Spotlight Series

Having grown corn and soybeans in Wheatfield, Indiana, for over 40 years, Mark Kingma has a lot of experience under his belt and has witnessed, as well as implemented, many changes to his family’s farm.

“I’m a third-generation farmer and, while I grew up on the farm, my first crop year with a financial interest in the operation was in ’77,” details Kingma. “It was around the mid-1980s when my dad and I started no-tilling. We just realized that we needed to do things differently.”

In a location with sandy soil, wind erosion is a major concern. According to Kingma, the family was facing some significant issues with the fields blowing away following planting – something he explained to be caused, in part, by their conventional tillage practices at the time.

Sustainability doesn’t end at no-till for Kingma. Over the years he’s committed to new and exciting practices such as cover crops, crop rotation, and split applications of nitrogen.

“I see sustainability as stewardship, because I just strive to leave the farm in better shape than when I started,” Kingma explains. “Sustainable agriculture wasn’t our goal. It’s what we’re doing, but that wasn’t the goal. The goal was to improve our ground for future generations, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

Kingma recognizes that his proximity to the Kankakee River, Lake Michigan, and other bodies of water are guiding factors towards his stewardship efforts, too.

“We’re very aware that any nitrogen we have left on our fields can make its way into the waterways,” he explains. “We don’t want to send anything down the river and through our practices we’re able to reduce that.”

Through his local ag retailer, Ceres Solutions, Kingma uses the Truterra’s sustainability tool, integrated with the Fieldprint Platform™ to track these efforts. The integration allows him to implement and measure his practices on a field-by-field basis.

“Mark is able to generate a stewardship baseline for every field and then predict and measure the impact of implementing specific conservation practices on both the environment and his operation’s profitability,” says Sina Parks, Stewardship Specialist at Ceres Solutions.