 with the NDSU Williston Research Extension Center and this intercropping slash cover cropping slash everything else that's going on field day is a kind of the culmination of this extension risk management agency grant looking at alternative marketing and production practices for post crops so please join me in welcoming Paul. Thank you Adrienne it's great to have everybody here and Nathan will be there in the blue shirt waving he'll be covering the second half of the tour and we'll end up at he and Lisa's farmstead the three fields that we're going to look at of mine are in your packet and there's one that says sunflower pollinator intercropping so the goal of this last year we planted a strip of pollinators right alongside of some sunflowers just to see if we would attract more more pollinating activity get a yield bump off of it and it was kind of pretty but we had to give up 40 a 40 foot pass a crop for the sunflowers we did get a yield bump but we gave up 40 40 feet of crop to do it so the goal this year was to plant them and get them under seeded there is an understory of the sunflowers and see if we can get that same impact of the pollinators getting the the plants getting the pollinating species coming to the sunflower field earlier and and what we chose to use were all species that could stand up to Spartan charge so fava beans flax cow peas what I was shooting for was about 10 to 12 plants per square foot is what we planted okay so they were there but not so much that it would overwhelm the sunflowers and this is the first time I've ever tried this so and I think when we get into the field you'll see it it didn't do too bad one of the other things that we use a air seeder okay we we plug every other row so we're on 15 inch centers on the air seeder to plant but it's all solid seeded and for anybody who's seeded sunflowers with an air seeder you know that it tends to get a little bunchy okay now the planter makes nice rows this makes a little bit more bunchy and so you'll see some advantages of having the pollinators when you get out there to fill in those gaps where the sunflowers didn't get didn't come up so we seeded this at about 27 pounds to the acre cost a buck a pound so we got 27 dollars tied up just in cover crop seed and and then plus the cost of of seeding it so we ended up with three three passes running up the whole length of the field so 120 feet wide we use a 30 foot header so that should work out pretty well to be able to to measure the distance difference on that and the part that's going to be interesting in this field is with the canola off on one edge then we will have quite a gap and then the the pollinator species go up kind of in between these two slews right here so up up that way and and so there are ways away from the canola and then on the other side of them is oats so what i'm looking for if i look at the yield map i want to see if we end up with coming from the oats field and then it goes up where the pollinators are planted maybe it'll come back down again we'll see if it goes back up planted next to the canola because that could be a strategy too is making sure you're planting sunflowers next to next to a canola field for example if you can if you can swing it in your rotation so well so we got a lot of you know lots of moving parts out there to to try and see if it works this this field on this side we've intercropped uh cover crops or interceded cover crops into it after it was at the five leaf it was actually just a little bit past where i wanted it we were getting into early jointing um and and that's when we planted cover crops we put 20 acres in here in the map that's in your handout shows how we planted it on a kitty corner when i get into fall my cover crops are already planted and i'm not trying to plant cover crops post harvest and it is insurable as planted without a written agreement without any notification cover crops interceded into small grains are are insurable crop so we planted uh two strips of peas and i planted those first because you can put them down two inches so that worked pretty well and so we planted the peas i planted 60 pounds in one strip and 90 pounds in the other strip and and the normal seeding rate for that particular variety this year was 195 so half rate third rate as as uh my my peas and then for canola with with my air cedar uh shank type air cedar we typically seed five pounds to the acre of canola and and that's what we did although in the middle of the strip on on both of these i switched it down to four pounds per acre just to see again can we get so the goal of this is to see if we can get like 125 percent of production compared to if we raise just peas or just raised canola how many pounds would we get can we get 125 percent of of production by raising the two of them together uh so that's one goal there the other the other thing we did in this was i did do some nitrogen uh strips that go east west across the field kind of had a miscommunication with the applicator and uh it didn't get done quite the way i wanted to but but i will still go in and we'll do hainy tests on these as well again looking at the soil health in those in those two strips 60 pounds 90 pounds and then also using the there's a chunk in the middle of them both that we'll use for the control and just trying to see are we getting any additional soil health benefit from the peas above and beyond any potential yield increases so that's that's kind of my game if you haven't figured it out is soil health and and a lot of the stuff i'm going to raise the rotations we do all of those things are all geared to how can we build up soil health and and so that we started on this actually a long time ago uh 2005 when we started no-telling but it's it's kind of finally coming around where we're starting to see food companies interested in in things being raised regeneratively customers will be getting of what we consider to be a higher value food product and the farmers hopefully will be getting a little bit of a premium to go along with that and we'll start seeing the the benefits of the food chain coming together for everybody so uh soil health is a big big piece of that so no-tail cover crops crop rotation keeping your stuff covered uh keeping your soil covered all of those things that fit into that this is a way of ensuring i believe when you grab a combine through this you'll just be going along and it'll be 90 soy beans and you'll drive 100 feet and it'll be 90 canola and mother nature picks what's going to work and it depends on rainfall it depends on insects it depends on all kinds of things that we can't control and if you didn't have crop insurance i think this is one way that you insure yourself against a lot of other things um certain stages of uh of growth soybeans will take hail pretty good when they're potted they won't take it very well at all you know and that when you have crops going um that's another insure yourself a little bit against hail as well so that's one reason i do that similarly with uh the next field we go to we'll have uh soybeans that were seeded green into standing rye which was headed out at the time we seeded and um i've done that for quite a few years and and that's worked to varying degrees we got a little light on our seeding right here i want to shoot for eight tenths of a bush or a canola and i know seed count matters and whatever but i wanted to seed it but we even got it on just a little lighter than that in the end so so this uh again there's not a lot of fertility there's not a lot of cost into this uh and no crop insurance and this uh no hail insurance and so there's there's not nearly the same not nearly the cost into this as you would in a conventional field two things i've used to separate inter crops would be this or i've got a quick clean which i didn't pull out i assume a lot of people have seen a quick clean uh the thing with the quick clean is to take off the auger and let it dump out and then those blue conveyors that we have here we slide those underneath um because that that auger that goes up on the quick clean is the limiting factor and you go much faster without it if you have a lot of canola or whatever you'll see what we have here is a land on the deck is a trough on there and then there's a different one on the machine in the back that you'll be able to see and that's the one we use for separating so we'll just put a screen on top say we that that the canola would fall through and that would come out the normal place of the clean grain and then we basically scalp off the top the soybeans and they'd go up the elevator here or the auger and into the truck or we could you can configure this thing different um there's a variety of things you can do this is a air end screen machine so uh there's a lot of things you can do with it um there's a lot of trial and error with it uh so you have to have a good truckload to learn what you're doing so a lot of people have seated into rye at this point that's not really a new thing but i just thought it was an interesting part of the tour because we have uh you know such a difference in color that was pretty common around here this year to have extra nitrogen left from last year uh this one i don't remember so that could have been i mean we may have a nodulation problem because of that but i tend to think that the rye sucks some nitrogen out and that probably wasn't a consideration but that's about all i can think of as to why there's such a stark difference in color i've done this for quite a few years the the reason i like to do it is it's saved on herbicide this just needed a light shot around up to kill the rye and we had no weeds coming whatsoever this we put round up uh full rate around up and spartan pre-plant and we still had weeds coming when it was time to spray and when it was time to spray that one we couldn't hardly find a weed and uh the the rye really works good especially with um mare's tail it's kind of a no-tail weed it's something i never had a problem with until we started i suppose we were eight or nine years into no-tail before we had trouble or before we had any mare's tail uh i think the rye is a real useful tool there's there's i suppose differences in seating rate depending on what your goal is uh and and things like that but it it's a cheap it's a cheap herbicide to me it really works really well on kosha and mare's tail i think this has a lot of value for weed control and weed control is a big concern in all of agriculture right now