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 Doug and Derek both grew up on the farm and are
sixth generation farmers. Doug has been involved in the family
operation for 20 years while Derek has held a variety of Ag related
jobs throughout his career. Derek came back to the family business
five years ago after a ten-year stint managing Lake Fork Elevator.
Both young men are innovators in agriculture, much like their
father, Jeff.
Jeff Martin was one of the first farmers to implement no-till
farming back in 1982 when he experimented with 40 acres of land.
The Martin family has always been very conscientious about
conserving the soil and 2018 sees the family once again at the
forefront of innovation. This time the family is on the cutting edge
of reaping the benefits of making the soil healthy in order to
produce a cost-effective crop in the ever-changing Ag economy.
Over time the Martins have seen the benefits of lower input costs,
higher yields and overall improvement in the soil health, all which
in turn allows them to produce crops at maximum efficiency.
“We’ve been working with different products and we are arriving at
more of a conclusion to where the microbial process in the soil
allows it to be more healthy, allows us to use more of the available
nutrients that are in the soil,” said Doug.
“Between that and the cover crops, we experiment with a lot of
things, but the microbial process products seem to be giving us more
of an advantage and making our soil healthier.”
Derek jumped in to explain. “All of our soil has microbes in it,
which are beneficial bacteria and fungi. It’s either beneficial or
non-beneficial. Currently a lot of it is non-beneficial given the
farming practices we’ve done for the last 50-100 years. We’ve
destroyed those.”
“A lot of the commercial fertilizers and chemicals have a high salt
content and things like that which are detrimental to the beneficial
microbes and fungi in the soil,” added Doug.
“So with the non-beneficial, your soil is not as healthy, and so
what we have tried to do here through this, is reintroduce
beneficial bacteria and fungi to our soil, as well as get rid of the
non-beneficials and try to get your soil healthier,” explained
Derek.
Brothers Derek and
Doug Martin stand next to a live batch of BioMax made in their shed
at Martin Family Farms.
“The product we use is BioMax and we make it here.
It has over 4,000 beneficial bacteria and fungi in it. What that
does is it helps, for example, we spray it in the fall and put it in
in the spring. In the fall on your leftover corn stalks or your bean
stubble or whatever, it captures those nutrients that are left
behind and keeps them and converts them to a readily usable form and
holds them until the next growing season. Whereas before the non-beneficials
would eat it and gas it off and we’d lose it.
"So, in comes the cover crop side of that. The more diverse your
soil is, the better.
"We’ve been a monoculture corn, corn, corn - beans, beans, beans. So
this gives it diversity. When your soil sees diversity it does
different things and it also allows those microbial to feed. It’s
like a food source for them throughout the year.
"We have thousands of pounds of fertilizer, like P and K, phosphorus
and potassium, that are in the soil that aren’t in a readily usable
form. So, when you improve your soil biology and your soil
health, it takes those nutrients that are there and converts them to
a readily usable form, which in turn leads to less money out of the
farmer’s pocket on spending for P and K and to apply it. Because
most phosphorus and potassium you put on this fall, maybe only ten
percent of it is available to the crop next year.
"So through all this, Doug, Dad and I have gone through training.
We’ve got microscopes, computers and labs here so we can take soil
samples and then we look at each batch and we are trained now to
identify good soil aggregation or bad soil aggregation. Or if you
have anaerobic bacteria, which is non-beneficial, versus aerobic. We
can identify all those things with a microscope and through a soil
tests.
"With the soil aggregation, what that does is when you have a
healthier soil it allows your soil to hold water, it allows water to
infiltrate and get away faster and it allows you to hold more
things.”
“But it’s also a process,” chimed in Doug. “It’s not something that
happens overnight. We are saying it’s a three to five year process
to get the soils at the proper PH and fertility levels before you
begin this process.”
“With a healthy soil you can hold more things,” said Derek. “Like
when we put nitrogen on in the fall. So, there are things called
N-Serve, which is a nitrogen stabilizer. The idea is it keeps the
nitrogen from leaching away or gassing off or converting. What we’ve
been able to do is last year, if your soil is healthy enough, you
shouldn’t need something like a nitrogen stabilizer. It’ll hold it’s
own without leaching away.
"So, last year we did no nitrogen stabilizer and we did a trial of
28 percent, which can be volatile or due to leaching away. We put 28
percent on a field, we split it in half, 28 percent and
anhydrous. We found out this spring that we held that 28 percent all
through winter, without any nitrogen stabilizer because our soil was
healthy enough to hold that there.”
“That’s a real small scale and it’s just the beginning stages of
what could be,” added Doug.
The Martin boys are on the cutting edge of something huge.
“We hope so,” smiled Doug. “It might not be exactly what we are
doing now, but it’s a step in that direction as we develop these
things it evolves. Just in the last two years, it’s really evolved.
And it changes, but we are kind of getting comfortable with some of
the things. From where we started to where we are today, it’s
changed fifteen times, you know, how we’re doing things, and it just
constantly changes. But I do think it’s a step in the direction
where we will end up one day.”
The Martins both stressed that soil health is the new fad in the
agriculture industry. Derek noted that the topic is covered in every
Ag magazine these days and all over social media.
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 “A lot of that is due to the Ag economy has been
bad the last three to four years,” Doug said, offering his
perspective. “There has been negative farm income and it’s bad for
all of us. We are all feeling the effects of it. But a lot of those
down turns in the Ag economy sometimes spur innovative things like
this. People get a little more creative when they are not so
comfortable with how things are going. They are looking for new ways
to improve things or cut costs or improve efficiency. This is kind
of a result of that. We are trying to figure out a more
cost-effective way to raise crops.” “There
are lots of products on the market that benefit soil health. There
are other microbial products on the market and they may have one to
ten different species of bacteria or fungi and it comes in a jug and
not to say that the jug is bad, but there’s not much diversity in
it. That’s where this process comes to be a little more different.
We make it on site right before we apply it and we know it has 4,000
different strains of bacteria. It’s live,” stated Derek.
Both men stressed the importance of the product being live. Quality
control is of the upmost importance as well they said.
“Anybody can put something in a jug and sell it to you, but this is
the biggest bang for your buck, so to speak,” said Doug.
“The raw materials we use, we are sourcing them on a more local
basis,” Derek. “When I say local, I mean more Midwest.” Derek
explained throughout the regions of the United States there are
different microbes. “We are trying to source more local inputs for
this product.”
Martin Family Farms is a dealer for Agri-Bio Systems, the company
that created this product, according to Derek.
Doug mentioned that locally Lake Fork Fertilizer and Herrin
Fertilizer have customers that are using Agri-Bio products.
Derek noted that this product is in fourteen counties in Illinois
right now.
“Not only is this new to us, but it’s new to everybody in the Ag
industry. We are learning more everyday,” said Derek.
Both men emphasized that it’s been a process developed over the last
three to four years and it’s continually been tweaked and gotten
better as the Ag industry as a whole learns more about it.
Farming has come a long way over the past 100 years as farmers
relied heavily on Mother Nature in the beginning and as new farming
methods were introduced, farmers were allowed to control some of the
elements even more. The Martin family was constantly taking notes.
“Kind of the basis behind this for years is farmers have focused on
N, P and K ~ nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium,” Derek went on to
explain. “On the nutrient ladder there are nine nutrients in order
of importance from one to nine. N, P and K are 5, 7 and 9. So
farmers were focusing almost all of their time and resources on
numbers 5, 7 and 9.
"So by using things like biologicals and cover crops we’re are
unlocking those things as well but we are also shifting some focus
and dollars away from N, P and K and in other things like sulfur.”
Sulfur is the number one nutrient on the nutrient ladder and Derek
said their farm has been sulfur deficient the last couple years.
Derek reiterated that there are also other things besides N, P and K
that a farmer must pay attention to.
“In the beginning you may be taking money away from things like N, P
and K and focusing it more on biologicals or sulfur or boron, and
then as your soil gets healthier, you see that yield boost,” said
Derek, who is a graduate of the University of Illinois. “Actually
for three years in a row we’ve been able to reduce our total
nitrogen applied and our yields have stayed the same or been better.
We’ve been in this process a while and we’re now starting to see
that all come full circle.”
"We started it on a small scale four or five years ago and verified
it to ourselves before we’ve taken this step,” said Doug, who is a
graduate of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. “We started
with a 40 acre plot here and we watched how that evolved. It’s
really proven to us that we can go this next step.”
This is a mix of crimson clover,
oats, radish, and buckwheat that the Martin Family Farm uses as a
cover crop. Martin Family Farms has
now been 100 percent for two years using microbes and cover crops,
according to Doug and Derek.
Doug and Derek have also devoted a lot of time going to meetings
with an agronomist and doing research year round.
“Our goal is for our farms to be profitable and our soil to be
healthy and we want everybody else’s to be that way too,” said
Derek, noting that they are willing to educate and work with local
fertilizer companies in order to use this as a tool to enhance their
customer’s production."
This all goes hand in hand with the character and family history of
the Martins. They are a family that cares about the land, they have
a passion for farming and they are always on the cutting edge of the
latest farming technology.
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