CHILLICOTHE, Ohio – It was a hot day. Still, Lydia and her dad, Jarrod Dresbach had folks sitting up and listening as she talked about cover crops and regenerative farming at the Butler Soil and Water Conservation District Cover Crop Field Day. 

Later, the Dresbachs expanded on that. They farm 1,200 acres and are currently row cropping 600 acres, all non-GMO, Jarrod said. Some acres are in Conservation Reserve Programs, there are buffers, water shed ground and pasture. They have about 45 cow-calf pairs and finish them all.

“We are direct marketing our proteins, so we do beef, pork, pasture-raised chicken, and eggs,” explained Lydia. “We’re an all non-GMO farm, and behind our wheat, we double crop sunflowers in our cover crop blend.

“We are focused on regenerative agriculture,” she said. “We are doing the best we can to steward well what we have been entrusted to care for on the farm. We want our farm to be a functioning ecosystem where the enterprises and the different things we are doing are building each other up.”

Jarrod had always been an out-of-the-box thinker; his wife, Stephanie, applauded that. So, when he heard the late David Brandt, a proponent of no-till and cover crops, speak in the spring of 1991, Dresbach immediately switched to no-till exclusively. He used cover crops when they were convenient.

Then Lydia came back to the farm the summer after college graduation. She had a dual degree in ministry and elementary education and planned to teach. That all changed.

“My grandparents, Joe and Marlene Dresbach, sat me down and said there wasn’t a grandchild at the time who was passionate about agriculture,” Lydia said. “They knew I had always had a heart for the farm. I helped in the summers or when I was home. They said that if I wanted to come back now was the time.”

They wanted Lydia to have the opportunity to learn from her dad before he retired, her Uncle Jeff Dresbach, who is also part of the farming operation, and her grandpa, who, in his 80s, is not so active on the farm but still takes part in the decision-making. They wanted her to have the opportunity to leave a legacy for other family members who might want to farm.

It was not a hard decision, she said. After that, they transitioned the farm even more into regenerative farming. They added diversity. They had always grown wheat, but Lydia pushed to add heritage grains to the crop.

“We’re doing several heritage wheat varieties,” Lydia said. “We’re doing spelt, not just commercial wheat. We want our focus to be community centered. We want to provide nutrient-dense foods for our community rather than solely selling to the commodity market.”

People in the community asked them for non-GMO finished beef, Lydia said. That helped them decide to transition to non-GMO completely, even the row crops.

“We didn’t want the chance of a cross-contamination in our bin system so we transitioned the entire farm to non-GMO,” Lydia said.

Trying to get a premium price for non-GMO corn and soybeans has been a challenge because regenerative farmers have a different mindset, Jarrod said. They are not all about yield.

“The thing with regenerative is that you’re not sacrificing next year’s crop because you’re putting so much into this year’s crop and burning up all the organic matter you have,” he said. “When the ground is only supposed to produce 150-bushel of corn, but you’re pushing it so hard it is producing 200, the ground is going to fall or you have to continue to put more money in it to make that crop.”

Lydia’s brother, Jacob, began raising pasture-fed chickens for eggs and meat. When their customers requested pork, they brought pigs into the mix. They found niche markets for deer corn and heritage grains.

The Dresbachs, and other farmers in the area who raise their crops with the same regenerative mindset, market their heritage grains through the Local Mill, a heritage grain mill run by Jay Brandt.

Now they always plant cover crops to keep a living root in the soil, Jarrod said. Lydia added sunflowers to that cover crop mix for several reasons. Right now, with the ongoing drought, the cattle are grazing on that mix that they put behind wheat.

“One of our goals for the farm as a family is to help educate the community as to what agriculture can look like and to provide opportunities for the community to take an active role in where their food comes from, how it’s grown, just some of the beauty that can be found in agriculture,” Lydia explained. “So, the sunflowers are a double crop.

“This year we had two types,” she explained. “One that is strictly for a grazing mix, those are the smaller sunflowers. We looked to the weather and a drought was coming. So we were prepared for our cattle to still have good forage through this drought. We also do production sunflowers.”

They cut the tops off the sunflowers and graze the cattle on the forage underneath. The taller species are black oil sunflowers; they were planted with the corn planter. They have an oil press and make oil out of the sunflowers.

When the sunflowers are in bloom, they invite the community to come and enjoy them. On social media they promote coffee in the sunflowers, photographing the sunflowers, or just enjoying a sunset in the midst of them.

“For us as your farmers, sunflowers are one of the biggest blessings and joys that allow us to build community from soil to the people we are growing food for,” they said on their Facebook page.