 My name is Michael Willis. I farm near King City in Northwest Missouri. I farm with my parents and my brother. I started farming full time in 2010 after I graduated from college and my brother returned to the farm in 2014. This project was looking into using the roller crimper on a terraced, irregularly shaped field, hilly ground, which is pretty common in our area. A lot of research had been done, kind of in test plots in universities where it's square, flat and level. And so it's kind of to look at how do you operate the roller crimper in those more complicated situations on the types of fields that we have. So the roller crimper for the project that I did, I bought it from INJ Manufacturing out of Pennsylvania. The website's listed there. I'm sure probably by now there are other places that also sell it. And you can just check prices for different widths of roller crimpers for pull type, front mounted, rear mounted on there just to give you an idea of what kind of cost you might incur by adopting it. Or you can also build your own. There's plans available from the Rodale Institute website. I downloaded them and I couldn't make heads or tails of them. I don't do a whole lot of welding, but someone who does a lot might be able to do that and save a little money doing it that way. And for the project that I did where it was designed to do the roller crimper in the single pass, you roll and crimp and plant simultaneously, this one was designed to mount onto a front mounted three point hitch. You can add a little bit of water to the roller crimper on their design that adds a little weight to it. I did that in the project. Whether it's really necessary, I'm not 100% sure I added, didn't feel it quite half full. So I think it helps a little bit, but I think other factors that I'll get to later, such as crop fertility, having a really good stand, those are more essential than just the weight of the roller crimper. And so on those tractors, a lot of you'll find they don't have a front mounted three point hitch on them. You might have maybe a front end loader that you could modify to accommodate a roller crimper, or perhaps you might have one of those old Daigleman blades on it that you could modify something. But just doing a quick Google search, those are just some different manufacturers I find online. A lot of them you can look through their websites and they'll oftentimes have their three point hitches designed to be set up for certain brands and makes and models of tractors. So you can just kind of search through those to get an idea of what your cost would be. Or another option is you can go to something like Craig's Leist Auction websites and you might be able to find a pretty good deal on a front mounted three point hitch there. So the one that I had, it's one of the LeForge three point hitches. And the front arms on it, unlike most rear three point hitches, they don't have any left or right sway to it. Once you put the arms down, they lock into place. There are these pins that help lock in there and there are two settings that it offered. You could either set it in kind of a looser setting that had about an inch or two of give to the arms. And that's the setting I chose for doing the project because I figured as you'd be going through the field, say if you ended up hitting little bumps and stuff rather than relying on the flotation of your hydraulic cylinders to pull the roller crimper back down, having that extra gap allowed you to adjust to the terrain in a much quicker fashion. And that is one thing I would add on whatever tractor you decide to use. Make sure it has the option on the hydraulics to put it into a flotation of that way or not pushing the lever or however you have set up like a joystick or whatever that it doesn't just constantly push the roller crimper against the ground. It actually just lets the weight of it drag it to the ground. And some tractors have been in summer easier to engage float than others. So this is using the roller crimper. This was May 23rd, 2013. This was cereal rye planting corn into it. And as you can see, it is rolling pretty well. This field actually is one of the later planted fields of rye. And so I thought that maybe it was going to be a little bit later in maturity, but where it accidentally had gotten some fertilizer applied to it that was intended for wheat, I think having that extra boost of fertility allowed me to get into the field sooner and roll and crimp it more effectively. So when to roll and crimp, most publications will read, they talk like it needs to at least be at the emphasis stage. But just like in the picture you'll see, you'll see these little yellow flowers dangling from all the seed heads on the rye. And you know, rye will be kind of variable if you bought maybe a named variety, they might be more uniform in their maturity. But you know, you'll see maybe a few heads out there with some flowers on it. But once you see it more uniform, that's when it's better to start trying to roll and crimp. And if you wait a little bit longer when it gets to the milk or dough stage, you get even improved control. And you always want to keep in mind that, say, if you have a cool spring, that tends to push that maturity date in a little bit farther for rye. So for operating the roller crimper, kept it at normal planting speeds. And the one thing I noticed is you do not want to turn too sharply, or at least with the three-point hitch that I had, where those arms were fixed, what would happen is the roller crimper, once you'd set it down on the ground, it would just want to keep going in whatever direction it started at. You could adjust it a little bit, but if you tried to turn much, you would start bending those arms, and they were just a solid chunk of metal. So I lifted it up and the arms sprang back into place. So there was no damage done, but I don't think I'd want to tempt fate on that, because that'd be a great way of sinking $3,000 plus down the drain. So this is an example of we have one field where that's just too sharp of a curve to take with the roller crimper, but something like this one over here, where this kind of a gentle curve that goes along the waterway, I was able to adjust to that fine without any problems. So when starting out a field, I'd usually do at least four passes around the outside, just like a standard approach of field. If I could do even maybe six or eight, that would be even better, because it just gives you that much more room to maneuver around where that roller crimper on the front, it does change how you want to turn your tractor, because as soon as you turn, it goes way even farther than the direction that you've turned. But around the edges of the field, sometimes you might have some terraces that end at the edge of the field or little berms that feed into waterways. And so this is an example of where around it things flattened for the most part pretty well, but that right there was where I was going toward the terrace. And then when it went up and over, there was this lag time where the roller crimper wasn't making contact with the ground, because the arms were still holding it up and the flotation of the hydraulics wasn't enough to let it get back down to the ground. So the way I approached that was, you can see my lovely Microsoft paint art here, did boundaries around the outside of the field just went the same direction each time. Then once I was doing subsequent passes inside the field, once I reached that area where I had trouble with right of standing, I just keep driving toward it. And once I got into that area, since if you were doing beans, if you wanted to plant over it again just to get a thick stand, you could. Or as you entered into that previously planted area, just lift the planter up and keep the roller crimper going. And that seemed to address it pretty well. One other issue I ran into is this was along the edge of the field along a waterway. There was just a small little ditch or divot that had cut along the edge of it. So when I went along the outside of the field, on the left and right hand sides of the roller crimper, it made good contact with the ground. But in the center where that small ditch was, you know, only had to be an inch or two deep. Since the roller crimper wasn't making contact with the base of the stem of the rye, it just bent it over. It didn't flatten it and crimp it. So if you do have a field where you're looking to use it, you want to make sure that any of those irregularities are taken care of beforehand. Because otherwise, if it doesn't make contact with the base of the stem, it just wants to spring back up. Another thing to look out for is on some side hills. The roller crimper I found would tend to drag the tractor sideways downhill. And if that ever did happen, don't turn to correct because that would just bend the arms. And it really made no difference in the trajectory of where you were going. I felt I found it was best to just kind of let the roller crimper guide you. And if you were getting too far off course, pick it up, back up, and start your pass again with the given direction that you were shooting for. So this is doing it on terraces. This would have been done June 13, 2013. And this is just a straight terrace on my farm. The way I approached this, where I was doing it with the roller crimper and a drill, I did one pass along the very top of the terrace, which didn't cover the full 15-foot swath of the drill. It only got maybe seven or so feet at the very top of the terrace. So then did passes to the side of that, where there still was standing ride that hadn't been rolled and crimped, and then passes to the sides of those subsequent passes. So it took a few more passes than just your standard planting. But in the end, I thought it resulted in pretty decent control. And so there's nine days later, you still see a few plants where they have a little bit of greenness to them. They're still standing. But after what we'd seen through this year, where we had a really wet year, and weren't able to plant beans until Rye was well mature. And so we had a lot of standing Rye in our fields come harvest time. This Rye that was kind of bent over from the wind and all the moisture that we had, we didn't notice it causing any problems with getting in with the soybean seed when we were combining. So I would think that things like this, where the stems already gnarled up, not necessarily rolling crimp, shouldn't give you too many problems come harvest time. Now for a curved terrace, kind of approach it the same way. But rather than following the curvature of the terrace, I just would do a straight pass and then go down the bottom of it. Then when I do be doing passes elsewhere in the field, would follow on the top and drive down it. And then on this end, follow along the side up and over the terrace. And then follow that same pattern until it was rolled and crimped for the whole field. And on some of those curved terraces or any terrace for that matter, you'll have your, if it's a closed outlet, then you'd have those risers that had some cereal Rye that didn't want to get too close to the riser and mash it down. So that was one thing that would escape you by doing terraces. But on the other hand, you usually tend to have weeds around there anyway. One thing that really struck me on rolling and crimping was the role that fertility played. This is where we grazed some cows on cereal Rye and you can see you have little areas where they'd, you know, manured and added urine. And when it came time to roll and crimp, those areas where it was more fertile, they, it rolled and crimped really well in those areas. Whereas surrounding areas, even though they might have been an anthesis, past the anthesis stage, they had more of a tendency to spring back up. They just tended to have a tougher stem in those areas that didn't have the ample fertility like these did. And that's pretty consistent with what a lot of other publications say that by adding fertility, particularly nitrogen, that does result in a thicker mulch and result in better control from the roller crimper. And it's the same principle here. If you have any thinner areas, thinner ground, the rye just doesn't get nearly as tall. It doesn't have that lush green stem that bends over well when you roll and crimp it. So here's doing soybeans, which this is kind of the same principle as this clip goes along. Most of it is flattening well, but there's some areas along the edge where there's kind of a hedgerow to the south of it. And I think it maybe shaded out some of the rye and it had a tendency to want to spring back up as well. But it was a pretty small area, so it didn't cause many problems. But you can kind of see them there in the foreground where they wanted to spring back up. So for the project 2013, we did corn and soybeans on the corn. We did some in a cover crop mix, about 15 pounds cereal rye, 5 pounds hairy vetch, I think about 5 pounds Austrian winter peas, 3 pounds crimson clover, and a pound each of turnips and canola, done after wheat. The corn was planted May 23rd. Lower seeding rate than I'd wanted, 25,000 seeds per acre. We skew a little bit lower seeding rate than where we are. We usually shoot for about 27,000 just because of experiences that it had in the past with higher seeding rates, how it kind of nipped them in the bud. So we've been sticking with some of those lower rates, but we've been trying to bring them up. In this instance, after the corn was planted, the weather turned wet and cool. After that date in May, and anyone who planted at that time, whether it was conventional till, no till, cover crops, had poor emergence. It just stayed too wet and too cool. The problem was where we had all that mulch out there, it locked in that moisture that we received. So trying to do any kind of replant did not seem feasible because, I mean, we'd go out there, dig around, and it still was wet. And so we thought if we tried to replant it, we were just going to tear up the field more and probably cause more harm than good. So in the end, the mix was about 49 bushels per acre, 21 bushels per acre in the cereal rye that the corn was planted into. On both of those instances, I ended up spraying them afterwards because there were enough areas like in that one ditch that I showed earlier, plenty of areas where the cereal rye didn't completely flatten, where we had to spray afterwards to control the cover crops, like you can see there. In this instance, I think fertility played a big role. This is our first year of doing cover crops. And I thought, well, I had some legumes to it, and that's going to give me my nitrogen. I can roll and crimp it. Now, I think it's kind of like a Troy neighbor talked about. It's a process of building fertility up in order to get it to work in the way that you want. But that's how it looked about a couple months after, one month after that it was planted in not a bad stand, but there were plenty of other areas in the field where it collected more water and just didn't have much of a stand at all. This area was, the cereal rye was actually planted later, but it had that fertilizer like I was talking about. And that kind of impressed me on how well it controlled, that it flattened just like you'd see in the videos that you see online. But because of the rain, and I think maybe the allelopathic effect of the rye and the nitrogen, I think the combination of all those things resulted in poor canopy, poor stand. Yes. Yeah. And the question was that, you know, where she had, they tried a cereal rye and planting corn into that on their farm. It had, you know, such, you know, saddening effects from the rye on the corn. That is one thing we're starting out with cover crops we've kind of had to work with as we've been doing it. We, if we ever have rye before corn, which we try to do more than mixes before corn, like if we can get like a corn soybeans, we cover crop mix back to corn rotation. We like to do that, but there aren't as many markets for wheat in our area. So we've been doing more like raising cereal rye seed for our own use since it seems to be more of a benefit to us than putting the wheat out there. Likewise planting maybe some more oats to use for feeding cattle or for our own cover crop seed use. And I think that if you terminate it when it's small, any of the allelopathic effect and the nitrogen tie up from it is diminished, you know, like if we'll do it say just a little bit less than knee high, we don't seem to have as many problems. There was one, I forget where it was, it was like in No Till Farmer magazine or something, but I think someone was talking about that they actually planted a little bit deeper, because I always thought, well, you have that residue on top, so you want to plant shallower because, you know, say if you're shooting for two and a half inches, well, if you have an inch of residue on top, well, that's going to fall you up. But they were still planting at least two inches deep. And he thought that that was the best way of avoiding some of the allelopathic effect. But really, for us, we try to stick more with cereal rye before beans. And if it is, you know, in areas like erosion prone areas, we'll sometimes put some before corn, but we usually try to terminate it small when we do like a herbicide pass. Soybeans 2013 did just a similar setup using the 15 foot No Till Drill. They were done at 160,000 seeds per acre. You can see them poking up there about eight days later through that cereal rye mulch. And there's like that curved terrace that I showed you where I did that diagram for the most part. Had decent control, I thought. Did have a little bit of rye around the riser there. But one thing I did notice that I think partly due to fertility, partly due to needing a higher seeding rate, the mulch left from rolling and crimping didn't smother all the weeds. And you could see like right there on the fairs tail, you can see where it had rolled and crimped and made a little bend in the stem and just kept growing right up. So since they were a Liberty Lane bean, I was able to chose that because I thought, well, I might need a rescue spray on it. So I did that June 22nd, did a second spraying July 21st. I don't think it was necessary, but where these were being grown for seed for a local seed dealer, they usually prefer if you can try and get as many escapes out of there as possible because it makes the whole cleaning process easier for them. But I think we could have gotten by without doing that second spraying. And just another example of where we had a garden plot. There's this prickly lettuce and you could see the stem just kind of grown flat underneath the rye mulch. And then once there was an opening shot right up through there. So it's, you know, if it's thick, if it's lush and green, that provides the best control. But even in that instance where it was about as lush as I think I could have gotten it, it was a, you know, well fertilized garden, there still were some openings that weeds could get through. But there's the soybeans that were planted there June 13th and the ending yield of them. They were 29 bushels per acre versus other areas in the same field that had the rye planted earlier and the rye was terminated with herbicides that yielded 36 and a half bushels. So gave up about seven bushels by doing the roller crimper and an adjacent field just right across the road that we farm that it had a similar setup, just a different variety of soybeans and yielded 50 bushels per acre. So I think that's also another thing when you're trying out any of the new practices with cover crops. If you have certain varieties that you know work well for you, have good emergence, seem to maybe I'd say are kind of like more workforce type. They seem to be the ones that we like to stick with because they seem to do well into those conditions. Now when I rolled and crimped the soybeans on June 13th, which I had to wait that long because since we had that wet stretch at the end of May, that was one of the first chances I could plant and even then it was still close to mudding it in, not that wet but pretty close. But the rye was already far enough along that once it was rolled and crimped, it laid it over and started germinating. But it didn't cause any problems for combining and really once it was all said and done, you can either say well it was a weed or it's a self-receding cover crop. So depends on your perspective on that and there it is the next year. The lurethworm there is providing good structure, helping hold the ground in place. So I decided well what am I going to do with it? So I thought well maybe I'll try you know using it for a rye seed where we've been doing some of that. One field did receive some nitrogen, the other I thought well maybe I can get some credits from where it was growing side by side with the soybeans. The fertilized area went 24 bushel per acre, 11 for the unfertilized, and one of the reasons for the lower yield than what we were anticipating with the rye was since it was a volunteer stand there were big gaps of rye that just didn't emerge. I even tried spotting some in but it didn't really make much of a difference. So areas where I had a good stand, it was going closer to 35 bushels per acre on the field that did have the fertility. 2014 tried it again and it was a similar situation. The forecast was calling for it to be wet for a long stretch so I thought well get in there and try and do soybeans. But it wasn't quite far enough along in the rye's life cycle to provide adequate mulch. So it actually the night after I planted it rained I thought well these were non-GMO soybeans I planted. I thought well if I have to spray this I need to get it done before they emerge otherwise that's going to kill them. Or it was at least going to land in my options with all that rye out there. But a couple of days later was able to get in there and it really didn't cut many ruts in the field. So if there is one thing about having that higher residue rye it does seem to make any of those rescue sprays a little more forgiving than say just in a standard no-till situation because that ample amount of mulch provides some cushion for the tires to go over the soil. And there's beans about 30 or so days later, close to a month later, and they you know were pretty clean in between you maybe would see a few weeds here and there. Ended up doing a post spray again because where we were raising for the local seed dealer they kind of put a premium on trying to have as little weed seed as possible. But I was really impressed with how well that rye mulch took care of the weeds. And here's just a side example I did with the project. It wasn't part of the project but I figured where I had the roller crimper might as well try it out. I used it in a garden setting so this was just a few days later in 2013 after I did the beans. I rolled and crimped a mix of rye and hairy vetch. The seeding rate on that was whatever a five gallon bucket of rye in like a 20 foot by 20 foot area would be. It was a pretty thick standard rye and a thick standard vetch. But you know even a day later after rolling and crimping it you can already see the rye is starting to brown. And then we transplanted some summer squash into it because hairy vetch did not do as well rolling crimping. Some things you'll read talk like it'll trellis up the rye and then it'll terminate well. But in Missouri down at thea I think it's a Bradford research farm that they do. They've had similar results with hairy vetch. If they want to roll and crimp it they talk like they have to you know do multiple passes in order to get the hairy vetch to terminate. So just that one pass at the roller crimper really wasn't enough. But things grew well and this was a video but I don't think it's able to play. But we just know some we seeded in somewhere. I think this was actually just put in its seeds. But it made nice summer squash. They didn't sit on the bare soil so they didn't have some of that yellowing that you see on the bottom. So I was pretty pleased with how it worked in squash. So just some main points of it is definitely don't turn too sharply so you don't tear up your equipment for starting out. And this is true for any new practice you're doing with cover crops or anything. You know start small, pick your easiest laying fields and planting soybeans into rye is easiest. Like the lady back there was talking about you don't have that allelopathic nitrogen and nitrogen tie-up effect of the rye. The cover crop mixes I really like using them but they are difficult for the roller crimper because in the field where I did that they have different maturity dates. So when it's right to rolling crimp one it may not be for the other plants like canola. They tend to have more like a rubbery stem so they either would just snap off or they'd spring back up but they didn't really seem to want to flatten all that terribly well. By either having just a high fertility field or fertilizing your cover crop by having that ample fertility and that lush green growth that makes it easier to roll in crimp provides you a better mulch. On terraces the straight ones it's easier to do than the curved ones and having even level terrain trying to get rid of any ditches or divots in your field that also provides for better control. And weather delays that is one thing that having the roller crimper throws another management element in there. Say it might be the optimum time to plant soybeans well your rye may not be mature enough yet so you'll wait. Well then you might have a couple weeks where it's too wet to plant and during that time the rye is maturing so you always want to keep that in mind and always have a plan to fall back on you know maybe you just want to take that rye and harvest it for seed instead scrap doing soybeans you know try and be flexible with it and don't think well my plan was to roll in crimp and I must do it because mother nature mother nature may not let you. And be prepared for volunteer cover crops if rolling and crimping late like those where they seem to be kind of at that dough stage they still set on seed but there are ample ways to try and figure out how to utilize that volunteer stand and if all else fails having that residue I found did make a rescue spray more forgiving so that's all I got here so anyone has any questions feel free. The question was if we were terminating before corn but it's not at the right stage you wouldn't be using the roller crimper in that instance it would be where we just have conventional corn bean acres it would be terminating it with herbicides if the corn is for the zero rye is only you know below knee high or so. The question was on nitrogen source for corn we've used top usually we've done some side dressing urea in the past as a nitrogen source for corn we've also done some anhydrous in the past few years we've been looking to get away from that just because the more you read into it they talk about the soil health adverse impacts from anhydrous plus last year where we did put out anhydrous and we had such a wet year by putting all your nitrogen out then we locked ourselves in place with doing something that was going to take it up and where we had you know long stretches of rainy weather where we weren't going to be able to get corn in we thought well maybe we want to do something you know do more like just your liquid fertilizer first and top dress later which there have been some studies done down at MU I think or they had a field day a while back where they had good results with you know top dressing say with I think they used just urea at knee high so we're looking to do some more of that for our nitrogen source for corn this coming year