My favorite Easter Sunrise worship services were when I served the Fairmont, Nebraska, Community Church from 1977 to 1981. Those were prosperous years for Nebraska grain farmers and cattle feeders.

Government programs that promoted “fencerow to fencerow” cropping and encouraged capital investment meant progressive farmers spent big. Lots of land was cleared for center pivot irrigation systems.

On Easter morning, we gathered in a small wooded area beside the driveway on a farm that was behind the times. There was a glorious view of the rising sun looking up a gradual draw that extended for two miles to the east—to U.S. Highway 81.

After worship, the men of the church cooked pancakes on a homemade gas-powered grill.

Joe and Anna Novak had lived on that farm for over 50 years. They had planted many trees.

They respected ones that came up on their own. They heated their house with wood from trees they planted. Their son-in-law now did the farming with smaller and older equipment than most area farmers used. Farmers were buying bigger equipment to take advantage of investment tax credits. The Novaks did not appear in the church directory but they had a spiritual connection to nature that inspired me.

I loved to go out there a few days before Easter to get things ready—but mostly to behold the rebirth of nature as the Novaks celebrated it. Once I took our two toddlers with me. Joe and Anna showed us where the spring flowers were blooming, where the baby rabbits and raccoons were, where various birds were nesting, etc. They did so with a sense of awe that had not diminished in all the years that they had witnessed spring on the same farm.

One year, Joe told me that he didn’t blame land-owners for clearing trees to put up center pivot irrigation systems—he just wished they would leave corners and space between the circles for wildlife. Every year since, ag science is discovering more about how important trees and other natural borders are to soil fertility.

Thank you Joe and Anna for nurturing soil and nurturing community (both natural and human communities).

Happy Easter, Jay

Grain Place Foundation farmer and community builder Jay Goertzen is out digging a hole under an apricot tree.

This hole is the first phase of a “brief” soil health experiment he’s conducting.

This is a very simple soil health test. We take a pair of cotton underwear. It’s gotta be a hundred percent cotton, ‘cause cotton is organic.

Some people came up with it a number of years ago. They called it the Soil Your Undies Test.

Jay plans to have a group of kids out to visit the farm over the summer—junior high and upper elementary age kids—so he thought they’d get a kick out of an experiment like this.

If the soil health is good, the microbes in the soil will actually break down the underwear. There’ll be almost nothing left except this elastic band. Otherwise, the rest of it will be completely gone.

We’re in a row of apricot trees that have been here for—judging them by looking at ‘em—I would say 20 years or so. So untouched soil. It’s not gonna be tilled or messed with. We’ll plant one pair here and plant a pair in the road—a little bit down the way here where there really is not much soil activity.

And then we’re gonna go into a field that was just planted at with barley and plant a pair there. Kind of do a comparison this summer when we have the kids out here.

I’m gonna try to just kind of cut the soil off like a saw. So we can just lay the soil right back on, so everything just grows right back on top.

Then we’re gonna put a flag here. So we can find it again.

Okay. And that’s it.

Bon appétit, soil microbes. We’ll see you in about 60 days!

Herman and Gladdis made their life on a farm East of Fairmont, Nebraska. I visited them for the first time when I was pastor of the Fairmont Community Church in 1977. Their place was a modest and rundown farmstead.

After getting acquainted with Gladdis, and learning some of their story, she told me Herman was out working on his tractor. I found him, wrench in hand, standing next to an old Farmall with weeds growing up around it that were as tall as the back wheels.

It did not take me long to realize that he had dementia and was living in a different time—when that old Farmall was a state-of-the-art piece of farm equipment.

It was a natural place for Herman to be. Seldom have I visited someone with dementia who was so content with where they were.

Herman and Gladdis had married and bought the farm a few years before the “dirty thirties”—the Dust Bowl days. They milked cows, kept chickens, and worked hard to make a go of it. During hard times, they had resorted to selling some of their milk cows to buy feed to keep the others alive. They raised a son and a daughter, neither of whom stayed in the community.

With encouragement and support from the government, they had planted trees to hold their soil in place. The government recognized—maybe too late—that existing farming practices of strip-mining the land contributed to the Dust Bowl. They instituted policies to help hold down erosion and maintain soil fertility.

By 1977, the change in government agricultural policy put in place by Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz five years earlier, was in full force. His “get big, or get out” mandate to farm “fencerow to fencerow” was having a profound effect on the community. During my four years in the Fairmont area, I probably conducted over 50 funerals (including Herman’s). In every case where farmland changed hands during that time, the land was acquired or rented by businesses or farm families who already controlled a lot of land.

At the time I met them, Gladdis and Herman had rented their land to a neighbor who not only farmed their land in a way that respected what they had worked so hard to keep, but looked after them in a way that enabled them to live there. They stayed on the farm as long as they could—it was home.

When I visited Herman in the hospital before he died, he was still a farmer. One time he was calculating his crop yield and figuring out how much corn he needed to sell to pay the bills. After he died, their children persuaded Gladdis to sell the farm and move into town. It sold for over a million dollars—prices had been driven up by the “get big or get out” folks.

Gladdis wanted to sell it to their renter, neighbor, and friend—but he knew he couldn’t raise enough to afford it. The children prevailed in selling to the highest bidder—who was able to take advantage of the current government farm policy and ready financing.

The buyer immediately bulldozed the farmstead and took out the trees, including a row of big, beautiful cottonwoods along the road. Encouraged and supported by the new government programs, they could now farm it with their big equipment and chemical applications.

There is a saying in farm country, “Farmers live poor and die rich.” In Gladdis’s case that was true. I remember her remarking with amazement that she could never imagine having a million dollars. I do not think that the money compensated for the grief she felt seeing the farm she and Herman so lovingly nurtured treated as a commodity to be exploited.

Government farm programs make a difference, good and bad. Perhaps some folks farm “government programs” rather than the soil. Perhaps we’ll see another Dust Bowl.

How your food is grown matters—to your health and to farm communities.

Nurturing soil—nurturing community, Jay

Jenny Brhel walks the fields with farmers—not leading them, not dictating solutions, not discouraging experimentation. She walks with them and she listens.

Farmers, she says, don’t just struggle with weeds or markets. They get stuck.

“We all get stuck. We all get stuck at times and we just need someone to help us
out of that rut. And I can’t say that I have the answers, but I may know a farmer who does.”

Jenny is an Extension Educator with the University of Nebraska. She’s been working in this role for over two decades.

She grew up around farming and always knew she wanted to be part of farm life, even if the path to get there wasn’t clear at first.

Now, she occupies a rare position: part technical advisor, part counsellor, part translator between different agricultural worlds. She’ll even referee a negotiation with the bank when needed.

She also married a regenerative farmer. So now, as a farmer’s wife, she understands the challenges in a way few do.

“As an Extension Educator, I serve farmers wherever they’re at in their journey— conventional, regen, organic. I just walk alongside them and meet them where they’re at and just try to help them with their questions.”

That posture—walking alongside—defines everything that follows.

Jenny doesn’t describe agriculture as a technical problem to be solved. She describes it as a human one. That realization led her to do something simple and—in practice—radical.

She started connecting farmers to each other. She organized soil health groups across multiple counties—not around a program, but around shared observations.

“It involved farmers from seven counties because I just kept seeing like-minded people trying outside-the-box things, but they all felt alone and isolated in what they were doing.”

What changed in bringing farmers together wasn’t just information flow—it created a sense of camaraderie.

“By bringing them together… it’s all of a sudden, well, have you tried this? Or, you know, this may not work in your situation, but this is what I did.”

Her shorthand for that shift has become something of a mantra:

“We’re gonna fail forward faster together.”

The divide she sees

Working across conventional, regenerative, and organic systems gives her a clear view of cultural differences most people never see.

“I find the organic growers are more open-minded to sharing. They’re more vulnerable. More wanting each other to succeed.”

On the conventional side, she often sees something else.

“There’s so much competition, and so much ‘we just gotta keep doing things this way’ thinking.”

She doesn’t attack that mindset. She works around it—by asking questions instead of giving directives.

“Is farming fun for you? And if it’s not fun, what would make it fun?”

“You have livestock. Right now, corn prices are not very good. Have you considered just converting just a little bit of your ground to forages this year that you could graze? Have you penciled it out?”

Sometimes the barrier isn’t agronomic. It’s structural: landowners, lenders, systems.

“Some people tell me limitations as to why they can or can’t do that with landowners or bankers. And I say, I will help—I will talk to these people for you and let’s, let’s work together to make this work for your farm. But sometimes it’s just asking them questions about the “why.” Why are they doing what they’re doing? Is there just one little step they could take to just nudge them a little bit closer to a regen system.”

Why some farmers move—and others don’t

Change, in her experience, rarely starts with data. It often starts with disruption.

“Usually it comes down to a health thing or some environmental thing. The well has too many nitrates in it, or they’re thinking about how much profitability they’re losing.”

Even then, changing the way you farm isn’t easy.

“We have in the United States an agricultural system… it’s hard to move.
With markets, with the farm program, with everything.  And so there’s not one remedy or one prescription that fits all my farmers.

What I would like to see is food grown with less chemicals or no chemicals or less fertilizer inputs, or no fertilizer inputs—but that’s just what I’d like to see. The reality is it’s not gonna fit a lot of the farmers because they’re either not willing to move or—just to be very honest—it’s just hard to move. The system is set up to grow corn, soybeans, and commodity crops… And that’s the reality. It would take a huge system change.”

Community as infrastructure

Despite the challenges, she sees small system changes every day.

“What’s encouraging to me is just seeing the growers who are making these changes on their own because of their “whys,” and building community around that.

The community piece is huge. I would just say for all the farmers I work with and people in general, we’re human beings and we are interconnected mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually, we have all these parts of us as a being. And we were never meant to be in isolation or created to live in isolation. And that’s what I believe. And so I see so many mental health struggles in all the farming categories. It doesn’t matter if it’s conventional, regen, or organic. I get called out to people’s fields for all the problems they have in the field as an agronomist. And normally I spend most of my time in the problems behind the problems.”

The dream—and the gap

Jenny isn’t just observing change. She has an amazing vision for where things could go. She imagines something in between existing systems.

“Create a regen co-op… for those guys that are in the middle. Who haven’t quite moved over to the organic side, but who really don’t wanna be over on the conventional side.”

Local production. Transparent practices. Regional markets.

But she doesn’t pretend it’s easy.

“How do you create it? How do you make this sustainable for our lives too?”

If there’s one place she hesitates, it’s here: the transition. Not just the idea of change—but the years it takes to get there.

Including on her own farming operation.

“The profitability has been hard… between conventional to regen and then the regen to organic… that transition phase… is really hard.

We’re hoping for profitability this year… But it’s been a four year process to get there.”

That, she says, is where community matters most—not at the beginning or the end, but in the middle.

“Another reason community is so important is to try and help each other through those transition periods until profitability can be achieved.”

And progress, she insists, has to be measured differently.

“We celebrate every small win… Because if you wait for the big things, you get burned out in the process.

Jenny echos the motto of the Grain Place: nurture soil, nurture community. It’s an achievable farm future that works for everybody.

“There’s a community. Seek community. Don’t do this alone.”

Job Title: Entry Level Resident Farmer
Location: Grain Place Farm – Marquette, Nebraska
Salary: Base salary range is $38,000 plus benefits and housing
Reports to: Resident Farmer/Advocate
Status: Exempt, Full‐Time plus benefits

Position open from March 5 through April 30 or until filled

Application: Submit your cover letter, resume/curriculum vitae and three references to David Meyer meyerdavidh@gmail.com

This position supports the operation and development of Grain Place Farm, a leader in organic farming since 1953, dedicated to nurturing soil and nurturing community. The role assists the resident farmer with managing a 240-acre sustainable organic cropping system that includes diverse, complex rotations and integrated livestock.

Ideal candidates are passionate about organic farming and understand the role the Grain Place Farm has in the soil, plant, animal, human, and planet health nexus. The candidate must possess the skills, commitment and demonstrated abilities to ensure the operations are efficient and effective and nurture an atmosphere where all employees thrive. The candidate is expected to reside in the housing that is provided on site.

Examples of Specific Duties and Responsibilities- These are subject to change based on needs, but core activities and responsibilities will include:

• Work with the Resident Farmer/Advocate to perform all tasks associated with the design, establishment, and subsequent upkeep of the farm to ensure a certified organic, sustainable and profitable model is maintained and the health of both animals and crops are kept at the highest level of current certified organic and regenerative standards.

• Acquiring, developing, maintaining, and using farm equipment

• Accomplishing appropriate field practices

• Making decisions and practicing irrigation and water management

• Maintaining livestock/animal husbandry practices for animal welfare

• Managing work schedule to complete tasks in a timely fashion in harmony with nature while maintaining personal health

• Maintaining records on farm and for USDA Organic, Regenerative, and other certifications

• Maintaining landscaping around farm fields, livestock lots and pastures, and your private living space.

• Collaborating with Grain Place Foods in sharing equipment and maintaining the property including, but not limited to, snow removal, traffic areas, and other common areas.

Education, Skills, and/or Experience –

• Farming experience (preferred)

• Familiarity with operating and maintaining farm equipment (preferred)

• Openness to and enthusiasm for learning new techniques, products, and approaches

• Must be willing to work rotating-seasonal and non-standard hours as needed

• Ability to work cooperatively with other staff and volunteers and a willingness to assist others in the service of Grain Place Farm mission

• Strong time management skills

The foundation has taken to calling The Grain Place, Inc. the “Vetter Family Farm” because that distinguishes it from Grain Place Foods and Grain Place Foundation. Also because folks recognize the name from the movie Dreaming of a Vetter World.

The name makes me feel a little awkward and embarrassed. We are not even the oldest Vetter Family Farm in Hamilton County.

Our great grandfather, Bernard Vetter, and his wife, Mary Seckler Vetter, bought a farm there in 1908. A Vetter still farms that land—the fifth generation to do so.

Bernard and his brother left Germany when they turned draft age in the latter part of the nineteenth century. They spent time in Illinois, split up, and lost track of each other.

Bernard married Mary Seckler, whose parents immigrated from Germany. They spent time in Illinois and Colorado, then bought a farm southwest of Aurora, Nebraska.

My dad, Donald Vetter, passed three things along to me from Bernard and Mary. One was a travel pouch that contained a little notebook with addresses of people in Germany who he’d made contact with when it was finally safe for him to reconnect. He made the trip after he had settled in Hamilton County.

It was not always comfortable to be German in Hamilton County during WWI.

Two of Bernard and Mary’s sons registered for the draft in 1915. Later, they went into debt purchasing war bonds to demonstrate their loyalty to the USA.

The other two things my dad gave me were a coin purse made from a sow’s ear and Mary’s wedding ring with a note that said it had been given to dad by his father.

Incidentally, I have been wearing that ring for 31 years since—since the day I lost my third wedding band and my wife, Maureen, said she would not buy me another.

Visit the Aurora Cemetery and you will find many headstones with the name Vetter on them. Each generation of Vetters understood their responsibilities to the community and to the soil of Vetter Family Farms. Not all have chosen to pursue organic farming, but all have taken care of the land.

We all understand that we did not just inherit the land from our ancestors, but are borrowing it from our descendants.

The descendants of Bernard and Mary participate in many different faith communities now—or none at all—but we all feel a spiritual connection to the land.

Nurturing soil—nurturing community, Jay.

As the old saying goes, a lot of good stuff ends up on the cutting room floor.

Bonnie Hawthorne, the filmmaker of the documentary about the Vetter family farm, Dreaming of a Vetter World, shares some of those overlooked nuggets with us here.

“This segment was part of the original version of the film, before I recut it for time,” she says. “I always liked this story of how three guys grew up together and influenced each others’ lives as the years went by.”

Narrator:
…They also rotate their cattle, and it’s a big job.

David Vetter:
These guys move to a new paddock for about every three or four days. We rotate them around the farm and we’ve got enough paddocks that they’ll get back every 30 to 40 days, depending on weather conditions and pasture recovery.

Narrator:
As they graze and poop, a complex system of bugs and bacteria and sunlight and dying roots—left over from the grazed plants—help build that amazing water-storing soil.

Know what else soil’s good at storing? Carbon.

Bill Whitney:
We can sequester carbon in the soils through restorative actions in agriculture and forestry and grassland management.

Narrator:
The folks at Prairie Plains Resource Institute are all about that.

Bill Whitney and co-founder Jan Whitney are on a mission to restore prairie disrupted by agriculture.

Bill Whitney:
We collect over 200 species of native prairie and wetland seeds because we do what is called high-diversity prairie restoration.

Restoring grasslands is one of the tools that could work to mitigate climate change.

Grasslands build soil and soil creation involves the locking up of carbon in the ground. It’s a sustainable resource that if managed well can produce food and fiber. And I feel that the cultivation of marginal lands is a shortsighted process.

Narrator:
Nothing shortsighted about Bill Whitney’s vision. He grew up here, but it wasn’t until he came home with a master’s in science that he really saw the prairie.

His mission was to make a difference in his hometown, just like these two other jokers he knows.

Bill Whitney:
The triumvirate.

Narrator:
What’s the triumvirate?

Bill Whitney:
Oh, it was a, a self mocking triad of David, Ed, and me. We grew up here, we came back here, we got excited about a future here.

Narrator:
They were all sort of misfits in their community, but they understood each other.

Bill Whitney:
David had his ideas about food and agriculture, and I think it influenced a lot of what my wife Jan and I did in terms of grasslands and creating an organization to be on the landscape too. And so we felt, along the way, allied with the cause that David had.

Narrator:
And the mutual influence continues to this day.

David Vetter:
We’re experimenting with planting prairie grasses in our field borders to encourage pollinators and predator insects to assist us with pest management.

Narrator:
The third member of the triumvirate, artist Ed Dadey, helps the Vetter farm with all sorts of things.

David Vetter:
Ed Dadey works with us, on a part-time basis. Pretty much on his schedule. We have just special projects that we assign for him that may be equipment repair or modification or making parts.

Narrator:
Making parts is crucial ‘cause this is their most modern piece of farm equipment. And not by choice. Their combine is from the 1980s. Other stuff is even older.

The machines that work in their small field sizes, which are essential to their pest management and crop rotation, are no longer made in the U.S. Everything is scaled much bigger now.

Ed Dadey:
This is State of the Art 1940.

Narrator:
This old seed broadcaster still has plenty of life in it. With a little help from Ed.

Ed Dadey:
This was designed to do its job and nothing else, and do it simply do it efficiently. You just go out to the field daydream while you go around and round in the field in your tractor and it’s all done.

Narrator:
How does an artist know about daydreaming on a tractor? Ed grew up on the farm that is now Art Farm Nebraska: an artist residency.

Ed Dadey:
Art Farm is still partly conventionally farmed. Then you got half of it which is like undergoing dramatic change in a social way, which is, you know, cultivating culture if you wish.

I have no interest in the economic profits of agriculture, even though I do live on a farm and grow corn. My so-called profits basically equal the amount of tax due on the land.

David Vetter:
I would classify Ed as a farmer that’s probably a better big picture farmer than most farmers who farm full-time. That’s why conversations about farming are always useful with Ed.

Ed Dadey:
My parents, they were totally organic without knowing it.

A five-acre patch intensively farmed would get you as much as a 500-acre field extensively farmed.

It’s a cycle that you grow corn to feed your tractor.

What is the cost? Everything has a cost.

Our documentary, Dreaming of a Vetter World, is available to watch for free on Vimeo or thumb drive. You can share it with your community by hosting a screening!

We can support your screening with:
🎬 Help organizing a public or private showing
📋 A press kit to promote your event
📚 Discussion guides for school, church, or community groups
💬 A live Zoom Q&A with people connected to the film
🍿 A pound or two of Grain Place Popcorn (we ship it, you pop it!)

Reach out to get started: jay@grainplacefoundation.org

I lived on Grain Place for my primary school years. The farm was a great place to be a kid, especially if you had cousins. Picking sweet corn with everyone was a high point every summer.

Tough times for our family started about the time I was in the seventh grade. Dad had to give up farming, we had to move, and Mom died. I am thankful for the support we received during those difficult fifteen years between when Dad stopped farming and when David returned to the farm. We were nurtured by soil and community.

After Dad stopped farming and sold the equipment and livestock, we continued to live on the farm for a year while someone else farmed the land. While Dad was in the VA Hospital in Lincoln (being treated for an old case of malaria) and then being retrained at Lincoln School of Commerce, Mom kept the family going.

The soil fed us. Family, church, community, and the VA supported us.

We had a big garden—it was a lot of work. We turned the empty livestock lots into garden beds. That soil was really rich; we grew a couple acres of tomatoes. We grew lots of green beans.

We worked out an arrangement with the Red and White grocery store in Aurora, Nebraska, to sell our excess vegetables to the company that delivered produce to them. When the produce truck arrived in Aurora, we would get a phone call. We’d load three bushels of fresh green beans or 20 bushels of vine-ripened tomatoes in our green 1950 Chevy pickup truck. I learned to drive in that pickup, though I wasn’t allowed to drive on public roads for three more years—when I got my learner’s permit.

The produce truck driver would pay us in cash—about three dollars a bushel—and Mom would buy groceries with that money.

After Dad got his health back, he was able to get a job. We moved off the farm then.

We ended up moving three times before I finished high school. Each move was accomplished by a team of relatives, neighbors, and farm trucks. The village that raised me was made up of about half a dozen of my parents’ siblings, a church community, and a small-town school system. Child care was often ‘load shared’ amongst extended family.

Even though we didn’t all agree on important matters—like how to care for the soil or religion or politics—we remained faithful to each other.

I don’t think my parents ever considered selling the farm, even when they fell on hard times. We remained connected to it. When David returned to the farm, it marked the end of a dark time in our family’s life.

Our Mom died in a motor vehicle accident in 1970. Dad entered a period of depression. I don’t think he would have made it without staying connected to the church. He and my sister, Monica—who was entering her teenage years—moved back to Hamilton County to be near supportive family. His trust in God pulled him through. What revived him was returning to the farm to farm.

It wasn’t long after David and his family moved to the farm that Dad sold his house in Aurora and put a trailer house on the farm. He lived in that trailer house for over 30 years.

He even found romance again and enticed Marie to marry him and move to the trailer house in a cornfield. She was a vital part of Grain Place for 15 years. Her landscaping and baking brightened up everyone’s life.

We continued to be nurtured by soil, nurtured by community.

Nurturing soil—nurturing community, Jay.

This is the second in a series of interviews conducted by Grain Place at the 2026 Nebraska Sustainable Agriculture Annual Conference.

Ask Kevin Fulton what he does, and he hesitates for a second before answering.

“I try not to think of myself as a farmer or a rancher,” he says. “I’m a land manager. My farm is an ecosystem. That’s what I’m managing.”

That mindset didn’t happen overnight. It came from decades of watching how farming works—and how it doesn’t.

“ When you’re a conventional farmer, you look out there and think, what is it I need to kill today? Is it some weeds?  Some insects that are being a problem?

Now I ask what can I do to increase diversity? What can I do to improve those symbiotic relationships that we have in nature that are working together? I mean, I don’t need to use insecticides ‘cause I don’t have any insects that are a problem on my farm.”

The Pull of the Land

Like a lot of farm kids, Kevin left home as soon as he could.

“I went to Kansas State, got a degree in animal science, then later a master’s in exercise physiology.”

For nearly three decades, he was a competitive weightlifter and Strength Coach. At one point he was Head Strength Coach at the University of Massachusetts.

Then the pull of the land brought him back home to Nebraska.

“I came back 33 years ago and took over the family farm. And like everybody else, I farmed conventionally. I was selling $1.70 corn and $30-a-ton hay. I had a corn–alfalfa rotation and I didn’t even have cattle yet.

Financially, it wasn’t working. I was getting fed up.

I realized they’re only gonna let us make money one year. Then all the companies up the price of fertilizer and chemicals and we gotta struggle until corn prices go up again.”

So around 2002, he made a decision most conventional farmers would consider unthinkable.

“I quit cold turkey.  I said, I’m done using your damn chemicals. And I’m done using fertilizers. And I’m done paying for that stuff.

I kicked all of MonSatan’s inputs to the curb.”

Now his products fetch a premium price.

“ I typically sell my organic grains for about double what the conventional market is. I sold my soybeans this year for $22.50 a bushel. The current cash price in Nebraska is just under 10 bucks, so that’s more than double. I sold my corn this year for $8.25 a bushel. Conventional prices are around $3.80 or $3.90, so again, double.”

A Closed-Loop System

His farm today is built around cycles rather than inputs.

“We build fertility with cover crops, crop rotation, and livestock.”

Over time, his system has included cattle, sheep, goats, laying hens, and organic grain crops.

“I was one of the early pioneers in the grass-fed beef thing. I mean, there were times we were grazing 1,500 to 1,800 head of cattle on grass and never had anything in confinement.”   

The idea is simple: let biology do the work.

Instead of fighting nature, he says, the goal is to work with it.

“It’s a much more noble approach to farming.”

Learning from the Prairie

Some of his biggest lessons come from land that was never farmed at all: native prairie.

“On my place, we estimate there are probably 150 to 200 species of plants.

I see prairie chickens almost every day—groups of twenty or fifty sometimes.”

There are also sandhill cranes, grouse, deer, and countless insects.

To Kevin, the prairie represents the ultimate regenerative system.

“Thousands of years of soil building. Plants and animals working together.

You dig down and you find rich topsoil layers that formed thousands of years ago.”

Regenerating More Than Soil

For him, the conversation about regenerative agriculture goes beyond soil health. It’s also about regenerating rural communities.

“Back in the 1930s, my county had about 9,000 people. Today, we have about 3,000. We moved animals off the land and into factory farms. Once that happened, we didn’t need as many people out here.”

Big farm machines replaced neighbors.

“It became more important to have your neighbor’s land than it was to have your neighbor.”

Kevin thinks bringing livestock back could reverse that trend.

“If we get animals back on the land, we’ll need more people. But to do that, you gotta entice ‘em economically. They’ve gotta be able to make a good living.

We’ve got to regenerate more than just the land. We’ve got to regenerate the people on the land.”

A Different Kind of Farming

When he thinks back to his early years in agriculture, he remembers how little there was to say about it.

“If you had interviewed me twenty-five years ago, I would’ve said: I grow corn and alfalfa, I’m selling it cheap, and I’m not making any money.”

That would have been the whole story. It’s different now.

“Now I’m passionate about it.”

And for him, that’s the real sign that something has changed—not just on his farm, but in agriculture itself.

This is the first of what I hope to be a weekly column for Grain Place Foundation. I stepped away from my role as Executive Director after helping create Grain Place Foundation and serving in that role for ten years.

Most of my childhood was spent on what is now The Grain Place.

Buoyed by our Mom’s love, two significant life changes happened to our Dad during the 1950s.

Dad decided to stop poisoning the farm and pursue organic farming practices. This was well documented in the movie, Dreaming of a Vetter World.

(Paid subscribers can watch the film here.)

The other significant life change was that Dad was baptized and joined the E.U.B. church (Evangelical United Brethren) in Marquette. This was largely due to our Mom’s faith, which she gracefully lived out since her own baptism as a teenager. Dad came home from the South Pacific in 1945 as agnostic. He had seen too much hypocrisy. Mom’s gentle love and Dad’s keen observations of nature led him to seek more intimacy with God. He chose to do that through Mom’s church.

Each of these decisions has had a profound impact on all members of our family. Dad did not just say he believed something—he behaved differently. He farmed differently. We ate differently.

We went to church—a lot. Sometimes it was embarrassing for me because I couldn’t be as “modern” as others. No Wonder Bread, just what Mom baked from flour grown and ground on the farm. In the 1950s, “store bought” stuff was considered better than “homemade.”

These two decisions changed the way Dad related to the farm, his family, and the world. God had a claim on him. The difference is reflected in the motto we chose for Grain Place Foundation: nurturing soil, nurturing community.

The word “nurturing” demands respect for the other. It demands working with not against. It precludes exploitation and domination. It requires humility.

Dad immersed himself in learning all he could about soil health. He also immersed himself in following Jesus. Without knowing he was doing so, he followed John Wesley’s three simple rules:

1) Do no harm,

2) Do good,

3) Stay in love with God.

Not everyone understood. Tension

s even arose between Dad and Grandpa, who owned 200 hundred of the farm’s 280 acres. Dad stuck with his commitments even though he had to stop farming. During those rough years, Dad spent three months in a VA hospital and Mom died tragically in a motor vehicle accident. Our motto could have been nurtured by soil, nurtured by community.

We are lucky to have had such supportive extended families and church communities.

I chose a career as an ordained United Methodist Pastor, serving mostly in rural communities for 42 years. It was a privilege to explore faith with many rural folks. When I get all churchy and Biblical, my brother reminds me that the first profession God ordained was farmer—not minister. (Genesis – chapters 1-3)

Most folks I know who till the land experience a deep spiritual dimension to their work. Over the next few weeks, I hope to share stories and meditations on how vital it is for us to experience soil and community as “nurturing” and to engage in nurturing them.

Feedback is always welcome. Thanks for reading.

Jay Vetter

Nurturing soil—nurturing community, Jay.

This is the first in a series of interviews conducted by Grain Place at the
2026 Nebraska Sustainable Agriculture Society Annual Conference.

For years, Gene Phanstiel, Junior, chased yield.  He had thousands of dollars invested in fertilizer and other inputs. He made pass after pass with the herbicide sprayer across his fields.

He studied and carefully followed the protocols all the high-yield growers were using. But one good hail or drought and he’d lose his whole crop, no matter how much he’d spent on inputs.

Then came the season that changed everything.

“One year I had soybeans that made 81 bushels across the scale. That’s really good. I was super excited—until I got the check. I looked at my bank account and realized I didn’t make any money.  

So what is the point of growing 81 bushel beans if we don’t make any money doing it?”

That was the moment his thinking started to shift.

The First Experiment: Biology Instead of Chemicals

One of his soybean fields had heavy white mold pressure. The standard approach to treating it would have been multiple fungicide passes—which was expensive, and not guaranteed to work.

Instead, he tried something different.

“My thought was, if I can get a small grain started in that field, by the time we come in to combine it, that sunlight would help take care of those spores—instead of spending money on three fungicide passes.”

His wheat yield that year was excellent.

“I didn’t even know what I was doing. But it worked. I followed it up with a cover crop mix and rotational grazing.”

For him, the snowball had started to roll toward organic production.

The Moment That Changed Everything

 “But, I was also—at the same time—trying to run a spraying application business. And I was having a really bad year. I had a lemon for a machine. It was really bad. Very stressful. I ended up having one guy try to not pay me—like a $12,000 bill.

One day, I told my wife I needed to go fix fence. But I didn’t need to fix any fence. I just needed some time for myself. So I was out there in the field, watching cows graze a diverse mix of covers. And granted, there were also weeds there, because we couldn’t get it sprayed in time.

So it was weeds and covers. But you could hear wildlife everywhere. I was watching pheasants running in and out. You could hear all the insects. Nice.  

And then, on the other side of my fence—where I was conventionally farming yet—there was nothing but silence.

It was an epiphany.”

Rethinking Soil

Junior has a degree in agronomy, but was only taught how conventional agriculture works.

“We never really studied the fact that  soil is an actual living, breathing ecosystem. The more I learn now, the more I realize I don’t know.”

Once he started studying soil biology—microbes, fungi, the soil food web—his mental model of farming changed, one observation at a time.

“So really diving deep into the microbes in the soil and the different species and, yeah it’s been mind blowing ever since.

I realized all my most progressive customers had two things in common. They were trying cover crops, and they had livestock.”

That insight pushed him to begin the transition to organic.

Today he farms about 300 organic acres. This year, 2026, will be his first year as a certified organic farm.

His approach to rotations is unconventional and based on observation, but it’s working for him.

“I really don’t have a rotation. I just try to look at each field and determine what would be the best fit as a crop for that field the following year, like what would I fight Mother Nature least on.

And that’s probably the opposite of the way you should do it, but my thinking is if I’m not fighting Mother Nature, it should be easier to grow that crop.

Using his intuition has led him to make other changes, as well.

“I converted my sprayer into a cover-crop applicator. That machine now seeds roughly 4,000 acres annually.”

New Mindset, New Techniques

One of his biggest surprises has been roller crimping—mechanically terminating mature cover crops and planting directly into the residue.

“Where I’m roller crimping, I’m blown away at how fast soil health increases. You pull that mat back at the end of the year and it looks exactly like compost.

I don’t even know how much benefit I’ll get from adding compost anymore. I’m making it in place.”

Junior’s also experimenting with strip systems by alternating crop rows with soil-building strips. The insight came from earlier research.

“We had corn that made 420 bushels on the outside rows on dryland. The only extra thing we gave it was sunlight.”

Now he’s combining sunlight capture with soil recovery strips, what he calls a “Sabbath year” concept built into the field.

“If we could maintain yield while only farming half the acres each year and flip-flop, think what that would do to our soil as a country.”

Biodiversity Returns

Recently Junior found something unexpected.

“I found a blue bee in my cornfield. I didn’t even know that existed.”

That was another sign that he was on the right path.

“With the cover crops, there’s new habitat there now.”

Changing the Conversation

Many farmers still compete on yield numbers. Coffee-shop bragging rights. But Junior thinks that conversation is outdated.

“Conventional guys want to brag about high-yield corn. But what matters is profit. And resilience.”

What he hopes happens next is simpler than policy or technology. The biggest shift starts with one realization:

“Guys don’t walk their fields anymore. If they start trying this way of farming, they will. And they’ll see things. There’s a difference here.”

Because, as Junior says, once you hear life in a field that used to be silent, you can’t unhear it.

“They’ll have the same a ha moment I had  when I was fixing the fence. So hopefully it helps people in more ways than they know.”

So, with his undergraduate degree in Soil Science/Agronomy, and the ink barely dry on his Master of Divinity, he went home to the Vetter family farm to “minister to the soil” and—with his dad, Donald Vetter—grow some of the first and finest organic grains in the country.

The Vetter farm became the Grain Place. It still is.

“We don’t look at the resource degradation. We don’t look at soil loss. We don’t look at all of the health risks for all of the chemicals and materials that we use in it. It allows us to do large volumes in small spaces in a hurry with little or no labor. And, it’s a very, very inefficient way to use our natural resources that are not renewable.”

—David Vetter

“I am 22 miles from Salina, Kansas. There is a severe thunderstorm to my left and then tornado warnings for Hastings, Nebraska. Yeah, I’m in tornado alley. In tornado season! With a small trailer. The other thing that the weather radio keeps mentioning is quarter sized hail. That, of course is my concern. Petunia’s complexion.”

This recording was made in the summer of 2014. I’d bought Petunia, a used T@B trailer, the summer before. My goal in buying a small trailer was to get out of Los Angeles more often, and to have more adventures. I had no idea I’d get this far out and what a protracted adventure it would become.

I was on my way to Marquette, Nebraska to start shooting my first film. It eventually became a documentary feature called Dreaming of a Vetter World about organic pioneer David Vetter. As far as I knew on that drive through Kansas, Petunia was to serve as my production office and home for a few weeks while I camped and shot on the Vetter farm.

Yes, I naively thought I could shoot a documentary film that quickly. By myself. A few weeks turned into a few months. I developed what a friend called mission creep. It’s a military term. Your squad was just supposed to go in and blow up a bridge, but you end up doing all sorts of other things and stay there for a long time.

Ultimately, I ended up zigzagging between the Midwest and West coast for the next three summers and living in Petunia full time for two years. This podcast is the result of that mission creep. I interviewed 38 farmers, scientists, and thinkers about agriculture. And it all started with David Vetter.

“We can kind of head down this way a little bit if you want to look at the, uh, hazelnuts that, that were, uh, doing better. They have a whole different look to ‘em than what we’ve seen in the small shrubs up here.”

That’s David Vetter. I’d never set foot on a farm like this one. I had no idea what row crops are or why borders with hazelnut trees are cool. I’d also never encountered a hot fence used to keep livestock in place.

“Watch the wire! Oh gee, not hot. If it was, you would know by now. In the summer, when we’re growing and we’re grazing these, we’re only gonna let ‘em eat about half. Now the grass that’s growing up, we’re gonna take ‘em off and let the grass recover. You graze it down, the root system dies off, and then as it grows back, the root system grows. So it keeps adding biomass in within the soil system.”

It would take me a while to figure it out, but the story David Vetter wanted to tell was about his most important crop: soil.

“These pastures play a big role in growing that soil. The general rule of thumb when you’re grazing pastures on a rotational system is you graze half, leave half, and different animals will like different species and different mixes. So that lends itself to being able to do a combination of grazing with different animals and still preserve enough of the vegetation for good regrowth.”

Okay. So at this point, I thought I was making a film about GMOs. I had no idea what this had to do with anything.

It’s funny how sometimes you can’t see a pattern until you have enough distance from it. In 2013, right before I bought Petunia, I heard a story on the radio that would change the direction of my life for the next few years. A farmer in Oregon found wheat shoots spread across a hundred acres—that couldn’t be killed by Roundup. It was a mystery.

The farmer took samples of the wheat to Oregon State University for testing. They said, why do you have this? You shouldn’t have this. This is Roundup-Ready Wheat. There is no Roundup-Ready Wheat.

There was an investigation by USDA. It resulted in a big, thick binder, which ended with an old school shruggy on the last page. It didn’t really, but the conclusion was the same.

At that time, there was a lot of talk about GMOs and Frankenfood. I honestly hadn’t given it much thought, but something about that mystery wheat story caught my attention. I asked a friend—whose family had a farm—what she thought. She said, I should ask her uncle, because he’s pretty smart.

That friend was Molly Vetter. Her uncle is this guy.

“So can we talk for a minute about that wheat field in Oregon?”

“Okay. I don’t know a lot about it, but, okay.”

“What do you know about it?

“Well, I just know that with some observations, some questions were raised and they did some testing and found some strains of a GMO wheat there, and it was stuff that was to have never been released commercially and only grown in trials, field trials, to the best of my knowledge, not even in that immediate area.”

A quick aside, if that’s David Vetter not knowing much, imagine what it’s like talking to him about a topic he does know.

“And there’s huge questions about our ability to manage these crops that we’ve created effectively for any kind of isolation or any market protection or anything that we might do to keep them outta certain segments of the market. Because this was something that was done supposedly under very tight controls as a part of research and field trials, in which case it should have been monitored extraordinarily well. And, uh, if those measures don’t work, I don’t know how we expect any general market production safeguards—and I use that word very cautiously—will actually work no matter what we do.”

One of the many beautiful things about David Vetter, a man of science and faith—or as I like to say heaven and earth—is he’s not prone to drama or hyperbole. The fact is that mystery Roundup-Ready wheat event sent shockwaves to through US organic community and wheat markets around the world.

Roundup-Ready means a seed has been genetically engineered not to die when sprayed with Roundup, a glyphosate-based herbicide created by Monsanto in the 1970s.

Its use has increased exponentially since the 1990s, when genetically engineered soybeans, corn, and cotton came into use. But genetically engineered wheat was a non-starter because Asian countries—big markets for US wheat—said no way to genetically engineered udon noodles.

The lack of a clear explanation of how this experimental wheat ended up in that Oregon farmer’s field, served as a warning shot across the bow that the genie was indeed out of the bottle. But as I continued to learn from David, I discovered that GMOs are not the only agricultural elephant in the room. (So many metaphors in one paragraph!)

“In town yesterday, I saw a farm finance joint, and they have a big sign out front that flashes information.”

“Okay.”

“One of the messages is that 70% of the farm bill is food stamps.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Three percent of Nebraska’s population are farmers.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“So I just wanted a very brief explanation of what the farm bill is, or farm subsidies.”

“Oh my. Uh, most of the farm subsidies now come in the form of risk management, or income or yield return guarantees for insurance that you have to buy if you wanna participate in any of the federal programs. And tell you the truth, I don’t know how they work because I don’t buy ‘em.”

“You have to buy them?”

“Yes, but the government pays for most of them. They subsidize the farmers to buy it, and they subsidize the insurance companies who make far more money than any of the farmers do. That’s my opinion. There’s a revenue based thing that you can do. So you can buy insurance for a guaranteed per acre return regardless of what your crop does.”

And regardless of your farm management system. We’ll get to more on this in another episode.

“So, if the population of Nebraska is three percent farmers…”

“Mm-hmm”

“What is the percentage of land dedicated to farming?”

“Oh my gosh. My guess would be that the amount of land in Nebraska dedicated to agriculture is gonna be in that probably 85 to 95 percent range.”

“Okay. So 85 percent of the land, let’s say, conservatively, is being farmed by three percent of the population.”

“Pretty much.”

“And how much of that approximately goes to actually feeding people?”

“Well, indirectly, a good chunk of it will, but, uh, not very efficiently.”

“Okay. So going along with this percentage game, 85 percent of the land, let’s say, is, is used for farming. What I want to know—this is just guessing, and I’m not holding you to any of these numbers—but about how much of that is GMO stuff?”

“Because I don’t know the percentage of range land to crop land—none of the range land is gonna be devoted to GMO stuff, so it’s gonna be all crop land—and you have to look at that probably in terms of corn and soybean acres. And so of the corn and soybean acres, it’s probably, I would guess somewhere around 85 to 90 on the short side to 95 percent plus on the tall side of those acres will be probably GMO crops of one type or another.”

“For real?”

“Yeah, for real.”

My first thought upon hearing these estimates was, I sure hope the people claiming this stuff is perfectly safe are right. Because if they’re not, we’re screwed.

“You know, they claim that it’s safe, but there’s very little or no really independent research to verify any of that from what we’re catching from the owners of the patents. And then experience over the last 15 plus years that we’ve been using it tells us that it really doesn’t work all that well because we’ve created super weeds with the herbicide resistant stuff. We now have a strain of corn rootworm out there that likes the BT corn for lunch.”

“What’s BT Corn?”

“The BT corn has the Bacillus thuringiensis toxins it produces in every cell of the plant. The toxins that were toxic or kill the corn rootworm. But now there’s a whole strain of corn rootworm out there that’s overcome and adapted to it. And they’ve done that really quickly, a whole lot quicker than anticipated. And history should tell us that it doesn’t work. ‘cause we’ve tried so many other methods. Different insects have become resistant to different insecticides when we continue to use them over and over again. My basic thought is that the reason we have so many pest problems is because we’re raising poor quality crops that have no native or fundamental plant health, which would be normally resistant—not insect proof, but resistant. And then there is some indication on, particularly on some fruits and vegetables and stuff, that it’s some insect pressure that causes the plant to respond in self-defense that produce a lot of the nutrients that are useful to us. And another area that I think needs a lot more study. But we, we always assumed we known enough about how everything works to make some of those decisions. And I think the only thing that we’ve proven consistent in the last 60, 70 years that we clearly don’t.”

In this first interview with David, I was confused by his use of the pronoun “we.” As an organic farmer, he doesn’t use the pesticides or BT corn or other products his neighbors use. In fact, David and his dad were ostracized by the community for many years for farming differently. But David doesn’t resort to “us and them” thinking. He sees a fellowship among farmers, even if their farming practices have the potential to wipe out his crop. But back to that big digital sign in town.

“So when they’re saying that 70 percent of the farm bill is food stamps, what is it they’re saying or not saying?”

“That 70 percent of the budget allocated to the farm bill goes to, uh, what is it SNAP? Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Yeah, I have problems with so much of the objections to that. It always gets framed in terms of a abuse with a few extreme cases. And a lot of abuse occurs in that, I suspect, more in the administrative than on a percentage basis than it does down at the user level.”

“So is that message to kind of make farmers angry ‘cause they’d rather have more of that money?”

“I don’t know what it is because that’s an indirect subsidy. If you ask me if more people have money to buy groceries, the more stuff they’re gonna sell, for one thing. Except most of ‘em on the farm these days don’t actually grow food. We grow industrial stuff for ethanol or for other manufacturing stuff going into the more industrial aspects of agriculture. It deals with concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) that are modeled on an industrial kind of approach rather than a more biological one.”

“And you have indicated previously that it’s a very inefficient way of doing things.”

“I think it is. It’s very efficient in the way we calculate costs and look what the costs are, but we don’t count most of the costs when we figure that out. We don’t look at the resource degradation. We don’t look at soil loss. We don’t look at all of the health risks for all of the chemicals and materials that we use in it. It allows us to do large volumes in small spaces in a hurry with little or no labor. And, it’s a very, very inefficient way to use our natural resources that are not renewable.

To David, the most important of these is soil. Soil health can be improved. The term being used at the moment is regenerated, but the three inches or so of top soil we’ve lost to degradation isn’t coming back in our lifetime.

That’s why David’s mission is to preserve and nurture the soil in the little slice of the Great Plains currently in his care. And to inspire others to do the same.

“Do you think that it’s too late to turn this big barge of agribusiness industry the way the way farming is going? Is it too late to turn things around and go back to a more natural way of farming and producing food?”

“I think probably we’re running out of time on being able to change how we produce food and how we continue to develop what we do in agriculture. I think it’s quite clear from what we’re seeing that we really have to do a lot more to be more resilient in what we do with our managing. And by that I mean developing production systems that have the ability to adjust and correct and to respond under stress and changing environmental conditions that we don’t try to manipulate with inputs or as we quite often refer to them as silver bullets, that that fix a problem because seldom do they work very well or for very long. And I think if we don’t, I think eventually that whole system will collapse. And whether it collapses quick enough for us to have viable resources left to rebuild from might be a bigger question than whether or not we’ll keep going.”

Remember what I said about David Vetter not being prone to drama or hyperbole? To me, this fact made what I was learning from him all the more chilling.

“But it’s not gonna be easy to do that. Too many big corporations have big bucks invested and they’re gonna do everything they can to manipulate the regulatory environment that we all have to work in. And I think that’s been pretty clear when you look at the kinds of approvals we get for things with very little, really independent research to document that they’re actually safe to do. And when I say that, I’m covering a lot of aspects from GMOs to herbicides that we use, to insecticides that we use, and what the impact of those in the environment to help somebody say, grow corn, soybeans, what that means to the vegetable grower or the local winemaker, or the specialty vegetable producer, and/or somebody that might be producing tree fruits and stuff like that. In a mixed production environment, every time we introduce something in one, it almost always has a negative effect on somebody else. And we’ve structured and manipulated things in such a way that the person that uses stuff that harms the other guy has no liability for that problem. It ends up on the guy that has to try to defend himself. So you know, they look really efficient ‘cause they can impose a lot of the cost of their input materials on somebody else.”

“In your opinion, are we doomed?”

“I do not think that we are doomed. Otherwise, I wouldn’t keep doing what I’m doing. And, I always think there’s possibility to turn it around. And I think if we have enough people in the younger generation that are willing to demand quality food and willing to push the whole, infrastructure that we developed, that it can be turned around. And so you keep going.”

And we’re going keep going and sharing these stories in the form of this podcast. We have so many amazing thinkers in farming and food and agriculture and prairie restoration. You’re gonna be amazed at some of the things you’re going to hear. We had support for this episode from Organic Valley and continuing support from Dr. Bronner’s. Music today was from the extremely talented Lucio Menegon. You can find him kingtone.com. And thanks to our ground floor Patreon subscribers for being there from the start. See you next time.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This podcast never advanced beyond this first episode, but if there’s enough interest, it could be revived.

Glenda, Jay, and David Vetter.

Filmmaker Bonnie Hawthorne's debut feature documentary shares the struggles the Vetter family faces as “Big Ag” encroaches on their tidy organic production.

Informative yet entertaining, the film highlights t…

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