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Jay Goldmark
Jay Goldmark grew up on an 8000-acre, conventionally managed wheat and cattle ranch in Eastern Washington State. Today, as farm manager of Stone House Grain, a 3000-acre certified organic grain, feed, and livestock farm in Hudson, New York, he is partnering with Cornell University's Sustainable Cropping Systems Lab on “rotational no-till” trials that call upon him to apply “adaptive thinking” to decide when fields require tillage and when it is possible to give them a no-till “sabbatical.” He believes both tilling and no-tilling have critical roles to play on any holistically managed farm when the goal is to reduce or eliminate synthetic inputs.
Goldmark agrees that tilling can be soil-destroying when chemical fertilizers and pesticides are applied to mono-cropped fields year after year. But, he reports, “if we go back hundreds of years, the small family farms in New England kept their farms going through the generations through good practices that did involve plowing and tilling.” These farmers incorporated livestock into their systems, and understood the fundamentals of crop rotation and disease management. “It’s only until recent history, within the last hundred years, that we've lost that intrinsic balance on farms,” he notes, when synthetic inputs became substitutes for sound soil management practices.
Still Goldmark recognizes the tangible benefits of giving the soil a break from tillage for extended crop cycles. “Some amazing things start to happen with the soil’s biology and with its root structures when they're not disturbed,” he explains. He was consequently eager to seize the opportunity to collaborate with Cornell's Sustainable Cropping Systems Lab, which has been researching ways to help more organic farmers integrate no-till practices into their cropping systems.
In the initial trial, launched in the Spring of 2024, Stone House planted a cash crop of corn on 30 acres into a cover crop mix of oats and vetch that had been planted the previous August. “The oats died over the winter,” Goldmark reports, “and then the vetch woke up in the spring and got big and beautiful. We wanted to wait for it to blossom because it’s only when vetch is about to set seed that it is susceptible to dying from mechanical termination with a roller crimper.” It was the first time Stone House had planted green into standing vetch waist high.
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“It felt wrong because you think you are just going to have a weedy mess behind you,” he says. As it turned out, because it had been stressed by a heat wave that spring, the vetch died almost completely from the slicing action of the seed opener and its wilted biomass acted as a mulch, suppressing weeds as the corn grew up out of it without any cultivation. About 10 days after planting, they also roller crimped the vetch when it was about to set seed and was most susceptible to dying from the roller crimper. Planting into the standing vetch allowed them to plant corn sooner but it also meant that roller crimping would happen after the corn was up. One of the most surprising lessons was how the corn, when rolled soon after emerging, bounced right back and the vetch stayed down. “So this felt like a real eye-opener,” Goldmark, leading him to wonder if this could be done on a thousand acres instead of just 30.
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What he didn’t know at the time was if there would be any negative impacts from delaying the corn crop planting (he had planted on June 10th instead of mid-May, about 3-4 weeks later than normal). He assumed a yield loss but at harvest time the yield monitor in the combine told a different story. A side-by-side comparison of 95-day corn that was planted as the “control”—at the normal time in May and into a plowed down seed bed—to the no-till planted 95-day corn revealed the no-till corn as the higher yielder at 138 bu/acre compared to 114 bu/acre in the cultivated control. Because of the dry summer, the no-till managed soil had stayed cooler and retained moisture better. Delaying planting also meant the later planted corn wasn’t stressed due to heat during pollination as was the earlier planted crop.
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Since the corn was not harvested until November 2024, the soil had been undisturbed for a full 15 months. The next challenge, which Goldmark says Stone House is still trying to crack, is to see how long no-till can be extended into succeeding crop cycles. “We ended up not doing anything after harvest and left the corn stubble as is,” he reports.
“Then in the spring of 2025 we disced it up and planted yellow peas. Going forward, we are already thinking ahead to next year’s trial. We’re going to experiment with planting wide row corn, like in 60 inch rows, and at time of no-till planting into vetch, we’re also going to plant a warm season cover crop grazing mix across the field with a grain drill. The idea is that the cover crop grows up but doesn’t outcompete the corn. The wider rows will help sunlight filter through even when the corn gets tall so the cover crop doesn’t go dormant or die.
Then, after corn harvest, we already have a lush cover crop that has been growing all summer and is ready to graze. Having two tiers of biomass like this will hopefully create a lot of mulch and soil cover so that maybe in the fall we can drill in some triticale that overwinters and can provide a green biomass bridge into the next season for grazing, hay, and cover to no-till drill in a bean crop. And if in the spring things look a little different than what was in our imagination, then out comes the disc and we know how to reset the seed bed and grow a bean crop like that too.”
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That’s where adaptive thinking comes into play, Goldmark says. “If the conditions are right, and if you have a really good crop that has suppressed any weeds, and you have a good chance of growing a successive crop, then you can make that management decision. But I don't like the dogma of saying we're no-till no matter what, because then if all of a sudden you have a crazy flush of weeds, or if you had a really hard winter and the crop got killed out, then what?” What he loves about farming is the freedom to continually take stock, make choices and, if need be, change course. “Signing up for any program that limits your choices or that constricts you to a narrow practice may sound good on paper but nature often has other plans,” he says.
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