 My name is Jamie Scott and farm here on the family farm with my father Jim at Peirston, Indiana at 100% no-till and 100% cover crop on all our acres. Also have a side business where we help others get cover crops on their farm. We flew on 30,000 acres last year and probably touched about 60,000 acres total of trying to get those guys cover crops. Like I said, using cover crops and no-till on everything here, you know, we feel that that's the sustainable way to do things. Hold nutrients on our ground. We've got a hundred and some lakes in this county that we all feel like we should be part of protecting. We've got the Tipicanea River here, which is one of the most diverse rivers in the nation. There's some dangerous mussels still in there that aren't in other places and you know, we need to be able to farm and still have you know environmental issues in mind too. Using the cover crops and no-till to sequester carbon and build soil health up. Been in continuous cover crops for the last eight years on every acre. Before that was kind of just a few acres here and there trying to figure out what to use and when to use it. But by those eight years we've seen a real improvement in the plant health, the amount of nutrients that we have to apply. I think we're losing quite a bit of nutrients before. We're now we're making some of our own and scavenging them. But plant health is really a big big part of it to us. I'd like to introduce myself. I'm Tom Nelson from the Central Michigan area. This is my wife Lori and she and I farm here a crop farm operation organic crop farm operation and comprises about 700 acres of crops. We've been organic since 1996. I'll give you our crop menu includes corn, wheat. We do spelt occasionally depending on the market. We grow edible beans, navy beans for the last couple years. We grow for Gerber. We grow green beans and peas for Gerber baby food. We have rolling land, not the best of land. Probably what got us into organics more than anything else was tired of smelling the chemicals that I was using for the 25 years before I farmed organically and the marketing opportunities. They're very very interesting opportunities to feed people that are rather discerning of their diet and we're happy to be a part of that. We do use cover crops here. We use clover cover crops after wheat and we use old cover crop after soybean. Been pretty successful. We feel that doing this well certainly contributes a lot of nitrogen and organic matter to our soil increases the friability the till of the soil and it certainly keeps our hills from washing down into our valleys a bit which is part of the game. We have noticed over the years that our snow drifts aren't as deep as they used to be. It seems we get in the field earlier in the spring depending on the rains. More extreme weather events I would say. Of course memory is kind of hard to really trust. I'm not sure if it's me putting a label on something that otherwise would be really not significant really but to me it seems that we are having stronger rainstorm events especially this last August. We had about a half a year's rain in about two weeks. We picked up nine and a half inches of rain. Before that we had about four weeks of exceedingly dry weather. Makes you wonder makes you worry. To increase the carbon content of the ground through organic methods and through cover crop practices and through to the extent you can reducing tillage hey they're all pluses they're all things that we should do both financially for our own benefit and the benefit of people who will follow us. I'm Henry Miller Constantine Michigan. I along with my son are farming approximately 2,000 acres. To do a fairly extensive rotation of crops using growing seed corn, soy beans, wheat and edible green beans. As well as a whole series of cover crops. We've been incorporating dry grass on a good portion of the acres also some lacy radish and Austrian winter peas as well as you'll stand by is a rye cereal rye and when that's not readily available have used wheat as a cover crop. We intend every year to do a cover a hundred percent of our acres and with cover of one form or another. We irrigate all of our crops and that also even includes sometimes irrigating cover crops to establish stand. This fall here last week we actually had dry grass blown on and presently irrigating to incorporate to get that to germinate. We try to limit the very necessity in terms of the amount of nitrogen that we apply on our seed corn generally less than most growers are applying but I think we're depending a lot on the cover crops to produce and recycle nutrients feel that that's our way of making it more sustainable and improving the soils. We do use a strip till or no-till on all our acres which is also an attempt to reduce our footprint. I guess that in the nutshell is kind of what we're doing. Thank you. I'm John Burke I farm here in Bay City, Michigan. We're in the Saginaw Valley. We farm 2,500 acres of cash crops which include white wheat, soybeans, corn and sugar beets. We do a lot of cover crops for instance like when this sugar beet field is harvested they'll come in and we'll spread rye. We'll just discrip it in. The reason we discrip is we have a lot of heavy clay loam soils here and there's a lot of compaction especially after the heavy machinery hauling the sugar beets out of the field so we're worried about compaction so we're trying to bust that up but at the same time we're trying to add organic matter back into the soil and trying to loosen that top layer up a little bit. With our white wheat when we get that wheat off we come in and we'll spread an oil seed radish and there we're not using the typical tillage radish we're trying to use a variety of resistant to or helps with the resistance of nematodes because we have a lot of nematode problems here with the sugar beets and we also are developing some nematode issues with our soybeans as well so we're trying to maintain four and five year rotations with our sugar beets to help with the soil health but also at the same time to minimize our disease and our nematode pressures. We use a lot of fielder strips and what I mean by that is we plant grass barriers along our drainage ditches to try and help keep the sediment and our pesticides and our fertilizer from washing into the drainage ditch. Close to drain commissioners seem to like that when they don't have to come out and clean our ditches all the time because it helps prevent that soil from washing away. I'm also working with Dr. Dale Mutch and we're trying to look at different cover crop species that we can use up here in the Saginaw Valley following a wheat or maybe a peckle crop however we don't grow pickles but there are a lot of pickles that are grown in this area. Sustainability is a big issue here on our farm the last five ten years we've been looking at the different types of cover crops we can use. Manufactured fertilizers are great but they're not going to improve your soil health or your soil till. We've been also using a lot of conservation measures practices on the farm where we leave a lot of like straw mulch on top from the wheat or like after our corn is harvested we'll either leave it lay and no till soybeans into it or most of the time we'll just go through and chisel plow it or use one of these disc rippers to try and leave as much of the residue from the past crop on top of the soil. They help eliminate a lot of the erosion plus it helps to maintain the moisture in the soil when we plant in the spring. Some of the other improvements we've made as we've narrowed our row spacing up for our corn and our soybeans our soybeans are planted 15 to 20 inch rows and our corn is standard in 20 inch rows now. The sugar beet crop we have not changed yet we're still in 30 inch rows it's just a factor with the size of the equipment our heavy clay soils the narrow rows would be hard to harvest when we have a lot of muddy conditions. Martin Kleitschmidt has a 380 acre organic farm dedicated to livestock and machinery. In 1971 when Kleitschmidt started farming he began to transition from a commodity livestock-brained farm one that sold milk, pork, and grain of fat and beef to one that grows organic grains supports a small 30 head grass fed beef herd and grass fads about 120 head of yearlings a year. All the grassland acres on the farm were crop fields at one time but now they are in a recovery phase in grass to grow cattle and rebuild the soil carbon reserves. Currently the milk barn is vacant and used for sorting cattle and the hog barn is storage and in the process of being renovated for a solar array factory. Kleitschmidt is retired and mentors a young farmer in organic production and grass management. The mentee rents the 190 acre pasture as well as 125 acres of organic grain while Kleitschmidt controls 80 acres of pasture and has low-line angus and Murray Gray cattle. So I'm Jim Loback and we're here in the morning on a Friday. Farm is a relatively small farm we have about 25 acres of Montmorency tart cherries and about an acre of sweet cherries and we've been these were all planted in the early 80s and and we we've been farming them since. We have calcassians which I think has been renamed but anyway we'll call them calcassians so if you know a little bit about soils you know these very sandy forest soils and so we've installed irrigation from day one and we still maintain the systems although they're older trees but we still maintain them and feel that we get a good use out of that. Myself and my family have quite a few woodlots in along this road in the area and the wood is is not great quality so a lot of it gets chipped and I mix those with one of the things we do to kind of build up the soil is we we mix that with turkey litter and kind of compost it for a year or two and then we spread that on the orchards. We seem to be having more extremes in this area and I know all over the United States. Around March 10th we had two feet of snow fall in six hours and heavy wet snow and we really had a lot of damage to the orchards now that's not that's a was an unusual occurrence but what was even more unusual as we all know within probably 10 days of that storm we were in the 80s and spring started in mid-March and that certainly impacted this farm as well as all the other farms fruit farms up here in that we we had accelerated bud development and then a series of frost that took pretty much all of Montmorency tar cherries in the area certainly on my farm and and really devastated our our other fruit crops as well on this farm we had no fruit and that's that's a kind of unusual certainly we feel that in the last five years we've had we've started having these these extremes my name is John Caveny I'm a farmer from Central Illinois this farm is located in Puyatt County we have basically 35 acres of ground that we purchased in 1987 and then we rent another 20 or so acres this farm is really a grass farm we're in the business of turning grass into cash and we do that a couple different ways we we raise cool season grasses on this farm for animal feed and we raise the warm season grass the scant that's gigantic which you can see in the background for a renewable energy grass for baseload energy as well as a great perennial grass to sequester carbon the enterprises on this farm are bourbon red heritage turkeys Ruan ducks American buff keys cotton sheep and then we have managed to make this farm into a an actual production center whether it's a profit center yet it's still to be determined for growing the energy grass the scant this so we started out in 2002 with a couple grants from the Illinois Department of Agriculture and Department of Commerce and Community Affairs in conjunction with the University of Illinois Department of Aces to assess the availability of growing miscanthus as a energy crop or a third crop for Illinois and so at that time we established a mother bed which is now the oldest miscanthus on farm research plot in the United States from that we planted this track back here and this track has now become the base of miscanthus for the MFA well company B cap area miscanthus plots in Pennsylvania Ohio Arkansas and Missouri