Pleasant Grove Farms
Pleasant Grove Farms(opens in new window), located north of Sacramento in Pleasant Grove, California, is a 3rd generation family farming enterprise started in 1946 by Tom Sills. It is now run by Tom’s son Ed, Ed’s wife Wynette, and their daughter Jessica with a mix of year-round and seasonal employees. Ed started transitioning the farm to organic in 1985 and it became fully certified organic in 1986. The Sills family is now moving into regenerative agriculture with certifications from A Greener World(opens in new window) (AGW) and the Regenerative Organic Alliance(opens in new window) (ROA) over the past two years (as of July 2024). They grow organic popcorn, corn, beans, wheat, triticale, sorghum, and rice as well as vetch, oats, and triticale seed on approximately 3000 acres of certified organic land. Their products are all sold wholesale. They also have a seed cleaning and bagging facility on-site that they call The Mill. They use that to prepare their crops for sale in the food, feed, and seed markets and provide seed cleaning services for other organic farmers and food companies.
A Step by Step Transition
In 1985 Ed Sills was frustrated with conventional practices and markets. The family had been spending too much money on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and fuel to produce commodities that were often oversupplied and undervalued. It required high yields to make any profit at all, and frequently additional factors like poor weather could keep the yields lower than expected. They also saw that pesticides were not working as desired and resistance to herbicides developed too quickly. This led to trying even more expensive chemicals with unsatisfactory results and damage to the environment. The conventional approach just didn’t seem sustainable. For the farm’s survival, they needed to find another way. At that point, Ed became interested in farming techniques that could improve their soil and produce good results without harming the environment. And both Ed and Wynette are glad they did.
From a profitability standpoint, eliminating chemical pesticides and fertilizers while building soil health and fertility just made sense. Ed says, “Nature has systems of maintaining fertility and controlling pests. So we try to use those efficiencies as much as possible.” Wynette was also grateful to have a safe environment to raise children as they live right on the farm. They also cared about that for their employees as well.
As it turns out many of the practices they turned to—crop rotation, cover crops, use of compost, etc.— are those most often used in regenerative agriculture. But there were also additional practices not always used for organic operations such creating habitat for wildlife and pollinators and habitat restoration.
Regenerative Practices Used on the Farm
Crop rotation and cover crops are the mainstays of the Pleasant Grove farming system. They have also used no-till or reduced tillage approaches, compost and poultry manure, and more recently they have been integrating sheep and doing habitat restoration.
Crop Rotations and Cover Crops
At Pleasant Grove Farms these two practices are integrated into one system. They use three crop rotation systems. Where they have heavy, poorly draining soils they use a two-year rotation. In their lighter soils they employ a three or four-year rotation.
The two-year rotation consists of one year of rice followed by one year of a no-tilled cover crop of purple vetch. It’s an interesting and innovatively profitable system. Rice is grown in the summer. A cover crop of Vetch used to be seeded by airplane but now Hairy Vetch reseeds itself every year. By the time the rice is harvested, the vetch is almost 6 inches tall but still low enough to survive being damaged by the rice harvesters. It is allowed to continue growing and sets seed over the winter and spring. The seed is then harvested in the summer and sold to seed companies and other farmers. In late September, they flood irrigate the fields. That allows for the germination of the vetch seed, but also Barnyard grass and Watergrass which are major weeds in rice. The grasses will die prior to seeding due to the colder fall weather but the hard vetch seed survives irrigation and becomes another cover crop without needing to be deliberately planted. That crop of vetch is incorporated into the soil before rice is planted again.
The three-year rotation consists of corn or popcorn, beans, and then wheat or triticale. Every winter a vetch cover crop grows and is incorporated into the soil before the next crop is planted. Wheat, however, grows during the winter and spring. Sometimes the wheat grows with the vetch and the seed is harvested together and separated out in their seed cleaning facility.
The four-year rotation adds rice to the three year rotation with the rice planted between the corn and bean years.
In all the rotations, once the crops are harvested, all of the remaining plant residue is incorporated into the soil to build soil organic matter and fertility.
Multispecies Cover Crops
One of the most important cover crops used at Pleasant Groves Farms is vetch, a legume known for its ability to take nitrogen from the atmosphere and fix it into a form that can be used by plants in the soil. By planting vetch in the fall and incorporating the plant material into the soil in the spring, the Sills family finds that they can grow high yielding crops, often without needing to add any other fertilizer. But they don’t just add vetch. “We’ve done oats and vetch covers . . . we do a grass and a grain and a vetch quite a bit,” says Ed Sills. “We do that because it’s somewhat self-regulating for nitrogen. If the nitrogen is low, the grain crop will not produce as much and the vetches will produce a lot. So after harvest you’ll have higher nitrogen condition.”
They also have wild vetch that just shows up naturally without being seeded as well as other species that are bothersome weeds in certain fields but are useful as part of a cover crop mix in others. Ed jokes that even if they plant a monoculture cover crop of vetch, they wind up with a multispecies cover. “If I plant vetch, I don’t just have vetch. I have chickweed, I have Black Mustard, I have radish. I’m not planting anything except the vetch. It’s all there and I can’t stop it! On wheat or triticale fields, I would prefer not to have the mustard there. It’s a weed that’s just built up over time. So for us, multispecies is a given. It’s rare that we have a cover crop that’s one species no matter what we plant.”
Challenges with Weed Control and No-Till and Some Benefits
As you might expect from that previous comment, weeds have been the biggest ongoing challenge on the farm using regenerative techniques. “It doesn’t matter what you plant. If you’ve gone 40 years without weed control or herbicides or anything, there are going to be weeds!” says Ed Sills.
Some of their regular practices do tend to help. Crop rotation, for example, changes the growing conditions from year to year. And keeping the soil covered with growing plants or plant residue from the previous season can also be useful.
But the Sills family has found that, despite their initial desire to use no-till methods, a light tillage some years seems to be necessary. They use tractors mounted with shovels and knives to kill small weeds without damaging the main crop with the help of a well-trained driver and GPS tractor guidance systems.
They also use water management to control weeds with the additional benefit of getting better rice plant yields. Ed Sills explains: “With the rice rotation and the flooded condition in the summer we’ll control quite a bit of the mustard and radish and, usually, wild oats, too. So that’s a good thing. It’s very hard to do what’s perceived as regenerative no-till or minimum till with rice because you really can’t leave a lot of undecomposed organic matter on the surface in a flooded condition because of the anaerobic situation that occurs when you grow rice. And that’s a really interesting situation because we found it is tremendously efficient in getting nitrogen in that flooded condition. So we don’t fertilize any of our organic rice anymore. There’s just the rotation with a legume every other year. It seems to provide all the fertility that we need.”
At this point, Pleasant Grove is working with what Ed calls a “pretty reduced tillage system.” ”We till before the rice and then we don’t till again for one and a half years or so when the rice will be planted again. So all through the legume crop we don’t do any tillage. And on those fields is where the wild vetch is, too. We discovered this by experience: after you drain the water for harvesting, the vetch will just come. So it survives flooded conditions and won’t sprout until it’s aerated again. Which means we never have to buy any vetch seed for that particular vetch. And then we can harvest that!”
Ed says that those are the fields that have the highest organic matter, too. “We’re up above 4% organic matter on the 2-yr rice rotation while on the 3-year rotation [corn, beans, and wheat], I think it’s 2 or 2.7, maybe we get up to 3%.” He’s not sure about whether the difference in results are because of reduced tillage or because of the amount of straw biomass left there, or the practice of leaving a lot of vetch residue on the surface and tilling it in. “I think if you till it in, you’re aerating the soil and putting in more oxygen. So you can have more decomposition, I think.” So, he muses, are the results because of tillage or reduced tillage? He strongly thinks more research should be done on the benefits of tillage for this particular application.
Animal Integration
Integrating animals, particularly sheep, has been a trial and error process the Sills family has tried and will continue with going forward with help. Ed Sills says, “Twenty years ago I got my own band of sheep and tried to graze the rice levees to keep the weeds down, and it wasn’t too successful. And it was a lot of management so we ended up selling the sheep that we had. We had them for a year or two with electric fence and all that. Then five or ten years ago we started working with a guy that had sheep, and we tried to graze the cover crop before incorporations and had trouble with it. It rained a lot and the sheep couldn’t be moved easily. So we've had situations where, when it rained too much, we got compaction and it was very difficult.”
Most recently they found a sheep herder, Nate Medlar, they feel very positive about because of his expertise in intensive management, rotational grazing, and strategic grazing. They have a mutual exchange where he can use their land for grazing for free in exchange for doing so in a strategic way where they need and want it.
Ed Sills is looking forward to seeing how their first experiment with this works out over time. “This past year we had a fallow field that had a cover crop, and we grazed all of it with sheep, and we're interested to see how that looks. That was mostly canary grass—one of the grasses that comes wild with the vetch on our rice fields—and it doesn't decay very quickly and, with rice, that’s a problem.”
“I'm interested in eventually seeing if we can have some kind of sheep or cow /calf rotation, or even a pasture rotation. Because right now, for all of the corn that we grow, we're importing quite a bit of turkey or chicken litter. And manure. So that's more and more expensive. When I first started farming organically, that was a waste material that people wanted to get rid of, and it would cost me $10 a ton delivered, and now it costs $80 a ton delivered. It's very expensive. So I'd like to at least start with maybe 40 acres that would be in a long term pasture. Then go to a vetch grass mix, and then corn, or something like that, and see if it would be economically feasible to raise our own animals so we wouldn't be relying on all the turkey and chicken litter.”
They tried raising their own chickens but lost too many to coyotes. They also tried making their own compost but were not happy with the nitrogen levels given the amount of land required to produce it. Currently, they use compost every third or fourth year to cut down on the expense.
Supporting Wildlife and Pollinators
In more recent years, the Sills family has been putting efforts into habitat restoration to support wildlife and pollinators as part of their commitment to regenerative agriculture.
Wynette Sills is particularly happy about this development. “What was exciting about the regenerative component was that all of the things that were really a passion of mine as far as beautification and wildlife and the environment and birds and butterflies and pollinators and flowers, all these things—finally there was a business-motivated reason to invest assets and resources, whether that be time, money or personnel, or just hours of bandwidth of interest into areas I felt a particularly personal interest in.”
Wynette explains that their first forays into this were quite easy to do and are things most famers could afford. For example, she cites the Seeds for Bees(opens in new window) program where farmers can apply and receive free wildflower seeds to spread on their farm as being a particularly easy and rewarding entry point.
But then, with their new focus of seeking regenerative certification, they soon discovered the value in their so-called “weed problem”! Wynette explains that after being out in the field and paying attention to things they had not noticed before they realized “as much as we had invested in planting these special wildflower seeds for bees, the radish and mustard and vetch were actually buzzing with wildlife! And here we were trying to improve on what was fairly naturally occurring on our farm. At 61 years of age I began to realize that I don’t think all of these things are happening just in the last couple of years. I think it’s been happening all along. It’s just that I wasn’t really paying attention. And that’s where the regenerative certification has actually challenged me to spend more time watching, listening, and documenting.”
This opened a new interest for Wynette in birding and providing healthy bird habitat. “We have that Merlin app on my phone. Now I’m not the most gifted birder, I don’t have much experience, but with that Merlin app you just listen. You don’t have to see the birds, just have that app open and listen to them. It actually documents the species, the time, and location for you. So I guess it was for A Greener World or ROC—we gave them a list of 80+ species that we had documented in the last year on our property.”
“From there we participated in Bid4Birds(opens in new window) where they compensate you a certain amount per acre to provide shallow flooding conditions to welcome shorebirds early in the fall.” They tried that program last year for the first time, and were surprised that having shallow water of less than 4 inches on the fields earlier than usual for 2- 3 weeks brought the shorebirds in. “It was so exciting. And we've never really seen that. You know when you go to the coast and you see the little birds running in a flock back and forth from the waves? Those birds were there, plus lots of others. And the vetch crop was good! It was an experiment for us and one that convinced Ed to try without too much risk involved. And, lo and behold, now that we're coming into another rice rotation, it's one of our better ones.”
Another program they’re participating in for the first time is the Delayed Cereal Grain Harvest(opens in new window) program through the California Waterfowl Association where farmers are compensated for waiting until at least July 15th to harvest in order to allow ground nesting birds to hatch and exit the field before harvest occurs. Wynette was excited to report that this year “we've had over 200 mallard duck eggs rescued! And were they always there? We just weren't paying attention. Or was this actually a bumper crop of mallard? We don't know. But we hope that this was just the beginning of something we can do year after year. For our employees, I think it's been very rewarding, providing a sense of purpose and enjoying nature. And it's really, really beautiful to have a partnership with the District 10 Wild Duck Egg Sanctuary program(opens in new window). They take them for us. They raise them till they're 6-7 weeks in age, and they're just getting their flight feathers, and then they bring them back and release them into our Willow Pond. We've converted a tailwater return ditch into now what is called Willow Pond with a riparian habitat restoration.”
Ed: “That's beautification, you know. It was just our tailwater ditch, and then Wynette gets involved and now we have Willow Pond.”
Wynette: “Yeah, willows are sort of wild around here, and they'll grow on the side of your fields, and there's quite a few willows started. So it's really rewarding.”
They’ve also planted 60 Milkweed plants for the monarch butterflies through the Monarch Joint Venture program and are working on riparian restoration with help from the Xerces Society.
People
Wynette wanted to acknowledge the important role employees and other family members have played over the years. “Ed and I are both over 60 years old. So we want to give a lot of gratitude to our daughter Jessica, who's our operations manager. She’s foundationally important to the farming business. And also our farm manager Fernando Cordova and our mill manager Fabian who are brothers. The Cordova family has just contributed so much to our farm. It's almost like an extended family. I think some of our employees have been with us 25-30 years. Turnovers are minimal so that says a lot. High dedication. Trustworthiness. Ed doesn't have to be out checking rice water much because Fernando not only has expertise at a pinnacle but he’s also trained other employees such that a lot of those day to day walking the fields skills have been passed on to a next generation.”
Special Equipment Required
Ed Sills shares, “When we were spreading the chicken litter, I would have companies come, and some companies just had regular trucks to go down the road. If the soil had a little moisture, it would compact quite a bit. So we built ourselves a track, a wagon that has rubber tracks underneath it that spreads the turkey litter or chicken litter for us.”
“We had a no till drill, and that's one of those things that are pretty available now because there's so much minimum or no till farming being done in the Midwest. All the other equipment we have, we made sure that all of our big tractors and our row crop tractors are rubber tracks instead of wheels, just for the compaction. And GPS, that helps. That's efficient as far as tillage, because your swath width is uniform, and you're not overlapping.
“And then there’s yield monitoring. We got away from yield monitoring in the last few years and we're getting back into it. Mike, the individual that was doing research for us is mostly retired so we lost our yield monitor guy. But we just started training a young guy to take over for him and we’re going to get back into it.”
Wynette adds, “We also have a grain mill where we can clean our own products. That gives us an advantage that, realistically, not every Sacramento Valley grower or California grower would have.”
New Ventures and Plans for the Future
After attending a university-run event for rice farmers that did not include farmer experiences, Wynette and Ed decided to set up their own event for fellow farmers and for the local community.
Wynette explains, “Nearly 40 years ago I was a farm advisor and so I have great empathy and respect and gratitude for UC farm advisors. But I attended that organic rice grower meeting alongside Ed and our daughter Jessica last fall, and I just had memories of my own experience. You can be in a meeting with university experts who have done highly controlled, replicated, often times single variable, or 2 or 3 variables at the most, designed experiments. And you’re giving the expert opinion. But when I was sitting in the audience, it was a turn of roles. I was sitting in the audience this time around and I knew there was so much wealth of information amongst the growers who were sitting at the tables listening to the experts present the latest research results. And this wealth of information was untapped—I was among my fellow peer farmers who had 40 years of experience that were not even invited to share their expertise. It's really important that we have a grower panel. So that's what motivated us to have the Organic Rice Corps meeting, and it was standing room only in our 100 year old red barn.”
Ed added, “We invited all the organic growers and rice growers that we knew. We put the meeting out to the rice co-ops and the UC Extension Farm Advisors Office. We had a panel of organic farmers that had long term experience with organic rice, and we had a really good meeting. Mike Hair was there. He’s a person that we’ve worked with for probably 20 years now. He’s mostly retired but he’s a PhD in Weed Science from Davis and he’s been working on our rice weed control for over 20 years, maybe 30 years. And so he's been taking a lot of data. We've been measuring stages of the rice, the density of the rice, and the density of the weeds and the weed species, and we have different methods of controlling weeds and rice that we explained.”
The event included a farm tour, a farmer panel on best management practices, another on weed control, and lunch with industry leaders. The Sills family is thinking about doing this annually, at least every two years.
Wynette says, “It was really valuable and exciting and inspiring—just the camaraderie that we're all in this together, learning from each other.”
“Implementation is our mutual goal. I think the process will be hastened by more farmer-mentor panel participation, because once you hear information coming from people that you've lived nearby, you’ve gone to school with and really trust, and know have gone through the same challenges and the same weedy fields. Experiences that you have had! It makes a huge difference.”
Pleasant Grove Farms also sponsors “Friday Morning on the Farm” events for the local community. They invite groups such as school children or members of local organizations to learn about organic grains, plant growth, harvesting, milling flour, the difference between different types of wheat and how it is grown, etc. Wynette says that getting to be a source of information and inspiration for all ages for an urban center like Sacramento has been a real plus.
Advice to Others
Ed Sills suggests, “If you’re a conventional farmer, I always say to start small. if you farm 500 acres, start with 50 or 80 acres and see how that works. You have to sort of have a plan. But most of what we've learned, you could say, has either been from other growers who are doing or trying to do organic practices, or else our own trial and error. And then you find out that this doesn't work or that doesn't work. And usually it comes back to either a disaster or a semi-disaster— the ones that you remember where things didn't work and you tried.
“I would also say that Regenerative is the next iteration of perfection. But things don't have to be perfect, to be an improvement. So if you can figure out how to have a cover crop and reduce your fertilizer rate, that’s a big improvement.
“People haven't asked me this in a while, but if they asked me if there wasn't an organic premium, would you be doing any of the things that you would be doing now? I think I would still do the crop rotation. And I would still use cover crops. . . . I think you should use Nature’s techniques to produce fertility because that’s just efficient. And animal grazing.
“In terms of organic rice production, several people have developed strategies for water management, water depth management, and the dry up method. It’s an art form and very science-based and I think every grower could learn something. Wherever you are on the organic, regenerative, or conventional spectrum, why not increase your yields, reduce your weed pressure and save money?”
Wynette emphasized, “There are no really trade secrets, because it's in the execution that is so important for how you do something.”
Ed adds, “And it's all usually multi-factorial, or whatever you'd call it. It isn't just one thing that you're going to do, and then everything's right. It has to fit in with all these other practices. So that's why we haven't really had any trade secrets for our row crops.”
Learn more about Pleasant Grove Farms(opens in new window).