“It Won’t Work Here”—Until It Does: Twelve Years of Lessons from a Southeastern Farmer

Buz Kloot, Ph.D.
2 days ago
3 min read

Photographer with farmer in front of a cotton bale and a newly picked field of cotton in background. — Dillon Co. SC Farmer, Sonny Price with our very own Barrett Self in a Freshly Picked Cotton Field

By Buz Kloot

When I think back to the first time I stood with Sonny Price on one of his Dillon County, SC fields in the fall of 2013, I remember the wind rustling in the just-harvested cotton plants, now dry, and Sonny looking out as if he were listening for something beneath the surface. He had just planted his first cover crop, Austrian winter peas as it turned out. Nothing dramatic—no perfect stand, no easy triumph. Just seed, soil, and a man with questions.

In places like the South Carolina Coastal Plain, the land has a way of humbling anyone who believes they’ve mastered it. The sands run deep. The summers run hot. And the conventional wisdom, passed along like an article of faith, said: “You can’t build organic matter here!” Not really. Too sandy. Too hot. Too dry, people said. But Sonny never much cared for blanket statements. He cared about the land in front of him.

In one of our interviews, he said:

“We were told you can’t increase organic matter in the South… I couldn’t promote something I didn’t know anything about. I just needed questions answered.”

At the time, we had just started a Conservation Innovation Grant (CIG), sponsored by the USDA-NRCS, with him and four other farmers in the southeastern coastal plain of South Carolina. What we wanted to see was whether cover crops could change soils over a three-year period in real farm ground.

What Twelve Years Revealed

Over the next decade, and past the three-year CIG, I watched Sonny and his brother, Tony, move through the kind of slow, considered experimentation that defines genuine stewardship. His rotations were already diverse: corn, wheat, double-cropped soybeans, cotton, and, where economics were good, winter peas, rapeseed, pink-eye peas. He introduced cool-season cover crops, then started working with warm-season cover crops behind the corn (harvested in August in the Southeast). He brought in chicken litter, then cut nitrogen back. He let go of phosphorus and potash altogether. And he parked the subsoiler—first by conviction, later by hard evidence from the field. When he quietly tried subsoiling a few spots again, “just to check,” the yields didn’t budge. The ground didn’t need it anymore. So the subsoiler stayed parked.

By 2022, we had gathered eight years of soil tests, yield data, and input records to see what the land itself had to say. The full story is here:

👉 https://www.soilhealthlabs.com/projects/cotton-country-conservation

What the data showed was what the fields had been whispering for years:

Organic matter increased.
Inputs fell: fuel, fertilizer, lime, and subsoiling.
Yields held or improved.
Costs dropped...significantly.
And all of it happened on 6,300 acres of Coastal Plain ultisols, with sand, loamy sand, and sandy loam textures.

This was not about a miracle product or a perfect recipe. It was about paying attention, year by year, and letting the land teach.

For Those Who Still Say “It Won’t Work Here”

Every region has its cautions—ours perhaps more than most. But Sonny’s experience stands as a quiet counterexample, revealing how much becomes possible when we work with the land rather than against what we think it is. Sonny didn’t begin with certainty. He began with curiosity, and the humility to test what he’d been told. Twelve years later, the land has given its answer. So if you’ve ever found yourself saying, “It won’t work here,” I invite you to walk through Sonny’s case study. Not as a rebuttal, but as an opening. Because in Dillon County, on soil once written off as too fragile, too fickle, too Southern, Sonny found that it did work. And if it worked here, we owe it to ourselves to wonder where else it might.