Episode #77: Rick Clark
Regenerative Agriculture Podcast
AEA Marketing
4.7 • 546 Ratings
🗓️ 24 November 2021
⏱️ 90 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Rick Clark is a fifth-generation farmer from Warren County, Indiana. Driven by a desire to work alongside mother nature, Rick has been implementing regenerative practices on his farm for almost a decade. Rick's commitment to soil health has allowed him to grow his operation to 7000 organic, no-till acres, in part by employing a variety of cover cropping and weed control techniques.
In their conversation, Rick and John Kempf discuss:
- Rick's journey to a fully organic operation
- Conventional agriculture's "dependency on chemistry" and the best practices for conventional burn down
- Rick's humbling experiences experimenting with cover crops in the early days
- How planting multiple cash crops together could be the future of agriculture
- Handling foxtail and other difficult weeds through regenerative practices
- The power of diversity and rotation in a no-tillage system
- Rick's take on farm economics and how he is saving almost $1.7 million a year in inputs
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi friends, this is John and this is the regenerative agriculture podcast, |
| 0:04.0 | where we talk about agronomic science and cultural management practices that regenerate soil health, |
| 0:10.0 | that regenerate plant health, and livestock health, and human health, and very importantly, also regenerate farm profitability. |
| 0:17.0 | My guest for this episode is a farmer who's become very widely known in the last half a dozen years, and I'm delighted to have him here with me. Rick Clark. Rick, thanks for joining me. So glad to have you here in the podcast. Oh, it's an honor, John. Thank you. I can't tell you and your audience enough how much I appreciate what you've done for this industry. So keep up the good work, keep bringing |
| 0:38.4 | the good speakers and keep the word flowing. So thank you. |
| 0:42.3 | Yeah. There's a lot of farmers and people with a really great knowledge and information |
| 0:46.7 | the world that the world deserves to know more widely about. And if I can facilitate that, |
| 0:50.5 | that's really what this is all about. So Rick Rick, you've, you've become much more widely |
| 0:54.8 | known in the last half a dozen or so years. Your story is more widely known. You're doing really |
| 0:59.9 | great work. What are some of the memorable moments that really guided you in this transition, |
| 1:06.2 | going down a different pathway, beginning to farm differently? Yeah. There's quite a few of those moments that, |
| 1:12.6 | you know, you stop and say, wow, I'm glad I did this. And let me start with that right there, |
| 1:18.3 | that thought right there first, John. I am one of those people that I did not want to get to be 60 |
| 1:25.3 | years old and look back and say, you know, I wish I would have done that. |
| 1:28.8 | I was the type of guy that, you know, hey, I see something different. |
| 1:32.6 | Let's go this route and let's see if it's going to work. |
| 1:35.8 | And I'm glad I've taken that approach. |
| 1:39.0 | You know, probably the most accomplished thing that I feel I've done is transform this whole farm to organic. |
| 1:46.8 | Wow, that's hard. |
| 1:49.0 | Yeah, that's difficult when you think about weed control and everything else. |
| 1:51.9 | That's a big deal. |
| 1:53.0 | Yeah, and John, we're also doing this without tillage. |
... |
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