Learning to See

Tony Thompson has lived on his family’s Willow Lake Farm near Windom, Minnesota all of his life. Although he holds a bachelor’s degree in agronomy and has nearly completed his Master’s degree in Plant Community Ecology from the University of Montana, at Bozeman, he never really left home for school. “I went to school winter quarter for 16 years,” he said. “When they adopted the semestersystem I dropped out.”

The skills he gained from college enabled him to see Willow Lake Farm and the southwestern Minnesota countryside through more informed eyes. “I remember taking a botany class when I was 21 and the only wildflowers I knew then in Southwestern Minnesota were the pasque flower, the blue flag iris, and maybe the violet,” he recalls. Now he can identify over 200 species of plants that live on or near his farm.

Restoring the Land

Tony takes pictures of his corn and soybean fields during rainstorms to see how the water moves over the fields. “Nothing substitutes for actually being there during a storm,” he says. From his soggy photo sessions, Tony discovered where to place grass waterways and filter strips in the best locations to prevent erosion. He also adapted his fields to a ridge tillage system that absorbs water, rather than letting it drain into nearby streams, ditches, and wetlands.

“We’ve learned that there’s less than one quarter of the runoff water coming from the ridge till fields and when that water finally does come it’s much cleaner. There’s much less soil and attached herbicides and fertilizers in the runoff water,” Tony said. Tony put Willow Lake Farm into permanent ridges in 1991.

Recently, with help from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture’s Energy and Sustainable Agriculture Grant Program, he has been increasing the diversity of plants in his corn and soybean fields, so he can protect the soil even better. Using a specially designed seeder, he has been able to experiment with planting red clover, annual alfalfa, annual rye grass, hairy vetch and buckwheat right over the living corn and soybeans. His idea is to have something growing in the soil as close to year round as possible.

Creating A Diverse Ecosystem

“As farmers we’ve skewed our whole soil ecology. If we want to do something to make the soil ecology more diverse, so that soybean cyst nematode (a devastating soybean disease) might have a tougher time, we should add some elements to the crop rotation that won’t hurt corn and soybean yields.”

Tony is interested in diversity for reasons other than the essential one of good crop yields. “I’ve been seeing a lot of sandpipers in the soybeans,” Tony says. “For awhile I was afraid they were a sink and we were destroying the nests but now I’m seeing lots of sandpiper broods.” Those successful sandpiper broods pleased Tony and he knows they would have pleased his father too.

A Generational Influence

“My dad went to a lot of Audubon and other conservation meetings and, as a kid, I’d tag along,” Tony says. “My interest just grew. I wasn’t so much interested in hunting, like my dad and the other older farmers. I was more interested in agronomy and plant ecology.”

Tagging along with his father, reading his great aunt’s copy of Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, or associating with older farmers from the neighborhood has been formative to how Tony Thompson sees the land and his place on it. It was, in many ways, his love for these people and their connection to the land that kept him from leaving the farm. Those associations and connections, along with Tony’s 16 winters at school in Bozeman, have allowed him to establish his most remarkable enterprise.

Restoring the Prairie

Over a period of many years, Tony turned an interest in preserving remnants of Southwestern Minnesota’s tall grass prairie into a profitable business. “After I took my first field botany class-my botany professor was wonderful-I realized the tall grass prairie is a tremendously diverse plant community,” he says. “I started renting land from a great aunt, my dad, and some cousins who had remnant prairies on their land. These were mostly old native hayfields or pastures.”

Some of the pastures, although never plowed, were choked with invasive thistles. There were native prairie plants but not many. Tony started to experiment with fire and a biological control for the thistles. He also tried to graze the pastures lightly with cattle. The fire and biological controls worked. The thistles largely disappeared and the native plant diversity skyrocketed. Although he did not originally plan to, he has made a profit harvesting the prairie.

“About 15 years ago I started to make an attempt to combine the seeds. Now I’ve got a huge seed crop. This last year we got thousands of pounds of seeds.” Tony uses an old John Deere combine to harvest in August and October-he gathers different species for each season-and sells the crop to the Minnesota and Iowa Departments of Natural Resources. He is glad to have an economic reason to be protecting the prairie. He is even more delighted to have provided a haven for a multitude of prairie plants, birds, and furry squirming creatures. But most of all, his dad and old farmer friends would be pleased.