On an overcast morning in June, more than a dozen livestock producers gathered in the on-farm cabinetmaking shop of Leslea and Brad Hodgson, situated in the scenic hills near southeastern Minnesota’s Root River. Soon after taking seats on folding chairs arranged in a wide circle, the farmers answered an opening question: “Why am I here?” That query was fielded by men and women ranging in age from 30-something — a few of those on the younger side had children in tow — to 60-plus, and ranging in the level of experience they had producing livestock utilizing adaptive rotational grazing, a system that moves animals between paddocks in a manner that builds soil health, prevents overgrazing, and extends the forage production season well into the fall/early winter. Some of the participants were just starting out and in the midst of acquiring livestock and setting up their fencing systems; others were “early adopters” and had decades of experience under their belts.

So why were they sitting inside smack dab in the middle of a busy Midwestern growing season? These are farmers who are raising livestock utilizing innovative systems that don’t fit into the mainstream of agriculture. Producing meat, poultry, milk, and eggs on pasture rather than in input-intensive confinement systems requires seeking information that often isn’t available from land grant colleges, extension educators, or input suppliers. That means they need to work just a little harder to get intelligence on how to make adaptive rotational grazing and other regenerative farming techniques more effective from an agronomic, economic, and ecological perspective.

So, it’s no surprise that during the next few hours on this summer day, the participants energetically shared ideas on everything from fencing and watering systems to methods for grazing native grasses and setting up sacrifice areas in muddy weather. They also talked about frequency of rotations, the best breeds for grazing, and ways to monitor the effectiveness of various forage management techniques. And during a pasture walk, sightings of bobolinks, dickcissels, and other grassland songbirds prompted Leslea to lead a discussion around which grazing rotations benefit wildlife the most.

As one farmer headed home at the conclusion of the gathering, he nodded to the shed-full of farmers behind him and said, “There’s a lot of knowledge here.”

Bringing Folks Together

This gathering was just one in a series of Soil Health Hub meetings the Land Stewardship Project is facilitating on farms across southeastern Minnesota and northeastern Iowa this summer. These are not open-to-the-public field days. Rather, these are opportunities for livestock and crop producers to take part in the kind of private peer-to-peer learning required to step out of the mainstream and build a farming system based on living, biologically rich soil. These closed meetings involve building a level of trust so that folks are comfortable sharing failures, as well as successes. As the current soil health revolution farming is in the midst of continues to evolve, it’s become clearer than ever that traditional methods of information transfer — educational and governmental “experts” handing down scientific knowledge from on-high — simply aren’t adequate to meet the needs of farmers seeking to take a different approach to food production.

Studies going back decades show that farmers are most successful at adopting innovative practices and systems when they are involved in peer-to-peer learning networks of some type. A seminal 1941 study conducted in central Iowa’s Greene County traced the adoption of hybrid seed corn during the 1930s. Through extensive interviews, rural sociologists discovered that the majority of farmers did not accept the innovation immediately from land grant experts, but rather “…delayed acceptance for a considerable time after initial contact with innovation.” Many Iowa farmers who put off planting hybrid seed for years were first made aware of its existence at the same time as their early-adopting neighbors. It turns out these early adopters served a key role: they were willing to jump in feet-first and test this innovation on their own land almost as soon as they heard about it, and they shared the results with their neighbors in a kind of community laboratory setting.

More recently, starting in 2009 the Conservation Cropping Systems Initiative helped make Indiana a national leader in integrating cover cropping into the traditional corn-soybean rotation with the help of Soil Health Hubs that brought together farmers in small-group settings to share ideas and support each other through thick and thin. The hallmark of these hubs was that participants represented a wide spectrum of farmers when it came to their experience with innovative soil health practices — early adopters were hobnobbing with late adopters.

And the Land Stewardship Project’s Farm Beginnings course is also based on the idea that farmers learn best from other farmers. In fact, the Hodgsons graduated from Farm Beginnings over two decades ago, and credit the networking they gained through that with helping them launch a successful grass-based beef production and marketing enterprise called Root River Galloways. “That changed everything,” said Leslea of the course.

In 2024, the Minnesota Office for Soil Health sent a survey to 8,000 farmers. The questions centered around, among other things, what factors influenced decisions to adopt soil-friendly practices like no-till, cover cropping, rotational grazing, and diverse rotations. Of the roughly 1,100 farmers who responded, 40% said that having a neighbor use a soil health practice like low-tillage, cover cropping, or diversified rotations was a major influence on whether they would consider such a technique. Half identified as middle adopters — they tend to take on a new practice after others have demonstrated them to be successful.

But only 10% of respondents had ever participated in a farmer-led group or network of farmers that was focused on soil health. Of the respondents who had participated in such groups, they ranked highly these networks’ influence on their decision-making. Bottom line: farmer-to-farmer learning is highly effective, but suffers from a public relations problem — only 17% of survey respondents had even heard of farmer-led groups centered around soil health.

During the Soil Health Hub meetings LSP has held thus far in 2025, a general theme has filtered into the discussions held in barns, sheds, paddocks, and during hikes across farms: how does an agricultural operation balance that three-legged stool of social, economic, and environmental sustainability? In coming weeks, we will be running a series of blogs describing how farmers participating in LSP’s Soil Health Hubs are addressing the three-legged stool question. It turns out community-building and moral support play a big part in striking that balance. After all, as that original question that launched the recent meeting at the Hodgsons reveals, farmer-to-farmer learning isn’t just about transferring information on the best brand of wire reel to use or whether one should clip a pasture to maintain forage quality.

“Why am I here?” said Mike Rupprecht, a veteran grazier and organic crop producer at the outset of the meeting. “Because I love being around people who are farming like Brad and Leslea.”

Brian DeVore is LSP’s managing editor. For more information on the Soil Health Hubs, contact LSP’s Alex Romano, Shea-Lynn Ramthun, or Sarah Wescott. More on building soil health profitably is available here.

You can read the second installment in this series here.