Engelbert Farms: Organic Resurrection

A Family Tradition

The Engelberts have been farm­ing for what would be, to any­one, a long time. “My great-great-grandfather came over from Germany in 1848 and started farm­ing in the Southern Tier area of New York State,” Kevin Engelbert told Organic Connections. “My sons rep­re­sent the sixth gen­er­a­tion that has been farm­ing with the Engelbert sur­name. We’ve been on our cur­rent prop­erty in Nichols now for almost a hun­dred years.”

All farms have their ups and downs, from weather, pests and numer­ous other fac­tors. But it was an inno­cent belief in the lat­est agri­cul­tural “sci­ence” that even­tu­ally brought this farm to the brink of extinction.

The Impact of “Modern” Farming

“The story starts with my dad com­ing back from Cornell University in the late 1940s,” Engelbert related. “He was always a maximized-yields type of per­son: get high pro­duc­tion out of his crop­land and high pro­duc­tion out of his dairy cows. He was the first farmer in the area to start using chemicals—herbicides, pes­ti­cides, insec­ti­cides, chem­i­cal fer­til­iz­ers and other syn­thet­ics. He was first to stop cul­ti­vat­ing his fields, and also the first to stop rotat­ing crops, which helps con­trol bugs and diseases.

“The infor­ma­tion my dad got wasn’t just com­ing from Cornell—it was in mag­a­zines and every­where at the time. If you wanted to com­pete, if you wanted to be more effi­cient, you had to grow, and to do that you had to start using these her­bi­cides. Back then they cul­ti­vated corn two rows at a time, where they could go down and through with a 20-foot-wide sprayer, mov­ing five times as fast and cov­er­ing ten times as much acreage. They could increase their acreage and accom­plish a lot more, and it was just a one-time pass; so they could go through and spray and that was it—they didn’t have to worry about it for the rest of the year.

“To start with, it was great because these soils had never been exposed to any­thing like that. They were still healthy and it took a few decades before we really began see­ing the true impact of the use of chemicals.”

When that impact was real­ized, it was a hard les­son. “I grad­u­ated from col­lege in ’79 and started look­ing things over,” Engelbert con­tin­ued. “That sum­mer we had to buy 21 bred heifers—not to expand, but to sim­ply main­tain our cow num­bers. We had reached a point where we couldn’t keep cows alive. We couldn’t grow good crops to feed them; we had vel­vetleaf, which is a weed, in our corn and we had yel­low nutsedge that took over our alfalfa fields. In the spring of 1980, I plowed 200 acres of ground and found only six earth­worms in that entire 200 acres. We just turned over hard, hard lumps of soil. The soil was dead—there was no life to it at all. The chem­i­cals had killed it. And we were see­ing the impact those same chem­i­cals had on our cows.”

In an effort to keep the cows healthy, a for­tune was being paid to vet­eri­nar­i­ans. “In 1980, we were spend­ing $1,000 a month on vet bills. In the late six­ties, a lot of health prob­lems had started in the herd, and my dad finally con­vinced the vet to sched­ule a weekly visit with­out his hav­ing to call him. He would come every Thursday morn­ing as soon as his emer­gen­cies were taken care of. While the vet was treat­ing cows—infusing their uteruses and giv­ing them hor­mone shots, try­ing to make them come in heat, and whip­ping up mas­ti­tis treat­ments because they were get­ting infec­tions all the time in their udders—his dri­ver was trim­ming cows’ feet, pop­ping abscesses and wrap­ping them. A thou­sand dol­lars a month try­ing to keep ani­mals alive—and we weren’t able to do so.

The Change

“In August of 1979, just after I had pur­chased the 21 bred heifers, I hap­pened to tell my grand­mother, at one of our gath­er­ings, that I had bor­rowed money to go buy them,” Engelbert recalled. “Just being out of col­lege, I thought that was a pretty big deal and was expect­ing a pat on the back. Instead, she looked at me kind of dis­gusted and said, ‘Huh! All I know is when your grand­fa­ther and I were run­ning the farm, we had bred heifers to sell every year. Sure made a dif­fer­ence on our bot­tom line.’

“I got think­ing about that. We had just spent $21,000 to buy 21 bred heifers. What if we had had 21 bred heifers to sell?

“I told my dad that we had to make some changes. Back then we incor­po­rated Eptam, a her­bi­cide, in any­thing that we seeded into alfalfa. I said that instead of doing that, we were going to go back to a nurse crop,¹ like they did 40 years ago, to spur our alfalfa. We did so and, lo and behold, we had a nice crop.

“The fol­low­ing year, 1981, we just quit cold turkey. We stopped using all her­bi­cides, pes­ti­cides, insec­ti­cides and chem­i­cal fer­til­iz­ers. One of the keys that allowed us to do that was a manure stor­age facil­ity my dad had built in 1975. Instead of look­ing at manure as a lia­bil­ity, we could uti­lize it and con­sider it an asset; we could store it in that manure pit and then spread it on top of our fields when we needed to. We could spread stored manure on our corn ground and plow it down, and then top-press alfalfa fields with it. That enabled our soils to start recov­er­ing their health.

Click any image above to see a larger version.

“We were able to start cut­ting down on our vet­eri­nar­ian vis­its. We went from hav­ing them come every week, to every other week, to once a month, to just com­ing on an as-needed basis. By 1987, I had got­ten enough con­fi­dence in the actions we were tak­ing that I knew what we were doing was right. Now we don’t have a vet on our farm except to dehorn calves and cas­trate any bulls that we’re going to raise as steers. We haven’t had a vet to treat a sick ani­mal in close to 15 years now. There was an absolutely direct cor­re­la­tion between the health of our cows and the health of our soil.”

Engelbert was so cer­tain in 1987 that they sold all of their spray­ing equip­ment, and they never looked back. The changes they saw in the soil were remark­able. “In the late sev­en­ties when I would stop in the field to fix  a piece of hay­ing equip­ment, about the only insects that I would see were the ones we were try­ing to kill: potato bugs, leafhop­pers and alfalfa wee­vils. But now when we stop, we see lady­bugs, spi­ders and even toads. The life has returned to the soil. When we did tillage in the late sev­en­ties, after we had plowed the fields we would spend hours just break­ing up those big hard lumps of soil into lit­tle tiny hard lumps. We haven’t done that in over 15 years because now they sim­ply break apart—they’re mel­low; they still have life in them. The tilth has increased a lot;² the organic mat­ter has increased a lot.”

Out to Pasture

In addi­tion to the dra­matic increase in qual­ity of the ani­mal feed, Engelbert also moved his cows out to pas­ture, where they would nat­u­rally be. “The cows regained their health by the late eight­ies with no change in our facil­i­ties or prac­tices,” Engelbert said, “but we were still using the barn. In the late eight­ies we started pas­tur­ing again and saw another improve­ment in our herd health.”

Today

In addi­tion to dairy prod­ucts, the Engelberts raise sev­eral dif­fer­ent vari­eties of meat, includ­ing beef, veal and pork. All ani­mals are treated in the same humane way. The farm is cer­ti­fied organic by Vermont Organic Farmers—and on every front the Engelberts meet or exceed organic standards.

The farm is truly a fam­ily oper­a­tion. Kevin’s youngest son is a senior at Alfred University and has promised to return upon grad­u­a­tion. His older two sons have already grad­u­ated col­lege and are back. His wife does the book­keep­ing and is in charge of the retail busi­ness, and his daughter-in-law runs the farm store three days a week. His brother, retired from the sheriff’s depart­ment, helps out with field work and deliv­er­ing grain when needed. In a time when peo­ple might be leav­ing farms, it seems that every­one there is anx­ious to remain.

“It’s very unusual to have had sons come back to the farm in this day and age,” said Engelbert. “Organic is what has allowed us to be able to do that and has made them want to come back. They don’t know any­thing but farm­ing organ­i­cally; my old­est is 28 and it will be our thirty-first year next year, so they don’t know any­thing but that. They like to hear the sto­ries, but they’re glad that they’re not involved with all those chem­i­cals like I used to be.”

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1. Nurse crop: a crop planted in the same field with another crop, espe­cially to min­i­mize the growth of weeds.

2. Good tilth is a term refer­ring to soil that has the proper struc­ture and nutri­ents to grow healthy crops. Soil in good tilth is loamy, nutrient-rich soil.

For more infor­ma­tion on Engelbert Farms, visit their web­site at www.engelbertfarms.com.