Paul Overby, a student in the Sustainable Management master’s degree program, embodies what one might call a lifelong learner. A farmer by trade, Paul is known for regenerative agriculture practices he’s implemented on the farm he runs with his wife, Diane, and hopes to continue helping other farmers improve their own operations and the environment.
Paul’s many contributions recently led him to receive the National Conservation Professional of the Year award from the Soil and Water Conservation Society. Paul, who joined the group within the past two years, has been an active participant in meetings and was notified by a member that they were nominating him for the national award, a major honor.
Krista Bryan, a soil scientist with the National Conservation Service at the US Department of Agriculture, says the local chapter liked the number of activities Paul has been involved in.
“I especially like that he does soil health practices and takes the initiative to share what he’s done and learned,” she says. “He’s been a speaker at our events and is active in other outreach activities.”
Paul couldn’t attend the national convention because his flight was canceled due to CrowdStrike technology issues, despite rearranging his schedule for field work he had planned for his farm.
“I had to scrub the whole trip, the whole trip to Myrtle Beach. It was a bummer.”
Among his many activities, Paul was on the Manitoba North Dakota Zero Till Board of Directors and brought in programming for farmers.
“I served on a committee that was working to develop nutrient management plans for the state of North Dakota. I led a regional conservation partnership project on cover crops in northeastern North Dakota. We did it in 2014, ’15 through ’19. And so in addition to what we’re doing on the farm, I was doing those things either as a board member or a committee member or whatever. And I’m presuming, since it’s called conservation professional, some of it was more focused on those activities than just the farming activities.”
Paul and Diane have run their Wolford, North Dakota farm since 1993.
“We left our suit and tie careers and came back to my parents’ farm and lived through the culture shock that comes with switching careers when you’re in your mid-30s,” he says.
Paul and Diane are now in the process of trying to find someone who would like to run their farm. However, despite current interest in farming, most of the people he’s come across are looking for a hobby farm right outside of a major city.
“It’s been much more difficult to find someone who wants to run a commercial operation and try to figure out how to integrate them into the system,” he notes. “We’ve had a couple of tries that just haven’t worked out due to personality differences. We’ve done a lot of things in the way of conservation agriculture, or sustainable, or regenerative now is kind of the phrase that gets wrapped in. And we want to see that continue. So that precludes renting our land to some of our neighbors who don’t farm that way and don’t see eye-to-eye with us at all on farming them that way.”
Regenerative agriculture aims to restore degraded soils through no-till planting, and limited use of pesticides or fertilizers.
Paul’s parents, who previously ran the family farm, encouraged him to get a bachelor’s degree plus experience to fall back on, so he got an agricultural education degree from North Dakota State University.
“But by the time I finally finished my college education, a lot of the good jobs that were open when I started in that program had been filled,” he says. “I moved instead into politics. I got involved and was running a local political organization and then doing consulting on statewide races in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska. And the last one, working on a campaign in Nebraska, led me to a job at a hospital in North Platte. I stayed in Nebraska for five years as vice president of development at a major regional medical center.”
“And then when my dad turned 65, he said, if you want to farm, this is your time to come and check it out. By that time, I was married, and we came up and discussed it, looked over the finances, and decided we would give it a try. And my dad was great at transitioning. He helped. But he let me make my own mistakes.”
During Paul’s transition period on the farm, North Dakota went from a very dry period to an extremely wet one. A large lake in the north central part of the state, Devil’s Lake, grew by 100,000 acres over the course of a decade. While Paul’s biggest fear when he began farming was drought due to rough conditions in the 1980s that had been tough on his parents, he and Diana struggled with the wet conditions. Then Paul, who had been doing research on no-till farming for a while, started transitioning his farm toward regenerative techniques.
“We started adding other components with nutrient management and things like that over the years,” he says. “We’d be in the 20th year of it now, 2024.”
Paul enrolled in Sustainable Management after his experience selling farming software to state colleges.
“I really liked going to the campuses and doing kind of like a mini guest lecture on how to use the software. So my first thought was to maybe get a master’s in education. I could teach at a community college part time or something like that.”
However, there weren’t many online programs available. Most master’s degree programs he encountered required at least one semester full-time on campus, which was impossible with running the farm.
“When I went to college, we were on a quarter system, so we had fall quarter, winter quarter, spring quarter. And many of my classmates went to college just in that winter quarter. And they only came back maybe for spring or fall classes when that was the only time they were offered. And then they tried it. But they were farming. And they would come to school in the winter. That all disappeared with the semester systems.”
Then, he found UW Online Collaboratives.
“One of the great things has been the ability to use my agriculture experiences or interests in each of the classes,” he says. “I could talk about the Devils Lake basin and the water challenges we faced. And another research paper was about nutrient loading into Devils Lake. For me, regardless of the degree, it was very helpful for me just to go through that process because it allowed me to dig in on a specific topic and learn more.”
Paul is his own boss, so he has flexibility in his schedule.
“There were times when maybe equipment should have been moving and it was parked because that was when the class discussion was scheduled or our discussion group. But most of the other students are all working full time too in this program. So a lot of our work, when we did discussion groups, it was in the evening, and that worked just fine. My biggest problem is getting involved with too many things and trying to keep up with classwork.”
“And I will confess, being older–I don’t want to knock old people, but our brains just don’t think as fast as they did 40 years ago. Just staying on top, or just absorbing information, it’s a bit more challenging. Sometimes I’d be frustrated with myself. It’s like, well, why am I not getting this? And it’s like, well, you’re not a spring chicken anymore.”
Paul’s capstone project revolves around shelterbelts [rows of trees, shrubs or grasses to provide protection from wind] in prairie states like North Dakota, in which the trees were planted in an unnatural way after the Dust Bowl. These trees are now falling down due to disease.
“The whole push to plant trees as part of the outgrowth of the Dust Bowl was to fix a problem in the ecosystem that man had made in the first place by plowing all that grass up,” he explains. “The farming techniques at the time meant that the soil was always bare and exposed. And so it was always susceptible to wind erosion and water erosion. And so man screwed up the ecosystem, as we do.”
“Trees were a fix to that. My thesis is that if we were to adopt the concept of the savannah, which is where the forest and the prairies meet, and design it with that in mind (with multi-species so they don’t all age out at the same time and they don’t transmit diseases), they can be harvested. Like an ash tree, when it gets to be 40 years old and in perfect condition for lumber. Nonetheless, it has real value in terms of rethinking the role of trees on the prairies. It’s an ecosystem.”
As part of the capstone, Paul is undergoing survey work with farmers on their attitudes toward shelterbelts. There are farmers in favor of them and those who wouldn’t plant one without annual compensation from the government.
“So you’ve got these two extremes. How can we approach the farmers who are interested and create a plan for them to plant these and then use those as demonstrations? We’re talking about a problem that started 100 years ago. And it isn’t going to be fixed overnight any more than all those shelterbelts were planted overnight.”
In addition to his capstone and running the farm, Paul is also involved with field work and projects with North Dakota State University’s precision agriculture program. One project, Data Intensive Farm Management, allows farmers to run trials in their fields.
“The goal is to have an online portal that allows farmers to set up field trials and then evaluate them to be statistically significant,” he says. “For example, now that farmers have GPS systems in their tractors, they can consistently plant strips with different varieties of corn. The soil changes throughout the field, but doesn’t give them enough randomized application to be statistically valid. The data intensive farm management software creates microblocks in the field.”
Paul is also aware of the heightened awareness concerning climate change and some of the new products coming on the market being sold to farmers, with the promise of reducing carbon footprints.
“I’ve got a couple of trials going where we have 36 replicates out on the field. So now, I’ve got four treatments, 36 different blocks. So now when I do an analysis of that, it’s going to be much more statistically accurate in terms of the results that we’re seeing. That’s the type of thing that we need to bring to the farmers. And believe me, with the concern over [climate change] in farming, there’s a lot of questionable products coming out to farmers that I worry about. The importance of statistical accuracy has been motivated in part by my master’s degree studies.”
Paul’s ultimate goal is to become a regenerative agricultural coach, of which there is a large need in his area.
“A lot of the crop advisers in North Dakota at least have a master’s degree,” he says. “Very few of them have a PhD, but a lot of them have master’s degrees in agronomy, or soil sciences, or something like that. In the ag community there are a lot of farmers who have bachelor’s degrees. So they’re college grads. And so part of my motivation to pursue the degree was to just get that extra level of credibility that comes with having a master’s degree behind your name. The goal, as it has been for five years already, is to then take my business, which has kind of been in hiatus as I work on this degree, and become a consultant.”
Meanwhile, he is continuing to work on his capstone project, with the hopes of graduating in the near future.
Are you interested in learning more about how an education from UW Online Collaboratives in sustainability-related topics can help you? Contact us at learn@uwex.wisconsin.edu to find out more how one of our programs can help you achieve your personal and professional goals.