A Saskatchewan farm will be the first in Canada to have regenerative certification.
Axten Farms by Minton, SK, has been rewriting the agriculture industry for a while now. What started as a family farm three generations ago, has become a sustainable powerhouse that’s building for the future.
Derek Axten grew up on the family farm. After college, he returned home and took on the farm himself. After a frost in 2004 left the Axtens vulnerable, they realized they must find ways to eliminate risk and increase their resilience; the only question was how.
The search for a solution took the Axtens to South Dakota to find a new disc seeder that would help their crops to lose less moisture. While there, they learned about the South Dakota State University Research Farm, which Axten described as “the birthplace” of regenerative agriculture.
Regenerative agriculture is a conservation approach to farming. In Axten’s words, it’s about putting the earth’s resources first.
At the research farm, Axten and his wife, Tannis, went on a tour of the irrigation plots, seeing nothing they hadn’t already seen before. However, it was there the couple first saw an irrigation system putting out two inches of water in nine minutes — and leaving the soil dry enough to not muddy their shoes.
“That was the TSN Turning Point,” Axten said. “I was like, ‘show me what to do.’”
The Axtens spent the next few years researching, travelling, and learning everything they could about regenerative agriculture. They started with cover crops for crop diversity. Over a decade, Axten said they tried more than 15 crop combinations, and because of that, they now grow over 10 different grain crops along with various specialty peas, mustards and more.
“We were looking for a way to increase diversity and lower fertility,” he said.
Their first cover crop didn’t receive nitrogen when they fertilized — and he saw no difference between that crop and the ones that did receive it. Today, half of Axten Farms is nitrogen-free.
Years later, Axten bought his own seed cleaner so he could start separating and cleaning seed himself. This led him to start thinking about food instead of commodities and became the spark for advancements the farm has made today.
“It was like how far can we push this thing?” Axten said. “We started to explore ways to grow the crops with less, but still be successful and have good quality product.”
After attending a conference where the speaker talked of microbiology management, Axten and Tannis found their new interest: managing the microbiology of their crops. They started by making large amounts of windrow thermal compost (organic composting material in long windrows) and then doing compost extracts in the place of fertility.
To get compost extracts, they first fill small bags with the compost, then hang them in a small brewer. The bags and the water each have bubblers that wash and massage the biology and the compounds out of the compost, and after 20 minutes, they can change the bags out with fresh material to extract. Once they have the compost extract, Tannis will look at the biology under her microscope and when she’s happy with what she sees, they’ll add minerals and biological foods to it, then put it in the seeder to add in-furrow.
Around the same time Axten Farms started making its own compost extract for fertility, it also started doing sap analyses instead of soil analyses. A sap analysis takes a certain part of the plant from various spots in the field and squishes the juice out of it. The information from that tells Axten what his plants are taking in.
“It doesn’t really matter what your soil test says because it doesn’t correlate with the sap analysis,” he said.
When Axten started this, no labs in North America did the analysis for him, so he was sending his samples to Australia. With the results he get from it, he’d plan next year’s crops and fertility. Axten said it’s all about balance. If the soil has certain deficiencies, he can subsidize that with micronutrients. The intervention only costs around $4 per acre.
“If you buy them in the right form, it’s not an expensive thing to do,” he said.
What’s surprised Axten most since starting these practices is how everything seems to be crop-specific rather than field-specific. Because Axten Farms seeds over 10,000 acres a year, knowing what’s in the crops before they grow gives Axten more peace of mind.
At a conference in 2017, Axten listened to a presentation on regenerative becoming its own stream of farming, similar to organic farming.
“I went home thinking I’m pretty sure that lady is right,” he said.
Because he already had a seed cleaner, his new interest became tangible, so Axten started planning a facility for packaging food products. He started moving ground on it in the summer of 2019 and by 2020, it was done. Axten soon started expanding the facility to add a packaging line and automated packaging for milling flour and the expansion project just finished.
Because of its advances and changes, Axten Farms will now be the first in Canada to have its regenerative certification.
“To us, regenerative means putting the soil first,” Axten said. “If we put soil first everything else looks after itself.”
A few other things Axten Farms does to help the earth is never driving outside of tire tracks on fields and using mechanical weed control on combines (another Australian invention).
Axten believes regenerative agriculture is the future of rural communities. He backs this up with the movie One Hundred Thousand Beating Hearts, which tells the story of an American farmer who started putting the earth’s resources first, and by doing that, his poor, underpopulated community began to rebuild and thrive.
“You can sit back and watch your town die, or you can do something about it,” said Axten. “We chose to do something about it.”
Axten and Tannis will be speaking at Manitoba Forage & Grassland’s Regen Ag Conference in Brandon this November. To learn more about that, go to www.mfga.net
