 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. I am speaking about some soils topics around the state this year and this is an abbreviated version of that because of time and the highlight of what I need to want to share with you is basically all work that's been done mostly on No-Till. That's a bulk of what we do anymore, I guess that's my interest as well. I'd first like to highlight the rig here, El Miran's planting rig there, you all know him very well from the commercials on TV, just a wonderful set of commercials that promote soil health and No-Till and I think they've done a great job with that. To get started I want to really look at the folks behind the scenes as well, highlight them because what I do is part of what they do and so it's a team effort. Sarah Berg on the left, she's going to start with extension here this summer, she's working with Dr. Sexton right now and her masters and we really are eager to get her on board with extension and she's also very related, she has a farm by Baltic so she's well into it as well. Then Ruth Beck, colleague and peer, really enjoy working with her and I've got a couple of her research projects here in the data set, David Karky in the middle there from Watertown, been working on cover crop research with him and some soil fertility stuff and then I have a plant pathologist up here, Connie Strunk from Sioux Falls and she and I got a grant from the soybean research and promotion council to do a lot of this work, the soybean work and so that's why she's up here and then Dr. Sexton, a manager at Southeast Farm do a lot of work, work down there at the Southeast Farm and they like to bring highlight to our sponsors, of course the soybean board, Dow, West Central, Coke Fertilizer and then the Southeast and Northeast Research Farms. This data I showed you last year, this is the nitrogen calibration work that Ron Gelderman started in 2013, it was carried on in 2014 after he left. Just as a little review, our current recommendations are at 1.2 pounds of end per corn yield goal and it looks like if we can get a chance to kind of summarize this data and publish it, that maybe those recommendations would be changing to one, one pound of end per corn on the yield goal there and this is our end rate calculator for corn, if we go to that one versus 1.2 on a 200 bushel yield goal that's about 40 pounds or at 38 cents about $15 an acre, so something to really consider there as well. Reason I reviewed this is I'm kind of sharing that information getting folks used to that because there's some regulatory reasons to kind of get folks used to the one as a coefficient and so we're just kind of spreading the word a little bit but officially SDSU recommendations have not been changed from 1.2 to 1 but I think the evidence is strong that that can be done. Yes, well the program we used to use at the lab would estimate an average and I can't we don't have the lab on campus anymore so I can't speak for what other labs do but if you use a 20 to 25 pounds and that's 6 to 24 that's pretty pretty close to an average but that's that's what the lab would do if they didn't have that deep test. The reason I highlighted this slide is we had some data from back in the 90s that would show that we needed an extra 30 pounds for for what we would consider no new no-till fields there that are building carbon building organic matter we need to build the nitrogen in the soil as well this is the yield response curves and we can easily tell that the optimum nitrogen rate for no-till and conventional till we're different at that time about that 30 pounds difference so that's where that came from is a number of studies that we had that did that but this is about six year no-till young no-till got that organic matter increasing rapidly Sarah Berg who I mentioned going to be joining extension is working on her thesis with Dr. Sexton they have a 24 year tillage comparison at the southeast farm and basically what they're finding is there's a lot of curves here but the optimum in rate is pretty much the same so I guess at some point in longer term no-till fields we can we can maybe take away that extra and that may be required what do we do in the interim between shorter term no-till longer term this 24 year no-till that that's a that's a good guess it's probably somewhere in between Dwayne would say we can manage that with cover crops and rotations and that that's true but this is the corn soybean rotation here in no-till so it looks promising that possibly that those end rates will be will be the same wanted to highlight some work that we did do at El Muran's farm he likes to do field scale work which is great this study done on about a 65 acre field we were looking at side dress nitrogen basically here in this treatment here so we had a low end rate at about 140 pounds of end per acre all applied pre the side dress had that 140 pre plus 50 at v6 knifed in as a liquid and then the high end rate would be the 190 that was all put down pre we took some year-leaf samples couldn't find any difference there in the nitrogen in the leaf did some stock testing there at the end of the season at physiological maturity and then basically no difference in yield so what do you why don't what was the reason we didn't get any response between these treatments anybody have a have a thought there can it matter anybody else moisture maybe the end rate was too high exactly yeah we had it we had 54 pounds in the soil so if our end rate was too high to begin with we we didn't have any sensitivity in our measurements so we're going to try this again next year with a little bit lower end rates and see if we can pick up some benefit from applying side dress nitrogen a couple other studies I want to highlight this one on corn we did some micronutrient work born copper manganese we were really interested in the born and the manganese because of some things going on in the industry so we just threw copper in as well had five sites here you can see across the top the yields a variety of yields a little lower here at the Northeast farm but all all no-till sites basically the take-home message no significant yield increase to those nutrients and every one of those sites the university recommendations would have been zero for those nutrients same thing on soybeans five different sites again short of the long of it is no significant difference in those yields as well and so we do this once in a while to really confirm if our new recommendations are still valid or if something has changed and we need to learn something new a couple studies that Ruth Beck did out in Hughes County on soybeans a starter fertilizer inoculant study a control soybeans with granular inoculant pre inoculated seed and then that pre inoculated seed with starter 60 pounds of map at planting in a corn soybean rotation at irrigated what's the take-home message there no significant difference in those yields as well in another study she did some late season end work on that another pivot applied at R3 a nitrogen 30 pounds a N is UAN there applied through the pivot no one yes with and without and no difference in the leaf tissue and no difference statistically in the yields but numerically maybe slightly higher with that nitrogen applied at the three stage a lot of interest in cover crops and and amount of nutrients contained in those crops Jim Miller crop consultant from Redfield Precision soil management had a huge interest as well and actually got the work done something that we have been unable to do but had several fields with different mixes of cover crops in there mostly after wheat some hailed soybeans and corn solids in there and you can see the difference in the amount of nitrogen that was taken up by those cover crops but what I did is I calculated or maybe Jim did this but I did a little calculation on one of these numbers but basically large amounts of nitrogen that these cover crops are I call them sequestering or converting to the from the inorganic form to the organic form and so anytime we do that we we catch and release as Dwayne would say and so these cover crops are catching releasing these nutrients so it really depends on the amount of dry matter that you've accumulated and the species of the cover crop and I'll for the essence of time I'll keep going he also measured carbon and nitrogen than those and we in determine the carbon to nitrogen ratio and the take-home message is the more broad leaves the radishes the brassicas the legumes the lower the carbon to nitrogen ratio the more grasses in the mix the higher the carbon to nitrogen ratio so using this type of information you can manage for what you want to do and I believe the Haney test and and all that's getting at whether you need a high carbon cover crop or a high nitrogen cover crop this is kind of where this is coming from so my proposal is let's start managing that carbon and nitrogen ratio and let's forget about the car cat and exchange capacity we hear so much about the cat and I got a rise out of dr. Ward he knows what I'm talking about so so basically the take-home message is let's let's let's hone in on the biology let's let's think about what we're doing with our cover crops consider the carbon and nitrogen ratio and I think we're going to be in a good good point so the ideal carbon and nitrogen ratio in the soils about 24 to 1 I read that 16 parts of that carbon is for energy and 8 parts for maintenance so if you add back wheat and corn which are high carbon residues you're probably not going to have enough and in those microbes will mobilize that in but you've got a high carbon source there if you want some nitrogen released that you know falafel look like those are the ones that can do that and I just have those as simple examples so there's my contact information I want to end with a little bit of fun and I'm going to hopefully try to do that here I've been working with Dr. Sexton on some cover crops and and and and Dwayne as well we're looking for something that's as Pete would say bulletproof okay got it control control this is one of those things that that Pete has determined as somewhat bulletproof I don't have the audio sorry to say I should have it to get the effect but what's going on here is we have an airplane that's seating a cereal lie in the corn this is on September 19th on on my farm if you look really close you can see that right there it went just hit it doesn't hurt you I was standing right out there and it just comes raining down and and it's just fine there's another shot of that airplane coming I think sure wished I had the volume because it was a lot of fun to hear the plane go roaring over top but anyway there's the effect of the video I've got some pictures of what that cover crop would look like there is on September 26th so we spread that on the 19th there's the 26th there's a rice seed there laying on top of the soil surface it's sent a little route in into the soil and it's growing this is poor no tell isn't it no residue cover I did this in this part of the field it's a gateway into the field where it's hard to keep the residue cover by one to show that seed growing on the surface so that says September 26th here's September 26th also out in the field where there's some residue you can see those young rye plants coming up here it is on September 2nd got a lot more growth that that corn is is matured it's dying down there's light coming into the canopy and that rye is doing quite well and here we are on October 15th a little bit harder to see but basically it's it's it's it's stewing out or it's tillering a little bit wanting to develop some roots and but a lot more light in that canopy at that point and then right at harvest on October 22nd you can see that we got it's got some more leaves and stalks laying there at a big windstorm but you can see that the growth looks really well this is one of our attempts in corn and soybean country to introduce a crop cover crop into that rotation and if you're in weak country rise a swear word I understand that I was told that several times but just wanted to show you some of the things that we're trying to do in the east to get cover crops going so Pete let's take a couple of questions for you as long as these mic'd up so sure that was kind of quick but we got to get to Pete and Dwayne so actually I had a person that hauled a lot of manure and really beat it up a lot of really bad and it came back not too bad that's just an anecdotal evidence I took that picture right before I went through with the combine and my combine goes through and then those rye plants are covered with with husk and thing you kind of wonder what's going to happen right maybe Pete has more experience there but it seems to come out of it quite well and start growing in the spring I think Brian has a question okay did you see a brassica there Dan no I intended to just do a rye 40 pounds an acre I went out and checked and I had some brassicas and so I called my agronomist I order from say hey did we miscommunicate he said no blankity blank seed tender that we used to get your ride to the airport had some other cover crop seed left in it so I got I got some brassicas for free but just rye 40 pounds an acre okay we're gonna do a oh he's okay okay just a couple things to get started here I need to give some credit we're credit is due Dwayne is the first guy to talk to me about putting winter rye into corn probably seven years ago I had the good fortune to go visit there right away when I hired on and that stuck with me and we picked up a grant from the Sun Grant and we tried winter rye over several years both flying it on and drilling it and again if you're raising winter wheat just close your ears but if you're in a corn soybean system you can listen so basically as far as being bulletproof what we found was if we put it on in the fall if we had a dry fall and it didn't take and you think you had nothing there it would come in the spring so even if you don't get a stand in the fall you would get a stand in the spring and other things we tried would tend to either just sprout and die winter kill or not come out to put all in the spring so that's how the rise kind of a low-risk cover crop and then the question about the traffic I think just think of a small grain sprayer traffic you're out there before it really starts to joint if you're putting an herbicide down early you really don't see that much damage and you have the benefits as Dwayne said okay with this I'm gonna talk first just on some soil temperature data that Anthony said I should share and then I'm gonna talk about some cover crop work we've been doing the last few years at the Southeast Farm and we've also started doing some grazing and I need to acknowledge Warren Rushi and Elaine Grings as people working with us on the livestock side of it and I also need to acknowledge Sand County Foundation has given the Southeast Board some support for instrumentation for monitoring soil moisture and temperature and NRCS has given us support to help look at grazing cover crops so I need to we're getting help from different places I have to say thank you for that okay so all that said we'll start with the soil temperature data this is looking at no till versus tilled in a long-term rotation study it's on soybean stubble and this is in May and we're looking at a diurnal temperature shift and we see the the warmer part of the day the conventional till is a little warmer than the no till this is in June so again just looking at three days and they're coming a little closer we get into July and we have canopy closure and they're about the same actually no till this year measured just a little bit warmer at the peak of the day in July and August so we start out a little cooler and then once the canopy closes it's the same and I have to say this year we had very well timed rain we had about seven inches extra moisture that we usually don't get and it was fairly well spread out in July and August in a dry year I think we would see the conventional till would be warmer in August which would be detrimental but in this particular year we didn't see any difference if we look at it across the season this are hourly temperature measurements and here in May and June we're a little cooler in the no till we came about 1.6 degrees cooler for the first 35 days or 1.8 I should say 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit cooler and then once we had canopy closure it leveled off and I figure your growing points down below the ground about 30-35 days so maybe we lost somewhere on the order 60 to 70 growing degree days so maybe two three days relative maturity difference not too much and then we're a little actually a little warmer here and I'm not sure if that's just experimental error or it could be we've got a little more microbial activity going on because in the till system we're telling our residue in out here it's getting all burned up really before the crop needs it towards the minerals and nutrients being released whereas in the no-till system the residue is breaking down throughout the year and we would get more mineralization when the crop needs it when it's filling grain the next July and August so anyway in this study was just a tad warmer and I think maybe we had a little more activity but that's just speculation on my part so there's the soil temperature data there we'll go into the cover crop study we had two blends we had a blend that was mostly broad leaves mostly cool season turnips radish peas lentils 75% of that and then we had another contrasting blend was 75% grasses so oats barley millet and sorghum Sudan and there's the blends there and then we put cattle out there and we looked at the rate of gain in the cattle on each of these two blends and we came back and looked at the corn yields the next year with and without nitrogen so there's the soil temperatures in our three treatments so the control is no cover crop and no grazing and we can see we had the least residue there so we had the most oscillation and temperature colder at night warmer in the day the grazed was kind of in between and ungrazed had the most residue so it had more damper swings in temperature so not as cold at night not as warm during the day and if I look through the season again once the canopy closes you didn't have any difference this is control minus the grazed and we're about one degree Fahrenheit warmer in the control and then this is grazed versus ungrazed and we're about one degree Fahrenheit warmer where it was grazed versus where it wasn't if we look at the take a step back and look at the performance of the cattle we had we got saddled with some rodeo calves so it was my crew didn't have a lot of fun trying to keep them where they were supposed to be and they moved around a bit so the data is a little noisy yeah what's called we'll never do that again anyhow so here's the average daily gains we got and I did just by a little bit of background we were on rye and oats double okay the rye had very few volunteers the oats had a lot of volunteers because we're getting paid better for a better test weight so we tend to turn the air up a little bit so we got a whole slew of volunteer oats we're following oats and then we have plus minus our you know our broad leaf mix and our grass mix so if we look at the rye very few volunteers broad leaf cover crop mix it's 31% grass so we came pretty close to our target was to be 25% grass we were 31% grass they're the same cover crop mixture but we're on old stubble so we have old volunteers it's 81% grass then the rye with the grass cover crops 83% our target was 75 in this case so we're close without the volunteers and then the oats so we got a lot of volunteers plus a grass cover crop is 96% grass and if we look at that cattle average daily rate of gain it's about 1.6 or 1.7 pounds per head per day with the mostly broad leaf mix and as we get more grass as we come up here about 2.6 pounds per head per day with mostly grasses in the mix and again because of the noise it's not statistically significant but you can see the trend there that the plant the cover crop blends that had more grass is intended to give us a little better rate of growth on the cattle and the people I was working with in animal science weren't really surprised at that they said basically the brassicas are very digestible if you send them into a lab for analysis they come back very high for digestibility and protein but they're very high moisture and they think the high moisture content limits the intake so not saying you know the brassicas are good feed but if your name of the game is to get more cattle production you want to have more grasses in the mix or provide some grass hay maybe okay so we'll go from there and look at impacts on corn yield the next year so I broke this out we hit by main what we call main effects so we have every combination of plus minus grazing plus minus broad leaf or grass cover crop and plus minus nitrogen so we have each combination of that and just breaking it out by the main effects just comparing the broad leaf to the grass cover crops across all the nitrogen and grazing treatments the broad leaf cover crop gave us about 15 bushel per acre better corn yield the next year than did the grass based cover crop if we compare the graze to the not graze this difference is about 179 versus 175 and it was non-significant so we didn't really see a significant effect of grazing and there was a slight maybe benefit to it but anyway four bushel per acre there but it's not statistically significant so at least we can say grazing didn't hurt anything and then if we look at plus minus nitrogen the difference here is about 50 bushel per acre now if I break this out into individual treatments so each of these bars this first bar is no no grazing and no cover crop the red bar is full graze the green bar is partial no grazing and the yellow bar is partial grazing but we had a lot of hard trouble managing for that partial grazing so basically we want to focus on this red and green bars and down here this first group is no nitrogen with a broad leaf cover crop mix no nitrogen with the grass and then broad leaf with nitrogen grass with nitrogen and these statistically are all the same there's no significant effect there so with the broad leaf cover crop it didn't matter whether we grazed or not if we look at the grass cover crop this is statistically significant here so where we had a grazed cover crop we didn't see any drop in yield where we didn't graze and we had a heavy grass cover crop we dropped the yield significantly about close to 30 bushel here about 25 bushel so grazing significantly benefited a heavy grass cover crop mix and then when we add nitrogen we basically lose those effects although the the broad leaf cover crop still did a little better than the grass with nitrogen but basically nitrogen evens it all out so that last date I showed you was from small plots or 50 by 50 foot plots where we had exclusion fence out then we had some large plots they're about a quarter of an acre in size or and so this is a plot yields from those plots so these are all grazed so the zero nitrogen 160 and broad leaf versus grass and the plots up the yield there is 12 rows by about 400 feet and there's a significant nitrogen effect against about 60 bushel per acre and then the broad leaves yielded about 15 bushel per acre better than the grass that wasn't quite statistically significant the chance there's about one out of five that it's due to random events but we see that there was a significant increase in seed size between broad leaf cover crop and grass so I think this yield effects is real okay so we're moving away from grazing we have some work where we compare a number of different cover crops and we've been doing this in different form or fashion for several years and we have a hairy vetch blend where we're looking to get the hairy vetch to overwinter and put on growth in the spring but I haven't succeeded yet it's winter killed every time we've tried it then I have a low residue and a high residue blend which is basically the same as what we looked at the other one this is 75% cool season broadleafs and this is 75% grasses and then I have a broad leaf blend that again is mostly cool season broadleafs and looking at Duff the following year I have my grass based blend versus a broad leaf based blend and this is late June so it's like June 28th and we have about 20% more a residue on the field at the end of June where we have a grass based cover crop than we do with a broad leaf based cover crop and if I we didn't have time but if we'd taken this measurement in May the difference would have been even greater because they're all going to zero you know we go up there in the fall you can't see any difference so these grass based systems again as Anthony said you know higher carbon to nitrogen ratio I like to think of it in terms of fiber the more fiber you have the longer it's going to last so if you want residue because you're trying to save moisture this is a good thing if you're in a situation where you think it's too wet and you'd like to open it up more than you want to go with a more broad leaf based okay this is a temperature difference broadleaf versus grass and they're pretty similar but if you average this out it's about point six degrees cooler under the grass treatment again I think it's just a function of more residue okay this is a response of each of those to nitrogen and so I have two controls so this treatment had a double set of controls and we have zero 40 80 120 160 200 pounds of nitrogen and they really follow along similar lines it looks like we get some separation up here with the broadleaf blends tending to yield a little better so I asked my technician Sarah Berg to run a linear plateau analysis on it so the computer could do its thing and it wouldn't just be what I thought and this is what the computer came up with as a best fit and the controls and the grass based blend come in about 12 bushel per acre less than what we see with the broadleaf based blend and that's pretty consistent with what we see other years and the other thing I wanted to point out here is at least with these blends that we're looking at we really don't see where it's sparing any nitrogen if we had if our broadleaf blend was really giving us more nitrogen I you know we'd end up with some points out here where in the control where we didn't fertilize we'd see the broadleaf blend would be up here because it provided more nitrogen but they're all follow along that line so and we're not you know we're only about 20 25% legumes and probably about 50% brassicas so maybe if we had more legumes that would change it but basically with what we've got we don't see it affect where we're saving nitrogen we do see a yield effect but we don't see it where it spares nitrogen okay so we've done something along these lines for several years and so I just by way of summary I thought I'd pull those together so in 2012 we had a very dry year our yields in the trial were around 30 bushel per acre we just got hammered and I remember talking to my board then and I said guys this is the driest year I have ever remembered and they were older than me and they said yeah this is a driest year we remember too so I didn't feel quite so bad so anyhow we got 30 bushel per acre that year in 2012 but even when that dry dry year we picked up 11 bushel per acre yield gain with the cover crop broadleaf based cover crop so this is comparing the broadleaf based cover crop to control no cover crop so drought year 11 bushel per acre gain and that was significant at 10% level 2014 we picked up 7 bushel per acre this year the same trial we picked up 12 bushel per acre and then if I pull in the grazing plots so this is grazing with the large plots we get 15 bushel per acre with the cool season in this case versus a grass cover crop but the grass usually behaves like a control and this is grazing with small plots we've picked up 14 bushel per acre comparing the cool season broadleaf to no cover crop so if the average rolled out out it's 11 bushel per acre so these aren't all statistically significant but you can see the trend there and I pulled the data from 2014 and 2015 because these years were pretty similar and if I put those two years together and run the statistical analysis on it it comes out the average about 10 bushel per acre yield gain with the cool season broadleaf cover crop versus no cover crop and that's significant at a point oh six level which is your chances are between one out of anyway your chances are over 90% it's a real effect so there's some variability there but I think we can say on average at the southeast farm anyway we're picking up around 10 bushel an acre benefit with these cool season broadleafs now if you're in a really dry area that may not be what you want so I just have to put that caveat on there this is at Beersford in another place with less rainfall you might want a different cover crop mix and we talked about that so I'll just go through the summary really quick first the trend for cattle to gain weight faster with a greater proportion of grass and the cover crop blend a soil temperatures were intermediate with the grazed and control because the residue levels were intermediate and then we're adequate nitrogen was providing grazing really didn't affect the yield of the next crop where we didn't fertilize the grass based cover cover crop blend benefited from grazing and corn following a broadleaf blend tended to yield better than following a grass based blend I said this is the grass based blends in our work comes out real similar to control meaning no cover crop unless you graze it and the difference here is as I just said before is around the order of 10 bushel per acre on average okay treatments with less residue tend to have 1 to 2 degree Fahrenheit greater temperature during mid-may to mid-June and I figure that's you're looking at 35 to 70 growing degree days once you get past you know mid-June your growing points up above ground for the corn crop and you're running on air temperature rather than soil temperature and we haven't seen an effect of the cover crop on nitrogen fertilizer requirements and we've done the nitrogen response work in 2012 we had data 2014 and 2015 and we haven't seen a real effect where we spared nitrogen in any of those cases we didn't get any cover crops in 2013 because they wouldn't grow in that drought of 2012 I mean we didn't we don't have data from 2013 because we didn't any cover crop growth in 2012 all right this season had almost ideal rainfall during seed filling and it's kind of what I said tried to allude to earlier in a drier environment we might see a yield response to having more residue on the surface so just this data is from Beersford's just keep that in mind as you interpret it okay with that I think I better pass the mic over to Dwayne We're seeing work we've done we're either going in after winter rye or oats and we're seeing probably about the first week of August generally first or second week of August and cattle go out early October before the ground freezes yeah if you're not a cattle producer and you want to let those in the mix if you were if you wanted to increase the nitrogen rate but it kind of depends on your system there if you've got nitrate in the ground let go over from your small grain those legumes are going to take nitrate off before they fix it and so but I would say I would say if you want to push push your nitrogen put more legumes in the mix and particularly ones that are going to withstand the frost right so like cowpeas as soon as you get a frost they're toast so you're looking at them coals and bees and I follow beans you could drive a follow beans a really big seed size I need that to be expensive I don't think anything else comes to mind there well for legumes fall legume type things well and that's where the hairy vats or something can and the clovers keep going into fall chickling vats you go fairly late into fall but cowpeas they go back to they go back to Kansas as soon as it gets about 37 degrees it doesn't have to freeze it okay with that we're going to turn over to Dr. Dwayne Beck really needs no introduction he's been the manager of the SPSU the Dakota Lakes Research Station here here since I think about when the glacier receded he took over 17 thousand years ago this is our lateral move systems with Jorgensen's cows and you can see the buckets hanging down those we had ropes hanging down that held the wires there posts on those and then the buckets and that's that was a wire so when we moved it we just turned it on to move and the cows come running and then they're eating the swath swath graze stuff so that's kind of interesting we're trying to build this self-propelled grazing cell I was told that we're supposed to talk about new things so that's one of our new things that one cow weighed 1944 pounds so they weren't like small cows they were big cows or small elephants I was trying to decide that Brian when they showed up and they come out of that truck what the hell is this so we're going to try to go through this we had a lot of talk about weed control you know we've been no-telling forever and one of the first weeds that got us was mairstail but it grows in the fall that fall 24d roundup thing just wax it right out we had one called yellow goats billard or meadow salsify does the same thing and the thing is you got a problem you'd provide the opportunity and there's a lot of research and I think I've got some I didn't put all of it on your sheet but you can look at Randy Anderson stuff tillage is not a solution it makes the weed control problem worse because it randomizes a seed bank so you're better off with diverse rotations and not disturbing the seed zone and I got all kinds of data so if you want to argue about that come talk to me I got it on the computer and I'll show it to you but we're going to have dinner sometime but remember mother nature is an opportunity so if you got a problem you provided the opportunity and if tillage was good as getting rid of weeds and eastern South Dakota the son of bitches would all be gone so this is that first one that happened and we actually intentionally caused kosher to become ALS resistant because I was under a third of a lawsuit for saying that was going to happen and so we made it happen and then the lawsuit was dropped kind of like a Donald Trump thing I don't know what's going on there but we now use pursuit because we can take that back out of there and there is some resistant weeds yet but we got we got them down to low enough population they're not a problem you know and there's always been weeds that are resistant to Roundup when you started there's resistant ones okay and some of them you just like said this morning you set the jug on them but you just don't let them become a problem okay that's really so if you're looking at resistant weeds rotations here's water hemp 10 and 100 if you do a rotation that's one year out corn soybean for instance if you're controlling it in the corn year not the soybean year something 10 of them turned to 10 million in seven years okay if you have a more diverse rotation where you're doing controlling them two years out of three like putting the weed in there like was asked about they don't blow up for a long time like over 17 years if you do what guys are doing Roundup every year in the corn soybean corn soybean is not a rotation it's a two crop monoculture okay so if you're using Roundup on both sides and whatever the same chemistry it blows up in about four or five years and so yeah we're going to have that problem unless you stop doing what you're doing and here's the other ways to handle it more diverse rotations two in and one out is this guy right here so corn corn bean if you're going to do something that makes more sense okay natural control benefits two years out if you're doing wheat or something like that and you get two years out you get 95 percent control and I just same thing happens with warm season weeds and cool season crops you gotta change that crop foxtail for instance or water hemp if you want to it gets in sync with the corn soybean rotation but not with the wheat rotation because the wheat's harvested before water hemp it's up there it's competitive the water hemp won't grow and if it does grow you can kill it once the wheat's harvested okay this is a rotation study we did I guess this thing doesn't really show up on there but this is a rotation that we did rotation study we did for 12 years Randy Anderson come out and counted the weeds after 12 years we put on no herbicides and he came out just a half section of ground with 15 different rotations and he come out in those plots and counted the weeds in the plots that 12th year where we had no herbicides then counted in the wheat plots where we did a rotation that's two cool season crops wheat chickpea like corn soybean he had 94 where we had wheat corn chickpea he had 40 and where we did this more diverse rotation he had 7 and that's with no herbicides okay he did the same thing where Claire Stymus did a study out west river that was tilled once every time he needed to use anhydrous he used anhydrous so it's just during his wheat year or his corn year he would use anhydrous and that's all he did for disturbance so he counted the weeds in Claire's plots and where Claire had a similar type rotation he had 225 versus totally no disturbance 94 44 versus 7 where he had a more diverse rotation and then the point is if you're doing tillage you have more problems controlling weeds than where you're doing a true no-till thing 225 weeds with poor rotation and like corn soybean and disturbance versus 7 where you have good rotation and no disturbance so Randy got intrigued by this so he did a study on our farm where he buried Green Fox Hill 242 4 inches deep measuring the number of light seeds yearly just coming out and pulling out the ones that grew and letting other ones grow and we put no herbicides on it after 2 years where he left them on the service he only had 11 left where he buried them 2 inches deep he had 28 and where he buried them 4 inches deep he had 55 the same thing happens with white mold if anybody tells you to do tillage get rid of white mold tell them to look at the literature they're totally wrong 2003 we did a whole thing in Sioux Falls where he brought in Greg Grau's graduate student that showed that best thing you do get rid of white mold is to grow a cover crop to fool it and make it go early make it go in a year when you don't have something okay and then he did a thing where he come out and we just let the weeds that we had go to seed once everything that was there to 4 different sites on the farm and then he took a little tiller and tilled them in 1 to 3 inches deep versus leaving them undisturbed and then he counted seedlings for 3 years okay same thing 100% were number weeds that grew first year where there was tillage and then he just compared everything to that 88% where we did no till left them on the surface first year second year 48 versus 32 you gotta have that longer break to get that third year in there get out to the third year get 2 years in between when you use that susceptible thing think of these as being resistant weeds so to speak because we weren't using herbicides on them and we're down to 4 so we get 96% weed control after 2 year break so if you're doing corn pea winter wheat corn you get weeds that go that you miss in corn the resistant weeds you get them in the peas in the winter wheat and you come back to corn again you only have 4% left if you haven't disturbed if you disturbed you have 33% of them left that's what that's telling you but if you're doing corn being corn or corn pea corn you got 48% of them left with tillage and 32 doesn't make any difference neither one of those is acceptable okay this one we used to have an auto steer auto steer better than that right anyway that's my weed control stuff that I really wasn't intended to show you but I guess I did show you a little little cattle stuff and then we'll go eat lunch okay now that's a peat I know I have it here's my damn computer I should be able to find it right I was going to show you a bunch of fertilizer stuff too and I can tell you that's all in your sheet so we're going to leave that alone maybe the point is on fertilizer Peter are you using starters no but not 2 by 0 right you're not putting your fertilizer nitrogen 2 inches to the side of the row well if you're doing that don't look at his responses to nitrogen because it's worth 20 bushels of the acre for us in no till to put that nitrogen to the side band and we can get by with lower rates my opinion okay soil health that's what we're talking about today that's Dan Forge's hands and Mike Cronin's soil so they're both here so in no till everything that pops up is you got to do no till and I'm not sure why we don't understand that if you disturb the soil you can have a healthy soil it just doesn't happen mother nature doesn't do tillage and then you need diversity diverse rotations plus cover crops I don't think you can do it just with cover crops and not diverse rotation you got to have diversity more diversity and then I think we actually need livestock and we get those three together and we need the livestock because I think eventually we got to quit exporting our nutrients to China somebody said well China is buying our sinjenta China is buying your damn phosphorus a train load of soybeans going out of here has over half a million pounds of phosphorus in it they're buying your phosphorus you don't think anything of that I'd rather sell them sinjenta than sell our phosphorus 200 years or 600 years sinjenta won't even know that name but if we sold our phosphorus we sold our phosphorus healthy soil we ran into this I've shown you this before this is Argentina years ago when they used to do seven years of farming and seven years of of pastures and then they would come in with diverse rotations and cover crops on the left you see the hairy vetch cover crop black oats and hairy vetch had been killed and they're planting soybeans into it as mostly black oats I think but that's what the soil look like and if you want to know what a healthy soil is that's what it looks like your soil doesn't look like that then you don't really have a healthy soil you know you're maybe getting there but that's what it should look like and that big earthworm hanging there and and then they outlawed the export of beef and they outlawed the export of beef because they wanted the guys to quit doing cattle and start doing more soybeans so it was easier to tax them that was what was going on and that's been going on for a number of years that's just the ending now you should be watching what's happening in Argentina because they've had a political change and they're going to go back to probably doing more cattle which it would be good for Argentina it may cause some consternation here but this particular field that was taken in 1996 after the glaciers left and then it is kind of interesting though because kids come from SDSU to the farm and we've had rotations that have been going longer than they've been alive and it always gets them when you remind them of that they go and then they go God he must be older than my dad but I went back to that same field in 2006 and after doing corn and soybeans that's what it looked like there's not enough carbon in corn and soybeans to have a healthy soil you've got to add more carbon and so we really try to get more high carbon type soils Ruth and I went to France last February a year ago this week I was still in Ghana but we'd been to France before that and they took us to see all their castles and they'd show you the grain reeds in the castles and they said where did they grow the grain for these grain reeds and they said well around the castle and they said well that soil is so degraded it won't grow anything anymore and then I reminded them that my ancestors and all your ancestors pretty much left Europe and came here looking for good soils to degrade because all the soils in Europe had been degraded already so we just don't have time to screw around not get serious about starting to preserve things this is what the soil looks like in France hey you wait 100 years I was going to look just like that and so I'm coming in yesterday I'm going to look just like that if we keep doing what we're doing now what are new things real fast we got three projects going with the profit thing one is to restore native vegetation as much as we can to roadsides and public lands this is core land between us and the river that was Cresta wheatgrass and we've now switched it to tallgrass prairies at pier because that's what Lewis and Clark found when they came there and if you don't recognize these guys John Cooper's the guy with the cap on in the back and his head of game fishing parks and I brought him out there and said did you plant these and he goes no and I said well we got him to come back clay seed balls so one of the things we're doing is that roadside habitat thing we put our ditch our road ditch from Broomegrass to Tallgrass Prairie we should have told DOT before we did it but if you want to hear that telephone conversation we can do that over lunch we're doing something with seed ball technology and like Anthony and Pete talked about putting rye on and sometimes it grows and sometimes it doesn't we have to have a way to be able to put our cover crops on and get them started before we harvest their first crop and do that consistently and it's going to come down to putting on some kind of seed coat and this is something we had a German kid make we had about a hundred thousand dollars worth of those seed balls made up last year and we're going to be doing quite a bit of it this year to look at that as part of this Buffett effort here's some of the stuff that has been done this year just preliminary stuff looking at in the greenhouse and in the field what happens when they go out here's some taff with no coating and the 34 percent 50 percent 70 percent that's how much coat we put on them and you see that it doesn't grow as well if you got too much coat which might be good if we want it to delay and then the A means it's got an absorbent on it that helps attract moisture and that's that appears to be helping us and we've got some data you know both in the field and in the greenhouse and the pluses and minuses tell us where it did good or bad it was just kind of a good preliminary piece of work here's some stuff we put flax out into sunflowers when the sunflowers were relatively small but they were growing we have a lot of trouble up last even with no-till sunflowers when they come through in the spring and seed something into them the dirt will try to blow because the sunflowers are just kind of Mickey Mouse so we went out and you see these little flaxes growing these were coated flax the flax without coating didn't grow at all so we're kind of just at the very infancy of looking at that cover crops for grazing instead of letting your wheat straw sit here we're going to put a high carbon cover crop because we need to get more carbon in the soils and build them that hay millet thing like that as it gets colder it kind of quits growing like the cow peas and then the oats come up through it and then we'll swath this and we'll graze it okay we're doing a thing with alfalfa in a continuous corn field corn field has been corn for 25 years we've got half of that where we've got alfalfa growing underneath so it's a perennial cover crop 20 inch rows we can't really keep the alfalfa live there so what we did we've got one of these fancy corn planter things we're in 20 inch rows so we got one row of corn a row of alfalfa and then two rows of corn a row of alfalfa all the way across and then we go back and forth we end up with a pattern like that we planted you can notice 30,000 seeds per acre in those these rows of corn so it's at the equivalent of 38,000 if it was in 30 inch rows I told it it was 30 inch rows and then we put the alfalfa in between so we're still at 38,000 net per acre that's kind of interesting and we'll see how that works when we get next year but the alfalfa does better now so we're still at 30 inch rows on 20 inch centers we've still got a net 30 inch row there because it's 220's in a 40 inch gap so it's just giving a little chance for sunlight to get through here's one we do that's a little bit like Colin Seist does in Australia he uses the tall grass perry this is switch grass and he grows his cool season crops this is peas and then he'll harvest the peas and then let the switch grass back and graze it but we don't have time to harvest our peas for peas here we don't have a long growing season he has but this is going to be grazed right at about this stage right before the switch grass starts to grow we're going to run in there and do a high intensity grazing on it and we didn't this year because we didn't have the cows yet but that's what we're going to do this coming year come into a high intensity grazing then let the switch grass grow and then harvest it for seed okay again there's some of our cover crop this is that this is a pickup and then there are hay mill it there so it's pretty good size stuff and then we swathed it this way to look like before we swath grazed it and then the cows these are they're spreading out there eating these we're moving here we're manually moving the wire about every two or three days the thing that's interesting the wires right here you can't really tell but they clean it all up but they don't take any of their other residue off it's kind of interesting how good a job they do of sorting it out there's that irrigator you saw with buckets hanging down and the rope and then there's wire across here and the bucket just gives you weight so the so the the wire doesn't get to blow in when it's windy and and and then when it goes and hits it the wire hits a corn sock or something that bucket just heavy enough to keep everything moving it's very simple we're trying to figure out how the hell we're going to do that we have all these complex things and I just went out and put some buckets on there and said let's try this we thought we might have to put some water in the buckets but didn't have to do that so there's there's a Jorgensen cow and the interesting thing and you saw this actually on the on the video is we had this was corn stalks there's two irrigators that ran side by side and there we had a wire ran all the way through two were tied together we had to move at the same speed but when we moved them we had to start one and run to the other end take the bike and go around the other end and start it so we'd go at the same speed but this had corn stalks and then we had different things behind wheat in terms of cover crops this this was winter wheat and the other three were spring wheat the place they went is where we had the winter wheat so the first they ate that regrowth of the winter wheat and then they ate the the swass that were there and then they went and ate the other swass and the last thing they went to was the corn stalks kind of an interesting thing and here's the thing that Ducks Unlimited did where they they flew on some of it cereal rye some of it coated and some of it non-coated on the field they had and that was actually flowing on after soybean harvest