ABERDEEN, SD – For producer Blake Vince, running a successful farm comes down to acknowledging one simple fact.
“I recognize the only thing, at the end of the day, that’s totally 100 percent in my control is my expenses,” Vince said, “and by that, I mean the things that I can decide whether to or not to spend money on specifically.”
Vince, a fifth-generation producer, will explain how regenerative agriculture has benefited his family’s southwest Ontario farm at the Soil Health Conference, Jan. 13-14 in Aberdeen, SD.
His family adopted no-till practices in the early 1980s, and that has allowed them to reduce their machinery and fuel costs. “Those are the things that I recognize straight away as the benefits of no-till is that we can reduce the amount of horsepower that we need,” he said. “We can reduce the amount of fuel that we need per acre.”
Time is another resource producers need to think about, Vince said. “So instead of having employees out there making passes back and forth up the field, doing all this tillage that I really don’t see as a necessity, I can have that employee doing some other jobs that need to be done,” he said.
Longterm no-till and other soil health management practices have led to increased soil fertility on his farm. He has seen a reduction of 25 to 33 percent in his nitrogen use, Vince said.
Blake Vince grazes Hereford cattle on cover crops in the fall on his farm in Ontario. Courtesy photo.
Vince grows a diverse crop rotation, including cover crops, and has started grazing livestock on his cropland. These practices have paid off not only with reduced expenses but also with improvements to his soil health.
He said he and his wife purchased their first farm with their own money in 1999, and at that time, the farm’s average soil organic matter was 3.5 percent. “Today, that same farm, 20 years later, is crowding closer to 5.5 percent,” Vince said.
That increased organic matter allows his soil to infiltrate and store more water.
“So, as we’ve gone away from tillage, and we’re focused on no-till, our water infiltration rates have increased dramatically,” Vince said. “We don’t see the standing water that some farmers see with a long-time commitment to tillage.”
That’s a benefit that helps make his farm more resilient in droughts.
“That water infiltration capacity and then increasing water holding capacity really is a godsend on a year like this, specifically when we haven’t had a lot of rain,” Vince said. “And so, then the roots are able to proliferate deep into the soil profile and grab ahold of the available nutrients that the plant needs to grow.”
Other benefits
Entomologist Thomas Dykstra is the laboratory director of Dykstra Laboratories in Gainesville, FL. He will be a presenter at the 2026 Soil Health Conference, Jan. 13-14 in Aberdeen, SD. Courtesy photo.
Other conference speakers will highlight different benefits of conservation agriculture.
Entomologist Thomas Dykstra, laboratory director of Dykstra Laboratories in Gainesville, Florida, notes that healthier plants with a higher sugar content in the plant material suffer less insect pest pressure.
“When we know that the sugar is high enough, the plant is healthy enough that the proteins are well formed, and those well-formed proteins cannot be broken down by insects,” Dykstra said. “They are looking to have food that is partially broken down because it is easier for them to digest.”
Dykstra said that less healthy plants with imperfectly formed proteins release certain molecules like ethanol which are indicators of protein degradation and make the plants more attractive to insect pests.
To grow healthy plants, Dykstra said, producers need well-oxygenated soils and a healthy soil biome. “If you wanted to raise healthy plants, you cannot do that without the necessary microbes,” he said, “and in many cases, the fungi that are needed in order to impart that level of health.”
Other conference speakers will highlight additional benefits of conservation agriculture.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor of Grassland Ecology Randy Jackson, center, explains his research during a field day. Jackson will be a presenter at the 2026 Soil Health Conference, Jan. 13-14 in Aberdeen, SD. Courtesy photo.
“What is pretty clear from data is, in the short term, employing regenerative practices can have an immediate improvement on water quality, ground water and surface water quality, so that if you’re living in a place where your drinking water is degraded by nitrate, you can certainly contribute to improving things immediately for you and your family and your neighborhood,” University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor of Grassland Ecology Randy Jackson said. “If you care about birds and pollinators and hunting and these kinds of things, regenerative practices give you a better chance to manage for improved habitat and variety of habitat that, in some cases, can and should improve your livelihood, improve the profitability of your farm.”
The Soil Health Conference, hosted by the South Dakota Soil Health Coalition with support from its partners, will feature speakers from across North America who will present information about conservation agriculture that will be of interest to producers, landowners, and gardeners.
Jackson and Vince outlined why it’s an important topic for everyone in agriculture.
“The soil is a finite resource in human lifetimes, and what’s taking thousands and thousands of years to build – the soil itself and the organic matter that’s in it – we are wearing away and eroding in decades and even years, and it’s not sustainable,” Jackson said. “And our future selves, future generations deserve better. And in fact, if we don’t do something to reverse the degradation of our agricultural soils, there aren’t going to be future generations the way we might like there to be. So, it’s an existential crisis.”
Vince said it’s up to land managers to take action.
“We all know that we have been seeing a decline in soil productivity, and we think that there’s somehow a silver bullet solution, that miraculously seed genetics or some new traits are going to come forward, and it’s going to save the day,” Vince said. “But I think the onus of responsibility lies squarely on the shoulders of the practitioner to figure it out and get on with it and do something that is indeed beneficial.”
The 2026 Soil Health Conference will be held Jan. 13-14 at the Best Western Aberdeen Hotel and Event Center in Aberdeen, SD. Students may register for free. There is an admission fee for others.
To learn more about the conference and register, visit www.sdsoilhealthcoalition.org. For questions, contact the South Dakota Soil Health Coalition at sdsoilhealth@gmail.com or 605-280-4190.
