 Next we got Ed Bain. Ed's worked with the USDA NRCS here for 18 years and 15 of it being with farmers and ranchers and three years working with the plant materials program which is a little bit what he's going to talk about here today I think. Before I get started here I'm going to be talking really generally on a lot of detailed topics today and out at the registration deck so I brought plenty of handouts on some of the topics I'm talking about today so if you want to grab those before you leave not only that I have business cards here today so if you want to get some more detailed information on some of the information that I'm presenting on today just grab me a break and I can get you a business card and help get some information to you so. I work for the natural resource conservation service and for most of my career I've been in the field office for the last few years I started working within the plant materials program which NRCS were probably more known probably for our local field offices that are in each county working with farmers and ranchers and since I've got the mic hijacked here a little bit I do want to talk about a program a little bit and what we do within the plant materials program or mission is the NRCS plant materials program develops vegetative solutions for natural resource concerns such as stabilization soil health and productivity and water quality and just to give you an example of something that we're working on right now is we have our local Dickinson field office a little bit pertinent to what we got going on here is they said they were out working on doing seedings and they're finding areas within these seedings that weren't establishing and they were taking soil tests and they were getting very low phs and very acidic soils so what we're working on right now is we're working on a literature search to try to see if we can find better information and guidance for them to find grasses that'll establish better into those acidic soils now if we can't if we find stuff and it's palatable we can just give that information to our field offices but if it's not we could probably work on a publication to make a little more palatable for them but not only that if we can find information we may go out and try to do some testing on those grasses kind of giving you the big picture of some of what we work on there are 25 plant material centers that make up the plant materials program in the entire US if you can see up on the map up here the program that I work is based out of Bismarck and it covers North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota we all kind of work together there's a lot of people that pull this together the Bismarck plant material center is located down in South Bismarck if you guys know where the airport is we're directly to the west across the street we're located on roughly 300 acres of land and co-located with Lincoln Oaks Nursery so part of that land is in their production from the nursery side but part of it's in does some of our experiments but not only that in the growing of some of our foundation seed uh some of the tasks that we work on within plant materials is a big one is our foundation and if you've ever heard of like bison big blue stem that is one of our releases and that was developed for a purpose uh one of the selection criteria on bison was leafy material but also if you look at bison that's probably going to be one of your lord stature cultivars a bison but one of the big advantage it has is it's probably going to be one of your most adapted uh cultivars the farther north you go in the US so uh one of and maybe one example to explain that a little bit farther is let's say that you would take a big blue stem from down to Texas and move it all the way up to North Dakota you might have a great beautiful big plant the first year but it may not make it through the winter that's the advantage of our foundation seed not only that we make that seed available to commercial growers so for example on bison big blue stem we have a 2.8 acre foundation field we harvest the seed off of that field we get that to a commercial grower they will plant let's say for example 160 acres of bison big blue stem and they will turn around and get that to a retail situation where somebody can purchase it the other thing we work on is technology development and one of the big pertinent ones that we just finished up on a study was studying different seeding dates for warm season grasses and I do have the full publication laying out on the table but if we're out just give me I'll get you a card and I'll get you that more detailed study but just given the just with the amount of time we have today what we found out of doing that study on the warm season grasses is you're actually the most ultimate or your most optimum time for warm season grasses seeding in the most stable time you're going to get us actually seeding it in the spring you know not super early but about a little bit on the later end of spring we found that in the august time frame and doing it dormant we could get establishment on those warm season grasses but it was very inconsistent the other thing we work on is outreach and that's what I'm kind of doing today and we also partner with other with other agencies within our local program we work on for actual full-time staff as you got me I'm the plant material specialist which does outreach within the states we've got a plant materials manager that manages the center down there in Bismarck we have a technician and Nancy Jensen that that is our study lead and we have a couple technicians that help with foundation seed we don't have a lot of labor we do have to do a lot of partnering and I know that we have several partners out in the audience here today that allows us to be able to get work done uh one thing that on on before I get directly into the seeding dates that I do want to bring up is that plant materials over the years have come up with five considerations to think of prior to seedings and they all make a lot of sense if you can get these five things down you really do set yourself up for success on doing a grass for type seeding uh one one of the seeding dates I won't go into depth on that because I'll do that but I'll briefly hit a couple of the other ones is you want to get good weed control where you're planting and it makes sense those weeds can be competition for your uh new seedlings and you want to give them the least amount of competition you possibly can the other two is seed bed I think a seed bed and seed placement together and if you read the research on planting depth you get much beyond probably a half inch on a lot of these grasses and forbs and all of them have different characteristics some can go a little bit deeper than others but you get much below a half inch you really struggle with getting emergence on your uh seedlings and just coming from experience with commodity crops you can deal with a lot of challenging seed beds and get really good stands with commodity crops it's not so much so easy with a quarter inch or a half inch grass seeding I think that's where we have a tendency to have challenges in a lot of our seedings the other thing to consider is seed quality and where I'm coming from that is a couple of those factors would be the purity of the seed and germination if you start getting on the lower end of that you might you're going to want to try to accommodate and get a little more seed out there to try to be able to get a thick stand the other thing to think about seed quality is the adaptability I talked a little about earlier it's an extreme case but if you pull let's say especially on the warm season you pull from too far south and you're trying to see that one of the first indications that you're pushing the adaptability of that grass is it's going to quit producing seed the next one's probably going to be that's probably going to die over the winter so sourcing a seed that's adaptable in your region is probably a pretty good key to having a pretty successful grass seeding so getting a little bit more deeper into uh typing our seeding for for uh enhanced reclamation where this uh her talk is today there's a few things you kind of want to think about why are seeding dates important well you think about it you want to maximize your your soil moisture that should be fairly obvious I mean if you want to get germination you want to get them to come up not only that you want to keep your those seedlings fairly cool I if you read the statistics on it the hotter it is the harder that those seedlings have to survive and also you want to have a proper climate for your seed germination and probably the big key out of this one without reading all the way through it is we're talking somewhere on a minimum of 60 degrees celsius before you start getting rapid germination of your warm season grasses if you seed them for example too early in the spring they could essentially rot on you in the ground uh the other thing you want to avoid on your seeding dates on your new seedlings is getting getting frost on them and for example like I just talked about your early you get too early on germination on your warm seasons they come up uh they actually have a warm season grasses you have usually not always have a elevated growing point and with that if you end up frosting that off you can start losing your seedlings and not only that is if you pick a fall dormant type uh seeding window especially with your uh a lot of your warm seasons you normally don't have enough growth going into the fall for them to survive uh and another advantage you may want to think about especially like green needle which is really known for your your seed dormancy maybe you do have an advantage with that with some dormancy and I'll get into that a little bit later and uh another thing that we put into the factors on some of our seeding dates is trying to get 68 weeks so we can get the sixth leaf on our alfalfa before we go into fall to be able to uh get enough growth to allow it to make it through winter uh this is a little bit of a busy slide so I'm going to bust this down a little bit farther uh this is actually out of the North Dakota field office technical guide this is a lot of information that our field offices use this is on a public site where you can pull this information up and this is where we do give some suggestions of some different seeding dates for success so uh some of the factors that have went into setting some of those dates is we split the state into north and south and the reason we do that is that for example if you're going to seed in the spring in the south you probably want to be seeded a little bit earlier than the north because hopefully you have a little bit cooler temperatures you have a little bit more more moisture at that point in time uh and here's our chart and it's a little bit on the busy side you can see we have it divided by cool season warm and warm and then a cool season warm mix and if you notice here and it kind of gets back to that last slide we're talking hopefully you can get in on a cool season grass before May 20th in the north and prior to May 10th in the south and basically the reason for that is is heat and moisture hopefully you're finding a more optimal time of the year we're also suggesting like on your cool seasons that you can also seed them in March and into early September and basically the window we're trying to catch there is a window where things start getting a little bit we're past hopefully we're getting past the kind of heat of the summer towards the tail end it's going to get a little bit cooler but yet we're not late enough that if we seed that we're going to we're going to get enough growth on those grasses to allow those better survival on those grasses we also look at late on a cool season is our late falls and basically our definition on that is to try to have your soil temperature below 40 degrees for five consecutive days and the reason behind that is you're trying to get those grasses not to germinate over winter and hopefully they pick up and they germinate in the spring warm seasons and our mixes we're basically trying we're basically trying to shoot or we typically try to advise to go with that kind of later spring type window and what we're trying to do that is get past the frost period especially on those warm season grasses but yet still be a little bit on the cool side and still have a little bit of moisture so we're bumping those a little bit farther back than probably our cool seasons this is another part of that same document that's within the nrcse photog and it does explain a little bit more on you know we're suggesting and I believe our start date you know for if let's say we want to fall for a legume in the mix is to probably start seeding august 10th and stop summer on the 25th of august to try to keep within those windows that we're talking about this is actually a couple pictures that came from that study I was talking earlier where we studied our warm season grasses and seeding dates both of these pictures were taken in the fall of 17th so at the same time so both of these had roughly two different growing seasons on them the one on the left was a spring seeding or on our warm and you can see the really nice stand we've got and it's kind of hard to see because we do have quite a bit of weeds in here but this is actually our august seeding window and we had we didn't have nearly the establish on that one and we got a lot more weeds uh uh this chart is a little bit on the busy side but we tried laying out you know we're talking spring window late summer and dormant for different seeding windows on grasses and try to a little bit of your advantages and disadvantages of each for example on your spring window you've got the advantage of having a having good moisture and it's cool and actually like I've been talking the whole time probably that late spring is probably your best for your warm seasons the disadvantage of that seeding windows you could run into you know we have a lot of field offices that run into especially on the eastern side of the state run into some wetter sites and you're not not able to seed in that window might be a disadvantage to that window our late summer window actually one really good thing about it is it actually provides a good part of the growing season to get weed control that is a definitely an advantage and if you do like I was talking earlier the higher soil temperature are the more rapid that those seeds will germinate and come to the surface so if you do seed in that late summer or that late summer timeframe you can actually get some pretty quick establishment but one of the biggest disadvantages to that late summer august seeding is often that is the hottest and driest time of year and it may hinder your establishment and we do see that a lot even with our cool seasons it seems like we either have a really good one or a really bad one and it all just matters on what sort of weather we have going into august and then I also talked about our warm season I think I hit that fairly good before uh the other thing I want to get you guys down the road of is if if any if you want to look up some more grass seeding and information I do have the website up here to get into our publications but also if you get into any sort of search engine just type in Bismarck plant material centers and within that webpage you're going to come with a publication link and you're going to end up on this webpage that I have down here at the bottom and if you go down into the search box when I was earlier talking earlier I had that map of the 25 plant material centers if you do not if you just simply type into this box and start keyword searching for the information you're looking for you're going to search the entire plant materials program everything which is good in certain situations an example where I think that would be good maybe for this crowd is that I know that there's also a different plant material center that's out of Bridger Montana that that covers Montana in northern Wyoming and I know that they have done a lot of work on reclam reclam mating and restoring some of these sites that's kind of the topic of this so there might be some really good information from Bridger in there for you guys get that deep but also if you type in NDPMC down there that will narrow it down to all the publications that we have available from the Bismarck plant material center also if you get into those publications we do have this sorted by different we got grasses we've got information on trees it's about everything on plants you know we mainly work on perennials occasionally we do work on annuals but for the most part we're either on trees we're on grasses we're on forbs for the most part and this has a lot of good information if you're looking for technical information on there this is uh this I actually got copies of this out at the registration decks if you want to read more up on the effects of the seeding data on the work I've talked about that several times also on the table out there and also within that publication page is the five keys to access successful grass seeding I went over there's extremely briefly earlier you can read up more on some of the keys to maybe trying to have a better better seeding a lot more detail we also have a publication that was done probably probably 10 years ago talking in general maybe some good ideas to have a successful reclaim site on there too and I have copies of that out on the registration table too the other resource that you can find if you want to find more technical information for example like suitability of certain grasses to different soils if you get into the north dakota nrcs electric we call the ephotog but it stands for electronic field office technical guide you will run into a lot of technical information on on grass plantings too and this is actually the a little bit more of the guide that I was talking guide on some of the seeding dates I was talking earlier you can find that in uh you're not actually going to find that on our website you're going to find this within the ephotog I was just talking about and some other resources that I bumped into given base of the topic we have here today and I know we have some people here from ARS there's a lot of good information from like I know there's quite a few papers from the 90s where they got a lot of good research on different ways to establish grass which is really good and this actually one is not on our website but when I read through this particular paper I know that that's where a lot of our recommendations came from that are within that our suggested seeding dates that I was talking about earlier this is actually I believe that this is a cooperative one from probably back in the 50s and a lot of the research is done in the 40s that was actually when plant materials originally started on the man down side and we moved to the Bismarck side so that was like a cooperative probably like 70 to 80 years ago that has some really good information in it so that's what I guess I got from my presentation do I have any questions or I know I have one question I guess nobody else says you know going off you focus this kind of timing a little bit but one that you talked about was like seed bed prep and something I guess I wasn't really super keen on but recently the word to do since like compassion and rolling and some seed bed you got anything you can talk about in that yeah uh for example there's one I'll give you a real-life example I went out and looked at we had one where a guy went in he tilled it it made it really fluffy and he came in with I believe it's the 750 version of the air seeder so basically it's a no-till disc drill opener and what happened when he went into that fluffy seed bed he had his drill set correct but with that fluffy seed bed actually those openers the front gang was what's would plow in place it at the correct level but then when that second gang came back it was piling four inches of dirt on top of it so we went back to check that seeding we had seed at a quarter inch like we should but we had some that was pushing three to four inches so we're probably going to get a pretty spotty stand on that but getting back a little more direct your point if he would have rolled that and got a lot more firmer he would have been able to control his depth a lot better and not only that probably another thing that helped me on depth getting down to that road is also they make what they call depth bands on your on your drills where they have a ring that sticks down it only allows that drill to go so deep those help a lot too