 Thanks Marty. I want to thank Ruth for putting this together. She does all the work and I want to thank you for coming. It's always good to talk to real farmers. Last winter if you were here we spent a lot of time talking about water and that's what it's all about is water. And if you look at what impact that we've had with with no till in South Dakota and whatever it's all about water and better utilizing the water. And we calculated a couple years ago for the board of regents who wanted to know what the hell we did. The board of directors of Dakota Lakes got together and we met with the board of regents and we calculated the difference in crop production in 1987 versus 2014. This was in 2015. If we took the center, the south center and the north central crop reporting districts in South Dakota, basically that middle third of the state of South Dakota in the middle there. We changed, the farmers changed there, we used the Woolsey price the night before, Woolsey South Dakota price. We changed the amount of grain that they sold by $1.6 billion. Those are big numbers unless you're in Washington. But that's big numbers in South Dakota. That's a big increase and it's the thing that I noticed from when we first started doing this in 1990 till now. Cities like Gettysburg that at one time years ago in the 60s or whatever when there's lots of babies had two classes in every grade in the elementary school and then they went to one class in every grade and then all of a sudden they're almost talking about closing the school. They're going back to two classes in every grade again and I think that's a good news and I think part of that is how we produce things and I'm going to kind of follow up a little bit with what Cody is doing and then I want to talk about just some real basics. A lot of talk about soil health and muffin fluff and whatever but they're just some real basics to how you do how you do no till and it's just real simple stuff so we're going to talk about a little bit of that and then you can go home get ready for the blizzard. That's the Dakota Lakes right you know that's our main station then we have some soils to the north and if you're not familiar actually that main station the north those north two quarters right in here those are what we call Milborough soils which would be very similar to what you see around Kennebec in that area for you guys for their east. They're a bit just a little bit better than the pier soils and stuff you see out here in some places and then the south side are some pretty good less soils. Our north unit has the old triple threat with promise opal and sand sarks so those are ones that you're familiar with some of you guys here have none soils which are really quite good soils actually and then quite a few farms and pier soils or something like that. I have a little trivia question for you. All our soils are named after cities and whatever localities right so the sand sark is a really shallow soil it's about a foot and a half deep over fractured shale and it's a foot and a half of that real clayy stuff the true vertisol just really shallow. What's that named after? Well the sand sark Sioux right sand sark Sioux tribe there's a little city of sand sark there right across the river from guest Gettysburg but where does that name come from it's French. Anybody here speak French? Well in French sans means without. Arc means archery or bow and arrow so when the first fur traders first came to that area across the river from Gettysburg the tribe they ran into there was it's not using bows and arrows they're still using lances. So that's where that name comes from it's kind of interesting I always like to joke with my Native American friends from that I said that those guys were the conventional tillers of the Indian society the last the last Native Americans to adopt a new technology right we still have people doing conventional tillage here you shouldn't be doing tillage here. Water is too precious to you did a meeting yesterday in Columbus Nebraska get 28 inches of rain a year. Well maybe they can grow crops without saving water there and then they got irrigators they got irrigators sitting on fields there where they get 28 inches of water a year in rainfall what a bunch of pessimists right okay that's what our native vegetation looks like we're going to go to Australia Ruth not going to go to Australia in about a month and they have trees everywhere and they have less rainfall than we have because the rainfall comes in the winter time when it's cool and it goes deep past because you're not using any water and it all just moves deep and then you've got trees okay so that the only place we see trees is where there's a major drainage way so the first time I went to Australia I showed this slide somebody in the audience went I said yes ma'am she's where did the trees go I said Paul Bunyan cut them down there no idea who Paul Bunyan was so you don't do that that was a dumb thing to do so Ruth and I went to France four years ago and we did a kind of it we were in England first that was fun and then we went to France and they they got us a car that had GPS that would speak English and we would do a meeting I do a meeting from 8 till noon and then we'd hop in the car and turn on GPS and go to the next town and somebody meet us for supper and show us around that town and we do another meeting the next day and whatever it's kind of an interesting trip but every town we went to they had to show us their castle so we went and looked at the castle and you got the grain bends and they all kind of look pretty impressive and took a lot of energy to build them and a lot of work and a lot of wealth and whatever and you know you go and now you got the grain bends there where did where'd you produce the grain that went in the grain bends they said well in the land right around the castle so you look over the wall and it was so degraded it wouldn't even grow bushes very well and you'd point that out that maybe that was one of the reasons it's no longer a castle and when we looked at their soils it's what they look like and this is what they look like and they're still plowing them and they're plowing them deeper and they're plowing up and down the hills and there's places are plowing down the hills because they can't plow across the hills and they can't plow up the hills that can't pull it so they drive up and plow down and so I started the discussion by saying my ancestors left Europe to come to the United States because they degraded the soil so badly that they had in Europe that they had to go someplace else and find soils that weren't degraded and then I said they've done a good job of degrading the soils that they find in the U.S. okay this area is part of the Louisiana Purchase so the Louisiana Purchase happened because the Lavandre brothers came from Winnipeg Manitoba they were fur traders and they came across the Continental Divide in eastern North Dakota if you didn't know there is one there is one there between the Red River drainage and the Missouri River drainage right there between Valley City and and Jamestown there's a Continental Divide it's about this high okay and and they came across that Continental Divide they came down the Missouri River and they buried lead plates in different areas of around here we don't know how many they built if they buried but one was buried just above Fort Peer and you can see that one in in the Heritage Museum and it claimed this area for France it was 1743 so the white man had been here quite a while you know pretty pretty actually before the Revolutionary War we had white guys run around out here claiming the area for France you know pretty optimistic guys there too and and our founding fathers George Washington Thomas Jefferson and those guys were way back in the early part of our nation the late 70s and 1700s a few years more increased sterility will drive the inhabitants of the Atlantic states westward for support they're degrading the soils and they knew that and they were trying to figure out what to do about it whereas if they were taught how to improve the old instead of going on to in pursuit of the new and productive soils they would make these acres which now scarcely yield them anything turned out beneficial to themselves George Washington he and Thomas Jefferson had lots of conversation about how stupid it was that they continuously degrade the soils that's 300 200 whatever years ago David Montgomery wrote a book dirt if you haven't read it it's kind of interesting reading this photo here was taken in South Dakota in the 1930s because we were doing that when I went to Gettysburg in the 1970s to teach high school chemistry not not egg I was teaching chemistry people don't understand that you couldn't be assured that you would make it to peer and back if you left Gettysburg go to peer in the wintertime you wouldn't be assured you're going to get home if if the wind started to blow because everybody was doing wheat and summerfowl in that country okay talking about his dirt book at a meeting and I said you know in the teachers line I mean the speakers loans that you have at these bigger conferences I sat down with him I said you know you really should come and revisit that area north of peer again and see what's happened there because it's changed and he comes it subsequently wrote this book growing a revolution which has a chapter about some of the guys in that area in fact Mike Arnold he's in that in that book they talk about his his operation okay but anyway Thomas Jefferson realized that they had to do something soon 1803 he bought the Louisiana Purchase and then he sent Lewis and Clark up the river right here's where Dakota Lakes is by the way right in there but they came through here so we know what this land looked like before before we got here and start screwing it up but what they were looking for were beavers was the first thing that's what the Lavender is were looking for is beavers and they took all the beavers I well what were the beavers doing here all these dams and all these little tributaries all the way from Black Hills down down river through Missouri whatever so you take all the beavers out then you send the settlers in and the settlers start to do tillage they cut down what few trees there are and they start over grazing and we have flooding now what should the response be put the beavers back and quit doing that stuff you're doing right I know we're we're not that smart so we're gonna put in large main stem reservoirs we're European males right that's what we do we go put in large main stem reservoirs we got four in South Dakota they're gonna they're gonna give us 500,000 acres of irrigation over around Redfield because that was flat in the 1930s and 40s you can't irrigate land that's rolly you have to have this stuff that you can run the water down between the rows and we all know that you couldn't produce corn and soybeans at Redfield without irrigation for God's sake and it's kind of like Nebraska they don't think they can produce anything without irrigation right did you notice that so they built a big dam and they built a big power plant and they built an irrigation pump station that's never been used and they built a whole bunch of canals so I show people the canals when they come to visit if they're going the right direction we show them this huge huge canals that were built to take the water from the Missouri River over to the Jim River but when I went to Redfield in 1983 and by the way Ray managed the same farm I managed the one at Redfield one time in its existence we both had the same major professor and our PhDs we have a lot of parallels but when I went to Redfield in 1983 there was 1900 acres of soybeans and spanking Brown County combined and I made the mistake of my PhD orals to say that I thought if we know till we could probably grow corn and soybeans in the Jim River Valley without irrigation and Larry Fine who Ray remembers nobody else does but he thought I didn't understand water very well so he he really made my life miserable for an hour or so in my orals but he lived long enough to see no till and different crop production move into the Jim River Valley which now those two counties are the number one number two corn producing counties in the state and I was told before we came to peer that we would never produce hundred bushel dry land corn in use County I was told that George and I made a bet on it so we won that bet several years in a row before the guy decided he didn't want to do that anymore but it just it talks to the idea of we haven't in the old days we didn't use water well the thing that we have done no till is just a tool the thing we're doing is using water better that's really what we're about so 1973 we had a whole bunch of guys got all excited about the Russian wheat deal energy prices were low 1973 and interest rates were low 1973 everybody started putting in irrigators along the Missouri River because somebody had invented a center pivot we didn't need to we didn't need to have a level ground to irrigate anymore so these guys start pumping water on the Missouri River and irrigating and it ran promptly back down the hill into the river because our soils were these wind blowing less soils and they when they got tilled which everybody said to grow irrigated corn you got to have it black and then we put water on it just looked like this floor and that's kind of when I entered the scene to try to figure out how to stop runoff under irrigators and that's where those efforts led to a meeting after field day one night at Bob Steakhouse where people said we really need to have more research effort along the center in the western part of the state and another guy said well I'll get my brother-in-law who's in the legislature to get you some land and I said why don't you leave your brother-in-law alone let's see if we can't get our own land instead of having the state on it so we can control it so that's the way this started it's owned and directed by farmers all fixed facilities and land and much of the irrigation equipment is owned by the corporation and things like that right again the comparison of corn soybean spring wheat winter wheat and sunflower production those three areas increased by 1.6 billion in 2014 as compared to 1986 we didn't do that because we set out to improve yields the goal was to better manage our water because that's what we're having trouble with we weren't getting the water in the ground better manage our nutrients and this is what this whole movement's about whether you call it soil health or you call it no till or you whatever you call it it's about better managing the ecosystem we have to do a better job or we're going to end up looking like the Europeans with a totally degraded soils we've only been at this for 200 years so what we did is starting to look at how the native systems work because they water goes in the ground native systems and you don't have the salty spots and native systems normally and we call this a transformational change or a holistic report approach I stole this from Jay Fuhrer who said he stole it from somebody else but it's one of my favorite statements the light bulb did not result by incrementally making candles better you know when you think about that it just kind of okay yeah that makes sense you know back and off and and so what we've been doing a lot of times in agriculture we're just incrementally changing what is really a system that's been broken since it was in Europe instead of just saying now this is stupid let's do something else farmer manages ecosystem take sunlight water and carbon dioxide makes them into products to be sold and we look at this water cycle energy flow mineral cycle community dynamics and there's lots of places where we have talked about how we do that does the rain feed plants and recharge ground water do you run off or deep percolate if you're running your water off and you live at wall you that's a problem you don't want to do that okay then that's what's wrong here we can now put on two inches of water in nine minutes with our irrigators and we have nothing run off and if you come in the summertime and many of you've been there we walk in behind those irrigators and it totally changes your way of looking at things and it's because we have this armor we don't have the armor there because we think that's cute it's there because it protects the soil keeps the weeds from going keeps the soil cool does all these sinks people so I really like to use that big hole opener makes that week grow better well now you have no more armor okay you've got to have that armor and that that that whole process starts it there's where earthworms live they're protected for anybody that's been around irrigation this is 20 years of wheel track if you've been around irrigation those things always had big rots in them and when we first started doing this we had our board of directors from Dakota lakes the guys that were irrigating were irrigating with tillage come to redfield one day and we had a lateral move there running on some no-till ground and we went out to look at crops and I'm walking along I'm talking to the other yeah then turn around I have no farmers behind me they're all lined up on one of my wheel tracks going why isn't that deeper and I hadn't really ever thought about that you know they didn't set out to make shallow wheel tracks and they noticed it because theirs weren't that way take the e out of ET evapotranspiration ET evaporation makes you no money when you make the water go through a plant it makes you money when you make it let it just float off the surface it doesn't make you any money so one of the ideas behind this forage cover croppy thing is to try to take something that would have to evaporate to make it dry enough for you to plant or whatever make it go through a go through a plant and yesterday at in Nebraska we had two young farmers that were on a panel and they're both talking about well you know one of the things I really like now that I know till and got cover crops and whatever I can drive in that field anytime I want to and I don't sink in I don't make ruts and all that kind of stuff doesn't happen year one but they've noticed now that that is starting to happen make water in or the soil and then maximize water holding capacity by building the organic matter we've talked about those things today this is a good idea for irrigation is a great idea for those without irrigation like you guys so most of our impact has actually been on the non irrigation part of of the country most of the guys that were irrigating in in 1976 have quit because their lifts are too high and they they grow they make more money per dollar invested by far on their dry land they would on irrigation irrigation is expensive and it costs you a lot of money every day and it and it's it's high management and it gets obsolete and it has issues there's places where irrigation makes sense but you shouldn't be competing with you know until you tell you've used every drop of water the mother nature gives you as efficiently as you can you shouldn't even think about irrigation ecosystems harvest sunlight that drive all other processes sunlight energy that's stored in the residue removing these products from the ecosystem reduces the energy available so if you're taking off all your residue which they are in a lot of places there's nothing to drive that soil biology everybody keeps talking about the soil biology well the soil biology you got to feed them and they eat residue had a guy from Iowa called me the other day and they they going to harvest his corn they're going to take always a dairy you got a grimo the dairy he's going to harvest these corn and then they're going to take cut off and rake up and bail all these corn stocks and he said I want to continue to no tell my soybeans how do I do that I'm going we've got a lot more things to discuss and just how you're going to no tell your soybean that's one of the reasons we're doing the thing with livestock it has to do with the residue and cycling the residue so there's one of our cover crops that mixture of barley oats and peas and whatever and we swath that you've seen these photos there's winter week going back in there's we got the living route it was in winter week during the summer but we also have winter week going back there and it'll be there next spring and then we'll kill it before we plant the corn in this case and this thing stays nice and green in there one of the things that I don't know Cody mentioned it but the stuff we bailed this year those swaths we bailed to make the comparison so we have the residue remute move stuff that swath was pretty wet when we bailed it but it was a wet fall and and so we've had to feed those bales because they were going bad whereas the swath is fine finding really bad stuff in that swath here today no okay went in really wet because the wet fall swath that one is pretty wet it's fine so there's there's our our mamas and their babies eating their swaths but the question always comes up does the swath get spread out if you move that thing a little bit every day they clean it right up but you can see the arm are still in there that swath reach stubble still and they leave that alone it lays down and everybody's happy okay more cows more goats more sheep number one meat eating in the world is goat okay so and they're good at getting rid of canada thistle so we might want to get excited about this but there's no way to feed the people in the world in the future if we're going to take meat away the only way to take marginal land and turn it into human edible protein produce human edible protein on it upgrade the protein is to use rumen and animals and anybody that tries to tell you that we're going to have fake meat and all this stuff they can't make fake meat on marginal land okay so if you're going to feed people we're going to have to use animals which is fine that's what we should be doing anyway 100 grass-fed ground beef certified USDA where was this produced well we get some cows from Montana that have never seen grain doesn't know what grain looks like some coal cows you haul them to them placed in central or eastern south dakota and you put them on cover crops and you fatten them on cover crops you take them in Omaha and you make them in hamburger okay so this is actually being done okay i don't know why i'm having trouble with that i'm probably doing something goofy all tillage tools destroy soil structure all tillage tools decrease water infiltration all tillage tools reduce organic matter and all tillage tools increase weeds 27 000 gallons of water with one percent organic matter and six inches of soil that's a fourth of an inch of water we can increase the organic matter by four percent we've put in an extra inch in the top six inches and extra two inches in the top foot grandpa had more organic matter than you do he came here because it had high organic matter he mined it that's fine now you have to quit doing that uh what about pests well let's talk about aphids given the high rate of reproduction by aphids shouldn't levels continue increase all summer aphids are pregnant females that give birth to pay pregnant females seeing all the guys in the in the audience should be afraid because you could be out of business if you're in the aphid world if you're next reincarnation you're born as an aphid you're really in trouble so pregnant females that give birth to pregnant females you should grow high populations but we don't because aphid population dynamics depend on levels of natural enemies temperature and that kind of thing seven spotted lady beetle females eight on average 115 soybean aphids in 24 hours a male eats 78 the instarts the little things that look like dragons eight 105 the other kind eats 95 males 54 not quite as hungry right so when you go to check how many aphids you got in your weed or how many aphids you got in your soybeans you also count to ladybugs we had a wheat walk at the farm a few years ago and the entomologists are saying oh well he's way above thresholds and i smiled and whatever and we went home that night and Ruth says you're not going to spray are you and i said well i'm going to look at a monday because i have lots of ladybirds in there and the temperature was going to get hot monday or tuesday they're all gone okay so no one knows the number one thing that kills aphids is fungi 84% soybean aphids got whacked by this one fungi so if we know the number one thing that kills aphids is fungi number two are these predators and somebody tells you we're going to come out and spray some herbicide now why don't we just throw a little fungicide a little insecticide in that and it just doesn't cost very much and it can't do any harm okay you're going to kill all your predators seven species of aphid found found seven species of aphid pathogenic fungi were found in them 2003 and 2004 over use of fungicide can cause insect outbreaks if we used too many fungicide you kill you kill the predatory fungi so we had this cover crop few years ago my neighbor come over and we were you know it was one pollinator type thing it was a mustard and it's all flower and just full of bugs he's aren't you going to spray this i said why would i spray this he said well there's bugs in here most bugs are good bugs some of these weren't good bugs but i didn't want to harvest this crop anyway i said i'm feeding my predators so i'm going to have predators around next year when the when the bad bugs show up i got to feed them something to keep them around and let them have babies and stuff so they're ready right over reliance on herbicides leads to resistant weeds and maybe disease problems everybody talks about these resistant weeds one of the problems we have is we have too many bacterial diseases now because we use surfactants too frequently the things like bacterial leaf spot and whatever what what bacteria do is they penetrate them to leave if you put a surfaction on and weaken the wax you're going to get more disease fungicides herbicides and insecticides have collateral damage their disturbance to the system ray mentioned chloride when we get a chloride we always put a little chloride on with our wheat because chloride helps the wheat protect itself from disease so we don't have to put the fungicide on so we just put a little bit on there so it has high high chloride concentration high disturbance techniques hoe drills and such and and vertical tillage increase weed pressure and cause soil erosion and this this is tillage erosion where you pull the top of the hills down as they came north from clumbus just up through Norfolk and indiankton uh came home that way have all these big rolling less hills down there blew up by the Missouri river bottom and they're still doing tillage on them and the tops of the hills are going down to the bottom i couldn't believe they were still doing that okay the way we control pests is we use sanitation rotation and competition pests decides are only part of sanitation to keep weeds from going to seed for instance they're only part of rotation what i want to do in terms of competition is to keep a weed small enough that my crop can compete with it fertilizer placement ray doesn't care about fertilizer placement i do because i don't want my weeds to have it so i'm going to place my fertilizer either in a place or a time when it's not going to benefit the weeds something like palmer amaranth is a huge end feeder and if you if you broadcast nitrogen on you're just feeding the weed so we're going to place a fertilizer three inches from the cornrow at the same depth or the sorghum row i don't care where it's roots are i just don't want the weeds to get to it so i'm going to put it where the plant my plant my beneficial plant can compete with the weeds ecosystem the lake nutrients for extended periods of time become deserts saline seeps and you have some of them out here is because we aren't using and cycling the water in the nutrient uh like it should be and nutrient placement is part of cycling i'm a farmer i take sunlight water and carbon dioxide to make products that i can sell and ray said to me earlier today in a private conversation is what we need to do is be getting to the point where we're selling stuff instead of selling commodities selling stuff that we're we can sell on the internet you guys all know how to do that those old guys don't know how to do that but young guys know how to do that so we're going to produce something and sell it and there's people that want to buy stuff that's produced sustainably or regeneratively or whatever at a half an hour conversation the other day on a telephone on the way down to nebraska stopped on top of hill had a half an hour conversation to the person in charge of sustainability for cargill okay and we've got to be able to give them a product that we can defend and say this is done the right way the best environmental way the best food safety way and and this is the way we do it focus on having the soil wet during the dry part of the year instead of just focusing on having it dry during wet part of the year so you can be the first guy to get done planting right and you know every year people come and i got a neighbor that works the heck out of his ground and sometimes his corn is bigger than mine last weekend in june last thursday in june most of the time it isn't but sometimes it is and guys will look at things and say well his corn is bigger than yours and i used to go through a long explanation now i just say oh i didn't know you harvested corn in june and i turn around and walk away and then kind of end the end of that conversation focus on having the soil cool during the hot part of the year roots don't like it hot and they don't do a good job of taking up nutrients if they're hot that cover that armor it keeps the soil cool so we can have it cool during that hot part of the year that's important to irrigation people it's imperative to rain fed farming mother nature's an opportunist if you have a problem weed disease insect i don't care you provide the opportunity somewhere in your system here's resistant kosher that we developed on purpose in the early 1990s to prove we could it's resistant to pursuit because i said i predicted that was going to happen the company threatened the lawsuit if i didn't retract so i just developed my own and then that negated that whole lawsuit thing uh that's that's kosher right there that's chickpeas hiding in there just for mike earnley that's chickpea mike but we didn't have much at that period of time to control anything in chickpeas we surely couldn't use it now the cross compliant the cross resistance came because those kosher i went and got from somebody that had been overusing glean so it's not just a pursuit thing it's all herbicide said if we don't use them properly now what happens there over here let's look at how this happens if in the old days you guys used to have a little bit of downy brome here you don't have it anymore right it's gone scott you don't have any cheat grass anymore do you he's just grinning uh but that used to be a huge problem because it did a rotation that provided huge opportunities and randy anderson made this statement two years of warm season crops or a fallow one using warm season crop in a fallow reduced number of seeds by 95 percent so if we did weak corn fallow the old equal fallow thing we could take care of cheat grass same thing happens with warm season weeds like the palmer amaranth or waterhemp or something like that and the reason that works is let's take foxtail it emerges palmer amaranth at the same time after the corn's planted and goes to flower before the corn is harvested so it has its whole life cycle here and it can compete in the early phases if i put winter weed in that thing has an emerge winter weed has full canopy and it it's harvested before that thing goes to flower and you can control it just very simple thing we had long-term rotation study maybe some of you remember that we had warm and cool season crops everything was done no-till was in lineman county on some promise oils we did that for 12 years and in the 13th year randy anderson came out we had a what we had to do was was uh planted all uniformly to a wheat crop which we did and he came out and accounted the number of weeds in the different rotations where we did wheat chickpea for 12 years he found 94 weeds where we did wheat corn chickpea found 40 where we did a more diverse rotation that he found seven claire simas who a lot of you still remember had a similar type study where he used an anhydrous knife for once every four years other than that he was no-tilling and he had a loaded he had a high diversity sunflower wheat corn spring wheat and he had a low diversity wheat millet rotation and randy did the same thing with his and what we found was the same trend highest with the low diversity lowest with the high diversity rotation but since i didn't do any disturbance i did better the real comparison there is tillage and poor rotation 225 weeds per square yard or square meter no-till and good rotation seven weeds 97 percent weed control just with cultural practices dad has to do with disturbance so if you're thinking well dad just going to go out and disk a little bit right i mean one of the one of the things i used to tell guys because they they'd want to start no-tilling but dad didn't want or the uncle didn't want to get rid of the machinery just in case we might need it i said fine okay just tell him you'll do that but you know to protect the tires and hydraulic cylinders take the tires off and hydraulic cylinders off before you park it over in the edges and then they really won't be tempted to start up and go out and screw with it when you go on vacation right so because that used to happen at times kid goes on vacation dad goes disk a bunch of ground just just to make it better he took green foxtail place at three depths in the soil zero two and four inches and he looked at the number of live seeds yearly okay after two years if he left it on the surface only 11 percent were still alive buried two inches 28 percent buried four inches 55 percent if you're doing disturbance you're constantly digging up and burying and making seeds go dormant you can't control the weed seed bank so to prove that even further we took four places at dakota lakes i let little areas go to all the weeds grow and go to seed once and then he tilled a small area and left a small area not not tilled and then when we put herbicide on these areas we put a tarp over top of them so they never got herbicides on them and he counted the seedlings yearly for three years okay first year not much difference between tilled and no tilled second year not much difference it's when you have that two-year break that you get the big difference corn pea winter wheat corn if you got a weed that goes to seed in the corn that you really can't control in corn you can get rid of 96 percent of it if you're just doing every other year you can't so there's a typical thing if we drive a little wide with our winter wheat we don't really get a runaway in terms of weeds so real quickly rotation types simple rotations this is the one most people think about wheat corn canola spring wheat winter wheat corn sunflower corn soybean wheat fallow whatever they're simple they're predictable limited number of crops to manage the market this is what a lot of people are doing but they're very predictable to the insects and such rotations with perennial sequences which i think we're going to have to use we're going to have to put those deep roots in that kody was talking about and we can if we we can do a stupid rotation for about six years and then put in a perennial for three or four or the only thing i don't like about this is i'd rather see grasses in there but there's lots of examples of those limited number of annual crops to manage the market excellent place to spread manure if you're going to spread manure you can probably produce more soil structure with annual than annual crop because of the grass especially the grass mixtures disadvantage you've got a kody pointed out today he said we got that new rotation we started we're only putting in a perennial five years out of 20 i'm not sure that's enough okay compound rotations where we take two rotations and make them into simple rotations make them more complex we were talking about one of these at noon spring week winter wheat corn soybean corn soybean half the corn is behind soybeans and half the corn's behind wheat if you're over in the jimmer of a valley that's probably a good good rotation for you because you can grow pretty good corn behind soybeans as you get further west you can't do that you got to have more moisture i call this the mother-in-law of banker rotation because the mother-in-law banker comes to visit you in june you show them this corn planted in the soybean looks great if if they come in august or september most likely you'll take them out and show them the stuff that was in the in the wheat stuff okay still have limited number of crops to manage creates more than one sequence for some crop types if you grow corn behind beans every year you're going to get corn rootworm beetle at five from the cornfield the soybean fields lay their eggs that's happened in eastern uh corn belt if we grow if everybody here grew corn behind wheat we would get corn rootworm that fly to the wheat double to lay their eggs so we got to try to be not predictable complex rotations were cropped for the same crop type varies so we start putting in billet barley instead of two weeks we've got barley or oats we got both sunflower and pea that kind of thing has some advantages very capable of creating a wide array of crop type by sequence combinations sorghum and corn have advantages and disadvantages but they complement each other it takes a lot more crop management skills but this is why we pay you guys the big bucks right it's not you got to have the management skills it's not because you can drive a tractor straight anymore because i got auto steer so now while the tractor is going across the field you can work on your management uh stacked rotations is the one that surprised us and that we developed and we didn't really realize the power until later it's where we put the same crop or crop type twice in a row and the idea is to do that to get the long break the secret here is the long break to let that weed population go down right and so once it's down it takes a couple years for it to come back up again so we do two and then get out of there and we got a four-year break before we come back to that crop again okay we keep the past population diverse or confused uh diversity in sequence in intervals it's a mix of long and short residual herbicide programs for you guys out here if you're afraid of atrazine because the low rainfall if you stack two warm season grasses corn or sorghum or millet one after the other you can use a high rate of atrazine in the first one that's one of the most powerful things you can do it's cheap atrazine is cheap and you can do that kind of stuff and especially if you're doing grazing things okay two-year break between corn and wheat so you don't have to worry about the head scabs thing but the goal is to allow sufficient time for press pressure to decline to very low levels before sequencing the crop or crop type two times we can reduce the risk of developing biotype resistance and we grew the cost of herbicide programs some crop sequences may not be ideal we really don't stack broadleaves very often but the goal is to be inconsistent in both sequence and interval so look at your rotation say how predictable am i right to you it might look predictable to insects i mean if you're just doing something that allows them to develop some habit in the in the core in the western corn belt for instance corn soybean guys now have corn rootworm beetles where the eggs don't hatch for two years instead of hatching first year because it's always one year so they figured that one out that's why they've got to use bt and all that stuff where we don't have to here's some rotations utilizing both stacked in and normal sequences canola winter wheat corn the two corns and then the rest of it's not stacked we got one we use on the farm on the north unit where we do two wheats of pea and then we do sorghum corn actually up there and then and then pea i guess that's when here right here winter wheat winter wheat sunflower sorghum corn pea and this one really is a some kind of an oil seed might be flax whatever dryland rotations again those that's where those at you'll be able to get these slides too but there's no set recipe or best best rotation of everybody needs to pick their own it's going to vary with fields it's going to vary with if your neighbor has resistant kosher and he lets it blow across you it's going to vary with a lot of things and including you know your personal lifestyle when when do you want to have a little vacation time in the summer or whatever show you a few slides there's a rotation in 2006 that wheat meant looked very good 2006 very dry year and right across the road that's what the winter wheat looked like what was the difference there and you can see it from an aerial photo the good-looking wheat was in this corn pea winter wheat and been in that rotation since 1990 this was 2006 and this one was soybean corn pea winter wheat half broadleafs half low residue we didn't have the armor and look at that wheat okay what's it mean in yields 2006 60 versus 29 bushel 7.9 inches of rain from the time we harvested the peas until we harvested the wheat in 2005 when we got 23 inches 92 versus 57 in 2002 which is the first time this happened 6.4 inches in a year 56 versus 28 I can't afford to do I hear this all time I can't afford to grow this I can't afford to do this I've got to do the high value of things I've got to do the low residue things they make me more money they don't make you more money if you look at this type of response this rotation just doesn't have enough high residue so we've taken the soybeans out Cody mentioned this and now we put we have these three-way just looks like this three-way same thing other than we have a five-year perennial sequence in there and in 17 or 18 years we're going to have good information and when I explained that to Cody one day said you better keep riding your bicycle if you're going to be around here to watch that what happens where there is lots of water surely they don't need to worry about this right so corn corn soybean wheat soybean first year soybeans 76 bushels second year soybeans 81 this is under irrigation if I just do corn soybeans I get 62.9 bushel so if I average those two from the other one 78.8 versus 62.9 so the guy doing corn soybeans is getting less soybean yields how about corn yields well continuous corn we've had corn in one field since 1990 it's about 203 bushel the acre average type thing corn soybeans 217 corn corn soybean wheat soybean the two corns average the first one's like 250 or so the second one's 217 or 220 235 okay so what if I grew 5 000 acres of that I got a million bushels if I got 5 000 acres of corn I got a million bushels of corn and a big-ass dryer lots of trucks I mean wow but there's guys that do that and think they make money okay corn soybean I got 2,500 acres of corn I got 2,500 acres of soybean corn corn soybean wheat soybean I got 2,000 acres of corn 2,000 acres of soybeans and 1,000 acres of wheat and there's the bushels okay would you trade 7,200 bushels of corn for 120,000 bushels of wheat today see that's what the numbers show you that can't afford to do anything but corn soybean I produce more bushels of soybeans on 2,000 acres of soybeans in this rotation than you do on 2,500 acres of soybeans in that rotation interesting can't afford to do that small grain over here can't afford not to first time I went to Argentina there was doing seven years of pastures and seven years of cropping and then their cropping was no till with cover crops and diversity corn, wheat, beans and I had a friend of mine we dug out a little bit of soil and he held it up and if you want to talk about what is a healthy soil that's a healthy soil and then they outlawed the export of beef get rid of the beef thing can't export beef keep all the beef for the poor people well the guys the poor people can't eat enough beef they can't pay enough for it so the guys started got rid of the beef and started growing soybeans on soybeans I went back in 2006 and it looked like this exactly the same field and went back a year ago this last fall they haven't changed that yet and now they have lakes showing up where they never had lakes they have rivers showing up where there are never rivers because they've got the water cycle broken so badly we can't expect our governments and our companies and whatever to understand the importance of maintaining our soil resource we have to do this ourselves organic matter makes a difference there's our daughters who are much older than that now one of them might come boffin in here pretty soon but this is a prairie plant and and and cody shows you one of those right compare that to what you get with wheat and whatever and that cycles these nutrients back to the surface of your ph's are dropping your lot you got lime down here but you keep pushing it down to go sideways becomes a saline seat bring it back up get it on the surface but if you haul that off and take it to a feedlot cody showed you that too today that nutrient doesn't get back to the fields all tillage tools destroy soil so structure all tillage tools decrease water infiltration right people i got the vertical tillage thing i got this tillage thing got that thing that works right no it doesn't mother nature doesn't do tillage tillage is the agriculture what fraction is the petroleum they both increase the speed and extent of nutrient removal from the resource leaving the resource degraded that's not where we're about we're not miners i did ask the north dakota and the alberta people when i was there earlier this year what's the hurry why don't you leave some of that some of that oil there for your grandkids i mean do you not like your descendants why are you mad at them why do you got to get rid of it all right away i mean you don't think we're going to use some of that down the road a hundred or two hundred years okay some expert proposed using tillage as a means to address weed resistance if tillage was so good at getting rid of weeds they should all be gone by now and i'd go through the science of that but i'm not going to okay thank you very much it's been a pleasure