 My brother and I farm northwest of Mitchell, South Dakota. We've been partners since the early 80s. We raise soybeans and corn and some wheat. We were alarmed at the rate that organic matter has been decreasing since they broke the native sod. Once you realize that 50% of the organic matter has disappeared in literally 100 years and we know that organic matter without it you raise no crop. So really that kind of got us interested knowing that it was imperative to start increasing organic matter levels in the soil. We can't continue on the same path. We have to start focusing a lot more on soil health and soil health isn't just one thing, it's like a system's approach. I mean, for us it's combining no-till crop rotation, cover crops and then planting like native grass species in our sensitive areas, in our wetlands, in our salinity areas and along our watersheds to try to make our land not only profitable but sustainable for the future and to be able to tell the consumer we're out here producing a crop in a sustainable, environmentally friendly way. One of the big benefits that people don't think about is water management, in our part of the world let's say you have a corn crop and it quits using water pretty much about October 1st and then you plant soybeans in the middle of May and they really don't use very much moisture until almost the end of June and that's one of the downfalls of our crops is we have a lot of moisture in the spring and our crops don't use a lot so we have to find a way to store that moisture and cover crops are an excellent way to do them. We've made a real push to involve our landowners on the land that we rent at least to get involved and to understand what we're doing and why we're doing it and show them that ultimately they probably benefit more than anyone does. One of the things that we've done in terms of educating our landowners is in the water quality area. We are upstream from Lake Mitchell and we have a one mile of fire steel creek running through our property and 10 years ago we worked in conjunction with the NRCS, the Game Fish and Parks, Jim River Development Corporation and actually the city of Mitchell to establish a mile long 350 acre riparian buffer to help keep runoff from going into the fire steel and ultimately ended up in the lake and it just kind of ties into the whole package that we put together in terms of soil health water quality even coming down to the bee pollinators we're in the bee program and so we just want to educate non-farmers on what we're doing to make the soil as well as the water and keep the bees alive and the things that we do that are kind of going the extra mile. Working with these guys is kind of the same process I do with all my other landowners. We spend a lot of time with the conservation planning process which has nine steps of planning. We're trying to identify resource concerns and identify different conservation practices that will benefit their land and operation and the resources on the land. It's eye-opening to see someone that committed for this long period of time to make no-till successful in this area and to try to better themselves with just not only no-till but to interject the various crop rotations and the cover crops into the cropping systems. You know the fun part of it is there's so many passionate people involved with the NRCS, with the SDSU extension, with Dakota Lakes Research Farm and the Soil Health Coalition there's all kinds of support and it's just nice, you know, talking with these other people who have the same passion at you that can help you. I mean, it's just been really fun. You know, and this isn't all just about profitability, it's doing what's the right thing for the future. Hi, I'm Craig Staley from Mitchell. We've had some excellent speakers so far and I think Chris said something about, you know, by the time you go home at night you feel even dumber you did in the morning but I think I peaked. Like, I don't think I could feel any stupider on some stuff right now after you ponder all the things that we've heard about that kind of really make you think different about what we need to do in the future. I have a little history on my farm. I farm with my brother Gene around the Mitchell area. We first started trying to no-till back in 1986. We just started putting a little corn into old stubble and barley stubble and really just did that and we're working the rest of our ground and then back in 1989, which was a dry year, we just happened to decide to go up. We knew there was a research farm and that Dwayne Beck was operating up in the Redfield area and I just remember driving up there. I think it was maybe at the end of July and the whole way up there we just went by burned up after burned up poor looking crops and we get up to Dwayne's research farm and it's like a little oasis in the area and saw what he was doing and he really helped us get started where we wanted to go 100% no-till. So went back home, ordered a 750 drill and then ever since had been trying to no-till everything. So when we first started, we did a pretty decent job with diversity. We were planting winter wheat, spring wheat and corn and soybeans, but we didn't really do a very good job of intensifying our water use. So we were just planting the winter wheat and then doing nothing except spraying it till spring and we really struggled obviously getting crops planted in the spring because the wheat would stop using moisture in July and you try to put corn back in there next May and we probably get a lot of years, get 15 inches of precept and the soil holds eight, nine. So you got six inches of water that's either gonna run off or pond on your field. So in the late 1980s, I started trying to find some different cover crop mixes to work with and worked with Jason Miller. When we first started off, we were trying to use the different clovers thinking that we could fix them. Nitrogen, the red clovers, crimson and sweet clover. If we could get them in there, we could maybe fix them in and use some water, but they really didn't, they weren't aggressive enough. You just didn't get enough. Unless you wanted to wait till June 15th to plant your corn, they just really don't use enough fall moisture. So just kept trying different stuff and finally ended up just like everybody else kind of moving to some different mixtures. Obviously we've talked a lot about the benefits of cover crops. You know, they help increase diversity, but I think the one thing that, especially in Eastern South Dakota, we have talked about is increasing intensity. You think what like our grandfathers used to do, they planted oats, the crop they use springtime moisture and then they put sweet clover with it and then let the sweet clover grow up. So in the next spring, they were using a lot of moisture in the spring too and then the only mistake they made was they plowed it, but at least they had their water intensity a lot better than we do. I mean, we're going out, you plant corn and beans, they don't use enough moisture in the spring and pretty soon you have all these salinity areas in this runoff. So I mean, that's one of the main benefits of cover crops is trying to increase our water usage. You take the tillage out, you have to do something to increase your water usage and try to make it more like the native prairie. And so that's one of the things I've been doing with cover crops. And the other things, obviously you're building carbon organic matter, reduce nutrient leaching. As you can see by Anthony's slides, slides that, I mean a lot of these pHs have dropped from seven down to mid to low fives and that's just because it's a leach of nutrients because we're not using enough water. And so some of the other advantages obviously is to manage the soil moisture. Fix nitrogen, which that's when I first started out is what I'm trying to do, but really you just really don't, if you're putting in behind wheat or putting in behind corn or soybeans you just really don't, you have to almost have a full season cover crop if you're going to fix any end. So it mostly comes down to managing soil moisture, having to provide a living root system and improve your soil health, changing the plant residue to darker residue so you can get better warm up in the spring and build organic matter and carbon. And some of the things obviously I've looked for everywhere to does since you're not normally going to harvest the cover crop is you try to start with low seed costs, something that's easily to establish, easy to get planted and has aggressive growth. So you can, in our short, we just don't have a long enough season that we got to have something to have aggressive growth. This picture is like cereal rye that I broadcast into standing corn about the 10th of September. And this picture is like the middle of April. So you can see you can get some really intense growth. And the other thing you got to really be careful of with some of the cover crops is make sure you're thinking about what herbicides you're using before you plant the cover crop. Like in my wheat, I usually pretty much just use a herbicide with no residuals so you don't have to worry about affecting your cover crop mix. And, you know, I've used a lot of different equipment. I pretty much plant all my mixes behind wheat with my drill. And I have tried planting a few with a planter just to get a few, get over a few more acres. And then I also broadcast like my cereal rye into corn stalks. And these are some of the ones I've tried. I've tried to, and all this was broadcast. I tried broadcasting the winter wheat, annual rye grass and oil seed radish into standing corn. And also the cereal rye. I pretty much just gone to using the cereal rye because it has some, it's so aggressive that you can get so much growth off of it. I've done it like four years in a row. I just kind of, usually about the first or second week of September when corn is starting to let a little more light drop its leaves and it's starting to let more light in there. I'll just watch the weather forecast and if it looks like the temperatures are going down there's a chance for precept. I just have an aerial ply somewhere around, you know anywhere from 55 to 60 pounds depending on the seed count. And so I just take the rye up and I've done like four years in a row and I've always gotten a pretty good stand. I mean, I suppose if we have a real dry fall it might not, but so far it's worked every year. And the thing that's nice about broadcast is you can get it done so much earlier than you can if you got a count by it. So I mean, this is all planted in the first couple of weeks of September and also when you drill it instead of broadcast, you lose quite a few leaves off your corn stalks because over winter you go over with the drill you'll lose quite a bit of residue. And I still do drill some, I just do some each so I'm not taking a chance too much on either one. And the one thing about the rye is so winter hardy that I mean, I drilled it this year in Thanksgiving day so it always seems like it never winter kills. And then in the spring, I just come back and I usually like to get quite a bit of growth on it. If I was gonna air on one side I'd let it get bigger than I wanted to because I'm just trying to help with soil moisture management and try to reduce, keep from getting more salinity spots. So I'll let it get up to boot high about three, four feet and then kill it and then plant soybeans into it. The one thing you gotta make sure, you wanna either kill it like six, seven days ahead or wait till after you plant it because you don't wanna kill it like two, three days before you plant because then it gets real rubbery and can really affect your seed to soil contact and cause you trouble. And like when I spray it out I make sure that I don't use any burners. You know, if you're gonna mix a pre in there I use like dual pursuit but really if you have a good stand you get such a matter residue it holds weeds down so good that you probably wouldn't have to use a pre on some fields I do some I don't but it really helps with weed control. And the other thing you gotta check on is like if you're gonna plant into green crops I mean, there's some rules on crop insurance so I mean, that's one issue too with planting green that nobody talks about but you probably wanna check with your crop insurance and see what they say about it. And I've done it like done even some dry years and I've never seen the soybeans yield less like this year where I had rye having all that rain and we had a tremendous amount of rain in the June and they were probably four or five bushel better than where I did have rye because they just took that moisture a lot better. And this is the thing I really like about it with soybeans we just really not you know, putting a carbon back in the soil and this is after I harvest the beans and there's just so much rye residue out there it looks more like wheat stubble and you know, might not see a huge advantage in two years but you keep doing that over 10 years or 20 years it's gonna make a very big difference. I mean, that's the thing about these cover crops you might not see a benefit next year. Like a lot of times in our area you know, where I put cover crops behind wheat if we have a fairly decent moisture next spring I mean, it doesn't necessarily out yield my corn on soybean grounds but usually the second year when I put beans back in there a lot of times there are four or five bushel better so sometimes it takes a couple of years and where you see the benefit and these are some different cover crops I've tried in wheat stubble and some successful, some not but I pretty much ended up where you see where most people are using a mix and obviously the first mix I think that everybody tried that actually worked was you know, the radish-canola lentil mix and this mix worked pretty good because it has a lot of aggressive growth but I mean, the one thing that's lacking is not enough carbon, it's just all broadleafs and what I noticed too is when you plant this you always get a huge flush of volunteer wheat so you have to deal with that and a lot of times spray it out so then I started going with more of a mix I have now which has like 15 pounds of oats or 15 pounds of oats and barley and that oats just comes flying out of the ground and seems like it really suppresses the volunteer winter wheat and then I also have rapeseed, radish, Ethiopian cabbage, flax and sunflower in that mix so each of them has different benefits you know, the flax and the Ethiopian cabbage they'll stand really good over winter if you want to catch some snow and but I definitely try it you don't want to put too much, you don't want to get too much oats or barley, too high a percentage of the grass crops in there I think I'm planting like maybe 10 or 15 pounds of oats and barley and this is one other thing I've tried behind the wheat this is like medium red clover I frost seeded in like March and into my wheat and then I let it grow all season and then put corn back in there and then I just had a little spot so I just left it in a food plot area to see how long it'd live and it was about two, three I got like three years out of that clover and then the frost killed it but the only downside to this is first it has to be dry enough in March you know, before you get it seeded and then you have to be awfully careful with what you use for herbicide because I think the only thing you could use is like buck drill that won't kill that clover either that or don't use one but probably the one good thing about it is it's growing all season so it should fix the man for you and the other thing I've tried where I didn't think I was going to get everything planted with my planter I went and put grain sorghum discs in my planter and I planted this is chickling vetch and field peas so if you don't have a drill that's one option the only problem is it really pretty low on carbon so it's certainly not near as good as the other mixes but it's something you could do if you have no access to a drill the other thing I tried this year I just keep trying different stuff to try to come up with more diversity and more water intense use is you've seen a lot of research on this skipperl corn so I'm in 22 inch rows so I planted two rows and then I'd leave a row blank and all I did was I just I kept my population total per acre I just usually plant around 28,000 so I just up the rate in those two other rows to mimic I think I was up to like 37,000 in those two rows and then at like V6 I side dressed urea and then I put a mixture of red clover, crimson clover, radish and annual ryegrass and I was lucky enough to get a rain and I had pretty good growth but even I even still had some trouble with shading because this year the corn grew so fast even though there's a 44 inch space I mean the cover crop didn't get real big but I still think it's gonna do me quite a bit you know you don't know the root growth underground means just as much as what's above ground so I'm hoping that did quite a bit good and the other thing I like about this is now I'll just go over where that 44 inch gap is I'm gonna plant corn there again and then this fall I'm gonna put shio rye in there and go back to soybeans so in three years I'll have two years of corn two years of cover crop and one year of soybean which will be a lot better for building carbon and using extra soil you know increasing intensity on soil moisture and corn soybeans I mean that's really the downside of doing that corn soybeans so I mean for parts of eastern South Dakota I think this could really work good but the only thing you gotta make sure of is you have to get a written agreement with crop insurance in order to do skip row planting so you have to get them to sign off on it before I do very much and as you can see I have some salinity areas too and this is just from over the years and you know not having an intense enough water usage so I mean instead of fighting it I mean I just put a lot of this area that had the low ground or had slinny issues into CRP and you could just see right the only problem I made here is I didn't go out far enough but you could see that's like three years of growth how much of that grew in that saline area and that's like that salt lander wheatgrass and alfalfa and it was really amazing how fast that turned that around and how fast that filled in I mean even first the wheatgrass comes and lowers that salt you know the salinity a little bit and then pretty soon you see alfalfa growing and so but if you just go back to farming and keep doing the same thing it's just gonna go back to the way it was so a lot of my fields I probably farm like 80% of it and have CRP spots in the lower areas just I mean there's a lot of them and they just drowned out and you know you're losing more money on them than even if you didn't you know you'd better off just not paying rent on them or have the land costs instead of keep farming them I think that's one thing you're gonna see people do in the future even if you can't get it to CRP you just will put it to permanent vegetation and bail it or instead of you know if your land costs are $150 but you know you still probably losing $250 by farming so you just better bite the bullet lose $150 and improve the soil health of the rest of the field and this is a picture this is like Canadian wild rye and this is another area that was had a lot of salinity and that's like two years after I planted it so I mean there's a lot of different things you can do with these areas besides just keep driving over them and putting seed and fertility on them so in conclusion I guess some of the things would be to plant aggressive mixtures plant the cover crop like it's a cash crop you know just don't take the time to plant it right and keep trying different mixtures, thank you. Good afternoon everybody, I'm Kurt Stiefaler I live over at Salem and farm over there get to go out and speak here once in a while just gonna talk a little bit about my farm history and some of the changes I've done over the years and kind of where it's progressed to here's from the previous owners of our homestead I guess or the where we didn't homestead but where we own now is a 1948 photo of our farm that they gave us from when their parents passed away and passed it on they thought it'd be kind of cool I didn't realize they'd take aerial shots back that long ago. Then fourth generation parents bought this farm in 1959 and it's got cow calf pairs and raised cattle and hogs over the years used a lot of barley previously and this is what it looks like now lots of changes the barn and where the new house is now is where the old house was that's about all that's left anymore May of 2011 I had a 120 mile an hour windstorm come through and that's why stuff got updated here a little sooner than my long-term plan but the grain bends mostly to the right and the big new shed there was other sheds and I had two silos there that were taken down in the wind so I got a instant farm upgrade. Just as we keep analyzing things as we go along in our lives back in 98 when the hogs got so cheap and stuff I decided to get out of that venture and concentrate more on the hogs and the crop part of our farming operation farmed with my mom and dad up till they decided to move to town in 1995 so I took over the farm more full-time I guess then but currently we're raising oats and corn and soybeans got some alfalfa for the first time last fall that I know of the farm has winter wheat on it gonna experiment with that a little bit got the cow calves to compliment some of the cover crops and stuff that I'm using doing a three-year rotation basically working in the corn and soybeans follow the oats with a cover crop right now and like to work in and get some crops in with the soybeans and the corn get that worked in there like staleas are using and I think that's a real good way to do that back in 1998 dad and I were talking we gotta do something a little different we gotta seem like our crops have plateaued a little bit the yields so we got a white planter and went to 19 inch rows on soybeans and we like that good enough went to 19 inch corn and about that same time we started no tilling there's a lot of ups and downs and it was early on for this area and the amount of rainfall we had and don't understand the soil I could do now but there's a lot of 10 years worth of failures I would say mudden the crop in not knowing how to manage that extra moisture that we had with the no till so we and working with the soil biology that I know now to break down that residue and use it better reason now I'm on 22 inch rows we went to that just to have some more common equipment as we upgraded equipment was a war out didn't see a lot of advantage at first to the yield but it's coming along now as we understand how to utilize it more about 25 years of no till just about all my ground I do put fertilizer in furrow just a low rate there to help get it going in the spring last couple years I've been people think it's always so much colder for no till I've been tempering my soils going from field to field between the corn stocks cover crops bear soybean fields I can test them all within an hour and they'll be all within a one degree soil temperature so I whatever reason I don't think that's an issue anymore I used to think it was a hold up but doesn't seem to be this is a you can see there's an awful lot of residue there and makes for tight quarters we call me the anti pheasant hunter guy around because of my narrow rows when I fertilize my oats I put about 35 40% of the fertilizer for the year down dry before I plant and then I'll put the rest on here later and I use the stream bar to stream the nitrogen on just about a boot stage here's some homemade wide drops I did for side dressing my corn got to realize and I was doing it too early so these little short ones are probably two and a half feet long so it wasn't quite accomplishing what I needed to I didn't think to get it on a little later now I've gone to these the mount on the bar they're not homemade but they're substantially cheaper than some name brand I guess after getting in the oats there about seven years ago I really started using the three way rotation and stuff that's changed the figure out a different way to utilize our feed also for the cows during the winter I just felt like I was taking too much time either used to chop silage and putting up hay extra equipment do most of this work myself except for some summer help high school kids I just didn't have a fall help either to get some of that put up so I started looking to get a cover crop in there and utilized that all winter long I figured I probably cut my hay usage down 40 or 50% or better during the winter last year was exceptional I had good growth of my cover crops I didn't feed any of my cows till the second week of March they didn't they put a hay in the hay feeder and they would take a bite and go spend the day in the cover crops so as you can see we get pretty good growth there these are planted like mid late August when I get the oats off I drill them in with just a 5400 international drill so it's nothing too special one thing I'll go back with my corn planter the last two years I have bought a wheat disc for my corn planter and I've been putting some oats in with my corn planter I'll make a pass and then I'll turn around and just offset 11 inches and come back so I'm on 11 inch spacing for my oats the yield seems there is good I just got to keep cutting the seed rate shooting for about a million and a quarter seeds originally an acre and I was down under a million and I still think that's too thick for the good stand I get with the corn planter using that the straw shortens up about probably 2 to 3 inches shorter straw but the yield is still the same I don't know I've got to keep playing with that if I'm going to keep doing that I was creating compaction I guess coming right back on top of those other rows when you're in the spring when it's a little wetter so that's the biggest part I don't like here's a little bit of some of the mixes I've tried probably 7 or 8 different varieties for a mixture I think you get too many one chokes the other out I think a little bit for me I think there are some varieties growing in there here you can see how much residue is there yet going in there I just really like that keep for the water retention protecting the soil from heavy rains and any rains as far as that goes and then wind erosion it says same I got cow calf operation put about on average a good 500 acres of oats in a year or some kind of small grain I also move my calving till the middle of May my cows don't start till the middle of May calving and I'll get them all calved out in the pasture start calving them out get 20, 30 pairs and then haul them out to pasture they pretty much take care of themselves calving I last 10 years I probably maybe helped 6 or 8 calves or pulled 6 or 8 calves I'm using a touch smaller bull but it's not that isn't a problem I think that green grass that the cow has it slicks her up inside to help her calve easier with that little bit of extra green grass one after they chewed it off in the fall I guess and I moved them on so you can still see there's an awful lot of residue and protection yet there for the soil and look how it stays green too right up till it's covered with snow deep and like I said if there's sunshine it'll keep going all winter long yet so this was a little oops that I found out but my cover crop from the previous year grew enough and it matured out in the fall the seed was good and came back to combine corn the next year in it and had volunteer oats coming up and made a nice inner seed cover crop so to speak so I guess this is a big reason why I switched to and I got tired of fighting the weather so much we just keep a lot more live calves around I guess doing that part of what they use in the cattle too is they'll additionally get on the cover crops but can utilize the pastures a little better so with the NRCS and getting some water lines put in tanks placed in the right place to get them some good water manage the pastures a whole lot better too this is just one of the setups one of my pastures that going out is just where the overflow drain pipe goes so it gets away from the tank area so don't mud it all up here's a pasture that I divided up the tank is in the middle there this is about a 30 meter pasture split it up in three just with electric fence we had extra rain this year but there's mostly kind of a brome grass in here I put them out about the 1st of June I put 18 pair in there and I pulled them off in the middle October and there's still a little bit of grass left on 30 acres for 18 pair so it shocks me how much a rotational grazing can help if we can get their timing down right to utilize that grass good here's a soil pit we did just that one's just showing how deep some of the roots went with the oats like some of those we measured were down a good three foot when we found them tried to get close to like a turn up and radish but it didn't quite work out to see how deep that tap root was actually going so there's quite a few even at two feet deep here's one we did for the soil health school that was in my place last fall we dug right into the corn field to see how deep the roots were going there they went down pretty deep but if you can kind of see the top layer of soil there's kind of a light brown and then the lower stuff the white is clay soil I sure think it's changing that clay over as I'm building organic matter and getting that down there's activity happening in the clay layer that's changing that over so that top layer is probably about ten or twelve inches next one was about six inches of change that's probably about a four foot pit the rest was heavy clay I guess I would call it you can change it over time to make the roots work like we've been talking today does make a difference we were doing some work with the ARS lab at Brookings and I just think we got to change how we're thinking here a little bit and we've been having a space program forever keep looking up at the stars looking for answers I think our answers are right below our feet to keep the next generations going here I think we can start looking under our feet a little bit we'll find our little pot of gold for us so thank you