Rob Jewell and his father, Bob, farm the same land as their forefathers in 1876 but with a few changes: Organic crops, turkey, beef and pork. (Photo submitted)
By Zach Jensen,
Organic crops, livestock and conservation practices aren’t new in the ag business, but one local family-owned farm is encouraging farmers to not only change how they farm but to also evolve how they think about the food they produce.
Bob Jewell and his son Rob, owners of Jewell Enterprizes just west of Decorah on Pole Line Road, were recently contenders for the prestigious Iowa Leopold Conservation Award, and while their efforts didn’t garner them the award this year, the farm operation is causing others to take notice.
“Bob and Rob Jewell prioritize conservation at their 1,600-acre Jewell Enterprizes,” said information from the Sand Foundation, which hosts the annual conservation award. “Beef cattle are rotationally grazed using a mob grazing system that encourages regrowth of native grasses. To build cropland’s organic matter, the herd is grazed on cover crops. The Jewells also raise organic turkeys and pastured pork. Intermixed with fields of corn, soybeans, alfalfa and cereal grains, the Jewells manage 95 acres of wetlands and 611 acres of timber. Protecting these highly erodible areas protects water quality while providing large, interconnected corridors of wildlife habitat.”
Rob said he believes consumers need to think more about the food they eat.
“I just think the public needs to be introduced to healthier food options,” he said. “Cheap food is an illusion. The real costs are passed down to your health and the environment. Statistically, Americans in the 1950s and ‘60s were spending more of their hard earned dollars on food than health care. Today it’s the exact opposite, Americans spend more money on health care than any other country, and yet we are one of the sickest. What does that tell you about our food system? There is plenty of evidence based research out there that says eating healthy, nutrient dense whole foods will benefit your overall health in the long run. I believe in using food as medicine. Let’s be proactive and fix our chronic diseases at the root cause with healthy food, rather than eating highly processed cheap food and then relying on pharmaceutical drugs to treat the symptoms. If you’re putting garbage into your body every day, what do you think that’s going to do to your health?”
Rob says he raises organic food because he believes in epigenetics — the study of how environmental factors and behaviors can affect how genes work, without changing the DNA sequence.
“The health that you are in when you have your children affects their health in their future,” Rob said. “The healthier I can be now, the healthier my future offspring will be. That makes sense to me.”
Rob said he tries to raise as much of his family’s food as possible — especially food his children enjoy eating.
“My kids love fruit, so I’ve planted a bunch of fruit trees and berry bushes for them to consume as they grow up,” said Rob. “Doing it this way allows us to know exactly how their food was raised. It just seems like the right thing to do. I want to create a better environment and better overall health for my kids.”
‘Eat Right or Die Young’
The Jewell family farm was originally established in 1876 and has always been a cow/calf and crop operation — until 1958, when Clarence Jewell added turkeys to the mix. The Jewells’ farming methods were conventional and unquestioned until a fateful day in 1996, when Bob’s wife Paula saw a book on the kitchen counter.
“My mom was reading a book called ‘Eat Right or Die Young,’” Bob said. “It was sitting on her kitchen counter, and my wife saw it and read it, and that’s when our whole world began to change. She almost demanded that I try some organic crops.”
The operation added four acres of certified organic corn that year, which they sold for a profit. They added four acres of organic beans the next year, which yielded similar results.
“I’m not 100 percent sure I would have grabbed onto the organic niche if she hadn’t pushed me, but she’s always been very health conscious,” Bob said. “We were farmers already, and then she pushed for this, I got into it, and it got kind of crazy. But, just because we’re doing it this way, that doesn’t mean we’re doing it right and someone else is doing it wrong. It’s just what works for us.”
Bob expanded the farm’s organic experiment from four acres in 1996 to 300 acres in 1998, after several neighbors were looking for someone to put their Conservation Reserve Program land back into production.
“We planted all Vinton 81 organic beans,” said Bob, “and we sold them to Scoular Grain out of Omaha, and they averaged 37 bushels per acre, which is pretty darn good. There was just more profit potential on the organic side at that time.”
Bob said most of the organic bean crop was “fairly weed-free” that first year, but more weeds sprouted up each of the following years.
“Every consecutive year that we got into organic farming, we saw more weed pressure opening up, and we had plenty of weed pressure as the years went on,” the elder Jewell said. “Sometimes, the weeds were so bad people wondered if there was even a crop in that field.”
Bob decided to eliminate beans from their organic rotation all together, because of the experience. Their current organic crop rotation consists of corn, small grains and alfalfa.
“This is working pretty well for us,” said Bob. “The corn market is in the gutter right now, conventional and organic, but we feed it to our turkeys and Rob’s hogs. As the old adage goes, ‘You’re far better to walk your crop off the field than to haul it.’ Put it through your livestock to enhance the premium, and there’s truth to that.”
Rob said he hopped on the organic farming bandwagon shortly after he graduated Luther College in 2014 with a bachelor’s degree in environmental science. He started learning about regenerative agriculture and no-till farming practices by reading books, watching online videos and listening to educational audio tracks while discing fields in his tractor. Rob soon wanted to implement what he’d learned from figures like author and agricultural lecturer Joel Salatin, but Bob didn’t completely agree with his enthusiastic son at that point, saying the methods lauded by Salatin in the state of Virginia don’t necessarily apply to producers in northeast Iowa.
Rob said that didn’t mean they shouldn’t at least try.
“I’ve always been the person who needs to learn the hard way,” Rob said. “If I fail at something, I ask myself why five times, and it usually brings me to a conclusion that I can work with to fix. Humans have tried to make farming as linear as possible because that is easiest to understand. However, mother nature is complex, layered and always changing. One year is never the same as the next. We, as the farmer, have to navigate the ways we farm to become synchronized with our environment, and that is hard to understand if we look at agriculture with a one track mind.”
Bob feels that although organic farming has made great strides in the last few decades, a significant portion of the public is still skeptical about it.
“There are still a lot of people who think we’re chasing butterflies and smoking crooked cigarettes and don’t know what we’re doing — or think we’re foolish for doing it, but it’s working,” he said.
From pasture to paddocks
The Jewells cattle operation followed mostly-traditional methods until Bob started to implement rotational grazing in the late 1980s. The cows had six large pastures, and they were grazed in roughly two-week increments.
“Pasturing cattle is by far the cheapest way to raise cattle,” Rob said. “Every day that you can keep your cattle on pasture is money in your pocket.”
Since 2021, however, Rob has taken that to the next level by moving their 125-cow/calf pairs to a different smaller pasture, also known as a paddock, every day and strip-grazing cover crop fields through the winter. He said, by moving the cattle every day, the farm is increasing its plant growth, which allows them to raise more cattle on the same number of acres. He said it also improves water infiltration, builds deeper root structures and creates healthier cattle by providing more nutrient-dense grass for them to eat.
“We’re trying to imitate the bison on the great plains,” Rob said. “Pack-hunting predators — like wolves — kept the bison moving across the land and caused them to form tight groups for better protection. As these large herds would move through the landscape, they would graze, trample and defecate on everything in their path. Because of the heavy impact this puts on the land, the bison wouldn’t return to these areas for some time. I don’t have any wolves at my disposal, so we use electric wire fencing as our predator. This allows us to keep the herd in tight groups and prevent any back grazing of previous paddocks. Some of the benefits to this system are increased plant growth/recovery, increased water infiltration, better manure distribution, building topsoil through increased carbon sequestration and so many more.”
Rob went on to say another benefit of this method is the extension of their grazing period into the spring and fall, which also means the farm doesn’t need to cut as much hay for the herd.
“People don’t think enough about plant health and water-holding capacity and how that enables us to be more resilient — especially if we have drought,” Rob said. “In 2023 for example, we were out grazing while everyone else was feeding hay. We have become more resilient, because we have built a deeper root structure, so those plants will be healthier in drought. We did have to stop grazing eventually last year, but everyone else was shut down a month or more before us.”
Rob said he’s currently trying to get a stocking density of 50,000 pounds or more of beef per acre — well above conventional continuous grazing — and he said the conventional equivalent of pasture-raising beef isn’t nearly as effective when going for higher stock density grazing. Rob went on to explain that higher density herds must be moved more quickly to keep them from trampling and eating the available grass too rapidly.
“So, if left in that pasture for an extended period of time, they’ll be lacking key nutrients that were only in the good grass,” Rob said. “If not supplemented properly, they will lose body condition. This has negative effects on not only the cattle’s overall health, but also the health of the more desirable plants they’re overgrazing.
Bob added that, when moved to a fresh paddock, the cattle will move to the best grass first.
“We don’t give the cows credit for how smart they actually are for choosing what they like to eat and what is good for them,” Bob said. “It’s amazing to watch them, and it’s cool when you let them into a new paddock, because they’ll go to the end of the paddock searching and searching for those good plants, but they have to do it fast, because everyone else is right next to them doing the same thing. Once they establish where the best food is and establish their boundaries, then everyone gets together and starts eating.”
The perfect storm
Jewell Enterprizes also switched to all-organic turkeys in 2001 — harvesting 20,000 every year.
“Turkeys are so prone to disease,” said Bob. “If there’s a way to die, they are going to find it. That was scary — going into it with no antibiotics. So, we went from using antibiotics to using probiotics. Animals are the same as humans when they get sick. The first thing they want to do is stop eating. The probiotic keeps that gut active, so they continue to eat and muscle their way through a potential disease.”
Last year, Bob said, farmers faced the perfect storm, which really tested their mettle and methods.
“We had the terrible drought, and nobody thought they were going to get a crop,” he said. “So, all these imports were coming in to take care of our needs for an organic crop. But, it turned out that we had a better crop, for the most part, than anybody thought. At the same time, avian influenza was killing millions of turkeys and chickens. And, lastly, the organic egg market is now less than the conventional egg market. So, the people who are raising organic chickens are tearing up their certificates and raising conventional. You take those three things, and now we have $6 organic corn, when it should be twice that.”
Bob said organic turkeys are something of a niche product, but he admitted that Jewell Enterprizes represents the minority of farmers in many ways — and they’re okay with that.
Pastured pork
Most recently, Rob added pastured hogs to the family farm in 2019. That first year, as an experiment, he only raised six pigs in pasture and woods. Six years later, they’re now raising 100 hogs — 50 in a hoop barn and 50 in pasture and wooded areas called silvopasture, which integrate livestock, trees and grass. The family said their pasture pig operation came about as a way to use their timber acres, but the silvopasture can also capture more CO2 than heavily-wooded areas, when managed properly with rotational grazing. Rob said the result is well worth the extra work, adding the practices helping improve not only the environment and the nutritional quality of the pork, but the taste and texture of the pork as well.
“Allowing the animals lots of movement is key when trying to raise great tasting livestock,” he said. “Movement creates lubrication in the joints and muscles, resulting in a more succulent and flavorful product. Think of the difference between white meat and dark meat on a chicken. The white breast meat, that doesn’t get utilized much is going to be very tender but bland and dry. The dark thigh meat that is used more often is going to be a little tougher but moist and flavorful.”
‘You vote with your dollar every day’
The father and son agreed change can be difficult for many farmers who have farmed the same way for so long, haven’t the manpower or lack the acres to experiment with alternative farming practices. However, Rob believes there are plenty of young farmers itching to do things differently than past generations.
“There are many young people out there who actually do want to get their hands dirty and jump into these regenerative ways of farming,” Rob said.
Both Jewells said there are some who likely see their choices to produce organic products as less than sound decisions — a viewpoint each said bothers them far less today than it did in years past — and Rob hopes more farmers become willing to step outside the proverbial box and try different techniques on their farmland. He indicated support from consumers may have a hand in that shift.
“Less than 2 percent of the population is involved in agriculture, and yet, farmers are being pushed harder than ever to become larger,” he said. “I don’t blame the farmer, but I do question the consumer. You vote with your dollar every day. Whatever food choices you make support and shape what the future of agriculture is going to look like.”
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