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Kurt Melville of Cornerstone Farms unloads soft white winter wheat
after harvesting a dryland field north of Enterprise on Wednesday,
Aug. 18, 2021. The Melvilles have become one of the more diversified
farms in the region with a rotation of 12 different crops.
Bill Bradshaw/EO Media Group, FIle
Choosing crops a complex task for Cornerstone Farms
By RONALD BOND
EO Media Group
ENTERPRISE — A transition to direct
seeding — what at the time was called no-till
farming — triggered the process that, today,
has Cornerstone Farms in Wallowa County
running smoothly as a 12-crop operation.
The farm, owned by Tim Melville and his
sons, Kevin and Kurt, has one of the more
diverse sets of crops in the area. The primary
crops, Kevin Melville said, are fall wheat and
spring wheat, with the Mevilles also grow-
ing fair amounts of alfalfa and Timothy hay.
Mixed in with that are rotation crops of bar-
ley, oats, flax, mustard, canola, peas, lentils
and grain hay.
“This has been a long time in the mak-
ing,” Kevin Melville said of how Cornerstone
came to its current roster of crops. “When I
was a young child and my dad was farming
back in the ’80s. ... he basically raised wheat
and barley. Occasionally he might have some
hay. He was basically a grain farmer.”
Kevin Melville said that in the mid-1980s,
his dad began the transition to no-till farm-
ing. Some of his crops — such as barley —
adapted well, but disease started to be an
issue in others.
So, he began adding other crops to the
mix.
“The first real alternative crop we grew
was canola,” Kevin Melville said.
Within a few years, peas were added to the
rotation, and then spring wheat. When Kevin
Melville returned from college in the mid-
90s, they took a deeper dive.
“We started experimenting with more,
brought the alfalfa and Timothy in the mix,”
he said. “It just became more diverse. The
direct seeding lends itself to a more diverse
rotation. … I think the no-till forced us to
grow more rotation crops.”
What to grow?
A lot of factors influence the Melvilles’
decisions on how much acreage is devoted to
each crop annually, including the contracts
Cornerstone has, the market price of vari-
ous grains, and what chemicals and pesti-
cides were used on a field the previous year,
to name a few.
“The trick is trying to find a rotational
crop that can make as much money as your
mainstay crop,” Kevin Melville said.
One new factor that’s important now is the
increase in price of some of the pesticides or
other chemicals, like fertilizer. Even the pres-
ence of a weed can determine what crop may
grow in a field.
“Farmers will rotate to different crops to
handle a weed problem,” he said.
And some crops, even if they aren’t
money makers, are still put in for rotational
purposes.
“I don’t really make money growing grain
hay, we grow it for a certain rotational rea-
son,” Melville said. “Flax is the same way.
(Sometimes) what we do grow is for a par-
ticular reason — we’re trying to accomplish
something on that field.”
An example of how drastic things can
change: last year, Melville had essentially no
contracts for mustard seed. This year, he’s
growing about 150 acres.
Interestingly, though, long-range weather
forecasts for temperature and rainfall
amounts are not among the sources Melville
uses — partly due to a climate in the Wal-
lowa Valley that differs from the rest of East-
ern Oregon.
“You could be having a cool summer,
everything going great, and then in July it
gets really hot,” he said, adding, though, that
by then an early season crop may be done.
“Up here in the Wallowa Valley, for us, we
can’t make a lot of use of that on the dry land.
Wallowa Valley has kind of a funny climate
for Eastern Oregon. We usually get the bulk
of our rain in April, May, June.”
And as a business model, it comes down
to finding a crop that can turn a profit. He
quipped that it’s really easy to find one that
doesn’t.
“It’s been very dependent on us to try and
find rotation crops that are profitable,” he said.