Farmers Gather in Albert Lea to Talk About Bringing Small Grains Back to Minnesota

Corn and soybeans may dominate the agricultural landscape in southern Minnesota and northern Iowa, but reintroducing small grains such as oats into the rotation could help make farming more economically, agronomically and environmentally sustainable, while serving a growing consumer demand for healthy food, said a panel of national and local experts during a recent Land Stewardship Project workshop in Albert Lea. “It’s all driven by diversity,” said Roy Pfaltzgraff, who farms 2,200 acres in northeastern Colorado, to the over 150 farmers and other ag professionals from three states gathered in Albert Lea Tuesday for the Bringing Small Grains Back to Minnesota workshop. Since coming back to the family operation in 2016, Pfaltzgraff has increased the operation’s production base from a handful of crops to over 18 species, including several kinds of small grains. He said this diversity has increased his farm’s resiliency in an area that only gets 13 inches of precipitation annually, and that resiliency has repercussions all the way to people’s dinner table.