By Angela Lovell
“Loyal to the soil” is not just the farm motto on Axten Farms near Minton, Saskatchewan, it’s the foundation of Derek and Tannis Axten’s management system. For the last 20 years, that has meant a focus on building and maintaining soil health using regenerative practices.
When they took over the fourth-generation family farm from Derek’s dad, Herb, in the early 2000s, it was a struggle to retain precious moisture in their fragile soils.
“When we did get rain, it would often come fast in large thunderstorms, and would hit the ground and run away,” says Tannis Axten. “The farm had been no till for years, but we knew there was more we could be doing, so we decided we’d go to direct seeding and bought a disc drill so that we could disturb the soil as little as possible.”
After heading to South Dakota to visit Dr. Dwayne Beck at the Dakota Lakes Research Farm, and the farm of Gabe Brown, a pioneer in regenerative agriculture, they started to better understand the importance of soil health and how healthy soil functions.
“We had been so focused on everything above the ground, we really knew very little of what goes on below the ground, and how important it was to keep the soil biology and soil aggregation more intact,” Axten says.
Developing a healthy soil system
From there, things snowballed. In 2016, Axten took Dr. Elaine Ingham’s “Life in Soils” class to learn more about actual soil biology and the importance of diversity in supporting healthy soil life.
Today, the Axtens grow around 14 different crops each year, have planted pollinator boundaries around some fields, and also do cover crops and intercropping with the goal to add diversity to feed the soil life – and keep the soil covered to maintain moisture and prevent erosion. They also use a stripper header on the combine that harvests just the grain, leaving tall standing stubble behind to catch as much snow as possible in winter.
“The goal is to maximize moisture and with everything we do, we try to keep the soil in mind because we are an agricultural system. We do some damage, but we always think about what we can do to repair or do as little damage as possible to our soil biology so that we can cycle the nutrients and create that healthy balance,” Axten says.
Another big part of the system is monitoring the health not just of the soils, but of the plants in-season to make sure they can tailor their fertilizer plan and crop rotations to provide the maximum nutrition to their crops.
“We don’t do as much soil testing anymore because we want to make sure that what is going into the soil is getting into the plant,” Axten says. “We do a lot of sap testing, which is something like a tissue test that we send off to a lab and it tells us exactly what the plant is taking up. If it has any deficiencies, then we can add a foliar feeding. Then we build those nutrients into our nutrient program for the next spring because we know which ones are lacking.”
The Axtens, who were named Canada’s Outstanding Young Farmers in 2017, have learned that making sure crops get adequate nutrition to maximize yield and quality is a delicate balancing act.
“There are some nutrients that will tie up other nutrients in the soil, so we are always trying to find that balance and make sure that what we’re doing is actually working,” Axten says.
Taking the plunge into value-added
After putting so much work and care into their soils and producing higher-quality crops, the Axtens found it hard to just dump their crops into the commodity market, which wasn’t paying them a premium for all their efforts. That’s when they decided to take the plunge into the value-added market. They built their own food grade seed cleaning plant and an on-farm flour mill to produce their own flours from the grain they were growing.
“We farm 10,000 acres, so we grow a lot of grain, and we have eight different crops that we mill into flour,” Axten says. “All the grains mill a little differently, but for spring wheat, we can mill about a ton of flour in two hours.”
The robotic bagging line sorts the flour into one-, 10- or 20-kilogram bags that are sold to retailers, bakeries and direct to customers via their online store. The system was deliberately built large scale to allow for growth in sales, something they are now turning their attention to, but admit it is a challenging part of the business.
“Marketing isn’t our strong suit, and a lot of people don’t know we exist, but we are unique because there aren’t many farms that grow their own grain, clean it and mill it all on site,” Axten says. “We are working on creating awareness and promoting the importance of whole grain flour and nutrition.”
They have help from their daughter, Kate, 21, who has just finished her third year at Dalhousie University where she is taking a degree in international food business. She keeps the website and social media up to date for the farm. Their son, Brock, 19, is back for the summer after completing an agricultural equipment technician course in Saskatoon, and plans to get some more mechanical training over the winter before he comes back to farm full time.
Building community along with the soil
Besides wanting to add value to the grain they grow, another big incentive for diversification was to create employment and opportunities for their community, and also to pass on their knowledge and experience to others interested in their farming approach.
“We were tired of watching our rural towns die, and thought if we can provide some employment opportunities it would bring more people into our community,” Axten says.
Besides the Axtens, the farm now employs three full-time people, and hosts three interns a year who come as part of their educational programs to learn about the Axten’s farming methods. This year they have interns from Quebec, Manitoba and France.
“There is no better way to learn than to come and see, and be part of the farm and the conversations,” Axten says, “It is interesting to host people from other places and see their perspectives and ideas because nothing we do is really new ideas; we’ve taken and worked them into the context of our farm and made it work for us. We’re always still learning, making changes and trying to figure things out.”
Building value over time
Building soil health using regenerative methods is a long game. Changes don’t happen overnight, and the overall return on investment can be hard to quantify, but the Axtens know their system has brought value in many different ways.
“We grow different crops than we used to, and we are doing more value-add, so it’s kind of comparing apples and oranges because we’ve made so many changes,” Axten says. “We have invested a lot back into the farm, building this facility and trying to take a different route. A lot of what we are building is resilience, so that the farm is around for many more years.”
That said, they know their yields and quality have improved dramatically, something that became very clear to them after purchasing another farm a couple of years ago.
“The soil is becoming more productive,” Axten says. “Last year, after our second year of drought, we saw that our yields were much better on our home farm, where we have been working on our soil for years, versus the new land that struggled a lot more.”
Looking to the future
So now the process begins again on their new land as they begin to prepare for the next generation on the farm.
“There are so many things that change, we constantly need to be adapting in order to stay current,” Axten says. “We are excited that our son is interested in mechanics because that is something that is a full-time job, and our daughter is passionate about marketing and food systems. We are trying to diversify and think about what we can all bring back to the farm to make it better.”
For the short-term, though, the goal is to concentrate on the marketing side of the business and identify markets and partners that appreciate what the farm does and everything that goes into producing their products.
“We are looking for people who are really interested in the nutrition and the flavour, and care about where their ingredients come from,” Axten says. She acknowledges that is a challenge, and although the current ‘Buy Canadian’ movement, prompted by tariff threats from the United States, should be providing a lot of opportunity, Axten says that doesn’t always translate into action from consumers to buy locally produced products.
“Although people are feeling stronger as Canadians all the time and want to support other Canadian companies, it’s been a little disheartening that people talk, and have plans to buy local, but when it comes to actually making that change, and switching to a different supplier, people struggle,” she says. “It’s sometimes easier to keep doing what you’re already doing even though you’d like to make a change, because it’s risk and hard work. I think it will come, but it is like anything. It’s easier to talk about it, but it’s a lot harder to actually do it.”
What the Axtens believe will make a difference in the long term to change people’s buying habits is assurances, through certification processes, that food producers are doing what they say they are doing. They are certified with a U.S. body called Regenified that audits the farm annually to verify they are using regenerative practices.
“What we like about the certification is they have different tiers, and you need to be constantly improving,” Axten says. “For us, on the marketing side, when people see the Regenified label on a bag, there’s substance to that. I think we are going to see more of these programs in Canada in the future.”
