 Thank you for coming. So yeah, drill, we're gonna talk a lot about that. Among seller things. So we're gonna focus on financials primarily. I've got a couple of confessions to make and I will make those in a minute, but first a quiz, just so I can get to learn the audience better. So I'm assuming this is the StripTill conference, you're all StripTillers, right? Any no-Tillers? No-Tillers. All right, cover crop users. How many people have used cover crops, tried them and quit? How many are thinking about it? So a few, be proud when you say we're thinking about it. So you are my audience today. So the people that are using cover crops, you think you've got a benefit, you can see from the combine cab to the line where you plan to cover and where you didn't have it. I've got data for you. But really my audience both, my target audience both here and in my other presentations is for people that are thinking about cover cropping, but they're worried about the economics, whether it's yield reduction or added expenses of the cover crop or implications related to weed control. That's really the heart of my research and outreach program now. And I'll talk about that again, but that's what we're gonna talk about. And so mostly it's financial in nature. Anyone here from SARE? So let me put the plug in for SARE. This is labeled as, and I want to thank SARE and Lesadere for inviting me here. So this is really a SARE farmer forum. So I'm on a speaker bureau. A lot of my funding comes from SARE. And so we speak at various conferences around the country talking about the SARE program. And the good work that they're doing. So I am an independent research agronomist. This is my third growing season as an independent. My past affiliations are Two Stents as a county-based extension educator in Southeast Wisconsin. And also Two Stents with Michael Fields Institute, which is a nonprofit that works in the area of sustainable agriculture in East Troy, Wisconsin, Southeast Wisconsin. I was initially a research agronomist there, did a lot of work in cover crops. And more recently, in a position I left to become an independent was the research director. I currently, in kind of a combined role professionally and also as a farmer, I'm a member of my local producer-led watershed protection group. So really, there's several of these groups. There's like 40 of them in the state of Wisconsin. And really it's a bunch of like-minded farmers who are really interested in conservation and soil health. And so this movement in Wisconsin got started several years ago. And it's a place where we get together informally and share information. And then I'm also just a fun fact member of the Soil Health Subcommittee of the Wisconsin NRCS Technical Committee. So I work with a lot of agency folks on issues related to soil health. So I've been at this a long time. If you include graduate school, I've been working in a cover crop arena since 1989. And I'll tell you, with all that experience, I have more questions than I do answers. Every time that we start researching a topic and farmers come to us with issues or maybe they're leading with technologies, it always raises more questions. And so that keeps us employed as researchers and it keeps things interesting. So my past research, past work, when I started, there was little known about cover cropping in the state of Wisconsin. So I did a lot of work on species screening, what works here that led us more into management. And my particular focus of interest is in nitrogen management. So I worked in nitrogen crediting and also in nutrient management implications, especially when we started seeing a lot of winter eye used on dairy farms. I have subsequently, well, let me back up. So this information is all out there. If you're having trouble sleeping at night, you can look at the research literature and you'll see that I've published there. But my emphasis in publication is in formats that we'll get into farmer hands. So, and again, no one here from SARE, but I'd like to plug this book here, Managing Cover Crops Profitably. This is a national publication I worked on initially as a contributor, but also contribute data to it under its revisions and is currently being revised. So it's going into the fourth revision. I've got several University of Wisconsin extensive publications, but most of my work is incorporated in University of Wisconsin extension fertility recommendations. And that gets to phosphorus and potassium removal as well as nitrogen credit for the cover crops. My current topics, like I said, I am now solely focused on economics. And this relates to weed suppression, but primarily to the yield response of cover crops because all of the social science data that's out there says that of cover crop non-users, it's the finances that prevent people from using them. So that's why I'm working on that arena now, in that arena now, I'm working on yield effects and the related economics that we're working on weed suppression, but then also on a conservation component. So from all my on-farm research, I collect conservation performance information that feeds into the software programmers and the modelers for the different models that estimate the cover crops role in reduction of nutrient and sediment loss. Where does that build into? Into the phosphorus trade. So ultimately it's financial. So if you can cut or if you can trade for phosphorus because you've done the right thing and you've cut your phosphorus losses, then that's financial. So I'm very active in that. And I mentioned serious support. I've gotten support throughout my career from various different programs. Because this is a serious farmer focus or forum, I feel the need to talk a little bit about my farm, but this is also important because about 50% of the research that I've done in the past has been done on my farm, a lesser extent now, because my on-farm research program has grown. But I'm in Walworth County in Southeast Wisconsin, 30 miles roughly southeast of Southwest of Milwaukee. I'll show you my location on a map in a minute. So I'm on the family farm. It's a typical dairy farm for Southeast Wisconsin. We skipped a generation. So when my grandparents retired from dairy farming, the farm was rented out on a cash lease basis, 30 years, 25, 30 years roughly of going from a dairy rotation, soil conserving rotation to a corn soybean rotation with a lot of tillage. So when I started farming there in 94, I inherited a soil health nightmare. And so for the past almost 30 years, I've been working to build that up. We'll talk about that journey a little bit as we go. So the soil type is very common to the area. It's a lighter glacial soil. It's a foxtail loam. On my farm, I've got A slopes, absolutely flat ground, but most of it's rolling four to 6% slope. I've got some highly rotable land. And this picture here shows you pretty much typical scene from my farm with a red clover cover crop. The thing to know about my farm is that I've got 18 inches to 24 inches of topsoil and subsoil. And that's perched over gravel. So I don't have available moisture holding capacity. My moisture holding capacity is very limited. So that definitely plays into everything I think about as far as farm management. My cover crop history, I started out with cover crops right off the bat, three crop rotation corn soybeans wheat. I interceded red clover in the wheat because I was interested in the nitrogen question. I, for financial reasons, quit growing wheat in 2012. So I switched to corn and beans. And I sat out of the cover crop world for a couple of years, but back into rye planted into corn stalks before soybeans. To me, that is the no-brainer. There's no yield penalty in the soybeans. And let's be frank, we're gonna talk about dryness. You have dry years. You're not taking up all the applied nitrogen. You wanna keep it on your farm. And in a form that'll become available to subsequent crops instead of losing it to leaching. 2002, the current growing season, based on some data I'm gonna show you. Next slide. I planted the entire farm, except for areas I'm saving for research trials into winter rye. And that's specifically to deal with the crazy weather that we're experiencing recently. My tillage journey, I started out, conventional farmer, till, till, till. I phased in no-till. I've been 100% no-till since 2003. So this is the 20th growing season as a no-till farmer. I forgot to tell you, give you my confession. I have strip-tilled 20 acres. That doesn't make me a strip-till farmer. All the data that I'm gonna show you is coming from no-till. I will tell ya, I've got a couple in my big project. I've got a couple of strip-tillers in there. And I'll talk about how they're incorporating cover crops into their strip-till system. But all the data that I'm showing you is from no-till. The other confession is that, because this is a Sarah Farmer forum, they want us to talk about current projects. So I've got one completed project I'm gonna talk about with actual data. The other two are projects that are in process. So I can show you what we've got so far, but no firm recommendations. All right, my motivation for cover crops on my farm, right now it's strictly tactical and it's adaptive management. How do we deal with extremes in precipitation? So the graph there is the growing season precipitation, almost 30 years of data from my farm. On the top, it's the season total for the growing season. So that's April 1st through October 31st. And then on the bottom, it's the three tenderline months of the growing season, June, July and August. So these graphs show a couple of things. So here's the mean, so the average, that's the black line there, and then the annual variation. The mean, the average, do we farm for average? Do we strive for average? From a risk management standpoint, maybe, but no, we wanna be above average. Here's the other thing I'll say about average and you've all heard this. The statistician can drown in an average water depth of three inches, right? It's not the average we're interested in. We're interested in the spread, so the high and the low and it's gonna come up in all my data discussion. Let's look at the last four years and this is what's really driving me. The wettest and the second wettest year on my farm, as well as the driest year. So this is the benchmark year. You all think about the dry year, the drought of 2012, right? To me, that was the benchmark. 2021, almost two inches less precipitation than we had in the drought year. Here's the other thing, 2020, right here, we ended up a little bit below average. The actual precipitation in that year happened in garbage time when the crop couldn't use it anymore. So a football analogy would be, okay, so we got rainfall in the fourth quarter. The football analogy is, okay, we're down 56 to nothing. We score 14 points against the third string defense. Who cares? Statistically, it shows that, hey, maybe that year wasn't bad, but I would argue from a moisture standpoint, it was just as bad as last year's drought, which was an official drought. Here's the other thing. Let's look at the tenderloin months, June, July, and August. So these are the monthly totals, and you can see we got some variation of the data, and you would expect that. You get a wet June, you get a dry June. Look at this, 2007, it's like you flipped a switch. Suddenly, the amplitude, the variability has increased. It's almost doubled, and we've got months where we're getting 10 inches of rain, followed by months where we're getting almost nothing. Embedded in this data is 300 year storms. What's a 100 year storm? A storm of sufficient intensity and rainfall amount that it only happens once every 100 years. That's the probability. And I've got three of them in a span of 15 years. That really influences crop production, and also as I think about my crops, how I'm gonna manage them. That's why everything on my farm this year, going into the growing season, was planted with a cover crop to help me manage this variability and the moisture. So we use what we call adaptive management with the cover crops. If it's dry, what do you do? You terminate early. So this picture is from 2021, last year, a declared drought in our area. This comes from a cooperating farmer of mine who's also a crop consultant. His name's Tom Novak. So this is part of a long-term trial that he's had on his farm to prove the value of the cover crops to his clients. And it's a real simple trial with and without cover. He collects the yield data and he shares it with his clients. If it's a white year, we terminate later. We let that cover crop use the moisture, dry the soil out. This is my farm this year and it worked. It worked. All around me, I live in no-till Nirvana. Everyone around me, no-tills, but I'm the one that uses the cover crops. I let it go. I was in the field planting a full two days sooner than my neighbors, which is important when you have five inches of rain in April and you haven't gotten anything done in the field. Everything's all compressed. The sooner you can get out there, the better off you are. Remember this picture, we're gonna circle back and look at it in just a minute. So you gotta have the rye in place to do adaptive management. Even if you terminate early, there is a benefit to it. And I'm gonna show you data that shows that there's wheat suppression, but also there's a yield benefit even from something that has such little amount of biomass. Here's Tom's data, corn yield, no rye and rye averaged across two different trials, which are basically nitrogen rate trials, a four and a half bushel yield advantage to the cover crop. He also saw some yield suppression. He also had, or not yield suppression, wheat suppression. He also has the same thing in soybeans and his soybean yield. He had a bump of 4, 4.3%. So he got a yield advantage, but had it turned out wet, he could have terminated later and used it to manage soil moisture. We also, and he's a cooperator on this trial, and I'm gonna talk about this. This is one of my wheat management trials. So we had three different treatments at three different locations in Southeast Wisconsin where we had a control, no rye. We had rye terminated, let's call it burn down, and where we planted green and terminated later in the season. In the case of the no rye versus rye, very little yield difference. And the thing that's really intriguing to me, we talked about the spread in the data, not the mean. Statistically, the means are the same. In fact, we got a slight yield bump, but look at the spread in the data. With the rye, it was a lot tighter. And again, this is averaged over three locations, three different farms, compared to the no rye. So that's telling us there's something there with the rye that's either enhancing wheat suppression or yield. Let's go back to the original drought. And this is where I became convinced that cover crops have great value to deal with drought. So up until this past year, 2012 was, by far, the driest year that we had had on my farm. At the time, I was in the fourth year of a nitrogen response trial, looking at the nitrogen response of corn to supplemental nitrogen after a red clover cover crop. And this is what the system looked like. So this is going into the season. This is at time of planting. And then this is in season. What I had was basically a mat that helped with infiltration but also a cut evaporation losses. So it helped me capture water and store it. And this is what the crop looked like in season. I unfortunately did not have a no cover control in this trial, but I had data to compare it to. And that was the three previous years, which turns out in Southeast Wisconsin, were really good cropping years. So at harvest time, I looked back at yield from the three previous years, and guess what? 80% of what I had in good years. So that was kind of compelling, but I thought, well, let's look at the rest of the county. So I took NAS data from Walworth County. This is all the corn yield data, non-irrigated, but it includes all practices. So based on my knowledge in the neighborhood, I'll tell you this is all conventionally tilled. There's a little bit of no-till in there, a little bit of cover crops. Mostly this is conventional. Their yield in 2012 compared to the three previous, really good years, 62%. So I'm like 20% better with my cover crop. And I attribute that all to managing the moisture that I got. All right, my motivation right now is tactical, but my primary reasons and the reasons that I grow cover crops, they remain basically the same. I'm looking for the ecosystem services, both general, but some very specific ones. Soil health, that's a gimme. I drunk the Soil Health Kool-Aid Longo. I don't worry about testing for it. I know it's there. How do I know I have soil health? I can see the earthworm castings on the soil surface. I know I can close my slots. I know my soil breaks apart freely. I know I don't have ponding that I get really good infiltration. And I know that leads me to yield enhancement. I'm also interested because of my soil nature in increased surface residue, both for infiltration but also to cut evaporation early in the season. I'm also interested in in-season biomass production, four-weed suppression so I can cut herbicide application, not rates, but number of applications. And I'll show you some data, what happened this year in a little bit. And I'm also interested in nutrient retention, not only nitrogen, but also increasingly in phosphorus. So in Wisconsin, there's a group that's affiliated with the university. It's called Discovery Farms. And they've done a lot of on-farm monitoring of runoff from different farming scenarios. What their monitoring shows is that in no till, we're not losing sediment, but our Achilles heel as far as surface water quality is concerned is soluble phosphorus. So now I'm thinking about ways I can use cover crops to cut the soluble phosphorus. On my home farm, it's not really a big deal because I, number one, drain internally, about 70% of my farm drains internally. The runoff water that leaves the farm goes to the marsh and it has to travel through several thousand feet of marsh which is gonna capture that phosphorus before it gets to the main channel. My problem is on rental ground and that's this picture right here. So I've got one field, it's a small field but I like it because it's relatively uniform and I do a lot of research on this field. It's got a soil that runs right through the middle. It runs to the edge of the field. It crosses six inches of mowed lawn and then right into a gully which plunges over the course of only a couple hundred feet, 60 feet down into the marsh. It goes through like 50 feet of marsh, goes into a pond that has a channel that gets it into the main channel which means it gets into the Macquanago River. Why am I so concerned about the Macquanago River? It has a designation by Wisconsin DNR has an exceptional to outstanding water resource not only because of water quality but also because it's home to several endangered species. So the DNR has a lot of interest in it. A lot of the conservation groups have huge interest in my watershed which means as a farmer I am under the microscope as far as what happens on my farm and what could potentially end up in the river. The other thing to say like all of you, my overarching reason for using conservation is for the next generation. So I can pass the farm on to the next generation in better shape than I found it. All right, economics. My primary justification, I mean I talk to farmers all the time so I know economics are the bottom line of the decision not to implement cover cropping. My justification for grant purposes is this. So the folks at SAIR along with the Conservation Tillage Information Center have conducted a periodic survey for the last 10 years to look at farmers use of cover crops or non use. They wanna look at the motivation but primarily what are the barriers? And so every two years they publish the survey, it's the same results of the non users every time. There is no demonstrated economic benefit. To me I interpret that as we don't have good data, we don't have numbers from acceptable side-by-side comparison. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence out there, there's a lot of testimonial farmer Jim will say, yeah, I got a 5% yield response to it. People wanna see the data so that's why I am data driven. They are in my research program. Fear of yield reduction, added cost and time commitment, complicates management, especially weeds and increased risk. All of those are valid concerns and reasons not to do it. What's really interesting in this survey is among the cover crop users, they say the exact opposite. Hey, we're seeing a yield increase, corn, especially in a drought year, corn up to almost 10%, soybean up almost to 12%. Those higher numbers, those all came from the first year of the survey, the drought response year of 2012. The users say we get improved, we control, we can cut our input costs including herbicide, planting green, boy, this is the greatest thing. It allows earlier planting in wet years, like on my farm this past year, like I talked about. And it may prevent us from having prevented plant acres because it dries it out enough that we can plant. So that's the data. And then just to add a little bit of richness to the data, this little sidebar here, I looked at evaluations from a winter workshop, my producer group put on this winter and got actual comments from farmers who had listened to Gabriel and talked for six hours about regenerative practices. And here's what they had to say. You know, the practices are great, but how do I actually implement these practices and remain profitable? So there it is, profitability. The next one, how do I implement regenerative practices without losing money initially? To me that gets at the fact that people have a perception that maybe there's a transition period, which ties into the third one. What about rental ground? So most ground, at least in the state of Wisconsin, at least on three-year leases. So if there's a perception there's a transition period and you're gonna have a yield loss initially, why would you do it? Also, why would you want to improve the soil on rental ground when you know you could be outbid and you could lose the lease? So one of the things I'm keenly interested in is first year effect, showing we can have a yield impact the first year. All right, so let's put a number on it. So these are the three SARE projects that I have that are related to economics. The first one, do cover crops pay? This one is complete, but this is the rationale for the second one, the second and the third one. Can cover crops pay and can planting green suppress our troublesome glyphosate tolerant or resistant weeds and no-till soybean. As I said, this is a work in progress. I will show you completed data. I will show you the data that we've gotten from the trial so far, but no recommendations. It is what it is. You can look for updates at the SARE site and Lesiteer is gonna publish it. I put down no-till farmer. I didn't know about strip-till farmer or cover crop. What's the other one, cover crop? Your third publication, cover crop strategies. It'll be in there somewhere, right? All right, do cover crops pay? This was a really fun project. So this was funded by the producer grant program or partnership program. It's a two-year funding cycle. I was able to get federal funding from another SARE, so I stretched it into three years. Again, conducted in Southeast Wisconsin through different counties. It's a replicated strip-till trial. It's got a formal experimental design and a real simple treatment design with cover, without cover. Here's the fun thing about it. I had a protocol as far as me collecting data and how I was gonna do it. As far as the cover crop management, that was up to the farmers. And there's a lot of wisdom in doing that because farmers know how to manage cover crops. We'll talk about the universities later on in the session. Anyway, they know what they're doing. Let them do it. Here's the ball who play kids. We're gonna collect some data. We did a financial analysis. We used parcel budget analysis. So we're just looking at additional costs and returns. There's no assumptions on it. It's just the two practices side by side. And I use the cooperators' input costs as well as their output prices. The differences between the systems are primarily in cover crop costs. So there's additional costs of the seed, the establishment, management, if necessary, like clipping, and then termination costs. One thing that's kind of unique to this research and this economic research was we also looked at interest charges. So you think about it. Most of the cover trials use winter rye. You plant rye in November of one year. You don't have access to the grain income till November of the next year. You've got one year of carry on that money. So it's important to carry that. We also looked at the yield increase and the cost of that. If you have a yield bump, that's free money, right? The answer is no. You still gotta haul it. You gotta dry it. You gotta shrink it. And you have to account for P and K removal. So we did all of that to come up with our break-even numbers and some other things, which are on this slide. So at the end of the day, we ended up with 14 site years of data. So that's like having 14 little farms scattered across three different growing seasons. We saw positive yield response 75% of the time. And that's important because it matches what Tom Novak has been doing in that trial I showed a couple of slides ago that he's been conducting for the last 10 years. He in corn and beans are seeing a positive yield response about 75% of the time. So here's the raw data. This is the corn and this is the soybean. On average, our corn yield response 2.1%. Soybeans a little better, 2.3%. So the average is represented by the X on the graph. Average is great. What I'm really interested in is the variability. Soybean, much less variable than the corn. And if I look at that corn data, I'm seeing a lot of upside potential. So in a lot of academic studies, they won't talk about the variability. They'll just talk about the average. We're gonna talk about the variability, the upside potential as well as the downside potential. Sir. So in this trial, it was very good questions. And the question is what were the cover crops? Most of it was rye, combination of after corn or after soybean. So whatever the farmer pretty much typically does. A couple of the sites also, and this was two site years on my farm after red clover and then another location had after red clover. But primarily it was corn bean rotation with winter rye after one or the other. So when we run the numbers, based on our yield responses and based on current market conditions at the time, we weren't close to break in. We needed a yield response of 5.7 in corn, 5.3 in soybeans to break even. That means we need to figure out under then market conditions, what's driving the responses here and here. So that led to the next generation trial. But before we do that, I just wanna look at a couple of the really interesting little cases from this trial. All right. It takes forever to get a yield response, right? No, you can see it first year. Here's proof positive. So this is on a kid or so long. This is the first year of the trial, winter rye after soybeans. It's a no-till situation. The pictures are taken here close up in a field shot, taken the day of termination when I was there to do the sampling to characterize the conservation performance. Not a lot of biomass there, 400 pounds. We did in soil sampling, realized that we were able to scavenge some leftover nitrogen. Now this is going into corn, so maybe that wasn't a good thing. But even that little bit of growth, rye growth, we're able to scavenge 30 pounds of nitrogen. To me, from a conservation standpoint, that's huge. Cooperator Nick here never grew a cover crop in his life. At the end of the day, 9.9 bushel yield increase, 5.3%. He grows cover crops now based on that one experience. This is not the most spectacular one, but I think this one is more representative. The most spectacular, I'll get to you in a second here, most spectacular 18 bushel. That was corn following red clover. He too had grown it on his farm, but he quit doing it. Guess what? He went back to putting red clover in his winter wheat, even though it's kind of hard to manage, and that's an expensive system. He is doing it now. Question or comment here? I'm curious about. Okay, so most of these are after harvest. In this trial, they were all drilled after harvest, so we're looking at November. I mean, in the case of soybeans, yeah, you can do it in October, but realistically, it's in November. So I told you I'm gonna run out of time. Yeah, 10.25 here. Most of them are in that window. These guys know that you gotta get it in the ground, but things get in a way like harvest, so yes and no. How about you folks? Do you have aerial application? So drones, okay. So we're getting more and more of that drone phenomenon. We're starting to see more and more of that in Wisconsin. I got rumors of two startups in Southeast Wisconsin that will be doing it. That works. There's a timing issue there. I don't have time to get into the technicality, but I'll talk about that in the after session. How about that? Or the beer and thingy tonight? I gotta keep rolling. So this one here, this one is really intriguing. This shows adaptive management. Wet spring, this is 2019. The site has a long-term cover crop history, two covers every three years. So a summer cover after a week, followed by rye after corn stubble. He had planned to burn down. Couldn't do it because it rained. I did sample in the rain. Three weeks later, he planted green and then he terminated. What did he get? 3.7 yield response, 3.7% yield response. Was that because of planting green? Was it because the non-cover was in withdrawal? I don't know. What's really intriguing about this site was I came back in the middle of the season in no-cover control treatments, there was waterhemp. In the cover treatments, there was no waterhemp. Can we use this planting green to suppress our troublesome glyphosate resistant weeds? We'll get to that at the end. That led us, that experience, led us to my current project. So can cover crops pay? Very much it's like the other one except it's much larger in scale. We're documenting the yield impacts but we're really drilling in on first year impacts. But we're also looking at the cumulative effects. We're still trying to identify the best management practices to maximize yield and on the flip side to look at practices to avoid so you don't reduce yield. We're putting a number on it with the partial budget analysis. We're gonna generate a lot of data analysis. This one I am punting to campus so we have an extension A economist who will do the economic analysis. And we're also collecting conservation estimates in an effort to improve the numbers for water quality trade. So the farmers that do this do get compensated for it. At the farm level, in effect, what we've got annually is 30 little on-farm trials where we're answering a specific question that a farmer may have. What about my seeding rate? Or what about if I plant in corn green, what about nitrogen management? Should I increase my starter fertilizer nitrogen? Because the rise presumably gonna take some of it up. So for the farmer, those are the questions that we're asking. We take all that data in aggregate. We do a meta analysis. We can tease out what causes the yield impact. Is it this practice on this soil type in this environment? So our goal is to get 90 site years of data over three response years. That's pretty close to big data. Let me back up. This trial is a little more involved. We have the no cover control trial. We also, to look at the management factors, we have two different cover treatments. The farmer's base treatment and then some variation on that. The best example is seeding rate. So if I seed dry at 40, what happens if I seed at 80? Actually, it's the other way around. So NRCS says you gotta have, in the state of Wisconsin says you need to have higher seeding rates than probably what you really need. So I'm doing 80, can I get away with 40? Especially since ride seed prices have basically doubled in the last couple of years. So that's the nature of the treatment design. So fun facts. We had a goal of 30 trials to put out this past year. We got out 29. We lost one of them because of poor rye establishment and that was in the soybean stubble planted in first week in December. 27 of the 28 are cereal rye. We do have one winter wheat. You always have to have a contrarian out there. He got some really cheap seed. He's got a really good stand to cover crop. More power to him. Most of trials are looking at response in soybean but we do have seven that are corn following soybean. And then interestingly, we've got three that's second year corn. And one of those is in a trial that I'm doing with my watershed group. The comparisons, what are farmers really interested in? It's rate. And I think this has driven, since it's mostly rye, by the fact that rye supplies have gotten really tight and seed costs have gone up dramatically. We've got some interest in termination timing, whether it's the burn down or the pre-plant and then nitrogen management and corn. And this is a picture from one of my sites. This is Dodge Coney. He's looking at seeding rate, but he's also, this is a double trial. So he's also looking at skip row planting. So this is gonna in row versus between row. So when I say row crop row, so this is gonna yield some really interesting results. And here's a map just showing where the trials are located. I put this up to show the magnitude. We're in six, or sorry, five different counties. I told you, this is my farm right here. I've got a bunch of it because it's easy to do research on your own farm. You don't have to travel, unlike up here in the Dodge County. So basically we're in a triangle. What this gives us is two different things. Growing season, environment, and we have definitely segregated environments. Keeps raining up here in Dodge County. We're in drought down here in Racine and Kenosha County, extremely dry here in Rock County. We're somewhere in between. We have the best soil types in the state of Wisconsin, Plano, Sil, Loam. We also have Kitter, Sandy, Loam. That's on the well-drained soil class. We also have some very poorly drained soils here in Dodge County, Pella, and then some Elliott's and tile drain, other tile drain type soil types in Racine County. All right, last topic. And this again is based on that first one in the observation that, hey, there's no waterhemp where we planted the rye green. Can we suppress life-state resistant weeds in no-till soybean? These are the weeds that we're concerned with in southeast Wisconsin. Giant rag, this is a field picture, and a close-up of a resistant individual. This is on my farm. This population was just confirmed by UW Madison two weeks ago. It also has multiple other resistances, which I don't understand because I haven't used those modes of action on my farm. And on my farm as far as glyphosate stewardship, I have done everything right. I have never used the roundup ready trait in corn. My presumption is that this is pollen. They blew in from somewhere else. The other one, Maristail. This one is all over confirmed resistance for about the last 10 years. Now in southeast Wisconsin, these two pictures are from Tom Novak's from his clients, and they show in the field this one with the Maristail. You can see the susceptible versus the resistant individuals, and then a close-up of the resistant individuals. And then Waterham. These plants are taken from the same field. Obvious case of resistance. We don't have Palmer amaranth yet. I just submitted a seed sample from some Camelina seed. I used it as a cover crop with my rye on my farm last year. I just got a call two days ago from Foundation Seed. I sent it in for analysis. Purity of germination. We have amaranth seed in there. Will you pay for DNA testing for four seeds? That's a hundred bucks. Absolutely. Palmer amaranth, it's on the horizon. We've got it in Illinois, just across the Illinois border. You folks dealing with it yet? Let's hope it. You dead? Southern Iowa. Southern Iowa. That's another thing just to watch and be careful of, because the experience in the Southern United States is something we don't wanna deal with, but it's on its way. Produced on farm by one of my co-operators. I cleaned it, but the seed's smaller than the Camelina seed. And I don't have official cleaning equipment. I did a window screen. So it's there. Did he have it on his farm? I don't know. I'm not gonna talk to him yet about it. I wait till I get the positive or negative results before I spook him. All right, so the last trial, we're looking at wheat suppression. And basically this is the same group of co-operators as in the first one. So this is funded by the SARA Partnership Program. Two year, we have four locations and then four replicates. So we're gonna generate a lot of data. We have three basic treatment sets. The first one is the control treatment. This is no rye. And we are using best management practices for management of the resistant weed. So we start clean. That means complete bird-nown glyphosate plus some kind of growth regulator herbicide to control the ones that are resistant. So we used LV6 last year, this year because of our tightened up planting window. And I didn't wanna have planting restrictions. We used enlist. All these trials are using the enlist trade. And then we used residual. So the generic version of authority for same thing as Sonic. I can't pronounce the common names with all of you looking at me. In fact, I wrote them down. I can't read my own writing. So you all know what I'm talking about, right? The next set is the first cover crop treatments. These that were burning down, but on our data it's labeled as pre-emergence. Why call it that? Some people burned down beforehand. Some people planted then terminated right away. Here we have two rye treatments, 40 and 80 pounds, to get at the seeding rate difference. And we use the same herbicide. So the glyphosate that's in the burned down mix also terminates the rye. The planting green treatments, same rye treatments, 40 and 80. We're using the broad leaf burned down. So the enlist, the growth regulator herbicide to control the broad leaf weeds that are there. And the residual. And we come back with the glyphosate to terminate the rye. The rye we're terminating at pollination. So in effect in our data set, we have the two polar extremes. We have the minimum amount of rye growth, pre-plant that we burned down, or at anthesis. And there's some implications to that I'm gonna talk about in a minute. Our questions of course, can rye do it? What about determination timing? Is that important? And what about the seeding rate? Does it matter? Especially since seed has gotten to be so expansive. So here's our one year of results so far. And again, 2021, this was a drought year. Suppression, yes, both in marestail and giant ragweed. Waterhemp did not show up to the party last year that showed up this year, but we don't have data from last year. Going from no rye to the plant green and terminate late treatment in marestail. And this is measured 45 days after planting. Marestail, 98% suppression. In the giant rag, 99% suppression. So yes, it does work. What about the burn down? Yes, we're seeing suppression there also in the case of marestail, 64% suppression. And in the case of the giant rag, 50% suppression. The other thing, question, comment. So you peeked ahead in my next slide. So let me say I should have said this up front. Okay, so the honest answer is, and this is counterintuitive, seeding rate had no impact on any of our response variables other than biomass production. So that makes sense, you got more plants, you're gonna produce more biomass. What is counterintuitive is we assume it's that biomass that's giving us the weed suppression either through competition or as a residue mat to keep the weeds down from germinating or physically to inhibit them. And then there's the issue of allelopathy. So what the research literature says that the chemicals that are in the biomass, they reach their peak concentration right at pollination. You got more biomass, a higher concentration that natural herbicide is there. It makes sense, if you got more biomass, you'd have better weed suppression. Planning rate doesn't matter. Recently published studies by Penn State University, there's two of them, they looked at the same thing, basically the same seeding rates, they found the same effect, biomass, yes. Any crop response variable, no. So you can cut your seeding rate. I shouldn't say that because there's only one year of data but going back to the other on-farm data, they're all doing 40 pounds. So NRCS in Wisconsin requires for cost-share programs, 55 pounds, Iowa, Illinois, are you in the, I heard 40, 46. Yeah, of course, yeah, of course. Okay, yeah, right, then you got to boost it. That makes sense. So we're all in the same ballpark, but the point is that it didn't. Okay, so we saw a 98% reduction by planting green. I can't show you the data, you've already seen it in that soybean yield. We were also by planting green and terminating late able to suppress soybean yield by 29% in a drought year. That's unacceptable. So I told you, we got the two polar extremes of biomass production. There's a sweet spot in there somewhere in between and that's my next generation work. So people are looking at my data and they heckle me at field days all the time. You're killing it too late. Well, no, this is a formal trial. We're trying to see what the degree of suppression is. Somewhere between the two is the sweet spot where we're not impacting yield but we're getting the weed suppression. That's what I'm looking for. My questions are, how do we stage it? Do we stage it based on rye growth stage? Do we base it on height? Because people are saying, when it gets knee high, you terminate it. Do we base it on the soybean growth stage? So I gotta figure out funding. You say, folks, I'm coming back to you this fall and figure out how to do it. This is a really involved trial. I can't do it on farm. Most of this is gonna have to be done on my farm because you're gonna have to be terminating like every five to seven days a different treatment. So anyway, and here that's where we're going with this data. So here's the seeding rate thing. Matches work by Penn State. What our data doesn't show you is that Plain and Green delayed the flush, the mid-season flush of weeds. It delayed it. The implication here is that if you're suppressing, maybe you can get away with one in season, post-emergence application versus two. I've got guys in my neighborhood that are on three. I'm sure they're up against the limit on there and less as far as total active ingredient per year. On my farm, I showed you that picture. I got away in most of the field with one application but this is actually a really interesting story. So this is the field that I got all my soybean research in. I went to terminate a couple weeks after planting. It was turning dry. I started getting concerned. I opened the field up. It got dark. So I thought, okay, I'm gonna start spraying the next day. It was too windy. Too windy to spray for eight days. The rye grew like this. I couldn't see my rose. I don't have guidance equipment. I'm too small. Rye grew like this. I couldn't see the rose but I could see the green streaks where the rye had taken up the sulfur and the starter that I applied to the soybeans. Where I had sprayed it the first time, I had to go back with enlist and glyphosate because I had a flush of weeds coming on. The other where I did it really late, I just recently like within the last couple of weeks made my one and only application. So I saved an application. Where this is important other than saving money from one application. If we have fewer individuals from that suppression plus fewer applications, that means that we have fewer individuals that are gonna be exposed to this new active ingredient which reduces our chances of developing resistance. So this is a resistance management tool. And it behooves all of us to practice resistant management because we've got nothing new coming down the pipeline as far as new products to deal with it. So we've lost glyphosate and a lot of weeds. And that's really unfortunate in these other chemistries. We could lose them too if we don't manage it. Anything we can do, it's important. The reason I'm harping on this other than I have the resistant population a giant rag on my farm. Look at this picture here. This is a giant rag. This is five days after a full rate enlist dual application. Look at its collings. They're all yellow. They're twisted up. Brings a smile on my face seeing them all twisted up like that. Not this giant ragweed here. Look at the leaf margins. They're all fused. You see this with exposure to certain modes of action. I've never seen it like this. It's also green and growing. It's got a little crook to it which shows the 2,4-D exposure. To me, this plant is doing something with that active ingredient. It's figuring out how to metabolize it. It goes on to reproduce that resistance developing in my field right now. I pulled that weed before I even put the camera away. I don't want any part of resistance, this mode of action on my farm. All right, like I said, this work is ongoing. We're gonna get a bunch of results this year. The yield response, it's gonna be a couple years out. But we have ample evidence that I am confident in saying that if you use adaptive management, that means manage the cover crops appropriately. Don't let them get too big. Don't let them compete against your crop. Don't let them use soil moisture. We can see first year responses and with the pre-plant termination, if you're using the rye or the cover crop just to manage soil moisture, it may seem like a waste if you're terminating it, but there's still some kind of yield benefit there. And also there is, there also is weed suppression. I forgot to talk about 2022 because this is about when I killed the screen. So our 2022 data pretty much mirrors what we saw in 2021. But this is universal across all four farms. We are seeing foxtail suppression even in the burn down treatment that's lasting long beyond the residual products that we put down. That to me is really intriguing. And these guys tend to go back, they're all in 30 inch rows. So they tend to go back with some kind of grass over side, both post emergence, but they also put metalloclour on because they're worried about season long control. So that observation is really intriguing and really positive. Next thing is to make these things work, use the low cost cover crop systems wherever possible. So that's the result of that first one, do cover crops pay? That was the major take home message. In effect, we had the yield response. It wasn't enough to break even, but it reduced our cover crop costs by 60%. Reducing the rye rate, looking at ways to terminate it with your routine program, your routine herbicide program so you don't have additional costs. And then planting green, we are seeing demonstrated weed suppression. So we have to find again that sweet spot that's somewhere between yield reduction, but we get the suppression. And I'm gonna be working on that hard in the future so that we can have our cake and eat it too. With that, I finished on two minutes over. I am done. I'm ready for the grilling. Any questions or comments? In the back. The question is, if you use the cover crop or something else, is it still a cover crop? So the cover crop perishes will tell you, no, that is a crop you are harvesting. What is a cover crop? It provides soil cover during vulnerable, I mean, this gets back to the original definition, during vulnerable periods in your rotation. As such, your rye is doing that. My inner farmer says, you're finding a way to market this and make more money. So I talked about my initial work, looking at the nutrient implications of rye. Rye is a luxury consumer of both P and K. The higher your soil test results are, the higher the tissue concentration. It's like open bar at a wedding versus cash bar. Rye is definitely at the open bar. It'll suck up everything that it can. So that would be a concern. The allelopathy just in corn and beans, I wouldn't worry about it. I'd be more worried about that with the grass seed for the mat that you're producing. Right, so I talked about the concentration of the allelocomicals. So we have identified them. They're benzoic acids. That's the same thing as bentazone. So it's like commercial herbicides that are out there. So traditional wisdom says it's a small seeded species that are more susceptible than larger. That's why we can get away with it with corn and beans, but not alfalfa. So think about that grass seed, that's really tiny. So maybe you ought to do a little pilot on the side to see if it works with germination with your intended crop. Yeah, so the question is allelopathy, is it in the above ground portion or below ground? It's in everything. What causes the soil effect? We don't know. My presumption is it's not allelopathy from the above ground biomass. If it's standing, if it falls down and that stuff can leach out, then yes. But below ground and the roots, they're exuding it all the time. Plants are always conducting chemical warfare against one another. So this allelopathy is to keep other things from germinating. So the point is that if things are still germinating and it's leaching out from the above ground, you'll probably get some suppression. But if it's already leached out and gone, then no. Sounds like another research trial.