TRANSCRIPT:

​

John: It's when you hear something, you're told that all the time and you're feeding the world, you're really proud of that. And you are. You are feeding the world, but you don't need to be maximizing your yields all the time. So that's why I think organic is a better avenue for a lot of these small farmers because you're producing less, but it's higher quality, and you're getting a premium for the work that goes in there that's representative and I think my non-organic farming, neighbors work just as hard as I do. But they should be getting that premium too because that's representative of the work that they're doing. And to see them get paid less but have to pay put in more, is kind of just a sad thing. And I've kind of just decided that I'm not playing that game. I'm going to do things my own way.

Peyton: At first moving here, especially older men would question what I do in the farm, like, Oh, you, you know, cooking a bunch and gardening doing that kind of thing. I would tell them my mom, the tractor, and they were definitely surprised and I think that was pretty cool and it made me feel pretty cool about myself. I don’t know a lot of women that are operating heavy equipment.

John: When I was farming non-organically by myself, it was like a struggle to get through everything and we probably needed a full time employee, but the money just wasn't there. And now there's a little more time to have someone helping that can make your life a lot easier. And all these like two person jobs, you're not that you they get done right away. And then a little bit of life comes back, and you get to enjoy your life. You know, we get a short summer here. And to not be able to enjoy it is kind of sad, you know, I love being on the tractor, but I also love doing other things. So when you have some help, and helps your mental health, and if it has you employ someone, and so you're building your community in that way.

***

Megan Torgerson (narrating): I’m Megan Torgerson and this is Reframing Rural. Today I’ll bring you with me to Tiber Ridge, an organic farm on the second highest point in Liberty County, Montana overlooking the low rising Sweetgrass Hills and the distant Highwood and Bears Paw      Mountains. Curious to see how an organic farm differed from the farm I was raised on, I went there to visit John Wicks to learn how he transitioned his family’s farm from conventional to organic production and to learn the story behind John’s decision to convert.

The dryland farm, run by John Wicks and his hired hand Peyton Cole - who you heard a moment ago - has been in the care of John’s family for three generations. It’s located in the unincorporated community of Ledger on the Hi-Line in North Central Montana. Twenty six miles south of the county seat of Chester, John and Peyton live and work in the Golden Triangle, an area held in high esteem in Montana for growing high-protein wheat.

Like John, I grew up on what is referred to as a conventional farm, which generally refers to the practice of applying fertilizer and spraying herbicides and pesticides to kill weeds and pests. Another similarity between John and I: John’s dad name was Russel John Wicks. My dad is Russell John Torgerson. Both of our dads were born in Montana in 1952 and they were great mechanics who kept disorderly shops.

I first learned of John’s farm, Tiber Ridge Organics, on a scorching August afternoon during a visit home to my family’s farm for harvest. That summer, record-breaking heatwaves swept across the West. On the plains of Eastern Montana, wheat shriveled up from drought and was grazed down by grasshoppers. At my farm I saw dozens of hawks line the furrows waiting to eat grasshoppers kicked up by combines in the field. And in some places it wasn’t worth the fuel to harvest the crop. That summer smoke creeping in from Canada and the West painted the midday sky a dull gray. At sunrise and sunset the smoke filter cast a radiant and eerie orange glow over the prairie.

It was clear the Earth was sick. And I was sick too.  Around that same time I had been diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease, an auto-immune condition where the immune system attacks the thyroid gland. It made me tired, weak and unable to eat gluten without suffering rashes. Later that year I lost nearly 40 pounds, dropping me to the same weight I was as a gangly 14 year old. That summer I came across an academic article linking exposure to glyphosate to an increased likelihood of developing a thyroid disease. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup, an herbicide my family and neighbors apply to their fields to kill weeds. My parents were careful about limiting my exposure to the toxin, which no matter where you were raised, you may have been exposed to. Food on the shelves, like Honey Nut Cheerios, has also been found to have residual glyphosate on it. But growing up surrounded by acres upon acres of crops sprayed with the chemical, I’m sure to have been exposed more than the average American.

At a time when I was looking for answers, this article naming glyphosate as a chemical that disrupts your endocrine system, gave me one story as to why I might have developed Hashimoto’s at 30. I don’t know for certain that being around farm chemicals is what caused me to develop the disease, and I’m sure there’s arguments that would refute my theory, but it provided one potential answer. And it was a hard one to consider. I love my farm and my parents who always had our health and the health of our crops and livestock in the forefront of their minds. My upbringing fostered my curiosity, work ethic and ability to think creatively. So grappling with this information while at the farm, the setting of my childhood and the backdrop of my identity, was to say the least, conflicting.

This research is what got me really curious about organic food and alternative ways of farming, which led me to stumble across John’s story. During that trip home I sought a break from the heat in our air conditioned farmhouse and came across the Montana Free Press article “Common Ground” by Emily Stifler Wolfe about John’s farm in Ledger, Montana. The story spoke to so many of the challenges I was seeing on my family’s farm and in my community.      It shared a vision for how organic and regenerative agriculture could foster drought resilience, create more jobs in rural communities and support the local food system.

For some context, USDA certified organic foods are grown and processed according to federal guidelines. To be organic they must grow in soil that has not been applied with synthetic fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides like Roundup for at least three years. Regenerative agriculture doesn't have a codified definition like organic, but broadly describes practices that improve soil health.

The regenerative techniques that John and Peyton were practicing, included rotating crops, seeding cover crop mixes and integrating livestock. According to Emily’s story, those practices were building topsoil, despite an enduring drought. This story also shared John’s personal tipping point for taking the leap to convert to organic: in 2015, he contracted chemical pneumonia caused by exposure to the herbicide Roundup. This was when I stopped reading and looked up from my computer for a moment. John’s story seemed like a potential answer to the problems I was experiencing and seeing.

I have always been aware of organic food production. Growing up I knew of a small number of farmers who farmed organically. I knew conventional farmers didn’t like when weeds from an organic field hopped the fence line and began populating in their clean furrows. And from conversations I’ve had with organic farmers outside my home community, I knew they were peeved when chemical drifted onto their field when a neighbor was spraying herbicides, sometimes compromising their organic certification. While in recent years I have sought out organic produce in the grocery store when it’s in my budget, I’ve never had much of an opinion on the subject. I’ve always believed, and still maintain the belief, that farmers are best equipped to make decisions about their unique operations. But I can’t deny, when I read about John and Peyton’s farm, the potential of organic and regenerative farms really piqued my interest. Perhaps it was something that could help farms like mine weather severe drought. Maybe it could prevent people from getting sick.

Thinking about organic and regenerative agriculture made me excited about the future of farming in Montana, but it also challenged me to practice holding two seemingly contradictory beliefs at the same time. I could see the benefits of organic, while I believed my family and those who farm conventionally have their farm’s best interest in mind.

And those who farm conventionally are in the majority. Conventional agriculture in my home county of Sheridan County, Montana is so commonplace that a mere 1% of more than 450 farms there farm organically, In Liberty County, where John farms, the portion of organic operations is slightly higher at 2% of 246 farms.      

“Conventional” farming isn’t really a choice families like mine made. It’s been the default. Farm chemicals became widely used in the 1950s and 1960s when DDT came on the scene. In 1972 the Environmental Protection Agency officially banned DDT. But there were other pesticides and herbicides farmers continued using, and for good reason. They killed the insects and weeds that threatened their crops and livelihoods, and they helped farmers save on “labor, machinery and fuel used for mechanical weed control.” This has contributed to substantial increases in crop yields over the past 60 years. Most farmers, who are tight on time and working within thin profit margins, have been sold on the innovation.

It’s easy to pit one school of thought against the other - to demonize or glorify either practice. But one thing I’ve learned as I’ve pursued an interest in organic and regenerative agriculture, is that these approaches don’t need to contradict one another. And they don’t need to threaten my upbringing on a conventional farm. They can both exist at the same time. The bottom line is: every farmer I know does the best they can with the circumstances they inherit. And growing food, caring for community and working with the land are shared goals that drive both organic and conventional farms, like John’s farm and mine.

I visited John’s farm over the last day of winter and the first of spring, when the farm was still blanketed in dry crunchy snow, packed down by tires on the road. When you drive into the farm yard, there’s not a grand entrance sign reading Wicks or Tiber Ridge Organics, just a proud, blue Farmers Union member emblem tied to a corner fence post.

Save for the solar panels, the site was familiar. Tractors and disc drills, grain bins, a shop and outbuildings fanned out from the house and bunk house surrounded by a shelter belt of trees. The farm yard is sandwiched between a quiet gravel road and a deep coulee that reaches north toward Tiber Dam and the Sweetgrass Hills.

When I was there, I took over the bunk house a few short icy steps from John’s house, where Peyton, his hired hand lives. Over the course of two days, I kept the microphones rolling there nearly the entire time. It didn’t take long before John and I realized we had more in common than our roots in agriculture. Here’s John’s friend Paul who stopped by the bunkhouse to chat.

Paul: So yesterday Megan asked me what my favorite movie is as part of her audio test. What’s your favorite movie?  

John: I really like “There Will Be Blood.”

Paul: That’s what she said! Whoa.

John: Dude, that’s...

Paul: I drink your milkshake.

John: …one of the movies I really like.

Paul: Guess what John’s favorite movie is?

Megan: “There Will Be Blood?”

Paul: Yeah dude!

Megan: That’s what I said!

John: That’s awesome.

Megan: That’s rad.

John: Yeah I have the book “Oil” somewhere.

Paul: Oh there’s a novel that’s based on?

John: Yeah it’s based on “Oil” by Upton Sinclair, but I was reading it and I could not pay attention because the first pages were about a car driving down a dirt road.

Torgerson (narrating): I wanted to start with John’s story, from the very beginning. So from the comfort of the bunk house living room, I ask him about his early days on the farm.   

John: Ended up getting kicked out of the fields when I was a kid one time riding in the track with my dad and he got out to go change a shovel. And I had must have been three, you know, and I locked the door and cranked the radio and pretended I was driving the tractor. And I was taking his cigarette butts that were out and pretending to smoke and drinking his crush soda. He ended up having to break the window with a rock to unlock the door because I just thought it was a big joke and took me into the yard and then said, “He is not coming out into the field again until he is like, you know, in his teens.”

Torgerson (narrating): John’s dad, Russ, managed the farm before John. Despite their differences on the tractor when John was a little kid, people often compare John to his dad. John has an easy smile that softens his broad 6’2” frame. His family says they can’t count the number of weddings John has been in, some invites were from friends he’d just met. His dad Russ was also good at making friends.

John’s mom Morb says growing up John was like his dad in another way too.

Morb: He was a little bit wild, sometimes it – well it did, it stressed me out. And his dad had a wild streak too. So I was like oh my god what’s going on here and Russ would just say, “it’ll be o.k. It’ll be o.k. you know you don’t have to worry all the time.” And he was right. Things were o.k., but just the same, but when you live 30 miles from town and your high school kids out on that road and it’s a lot of gravel and you’ve got to go across the damn, it makes you nervous.

Torgerson (narrating): I can hear my parents saying the exact same things. I, like a lot of us who were raised in the country, had a feral side as a teenager. And like John, I decided to leave my farm to go to college.

 John: And I think when I was going to school, it was something I wanted to get away from for a while and go have some experience, and I didn't really know when I would come back, but then you know with everything that happened, I just came back sooner than expected.

Torgerson (narrating): When John was an agronomy student at Montana State University in Bozeman, he got the news that his dad, Russ died suddenly from a cardiac arrest. He was only 54 years old. Russ’ eulogy, describes him as a “gentle giant with a soft heart and a good sense of humor who enjoyed life to its fullest.” He was a farmer, a family man, a Harley rider and a friend to many.

Russ passed on a Thursday and the following Wednesday, a funeral service was held at the Lutheran Church in Chester. John’s older sister Kali says his death was a shock to the family, and to the whole community.

Kali: When my dad passed, I remember, you know, standing room only at the funeral. Even when I was out in Spokane, people called relatives of theirs in Spokane, to come and sit with me. People showed up at my apartment that I had never met before. But they had a Chester connection and they were there to just make sure I was okay. You know, I was trying to find a flight home. And eventually, somebody said, let's just get in the car and go, so we did.

That's the magnitude of these rural communities - just looking out for each other and making sure that everybody is going to be okay.

And I will never ever forget, when the funeral finished, we walked out of the church and all of his friends brought their motorcycles and they turned them on and they revved them. So as you’re walking out of the church, you’re like smelling the fuel, but you’re hearing that sound and every time I hear that sound, it makes me think of my Dad.

Torgerson (narrating): John’s mom, Morb, speaks to me via Zoom from her home in Bozeman about the passing of her husband. She says not only was Russ’s passing a personal shock, it placed a huge strain on the family business.

Morb: Then in February of ’06 is when Russ passed away suddenly, and that was a definite, definite upheaval in our lives, both emotionally, financially. And we all had to grow up quite a bit. We did. And you know, what are we going to do? Are we going to keep this farm going? And I really wanted John to stay in school.

Torgerson (narrating): John’s sister Kali says the decision about what to do with the farm loomed over that time in their lives.

Kali: He was 21. I was 24. And our lives changed drastically. You know we really had to have some tough conversations about, do we sell, do we lease? Like, how do we keep this going? John is so young. John was in a band. They were playing some shows, he was just having a great time in college.

John: I was a freshman at MSU and it was in the winter. My dad, one of his great friends came over and told us that he had passed suddenly. And it was still kind of up in the air as to what was going to happen with the farm. So we came back and kind of did the funeral and then I remember we had a bunch of people at the house and we went in the basement and kind of made a plan. And it was going to be that I was going to farm that year.

Torgerson (narrating): Faced with the decision to finish his degree or step up and save his family’s farm, John chose to return to Tiber Ridge.

Kali: Overnight he quit school, came home and decided that he was going to make the farm a go. The plan in our family had always been for John to take over, we just thought there was going to be a lot more time for him to spend with dad to do you know, sort of the training, the day to day.

Torgerson (narrating): But instead of the years of training he’d expected, John had to jump into the deep end of farming. After Russ’s funeral, John returned to Bozeman to pack up his rental, while family and friends got the farm ready for when he got home to take over. John’s mom Morb says the first year farming without Russ was challenging, but John accepted the responsibility.

Morb: And he had never actually laid out the fields and you know, decided like, okay, now let's harvest, you know I'm gonna cut this first this was seeded here. And oh, we poured over Russell's notes, I can remember that. You know like, this was seeded here, this was seeded here. And then to try to even figure out which bins everything was going to go in. And, you know, the logistics of putting it all together. That little book Russ had, you know, we about wore it out. But with good help, but with very good help, and friends and neighbors, we, we got it done.

Torgerson (narrating): John’s sister Kali remembers how trying this time was for John.

Kali: things like, you know, where do we keep these wrenches? Where do we keep these bolts, like Where's all this stuff at? I mean, you know, to some extent, because you're out there in the summers, or you're out there, you know, helping from when you're home. But when you're in college, you don't know what project is going, where things are. And just some of those tasks were really tough. And I remember John telling me, you know, one time he was standing in the shop, and he was trying to get something done. And he just looked around and started crying. Because he said, I don't know where these tools are. I don't know how to fix this. And I know that there are lots of days like that.

Torgerson (narrating): In addition to the challenges of abruptly taking over the farm, John and Morb had to navigate life with constant reminders of their loss.

Kali: I think one of the toughest things that dawned on me when I was up here, in the year after dad passed is, I could always leave and go back to my life. And for a while I could forget it. But when they woke up every day, they would stare out the window, and they would see that his pickup wasn't there. And he wasn't coming down the road and the tractor was sitting there, or you would go into the shop and you would find a note that he had written about, you know, have to buy X this, do this, you know. And you would just have those little reminders every single day. Even now just thinking about it kind of makes me tear up a little bit because it can stop you in your tracks.

Torgerson (narrating): Despite the daily reminders of Russ’ absence, because he was such a good friend and community member, three of Russ’s dearest friends split the task of helping John that first year.

John: Chris kind of came over that spring. And you know, he showed me, this is a mix of tank and chemical, like here's your rates. And I gotta get back to work, but call me if you need me. I called him several times, and drove over there and bugged him a lot. So he kind of took on that part of it. And Bill was really getting the yard in shape and then Walt came and was showing me how to seed and he filled the drill for me and showed me how to do that and said, “We'll worry about calibrating next crop, like it’s set, you just go drive down to that field.”

And I had never driven the tractor, the air cart. You know, I was 21 years old. But I'd never driven the air drill. I'd had the plow or whatever that, you know, when I was 12, my dad would have out in the field, and then I'd go. So I hadn't really been on the main road. So it's a little nerve wracking, going down this really steep hill by my neighbor Buffingtons and then turning into the field without taking out gates or fences. And, you know, Walt showed me “you know, you’re winging out, and blah, blah, blah, and, you know and turn the fan on and get going.” And then he said, “You know, when you get down to the end of the field, turn around, just pick a point down there and look at it.” And so I got down to the end of the field turned around, and he was gone. He had to get back to work. So and I mean, at that point, I was ready to go so better to learn that way, then, you know, trained to sit there and baby me through it.

Torgerson (narrating): During the first 8-10 years John was back on the farm, he kept doing things the way his dad had always done them before. John reminds me how he farmed in those early years on the phone from his tractor this spring.

John: So I’d have half the farm in winter wheat half of it in fallow. I’d just rotate between the two. Sometimes I’d spray herbicide on the crop in the fall when it came up for cheat grass and then again in the spring. And then I'd be spraying all the chem fallow acres all summer.

Torgerson (narrating): When John was farming conventionally, he rotated between planting a crop on a piece of ground and letting it lay fallow and rest for a season. On the fallow ground he’d spray chemical or herbicide, a practice called “chem fallow,” so the weeds wouldn’t take over. On the land he seeded wheat, he engaged in a multi-step process. First, he’d get the equipment ready. Then he went over the fields with a rock picker. That’s a piece of equipment with a reel that runs along the ground that you operate with hydraulic levers in the tractor to fling rocks on the ground’s surface into a bucket. It’s way more fun than picking rock by hand.

Then when his fields were prepped and he was ready for seeding, he drove through his fields with a tractor pulling a hoe drill and a tank filled with seed and fertilizer. When John was farming conventionally, he typically seeded winter wheat, a crop seeded in the fall that remains in a dormant state under the snow before resuming growth in the spring. He’d spray the winter wheat crop with an herbicide when the crop started coming up in Fall to prevent broadleaf grasses or weeds like cheat grass or Canadian thistle from choking out the crop.

Then he hoped for timely rains and when the wheat stem was at the right stage for another spray against weeds, he came in with the spray rig and misted herbicide over the crop to kill fledgling weeds. He wished for timely rains again, then timely sun and heat so the wheat would head out and ripen, and he could come in with the combine and grain truck and reap what he had sown. Then he stored his crop in the grain bin until it was time to haul it to town and market it.

This, in a nutshell, is the cycle of a conventional farm. While my dad seeded more spring wheat than winter wheat crops, and we raised cow calf pairs when I was growing up, it’s essentially the same dance my dad did between fields every season.

Growing up John knew he wanted to live the life of a farmer eventually, but with the loss of his dad, he was thrown into this grind at an age when I was writing menial essays and living for college parties. He says it was hard to see his friends go on being foot loose and fancy free when he was responsible for his family’s multi-generational farming operation.

John: Seeing some of my other friends get to continue that college life, and you know, having to be here working. At least, you know, in the winter, I had a little time to go visit them, but it was like, this feeling of resentment. Yeah, where it's - god everybody else is still having fun, and I've got to do this, but I mean, I had my chair of fun, too. So it's not like I missed out on everything.

But it was a hard few years really to deal with all that and all this responsibility. At 21/ 22/ 23, some of those years, it's like, God, you're responsible for your mother's retirement, you know, your sister has student loans that your mom has promised her that she would pay. So it's like this money's got to come from somewhere. And my mom's always been a really hard worker. But you know she was teaching school, and it wasn't a huge income, so it was lot of pressure there financially to be successful.

Torgerson (narrating): It wasn’t long before John’s operation saw financial hurdles. The year before John’s Dad died, the Wicks had a bumper crop. The farm made a good profit. John’s first seasons on the farm were favorable too. He says at that point  the future of the farm was looking great.         

John: We had a couple good years in a row when I first started, and it was like, you know, you're like, 10 years off from not needing an operating loan is what our banker would say. And like that to a farmer is a huge thing.

And then, you know, the markets kind of changed and the inputs started rising. And I mean, we'd still be getting great yields out here, but the market just wasn't there. So then we started going backwards. And then it was like, you know, some misfortune or things like the hydraulic drive tires went out. And they were like $15,000 a piece. Well I had three of them go in one year. But some of it was equipment and years of the economy. Like I think there were three years in a row we were going backwards.

Torgerson (narrating): John and his mom ended up purchasing a new sprayer that year, another expense to add to the list. At this point John was getting tired and literally sick from having to spray costly chemicals on his fields.

John: the way we were farming wasn't making money, and we weren't happy doing it. And, I kind of dreaded every operation except for harvest. You know, we would be spraying and dealing with all the chemical and just knowing how much like, you know, you factor out how much each load, you're putting out, how much it cost.

And then, every seeding season, I would get sick from the fertilizer dust. So then I was spraying the road with Roundup and I had kind of been slacking and Morb had been on me about getting it done last couple days. And so the one day I was like, alright, I got some time, but the winds kind of blown and I went to do it quick. And I ended up through my mask breathing in a lot of 2,4-D and glyphosate and got chemical pneumonia. And then that was just not fun at all. And kind of like the turning point was starting to tip.

Torgerson (narrating): For ten years, John followed his father’s method of farming applying syntenic fertilizers and spraying chemicals like Roundup. It’s the method the vast majority of farmers use. While Montana has been ranked #2 in the U.S. for total Certified Organic acres, non-organic or conventional agriculture is by and large the dominant way of doing things: a fraction of one percent of Montana’s farms produce certified organic crops.

The status quo didn’t deter John from doing things a little differently though. When I was at his farm I asked him what finally pushed him into using organic practices.

Megan: O.k. so you had a couple set back years and you’re also getting chemical pneumonia and you’re like let’s make some changes here.

John: Yeah and then, Paraquat, when that came on the scene, that was just like, alright everything is done with that. We’re not messing with this.

Torgerson (narrating): Paraquat is an herbicide that farmers began using more heavily in the early 2010s to kill weeds that became resistant to Roundup. Since then studies have found that people who’ve applied Paraquat have elevated risks of developing Parkinson’s disease. In 2021 the EPA announced that there is no conclusive link between Paraquat and Parkinson’s, but the herbicide is banned in over 50 countries.

John was already experimenting with farming organically on portions of his farm at the time. He      decided he was drawing the line at Paraquat. And he was ready to fully pursue his interest in organic agriculture, no matter what his neighbors might say. His sister Kali thinks John’s time as a freethinking musician aided in this progression.

Kali: You know, to go from again, gosh, I'm 21, I'm in college. I'm in a band. I'm having so much fun to man, my dad passed away, and now I have to go run the farm. That's a pretty big jump. And I think, you know, if you see John, you can definitely see that in him. I mean, he's tall. He's got tattoos, but he's always wearing cool shoes, even when he's farming. You know, he just has this really cool like, punk rock farmer persona that I also don't think you find in Montana. So, I really liked that he never, he never left himself behind. When he came to the farm. He brought it with him.

You know, he's still that person that came back to the farm when he was 21. He just, you know, found a way to make this farm his. He found a way to bring it up to speed. He found a way to explore new avenues and was really one we're the first people to do that, which I think is so interesting when, you know, when my dad first passed, he had all these conventional farmers coming over and telling him, “here's how you do this, here's the way it's always been done.” And certainly they got us through those first, you know, couple of years, and maybe even that first decade.

But then what I love about John is that he started to see possibilities. And he started to see, I don't have to do it this way. And I think I can actually make more money doing it the other way. And I think that I could, you know, sort of honor the land and do these different things in a different way. And when he started doing all of this, you know, kind of newfangled agricultural techniques, some of those guys were like, “What are you doing?” Like, they would call him and they would just be like, “John, you're gonna lose the farm like this is you're gonna ruin everything, like, this is not the way it's been done.”

Torgerson (narrating): This didn’t stop John. And he had a leg up on the path to converting to organic. He grew his first organic crop on land that already met USDA’s organic standards.  In order for a crop to be certified as organic, the ground it’s grown on needs to meet standards that include not applying synthetic fertilizer, synthetic herbicides or synthetic-pesticides on the land for three years. The land John used to launch into organic production had been in the Conservation Reserve Program, or CRP, for 20 years. CRP is a federally-funded conservation program for private farm or ranch land that’s seeded back into native grasses to conserve soil, water and wildlife habitat. This land is on a break from agricultural production for a term of at least 10 years.

John’s CRP land automatically met the certified organic criteria. So when his CRP contract concluded, John hit the ground running with his first organic crop. This was in 2016. And this parcel of land was actually the ground John’s parents had intended to start John on before his dad, Russ passed.

For the next piece of land John farmed organically, he had to go through the three-year certification period. This was on land John was independently leasing from a neighbor.              .

John: Then I had an opportunity to lease some grounds that was recommended of a neighbor, like he was giving up the lease, and he told the landowner, “you should consider John Wicks. He's a young guy, he's doing well, like, his practices are good.” I don't think he knew I was gonna go organic. But so I started leasing that for like, a couple years. And that's really when I was like, I'm gonna start with this next because it's in my name. And you know, I'm not going to do all my mom's stuff yet, or the corporations.

And so I had called him and I'd said, “you know, I want to go organic on your ground.” And he had responded like, “well, we've tried it before. So we're open to it.” And he just said, “John, if you think that you can grow bananas and make money, then grow bananas, so just go.” And that was like, okay, this guy's giving me the green light, and, you know, believes in what I'm doing. And so we went for it. And things have been great on that. And then now, converting the rest of the farm, and 100% organic, because, you know, looking back, we did it quick. I mean, that three years flew by.

Torgerson (narrating): John decided to use land leased under his name for his first experiment with converting farmland to certified organic. That was intentional. He didn’t want to start his new endeavor on land his mother owned. John’s mom Morb says she was a little wary about the transition to organic.

Morb: Financially, it's expensive to get into organics or to even do a lot of soil health things. It's very expensive. Not only because you're not getting the yields that you would normally get in traditional ag, but also with the equipment and things that have to be financed.

So John and I spent a lot of time going through financial statements, banking, all those things. And at the same time, a lot of organic wasn't necessarily covered by some of the farm programs, so then your banker is not real happy, you know if - you could seed whatever you want - But when you're in with the banker, it's pretty nice to have, you know, a farm program that provides that safety net for you. So we had a lot of discussions on things like that.

You know, I always felt like I'm, I'm Debbie downer, you know, I'm the one that's saying, we can't afford this, we can't do this, this isn't possible. And then John would say, “but,  we just have to get this far.” And then, he was far more farsighted than I was as to you know, that this would work and there were other people that were interested in this and very much that it's a change in agriculture overall, in the way we think about our land and the way we think about our soil.

And I think Russ was always very much in tune. And I can remember his dad too. There's a picture of John and his grandpa, and John has on a hat and they're sitting down. That is in a heart of that time, I'm eating sandwiches on the ground, but very much just in touch with the soil and having that appreciation for, the bounty that it brings us.

Torgerson (narrating): Going organic meant John would have lower crop yields than a conventional farm. He’d receive less funds from federal crop insurance programs. And he’d have to purchase a new disc drill to remove weeds and take the place of spraying Roundup. Still, John was certain about his vision for the farm. At that point he had spent more than two years speaking to other farmers about their process. And he’d read any book about organic agriculture he could get his hands on. That’s the same amount of time I was in grad school.   Equipped with knowledge and first-hand-accounts from farmers, John says he felt confident in his ideas. His persistence and certainty helped him successfully convince his mom about his ideas for how to change the farm. It also helped his case that going organic would ultimately save the farm money. They wouldn’t have to buy fertilizer and chemical, and they would make more money selling an organic crop. In the first year John went cold turkey on fertilizer and chemicals he said he saved $300,000 on inputs. That evened out the costs it took to convert to organic.

There was a transition period before John fully switched to organic, when he farmed both organically and non-organically. He says it was a headache. He had to keep crops separate in different bins. He had to clean off the grain auger, air seeder, combine and semi-trailer between working with the different crops. Plus he had to keep tabs on both organic and conventional markets.

Five years after he began experimenting with organic, John decided it was no longer worth the hassle to farm using both practices. It happened one evening when he  was looking out onto his last field of non-organic lentils with his friend Jim Barngrover. Jim is one of the co-founders of Timeless Seeds, a farmer-owned, organic lentils and specialty grains business on the Rocky Mountain Front. 

Admiring the view of the Sweetgrass Hills and Tiber Dam from the field with Jim, he envisioned what it would be like to be a fully organic operation. In that moment, he knew it was time to go 100% organic.

​

At the time I visited in March, John was no longer using any inputs prohibited by USDA’s organic standards.