Zack Rendel and Brent Rendel of Rendel Farm, located in Ottawa County North of Miami, Oklahoma, regularly partner with Oklahoma State University on research studies on their operation. Over time, allowing OSU to conduct research has migrated to the Rendels doing some of their own research.
Dr. Brian Arnall, OSU’s precision nutrient management extension specialist, and Dr. Josh Lofton, Assistant Professor and Cropping Systems Specialist, spoke with them in the Red Dirt Agronomy Podcast about on-farm research.
Brent appreciates the research on his place due to the uniqueness of the environment in Ottawa County due to the presence of rainfall and lack of extreme daytime heat and nighttime cool downs seen in other parts of the state. “There is just a host of other things that are unique to Northeast Oklahoma,” he said. “It came down to, if I wanted to find answers that fit for my conditions, I could either try to do it myself or partner with OSU. I found out early on, that if I offered to perform a small part of the work, I could get whatever I wanted, and it was amazing!”
Rendel Farm has been working with OSU since 2002 or 2003, and on farm research has changed a lot since then. Zack said, “I consider myself a younger producer at 33 years old. It is a lot easier because I can come up with all of these crazy ideas, fun stuff to do and things to try, and it is as easy as hitting a button and mapping it in the machine as I’m going, and when we harvest, it’s right there. There are a lot less orange flags in our fields because we don’t have to stake them. We can see it on the iPad.”
He said that the concept and reason to allow OSU to conduct on-farm research is always the same. “There are always questions and if you aren’t asking questions every day, I don’t think you are progressing,” he said.
Zack believes that the fast-paced world that we live in today is the reason that more producers aren’t partnered with the university. Brent believes that a certain level of fear comes into play for many. “It takes a little bit of pain to maximize the value of the information you get out of it. Yes, you do go out and abuse some of the crops, but the answers you gain from doing that pays so many dividends down the road,” he said.
Zack agreed by saying, “You learn a lot more when things go wrong than when things go right. Eighty percent of what I’ve done wasn’t a failure, but it wasn’t what I was expecting the outcome to be.”
Brent pointed out that at Rendel Farms, things don’t always go as planned. Double cropped Soybeans are always planted the second week of June, sometimes circumstances cause them to not make it in the ground until the third week of July. “As the producer, I need to know what will happen when things don’t go right. What are my odds? What are my risks? What are my rewards? When I do a little bit of that, it informs decisions in future years when things don’t go as planned again. You learn that from those mistakes,” he explained.
To make up for research projects that didn’t go as planned, OSU occasionally loans various types of equipment to Rendel Farms to use. Most recently, it was a strip-till rig. “We’ve kind of played around with strip-till and thought about it, but now, we actually have a strip-till rig, and we are doing some work with it to find some answers.”
Established in 1883, Rendel Farms has a long history of progressive farming. Brent believes that his Grandfather (Zack’s Great Grandfather) was the first farmer in Eastern Oklahoma, if not in the state, who planted a commercial soybean crop on the advice of a county extension agent.
One thing that Brent is considering for the future of Rendel Farms is autonomous farming. “There are some companies around here that have gotten things all the way to marketability, such as Sabanto.” he said. “When some larger companies started considering autonomy, they were thinking about really large pieces of equipment, but Sabanto is looking at small, nimble, and swarmed. I got to thinking about it, and for the current price of a new tractor and a twenty-four-row planter, I could buy an autonomous equivalent of that for two-thirds of the price.”
Looking at it from an operating efficiency standpoint, Brent thinks that small autonomous equipment is the way to go.
The Rendels have already gotten mixed reviews from their peers and neighbors concerning their own research projects and those they partner with OSU on. “It kind of depends on which generation they are from,” Zack said. “If they are from my generation, they are in a fast-paced mode. They want to know what I’m doing and what I’m seeing, but that costs money, and right now, we don’t have that. We are just going to keep doing it Grandpa’s way. There are some generations that are stuck in their ways. That’s okay. Everybody does things differently, and I’ve always told myself that I won’t be one to tell a farmer they’re wrong.”
Zack admitted that while there is still a legacy to honor, Rendel Farms is no longer “Grandpa’s farm.”
To listen to the full Red Dirt Agronomy Podcast, click here.
