Living Sky Grains Embracing Soil Health — Regenerative Land Solutions

As a child growing up attending a class C high school, I did my fair share of bus trips. You can’t get to Butte or Helena from Gardiner for a track meet without stopping at iconic Wheat Montana. Back then I didn’t know much about soil health, but my Dad was well on his way and I would soon follow. Life has a way of circling back to important places.

The RLS team met Franck Groeneweg in February at the Montana Soil Health Symposium in Billings, MT and we couldn’t be more excited. If you don’t know Franck, you should. He owns and operates the former Wheat Montana farm and has been layering on regenerative practices and tools to make the highest quality grains at the lowest cost to him and our environment.

On his spring wheat, he set up 14 trial plots with hybrid biological and conventional controls. Two of those plots were treated with Provide and Revive from Earthfort five days after seeding. Here are his results from harvest: the Earthfort treatment showed better yield per acre than both the hybrid biological and conventional controls.

2020 was a particularly bad year for dryland wheat in many aspects, but Three Forks in particular saw very little rain. As a result, these are not the yields Franck had hoped for, but Provide and Revive still helped despite adverse growing conditions. Not only that, the biology inputs are building resilience for future dry years.

We would expect to see these results improve as Franck layers on more regenerative solutions, such as protein based fertility and fungal compost. He is going to play with putting the biology in furrow at seeding. Most operations are not set up for this, but most operations also weren’t set up for chemical heavy applications before large agricultural companies convinced our grandparents to switch over in the 70’s and 80’s. In hindsight, producers probably should have continued with the “conventional” method before big chemical companies co-opted the term. What is needed is a return to regenerative practices that feed the life in the soil and create a more nutritious product without environmentally-damaging inputs. Franck has seen first hand on his operation what working with biology can do for him and he won’t be going back.