 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, Adronomy Plus, Farmers Eliacs, Mitchell, First Dakota National Bank, C&D Operations and Davis County Ampliment, Scott Supplier, Crop Tech, Ducks Unlimited, Aurora County Conservation District, Davis County Conservation District, Hanson County Conservation District, South Dakota No-Till Association, SDSU Extension, USDA and NRCS, and Pioneer Hybrids of DuPont. So let's give them all a welcome round of applause. Grew up kind of around the Miltown area on a family farm there with my brothers Matthew and David and Lynn as my father. Graduated from SDSU in 2004 and since then I've worked with Metler Fertilizer out of Freeman. Certified crop advisor, I do some consulting work for Metlers and also work with their seed and fertilizer. So what do we grow for crops? In the last 15 years we've grown a variety of crops. As you can see on the list we've got anything from warm season, cool seasons, but what do we currently grow today is a much smaller list. Field peas, oats, sorghum has not been working well for the budgets. It's good for the rotation but for profit we need to continue with stuff. So the other thing we run into is what we grow in the majority of our acres is still corn soybeans. Not a lot of diversity. So that's where they asked me to talk a little bit on the cover crops and things that we've grown. Little side note, how do you hide a half-ton pickup at planting in the cover crop? So where we use cover crops is after small grains, after corn or before soybeans in a full-season cover crop. After small grains that's relatively easy. You've got a broad window of planting. You can use a variety of things. I like to keep it simple. I like to keep the cost down to 14 or 16 bucks. I've usually got something in there in the brassicas, dwarf asexorapes, some turnips, some radish, some lentils, usually little sorghum, sedan, millet or sunflowers. I would say be careful on the radishes. There's a lot of different varieties of radishes. Some do a lot and some go to flower, go to seed. Most of the suppliers I've worked with have done a very good job on the radishes but there are some out there that do not work well. Chemical-wise, not a lot of choice when we're doing cover crop. We usually stick to 2,4-D and bronate before the cover crop. We have done some Zidua fall applied. Hopefully that'll work fairly well. We're still learning on that. Full-season cover crops. We've got livestock so we always got an area where we feed in the winter time that's beat up. Corn, soybeans, time to struggle. So we've done some full-season cover crops instead of trying to grow corn and soybeans. That can be a mix of sorghum, sedan, oats, brassicas, all kinds of stuff in there. It provides a good place for the livestock to graze. Works well for us. We've got a spot then we can turn and take the bulls off before we turn the cows out to corn stocks. Another place we can add manure. The one thing that the cover crops and no-till, it has allowed us to manage our manure. Prior to doing cover crops, manure was an issue. We didn't have a place to really put it with no-till. So now what we do is we put that manure over our cover crops when they're growing and then that will canopy will hold the moisture and break down the manure and then we can no-till our corn into it next year. So next I got some pictures of different things we've done mainly on cereal rye. So cover crops after small grains is easy. After beans or corn gets a lot more difficult for us. So this is a picture planting I think around June 5th. It was a little bit late that year. 2011 was wet. So in the fall we drilled 90 pounds of winter rye after the corn harvest. Forgot to tell the crop insurance in spring. This was a no-no. It was already headed. Technically they wouldn't have insured it if we had a crop failure. 2012 yeah it was dry. Killed it off in mid-April. Harvested 16 bushel beans. Beans in area did 10, 12. So we earned a smaller crop insurance check. 2013 yeah don't tell crop insurance this one. Planted the beans couldn't get into spray, rain the next day. So as you can see it's kind of tough to see but there are beans actually coming up in that. So finally got it sprayed about 10 days after planting. This is a little over a month and really there's very little residue left. So drilling is a challenge after corn harvest. It's a narrow window so we've done some aerial application. So this is the fall of 2015. Combination of winter rye and 8 pounds of dwarf s6 rape. Had my boss fly it on about the 26th of August. It took pretty well. 14 that was a different story it didn't take it all. Cost wise seed aerial about 29 bucks. We are limited in how far the planes will go for application. Once we get behind about 8 to 10 miles the cost goes up a lot when you're dealing with something that's 50 pounds. So there's drawback stereo. This is a picture in November so you can see that's a fair amount more growth and then this is a picture of actual root growth. So it's spade probably 16 inches. We get rye roots down a full 8. The canola is down at least a full 8. How deep do you rip? This is this last spring planting. Most guys say they rip 20-22 inches. Those rye roots were down over 30. A few little watch outs. Brassicas after wheat. We have had issues with sulfur deficiency. They use a lot of sulfur. Soybeans after growing 5-6 foot tall rye. Potassium can be an issue. Moisture we haven't run into much of an issue but if we let the rye grow too long in a dry year that could very well be an issue. Other thing 6 foot tall rye. Yeah you learn a real hurry not to have the residue managers down. They'll wrap up in the first hundred foot. Been there. My wife thought it was okay to ride along for about the first hour and a half. That 6 foot tall rye also wraps on the closing wheels. So I probably won't let it grow that tall again. Future ideas, plans. We have not done anything from beans into corn. We did a little bit of winter rye in front of corn. A lot of allopathic effect when it's drilled. Nitrogen issues. So another idea is to plant that rye or wheat or rye wheat mix in 22 inch rows then come back and split that. Oh for the guys that are worried about getting a cover crop started that cover crops in 22 inch rows at 30,000. So even though that's a high population and very little sunlight hitting the ground it still take. If we have the moisture. Broadcasting into corn at v5 to v8. I would like to do this more of this but I know I'm going out on a limb because the crop insurance is not very favorable at this time to it. If it grows well and becomes a weed I'm probably out my crop insurance. They have gotten much more willing to work with people at the winter rye and planting beans. If I read right last now in Hutchison County we can actually terminate the rye at planting and still have insurance. So spraying it after planting well I'm still a little bit off there but maybe they'll eventually get there. I like to try to track some of the things that we do see what in what health improvements doing. We like what the soil structure is doing. When we look at the nice crumbly structure under the cover crop versus going to a neighbor's field across the road from where I grew up he still plows. Yeah the hilltops are pretty much clay. Other thing is working with egg pixels. It's a company that is stitching together photographs at high resolution one and ten inches. So we can take photographs and actually look throughout the season and see near infrared and actual photos what the crop is response to some of the cover crops we're doing. It's a little things we're looking at. Any questions? Okay we'll have Keith come up next and then we'll open it up for additional questions. Thank you. My name is Keith Alverson. Farm over near Chester, South Dakota. It's about 50 miles east of here and I was just going to talk to you a little bit about what we're doing on our farm using residue management, continuous corn and precision farming to work on building soil health. And so a little bit about our farm. We've got about 2,500 acres. It's a mix of dry land and irrigated production all under ridge till for the past 30 years. You know we've we've added some acres as I've had gotten involved into the operation. You know once I got out of college but you know the base of the farm has been in ridge till for over 30 years. For those that you don't know about that just threw up a couple pictures of some examples of what we do throughout the season. You know very much like a no-till planning pass. Really the only tillage that gets done throughout the year is when we build our ridges in late June and so got a picture of the planning pass in a corn on corn field and then you know pictured down our ridges after we've built those and so you can see where we've got a lot of the residues. They're still intact there in June and you know in our fields you know we heard Lance talk about some of the nutrient cycling and that break down a residue and some of those fields that we've been longer term corn on corn and especially in our irrigated ground. By the time you get to mid to late summer it's it's pretty difficult to tell what crop was a previous crop and so you know we've got some of that residue being broken down you know as we warm up as we start to memorize and as that residue you know just decomposes through the biological process. There's just a picture of you know right after corn harvest and so that's the way our fields go into the winter in the corn season. We think that's beneficial to us just you know having that residue cover you know much like most of you guys at no till you know slows down that biological process you know as we're freezing up in the fall just because you know the corn typically will use that full season for us. We just have very very few growing degree days left but having that ground cover there and that stover you know provides to building organic matter levels within our soil which you know I'll talk about a little bit later and you know we just all kind of agree that that's beneficial in building that. So this is my Dwayne Beck slide about 20 years ago when I was a senior in high school we had kind of one of those senior projects where we had to have you know what we wanted to do for our career and I was the Becks have been long long time family friends had Dwayne in and I remember one of the things that he distinctly talked about was the earthworm studies that they did. I knew I wanted to be an agronomist and want to be involved in agriculture I have to say that day it's caused me to pause a bit thinking about studying earthworms over my career but you know here I am you know 20 years later showing an earthworm video in front of a bunch of farmers so you know it's funny how life has a turn of events and so you know the earthworms are one of the ways that we we see that residue be incorporated into our soils in a minimum till situation and so that video just showed some of the earthworm channels you know bringing residue down as we are harvesting you know that was taken during this most recent harvest we saw you know quite often in our soybean fields a lot of the residue is starting to get pulled down by earthworms you know even as we're out there harvesting you know the leaves have fallen off both in the corned soybean fields and those earthworms are already starting to bring that down and add that biomass into our soil profile. We've done a little bit of messing around with cover crops you know we've made some attempts corn soybean rotation typically we've been real heavy on the corn about 75% corn historically 25% soybeans. In 2013 we had some cover crops flown on you can see in the the upper left-hand corner that the mix that we had flown on in this field we had to irrigate that in we didn't have enough moisture to get those cover crops started. I don't don't profess to know a whole lot about cover crops I would say that I was disappointed in the stand but I've had people that know more about cover crops say that that was something that they thought was maybe a pretty successful stand but there you can see the same field with the rise till grow in the next year and so that was our most recent attempt at cover crops and you know we're still trying to figure out to find a way to get that mix in with the corn and soybean rotation you know we just we use up an awful lot of the growing season to try and get anything established and I know that's a project that that many in the room and many across the country are trying to tackle is how to get those things seeded and established before we freeze up. One of the other things that we do is we like to use a lot of precision technology. I wouldn't say that we're necessarily always on the bleeding edge of technology but we like to be close to that cutting edge of technology and so some of the things that we've done more recently is incorporated zone management over the last five years and all of our nutrients and seeding applications of course you know incorporating GPS and and sonic guidance off of our ridges automatic nozzle control individual nozzle control on our sprayers to try and help any of our conservation areas and prevent any overlap and then this fall most recently we started using a varus cart to map both our electrical conductivity and organic matter levels within the soil and up here it's a little bit more difficult to see on this slide but over here you can you can see this is on a one of our pivot fields and it shows up pretty nicely on both the organic matter levels and electrical conductivity map levels where our corners were and so you know over the 30 years of irrigation we've changed that soil characteristic within those areas because of the high residue amounts that we've been returning with that corn production and high yield levels. Just a picture that I thought was nice and you know it shows some of the precision technology being able to use that and integrate that into our system to aid in our conservation efforts. One of the other things that we've witnessed over time and as we incorporated the zone management is a buildup of organic matter levels in our soils and so when we started doing the zone management and the testing we started to notice you know how high our organic matter levels were and we started to dig into why that was happening or what was going on and we looked back at our old soil test and realized that you know they built quite significantly over time we know that there's variations within the testing methods and things along that lines but this is a slide over several of our fields where it shows pretty nice replication of a pretty significant increase in organic matter levels and so it caused us to try and reflect on what had gone on in our soils what some of our production practices had been what our yields were and really got us curious about what the drivers behind this were and so this next slide is is one of the things that I think that we've helped key in on and help try and pinpoint and so what this slide is this is actual an actual slide from NASA they're able to measure the photosynthetic activities through solar radiance and so they've mapped the entire world with the solar radiation it was coming off of or infrared light that comes off during the photosynthetic process and the thing that's significant about this is this this was taken in mid to late July and you can think about what's going on in our cornfields at that time we've just went through that really rapid growth period you know a lot of us up here are tasseling or have started to tassel and this you know the light intensity measures the intensity of the photos synthetic activity that was going on and so one of the other neat things about this is this was actually the most intense photosynthetic activity that it's taking place in the world more intense than the Amazon rain for us you know one of the things that we think of when we think of a lot of photosynthesis and so it's just a nice way to visually see you know the incredible productivity of you know the corn crop and and those of us across the corn belt that you know can grow grow big crops and you know have great annual season crops to work with so I'd shown you the slide of our zero to six inch soil samples and how we'd seen that build up but you know many of the good soil scientists will tell you and caution you that you know are we just moving the organic matter levels from down deeper in the soil and and moving those up into the surface and so that caused us to want to look a little bit deeper so we we got a soil podologist and some folks from SDSU down and we tried to do a little comparative analysis and so we went to one of our long-term ridge till fields that was irrigated and you know we're very careful in trying to select soil types so we could make a comparison versus a pasture that was across the fence same soil type just different management practice and then also a meadow that had very little grazing and would be considered native native to the area and what we found was that our organic matter levels in the top six inches you know our row crop field was still just a little bit behind those grass areas but then as you look a little bit deeper the the row crop field quickly caught up to those grass areas and so you know one of the characteristics of these annual crops is we're able to to push those roots down deep and they'll annually die off and be be sequestered there in the soil you know and I heard a great comparison once you know when you see a wood fence post that's rotted off you know it always rots off in that top six inches you get down deep and it looked like it could be brand new and so that decomposition takes place very much in the same way where you know as we have those roots go down deep that organic matter and that soil carbon is is pretty stable down in those levels and so you know those were just a couple examples but we wanted to dig into this even further so we contracted with a group out of Wisconsin to take a look across our farm across various production practices they we got some permission from some neighbors that had different tillage practices different crop rotations and then we were also to be able to compare to some native pastures in the area as well as some CRP fields so I don't know if it's something that everybody can see from the back I apologize the print got kind of small but they very carefully you know selected soil types a couple predominant soil types from our area that they were able to compare and on the far left we've got an example of a ridghtill field or soil type I've been ridghtilled for over 30 years and over its history had had 75 percent corn and 25 percent soybeans then the next column is a native pasture then we've got a little shorter term ridghtill some of the stuff that I'd taken on since I got out of college and CRP and then finally over on the right we've got a chisel field with the corn and soybean rotation and what was remarkable here is in the zero to 36 inch soil profile organic matter levels and soil carbon had actually built up to within within one megagram of the native pasture in organic matter levels and so over that three feet we'd nearly achieve the organic matter levels of the native prairie not through that management practice so it's a you know reductions in tillage growing high carbon crops and sequestering that that carbon back to the soil so you know we all need to make money at this farming thing so wanted to take a look at what that value would be to us back to the farm you know as we build that organic matter you talked to Monsanto and others modern hybrids modern corn hybrids add about 10 bushels for every inch of moisture that you can that you can use and so adding that one percent organic matter adding for each percent of organic matter you get about 1.43 acre inches so it's about 14 bushels an acre which you know with current these prices about $55 a year of annual revenue based on that you look at the mineralization rates and plug in your own numbers these are I think were K state numbers which probably aren't representative of what we witness here in South Dakota a little warmer climate different moisture situation there's another $10 and so we just figure that annually you know for every that every percent of organic matter that we're able to gain in our soils it's about $65 an acre of revenue each year based on that so just in summary you know the work that we do you know is all for building for future generations and so you know that's one of the things that we focused in on our farm is just you know focusing in on reductions in tillage finding a way to be less intense because in that we lose carbon dioxide from the soil and miss out on that organic matter gain growing high residue crops consistently is something that we see as a benefit in in my part of the state using that precision ag technology to try and pinpoint those areas and focus in on that and then you know just setting up a system that feeds off itself you know you build that organic matter you can increase your yields which in turn cycles more nutrients and then can increase your yields and build even more organic matter so and I just as I was putting this together I saw quote that popped across my Twitter feed or something that I thought was nice and kind of summed up you know our many of our philosophies in this from from an author and motivational speaker that you know read some of his books that I enjoy and says your work is your own private megaphone to tell the world what you believe so with that you know the work that we do to preserve the land for future generations is really our megaphone thank you