 In 2013, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a cooperative agreement with the South Dakota No-Till Association and IGRO, SDSU Extension, for delivering the latest soil health and productivity technology to South Dakota farmers and ranchers. A series of four local events were held in South Dakota in Sioux Falls, Watertown, Belfouche, and Mitchell. No-Till and Prime Spur, where did that come from? It's not no secret code or anything like that. As I talk today, maybe you will come up with what I'm trying to say. And if not, I'll tell you at the end. It's no big secret or anything. Anyway, I'm not going to talk about putting spurs on your tennis shoes or anything like that. And I'm not going to talk about seeing the foot doctor because he had some type of problem that way. But anyway, Dr. Ward kind of hinted at it a little bit in one of his slides there. So we'll get on with this and go forward. But why do we do tillage? Do we think about that at all? What's the reason? And is it sort of a purpose? You know, just make us feel better? You know, I was raised on a farm in Eastern Minnehaw County. The family's been there over 100 years and much like most of you in the room. And I sat in that tractor seat and dropped that jizzleplot on the ground and felt the power of the tractor. And you know, there's a lure to it, isn't there? But I think we really have to question this and why we're doing this. Is it really to prepare to see that? You know, is that why we're doing it? And so I'm going to talk about that. And maybe it needs to make us feel better as I just talked. And but really, why do we loosen the soil up just to pack it back down to make a firm place to place our seed? Does that make sense? You know, in my mind, it really doesn't. And so I'm just going to present some of these things to provoke some thinking and some thoughts and why we do things. So I really think it's because Dr. Ward said it himself. I think what we're using is we're reacting to that. And I got just two examples here. I tried to be not be colorblind. I got a green and a red up there. And it just really has a lot to do with the type of equipment we've been we have available to us really, isn't it? We loosen it up so these two things right here can pack it back down. Isn't that right? And so, you know, the system we have is powerful. Our ag machine we have in the United States is paramount. I mean, it's a powerful thing. And, you know, we're not criticizing it in any way, but we have to think about the system and why we do these things. So next slide, you know, do we really need all this stuff? And it just seems in my history of being on the farm in the late 70s and early 80s and the size of equipment. Of course, farms are getting bigger. I realize that too, but it seems to me that the bigger our combines and our grain cards, the bigger we've had to make this stuff. Okay, and these things here. And, you know, is it really necessary? And I think the presenters today are going in a way or are leading us to topics and things to think about that that are leading us to think away from these things. And so, and then I put this up here, it's kind of a controversial issue now. And I remember the days where we talked about zone tillage, you know, a very popular topic for many meetings and did some research on it. And, you know, it was telling you deeper, you know, in the soil to try to do something. And now we have the exact opposite, don't we, a lot less. And really isn't it pointing to what we're really all talking about today? Reducing tillage and going to no-till. The switch gears is a little bit something that I've noticed in the last three or four years, all the bailing that's going on. And you really wonder, is it all necessary? I can't fault the livestock producer that has to provide for animals. That's totally understandable, and I get that. But I do see a lot of semi-trucks going down the interstate at 75 miles an hour going full of bails. And then they're going somewhere. And so, what are we doing when we're doing this? And I've got some statistics here. Dr. Jansen at SDSU reported that residue bailing has increased from about 16% in 2007 to around 50% in 2010. Now, do we have any more cows or livestock to date than we did back then? And so, we get calls, what's the value of our crop residue? We can measure the nitrogen, the phosphorus, and the sulfur and all the other nutrients in it. We can kind of come up with a number and give you a value. We want to put a dollar value on it. But it's really worth more than that. And I think you're hearing that today. Just to show you the value of organic matter in the soil, it was part of a study back in the late 90s. And it was a study not to research this, but sometimes we can glean from studies other things. And so, what I did here is I plotted the check plots where we didn't have any treatment. It had full nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium applied. So it was like the other plots in the study. But what I did is we didn't measure organic matter in these plots. And it varied across the study. And so, we can just see clearly the influence of soil organic matter here on the x-axis of this graph, its effect on corn yield. And we did it in another site, too, up by Aberdeen or Chelsea, South Dakota. And we could do the same thing. And it's quite striking. And really, when you look at the graph, you know, it's going the same way and even about the same yield levels. I'm not implying that you're going to see these results if you improve your soil organic matter like this. But it demonstrates and shows the direct effect of the importance of organic matter in the soil. So, I sat back there this morning and added a slide to my presentation. And Jason Miller, I'm going to say, he requested it. And he was so happy that had done this. And it's a very simplistic approach. And other soil scientists could beat me up all day about this. There's assumptions here. But at some point, you have to choose a number and go with it. And so, what does it take to increase your soil organic matter by 1%? Well, we know that the acre furrow slice of soil is about 2 million pounds right there. And we take that 1% and that's about 20,000 pounds of what we call stable organic matter. That's not raw plant residue. That's stable organic matter that's going to benefit soil aggregation and other soil properties. So, how do we determine what it takes to get that? Some say the conversion of raw plant residue material to stable organic matter anywhere between 10% to 20%. There's a place that you could probably find some literature that would deviate from that. So, in this example, I used 10%. So, just a simple ratio here. We need about 200,000 pounds of raw crop residue per acre to increase about 1% soil organic matter. That's a lot. So, all those bales you see going down the interstate are taking away from that, aren't they? So, I got a simple rotation here. Very optimistic yields, I think. 200 bushel corn, 75 bushel soybeans. Wouldn't you like to have that over here? 80 bushel wheat. Okay, so very optimistic, of course. But then again, I chose the 10% conversion. So, there's a little trade off there. But over a three-year period, those yields would produce about 20,000 pounds of raw crop residues. So, a simple math that 200,000 pounds that it takes divided by the 20 to get 10 years. But it's a three-year rotation, so about 30 years to get 1% increase. And I've heard the talk and those that claim, you know, gee, I went to a no-till and my organic matter went up 1.5% in, you know, four or five years. So, how can that be? Or how can this be? And what we attribute that to is the change in the system and sampling depth and sampling variability is huge when it comes to measuring organic matter and the test itself. But the math shows, and we know, that it takes a long time to build organic matter in the soil and to build soil period. So, it's an important issue. So, what does no-till really do to the soil? Here I have a couple pictures of the soil surface. The one on the left here is long-term no-till in excess of 20 years after soil needs. So, not a lot of cover on the soil. And I kind of fell into this by accident because here, and I apologize, it's not very easy to see, but there are earthward casts all over this picture, okay? It's alive. And in one time, I was out in that field after a rain and it was twilight, the sun was just setting and the ground was moving. Literally. It caught my attention. And there were so many night crawlers out there you could hardly believe. I just, you know, this is really impressive. And then over here, I have a picture of a soil surface, soybeans also, where they have been doing a lot of intensive tillage and they bailed it. And so, we could just see the difference in the general appearance of the soil surface. So, which one is going to exchange air, water, and other gases better? It's easy to tell, isn't it? This one on the left. There's hardly any soil structure left in the one on the right. So, these improved soil properties that no-till can lead to are soil aggregation of the soil particles clumping together by the effect of, you know, the critters and the biota in the soil as Dr. Lehman talked, they're holding and helping to clump those together. That leads to better water and air movement in the soil. Soil structure is leading, this is all leading to soil structure where we have these aggregates warming together and to beneficial soil structure. And what does that do? It improves the strength of the soil. It makes the soil so that it can help the soil so it can bear more load. Its load capacity is higher. Some say, well, it's so hard. Well, that's what you're experiencing, is you're experiencing the soil's ability to bear more loads. And I'm not advocating getting the 1200 bushel green card out there, it's just a better thing. Carbon and nutrient storage. Dr. Ward talked about the Hainey test, of course. You know, improved organic matter. We're improving our phosphorus exchange. We've been talking about that a little bit. The microbial diversity we've been talking about, the activity, the micro-asyl fungi, of course, acting as those root extensions. Just the residue cover itself, the armor or the protection over the soil. You know, the reduced water loss and erosion, and we're just protecting it. And another topic you wouldn't even think about, and being in the soil testing business a little bit and taking thousands of samples, I know I'd much rather sample a no-till field than a tilt field any day. And so it leads to better consistency in your results. A no-till soil sample is so much better that you get an accurate six-inch sample. And I think that will lead to better management in the soil testing. Temperature moderation, we're not going from these extremes. And so that aids in the microbial activity of nutrient conversion in the soil. You know, I think in the drought year, some of the soil temperatures got really high on the surface. And we probably killed some beneficial microorganisms in the soil. And so temperature moderation is important. And again, the earthworm diversity and activity, moving the soil around and digesting whatever they digest in their system, and that's beneficial. So what does a long-term no-till look like? This sample here or this picture is taken from Al Miran's farm in Kirk, South Dakota. He's been no-tilling about 25 years. And this is in the drought year, so it was really hard and dried out, of course. But we see the aggregation here and the roots that are growing in between those aggregates. You see the holes, the old root channels, or earthworm channels. And so we just see the benefits right there versus if we would have tilled that soil and took all that structure out. I have a friend, I guess you can call him, kind of a relative in a way related to the Bly family. Down the tree, quite a ways. But he was an inspiration for my dad and I in our farm. We started no-tilling as well. In fact, I think we could both say that we were listening to Doyne quite intensely many, many years ago. But I asked Stan why we no-till. And he says, I'll tell you why we no-till. He says, you remember the spring of 2012? I said, sure do. He said that the cord like crazy, didn't it? Now that was the drought year. But in April, we had some really intense storms coming through. And he says, you remember all those gullies and all those neighbors' fields? I said, sure do. And he says, that's why I no-till. And of course there's many other reasons, of course. But basically, he said he had a neighbor come by. He said, Stan, just check in your field to see if they washed like ours. And they didn't. And he says, see, that's why I no-till. In fact, Stan told me last week that he's told people that if he has to give them no-till, he's done farming. He's just done it. So that's how important it is to him. But what I have here is an aerial photograph of some land. And there's a quarter section here that's no-tilled. And hopefully it may be sticking out to you there. But there's some things about this no-till quarter that are different from the surrounding farmland. This very hilly farmland can have up to 12% slope in some places. There's some terraces on this picture. And there's some very obvious features. This field here, you can see the terraces in it. They're old terraces. The producer now farms straight over them. They were probably 40, 50 years old, made for a four-row planter and now with the big equipment. It's no problem. But what you also see in this field are these rails coming down, down the drainage ways. And when we got that intense rain, it just couldn't hold it. It just went. Those rails are, while they're showing up on this photograph, they're 6-8 inches deep, 6-8 foot across some places. And so that soil let go. But the no-till quarter is the one right next to it. And these are grass waterways here, right here. There are two terraces there that you can see. This field here is full of them too. And you can't see them. This was taken in August of 2012, right in the middle of the drought. And you should be able to see them, like you do over here. But you can't. This is corn. This is corn. Soybeans. This is soybeans and soybeans. This is over 20 years of no-till on that quarter. You can see some differences in shading there, which you should be able to. It's very sloped and everything. But all in all, it's a lot more either looking, isn't it? And this is the middle of August. It's just making it through. There's extra water there. And the management is totally different. Conversing to this field here, that's also corn. You can see it giving up. The corn is just done on some of those side hills. This field over here, especially too, it's just done. I realize it could be different hybrids. I realize it could be different climbing hills. All in all, it was pretty much done on the same time. But just some visual evidence of what's going on. Another thing that we don't think about a lot is something that's been called timid erosion. And Dr. Schumacher, Dr. Lobb in Canada, Dr. Lindstrom, ARS, others, many others. And it's not a new thing. In Europe, they discovered this a long time ago. And it's nothing more than moving the soil down the hill with tillage. And that's erosion. And when we think about precision farming and all that we can do farmed by the square foot, this is a big deal. It's not so much encroaching on your neighbor, on water quality or anything like that. We're just moving soil off this hill down the hill down here. It's within your own field. But you're decreasing productivity in one place. And you probably are decreasing it there too if you think about water and water management and so forth. And so till down the hill, the soil goes with you a certain distance. And if you turn right around until the exact track up the hill, it doesn't come up the hill as far as the soil. And I think what you think about that really makes sense, doesn't it? And so it's a real thing. And so my buddy Joe and I, standing right there, once in a while we would have time from our work to go goof around a little bit. And this is one of those days where we found a field on our farm. And this is not a very big hill, but it's there. And we have grass here that's probably not been farmed down. We really don't have any records of it being farmed. Actually the original homestead was just right over here on this hill. And it was just, there's some huge trees here. But in the corner it was used as a pasture. And we really don't know if it was ever farmed. We don't think it ever was. But the field, 80 to 100 years of tillage there, 20 years of no-till. But what we did is we set up three sites. You see the flags here that I have circled. And at each one of those sites we took some cores. And bear with me, this is no budget research. We're just having fun because Joe and I like soil. And we like things like this. But what we did is we took cores at each one of those flags. And these are small cores I realize they're hard to see. But in the middle there is a soil core. You kind of see the difference in color as you go down, especially with this. And so at the top, the middle, and the bottom of the hill, we took a sample in the grass and one in the tilled. And I drew a line here or an arrow where you can see the dark soil colors. So in the grass you can see it goes down to the bottom here. That's quite a ways compared to just right across the fence in the tilled where it was tilled for a long time. In the middle part of the slope, the grass is a little bit less. The depth of the dark soil colors is a little bit less, not much, but a little bit. And on the tilled soil, you can see here in the middle part of the slope that the dark soil colors go down to about here. But then right in about here there's light soil colors again. Light soil on top of dark soil. And so what's happening is the darker soil from the top or the shoulder landscape position is over topping the better soil on the middle landscape position. And I'm not advocating tile drainage, but I was in Wisconsin on Farmer's Field Day there about cover crops. And the father and son are advocate no-tillers right now. And they have a tile drainage business. But they admitted that the reason they went no-till is when they started installing drain tile, they noticed all the light colored soil on top of the dark colored soil. And it convinced them just down in there that something had to be done. And that's what's happening here. And so you go down to the bottom of the hill, we've got obviously dark soil all the way down. But over here on the tilt side again, there's a lighter soil material over the darker soil material. And so you think about those implications about what we're doing that tillage is really going against us, isn't it? And I realize this is a hill. If you have flat fields, it isn't an issue for you. But there's other issues there, windy erosion and such. So how does no-till yield compare? I like to go to literature and what others have done. And so this is just a simple literature review across all these locations. Iowa, South Dakota, Minnesota, Indiana, Tony Vine here, some data from Indiana, Ontario, Illinois, wherever I could find it. And I just plotted the no-till yield versus the conventional till and the strip till in here also. And you don't see much deviation between those at all, do you? And I got the average over here. No-till's a little bit slightly last because I probably had a couple locations where there was maybe a little bit of a problem. But you don't see them jumping out at all. So the reasons for tillage just aren't there. How about in South Dakota? A lot of the research that I was involved with, Dr. Gelderman and Jim Goering and Howard Woodard had a tillage component in them. And so I took that tillage component out and plotted the yields of corn and beans comparatively here and instilled the same thing. Not huge differences at all. So you're wondering, well, then why don't we no-till? You know, why haven't I tried it? I tried and got up. I was thinking about other problems with it. And one of those might be fertilizer placement. I don't know. It could be. So I tried to pick out some things. And a study at the Southeast Research Farm and in Brookings, both locations, longer, not exceedingly long no-till, a 10-year cycle there of no-till, but just a comparison of placement of phosphorus, okay, C-PAN versus broadcast. You can see here essentially no difference between those two. This is an average over soil test, of course. A nice response here, though, to phosphorus. And so that broadcast performing just as well. And it could be the fungi in the soil. Is that what's helping here? I don't know. We didn't measure that. Other locations that we've had phosphorus placement in no-till, Brookings County on soybeans, BAN versus broadcast, nice response to the phosphorus rate. Broadcast maybe slightly less than the BAN, but all in all pretty comparable. With spring week, no-till spring week here in Brookings County, similar results. So there's a little data for fertilizer placement. But I was at a soil fertility conference a year or so ago and Dr. Fernandez in University of Illinois, not with the University of Minnesota, though, did a soil sampling study. And he compared no-till broadcast to strip-till broadcast and strip-till deep-band, five and six inch depth. And he wanted to measure the effect on soil testing and where those were P and K was at. And I can't show you all the data because there's too much of it. But the summary showed that deep-banding the fertilizer reduced the surface-to-sub-surface P and K stratification ratio, therefore increasing the soil test in the subsurface with the fertilizer application. So by and large what he's saying is the crop was still taking the nutrients out of the soil surface. Even though in the strip-till where they were putting it deeper, you know, you would think the plant roots would go for that. The majority of the phosphorus and potassium was taken out of the surface of the soil at the top, two to three inches. So on our farm, this is the planter that I set up back in 1991. I remember the evening I sat in the living room with my dad and my uncle telling them about what I just heard about, no-till and what did we do. Being a young graduate student then and so forth, they thought I was just crazy. You know, this young kid didn't know what he was talking about. And I remember my uncle saying, well, you're going to have to plow at some time, aren't you? And I said, no, I don't think so. And so this is the planter we set up and basically fertilizer issues here. We put nitrogen sulfur in the saddle tanks and we had an opener here that we placed at five inches from the row. On the planter, we had our PK and Sink, full rate, 30% was put on the seat. I split it and put 70% in that, our on with that, that culture that put the nitrogen and the sulfur on. Because at that time, you know, we didn't have the data that we had about broadcast phosphorus or no-till. And so we just thought we got to get it off the ground. And I was dead set to make this no-till work with my dad and my uncle. And so that's the planter we had. And since then, these have come off. And all we do is we put a little starter on with the seed and we're in a broadcast program. And it's working. I believe the approved soil properties with no-till and the biota in the soil are getting those nutrients to the crop. Along with the data that I've showed you, on placement is important, I think. There is some data to show that if you're needing some phosphorus, your soil tests are lower. Certainly the banded applications are better. But if you're managing your phosphorus soil soil test levels at the adequate levels, then the maintenance of that is probably okay to put that out as a broadcast application. So other tips for no-till success. I believe it starts right here. I drive around the country. I can relate to Dr. Ward. Just driving around, looking. And I see this all the time. And I kind of cringe. And I realize why it's happening. These big combines, these big heads. You just can't throw it out there. But really when you think about it, we need to have this look like this, don't we? So we can do a better job of planting into that. And the soil temperatures are the same. And everything is just more even. And you can have better results if you handle your residue in the fall much better. Our biggest challenge on our farm was the sidewalk compaction. And this, we have silt loam soils. And silt loam soils, you wet them out and you dry them out in their break, okay? Dr. Nathan Mueller, our new agronomist at SDSU from northeast Nebraska, silt loam soils just like I got, says the same thing. Never did so much rotary honing when he was a kid. I mean, I rotary honed all the time. Those surface crusts were just monsters. And so when we went to Nontel, this really resulted in really the biggest challenge. And one year, we just couldn't get rid of that side wall on the see-for opener there. I couldn't get rid of it. I had tools there on my planter that I thought were the best. And this is just a picture of it. The side view here, you can see the wall of the trench right here. And then another picture of the same thing. What the roots do is they try to get through the bottom of that trench and they break out and then they go wherever they want to go. And so that was the biggest challenge. You may have different soils that you farm. They may be more forgiving than ours, but there may be other challenges, right? And so you know best what your challenges are. What I was using at the time was this little poly wheel that went on the closing wheels here and tried to push a little soil in the trench, right? And that's basically all I knew about. We didn't have the internet then, so we could do a big search and find all this equipment and stuff. Just word of mouth, right? And so that's what we did. And it did work too bad. That corn, this picture here, it yielded fine. Probably could have been better without those conditions, but we got through it. And then it went to a thermal closing system that ran at an angle. I'm trying to get a picture here, but this is off of video and it's dusty. But basically there are star wheels that run at a high slope to the seed trench and they just cut the edge of that trench off. And a former South Dakotan developed that and is now in Kansas now. And that was the next thing I came across that I thought could improve my condition there. And we since changed planters and we couldn't get these anymore and so I changed again. And I've got those same star wheels that are in at an angle here. But I put them back on the planter as they would be put on there, but I put wedges in there. I can throw it a little bit. I can throw, not throw, but gently push the soil a little bit in over that seed furrow. And then my chain comes along and it just fills it in really nice. But the important thing I think and Matt Hange from Kansas and others I believe will support me in this is that seed firming is really important. You want that seed in the bottom of that seed furrow so they're all the same depth and you get really even emergence. And so this is my system. The colter's only there for planting soil even in the corn stocks. That comes off for corn. I just moved a little residue when I planted my corn and that's my planter that I use. But today you've got more tools. You've got the internet. You can get on there and if you type planter clothing wheels in Google you've got hundreds of options, don't you? And so there's a lot more we can do and have available today. I'm not advocating any of it because I believe that you know what your problem is going to be on your farm and hopefully what might solve that. So in conclusion, I thank you for your time and if you have any questions I'll try to answer them there. But that prime stirr spurring is only, it just means the first step. And so think about that and cover crops are really important too. I've got a lot to learn on that but I think we get the tillage right. We're really doing the good things. You said on your farm you just put a little starter down. What are you doing to get the bulk of your nitrogen out there then? Are you broadcasting that? That's all broadcast. So you try to time it when there's some moisture coming to get it rained in? Aren't you at risk of losing some to the atmosphere without it? Yeah. It's broadcast urea. It's put on just before planting. I like to put it on in April when we're catching some more rains. And I kind of end you with with my person that runs the broadcaster, you know, gee it's going to rain. I'd really like to have you get this on. I realize that's not totally possible in all situations. I have put your yeast inhibitors in there so I feel like I'm not going to catch any rain to kind of give me some more time. Okay. Yeah. Your plan has been a little bit like ours. You talked about soil strength and low tail. Will you go back to ground and come down with tractor tires? With that tractor tires? Well, I believe that I've got the soil is can bear more load. And so I don't believe. I have some compaction probably. There's compaction in every field. And even in conventional field because it's right at the bottom where you run that disc or whatever you're running. So, you know, I have it. I did some bulk density measurements a few years back and I was convinced that yeah, bulk density is higher than in conventional field. We know that. But I felt I wasn't going down. It wasn't getting worse.