Eastern Iowa Farmer Spring 2017

managing your soil
and hilly ground of northeast Iowa
“add a whole different challenge.”
And they are challenges McCulley
is quite familiar with. She hopped out
of her white pickup truck after arriving
at one of her fields high above the
river bottoms and took a moment to
appreciate the view from the vantage
point. As the fall sun started its late afternoon
dip, McCulley and her guests
looked over acres of harvested ground,
timber and the Mississippi River clear
into Illinois. She never gets tired of
the view, she said, before turning her
attention to explaining some of her
farming techniques.
“I do a lot of terracing,” she said.
“It’s expensive, but because of the
bluffs, it’s necessary. I also do a lot of
no till.”
Terraces reduce the lengths of the
slopes across the landscape to control
the flow of water on the slopes to
reduce erosion. There are two basic
types of terraces – storage terraces and
gradient terraces. Storage terraces collect
water and store it until it can infiltrate
into the ground or release through
a stable outlet. Gradient terraces are
designed as a channel to slow runoff
water and carry it to a stable outlet.
McCulley also practices contour
farming, farming with row patterns
around a hill versus up and down a
hill. It can reduce soil erosion by as
much as 50 percent, according to the
USDA, because the rows form hundreds
of small dams that slow water
flow and increase filtration.
At another field, she turned a
practice eye on her grass waterways,
which are constructed channels seeded
to grass or other vegetation. They are
used as maintenance with contour
farming where runoff is concentrated
to prevent gulley erosion.
“If you get a real gulley washer,
there’s not much you can do,” she said.
A self-described conservationist at
heart, McCulley became a commissioner
of the Jackson County Soil and
Water Conservation District almost 20
years ago.
It was through educating herself that
she became interested in serving that
role. Conservation district commissioners
help to inform residents in
their area about policy and program
updates that impact conservation and
agriculture. n
— Nancy mayfield,
eastern iowa farmer
Joe Dierickx knew since
he was 4 years old
that he wanted to farm.
His dad, John, had a philosophy about
that: If you want to farm with me, you
have to get a college degree first.
So in 1978, Joe headed to Iowa State
University to study agriculture business,
eastern iowa farmer photo / trevis mayfield
Father and son John (right) and Joe Dierickx farm together on family land. Among the advice John, 87,
shares after a lifetime of farming: “It is nice to receive recognition, but experience is the best teacher;
being lucky helps; and one learns by mistakes.”
Soil health seeds
planted in college
course years ago
where one course in particular piqued his
interest, Agronomy 335.
“It was a soils class about organic matter
and humus and what we as farmers
could do to improve the soil system,” he
recalled. “The teacher essentially was
telling us how to grow better crops.”
More than 35 years later, he still
pulls out the notes from that class as he
64 Eastern Iowa Farmer | spring 2017