Producer Features

You’ve heard of the Texas two-step, a country dance. Let me introduce you to the Texas three-twist – cultivation, diversification and cooperation – involving sprigs, hay and custom work.

For the Rice family, farming has always been a family affair. With the sixth generation coming back to the farm, there is no denying farming is in their blood. Brothers Scott and Steve Rice operate a production alfalfa farm in Wilsonville, Nebraska, the town where they were born and raised.

If you buy a $90,000 30-foot-wide no-till drill, 95 percent of your neighboring farmers will call you crazy – a few cards shy of a full deck, a few bricks short of a full load, half a bubble off plumb.

“If your combine was throwing 80 percent of what it took in back on the ground, you’d be pretty unhappy,” Steve Kenyon points out. A cow, on the other hand, has a greater purpose.

Anybody who runs a bale wagon will tell you how critical bale length is. A New Holland bale wagon, for instance, will pick up three bales and lay them end-to-end in the stacker.

For farmers, innovation is the name of the game, and no one knows that better than Richard Knight, owner and operator of Knight Farm in upstate New York.