Healthy Food Begins with Healthy Soil.

Eat Alaska First

By Bryce Wrigley

It is very important to us to use sustainable farming practices to grow our food. I think that healthy food begins with healthy soil. We want our stewardship to make our farm healthier both above and below the surface of the soil. So, the changes I saw in the soil when we switched to no-tillage excited me to do even more to improve our farm. I had read about cover crops and felt like that was the next step for me.

Normally, cover crops are planted after harvesting a primary crop. The cover crop is left to go through the winter. In the spring it is terminated and another primary crop is planted in the residue. This ensures that a live root is in the ground year round to benefit the soil microorganisms. In interior Alaska, there isn’t time to plant a cover crop after harvest. Often, the ground is already freezing by the time the barley is off. We typically fallow the field the following year to rest it and plant the next barley crop in a field that had been fallow the previous year.

I decided to plant our cover crop in the fallow year. This meant that we would change our crop rotation from barley/fallow/barley and instead we would plant barley/cover crop/barley. I ordered a cover crop mix from Green Cover Seed in Nebraska and planted our first cover crop in June 2018. When the cover crop started flowering, I went out to scout the field to see what species had not come up so that I could replace the non-performers with something that would grow the following year. 

As I was walking in the field, I became aware of a constant hum all around me. I noticed bees and insects buzzing around everywhere I looked. My first thought was that I had never heard that sound in the barley fields so I walked over into the adjacent barley field and listened and it was silent. I went back into the cover crops and the sound of life was all around me. As with the no-tillage, planting cover crops was another remarkable experience. I fell in love with that sound and have rotated with cover crops since then. 

Between the No-tillage and the cover crops, we are seeing the layer of dark topsoil increase. The texture of the soil is slowly changing to feel more spongy as you walk over it. I have farmed all my life, but I have never been more excited about farming than I have been in the last 15 years. I learn something new every season to improve the way we grow your food.

Bryce Wrigley

Alaska Flour Company/Wrigley Farms

Learn more about Bryce and his Alaskan Farming operation at alaskaflour.com