Down to Earth: The Couple Behind Sylvester Farming Co.

When farmers talk about soil sampling, they usually mean collecting a small amount from their field for analysis. They don’t mean eating it. But that’s exactly what Ethan Sylvester did to catch the attention of a fellow student in a soils class at Kansas State University.

“I was trying to impress Krista, so I picked up a little piece of the soil and put it in my mouth. And I was like, ‘Yep, that is a silt clay loam, granular structure, slight calcium,’” Ethan recalled.

“It definitely left an impression,” Krista laughed.

But it wasn’t the clincher he’d hoped for. So he tried another tactic and started a study group for the class.

“That's how he got my number, and the rest is history,” Krista said.

That was in 2019. The couple has been married approximately three years now. A year ago, they started a farm operation together, practicing a core value they learned in class all those years ago: caring for the soil.

Legacy Planning

After graduating from K-State, Ethan got a job at Cargill in Nebraska, and Krista started working at an engineering consulting firm.

“What shaped our trajectory was, when I was working at Cargill, my dad ended up passing away unexpectedly,” Ethan said.

Ethan’s mother was suddenly faced with running the entire farm herself. Over the next several years, Ethan and his two sisters helped their mom with planting and harvesting, but each had full-time obligations off the farm. For Ethan, he was also juggling a full time off-farm job and air national guard duties, all while living an hour away from the farm. 

Ethan’s mom had offers to rent acreage to other producers, but she wanted to keep the farm’s future within the family. She took a class in succession planning, which is a process farm families go through to develop an estate plan for farmland and operations. 

“We saw this opportunity and were like, ‘Hey, this could be really good. What do we want that to look like?’” Ethan said.

Ethan and Krista started their own business entity and became tenant farmers renting land from Ethan’s mother and Ethan’s grandparents. It was a win-win: Ethan’s mother wouldn’t have to rent outside the family, and Ethan and Krista could start a new enterprise as a young, married couple.

“We sat down and had a good conversation about the legacy that we want to have,” Ethan said. “This quote that we kept coming back to was, ‘Leaving the land better than we found it.’ So we talked a lot about how we wanted to improve soil structure, to be able to grow healthy soils so that we could grow healthy crops.”

The family’s succession plan is evolving with the hope for all three siblings to be involved with carrying on the farm’s legacy.

 

A Holistic View

Ethan is a fifth-generation farmer. Krista's great grandparents farmed, but she had been removed from the profession and lifestyle.

They talked a lot about how they wanted to approach this venture.

“Something that initially brought Ethan and me together is we had a shared belief that our faith called us to be stewards of God’s creation, of the environment, of nature and of the land that we've been entrusted to,” Krista said. “That’s the foundation for everything that we do. This land is not our land, ultimately. We believe it’s our creator’s land, and we’re called to be stewards of it.”

They talked about what the operation could look like, and it boiled down to two practical elements.

“We wanted to build healthy soils and to relate to people, to have a spot in the community,” Ethan said. “Every day we’re working with creation and trying to be as holistic as possible.”

Growing Pains

That desire to engage with their community led them to expand from growing grain crops such as corn and soybeans to adding niche crops such as sunflowers. Their attempts did not always go well.

“We tried to plant a pumpkin patch that failed epically,” Ethan said.

“When we first did the pumpkin patch, we thought, ‘Hey, this is a way that we can share agriculture with the local community,’” Krista added. “It got overtaken by bugs and weeds, and we lost all of our pumpkins.”

So they pivoted.

“Our pumpkin patch failed because of weed pressure and insects,” Ethan said. “If you can't beat weeds, plant weeds. A lot of times farmers are trying to get rid of sunflowers, so we thought we could grow sunflowers.”

On the Sunny Side

The sunflower field has been a big hit in their community. Not only does the field provide gorgeous photo opportunities, but visitors can also pick their own flowers.

“We had tons of people coming and taking pictures, and it was so cool to see how much joy it brought the community,” Krista said. “Giving people a place to come experience nature, to come experience agriculture firsthand, was super rewarding for us.”

Plus, the sunflowers gave them an opportunity to collaborate with a local beekeeper.

“We want to be able to have an enterprise that focuses on regenerative agriculture,” Ethan said. “Sunflowers fall perfectly into that. We have a local apiary that we work with. Part of the reason that we chose sunflowers was because that’s great for nectar flow with bees.”

At the end of the season, Ethan and Krista will bag the seed for use as bird feed — another example of their holistic approach to farming.

Balancing Act

Incorporating specialized crops such as sunflowers, rye and alfalfa is helping them transition some fields to organic production. They’re also planning to introduce more niche crops such as einkorn wheat, an ancient version of the crop with lower gluten and higher protein content. But this approach comes with risks.

“I think the biggest challenge is trying to experiment while still economically hedging yourself,” Ethan said. “When we did the pumpkin patch, it was a calculated risk. And the sunflower field was the same. We said, ‘We really want to do this. We’ll put in all the effort to make this happen, but if it fails, how do we make sure that we’re not out a lot of money for it?’ That’s probably the most challenging part because in agriculture, you're always trying to hedge your bets.”

“It's like playing chess.” Krista added. “Can we try this? If this fails, then what’s a plan B? It can be challenging, for sure.”

Ethan said their alfalfa field is a prime example of how they assess risk and maneuver accordingly. In pursuit of their goal to transition to organic farming, they did a cost analysis comparing projected losses of not using the land to grow commodity crops with the potential gains of growing premium crops in the future. This assessment helped them determine the maximum number of acres they could devote to planting alfalfa, while hedging against the reduced production of other crops.

“In organic transition, it takes three years from your last date of (pesticide or herbicide) application, and that’s three years that you can’t sell a product at a premium,” he said. “How do you do that without severely impacting profitability?"

That particular gamble is paying off.

“The alfalfa field is one year into its organic transition. Seeing how many butterflies and bees and birds are out there in that field was so rewarding,” Krista said. “When you don't spray synthetic chemicals, you also get a lot of weeds. So we had that as well in that field. But when you let nature work, to see how all of these different animals and plants work together in nature’s design — we’ve really enjoyed that.”

Soil and Cereal

Whether to till is a decision many farmers must make, and the answer varies depending on the soil, the crops and other factors. Ethan’s father and grandfather transitioned highly cultivated acres into no-till. Now, Ethan and Krista are reintroducing a small amount of tillage.

“We’ll till, but only if we’re adding manure or cover crop residue or something beneficial,” Ethan said. “We always want to have living roots in our soils.”

Ethan and Krista also incorporate cover cropping and planting green — two regenerative ag techniques — to improve their soil.

Cover cropping is when farmers grow a non-cash crop such as cereal rye between growing seasons for cash crops such as corn or soybeans. Some farmers bale cover crops for haylage, but Ethan and Krista want to keep those nutrients in the soil.

“We've tried to make an effort to leave all that organic matter out there the best that we can,” Ethan said.

Planting green is a specialized form of cover cropping that involves planting the cash crop into the non-cash crop while it’s actively growing. In this scenario, the non-cash crop serves as a living mulch that protects and nourishes the soil.

“We did that two years ago, and it felt really novel to us,” Krista said. “Ethan had grown 5-foot-tall cereal rye, and he planted directly into that. What happens is all those 5-foot-tall grasses lay over and basically form a green mat on top of the soil. You have these beautiful fields just filled with this big, green, 5-foot-tall mat.”

They found those fields had significantly fewer weeds than others — another experiment that went well.

“I compare myself to a normal gardener on a really large scale, because it’s what we do in our garden,” Ethan said. “We'll go out there and spread mulch to try to keep moisture in. And we just did that, but we did it on over 100 acres. It was really cool to see that work out OK.”

Reaping the Rewards

Ethan said he learns something new every day.

“It’s been surprising to me to realize how much I actually don’t know,” he said. “And every single day, I find out that I know less and less.”

But both he and Krista lean into learning and embracing what nature has to teach them.

A favorite spot on their farm is their chaos garden.

“There’s no order or anything,” Krista said. “Whatever grows, grows.”

Approximately five secluded acres on their farm that couldn’t be used for other crops was devoted to the chaos garden. Ethan estimates a dozen different plants grow in the plot, including turnips, radishes, buckwheat, clover and even tomato plants. It essentially serves as a pollinator strip.

“When we walked out in that chaos garden, there were butterflies all over the place,” Ethan said. “When you looked up at about eye level, there were thousands of butterflies, and it was really, really rewarding.”

Another one of their experiments is vermicomposting, which is cultivating a compost pile for worms. Ethan loves checking in on his worms.

“Getting to learn and challenge what we thought we knew and trying new things is always scary,” Krista said. “If you fail, like we have many times, we always learn something from that, and then we can take a step in a different direction.”

Get to know more about this adorable, down-to-earth couple by following them on Facebook and Instagram.

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