 South Dakota's educational effort to raise awareness about the importance of soil health continues. The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a cooperative agreement with the South Dakota No-Tel Association and IGRO South Dakota State University Extension for delivering these seminars with the latest soil health and productivity technology to South Dakota farmers and ranchers. I think with that we're going to go ahead and get started until we've got the producer panel and certainly appreciate these free gentlemen coming here today. It's never easy to sit in front of your neighbors and talk, but we appreciate you doing that. So I'm going to let them do their own autobiographies. They've kind of got a little short PowerPoint presentation. We'll go through those, take a couple of questions after each producer, and then at the end, all three of them have completed their presentations. We'll open it up for a general question and answer session. So if you don't get your question in right after they talk, we'll have plenty of time at the end to take all questions. All right, with that, Matt Bainbridge, why don't you wave your hand quick. He's going to kick things off and then Justin Schoenrock is going to be our second presenter and Paul Hetlin will be our third presenter. So Matt is willing to be first, so I'll let you take it away, Matt. I didn't really have a choice whether to be first or not, because I told you it was. Glad to see so many people here. I think this is a really important topic so we're going through today and I guess I'm just going to talk a little bit about some of the things that we've tried on our farm and what we've had success with and what maybe hasn't worked as good as we thought it would too. I farm with my dad and my brother just down south here by Ethan. We grow corn, soybeans, winter wheat, alfalfa. We have cow cap operation and we back around calves too and here's some of the things we've tried at the cover crops. This was last spring and it was really, really early in April. In fact, we actually had a little bit of snow on it after we planted the oats. But we wanted to plant oats on the corn stocks ahead of soybeans. So we tried our two different ways with the no-till drill and then with just our spinner box too. And we had pretty decent success. We didn't have a lot of growth, but I think we got enough. I'll show on the next slide here. I think we got enough to actually do a little bit of good. So it's something we're going to keep on trying and experimenting with. The drill oats definitely came up a lot better right away. The ones with the spinner box, they kind of laid there for a while and actually came up kind of later on in the growing season when I didn't want them to come up. So it kind of caused a little bit of a mess but I really didn't see anything on the yield monitor for difference. I don't think it hurts too bad. So here's really what the whole point of this was. This is what we were trying to do to our soil. You can see we only got about six inches of growth but if you look at what's going on underneath the ground, I think that's where our big benefit was. Especially like the middle picture there, we can see how the roots are grabbing that soil and holding on to it like glue there. And really the root systems are as deep as what the top growth was. Students bought the same amount of inches. This really made a really nice seedbed to plant soybeans into and really I think we got a lot of benefits out of there too. Especially if we'd have a really early spring heavy rain or something, having something extra out there to hold the soil I think is a big benefit. One of the new things we tried this year was trying to spin on cover crop seed into corn and you can see there on the picture on the left there. We went through when the corn was as tall as I could still grab my tractor and my spreader through there and we just put out some crimson clover, ryegrass and turnips out there. And you can see there on the picture on the right, we did get a little bit of growth but it wasn't quite what we were hoping for. All the ryegrass seed is pretty light and couldn't throw it as far as what we thought we would be able to. I noticed that as I was doing it but I thought maybe if the seeds kind of separated themselves as they got spun out that I could see some differences too in what all grew and they'd kind of be separate at different widths and then all together in the middle and we ended up kind of with a streaky cover crop in the corn but it's something, maybe a different seed, maybe this will work better in the future. Here we're trying some winter rye. I actually did some winter rye and some winter wheat with the spinner box and soybeans that's trying right before they would drop their leaves and what I was hoping I could do here was on some of the alkali spots get something to grow in there and use in moisture and what actually happened was I got it to work really good where the soybeans were already really good. I think it was just a matter of the leaves kind of falling and kind of mulching the seed there. So we had good results but not the results I was expecting I guess. And the picture on the right there is just what it looks like in the spring we were just drilling soybeans into that field and that's actually on an alkali spot that we drilled with winter rye the year before and we were pretty happy with the results there. We definitely got a better stand with the drill and some of those tougher soils. Here's the easy one, the cover crop after wheat and on the left there that's just kind of an early emergence picture you can see there getting a pretty nice start there in between the rows of wheat. We didn't really do that on purpose but it kind of worked out that way I guess. This is the one that to me is a real no brainer especially if you grow wheat and if you have cattle this is just a home run in my opinion. You get so much grazing out of that cattle prefer the cover crops over corn stalks or anything else that you can have for them late in the fall. This really has worked out good for us this year and we keep on kind of changing up what different plants or different species are putting out there every year. We started off which seems to be the popular thing to do turnips out there right now and that's kind of how we started to we're kind of moving more towards added oats in there now and we actually added some sunflower stew we were finding that mostly with the turnips and radishes and those kind of mixes that we were getting too much breakdown and really there was hardly anything left out there in the spring and that kind of caused a few problems with really short pieces of wheat straw and we had a little bit of a hard time with hairpin and with it. These other two pictures here on the right we just took those yesterday and you can see especially in that bottom picture how we've got a little bit more structure there to the oats that are left over and they're almost rowed up there and I think it's not a big difference but I think we did catch a little bit more snow that way and definitely had a longer stems left out there. This is on our high yield plot we enter the yield contest for corn and soybeans every other year depending on the crop you can see here this is really really heavy corn residue and when we were planting into it it definitely wasn't easy it really had to pay attention to your planter setup but this is on 221 bushel corn and the cattle were only out there for a little while and really really heavy residue and we ended up with 71 bushel soybeans on this plot this year so you don't have to turn it black to get a big yield. Here's what I call the easy note till on the left there is this winter weed on burned off alfalfa if you're not used to note till I like to say set yourself up to be successful you plant it into an easy situation on the right we planted note till alfalfa we planted that into some rye that we planted in the fall when we took it off for an acre up it's just a perfect easy bit easy to note till into I guess that's it. Okay we can take a couple of questions from Matt are we getting set up for our next presenter? Yes sir. No we're I took the picture there and I'm glad you brought this up I meant to make that point too we left all the weed straw out there it's over an eight initial weed we blew the straw out behind the combine we planted a cover crop we actually sprayed cattle manure about 15 tons of cattle manure and then we grazed the cover crop I think there wasn't a whole lot left out there you know everything is doing its job it's digested and bolted into the soil I'm going to try to repeat the question we're trying to film this one it's getting harder than here so next question please do you spray manure to do that before or after you plant it? the question is do you spray manure before or after you plant it? we actually did it afterwards just for a time and then you know we wanted to get the cover crop out there and get it established and after that we had a chance to run the manure spreader out there we damaged the cover crops a little bit because they were already coming up but it really wasn't noticeable once they got established let's do one more question then we'll let Justin the question is where the oats went did you use any herbicide? on the oats that I planted soybeans afterwards yeah I just burnt it around up in my pre just right after I planted nothing to hurt the oats okay with that we're going to move on to our next presenter remember we'll come back and everybody's done for a final question and answer so if you have any other questions for Matt you can catch him at the end here now Justin actually I got to tell some stories because he's my neighbor so I'm trying to embarrass him too bad actually he Justin's one of these guys and he's definitely not only talking the talk he's walking the walk I can attest to that personally to deliver right across the road trying I think it was about the first year I was out there he had a cover crop field right across the road from my house and so the first day the cows were out there I was sitting there with my binoculars looking out the window my wife was like what in the world are you doing? I said this is fascinating washing these cows pick out these cover crops pick these species up so you're providing good entertainment too for me Justin I appreciate it I'll get it Justin what do you mean to you? Justin Chomar from Houlton area apartment Hanson County my dad have a corn wheat soybean rotation with stock cattle I would first of course started with the cover crops in the small grain with the turnips and radishes and some lentils more for a cattle feed than anything I guess when we started and we still do plan behind the small grain but same as map the same we found it was burdened up a lot of residents just doing the turnips and radishes so we kind of gone to mix and add in with some cereal rye and things like that we kind of done plant some cereal rye and actually taken for silage and then plant the soybeans having some effect on the yield is not terrible and there are reasoning I guess for cover crops is we want to increase the organic matter increase the creation of the water and soil that will be a compaction if we can and it gives an extra place for grazing and livestock this is some field relief that will CRP for 15 years that's been soybeans and then corn now and they flew a cover crop on the winter rye with some radishes and it's promoted to work every year but it got a good rain after it was flown on this year and worked pretty well did the same thing on a milder field. Any questions for Justin? Yes sir. When you're grazing the cattle on the turnips and radishes they'll actually prefer that even the corn stalks even off this way to here? Oh yeah. When you're grazing your turnips and radishes they prefer that over the corn stalks? Yeah, oh yeah they prefer that they basically have to lock them out but they'll keep going out it doesn't matter what time of the year they'll take through a lot of snow for that I'm your rye falling on those radishes corn. How much range did you have to fill it on? Is that putting the stand? There was a good inch-inch and a half of rain, I mean it was a good rain. Did he combine and how soon after you had it build on? We would combine, you know, late October probably on. One more question. Okay, hearing none we'll move on but you can come back and ask Justin some toward the end. Okay, our next presenter is Paul Patlund and Paul at IFC we have daughters playing the same softball thing so we get to talk farming there and go to the same church so we get to talk farming there. One thing that I find interesting about Paul is he's helping by trade before he became a farmer so he's always got the numbers in the sense running through his head and so I find very fascinating and tell when Paul does something he's thought through real well and it makes economic sense as well so looking forward to Paul's talk. I'm Paul Patlund, I farm northwest of Mitchell here with my brother Mark existing our existing rotation right now consists of corn, soybean, winter wheat and it's a date we primarily try to take advantage of winter wheat in our location to utilize cover crop seeding the cover crop species that so we currently work with radish, turnip oats, peas pover, vetch and flax. We typically try to have at least 3 if not up to 5 varieties in a blend when we plant. Some of our objectives are to primary objective is to build soil health we're trying to increase organic matter we're trying to protect the soil surface some of the other things that we're trying to do is alleviate shallow compaction or traffic compaction improve water infiltration recycle and sequester nutrients try and help break down that wheat scubblex left over some fixing of nitrogen and we're also the gap between when we harvest that wheat and when we plant that next year corn crop we have such a period of time with no roots actively growing in the soil we like to bridge that gap and put something back out there for the soil health for the microbes things of that nature specifically microids I would try and concentrate on crops that have a good relationship there you know when I think about cover crops we're going to have some slides here we've seen everything from a complete failure such as 2012 we're very dependent on moisture to establish these crops after harvesting weeds and if that's not there in this part of the world late July through early to mid August those are difficult times to come across moisture sometimes so it's not a slam dunk it's not a guarantee but we feel like it's worth it to be out there and be seeding those crops every year when a man was made you never know when that rain is going to come along a quarter of an inch a third of an inch these crops will establish quite quickly so we have no 2012 slides that's kind of our failure we're going to look at some 2013 slide which I would say is somewhere in the middle of a failure and a success just because of the kind of partial stand and not all of them I think we'd like to see in terms of a tiny out there but still certainly a benefit so 2012 we seeded probably three quarters and saw very little germination if any and probably didn't work out like we wanted it 2013 this is one of our weed fields and I think we'll get to see in this mix we had turnips, radishes oats, crimson clover and field peas this is on right about labor day typically we like to chase the kind of buy into the extent that we can and get these crops in the ground although sometimes we will try and wait for one flush of volunteer weed so that we can burn up before doing the cover crops so that that weed doesn't challenge the cover crop and you know, crowd it out this is just a close up shot of that same field and you can see some of the oats and the different varieties there this is just two weeks later and you can see that once they do establish and start to grow they will grow fairly quickly itself it is deceiving but you can get some good drainage out there fairly quickly and a lot of these varieties are fairly winter hardy so even after killing frost they will continue to grow and do good things this is 2014 and I wish I could take credit for taking that picture but it's just a ground level shot in there again and this was luck on our part but we were able to get down the center of the existing wheat rows that were there you can see the oats primarily here but there is a turnip or a radish coming a little further back in the picture and just kind of tell you and I want to say I don't know if there is a date on this but it's the 21st of August we are going to get to see a shot of that field later in the year I don't have a lot of pictures of 2014 so I apologize for that we are going to watch a video one of the things that we do like to utilize our cover crop for as well is we've got a couple of hog finishing barns that we inject manure into some of these fields in the fall and we typically do that after Labor Day but usually before the fall harvest kicks off which is around the 1st of October that's a little earlier than I'd like to go out with something like that but I feel a little better about doing it where there is an actively growing crop that will help us recycle any of those free nutrients and kind of lock those up a little bit so I think okay here we go there's a video here and the video is not great this is of me injecting into that same field that we just saw and this is probably around the second week of September but you can see the growth there that we've got on that and you know I like that practice of being able to put that manure out there I feel a little bit safer doing it that way and there's actually a synergy we really see a crop response as well because there's a lot of fertility so those cover crops if you continue to have good weather and any rain at all they'll just blow up behind that application so it's a low disturbance application we're not we're not turning up any soil or blowing up any dirt there so the other thing I like about the cover crop as well is it does give me a little bit of support this is probably one of the jobs that I have to be the most careful with compaction and things like that so it just gives me a little extra support there now this is what that field looks like right at the end of January so just a couple weeks ago I went out and I snapped a picture there so that you can see how quickly that residue breaks down and you know if we do have a wet spring or a lot of times in the spring our moisture can be a problem for us but we can get out on that and usually plant fairly easily like none that was made this morning that a lot of times that residue will just kind of wash your tires off or keep them clean we don't really pull up any mud or anything and if we can get that crop out of the ground I really like that residue there to keep that soil surface cool and we've done some we're going to try and do some more but there are times where we are five degrees or more cooler on the soil surface with that type of residue then eventually like corn into a swiping field so I think there's something to that as well so I think that's in my presentation so okay in question 4 we have also the rotation how do you control the volunteer week in the rotation how do you control the volunteer week at that point you really don't the week just kind of becomes part of your cover crop as well and so that's why sometimes I will wait to see if I can get that first flush of wheat coming and take it out in the spring then in 2013 after 2012 we had a good germination on the cover crop what type of problems did that or was it any of that not germinated that in the fall question is we didn't get good germination that caused any problems in the fall in the fall that's a good question I would have anticipated quite a few but I didn't have a lot of pressure we do use a pre-emerge herbicide on our corn and we do burn down our corn I had a planting so I didn't have to do anything outside of my normal herbicide program okay any more questions for Paul yes sir the question is how does the hogminer relate to fertility issues with your following crops usually with the hogminer we'll put out somewhere between 80 to 90% of what we feel is a total fertility need I don't feel like the cover crop can divert us because we do have the cover crops that are fixing nitrogen as well so I can't say that I've noticed any we reserve that option in the spring we're doing a lot of tissue sampling and things to try and make sure that we're not shorting that crop that's a concern we're trying to ratchet those rates down to be as efficient as we can without hurting the yield and so we start about B4 with tissue sampling our goal is to go through VT at various stages throughout that crop development and just make sure but we do have the option we talk to us a lot of our weeks and so we can always go out there and add 20 or 30 units of nitrogen if we need to or whatever we feel like we're a wreck but we haven't seen really that I'm aware of good question okay very none gentlemen thank you so much that was very informative and certainly appreciate it let's give them a big hand