Soil steward: Louisiana farmer Hilery Gobert teaches climate-friendly farming methods to veterans

Hilery Gobert is the seventh generation Gobert farmer to cultivate southwest Louisiana land. A native of St. Landry parish, Gobert left his father’s farm as a young man, served in the first Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam, pursued a career in Atlanta, and then taught small-scale agriculture at a Georgia community college.

After retirement, Gobert bought 65 acres of land and began his own farm with a vision to be climate friendly. His mission has evolved into working with the Natural Resources Conservation Service. He hosts “field days” with Farm Journal and their foundation, America’s Conservation Ag Movement, in which he instructs farmers on how to use conservation-smart and climate-friendly techniques. 

How long have you been farming?

It’s been an off-and-on journey for me. I am the son of a sharecropper. However, when I finished high school, I went straight into college, into the military and then into private business.

When COVID came, I reevaluated. I lost my wife the year before that as well, after 51 years. I considered where I was, what I wanted to do, and I decided I really wanted to come back home, buy a farm and build it up on a regenerative scale, where I can teach other people how to care for the soil and try to convince more people to grow their own food. 

What drew you to teaching others about climate-smart agriculture? 

I worked with the Department of Agriculture and their division (Natural Resources Conservation Service) in Georgia helping people. What I try to do is introduce people to the new technology that’s available in farming.

People really need to educate themselves before they start growing. 

I remember as a child growing up and asking my father, who was a great farmer, why we did things a certain way. He said, “Because it works,” but he never understood the science behind it. After I got educated in agriculture, I began realizing what the science behind each of these methods was. 

If you can learn the science behind it, it allows you to understand why you’re doing it, and you can improve on what was being done previously.

How did that lead you to working with conservation efforts?

Farm Journal has a foundation which is called the American Agriculture Conservation Movement. They seek out two people in every state to sponsor and help them put on field days to teach others how to become smart on conservation.

I started working with them, and I realized how much more people I could reach. It just makes sense.

I’m trying to contact as many organizations as I can to talk about my farm. But it’s not so much my farm, it can be any farm that is using organic conservation methods. We need to get this word out to more people. 

What are some aspects of conservation in farming?

We’re looking to make efficient use of all of the tools we have in order to negate the changes that are taking place in our climate. Regardless of how or why you believe that the climate is changing, we have to realize that the climate is in fact, changing. We have to address that right now.

One of the thoughts behind the science of why the climate is changing is because of the amount of carbon that has been released into the atmosphere. So, in climate smart farming, one of the key things we try to do is capture carbon and place it in the soil, which is where it came from in the first place.

I’m an organic farmer, which means I don’t use any pesticides or chemicals whatsoever on the farm. I also try to reduce tillage because that keeps more carbon in the soil.

Conserving water is another problem. We see a lot of farms with big overhead sprinkles that are shooting water up into the air. Almost 20% of that water evaporates before it hits the ground. I use drip irrigation where I’m releasing the water at ground level right at the roots of the plant, underneath a canopy of mulch, to conserve that water. 

With the drip irrigation method, I’m growing rice with less than 20% of the amount of water that the average farmer in Louisiana uses to grow rice. 

Cover cropping is growing an entire crop that you’re not going to harvest, but that you till back into the soil to restore the organic matter.

In what ways do you try to promote biodiversity and soil health?

The Field Days with Farm Journal. One group we worked with is the Veteran Farmers Coalition, which is primarily aimed toward veterans who are considering starting a farm. At our last Field Day we had 39 veterans who learned about programs that are available to them from various government agencies. 

Unfortunately, small farms have a large failure rate, and most times, I feel that it’s because they simply weren’t educated enough when they started to grow their produce. I push for more education prior to starting a farm.

The whole idea of regenerative and climate-smart agriculture is to produce high-quality food that is nutrient dense while improving the condition of the soil. 

What do you want our readers to know about farming in Louisiana? 

We need to support the farmers more than we do now, especially the small farmers who own less than a couple of 1,000 acres. They don’t get the amount of support as the larger corporate farms do. We need an opportunity for them to get educated on all of the current science that we have in production methods. 

For more information, visit driftwoodfarminiowa.com and America’s Conservation Ag Movement for a short video.