By TIM ALEXANDER
Illinois Correspondent

HENRY, Ill. — After 38 years of advising farmers, landowners, universities and the agriculture industry on the benefits of conservation tillage and the importance of preserving the Illinois River by reducing field runoff, University of Illinois extension natural resources management educator Robert Frazee officially retired last week.

The recent restructuring of extension affecting county units, director and educator positions was not a factor in his retirement. “I felt maybe this was the time to leave the position for someone else,” he said. “I’ve essentially completed my goals.”

These included championing conservation tillage practices – including no-till planting – many years before no-till gained wide acceptance, and helping introduce the Illinois Governor’s Conference on the Management of the Illinois River System.
The conference, held every two years in Peoria, has resulted in a cooperative effort among conservation and river groups, agriculture officials and farmers, politicians, ag equipment manufacturers and others to help reduce sedimentation in the Illinois River partly caused by soil erosion from farm fields.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in agronomy from Western Illinois University and a master’s in agronomy from UoI, Frazee began his career with extension by serving as an assistant agricultural advisor in Peoria County in 1972. Within three years he was promoted to the position of Marshall-Putnam counties ag advisor, becoming the youngest in Illinois to achieve that status.
While serving those counties, Frazee was promoted again in 1987 to soil and water conservationist for a 20-county area in central Illinois. Special appropriations from the Illinois General Assembly created the position to specifically address sedimentation problems in the Illinois River.

“(The assembly) wanted to have someone at the university level to provide leadership to the Illinois River Initiative, who could work with other state and federal agencies to address the soil erosion problem contributing to the sedimentation issue,” said Frazee, who makes his home near the river in Henry (Marshall County) with his wife, Alice Ann.

It was also in 1987 that Frazee helped develop the initial Governor’s Conference on the Management of the Illinois River System, with the backing of then-Gov. Jim Thompson, an avid outdoorsman and conservationist. Bringing together conservationists, farmers, river groups and end users of the waterway turned out to be a daunting task, Frazee recalls.
“There was a lot of uncertainty and distrust between state, local and federal agencies and the different organizations, but Governor Thompson recognized the magnitude of the problems regarding siltation and immediately directed all of the agencies and organizations to work together,” said Frazee.

“From then on we’ve had complete and entire cooperation between groups addressing the problems of our state’s most important inland water resource.”

In 1991, a restructuring of the UoI extension resulted in a shake-up of offices and personnel, not unlike today’s extension realignment. Because of the 1991 restructuring, Frazee was selected as one of five statewide natural resource educators for extension and assigned to the East Peoria unit in Tazewell County in 1992, where he presided over 24 counties until his recent retirement on May 31.

While his work on Illinois River sedimentation was taking root and starting to pay dividends, Frazee began urging farmers, ag organizations and equipment and seed manufacturers to shift their planting focus toward no-till practices and products.

The seeds for Frazee’s work in conservation tillage were planted in the late 1960s when Frazee was a young research assistant at WIU performing agronomy-related undergraduate work. While conducting plot experiments, Frazee had access to an old Allis-Chalmers tractor modified for no-till, which was purchased for the WIU farm.

“I could see the value and tremendous impact (no-till) was going to have in terms of the positive effect on reducing soil erosion, reducing fuel usage from less trips over the field and improving water quality,” Frazee recalled. “For the first many years, no-till was a very experimental type of thing. It took a higher level of management and a different way of farming.

“When I came to Marshall-Putnam in 1975 I began working with five different producers who were willing to try no-till on a 10- or 20-acre basis using their own planters and drills.”

As word of the farmers’ success spread, Frazee and the Marshall-Putnam extension were recognized as trendsetters.
They even held yearly tours for no-till corn and soybean production, farmers’ field days and no-till equipment demonstrations by dealers. With more farmers adopting no-till, Frazee and the extension began devising ways to measure the impact of the newfound planting method, beginning with fall tillage surveys in the 1980s.

“I became a very strong advocate of encouraging farmers to move towards conservation tillage and away from the moldboard plow to the chisel plow or disk, in order to leave at least 30 percent of the crop residue on the soil surface,” Frazee recalled. “By leaving one-third of the ground covered with crop residue, the UoI’s research data showed that we could reduce soil erosion by as much as two-thirds.

“Over a five-year time period we began to see that farmers were listening to our message. They could recognize that they were losing tremendous amounts of their best topsoil, being washed down the hillsides into streams and ditches, and that it was in their best interests to protect their best capitol asset, their soil.”

By 1994, conservation tillage practices had become so widespread that Frazee worked with the Illinois Department of Agriculture and the state’s soil and water conservation districts to implement a statewide survey of farmers’ planting techniques. The survey’s parameters were eventually adopted to a national survey of tillage trends conducted by the Conservation Technology Information Center.

Frazee admitted he is proud of his efforts in changing farmers’ attitudes and planting practices regarding conservation tillage, and for helping bring together diverse interest groups in order to affect positive change to the Illinois River system.

“Today we are all telling the same story of how we can go about reducing soil erosion and protecting water quality by reducing the number of farmers’ tillage trips across the field,” said Frazee, who claims an “endless list” of retirement chores will keep him busy for the foreseeable future.

Frazee, 61, also plans to spend more time with his family, including two daughters and four grandchildren who live in central Illinois. Fishing, hiking, gardening and landscaping will also keep him busy, while trips to northern Wisconsin are already planned for July and October. He also plans to step up his volunteer work within his community and church.

During his career Frazee was named as winner of a number of prestigious awards, including the USDA’s Superior Service Award, National Conservationist of the Year and the Sustained Excellence in Extension Programming Award, among many others.