If you think this is a group therapy session, you’d be wrong. It’s actually a gathering of scientific researchers – conducted not just for farmers, but by farmers.
“From The Ground Up” is a five-year project that kicked off last year with a $10 million grant from the U. S. Department of Agriculture. It works in partnership with four universities in Ohio and Missouri plus a global agricultural non-profit organization.
Farmers are more likely to respond and to take seriously something that another farmer has told them.
Alex Jeffries, The Ground UP project manager
The work takes place on 27 conventional and organic farms in Ohio and 25 more in Missouri.
The idea is to put farmers in the driver’s seat to research the real-world agricultural problems they face, and to do this on their own working farms.
“Farmers are more likely to respond and to take seriously something that another farmer has told them,” said Alex Jeffries, From The Ground Up’s project manager.
“We’ve been pouring millions and millions of dollars into agricultural research, but when it’s just scientists telling farmers, or it’s just experimental plots rather than on-farm research, it misses something.”
The academics in attendance left their power points behind. Instead, they came to listen, learn and assist a small group of organic farmers who gathered recently at Woodlyn Acres, Scott Myer’s certified organic farm near Dalton in Wayne County.
“This isn’t the way it works generally,” said Douglas Jackson-Smith, an Ashland County sheep farmer who runs the Agroecosystem Management program at OSU in Wooster and serves as From The Ground Up’s project director.
“Even when people do on-farm research, usually scientists are looking for farmers to do it with them, but all the thinking came at the beginning by somebody else.”
Myer and his research partner, Scott Stoller, who runs a certified organic dairy farm in Sterling, presented some early findings from their trial. The question they’re researching is whether the top growth of cover crops should be harvested before planting corn, or just left in place.
“We do it both ways, and we’ve had success both ways, but we really want to know if it’s the right thing to do or not.”
They also want to find out if plowing some crops back into the soil is more effective than other methods to conserve the health and quality of a field.
“What keeps the farm most viable with without robbing the soil? We don’t know,” said Stoller. “That’s the kind of questions we’re hoping to get some answers for.”
The project is in its first field season. Myers and Stoller are currently applying treatments and gathering data.
These farmer scientists are also tracking labor and equipment costs associated with different management practices, and monitoring soil health indicators like microbial activity.
“I think on-farm research is the best kind of research,” said Van Slack, an agriculture resource specialist with Muskingum Soil And Water Conservation District.
“It’s different when it happens on your own farm, because one of the pushbacks I get when you’re looking from research from Penn State or Purdue on northwest Ohio. It’s like, well, it works up there, but doesn’t work down here. We’ve got different soils.”
How farmer-led research works
This approach flips traditional research methods, with farmers being the primary drivers and co-creators of the research. Local farmers first hone their ideas in brainstorming sessions with OSU agricultural experts into actionable on-the-ground trials.
“The best part to us was at every single meeting, they’d look at us and say, okay, what do you want us to do? And we got to say, I don’t know. What do you want to do?” said Jackson-Smith.
“After a long awkward silence, the ideas started flowing. It led to formalizing projects.”
Once a topic is chosen, OSU scientists provide input for farmers to set up trials on their farms that mimic scientific research as closely as possible. Scientists say they want to facilitate farmers’ ideas and support them with guidance, but not make decisions for these citizen science projects.
“This approach has more directly applicable results to the farmer, whether it’s organic or conventional,” said Osler Ortez, a corn specialist at OSU in Wooster. “Our farmer audience will be more likely to read an extension article as opposed to a scientific research paper.”
Another benefit of on-farm research is that actual working fields involve uncontrollable real-life conditions more than experimental plots that are nurtured for closely-supervised scientific studies.
Academic researchers say universities may back experiments like these that might not be done otherwise.
It’s not a perfect research model, however.
Farmer scientists emphasize the challenges of managing resources on a working farm, and recognize that experimental trials occasionally fail or fall apart due to other demands on their time. Other challenges include matching farmers with open-minded researchers.
“Some farmers, especially organic farmers, have had some bad experiences trying to work with the university and being told this isn’t the way we do things,” said Cassandra Brown, a group leader for the Ohio Organic Farm Researcher Network.
Researchers point out that the grant process is challenging when no formal scientific experiments are outlined, which makes it harder for some institutions to fund them.
“It’s not a model that’s easy. It’s not one we’re trained in,” said Jackson-Smith. “Professors don’t get paid, and grad students don’t get dissertations easily out of projects designed like this.”
But the farmer-led research model is winning over both traditional academic researchers and more local farmers.
“The questions the farmers have come up with through workshops and networking have been really exciting and engaging for the researchers,” said Denise Natoli Brooks, an agricultural extension educator with Central State University. “They’re realizing that the farmers are indeed asking researchable, deep questions.
“This network has just ballooned in size as people realize what we’re about, and that it’s a safe space to have these conversations.”
Interested farmers can explore the From The Ground Up website for more information, or
email the team at fromthegroundup@osu.edu.