Russel Hedrick: From Lightbulb Moment to Regenerative Agriculture Leader

Considered by many to be a regenerative agriculture rockstar and one of the most progressive young farmers in the country, Russel Hedrick’s journey into regenerative agriculture started in the same way as many others, with a “light bulb” moment at a field day. Since then, Russel has rapidly and aggressively educated himself and began experimenting and optimizing his operation, JRH Grain Farms, LLC, utilizing a wealth of resources including AI to increasing his knowledge of soil health and regenerative practices. Russel is always eager to help others make progress int heir own journeys as well, and has since founded SoilRegen with scientist Liz Haney, a company focused on educating farmers, ranchers, and their communities on regenerative agriculture, soil health, and offers Regeneratively Grown^TM and Regenerative Verified^TM verification. If you need some support in starting your own soil health journey, Russel is certainly capable of supplying inspiration and information.

1)   What one thing have you done that’s been most important to the success of your operation?

The one thing we've done that I think has been the most successful for our operation is that we changed the way we view other people's ideas. I don't think there's anything out there that should be considered too crazy or too far out there. I think farmers changing their mindset to look at new ideas and new ways and new innovations are one of the biggest things that help increase farmers return on investment.

2)   Can you recall a moment or time when the light bulb went on for you, when you realized that soil health practices make sense or that you should change the way you were farming?

I remember the very first time that the light bulb ever did come on, which is something I will remember for my entire farming career. Lee Holcomb got me to afield day in Stanly, NC at Curtis First Farm. They did a rainfall simulator on tilled soil, no till, and no till with cover crops. After an inch of water, they flipped it over and the pan that had been tilled had maybe two millimeters deep of water infiltration, and the rest had run off. The no till was a little bit better. But Curtis's ground where he had integrated cover crops, he had flushed through that entire pan. It was it was full profile of moisture. That right there was my moment, because I was always told that you needed tillage to get that water to infiltrate. And it was 100% the absolute opposite.

3)   What surprised you most when you changed the way you farm to include soil health practices?

I think something that surprised us was just simply looking at the economics and that we were able to reduce the inputs. When I started farming, interest rates were cheap. Now they're more than double. Farming is extremely intensively hard labor and there's a lot of work and a lot of hours that go into it, so farmers should be making the most money possible. Hearing what some farmers make on their operation versus what some of these regenerative farmers make is a really huge difference.

4)   What would you say is the biggest misconception that people have who are not managing their farming systems for resiliency or soil health?

I think the biggest misconception is how hard it is and how much more time it takes. You’re swapping out work, swapping out effort: instead of spending time in a sprayer and living in a sprayer for what most farmers call “spraying season”, we're just out scouting. And it's a lot more enjoyable to walk the field and see what we're producing and being able to pay attention to what different practices are having certain impacts. We're able to get out of the equipment more. I would say that we have a better quality of life, that I'm able to do more with my family, and actually be able to pay attention to what we're doing on the farm instead of just worrying every day about running the same piece of equipment and doing the same practices over and over again.

5)   Is there something you'd still like to do that you haven't yet done to improve your soil health on the farm?

One of the things that we would like to do to improve soil health is really pay attention more to how we build our biological communities. We've recently introduced things like metagenomic testing and there's a lot of data out there, but we're still trying to figure out, you know, how do we dial this down even further to essentially build ground to where we can continue to reduce our need for inputs.

6)   What advice do you have for someone who's considering changing their farming system to one that's better for building soil health?

I think the biggest piece of advice I would give to a farmer to change and increase their soil health and production is, don't bet the whole farm. You need to do it on a scale that’s big enough that you have to pay attention to it, but small enough that if you have a problem, that it will not bankrupt the farm. Typically, we tell farmers to start with 10 or 20%, that's big enough that you're going to pay attention. Always do check strips, even if it's something as easy as splitting half of a field. Right now, most of my tests are done on 90 ft strips, because that's where our planter and sprayer and combine all match up. But you've got to start somewhere. You can't just continue to say, we'll try it next year. It's time now. To me, the hardest part about farming is-- if you build a computer program and you test it, you can find out in a couple minutes whether your computer program works; if you try something in agriculture, you're 12 months out from having the data.

7)   When you walk across your cropland, what do you look for as an indicator of a healthy system?

We talk a lot about testing, and testing costs money. There are hundreds of ways to look at the effectiveness of your soil health practices without spending money. Take a shovel and dig for earthworms. We had a farm in 2013 that had less than 100,000 earthworms to the acre, and now we're at 3.3 million per acre in the top foot. Look for spiders. Look for beneficial insects like ladybugs --how many farmers are looking for honeybees in the parcel of their corn? We have tons of them now! There are a ton of ways to look for health implications on your farm without having to spend money. Just use your eyes and your ears.

8)   Is there a change that you’ve made that you didn’t think would work at first?

Man, there's a ton of them. A big change we made that we thought wouldn't work was reducing chemical inputs. We also changed up tons on our planter, as far as how to handle these high residue cover crops and plant the crop at the appropriate depth. And as we've seen soil structure change and soil aggregation increase, we're planting our corn probably twice as deep as most of the people do in North Carolina now. And that's been a huge, huge payoff as well.

9)   What are the signs that your cropland is resilient and what does resiliency mean to you?

I think one of the ways that our cropland has become resilient is that we've increased organic matter and water holding capacity. We’ve seen our neighbors’ corn turn into pineapple trees. That's what we call them when they start stressing and rolling, whereas we can go almost a month now without rain before we start seeing crop stress. One of the other ways we've seen resiliency is that water infiltration rate. On our first infiltration ring test, we were at a half an inch an hour. Our farm average right now is running almost 16 inches an hour. If you're only capturing a half inch of that, and the rest is running off, your ground is not resilient.

10)  In what ways do healthy soil practices also make sense to you economically?

I think our economic indications really just go back to our APH (ActualProduction History). One of the big things that I think we've been able to glean from crop insurance, is that they keep track of our yield data for use very year. We have to turn that in, and continually our APH continues to goup. We’re not putting more money into it, but we're seeing yield response going up. So, our return on investment just continues to increase most years, and the biggest indicators are things like the drought year, 2015, when our county average for corn was nine bushels and our farm average was 128. So, we see in agriculture, if you look at our yield map for the last 80 years in corn, there's really big peaks, and then there's really big troughs. And our farm has a more consistent line that continues to elevate. We’re able to map that out.

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