Baumann likes ag’s cutting edge
Outstanding Young Farmer marries high tech with conservation
Adam Baumann, 38, named the Marathon County Outstanding Young Farmer of the Year for 2022, likes to stay on the cutting edge of agriculture.
That means studying tractor-generated data from last year’s 263 bushel per acre corn crop. It means participating in field trials with Bayer Crop Science, a major agrochemical company. It also means partnering with the Natural Resources Conservation Service to grow cover crops on half of his family farm’s 1,200 acres.
Bauman said he is always trying to break records, advance beyond the status quo.
“I am always pushing, asking questions,” he said. “I don’t settle for much. I want to take one step further.”
Baumann, son of Floyd Baumann, half of Twin B Dairy, town of Emmet, is a fourth generation Marathon County farmer. The family farm grows corn, soybeans, small grains, alfalfa and ginseng, a local specialty crop. The farm manages a herd of 125 Black Angus cattle.
Baumann lives in Rib Mountain with his wife, a school teacher at D.C. Everest, and two children, ages nine and six.
Baumann’s early interest was in computers, not tractors. As a student at Marathon High School, he built computers from scratch. Later, as a student at UWStevens Point, he earned a degree in web design and computer graphics.
“I was always a computer guy,” he said. “I always liked that.”
In 2010, however, Twin B Dairy purchased its first New Holland auto-steer tractor. Baumann realized that computers and farming went together. He hasn’t looked back.
These days, Baumann, a mechanical tinkerer even as a teen, does all of the maintenance on the family farm’s 10 tractors, except for occasional tractor software updates.
In the farm’s spacious shop, computer screens glow in various shades of neon colors representing soil fertility, compaction, yield and fertilizer application. Baumann has a tablet where he can pull up data generated by every tractor pass over a field.
“I’m a numbers guy,” he remarked. “What I like is data.”
Baumann lives in an agricultural world of precision planting. He cares about where each corn seed goes. Its placement will be within an inch of his planting plan. Baumann is fussy about seed depth. He calibrates his tractor to plant seed with more or less pressure depending on soil firmness.
“There is no guessing anymore in agriculture,” Baumann said. “We can’t afford guessing. You can’t plant on Loyal silt in the way you would on Fenwood loam.”
Baumann said that he is not alone in pursuing cutting edge farming. He gets together monthly with 10 younger farmers who down a few beers, chat about the weather, but, eventually, trade stories about how their latest experiments in agriculture have panned out.
“I can’t try everything in a single year,” Baumann said. “I listen to what the other guys have tried. The 10 of us talk about what it takes to move that train forward.”
Baumann said his passion for technology meshes with his interest in enhancing soil biology with extensive use of no till and cover crops.
“I am a true believer that one day all farmers will do this,” he said.
Baumann said he plants a cover crop of rye, oats and rapeseed over hundreds of acres and interseeds corn with a “cocktail” of cover crop seeds, including clover, over hundreds more acres. Cover crops cover roughly 500 acres on the farm.
Baumann said his farm does not experience a “yield hit” on no till acres. “I have the data,” he said. “We don’t notice any difference” between no till and conventionally planted commodities.
The farmer said he is experimenting with precise planting corn in a strip between cover crops on very hard soil. The idea is to be more precise with seed depth placement.
Baumann said no till and cover crops have improved his soil. It’s a difference he can feel when he grabs a handful of cropland dirt. The thing he wants to avoid, he said, is “dead soil” in the space between fall harvest and spring planting. A living cover crop root is needed, Baumann said.
Baumann said he worries that the general public doesn’t know or appreciate what a modern crop farmer like himself does to produce food.
“They think a modern farmer puts corn in the ground and goes down to Florida,” he said. “But that’s not how it works.”
To educate the public, Baumann has started up a YouTube channel, the Digital Farmer, which offers a variety of videos of different aspects of farming.
Baumann said he will continue to work at the craft of farming, incrementally getting more efficient. He hopes one day to bust the 300 bushel per acre ceiling for corn on his farm.
“I am just going to keep doing what I am doing,” he said. “I am going to ask the questions and look at the data at the end of the year.”
