Rob and Jean Stout receiving the Gary Wergin Good Farm Neighbor Award in 2017.
From no-till farming to cover crops and beyond, a West Chester farmer has been a leader in conservation practices for many years while passing them on to the next generation.
Rob Stout has been passionate about crop research since his time as an undergrad at Iowa State University, which led to conservation and water quality improvements he has made while farming with his father and now his stepson Alex Zimmerman. While Zimmerman handles more of the mechanical side of their farming operation, he shares how some of the research projects they’ve participated in have piqued his interest as a hunter, “A lot of the time when you come up with a good conservation thing there’s a perennial grass and flower mixture that gets planted over a bioreactor and that holds a ton of pheasants. And we have pheasant researchers down seeing how many pheasants actually nested within cover crops. So I got to go out with them in the middle of the night and they would fly a drone with a thermal imaging camera to see where the nests are, and then we’d see where the birds are and we would go with the big net and catch them and that time of year there’s no hunting. So you’re still being able to go out there and kind of seek out game birds and stuff like that.”
Stout has received several awards in his career, including the Iowa Farm Environmental Leader Award. Stout is welcome to practically any environmentally-conscious farming advancement, though he does balance the economic impact, “A new C-Change project we have where we’ll seed twelve acres to an energy crop that may be something because the C-Change stands for Carbon Change, Iowa State got a $1 million grant for it so that’s one of the things we’re studying, I’m one of the farmers that’s involved in that so we’ll see what becomes of that. I don’t know if that’s going to amount to anything or not, but I’m always willing to give something a chance anyway.”
You can hear more from Stout and Zimmerman in today’s KCII Special Edition Ag Magazine at 1 and 6 p.m., and on our “Listen Live” page.