Q&A: Iowa farmer Wade Dooley

A sixth-generation farmer talks conservation, tariffs and being the "crazy" neighbor

Apologies for the newsletter radio silence—it’s been a busy month here. I got married(!), honeymooned, closed on a house and have now undertaken some renovations with fun unexpected (and expensive) twists and turns. But I’m also working on a piece I’m really excited about, a personal essay for Noema Magazine about prairies in my home state, Iowa.

This week, I thought I’d share an interview I’m not sure will make it into the final piece, but really helped me understand the state of farming in Iowa—including some cultural and economic nuances that mainstream outlets often miss. It’s with Wade Dooley, 42-year-old farmer in Marshall County whom neighbors see as a bit of a weirdo for his willingness to take risks and embrace conservation practices. I spoke with Wade back in March, when farmers were starting to get worried about Trump’s tariffs. We were able to connect a little based on shared geography—I’m no farmer but my family owns a corn and soy operation in southeastern Iowa my dad grew up on. Now here’s the Q&A!

Wade Dooley on his farm in Albion, Iowa.

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

WADE DOOLEY: Sorry I missed your call, Christian, my hands were full.

CHRISTIAN ELLIOTT: No worries, you get so many spam calls these days.

WADE: Oh no, I was waiting for yours. I’ve just been working on a piece of farm equipment here.

CHRISTIAN: Thanks for getting back to me. I’m working on a story about prairie in Iowa and Illinois and restoration and land conservation where it overlaps with agriculture, and some folks at Iowa State University suggested you’d be a good person to talk to.

WADE: Well, that’s because I’m one of the crazy farmers. The neighbors always got to have something to talk about, so I give them something. I'm the sixth generation on my family's farm in northern Marshall County, right alongside the Iowa River, and the majority of my farmland is on the Iowa River floodplain, and so all of that river bottom ground is really affected by heavy rains and drought, because a lot of the land is underlaid with sand and gravel from the river, changing its course over millennia. So we can either flood or we can drought, or we can both. We can totally burn up in the summer. We can flood in the spring. It's always very exciting, starting this time of year, trying to out guess what Mother Nature is going to give us.

Historically this farm was a 50/50 run of row crops and grazed livestock. As a kid, growing up in the 90s we had small-scale confinement hogs, nothing like what they've got nowadays. And we were farrow to finish, which means we had the sows, the mamas. They had the babies. And then we'd raise those piglets all the way up until they were at slaughter weight, and then send them to the local plant, which is only about 15 miles away. But the economy shifted. The bottom fell out of that market, and we got out of hogs completely back in the late 90s, after, I don't know, the 15th crash. We were still doing row crops and had a fairly good sized cow calf herd. So we'd have a cows and calve them out, produce the calves up to about 5-600 pounds, and then sell them to someone else as feeder calves. But that was how it was done for 30 years.

And then I came back to the farm after time away in ‘07. For a long run, corn and soybeans were barely profitable, marginally profitable, and most of the profit came from government subsidies. And so there was never enough room on the farm for me to come back. Then the markets got better and there was enough profit in row crops for me to actually be able to start farming. But barely. And so we started looking at diversification. We did a lot with cover crops. Because we had cows, we were able to graze the cover crops in the fall and winter and spring, and make extra use of that growing forage out in the fields. And that also helped improve our soil conditions and our soil health, which helped us step away from some of the high nitrogen levels that we were putting on, so reduce our fertilizer use, and also save a little bit on herbicide applications.

But we had really variable weather. Some years we'd really flood bad, and so we had to figure out how to manage and mitigate that risk. Every year I do a financial assessment multiple times throughout the year, which is something that I learned in school, and my grandmother kind of beat into my skull as a teenager—you know you have to be able to do a budget. You have to know where your money's at, and you have to know how things are going, or you're going to make a lot of mistakes and then pay for it later. And so running the numbers is just a normal thing for me. A lot of farmers don't like doing that. Farmers just don't bother to run the numbers anymore. They take a shoe box of receipts to their banker, and the banker goes through everything and tells them if they made any money. It's insane to me, as you know, someone trying to stay on top of their business, but it's really, really remarkably common. A lot of farmers have no idea how they are financially in any given moment of the year.

But I was really on top of how much I was not making with the variability in the markets and the variability in the weather, and I was wanting to stabilize my income a little more. People who get a regular paycheck don't know what it's like to have boom and bust cycles in a single year, to ride on debt until you get one big paycheck and then pay all that debt down and hope that there's a little left over so you can make new payments on the next debt.

CHRISTIAN: A hard way to make a living.

WADE: It's, yeah. It’s different. And I was getting kind of tired. I don't like the debt cycle. An ag economist years ago called it the debt treadmill. And that's exactly what it is. Farmers are on a debt treadmill, and if they ever step off of it, either the debt crashes down on them and kills them, or they've developed enough assets that the income tax comes and crushes them. It's a bit of a strange business. I finally got sick of all of the variability.

CHRISTIAN: So that’s when you got involved in the Conservation Reserve Program, the CRP program?

WADE: Yeah, because I had drill, so I could go and plant. I did custom seeding for people and would go and plant all these acres and acres and acres of CRP for other people. And I said, you know, this is kind of silly. I'm planning for everybody else, but I'm not putting any of my own stuff in CRP.

And by the numbers, on the good ground, the CRP wasn't really a financially intelligent move. But on all the river bottom ground, especially the stuff that was really prone to flooding and to drought, well, it made sense there, because I get the same amount of money every single year, which you never do on river bottom in crop production. We're not talking about a big cash flow. But it was steady cash flow, which is great.

CHRISTIAN: I can see the appeal when the alternative is who knows.

WADE: Yeah, exactly. I mean, sure, crop insurance paid for some, but crop insurance isn't there for you to make a profit on. It's there to cover your ass and pay your debt off and that's it. It's not there to send the family to Europe. So, we weren't making money on the bad times, even though we had crop insurance. It just covered our ass so that we could do it all again the next year. With the CRP program. I put all of my ground that was really prone to flooding, every acre that was near the river, into 10-year CRP, with a high diversity mix for the wetland areas. And we did that in 2020, which was a good year to stop growing crops. And I have not regretted it at all.

Now after five years, I've got tall grass prairies out there that you walk into and you disappear from. I mean, you get eight feet in and you can't see out of it. The wildlife is just all over the place down there. And my payments come through on a regular basis, which is great. Running the numbers, I took the previous 10 years of net profit, which is only the only thing that matters. Gross profit means nothing. It's all about the net. Every farmer just wants to think about gross profit, because those numbers are big and happy. You put all your expenses in and you get the net profit, and it comes down to pennies. That's not so happy.

Well, I took the previous 10 years of net profit on those acres, and put them up against what the net profit would be for 10 years of CRP, including the cost of maintenance, the cost of the seed, which was substantial, and all of that. And within four years, the CRP was going to be a higher net profit than the previous 10 and a steady income. And I've got amazing wildlife now that I never expected to have. I was just down there yesterday at dusk and there's a herd of 45 deer running around there.

CHRISTIAN: Wow. Correct me if I’m wrong, but to be in the CRP program, you don’t necessarily have to plant a high quality tallgrass prairie, right? You just need to take it out of crop production. So why do it right? Was it that intangible wanting to have that landscape that made you take the extra step? The environmental benefits, having that native ecosystem? Because you could have done CRP without the cost of seeds, right?

WADE: Well you still have to put seed down, but you could go with the cheapest option, which is like five species. But having done cover crops for many years and being involved with groups like Iowa Learning Learning Farms through Practical Farmers of Iowa for more than 15 years, and interacting with all these people who really know their shit and who are excited about diversity, habitat and improving the soil, water and all of that stuff. I am just a big fan of diversity. I know we're not allowed to say that word anymore. That's not politically correct to use the word diversity, so you’ll probably have to scrub that from this, but that's that's the key to everything, is diversity. That's what I wanted on my farm.

I hate monocrops. Monocultures are unhealthy. What did I raise for years and years? Corn and soybeans. Monocrops. My pastures, when I started farming, most of them were maybe up of three species in the seeding mix, that was it. And now, when I do a pasture seeding, I'm throwing 15 to 20 different species out there, because everything has a place. Not everything does well in all places, but everything has a place it does well.

And I knew the river bottom, all that ground is so variable. I mean, you go 30 feet and you go from deep, black, heavy gumbo silt to just pure beach sand and back again. And so the variability in the ground. If I planted just five species, there's no way that those five species would do well over the entire property. And because we have these floods and because we drought out, I needed a diversity of species to survive that kind of variability. And I also really wanted diversity because then you get wildlife from what everyone was telling me. And now I'm seeing it, I'm like, holy crap. That was a great move.

The other reason I did this was because we flood so much, so many times in the past, I wanted to catch everybody's topsoil that was flowing by.

CHRISTIAN: [Laughs]

WADE: Seriously. I've been down there in after a flood in early summer in areas that we hadn't grazed, so the grass was really tall all winter and there was a lot of biomass still around. And then the flood came, and those areas would be huge deposits of silt, because they slowed the water down and the soil was able to settle out into those grassy areas, they snagged it. And any area that was either cut short or open ground that water just went through and eroded more. I thought, well, a tall grass prairie, there's a ton of material here that's going to slow a ton of water down. I'm going to get everybody's topsoil they keep throwing away. And in 10 years, I'll have a better farm than all my neighbors who apparently don't care about their topsoil.

CHRISTIAN: That’s your resource, right? I mean that soil is what makes Iowa so unique.

WADE: Yeah, we got the best soils in the world and we keep throwing them down the river. CRP, everybody does it for different reasons. I never do anything for one reason. So it's hard for me to nail down the thing that made me decide it. It was a whole bunch of things that piled up and added up to making that decision and I'm really glad they did. This spring the birds are going bonkers everywhere. There's just so much noise, all these different birds making nests and fighting over territory.

CHRISTIAN: I’ve talked to some of the Iowa Learning Farms scientists and folks at the Tallgrass Prairie Center, and they talked about how farmers they work with, there’s a sort of mutual respect of craft. There’s a lot of knowledge that goes into farming and also into restoring prairie. So it seems that’s true in your case, like it’s something you can learn to do well and understand, like farming.

WADE: One thing I love about farming is that it allows me to paint. Everybody's got a little bit of a creative streak in them, even if they repress it. Farmers have a huge creative streak in general. I don’t know if we self sort or maybe it's trained into us. But I paint the landscape. I don't paint landscapes on canvas. I paint landscape with the landscape. My swaths of prairie, I did that. I made that happen. It's very satisfying, but it was also intentional. I planned it out. When I do my pastures, I do the same thing. I'm always trying to plant things where they belong and where they're going to do well. And obviously I need to make money at it, because there's bills.

But it's never only about the money. Most farmers, they talk about money all the time, but they don't give a shit about money. If they didn't have to handle money ever again in their lives, every farmer would be thrilled. Money is the least important thing to them, except it has to be the most important thing, because the banker tells them it is. But if they could just grow stuff, that's all they would do.

CHRISTIAN: You started this conversation by saying you’re the crazy farmer. I’m wondering how common it is for farmers to embrace changing things up in the ways you have. Have others around you done similar things? Or are you seen as, like, why is this guy doing all this?

WADE: There are other people that are starting to do things like this, but they are not very common. I am seen as an outlier in my area. Every farmer has to have a crazy farmer that others watch to see if it works for them, and then maybe 10 years down the road they'll try that thing. So, I'm that crazy farmer for this neighborhood, basically.

CHRISTIAN: So they’re gonna watch and think it’s strange, but if it works, they might follow along in time.

WADE: Some of them will, yeah. Culturally, change doesn't happen quickly in farm country anymore. The farm crisis in the ‘80s wiped out most of the risk takers, most of the creative, inventive, innovative folks that had historically kept things moving in farm country. The banks pulled the plug first on the riskiest ventures. And so all those folks are no longer here. They're no longer part of the culture, right? So the only ones that survived were the ones who were the most risk averse, the safest investments for the banks. The banks are the reason that everything came apart, but the banks basically sorted us out for two generations.

The emphasis has always has been on low risk, steady return, even though it's low. Stability is everything, and stability means you don't change. That culture, it's pervasive, it's everywhere. Anything that's new and innovative, people talk about it, but then they won't do it unless it's absolutely clear it's not that much of a risk. Conservation measures, they're not instantly obvious, so people don't want to do it. Sure, it's going to stop erosion, but it's extra work, it's extra money. I'm not going to see any result from this right away. I don't trust that it's going to be a thing that lasts. So they won't do it. It's a real problem.

I sell cover crop seeds and it's really hard to get customers to do more than a little bit, because they see it as a risk. And all risk is considered bad anymore in farm country. You've got the few innovators, creative folks, that are really going to try, but they're seen as outliers. My neighborhood isn't that bad for it, but I’ve talked to folks in other parts of Iowa and the Midwest, and they're just flat out ostracized because they're so weird that nobody wants to associate with them, because they might get contaminated by new ideas.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah, to some extent I suppose it’s hard to blame farmers when the profit margins are so low. But being scared of ideas is not a great way to do things.

WADE: No, it's not healthy. The whole system is completely unhealthy, but it's also completely artificial. If we didn't have crop insurance, nobody around here would grow corn and soybeans like they do. The diversity of productivity would be completely different than it is right now. But we're completely and totally subsidized. So again, it's the low risk. We only grow the things that have a guaranteed payout. I mean, this year, I was talking to farmers, and all of them were doing the math. For once, they were doing math, on what the crop insurance payout was going to be. That was deciding what crop they're putting in. It wasn't about what the markets are doing. It wasn't about what that ground is ready for. It was OK, what's crop insurance going to guarantee? Only that that was the deciding factor.

CHRISTIAN: That makes me wonder what folks are talking about right now with the tariffs. Is there a sense in your neighborhood of what the outlook is like?

WADE: It’s a mixed bag. The stronger feelings come out right down party lines and everybody else is vaguely uneasy about the tariffs, but most of them kind of forget how bad the markets were the last time we had a ton of tariffs. What they remember was all of the government payouts, and they were huge payouts after the tariffs hit and wiped out the crop and livestock markets. Then suddenly the government was throwing money at farmers. At least one farmer in my area, he was going bankrupt. He was starting to sell equipment off. He was losing his ass. And then the government handouts started, and all of a sudden he was able to completely turn his operation around, put up new buildings, get more farmland rented, all of this because of the government checks. If it hadn't been for that, he'd have been screwed. And so everyone remembers that kind of stuff, so the tariffs aren't that scary, because commodity farmers are going to get handouts, and we're starting to see it now. The government is already starting to hand out subsidies or payouts to farmers who raise commodity crops to counter the negative effects of tariffs.

CHRISTIAN: And that’s yet another incentive to do the same thing everyone else is doing and not something innovative.

WADE: Correct. Because if you’re not in a commodity group, you’re not in a good place. I know a bunch of smaller scale vegetable farmers, and they are screaming for assistance, and they're not getting shit, because they're not raising corn or soybeans. So they don't get anything, even though they're actually feeding their communities. Nobody eats corn. That's a feed stock for other animals, but it's not food. It doesn't matter. That's where the money's at.

As far as conservation goes, the more government handouts there are, the more people stay with where the government handouts come from. If you're getting paid to do corn, you're not going to do conservation measures, unless they're going to link those payouts to conservation, and they're not going to do that for the next four years. If it wasn't for the government handouts, if it was just the markets going down, usually in times of really tight margins or negative margins, farmers will grasp at anything. That's when they start becoming more willing to take on risk, because they’re losing their ass anyway, so they might as well try this crazy idea. Given the culture against innovation, when things get tough enough, then innovation is incentivized.

CHRISTIAN: My family has a small farm near Wapello and it’s where my dad grew up. It’s corn and soy in rotation. Long before I was here there were hogs and cattle and some horses, and it just seems like it was a more interesting place before all those other things became too risky. So it’s the same story. They even considered doing a 30-year lease to a solar company fairly recently because it was going to be a regular payout.

WADE: If they do, have them do agrivoltaics. A lot of the companies that are doing this. I just got paperwork in the mail the other day, but a lot of the companies that are trying to get farmers to sign on these leases, if you say, “Hey, I still want to put livestock on this,” then they'll jack the panels up higher so you can still grow vegetable crops underneath it, or run sheep or something in there to graze it. And so you still get the use of that land.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah they ultimately decided against it because it would have involved a lot of gravel on the field and there was no off-ramp really. But anyway, I’ve gone off track here. This has been really great, I appreciate it. And if you think of anything else, please give me a call. I’ll be in touch when the story’s coming out so you can see it.

WADE: I appreciate that, great!