 In 2013, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a cooperative agreement with the South Dakota No-Till Association and IGRO, SDSU Extension, for delivering the latest soil health and productivity technology to South Dakota farmers and ranchers. This event was held in Mitchell. Okay, I'm Tom Gephardt, and I'm from Kimball, South Dakota, and I farm with my son Andy. And we raise corn and beans and wheat and milo and oats. And we run about 320 commercial cows, and then we run about 140 yearlings on grass. We've only been doing this cover crop deal two years. We've had a few hiccups with it, but I think the biggest hiccup was when I let Marissa talk me into doing what I'm doing right now. The first year when I went out and we did it, it was really dry, and I didn't even know the drill would go on the ground. But we planted it, and it rained a couple days after that, and I had a beautiful stand. But it didn't grow. It wasn't growing quite like I wanted to that year, and then about the 1st of September, we got a light frost, and we had planted like, oh, I should be doing my PowerPoint, we'd been planted like turnips and radishes and winter peas and sedan grass, and that frost, it just tipped the sedan grass right over, and the winter peas and turnips, they continued to grow, but not at a very good pace. And then that year, also we went out and we split a field, and we had half of it. It was all a wheat stubble. We had half of it, we planted half the field, half of it, we didn't. And we grazed it all off. That was okay. But we're not growing very tall, we really didn't get that much grazing out of it that year. But it was no difference, we planted that split field, we planted it to corn the next year, and there was no difference in yield. I mean, it wasn't like the cover crops used up a bunch of moisture or anything like that. And so anyway, after that year, I wasn't really that happy, but we thought we'd try it again. And we came around this year, and I had a field that was wheat and oats, side by side. Well, that'll be a good test, so we planted it. And the wheat just came up beautiful. I mean, it just came up beautiful stand. And the oats, I kept waiting for it to come up and it never came up. But the year before, we had that into Milo, and I used Halex as a pre, and we put on a little atrazine. And I don't know if that was it, or we had sprayed that oats a week, round up a week before we planted it. But I don't know, we still don't really know what the problem was there. I had a good oats crop, so as far as the Halex and stuff, it was a good stand there. And then when the cover crops didn't come up, I went in there, and I planted winter wheat, and I got a good winter wheat crop. So I don't know what happened to that oats. But anyway, that was that split field. Anyway, this year we planted crimson clover, turnips, purple, radishes, winter peas, sunflowers and millet. And like I said, this is where, oh, there on the one right there, that's, well, oops. Well, I don't know where I'm at, but anyway, anyway. Anyway, like I said, it didn't come up in that oats ground, but the winter wheat did. It really, it came up beautiful. And we turned the cows in there, oh, I suppose, about the first of December. We got eight inches of snow. And they went in there, and I mean, they ate, and they ate, and they ate. I mean, they just, they really, they got what they could out of it. The one thing I didn't know until I was sitting at a sail barn talking to a farmer in mind that planted them also, and when we had them on those turnips and stuff, the cows weren't going, they had a well to go to, and they weren't going to water. And I couldn't imagine where those cows were drinking water. But he told me, he said, they don't go to water. They don't need water. And I'm not telling anybody out here to go plant a field with cover crops and you don't need any water. But they just don't drink water. I mean, no, it really worked out well. And, well, let's see here, yeah. That was, yeah, that was this year, year, and then anyway, I don't know if any of you do a pheasant hunting, but I have a, we do a little bit, but I have a friend of mine that guides a lot, and he brings hunters over, and he hunted, I had a pheasant plot by this turnips, and he was just amazed at the pheasants and the turnips. The one thing he really liked later in the year, he started releasing birds, and the birds stayed there. I mean, they didn't leave. I mean, he was, in fact, he was just over the other day, he was going to plant turnips on his ground. He just, he was totally amazed at it. And then the last thing, one day I picked some of those turnips and radishes and took them home, and I had them sitting there, and my wife asked me what they were, and I told her, and that night I came in for supper, and I said, what am I eating? And she said, those are turnips, and, oh, I mean, they were good. We ate a lot of turnips last fall, yeah, so that was it. But no, that's about the way it is. The one thing you're going to be able, if you get involved with cover crops, you're going to have a full partner, and that's mother nature. I mean, she's got to work with you, or you probably won't get a lot done. But, and we have had no, we've only been at two years, but we've had no real compaction problems with the cattle running on there. I don't know, I think the ground freezes and loosens up and stuff, but we haven't, we haven't noticed anything there. But that's about all I got, so. All right, thank you, Tom. Yep. I'll let Jason get the mic switched over here. I do want to ask a couple of questions. I'm curious about this, and I've been sitting here. Who in the audience is currently no temperature, and will be shy? That's a very bound. Who in the audience is currently, okay, who has livestock on operation? Who has all three of those things going? So you're no-tilling, you do cover crops, and you've got livestock. So that seems, you guys correct me if I'm wrong, that seems to be the pattern I keep hearing from these speakers is, those are kind of the three magic things that you want to bring us all together is that, you know, integrating the no-till of the cover crops with the maternal livestock. So just an observation, but there you go. Yeah, I'm, can you hand me up there? You got both of them? Yep, I got both of them. This one, this one, you need to hold this one too. Why? For the video. I don't have the video. Oh. Well, I'm Dick Nissen. I'm from seven miles north of the Dakota Dome in Vermillion, and kind of the bottom end of the Vermillion River. And I'm on the bottom end of a 3,600 acre or 2,600 acre watershed. So I've seen a lot of stuff that's bothered me a lot, and a lot of erosion, a lot of silt going down to Gulf of Mexico, and I think it was 1995. I've studied no-tilling from a lot of reading and stuff, and I started in no-tilling in 1995. Corn and beans wasn't getting very far, so then I put winter wheat into my rotation, which was a tremendous move. I wouldn't even think about trying no-tilling if you didn't have at least a three-way rotation. 2002, we started doing cover crops, and I don't know, I think I've planted about every cover crop they can think of, but radishes, turnips, and I like annual ryegrass. It's done a lot of good in my soil because we're wet, and we need a lot of root structure and everything, live roots in the ground to get into the plant in the spring. Oh, goodness, I don't know. My son's working into the operation now, so hopefully he'll be the sixth generation on this, so we'll try and keep it in the family and make it more productive all the time. We tiled just about all our top ground is tiled, but I got retention dams on every outlet, so we aren't draining pollutants into the river. I don't know. That's probably about it. I did make one mistake, though. This year, we planted soybeans instead of corn into the wheat stubble, and that 50 acres made 111 bushels of the acres, so there's a lot of benefits to cover crop and wheat, so if you can't make money off of wheat, just have a little patience, and you'll get your money back. Thank you. He's kind of an ardent capital and an angle. What do you just say, maybe? Those are good videos, by the way, you guys asked. Well, there are some people that have told me that I have a good radio face. Thank you for inviting me. First of all, I'm going to stand so that I can see some of the things that I have here and point at those, if I might. I think the gentleman on the left is my grandson, and I think that's really what it's all about. You know, we need to watch what we're doing, and we need to do that for our children, our grandchildren, and our great-grandchildren, and this is part of some of the pictures that we're taking this summer, and you might note some of those corn, whoops. I'm doing the wrong thing here. Some of the corn ruts there that you can see down here, and that's from a corn that was just taken out with a spade, so you can see how far down they're going into that no-till ground. Just a couple of comments. I'm not originally from South Dakota, Minnesota farmer to begin with, and I moved to South Dakota. I was one of nine kids in the family. Now, that doesn't tell you a thing about what I'm going to say here today, but it does tell you I didn't know what it was like to sleep alone until after I got married. When I talk about my grandson, he's the one that's interested in farming down the road, and so I need to have about another 15 years. Of course, I consider myself middle-aged, and then my wife asked me how many people I know that are 146. But anyway, just a summary of my practices. I've been no-tilling corn and soybeans, and I say a rotation here. Duane said it's not a rotation. It's a monoculture. I think it would be a biculture, probably, but anyway, we do try to work in some cover crops, and I've been working with Peter Sexton on that. We've been using cereal rye as a cover crop after corn, and as Peter indicated, if it doesn't come up in the fall, it usually comes up in the spring. And so far, we have not, we've been doing this, I think, for six or seven years. We have not seen any differences in crop yields. We're looking at soybean yields following the corn, and maybe we should be looking a little bit more at the corn yields, and we have not looked at that. Soil organic matters increased about 2% since I've been no-tilling. I'll talk a little bit more about that, and we use pretty much just conventional planting equipment. The soil fertility has greatly improved over the years, and we'll talk more about that. We're using a 2x2 starter placement for the P, the K, the sulfur, the zinc, and about half of the nitrogen. So we're putting on about 400 to 450 pounds per acre of dry fertilizer. And then the remainder of the nitrogen is applied with the weed spray after planting, and so I'm fertilizing both the corn and the soybeans at the same time, so to speak, because I have not been putting any fertilizer on the soybeans. This gives you some idea of what we plant into here. Important, of course, that the crop residue be properly distributed and so on. Those are corn stocks from two years ago, and then the soybean stocks, and we'll be planting corn into that. But if you move that residue away and look at the wormholes, this is what you see. And that's really quite amazing the effect that that will have. This is the planter system that we use. We're pulling a Montague cart behind the planter, and, of course, it takes a little bit of engineering to accomplish that. Not many people to help you out with respect to how that's set up. Otherwise, the planter is pretty much a standard John Deere planter. We use the cruiser wheels on the back for the closing wheels, and we're using row cleaners there, and then you can see the fertilizer set up there. I think this shows a little bit better idea, and nobody makes a dry fertilizer boot for a John Deere planter. So we adapted our own. We found this on the internet, and we use a liquid fertilizer opener, modify it for a dry attachment, and, of course, it takes a lot of hydraulic oil to do all those functions, five circuits, and a pretty good supply of hydraulic oil to blow that. This is what the hose set up looks like, and we modified the platform here, just raised it and passed the hoses through there to the front of the planter. Now, this past summer, and Dr. Ward could probably expand on this if he would want to later on, but I wanted to do some studies with respect to what's happening with the soil, and I wanted to look at soil health, and so I sent some samples to his lab, and basically these are the results that we came up with, again pushing the wrong button. The fence line samples are supposed to represent probably what was originally there, because to my knowledge that fence line has never been plowed, and so you can see the pH at 7.1, the organic matter at 5.3, the phosphorus at 28, and that is a malic phosphorus, the potassium at 4.29, and so on. And then I took some field samples, and here the pH was 6.9, and by the way, I used some pH from my other soil samples. I think we hit some of the fertilizer bands when we did that, and the pH was quite a bit reduced, but I had some regular soil samples taken from the same year, and the same was true with the phosphorus, because I used where this is a malic phosphorus, this is a bray phosphorus, and so there should be some adjustment there, but at least it gives us some idea of what's happening, but the important thing that I want to point out is this organic matter. In 100 years of tilling, basically we destroyed about half or probably more of the organic matter that we had in the soil. If it started out at 5.3, I've been farming this ground since 1976, and I've had some soil tests as low as 0.7% organic matter, and most of them in the early 70s were 2.4, 2.5 in that range, and with the no-tilling, we've brought that up now to 4.9. But I also wanted to look at microbial activity in the soil and soil health, and so this is the fence line sample again, and if we look at the biological activity here, PLFA, phospholipid fatty acid, and that gives us a measure of the microbial activity in the soil, and the fence line was 7,400 roughly, and the diversity index about 1.7. And if you look at the table that Ward Lab sent out, and I thought he might talk a little bit more about this, you can see that on the excellent soil there, it's above 4,000. This sample was taken in July about a week after a rain, so it gives you some idea, because we really have something to compare with, and I wish I'd have taken some samples of soils that weren't no-till at the time, so I might make that same comparison. But if we look at the biological activity in the fence line, I would say that's really good. If we compare that to my no-till soil, we had a total living biomass there, 5,163 nanograms per gram, and you can again see that's off of their charts with respect to an excellent soil. We don't have quite the same biodiversity here with a 1.4. That just ends up to be in the good range, but I think part of that might be that we had less fungal activity, because some of that sample I think was taken again at the very high phosphorus levels in the row, and that probably depressed fungal activity, so that's what I wanted to show there. The change in soil organic matter, and I just put on the chart here since 1974. I've got two main farms that I've had for this time with no-till, and you get some changes from year to year in organic matter. It doesn't always show up with a steady increase, but that gives you some idea of what's happened to organic matter in my soils over the years, and this is a picture that Anthony Bly took, my no-till soils on the right there, soils from across the road on the left. And one other comment that I want to make, not much was said about that today. When I first started no-tilling, I felt that the benefits in reducing erosion was primarily coming from the residue cover, and I really find out that that's not the case. It's coming primarily from water infiltration, at least in my opinion anyway, because we did the water infiltration test and with some of the studies in my no-till field for two inches of rain to soak in took 17 seconds this summer. In my garden, my garden had been no-till for about 15 years. I plowed at this last spring, and it shows you how quickly you can destroy the no-till operation by eliminating the wormholes, eliminating the root holes, that sort of thing. And there, depending on when I took it, it took from six to 45 minutes for that two inches of water to soak in. And that's the reason why the water soaks in rather quickly, all the wormholes there. That's it. Okay, Al was talking about water infiltration, and last, oh boy, it was like the first of June, when one week we had three three-inch rains, and my neighbors across the road do conventional tillage. I mean, it's black when they plant their ground. In my field, well, after the first inch of rain, you could see there's looked like a lake, and after three inches of rain, I still didn't have any water on my field. So, I mean, that's really important. That's water in your ground that if you till the ground, it's gone. And it's probably going to Gulf of Mexico, and we'll pollute to Gulf of Mexico, and Uncle Sam will come along and tell us how to farm. All right, thank you. I'll ask the question to the entire panel, and I've decided to answer it, or if you have a specific question, you can say you want it for the ground. So, raise your hand, I'll bring the mic to you. Oh, come on back to it. We went into standing stocks with the drill. Sometimes that was planted, even about the end of the first week in November. Most years, we get a few days where you might see a few sprigs coming up, but not too much. One of the problems that I saw with that, and we did not deal with this last fall, I want to use a little bit different approach, but going with the drill with seven-and-a-half inch spacing, we cut up the corn stocks, and we had more residue blow, and I felt that I was losing residue with respect to that type of practice, so I want to try something else down the road. No, not really. Of course, it's important that you look at, you know, planting depth and the adjustment of the drill, because I think too many people don't watch that when we use the local conservation services drill. They say, well, we normally said it this way, and I said, no, I said it this way. I mean, you've got to take into consideration the residue, make sure that you get the planting depth correct. Pardon? No, with the roll. I try to plant as close to the row as I can, go while I watch your speed, and then, well, like Al said, make sure you adjust for your trash on top to go get it in the ground, and then I got Martin roll cleaners in the front so they'll knock it down, but you can be two inches either side of the row and still have the same results as going right on top. The reason I go on top is because you got your old roots there, and then that's your mellowest part of the field, and then plants seem to grow better there. Yeah, as far as the planting, I'm like him, we plant about two inches from the row when we're planting following the row, but when we go in with a drill, we plant at an angle. We just seem to get a better stand at an angle with a drill. A couple of years ago, we bought a vertical tillage machine, and I guess we wanted to use it, so we went out to some of our corn stalks, and it was a beautiful seed bed when we got done, but like he mentioned blowing, or if you get kind of a heavy rain, it can be a disaster. The rain will wash it around, and you'll have piles of stalks, and yeah, yeah. We drill ours with a no-till drill, 15-inch spacing, that's John Deere's soybean special, and so we have two rows between each corn row. We go with the row, that way the tractor's not running over the stalks, and we save a little bit on tractor tires, that sort of thing. I don't have any problem with residue unless it's a spot where maybe the combine stopped. Residue management, of course, is real critical, and it's not so much the stalks as it is the husks that are difficult to cut. We don't use any row cleaners on the drill. We use row cleaners on the planter, but no row cleaners on the drill. We've never had a problem. Tend to plant probably a too high a population because you think you're going to reduce emergence and so on, and we've never seen a real problem with any reduced population. If you bend down this row a little bit, no-till journey, what would you do differently? I would have started with the three-array way rotation right away, and then come back with the cover crop on the wheat stubble. That seemed like that was the best move I made. We've tried rye in the standing corn, but we don't get enough sunlight down there. I don't know. Our rye doesn't come very good, but we just spent way full hours on it, so I guess that's not really the way to go either. I see they got these new drills out for a fraction of a cost. I suppose you could go and drill rye in the four-foot-tall corner or whatever, but I don't know. I don't know if probably not very many of you grew milo, but the one thing we found out when we went no-till, milo likes warm soil. You just got to wait a little bit longer. Don't get in a hurry planting that, but other than that, we didn't have any problem. Things that I'd do different. We made plenty of mistakes. We made them small and so made them on a small scale. Things like not enough down pressure, sidewall compaction. None of those things probably really, really serious, but you learn to watch those things as time goes by and you become more astute at what you need to do. No-till is not a simple system. It takes more management rather than less. The other comment that I make that I forget when we talked about the residue, you know, with 200 bushel corn, I feel like I don't have enough residue. It doesn't last the entire summer. There's plenty to plan into and so on, but it's pretty well decomposed by about July. Any more questions? I rolled them one year. I will never do it again. And I just thought it might help with the combining. And I'm not really getting water runoff from my no-till ground, but the neighbor's ground has runoff and it comes down through mine and I roll the corn stalks with it. We had a heavy wind after that and most of them ended up with my yard and my yard, so I had to rake those out. So no, I won't do any rolling. Fortunately, we do not. Well, I got to be careful there what I say because ours was just the trial and you got to make sure that you obey the rules with respect to crop insurance. But I basically did what Anthony was talking about. If we had really wet conditions, I would wait until after the beans were planted and I would kill it off at that time with my first spray or roundup. If we had dry conditions, I would usually try to get it killed before I plant. And too often it's happened where we had dry conditions when I was about to plant and kill it off and we got really good rains and I wouldn't have had to kill it so we didn't have a whole lot of growth in some years.