Thomas’ No-till Drill: The Cure For Erosion

PRESCOTT - Last summer, a Canadian bicycle rider making her way across the country stopped in Waitsburg.

Being from the wheat belt in the flat-as-a-pancake province of Saskatchewan, she remarked on the pitch of the wheat fields in the hills around the Touchet Valley.

"Our farmers wouldn't know what to do with that," she said about the challenge of cultivating such steep terrain.

Growing wheat in the rolling Palouse has never been easy. There's not enough rainfall for an annual crop on higher elevations where angles can be as big as 40 degrees. But the biggest problem farmers run into is erosion.

"We lost half of our topsoil in the past 100 years," said Michael Wade Thomas, a third-generation wheat grower in the Skyrockets (hills) north of Prescott. "Every year, we'd have to fill holes big enough to fit a combine in."

Wade Thomas' grandfather, Elisha Streeter, settled in these hills in 1924 and carved out 240 acres that his descendants added to over time. It was a tough business until the family was driven to make a better mouse trap.

Erosion isn't necessarily a natural phenomenon in the Palouse. But growers who leave their land fallow every other year had no choice but to till it until the Thomas family came up with the notill drill.

The device, which resembles a normal tilling machine, is outfitted with tilling shanks, but also with fertilizer tanks and seed boxes that inject herbicides and wheat seeds straight into the soil so the surface gets disturbed only once instead of the handful of times it takes to do it the old way.

"Essentially, we're planting wheat with a stick," said Wade Thomas, who attended colleges in eastern Washington and California but dropped out before getting a degree.

He has relied on the inspiration of his dad, an aircraft mechanic in World War II, and his own mechanical resourcefulness to make his work as a farmer easier and better with the no-till drill.

Once again Necessity became the Mother of Invention .

About a decade and a half ago, Wade Thomas and his dad, Mike Thomas Senior, who passed away about three months ago at age 91, finally had enough of all the work they had to do to plant and harvest crops on their rolling 5,400 acres in the Skyrockets.

No- till drills, such as Yielders, were available from farm equipment manufacturers but they were too heavy to pull up the steep grades, and not equipped to insert the chemicals and seeds at an even depth on land with a significant pitch.

So, in 1982, Thomas Senior began tinkering in his shop and a few years later, they had a no-till drill that was about half the weight of an equivalent John Deere. The more efficient "banding" (running a trench for seeds and fertilizer at the same time) would also help their yields, increasing them to 80 bushels per acre from the previous 60.

The Thomases built two of their no-till drills for their "own stuff." Then, a neighbor, Sam Erwin, saw the success they were having in reversing runoff and boosting yields that he asked them to build one for him.

"We didn't mean to get into the business of making and selling them, but people really wanted it," Wade Thomas said.

Neil Carpenter, a grower with about 2,000 acres in wheat south of Waitsburg, was one of the first to buy a Thomas no-till drill and said he couldn't be happier.

"I've done it for 12 years now," he said. "I don't have big ditches tearing up my equipment during harvest."

Carpenter said 99 percent of his rolling land is in notill production and his erosion problems have all but disappeared. He also uses less fertilizer because he can leave the stubble with the residual chemicals, mow it to help retain moisture in the rehabilitated top soil and seed right through it when it comes time to plant.

The Thomases' no-till drill helped fuel the local no-till movement and the collaboration between manufacturers of their components.

Stoess Manufacturing of Washtucna builds the frames and mounts the seed boxes made by Wade Thomas and his crew. Then, the skeleton device comes back to Prescott for final assembly, bringing to together parts from as far away as Texas and Canada.

The contraption takes about three months to build during the winter time and costs about $120,000. Some farmers rent them, others buy them. Wade Thomas is working on his 15th no-till drill. Demand for the device far outstrips his ability to fill it, particularly now that wheat prices are high enough to require his full focus on growing the commodity.

That activity itself is now much easier for Wade Thomas himself thanks to the device and other advances in farm equipment technology.

"I'm never going back to the old ways, " he said. "I've been more enthused about farming the past 15 years than I've ever been."