health and productivity on his Iowa farm.

“Everyone talks about restoring prairie and saving prairie, but I feel like we need to be able to put a value on it; you have to justify saving it, in today’s world. I am grazing my cattle and sheep on it and the plants are doing well. The tonnage isn’t as much as you could get from ‘improved’ pastures but I am seeing a lot of other benefits. My animals have stopped eating mineral since they’ve been on the prairie pasture,” he says. The pasture itself seems to be meeting their needs now.

“I tell everyone that the two people running this farm are Allan Savory and Dr. Fred Provenza. They have been the biggest influences in what I do, and I try to follow the principles I’ve learned from them. I asked Dr. Provenza if he thought that was why my cows quit eating mineral and he said it seemed to be the only possible explanation. I am very excited about what’s happening here,” says Russ.

Russ was pleased enough with his progress that he agreed to host a field day at his farm in August 2017 and that’s when the botanist was checking on the native plants in parts of the pasture. “I showed everyone from PFI (Practical Farmers of Iowa) what I was doing here and we had a good turnout, with 50 people. These pastures are not where I want them to be yet, but they are definitely going in the right direction.”

Part of Russ’s strategy is bringing nutrients onto the farm with the hay he buys, rather than removing soil nutrients with harvested crops or hay. “I don’t make any hay here because I don’t have enough acreage to do that.

I buy hay and feed it on the pasture; the hay is the only soil amendment or fertilizer that I add,” he says. The hay and livestock add the organic matter and fertilizer needed for improving the soil.

“I haven’t been very good about taking soil tests or documenting the improvement but a person can walk around and look at the pastures and see that there’s a lot more life out there now. There’s less bare ground