 Today's event is a joint effort of the South Dakota No-Till Association, the Mitchell NRCS off-field office, SDSU extension, and the NRCS. And one of the first things I'd like to do is thank all our sponsors that helped us put together and provide input and money for today's event. I'm going to just read through the list. South Dakota Wheat Commission, Farm Credit Services of America, Wheat Growers, Mustang Seed, Monsanto, Prairie State Seeds, Next Level Ag LLC, Millboard Seeds, La Crosse Seeds, Dakota Best Seed, Agronomy Plus, Farmers Eliacs, Mitchell, First Dakota National Bank, C&D Operations, and Davis County Ampelman, Scott Supply, CropTech, Ducks Unlimited, Aurora County, Conservation District, Davis County Conservation District, Hanson County Conservation District, South Dakota No-Till Association, SDSU Extension, USDA, and Pioneer Hybrids of Dupont. So let's give them all a welcome round of applause. So Ruth said you got just a little bit of time to talk about a lot a lot of things. So we're going to hit a few things real lightly today. Dakota Lakes Research Farm, which you probably know, should know by now, is located east of here along the Missouri River. We have both irrigated dry land stuff. I went back through all the talks that I've done over the years here and kind of looked at those and I summarized those real neatly. If you're in this part of the world, you want to take the E out of E.T. E.T. is Vapo Transpiration. You want all the water to go through plants. And as every one of the speakers so far today has talked about, the idea is to get plants growing roots in the ground, those kind of things. We want to maximize snow catch. That's one of the things we want to do. We want to get some vertical architecture up there. You have to decide which information sources you can trust. There's a lot of people try to tell you a lot of things, especially when it comes to cover crops and stuff. Some of them don't really know what they're talking about. So decide which one of those that you can trust and then start listening to them. Address the problem instead of treating the symptom. We talked about water hemp. John did just shortly ago. The reason they got a water hemp in the eastern part of the United States is they don't have enough diversity and they don't have enough cover and whatever. So they have water hemp. They're resistant weeds. Let's go back and fix it. I always like to pick on NRCS because they had you guys building a lot of terraces. Terraces don't make the water go in the ground. So that water infiltration kit that they're handing out here, that would have told you water doesn't go in the ground. Just putting a ditch up there to keep from running out of the field doesn't really make the crop grow better. Ideas make the water go in the ground. And no-till does that. Cover crops can help us do that to a certain extent. Mother nature is an opportunist. If you have a problem you've created the opportunity. So if you've got a weed or disease or an insect or anything happening, some place in the way you designed your system you've created that opportunity. Because Mother Nature will come in and fill that. And I see Daryl's here. So Daryl Denneke is sitting back there. But years and years ago we were, when they first came out with, at that time they called it emicorn, pursuit tolerant corn. And I had a young producer in Sioux Falls tell me not to worry about crop rotation because I got pursuit corn and pursuit beans and I can just use pursuit. And I won't have any problems. And I said, well you're going to have resistant weeds. And so I animate at the time, took umbrage with me saying that because there was no proof that there was going to be resistant weeds. I think I also said they'd be cross-resistance other ALS herbicides. And they wanted a retraction. And all we did is, Leon and Daryl come out and put in a trial for me. And I went up to my neighbors and found some, I don't know if you knew I went and done that. Found some, found some gleaned tolerant kosher weeds and shook it around over top of that trial. And voila, we had our proof. Strived to produce a crop which is healthy, not a crop that does not get sick. So remember that too. We spent a lot of time trying to treat things that are getting sick when we should really just be trying to make sure we keep it healthy. So that really takes a whole system. And you guys have all seen that. If you can only know one thing about a soil, what parameter would you want to know? And Jay Furrier hit this a bit today. I'm going to hit it harder. Within all textural groups, as organic matter increased from 1 to 3 percent, available water holding capacity doubled. When organic matter content increased to 4 percent, it then accounted for more than 60 percent available water holding capacity. In the Red River Valley, they have salinity and water logging problems because their water doesn't hold as much, soil doesn't hold as much water as it should. We have the same problem here. Our soils no longer hold as much water. They used to hold this much water. Now they hold this much water. So when we get a little bit of rain, they're water logged and we get saline seeps and we get water logging whatever. If we had deeper soils in terms of water holding capacity, then we could hold more water. We wouldn't get wet, water logged early. We wouldn't get dry late. And we wouldn't have as much problem with salinity. When organic matter contents increased 4 percent and then accounted for more than 60 percent of available water holding capacity. When soil water storage capacity is low, much of the rain that falls during extended periods of precipitation is lost in contrast, highest water storage capacity combined with effective capture of rain by making the water go on the ground and snowmelt over the fall, winter, and spring can support a crop through extended dry periods. And what we're trying to do with cover crops and they don't have as big a fit here as they do in Illinois where they have in Indiana where they have longer growing seasons and more rain. But we have opportunities here. What we're trying to do is take these cool periods of the year or these odd periods of the year and build organic matter and suppress weeds and do some of those things. And we only do that when we have the opportunity. Short-term studies are not accurate in evaluating treatments. I was impressed that John was showing us 20-some years of treatments. That's very, very rare anymore. And we do that at Dakota Lakes, but not very many people do that. A farmer manages ecosystems. You take sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide and make them into products to be sold. That's your business. You're capturing sunlight. And if you're only growing corn and soybeans, you're capturing just a very small percentage of the sunlight every year. Let's capture more sunlight because the energy from the sunlight that goes into the soil or whatever, that's the stuff that drives that whole ecosystem. Crop rotations allow for time for natural enemies to destroy the pathogen. The one-on-related crops are growing and we spend our whole career working on crop rotation. Proper intensity, adequate diversity, and then we're stable. And proper intensity is matching that natural water cycle. Native vegetation is the best way to tell what you can do. As I travel around the world, the first thing I do is look at the native vegetation. And Jay can tell you that. That's one of the things he does too, right? You look at the native vegetation that integrates the soil characteristics, the climate, including rainfall and temperatures and those kinds of things that integrates them all into one package. People always say, how much rainfall do you get? It's relative. Amarillo, Texas, Pierce, South Dakota, and Brandon, Manitoba get exactly the same rainfall. Amarillo, Texas is a desert. Pierce, South Dakota is a prairie. Brandon, Manitoba is what they call a parkland, which is trees and tallgrass prairie. Same on rainfall, different temperatures, different amounts of heat. Organic matter is important. When we take off stuff, somebody started talking about hay today and I was about ready to go crazy in the back of the room. If you take off a 75-bushel acre wheat crop or half of 150-bushel acre corn crop, you take off 150 pounds of N, 50 pounds of N, 5 pounds of P, 100 pounds of K, and 3,000 pounds of carbon. You're mining one unit train of soybeans, these nice circle tracks, 110 cars. One unit train of soybeans has 400,000 pounds of phosphorus. If we keep shipping that stuff out, we're mining because the Chinese aren't sending it back. So what happened until we do that for 100 years? We won't have any soils left. And Jay already told you they don't have any soils left in the Red River Valley. So they're putting in drain tile to get rid of that excess water so we can get in Lake Winnipeg and screw up Lake Winnipeg, right? Matching water use to the climate and soils is imperative. Matching water use to what you have. Most of the plant growth problems blame the no-tillers out of inadequate diversity and proper intensity, or errors in technique. No reason for errors in technique anymore. We've got good equipment. So let's get our diversity and intensity right. In human environments, tallgrass, prairie, or wetter, the goal should be to have something growing at all times. That's this area in East. Should have something growing at all times. That's going to require the use of cover crops or forage double crops because you can't really do two grain crops in a year. There's not enough time. Subhumans, semi-urid, pure South Dakota arid environments, cover crops can be utilized, increase organic matter, and biological activity. We're going to use them less frequently because we don't have the moisture. Cover crops are like tillage, and wet environments more and longer cover and forage periods are needed in a drier environment. Residue loss can be an issue if the wrong species are chosen. Lots of emphasis on some people using radishes, turnips, and rapeseed and those kind of things. Those are brass, because they get rid of residue. You're going to be too bare or too fast. As you get drier, you've got to really limit how many of those you put in there. Number one, decide what you want to do before trying to choose a cover crop. John said this. He said it several times, right for me. I want to tell you that John Pike Seed Company, that family seed company went away. The Beck Seed Company he mentioned is still there. No damn relatives of mine. Mine all got hung for horse even, but I thought I should throw that in there. Think of your cover crop as just another component of your rotation. It's not separate. You've got to know what you're going to do, right? Using a mixture of cover crops allows meeting several goals simultaneously. Mixers add more diversity, grow at different times, better compete with weeds, optimize nutrient cycling, etc. But be careful not to bridge diseases or insects. Choose your mix carefully. Got a call from a major cover crop seed supplier. He said one of my growers said that his soybeans behind cover crop did not yield as good as his soybeans where he didn't have cover crop because he had phytophthora. I said, what did you have in the cover crop mix? I said, we had just our normal 12 way mix. He said, well, give me a list. Soybeans. We're in that list. Don't do that. But now in the old days, in the Jimmerer Valley here in North, when guys were going to grow soybeans for the first time 25, 30 years ago, 25 years ago or more, I'd say, okay, go after wheat and plant some soybeans as a cover crop after the wheat before you put the soybeans in the next spring because you need to prime that rhizobia pump. Get some rhizobia inoculum out there. Otherwise, you'll never be as good. That's first time. Don't do that ever again. Okay, so think about what you're trying to do. Creating conditions beneficial for the next crop is one of the goals. Water and nutrient management, another primary goal. Water used by a cover crop during the nine crop period can often be regained during the growing season because of better infiltration, reduce runoff, improve water relations, more cover. More cover if you do it right. Remember, I talked about Nebraska's. Here's the thing that Jason Miller and I did. This was back in 2008. I had a winter wheat corn field pea rotation. There's a wheat stubble, no cover crop. This is on the 9th of July. We still had this total cover to stop the E from the soil. Back up, back up. Here's right next to it. We had a rotation had actually more cover, spring wheat, winter wheat corn, but we put a brassica cover crop in there. It's almost bare. I think it was about 20 bushel difference because we lost the residue. Understand your rainfall patterns for your area and the water holding capacity of your soils in order to plan how you're going to do this and use web soil survey. Here's one of my soils. We farm some West River stuff. We got Jim Finley used to be one of my board guys. He can tell you about that. If I take a web soil survey, there is my north unit. This is five miles north of the farm. This is a promised soil, an opal soil. The glacier went around here. This is the old ocean bottom. This is a West River Peer Shale-derived soil. That field right here is Jimmy Corco's Buckinghorse pasture. You really never have lived until you have a rodeo contractor as a neighbor. Comes to Cadillac, windows down goes, see any horses? Yep. How many? About 120. How long ago? Oh, about an hour and a half. Where'd they go? That way. Thanks. So what this means is you can get all kinds of stuff off of web soil survey. If you don't know how to use that, you need to get it and get an app on your phone. I can tell you what soil used to be here before they built the building. Talk to your NRCS people. What this says is this somewhere between five, no, three and six and a half inches of total available water on this spot. That heavy soil does not hold very much available water. I manage that soil. It's very heavy clay. I manage that much different than I do my main farm. Here's a little glacial tongue that comes out there. Okay, that one holds about seven inches. Okay, these opals up in here hold less than three. Because they're only about this deep to shed. Here's the main farm. Here's my good Lowry's, right? Those are more like you guys have. You can see I got some of the red ones and those and whatever. But these will hold about 10 inches of water. I manage that differently than something that holds five. So once I know how much my bucket holds, then I go get my rainfall. This is Mitchell. I've got an Excel spreadsheet that will do this for you. You've got every rainfall from every station in the state of South Dakota and you can do this type of thing for you. So I start from October to October and you'll precept Mitchell 22.06 or 8.6. This is from a few years ago. So now everybody's going, why don't we get more rainfall now? Well, that's fine. We're going to look at what happens when you didn't get as much rainfall. Take the E out of ET from July to June from when you would harvest wheat until you would need water for your corn. Corn doesn't use any water before June. You get 19.34 inches of rain. How much does the soil hold? Seven, 10, maybe 12. If it was totally dry when you harvest the wheat, which it normally isn't totally dry to four feet when you harvest the wheat, you'll hold 10 or 12. You've got to try to put 19 inches of water in there. And guys say, I don't want to no-till it through damn wet in the spring. What a wonderful problem to have if you're living South Dakota. Right? Come on. So let's turn that into an opportunity. And that's where you have a chance to do something. If you go wheat to sunflowers, it's 22 inches. But that's the type of where you plant peas and grow wheat that you have at 22 inches. If I'm backing up one, if you get half a normal, which we seldom do, it's still nine inches, almost 10 inches. If you get half a normal and you're keep taking the E out of ET and haven't done tillage and you make the water go in the ground and do all those things you're supposed to do, you're going to fill a soil up at half of normal. So you're always going to be too wet. Okay. That's why you grow good weed after peas. Okay. And from October to June, first of October, first of June from corn to sunflowers, 12.1, you're still going to fill the soil up. If you've got good cover, take the E out of ET, that kind of stuff, right? So half a normal 6.06. When we first told guys that Gettysburg and Peer, they should put their sunflowers in the corn. They thought it was stark raving mad. Now, if you drive from Blunt to Gettysburg, they're all got their sunflowers in the corn because you got to do the numbers. July to November, this is your opportunity. Fall cover crop July to November 8.34 inches. That other one was 19. If you use that 8, you're still going to have enough to fill that soil by the time corn needs it. If you're doing all the things we talk about and you keep the cover and you do that kind of stuff, right? Even in half a normal, you've got four, that's enough. You can use that and you're still going to have enough to get your corn started the next year. July to September, when you harvest your wheat to when you appease it to when you do winter wheat, there's not enough time there, not enough water to try to do a cover crop on dry land. We will do this with irrigation. The old Long Fallow, you guys all look at me. I grew up 60 miles from here. We did Long Fallow on a half section of ground because the landlord wanted that. Wheat, Milo, Long Fallow. We had saline seeps, got awful mess in there. I had no idea when I got older and got a little more educated. I go, Jesus, what a stupid damn thing to do, right? Now they farm it the way they should and they don't have the saline seep problem. Cover crop seeds need to be inexpensive in terms of cost per acre. Small seeds mean less volume. We look in our shed, but be careful to not do peas. As cover crops, if you're doing peas someplace in the rotation, you'd like to have about a six-year break between pea crops to not get root diseases or lentils. Some of these crops you got to be careful with. Small seeds grow better on the surface than larger seeds. Large seeds emerge better through a matter of residue. Mixing large and small seeds in the same trench helps us. The large seeds help the small seeds emerge better. They kind of break the path. Using heros to improve the stand to surface broadcast seed improves the stand to weeds as well. And to make sure residue go away, right? It's not one of the things you like to do. One important goal is to use the cover crop to balance the diet of the soil organisms. Ron Elverson was asking some questions before about how do I, you know, shouldn't I add more carbon or whatever? And I'm sitting back there with him saying, well, Ron, maybe let's put some cover crops in and up your nitrogen and carbon, but have a higher proportion and if you want to get more in in the system to balance your high carbon. So that's kind of what you do with that thing. It's kind of like feeding cows. You don't feed a cow straight straw. She needs to have some protein. The trouble with feeding a cow straight straw is she just can't eat enough of it because you can't digest it, right? It's not good food for her. So you got to give her a little protein and then that makes it good food. So that's things. Managing cover crops is more of an art than a science at this point. If anybody tells you they know how to do it, they're a liar. I mean, it's just really more of an art. If at least some component of a rotation to not feel an excessively dry year, John was talking about 2012. If you didn't fail in 2012 with some of your components, we harvested really good winter week in 2012, but the corn sucked. But if some of those components don't fail, then you don't have enough intensity. Everybody wants to have a rotation that doesn't fail when it's dry. But if you don't fail when it's really dry like that, you haven't taken full advantage of a normal year and you will fail badly in wet years. And this is what's happened to a lot of people. They've been overly cautious and then they fail because it's too wet. If you look at a guy that still does wheat summerfowl, I was in Montana a couple of weeks ago. They still do wheat summerfowl there, right? P.H. is a five because they're leaching all the lime out. The lime's at three foot and then they're telling them to put lime on the top because they put all their lime down below. I mean, like get some roots out there, bring the stuff from below back to the surface where it belong. But I just said to them guys, nine years out of 10, you fail because you've followed that ground and you could have done something with it. You've failed. Nine years out of 10 when you did summerfowl. So, take about water cycle, energy flow, mineral cycle, community dynamics. Okay, mineral cycle are the nutrients available for plant use or have they been leached, eroded, transported from the landscape. Ecosystems that leak nutrients become deserts. One of those nutrients is carbon. J talked about losing carbon, gaining carbon, losing carbon, gaining carbon. If we keep losing carbon, we're going to turn into a desert. That's easy. Good, good students. Saline seeps indicate leakage. Decreasing P.H. indicates leakings. One unit train, soybeans, almost a half a million pounds. So, saline seep, rain here goes here, we gotta get this cycle fixed here. It's really a water cycling issue. I call this catch and release nutrients. What's in the saline seep? Salt. I used to teach chemistry. There's lots of salts, right? Everybody take an acid base to make a salt. So, salt isn't an answer. Number one thing that's in the saline seep is nitrate. That's fertilizer. Number two thing that's in there is calcium sulfate. That's gypsum. That's a fertilizer. Number three thing that's in there is calcium carbonate. That's lime. That's a fertilizer. So, when I ask you that question, you're supposed to say fertilizer. So, all the kids from SCSU and all the kids from Watertown that come and visit, I got the instructors trained and I asked those kids that question and they all go, fertilizer. Because if they don't say that, then I yell at the instructor. If you get stranded and rain in the back 40s, you drive home across the tilled field or the pasture. Pasture. People say, oh, my no-till is too wet and I get stuck. It's not no-tills fault. You haven't got the soil structure there yet and you haven't got your water cycle fixed. Organic matter makes a difference. We've been running some rotations that read at pure for, since 1990. Here's some winter wheat in 2006. It doesn't look very good. Right across the road it looks like this. What's the difference? Well, if I look at those two fields, this is a good one. This is a bad one. Both of them are winter wheat that followed peas that followed corn. This rotation is identical except I've got an extra soybean in there. Soybeans are low in carbon. Peas are low in carbon. Wheat and corn are high in carbon. So in one of those I've got two-thirds high carbon, one third low, and the other one's half and half. Corn soybean's half and half. You don't have enough carbon unless you add some carbon to some other place. So what's that mean for yield? With 7.9 inches of rain or total preset between when the peas harvested and the wheat was harvested, 7.9 inches in 2006, 60 versus 29, 23.7 in 2005, 92 versus 57, 6.4 in 2002, 56 versus 28. Organic matter makes a difference. But you kind of had to be there for a few years and we, John showed that too. It takes a little while to restore those soils because they've been degraded. It wasn't our fault. But we're fixing them. If you get a chance, watch the Cronin Farms video, Leopold video. Mike says, well, grandpa broke the land and my dad mined the land and it's up to Monty and I fix it. Right? Okay, that's it's up to us to fix it. This year. Okay, here's that two-thirds high residue, 95 bushel, 13.4. Here's that half, 80. Here's another half with Caranada and set of peas, 60. Here's where I got even higher carbon content, 95 and 87. Organic matter makes a difference. Alternate year wheat, this is old data from 1990s. Every other year wheat, half high residue, half low residue, 46 bushel, two years high and one year low, 53. Here I got two years of wheat and one year of corn, 48.4. But that's organic matter makes a difference. Here's what it cost me in 1990s to grow this. Here's the fallow thing, wheat corn fallow, wheat corn pea. It cost me 460 to do wheat fallow, 379 to do wheat corn fallow, 245 to do wheat corn pea. People used to ask me do you make any money on them dang peas? I said I don't need to make money on peas. I just have to lose less money than it cost me to Somerfell. I used to love doing that to people. We ran that study out in Lyman County for 12 years and in the 13th year I put the whole thing into spring wheat and I've shown a lot of over the years shown a lot of wheat things from there. I've never shown you this yield. 2002 really dry year right? Where we where we did wheat canola. This all went to spring wheat. So where we done wheat canola for 12 years and then planted spring wheat there 15.4. Where we did wheat fallow we got 20.7 that was on fallow ground. We're just doing the measure the ones where wheat would have normally gone. Wheat corn fallow 23.7, wheat corn pea 25.8. The interesting thing there this is a really dry year. Why is this wheat better than this wheat? Organic matter. 12 years of organic matter. We had that one year when we were producing at least peas instead of a zero. It's an organic matter thing. Roussa is going to talk about grazing. I took this picture at Lloyd Minster Saskatchewan. Many people have been to Lloyd Minster. Less people than have been to Chicago even. John we really don't know where the hell anything is in Illinois and Indiana. It's just over east. Right? We don't have a clue where any of them things are. But you can talk about these towns there. We don't know where they're at. Lloyd Minster sits right on the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan east of Edmonton which is about five or six or seven hours north of the border long ways north. Grow a lot of corn there and they graze it in the winter time. So I took this like in January. There's a cow there. In case you guys really can't see there's a cow hiding and this guy's over here can't see it. That cow is hard to see. That's one of the best things you can do is in in Canada is they can't really grow corn for corn but they can grow it as a grazer. And they had to do a lot of grazing because of BSE, mad cow. And I don't know how many years ago it was maybe 10 years ago I did a whole swing up through northern Canada or north central Canada Saskatchewan, Alberta. And listening to the radio an old cow was worth seven cents or eight cents a pound because you couldn't do anything with them other than make them into dog food. They had to take a bunch of money out of their cow raising system and they did it by quitting hay. You know quitting doing hauling stuff and feeding the cows. They put them put them out. These are Canadian cows. Okay and I'm going to give you a link later on but if you miss it just Google Alberta swath grazing or Alberta bale grazing and get all these videos and these guys talk about how they do their different different things. It's really interesting. Why are we doing this? And Jay talked about a little bit in sotted lands in dry or brittle environments. Soil biology slows during times of low soil moisture. That would be western central western South Dakota. The rumen of grazing animals remains moist continuing the biological process when it normally would stop. Similarly in cold climates soil biology slows during times of low soil temperatures and Lance brought that up. Talked about the tundra that you realize the tundra is a hundred miles north of here. Right Ruth grew up in Winnipeg which is several hundred miles north of here and I didn't see any tundra. Still looking for the polar bears and we go up to visit the family but the rumen of grazing animals remains warm during these times so that's why this winter grazing thing like Jay said is is really probably a pretty good thing. So here's some of our cover crop that's a mix of oats and peas and a little bit of of rapeseed growing after wheat harvest going to corn. Okay this is our mix it's not real fancy we just swath it we swath it because if you don't swath it it gets too mature. Your weight tells about right and you swath it otherwise it goes to hell in terms of quantity and quality okay and there it is it looks like that nice big swath right there look nice and green if you don't swath it on time you get less stuff and less quality. If you swath on time where we did it right we had four little over four tons of stuff 20 protein very good feet oats peas and rape where we're going to go from wheat to soybeans then we use a mix of oats uh German millet brown midrib forg sorghum sedan and that doesn't grow as late in the fall so it didn't yield as as much in terms of tons or it's not as good a quality either but it's an opportunity and then we use a moving fence now you move it by hand and there's lots of people know how to do that and that's fine we decided to do the most of this we did on our irrigated ground we use our irrigators to move the fence so that's a rope hanging down from the irrigator we got three of them per span there's a post and a wire up here and a wire down here and a bucket to keep things from blowing around and I do have videos of this but I'm not going to show it because I don't have time but we just move it every day or two and then the cows follow right behind in the movie it shows them running at a dead run as soon as they hear the irrigator going they just come as they go dad's moving the irrigator right so there they line up and they graze here uh the day before and that was a day before that you can see behind us but they clean up those swaths all the way down to the ground but it's nice and uniform see there's that fence and the irrigator it's a hell a lot nicer to go out when it's 20 below zero and push a button then it is to go you know drilling holes and doing whatever so now even when it's cold it's you know the irrigator doesn't like it sometimes those contactors are kind of a little hard to get them to kick in and stuff but uh if you do it right the manure is nice you know the the hundred and some bush hole wheat that we had is right there is that straw they never touch that and then this is the oats stuff now we were drilling most of this we had had it so we we also were doing corn stocks at the same time so we could balance their diet with moving the corn pivot and the oats pivot so they they got a nice balanced diet uh there's a hay millet stuff and then we swath that it doesn't look as good but it's okay the nice thing about swath grazing if you just leave the cover crop stand there and gets junk full of snow they can't eat it but if you get it in a swath like that they will eat it if you go to that Alberta thing they'll talk about that I mean they got them out and stuff this deep and the college is going oh yeah there's a swath under here right but if it's just they're trying to have to stick their nose through it all the time but if they can get their nose on the end of that swath they just keep pushing it with their head and going ahead uh it's kind of interesting to watch you can see here this is this is them eating through the snow because we had quite a bit of snow at time this year there's a fence right across here this wasn't an irrigator it's actually a fence you can see where the fence is and and right there it's you know the swath and they know that the swath goes on goes on ahead there the buckets work better the five gallon buckets work better than uh than the the little tubs but now here we're doing a thing what we we want to do is plant earlier so we're working with the thing with the Buffett you know Howard Buffett gave us some money and told us do whatever we wanted to with it which is kind of nice you know but but we're trying to if we can get that cover crop to start consistently before we harvest the present crop then it's a win because we pick up time and and and we don't have the weed problems and we we get extra time and and so we're looking at at at seed coatings and we we flew at Gettysburg when we flew in this area uh John O'Connell from Letcher flew a bunch of stuff in this area around Mitchell and I've got a lot of pictures from from uh Gettysburg but not from from John but here we're flying at Gettysburg uh there's a seed the coated seed on the ground we looked at seed with with just a coating on it none of this had peed or anything which I think we're going to need to do it's just a limestone coating with absorbent or without absorbent which you can see the seed the seed grew better when it was on where it had residue there so just run through a few this is field one bare seed with with nothing what we had out there's Indian head linals uh forage peas and flax so if you see grass there it doesn't count so there's bare seed there's where we had uh 50 coating with no absorbent on it and there's more there uh with absorbent there's even more it's kind of hard to tell there but if you take a picture like that that's what that looked like and and that's the bare seed equivalent there was was uh half 50 so it'd be seven half pounds of linals 14 pounds of peas and and six pounds of flax okay so the same the same seeding rate on all of them and then we did a thing that we called um winter that was a spring this is winter linals winter peas and flax of course it's not winter flax but the same this is 50 percent again the same was that bare seed basically but it's using winter species so again the seven and a half and fourteen and and six and the winters don't take off as fast as the springs because they're going well it's going to be winter and then i'll rest and then i'll come back next spring right it's like winter wheat versus oats winter wheat will just lay there and kind of go oh okay and then take off the next spring whereas oats goes it's spring even if it's off it it doesn't know it's august it goes it's spring and it and away it goes and it heads out and say so there's that looking down the row okay and then we we say we we do a winter it's the same winter things plus we added a few extra seeing rapeseed and oats so we put the winter little winter pea flax rapeseed and oats these are all going to go to to wheat to spring so we didn't want any winter wheat or anything like that in there and that's a bit better because you got the oats and things trying to do some things for you and that's what it looks like down the row okay and that's just that's just the 50 with no absorbent here's the 50 with absorbent looking down the row that's a bit thicker now not all the time as the absorbent helped us sometimes it doesn't help but in this case it helped us and there there's another one with absorbent and then here we go 70 70 percent coating uh with no absorbent wasn't all that flash uh and then field one i showed you this picture before here's field one there's a 50 zero and then field four 50 zero this is a different field that one didn't they were about three miles apart okay so it's not consistent enough and then again field one with the absorbent on it field four with absorbent again it's a little better but it we'll see this spring what it looks like here's that thing i told you about uh but just google alberta swathgraging whatever more cows more goats more sheep that's how we're going to feed all these people the number one meat eating in the world is goat okay just so all you cowboys get get humbled a bit uh hundred percent grass-fed ground beef this is done in Aberdeen a guy buys cattle from montana call cows put them on cover crops at Aberdeen and he has them as certified grass-fed somebody bought off on that okay use a perennial sequence or perennial cover crops will probably be necessary we're not going to fix this salinity thing without perennials and i think jay talked about that right jay i'm saying i'm good thing jay took care of my easy work so i just put one slide in all tillage stools destroy soil structure all tillage stools decrease water infiltration all tillage stools reduce organic matter and all till these twos increase weeds right now all these years that i've come here showed you every one of those things all the data behind it so i just put that in so you don't get confused as you drive back buy the machinery dealership when you leave uh bureaucracies governments corporations are operated by people with limited tenure some are more limited than others right but they're not going to be here long society and landowners and farmers deserve to have long-term research that's what decode lakes does farmers and ranches harvest sunlight carbon oxide and water produce products they can sell some of this is human food we need to be aware of nutrition issues and off-site impacts so if we want to eat meat maybe we should concentrate on producing meat we have a new director of the west river ag center rapid city you know that's where we kind of house all the cowboys and stuff for the west river thing and when we were interviewing the candidates i asked the question do you think there'll be feedlots in 40 years didn't think about that with all the energy it takes and all the problems of biological resistance and all the issues with nutrient cycling and all these issues and one of the candidates answered no the other one went probably not so how do we start preparing for that till they just agriculture where fracking is to petroleum tying in with jay's thing this morning they both increase the speed and extent of nutrient removal from a resource leaving the resource degraded in mining that's what we want to do that's what grandfather did we can't do that anymore so we need to quit fracking our soils and start building our soils continuous low disturbance no tailing combination with diverse rotations and cover crops is a biological answer to a biological problem doing the right thing environmentally is almost always a correct economic approach in the long run take the out of et and the t out of cat thank you