“We do so many different things here on our farm, I always tell people that even though I’m nearing 50 years in this field I still learn something new every day.”

— Jim Hershey, No-Tiller & President, Pennsylvania No-Till Alliance, Elizabethtown, Pa.

In today’s episode of the podcast, come along on the road with Cover Crop Strategies Associate Editor, Mackane Vogel, as he travels across parts of Maryland and Pennsylvania to visit 3 different farmers who are working with cover crops in unique ways. The first stop will take listeners to Jim Hershey’s farm in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. Hershey has been no-tilling for nearly 50 years and planting cover crops for more than 20 years. Buckle up and enjoy the tour through Maryland and Pennsylvania as 3 great farmers share their stories during this brand new Cover Crop Strategies Podcast series.

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Full Transcript

Welcome to the Cover Crop Strategies Podcast. I'm Mackane Vogel, Associate Editor of Cover Crop Strategies. In today's episode, come along on the road with me as I travel across parts of Maryland and Pennsylvania to visit three different farmers who are working with cover crops in unique ways. Our first stop will take us to Jim Hershey's Farm in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. But first let's hop in the car and get ready for the day ahead. Good morning from sunny Baltimore City, Maryland. This is Mackane Vogel, Associate Editor with Cover Crop Strategies, and I'm coming to you from my hometown of Baltimore where I am about to embark on a series of three farm visits, first of which is going to take me to Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania this morning. It is just after 8:00 AM on a sunny Friday. I'm already feeling a little hot. I'm obviously accustomed to our breezy lovely summer weather that we have in Milwaukee and it's hot and humid here in Baltimore, so we'll get acquainted quickly and we'll blast some AC here on my drive.

But excited for this first visit. We're going to be checking out Jim Hershey's farm. Like I said, Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. Jim, as many of you probably already know, has been no-tilling for over 30 years, has been extensively planting cover crops for more than 20 years now, and we've had some coverage on Jim in No-Till Farmer magazines in the past, but it's been a few years and I think it's time to see what he's up to. So excited to see what's going on for his 2025 growing season out there. We're expected to get a little bit of rain this afternoon, so hoping to get out there and spend some time with him outdoors and on the farm before that comes in and hits us, so hopefully we'll have some good luck there. Jim is also in the midst of planning a big event. He's part of the Pennsylvania No-Till Alliance and they've got some big stuff coming up this summer, so I believe there's an event in July.

I'm excited to hear some more about that from him as well and see what kind of community outreach is going on. One of the really interesting things that I learned last year, for those of you who may not know it, I did a similar thing last year where I came to the East Coast, spent some time in my hometown, Baltimore, and visited a few farms across Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and coming from most of my agricultural background is the last few years covering the Corn Belt, and it's just a world of difference out here is what I've learned so far.

Anytime you're near the Chesapeake Bay watershed, you have to be so cognizant of the farm practices that you're practicing on your farm and I was actually just reminded of this when I was in Ohio last week on the legendary Dave Brandt's farm, had a chance to talk to his grandson, Chris, and Chris was just telling me that his goal in Ohio and for the Corn Belt is to try and get farmers to adopt practices like cover crops, no-till because they want to and because they can and because it's a good responsible way of farming that ultimately can help your bottom line.

Now over here in Maryland and nearby a lot of these farmers are actually forced to adopt those practices for governmental reasons to protect places like the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. I believe there is a nutrient management program that people that live near where Jim Hershey lives have to abide by. So we'll find out some more details on that when I get out there as well. But just kind of a unique agricultural area, having to be so aware of different bodies of water, different regulations. And last year too, I visited... One of the farmers I saw was Jay Baxter in Delaware, and he said the exact same thing, just that what some of these farmers are having to do now in these parts are right around the corner for Midwest Corn Belt farmers is what he believes and what a lot of others believe is it's coming.

So if you're in the Corn Belt, maybe your hand isn't being forced yet, but no better time than now to start learning how to plant covers and get them into your system. So I'll shut up and we'll get on the road here and in a minute we'll have Jim Hershey here and we'll find out some more about what he's doing. So here we go. I should be at the farm in about says an hour and 40 minutes. I've got about 80 miles, so off we go.

So it's a family operation. Our son and daughter-in-law, along with my wife. Well, our son came into the business about 12 years ago, but prior to that it was my wife and I. started back in 1979 and we started out as a dairy operation. We milk cows for the first 10 years. I grew up on a dairy farm in Eastern Lancaster County. This here particular farm was where my wife was born and raised. We brought the dairy from my father's farm here and milked for 10 years, and after 10 years we decided that the operation needed some major improvements. So at that point we were faced with some high interest rates and borrowing money and we looked at some other options. That's when we got into broilers. When you come into drive there, you saw the chicken barns there. So we raise about one and three-quarter million broiler chickens a year, so people need to keep eating chicken, but that's been good.

We started out much smaller than we are today. As 10 years ago we expanded the operation, the poultry operation, and included two more broiler barns. So we are at the max as far as our management options, we do in addition to my son, my wife and daughter-in-law, we have three full-time employees, the one or we have two that manage the poultry operation. Then we also have a 3,200 head hog finishing unit in the adjoining farm, and I can show you that when we drive around. Usually two groups a year, about 6,400, 6,500 head a year we market there. It's a wean of finish operation. With all that, then we do the crop farming.

I've been no tilling for 30, 37 years, I believe now, started that journey when we still had the dairy, dabbled in a little bit and at that point in time there wasn't the resources that we have today, like No-Till Farmer and all the other conservation groups. I am president of the Pennsylvania No-Till Alliance, which we'll be talking about a little later I guess. So we raise corn, soybeans, wheat, and barley, and I like to add cover crops because cover crop is... I feel it's a cash crop for me even though I don't harvest it. What it's doing for the soil is just... I've seen tremendous improvement in soil profile, the soil health and water infiltration and the list goes on.

Yeah, something I learned last year when I did my couple of East Coast farm visits, I visited Delaware and a couple farms in Maryland, Pennsylvania because of the Chesapeake Bay and just some of those other watershed areas, it seems like cover crops have really become almost kind of mandatory for a lot of farmers in those areas. But I mean from an erosion standpoint, it seems crucial for this area.

And when I started, well, then I've been cover cropping for 27, 28 years now, and planting green like 17 of those years, or maybe even in 20, I lose track it anymore. But originally for me the cover crop thing was erosion along with the no-till. It was just another way of managing your soils to help hold water, help hold soil from running off. Little did we know back then how much benefit the cover crops were doing for everything underneath the soil that we didn't see or we didn't monitor or we didn't know what was going on down there and we still don't know everything. We're learning new things all the time about how carbon sequestration, well, that you didn't hear a decade ago. I mean now it's new things evolving all the time, and so every acre of our crop land will get covered with some either multi-species cover crop or just a single cereal grain or something like that.

How many total acres are you running for crop?

So we're running at about 500 acres here that we own. We do have a custom crop management service that we provide for area farmers that still want to have their hands in it. They still want to take some risk other than just us writing a cash [inaudible 00:11:43] check. They better understand what the cost of production are, but going right to the point with them, I tell them we want to manage this ground the way that we manage our own. If you asked me to come in and do some tillage work or not to plant cover crop, not to no-till, then it'd be best you look for someone else because I don't want my name on Jim Hershey Farms is managing my ground. And then you just see things that you don't want to see.

And so it's been very encouraging because now we've been doing that enough of years that the farmers that we do manage, they're saying, "I can see a difference in my soil. I don't see as much water ponding in the fields. I don't see as much weed pressure." And I explained to them that we're reducing our herbicide by about 50% of the recommended rate and still getting good weed control. And they're seeing that and they're appreciative of our encouragement and our knowledge in order to help save them some money, but not that as much as just see improved soil.

I'm curious what your nutrient management system looks like out here, and is there certain regulations that you kind of have to abide by for this area when it comes to that?

Yeah, yeah. So we are considered a large CAFO and that is a lot has to do with the amount of animal units that we have on the farm. And so we're required obviously to have a nutrient management plan. And so that's typically a three-year plan. In fact, we just got done updating the system or updating the plan. We'll start in 2026. So managing manure applications, that's the biggie. Of course, nitrogen rates need to be monitored. [inaudible 00:14:35] levels is a big thing. And we have in the last five years, we also hire Rosetree Consulting that does all our soil testing and helps build a program each year. And they have been monitoring the last more than five, but we would have a chart that indicates that our phosphorus levels are decreasing. And so that's encouraging to see the things that we're doing is being effective and the lines go in the right direction.

Now are you guys grazing any acres these days or no?

No. We do have seven head of beef animals that we are grazing on five acres. So it's not really a grazing program. I keep thinking about it. I mean it's just in the last three years that we started, we've fenced an area and we do controlled grazing in that area. So we like to say they're grass-fed and grain-fed, but to do a large area, like I'm thinking of his name, Jimmy Emmons from Oklahoma, I'm not there yet, although we talk about we have the wedding venue here and the barn and the way the topography of the land is, we say, "It'd be really cool to just graze some mama cows or something out there and have some small calves in the spring and the wedding guests, they go crazy over that kind of stuff." But it might happen someday, but I'm actually getting the point where I'm sort of shifting maybe some of my responsibilities to the younger generation.

But that doesn't mean that I'm sitting back and just watching everything happen, I'm involved in the State Conservation Commission Board, so I've been given time to that. I've been given time to obviously the No-Till Alliance. It seems as though that the times continue, the availability or the option to give more time to that is more than enough. And then also another project that I'm involved in looking at the possibility of establishing a regenerative ag research farm here in Pennsylvania. And so it's a little early to talk much about the details, but been working on that with a group of like-minded individuals for two years this month and we're hoping that we can soon make an announcement.

Very exciting. We'll stay tuned. We'll have to circle back on that with you. You mentioned you have some research plots here too, so tell me a little bit about what you guys are looking into on your land.

We do research every... I mean, we do side-by-side comparisons every year. Plus in addition to that, then Penn State also does some different research that they want to do on large-scale research on farms, nitrogen rates, cover crops, different things like that. So one of the things that has been ongoing for several years is we're evaluating the heavy cover crop, multi-species cover crop, letting it grow, planting into green living cover. We have a Dawn ZRX roller on our corn planter that we'll use on every acre that we have cover crop to plant or green living cover.

So what we've been doing there is that we're experimenting with three different stages of planting. One obviously would be the lush heavy green cover crop. Then we have one that we would burn down ahead of planting. So you still have cover there, but it's brown. And then we'd have one that we would even terminate earlier than that and just watching a number of things, pulling soil samples in each one during the growing season, measuring temperature of the soil in the summertime, say we get into July and we have some 90 degree weather, measuring that, measuring soil moisture and then of course yield.

And we're finding that every year is different because the weather conditions change from year to year. We also evaluate the stands because of the heavy green cover. Sometimes we felt that we weren't getting quite the stand of corn because of shading. So we take a look at that too as well. And then we do in the wheat, we do fungicide side-by-sides, fungicide versus no fungicide. This year I have to ask Brian, Brian Zimmerman, who is pretty much on the heels of what I've established over the years in the cropping production here, and he's doing an excellent job, so I'm letting him take the lead on some of that. But I think he might've turned chicken this year because we had so much wet weather over the time that we needed to spray fungicide and there's still disease out there. And then we're trying something in soybeans this year that we never did before, and that's a 30 inch no-till soybeans versus 7 inch soybeans or 15 inch. 15 inch.

We didn't plant any 7.5, 15 inch beans versus 30 inch beans. And we want to there again, look for any disease that comes on late in the maturity and then of course weeds and [inaudible 00:22:40]. And then we have a plot that is going to be in corn. We're going to make it available to the crowd that comes for the summer field day this year that there is several different management practices in that and nitrogen application. We've been down the whole road of variable rate nitrogen application. Penn State has done several tests here, researches where they go from zero on up to 200 pounds or whatever and increments in between and measure what is the economic threshold. And so we do that somewhat, but not on the scale that Penn State does. I mean, we've been in not only our farm, but even with the No-Till Alliance, a lot of the board members have partnered with Penn State on research and it's been a very good relationship.

You mentioned Dawn earlier. I'm curious, what other pieces of equipment would you say are kind of crucial to your guys' operation? What's I guess, one or two pieces of equipment that you guys couldn't live without?

Well, I would just say our planting equipment is just our top priority. We don't have any tillage equipment, but some of our Case IH planter, which isn't here right now, we're at another customer with it. We had the Case IH T500 drill here that we plant all our soybeans and small grain and cover crop with, but on the corn planter think is even corn seems as though it wants to have the right conditions for planting. So when we started out the planting green, we just used a Brillion cultipacker and that worked for two years, but felt that we needed something a little bit better. Then we had put precision meters on this planter that didn't have it on the hydraulic down pressure so we can regulate the pressure on the planter unit, those kind of things. Another big thing that we've played with for many years was nutrient placement.

We've done the incorporation route on the corn planter for a number of years and got rid of that because it was actually running another colter through alongside the row, which we didn't like. Probably the one that we've been with the longest now is that we're putting dual nitrogen placement on either side of the row on top or right behind the press wheel. We're not incorporating it. We're putting it on top and feel that we've been getting good benefit from that. I mean, with the cover crops, we feel like we like to get more of our nitrogen on up front at planting time. Originally we were doing more of it on the side dress pass, but felt that we were always behind the eight-ball. We could never catch up to the growth of it. By the time we thought it was time to side the corner ready was lacking something. So it took a while for it to get down into the root system.

We did nitrogen incorporation side dress for many years, two years ago after doing side-by-sides, incorporating it versus dribbling it on. We could not see any difference. And so we said, "Why we can do it faster with our high boy sprayer than we can a 12-row unit." The other thing that we felt we gave a fair chance at was doing cover crop interseeding. We actually back there on... There's pictures of units that we built. We actually have manufactured some and sold them several units, went up New York State, Minnesota, Indiana, Maine.

But out of all the work we've done here and we think it's a geographic area, we've just struggled to get any benefit out of it. We could get a good stand. It would come up, look really good in August and come harvest, it was gone. We did all the experimenting with herbicides. We were down that route. We actually did some 60-inch corn and there we got more cover crop, but we couldn't offset the loss in yield in corn. So we've done so many different things here and I tell people, "Even though I'm nearing 50 years in this business, I still don't think I've figured it out."

Well, that's it for this episode of the Cover Crop Strategies Podcast. We'll pick up with more of this interview next time, so be sure to look out for part two to hear how the rest of the visit with Jim Hershey went and to see where we're headed for our second farmer visit of the trip. A reminder that a transcript of the episode and our archive of previous podcast episodes are both available at covercropstrategies.com/podcasts. For our entire staff here at Cover Crop Strategies, I'm McCain Vogel, thanks for listening and have a great day.