 I want to thank the No. Till Association and the organizing committee for inviting me a year ago to talk about nutrient cycling. And then about a month ago I got another request to add on another project. And I hope I can get to that this afternoon with the time that we have. But first of all I'd like to recognize the people that are part of the Covercroft Nutrient Cycling Project. Quite a list and I'm not going to read them all off but lots of expertise there. Lots of knowledge and really rely on them for a lot of good sound advice. And then our staff, Dr. Debunker-Sanuel is a project coordinator for the Covercroft Nutrient Cycling Project. Justin Brown, a master's student. John Wolthews, an extension associate. And then Chris Morris works in the lab and we're doing a lot of our analysis right in Hollis in our lab. And of course USDA is funding this project, this on-farm project. We have two more graduate students coming and we're excited about that so it's cranking along. But anyway, why are we concerned about Covercroft Nutrient Cycling? Covercroft sequester, inorganic nutrients and what's the availability to our cash crops? Is it taking it away from those crops or are we getting some release for those crops? I guess those are all questions that you have. We're potentially converting mineral forms of nutrients into organic forms and those become available as well. One of those examples would be non-label phosphorus to labile forms of phosphorus, plant available forms of phosphorus. So we could be increasing those plant availabilities of that. We're preventing nitrate nitrogen from getting into our water supplies and that's big with our stakeholders. The state of Iowa is working on that as well. And of course we're increasing the need to build our total soil nitrogen as well. And we're building carbon, we need to build that nitrogen component in the soil as well. And so you might have all those or one of those on your mind but you've probably been all reading these books too. And these are good books and Dr. Nichols mentioned Gabe Brown quite a bit and you want to be like Gabe, right? And so that's why we're having this conversation. But really what we're after is something like this I think. And this is a nitrogen rate study in 2017 where we had established rates of nitrogen put out in plots, 60 pound increments. And we measure the yield response across those nitrogen rates. And we try to extrapolate what the ideal nitrogen rate was at this site. And I've done that and it looks like 95 units a in. It took to raise the optimal yield. But look at what the check plot produced. 187 bushels of corn. No nitrogen at all. I think that's what we're after, right? We don't want to write the check for fertilizer. And so if we do, by the way, that was a 25 years of no-till, 5.1% organic matter, okay? And if you do the math though, that 95 units of in roughly 36 bucks, 35 bushels gain here is worth $113. That's the inorganic agronomist's approach, right? That's the economics. So I think at some point there needs to be a marriage of inorganic agronomy, what we're really, really good at, and organic agronomy, what Dr. Nichols is talking about. And that's got to happen at some point in the future for sustainability and so forth. Now we did the same exact study, but in 2018, in the adjacent field because of a rotation, of course. And this is not a corn and soybean rotation by any means, okay? But again, high organic matter, now 26 years of no-till. But look at, our yield there is barely at 180, okay? And our check plot is at about 140. So different year, different environment, same hybrid, okay? So can you bank on these things happening year after year after year? Well, we're not in control of the climate, and the climate's really driving a lot of this. But if you do the math, you know, again, about 35 bushels again, how ironic. You know, what's going on with that? But only $20 for about 55 pounds of in. We don't know this number going into this event, do we? That's the holy grail of inorganic agronomy. And I'm not ramming that down your throat this morning, but that's where we've come from. And that's where we're at, right? That's where we're really at. We know that developing no-till might have a higher need for nitrogen. A couple studies there done way back in the olden days. We do know that if you convert, you stop tillage, and you increase carbon, you've got to give it some extra nitrogen. And Dr. Nichols clearly pointed out that we can do that with diversity and microorganisms and so forth. But then Sarah Bauder came along and did some research on some very long-term no-till, and this need for extra nitrogen has gone away, okay? So that's that microbiology that I don't know a lot about, because I was trained as an inorganic agronomist, and so that's that microbiology, okay? So at some point it goes away. So the cover crop nutrient cycling project has three objectives. We want to determine the influence of cover crops and their compositions on nutrient cycling. We want to look at that also in producers' fields. Looking at the effect on the cash crop. And we also want to hone in on the effect of the carbon-nitrogen ratio, i.e. different blends of cover crops, and how that affects the nitrogen uptake of corn and use for corn. Okay, so three big objectives, and we're going to try to hone in on those a little bit. But a quick observation on one of the plots that I had, we have our no cover crop control and a plot with a cover crop, and this is a March picture, and you know I looked down and the day I was there it was very prominent that the cover crop plot had less wheat straw. And you may or may not see that in the light of this room, and so I've kind of focused in a little bit. That's what the straw looks like with the no cover crop, and here's the cover crop. And I think you can see that it looks more open, and we've accelerated the breakdown of those residues, if you will. And so an effect of the cover crop. So what we're doing with those three objectives is we're identifying cover crop compositions in the field. We're measuring the biomass. We're looking at the ADF and NDF content. We're measuring the decay and the nutrient loss out of those residues. And we're looking at how those fields are managed. Now these are on-farm examples, and we're really looking for a lot of cover crop fields. So if you're growing a cover crop and you can remember to call me, please do that. I like to come out and sample it. So objective one, this is what we do. We just go out in your field and we randomly choose a spot. We cut the biomass and take soil samples, okay? This is a very broad look of the nutrient results from objective one. And there's a lot of details going on here. But we measure things like organic matter, nitrate, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, and zinc. And in particular, just to kind of get this going along, I noticed that from the fall sampling to the spring sampling, we had an increase in nitrate and nitrogen in those cover crop fields. Now that's an average of all of them. And at the end of the day, we hope to characterize these in a little bit different way, maybe by the carbon content of the cover crop and other things like that. So this is just a broad look. And the summary of these results change monthly. Okay? So this is a snapshot just right now, right today, on a very young emerging project. Another thing to notice is the fall potassium soil test versus the spring. It went down. Now potassium is very problematic. It's affected by clay and clay structures in the soil and how dry or how wet the soil is. But I just wanted to point that out. That's a pretty big drop, okay, for not doing anything to the soil. So moving on to objective two, it expands on objective one. And what we do is we, again, seek areas in producer fields. And we try to get there just as the cover crop's emerging and we spray it out. Now we try to keep it from establishing. Because then we've got plots with and without cover crops. Again, we're looking at the blends and the biomass and the nutrient composition and all those things. And here's kind of a picture of what we're doing. This one looks like it's a heavy brassica blend, but we've established our plots. Okay? You can see that around the state. So, again, constantly looking for places to do this work. Now this gets a little bit more expanded because now we have no cover and cover in a producer field. And we have our fall and our spring sampling. And it gets a lot of data heavy, right? But we have some of those similar soil test values that are parameters that we had in objective one. But, again, the nitrogen comes out again. And is this a surprise? I don't think it is. I don't think it's a surprise. But our fall samples had these amounts and then we came back in the spring. They went down and that was with the cover crop. So this nitrate nitrogen we measured in the soil is what? It's vulnerable to the environment, right? It's just there, okay? In a form we don't want it to be. But if you look at the cover crop sampled in the fall, these levels here, 6.5 and roughly 22 are much lower than in the no cover crop plots, correctly? So that cover crop is doing what we want it to do. It's taking up inorganic nitrogen, okay, and storing it. And then when we came back in the spring, look at the levels in the cover crop versus where we didn't have the cover crop. They're quite higher, aren't they? And so there is something going on there. Whether it's a release or not, I don't know, but something is happening after that cover crop. Other things, again, is that potassium taking a dive from the fall to the spring, sampling, although with the cover crop in objective 2, we're kind of holding our own, if you will, okay? We're kind of holding our own. Yes. In a few cases, we had some cereal rye. Yep, in a few cases. All of that data is put together in one picture, and that's what I did. I have to get this out in 40 minutes. And so that's my temp, Russ. That's a really good question. That's really, really old data, probably mostly spring samples. Because we would have went out, found a location to do our work in the spring, and took the samples then. Yep. Anybody else? I really, I welcome questions. So anyway, okay, so I advanced there. So then we measured the yields, the no cover and the cover yields, at each one of our sites. So we had five sites, Southeast Farm, Salem, Garrettson, Madison to Clark, three corn and two soybean, just no cover and cover. And you can see the yield differences. Is there enough to talk about? Or not? But you got to pay your bank, don't you? Right? At some point, you want to get away from that. I get that. You want to get to Gabe Brown's point, right? I do too. I farm. I'm looking at that. That's my target. But you still got to get, you got to get there at some point. So are those yields worth talking about? No. I don't think so. We didn't do the stats, but you can just look too. Okay? We do not. Not yet. What's that? No. It's not. That's a fallacy of our objectives. But that's another, that's another objective. Dr. Sanyal wants to do that. And I think we're going to attempt to do a couple sites. Yeah. Sure. Thank you, Ruth. The question was, are we looking at the effect of the no cover cover at the subsequent year or a couple years later? And my answer was no. That was not one of the objectives of the study. But Dr. Sanyal has pushed me. And we're going to try to monitor a couple sites as best we can. I got one set up for you. You want to do it? Yep. Your name's on my list. Believe it. Wayne and I know each other, so I can say that. Anyway, but okay, there it is. So now going on to objective three, it's a little bit more complicated. We're looking for some type of small grain field where we can go in and establish cover crops. We want to minimize volunteer, volunteerism as much as possible. In my experience with cover crops, that's been an issue, okay, especially with oats. So we want to try to minimize that. We, of course, can control the volunteers on our check plots, but we can't in our mixes. We just can't. So it is what it is. We're going to establish these plots according to the producer's equipment, of course. And we had three mixes. We have a, of course, we have a check, but we have a broadleaf grass mix of 50-50, and I'll show you what I got in them. A predominantly grass mix, predominantly broadleaf mix. And we're going to look at the biomass. We're going to impose some nitrogen rates there across these blends. The producer plants their crop. They just can't apply any fertilizer to the plot area. We'll take a look at that crop, and we'll measure some yields. So this is the blends, the grass blend. Heavy on the grasses, of course, 22.5% of these, 2.5% on the broadleaves there. The blend, the 50-50 blend, 12.5% straight across, and then flip-flop for the broadleaf blend of what the grass is. See, 2.5% of the grasses and 22.5% of each of the broadleaves. So just keeping it simple, eight species. It is what it is. We just want to keep that. But really what we're looking at is we want to, we really want to compare the data to the carbon-nitrogen ratio of the cover crop. And so one place we may get our, you know, we might get a lot of grasses that do well, of course, and we get a lot of grasses in our broadleaf too, but we really got enough measurements that we think we can take a look at the data and compare it across sites. So here's a plot plan. Of course, four replications. Here are those cover crop blends, the check, the grass, the blend, 50-50 blend, and then the broadleaf, and that repeats itself randomly in four replications. And then we impose our nitrogen rates across each one of those cover crop treatments. So 96 plots at a site. 96 plots. Here's just a picture of the blend versus the control. And you can see we have dead plants out there that we've sprayed out trying to keep that under control because they're continuously coming. Okay? So that poses a problem, but we're measuring the residues there as well. So we're good. Okay, here's some of the nutrient results. Okay? It gets a little bit more confusing, but here's 2017 fall sampling, spring sampling, check, grass, broadleaf blend, and then it repeats itself, okay? There's those same parameters. And we've started looking at potentially mineralizable nitrogen, active carbon, it's a pox carbon, and then solvita, this is respiration, CO2 to see if there's any relationship there as well. Just some things to highlight is the nitrogen again. So I've highlighted that in objective one, objective two, and now I've pointed it out in objective three. And we see some really interesting things, maybe a little bit different than objective one and objective two, but somewhat higher in the spring than in the fall. And we really, but that check plot remained high from the fall to the spring. So again, this is emerging data that we've got to look at. Potentially mineralizable nitrogen, I'm going to point that out as well. We have a higher number in the fall versus the spring, and you know, that's your microbiology. That's the timing of those samples. And this is an average of all of our sites. I didn't know any other way to do it other than just bring that forth that way and go with it. Okay, here's a yield, the effect of the cover crop on the yield. So looking at the average across all of the nitrogen rates at each site, but looking at the effect of the cover crop. Okay, so we got our control, no cover crop, about 80 bushels at surf, 172 at Garrison, 215 at Salem, and 132 at Gettysburg. With the cover crops at Beersford, we tended to go up, okay, slightly. With the cover crops at Garrison, kind of a mixed bag. Corn following grass, similar yield. Corn following the broadleaf or the blend, looks like those yields are reduced a little bit. That may be something to talk about. But as we keep going here, Salem, hardly any effect at all. Let's take a look at those yields. But at Gettysburg, kind of a different story than Garrison. There's your control, the grass, a lower yield, the broadleaf a lower yield, but the blend, a similar yield. Could this be random? Certainly. It could be random. Russ, you're going like that. Pointing at the numbers, right? So, very wet surf, I mean, record historic water, right? Garrison, very above normal. Not as much as surf, I don't think. Salem, I think, totally optimum. Probably some high amounts of precipitation in there, but I think just a garden, okay? Just great. Gettysburg, water limited. So four different environments, maybe somewhat different effect. So now I'm going to go on, I'm going to look at individual sites as far as the nitrogen effect. Of course, at the surf, no difference in the cover crop effect or the nitrogen effect. Just too much water, okay? At Garrison, a very nice nitrogen response. Just really, really good. We see the broadleaf and the blend here starting out lower compared to the grass and the check. But as we increase nitrogen rate, they kind of come together, if you will. But a nice, nice nitrogen spot. Now what I'm looking for is I'm looking that if does one of the cover crop blends cause the optimum nitrogen rate to be lower? And I would say no with this site right here, okay? We need more and more and more of these sites. That's the key to inorganic agronomy, okay? That's the key. And we go to Salem, look at that. We might argue a little bit that it took about 40 pounds. But look at the check plot. There's not hardly any relationship to nitrogen rate and corn yield response. Now these are all really well managed no-till sites, okay? So I would assume the soil health would be as optimum as we could get in the region. That was kind of the goal or the objective is to go look at that. And I kind of think I'm looking at it wrong. I think I should be going to producers' fields that are just getting into soil health and we see the effect of the cover crop, okay? But I got all those smart people in the room when we started this thing and that's what we decided. And, you know, I'm not laying blame because I'm the project leader but I'm kind of thinking I should refocus just a little bit. But anyway, precipitation just right here at that site. Then we go to Gettysburg and we get some mixed results there. The grass and the check starting out lower than the broadleaf and the blend. But then as we increase nitrogen rate they're coming together at some point. But look at no response where we had the check in the blend but we got a somewhat of a response where we had the check, or excuse me, the check in the blend, no response but the broadleaf and the grass we're getting a little bit of a nitrogen response at Gettysburg. No livestock involved. No livestock. We had to get that out of our objective. And hey, that's a whole another thing that's got to be looked at. Obviously, it's got to be looked at. Okay, so I'm going to go away from the nutrient part and hope you've picked up something there. I think it's, you know, obviously we're going to be seeing an effect on our nitrogen in the soil and I think the results are kind of showing that. So we got a request to look at soil moisture. That's always coming up. It was only initially supposed to be looked at in the western part of the state but some things happened and we expanded it and so we've outfitted several of our objective three sites with nitrogen probes and you can see them laying here. These probes measure water content at 5, 10, 15, 25, 35 centimeters down the length of that probe. Okay, we stick them in and they take a measurement every hour. So we have a lot of data and we're looking at, we can only afford it and there's many to put in the control and the grass treatments. Those little sticks are $1,800 apiece. Okay, so to outfit three sites we spent about $45,000. So anyway, here's what it looks like when it's installed, it has a data port here and actually the data is stored down here and then the probe is over here in the ground and so we've chose to put them in the control and the grass. So just some preliminary data from Mitchell. We put them out northwest of Mitchell. That's a lot of data from September 27th to November 28th there. You can see that the control had lower soil moisture up to the point it rained. Okay, this is a significant rain event. Then after that it flip-flopped. The grass plot has slightly higher moisture than the control. Well, why would that be? Well, I think the grass was kind of taking some water out here and it was somewhat dry. There was a lot of moisture deeper in the profile. I mean a lot. I mean it was sopping wet when we put those probes in and I think what we're going to I'm trying to try to establish here is the grass was extracting water from down below. Okay, pulling it up. So you can see here at six inches not as much difference but again the effect of the rain got in, got down there but a little bit lower probably and then at ten inches again the grass is higher as we go deeper in the profile now even before the rain. There's 18 inches. It's higher. I think it's pulling it up. Water's going towards the roots. So I only went down to 18 but we've got data further down. So next I'm going to show you some soil biology work that Justin Brown did at his site in Sturgis and first the biomass the mix had slightly higher biomass than the grass in the broadleaf at his project. The PFLA total microbiomass highest in the broadleaf in the mix and the control in the grass similar. Go on to the bacteria control lowest the broadleaf in the blend the highest with grass somewhere in between and the fungi control lowest with the cover crops all pretty similar. So we're seeing the benefits of the cover crops with the microbiology. Okay, so in summary we're just beginning we need a lot more data a lot more sites and I'd appreciate your help with that. Nitrate in was higher in the spring samples in the producer fields. Initial results from ejected to show that the cover crops did not significantly reduce yield of the cash crops. I think that's big. Albeit all of those sites were east of I can't say highway 37 25 east of highway 25 let's go with that one. So we need to get a few more sites out west. Nitrate in was lower in the fall and higher in the spring with the cover crops. So the cover crops were doing their job and boy with those four sites that I showed you the data it's really inconclusive whether cover crop affected the nitrogen requirements of corn. We just need more sites probably a biomass was higher after the cover crops compared to the control. So all good things happening there. Okay, that covers the cover crop nutrient cycling stuff. I made it but I don't have much time left. Any questions about that? Okay, let's keep going. So I had a little project this summer with an intern Chase Daly he goes to USD Anyway, so it's kind of a combination of SDSU and USD folks. They have a sustainability program. Okay, and Chase is from a farm and he's interested in an agricultural sustainability project. So what we did is we wanted to compare the carbon and total nutrient status of native grass versus to cropland right next door and we wanted to calculate the nutrient decline rate of the cropland and estimate long-term nutrient sustainability. Okay, that's a mouthful. You don't think about this every day. Dwayne talks about a 200 year plan and a 600 year plan the Native Americans have, right Dwayne? Okay, 480, big, big years. We're worried about tomorrow and the next year, right? Anyway, so we're going to look at that. Northwest and Mitchell, two fields, native grass and about 100 years of cropland, 70 years tilled, 30 years no till. We sampled three different sites on each side of that fence, five different cores at each one of those sites. Those are our depths. We did bulk density and we analyzed organic carbon, total nitrogen, total phosphorus, potassium and sulfur. Total, not plant available. So what happens is you use some wicked acids and they dissolve the soil and then they measure the nutrients. So we're looking at total nutrients. Okay, Dr. Ward did this down in his lab. It's a nitric-procoric acid approach and I will tell you that there's one more acid that should've been added but nobody on the planet wants to work with hydrofluoric acid so I couldn't find a lab to do that. So this is the best I can get and that's what we did and then we measured pH 2. But I want to first discuss what's our interest in total nutrients? Why does anybody care? And so I had a little project that I looked at, it's kind of a hobby of mine and I took data from 1981 to 2015 and I took the 12 major crops during that period and I took their yields and I took it, multiplied the yields times the estimated crop removal. Okay, the estimated crop removal. So how much phosphorus is being taken out of the soil by the crop? Well you can see it's massive. Back in 1981, it was about 120,000 tons of P205 coming out of South Dakota soil into our 12 major crops. 120,000 tons. And it's done nothing but go up, right? Because yields have gone up, right? I did alfalfa, I did them all. They also have records about how much phosphate has been applied in the state. That's the red line. So are we meeting crop removal? Absolutely not. Now I'm not making a case for inorganic agronomy. I'm not. Okay, but here's the deficit. So this is the balance determined between fertilizer additions and crop removal. So this would be the removal, okay? And in some years we had less removal than we had application. Draw out years, whatever, okay? Around the state. So when Duane talks about shipping all that phosphorus to China, there's the data right there. What's that? They're getting a good deal because they're buying what? They're buying the oil and the protein, right? They're getting the phosphorus for free. They're getting it for free. Are we willing to give it up? This won't affect anybody in this room. So that's why it's kind of like, why are you talking about this? Well, anyway, it's a project. We got to compare native grass and cropland. So here's the phosphorus, total phosphorus by depth, blue line, cropland, yellow line, native grass. The only place that the nutrient level is higher in the cropland. The only graph I'm going to show you, the only one's right here. Phosphorus is higher in the zero to three of the cropland versus the native grass. Why's that? That's where all fertilizer goes, right? That's where it all goes. We're seeing differences all the way down practically. The crop is moving, removing phosphorus from those depths, right? So this data confirms this data because that native grass is just cycled, right? Sure, a cow or a deer or a buffalo came along and took a little bit, just a little bit because they crap most of it back out, right? Okay, so here's where we go. Potassium, all depths lower. Sulfur, all depths lower. Organic matter, all depths lower. Less down below, of course, but look at the surface. 4.3 versus 6.2. Now, this is organic matter, okay? But we're extracting carbon way down, way down, okay? Organic carbon, really the important one. This organic matter is kind of a quick way to measure it, but here's carbon, verifies it. Huge differences. Now, not as much down deeper, but it's happening, okay? Total nitrogen, same story. Total nitrogen, same story. Okay, so really interesting. Soil pH, Dwayne talks about this a lot. Look at the pH difference between the cropland and the native grass. Why do we need lime? Because we're using a lot of nitrogen, okay? Look at that native grass, big difference. Now, bulk density. What is bulk density? It's just weight per volume in the soil, okay? Just weight per volume. Look how much higher in the cropland it is compared to the native grass. So this is what we've done. Trying to feed the world. We've done a really good job at it. You know, we've really come a long way. I'm not trying to scare anybody out of the room because I don't have any answers. You know, really I don't, but we got to have a plan. So when I tell folks we got to build nitrogen as we build carbon, there's the evidence. Five minutes, good, I'm going to make it. There's the evidence right there. That's about the best relationship of a soil test value I have ever seen in my profession. It's almost one-to-one. Almost. So it's real. What Dr. Nichols and Delaine talk about and all the other soil health people talk about, this is a real deal, okay? So what we did is we looked at the course we measured elemental phosphorus and of course the native grass is higher, has more throughout the profile, right? There's the numbers, okay? I converted that to a fertilizer equivalent amount. Here they are. So the native grass has about 1100 pounds of P205 more in that profile than the cropland. About 1,360 pounds more K2O and 2,200 pounds more sulfur, sulfate sulfur. So if I take that difference and I divide by that 100 years, 100 years of cropland, we have decreased the soil total nutrients by these amounts per year, about 11 pounds of P205, 14 of K2O and 22 of sulfate sulfur. So we're really good miners, okay? So how long can we do this at our current practices? Well those numbers of years are huge, aren't they? But what did Delaine say the Native Americans plan was? 480 years? It's pretty darn close, isn't it? It's pretty close. There is an end to all of this someday. So sustainability is pretty important and I applaud Chase for being interested because private industry is sold out for sustainability and it's not to sustain the current status quo but what they're looking at is like companies like 3M, when they ship tape or whatever they make to wherever it goes, they know exactly how much water they're shipping to. So sustainability is a big thing and I was asked to present this. I wasn't going to make a big deal out of it because there's not a lot of answers. Building soil is the answer if I had to give one. Building soil has got to be the answer but there's only so much there and then we just got to keep after it. So in summary, all nutrient carbon, the pH levels are higher than native prairie except phosphorus in the 0-3 cropland manipulated by our phosphorus applications. Soil bulk density was greater in the cropland soil. Carbon and nitrogen highly correlated and total nutrient supply has limits. I'll just say that. I don't know how else to say it but now I'm not advocating everybody run home and put on a bunch of fertilizer. Well, nope. Because you could extrapolate that out of this, right? And you can overcome it. You're not going to overcome it. So that's this combination of inorganic agronomy merging to organic agronomy. That's why you're here today. That's why you're learning like I'm learning and then that's what we have to do. So any questions about that? I think you're all in awe. I don't know. Or it's a waste of time. But thanks for your time today.