From Bro Science to Better Soil Health

When we were kids, cell phones weren’t a thing. A day with Dad on the farm meant piling into the truck, driving over to a neighbor’s place, and leaning over the hood to talk through all sorts of things. There was always a moment where the conversation turned to best practices—how someone tried a new approach one year, or how granddad swore he’d never repeat a certain mistake.

For a long time, that was enough. Those stories kept food on the table and fields in production. But the hard truth we’ve learned after years on our own ground is this: not every piece of advice, not every old habit, holds up when the rain comes late, or the fuel bill doubles, or the soil starts to wash away.

That’s what folks call bro science now—ideas passed down out of habit rather than proof. And on a farm, that kind of thinking can cost you.

We remember when we really started paying attention. It wasn’t just one moment; it was a pattern of things we couldn’t ignore. We saw gullies forming after heavy rains, washing away the soil we depended on. We noticed healthy-looking weeds thriving at the bottom of a hill, a sign that our nutrients were running off and collecting somewhere they shouldn’t be. We began to see these little signals everywhere—signs that maybe the old ways weren’t holding up under new conditions. That’s when we knew we had to try something different.

So we started experimenting. We put in cover crops—not because a neighbor said so, but because we wanted to see for ourselves. We measured. We tracked. We tested strips side by side. And slowly, the evidence stacked up.

We saw water soaking in instead of running off. We noticed the soil holding together instead of blowing away. We counted dollars saved on fuel and passes we didn’t have to make. Yields didn’t collapse—they held steady or even went up. And all of it came while lowering our input costs.

But beyond that, we started seeing even more good signs. We saw better nutrient-use efficiency. We’d walk the fields and actually see more worm castings on the surface, a sign of healthier soil life. Residue from previous crops broke down faster, feeding that cycle of organic matter. We noticed a livelier soil biology, from more visible earthworms to what seemed like greater activity in the soil’s fungal networks.

And importantly, we never saw an increase in insect or disease pressure. If anything, the balance of life in the soil helped us, not hurt us.

But more than the numbers, we saw resilience. The kind of resilience that only comes when you respect the biology under your boots as much as the machinery in your shed.

Here’s what we’ve come to believe: tradition is worth honoring, but data is worth trusting. If we rely only on what’s always been done, we risk repeating the same mistakes. If we open ourselves to testing, to measuring, to letting the soil show us what it needs—then we give our farm a fighting chance at a future.

And we’ll tell you this—nothing makes you a believer faster than standing on your own field, in a dry year, and realizing the ground still has moisture because of the choices you made the season before.

So here’s our challenge to anyone listening: don’t settle for “that’s how we’ve always done it.” Don’t be wed to a particular practice just because your neighbor swears by it. Don’t skip a practice because your granddad never tried it. Run your own trials. Measure your own results. Trust your own soil.

Because “bro science” might start the story—but your evidence, your data, your land should be the one to finish it. Better soil health is everything.