 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. A series of four local events were held in South Dakota in Sioux Falls, Watertown, Belfouche, and Mitchell. First of all, I'd like to talk about the impact of no-till-hunt season. When the weeds produce their cities, and they fall to the soil, they can have a tremendous flow through a series of fakes. I list up here several fakes. Of course, we're familiar with the germination of where we see a lot of seeding, and also the dormancy, but also they can go through several other fakes. In other words, the insects can consume it with a micro-connection, equal to these seeds. Another fake is they can germinate and die, and also they can simply die because they're not able to survive. We can develop a... We need to leave the seeds on the soil, certainly with no-till. This is quite damaging to the weeds seeds. In other words, the weeds that need to stand on the soil, they're not going to be able to survive. If you keep the weeds seeds out of the soil of the surface, that is actually the most damaging to the survival of the weeds seeds. There was a study that examined that the survival of green foxtail is affected by its position in the soil. What they did is they placed seeds into these fabrics and allowed them to have contact with the environment, also with the insects. They planted them in zero, two, and four inches deep, and then they went and harvest those samples, and then they determined... In this study, what they did, of course, this shows the depth in the soil of the seeds are zero, two, and four inches deep. This shows the percentage of wide seeds, so they started out about 100%. This was after two years, so there were two years in the soil in these packets. Whenever they planted four inches deep, 55% of the seeds are still alive after two years, but when you let them on the soil surface, when you're at the zero, only 11% were still alive. In other words, there was a five-fold difference. When you bury the weeds seeds, five times more weeds seeds survive over time. You'll notice the two-inch is the intermediate. It's almost the spring line. Almost every study that did examine the weeds on they have found that weeds last longer when you bury them in soil. The soil, I put it in a cone-up, in other words, it just helps the seeds survive longer. I'm sure these were buried continuously. What would happen if you were to tell annual people whenever? I've always noticed that we had a lot more weeds than we tell. So I did another experiment. What I did is I we had seeded, but we just had it once. In other words, we established a site that put the weeds at least all the seeds into the soil, and then we went out and established two treatments. One is we continuously no-tilted, and the other is we tilled one time, and we tilled super crucially, so to speak, at one of the five inches. In other words, we was now at a no-board plow. What we did then is we counted the number of seedlings weekly for three years. We had to have four sites. What I have here is the number of seedlings from zero to 100 percent. I've used the percentage because I had 16 different replications of sites. This shows the seedling numbers for years from year number one, number two, and number three. This yellow bar refers to my till treatment, and the white bar refers to my no-tilt. To let you know exactly what I was doing, what I did was I identified an area kind of like this table. I would mark it, I would go out and measure, record the number of seedlings that immerse every week. I would then pull them, and I would keep that total, and I would come back next year and repeat the same thing, so I got a sense of what was going on with the seeds and stuff. The first thing I'll notice, well, for example, when I had my sample of the till, when I got 100 in the first year, I got 48 in the second year, and then 33 in the third year. That's in the same size. Well, the first thing I'd like you to notice, if you look at the depth and length of the bars, they decrease in time. We're fortunate that we do die over time, therefore the density declines. But I'd like you to compare the no-tilt versus the till. So the yellow bar is a till, and this is a no-tilt. So in the first year, if we got 100 seedlings in our till system, we got 88 in no-tilt. In other words, there's really not much difference in the first year. In the second year, we got 48 seedlings in till, and we got 32 in no-tilt. So they start to pick up a little bit of difference. But if you look at year number three, we had 33 seedlings in the till. We had only four. In other words, we have an eight-fold difference here, a ratio of 1 to 8. This is a ratio of 1 to 1.5, and it's a ratio of 1 to 1. In other words, the benefit of no-tilt takes some time. It doesn't occur in the first year. It takes a few years. I'm sure you've been wondering what value is that, because if you're growing crops here. But I wanted to give you an example. If you look on the top of this, a couple of rotations here. Soybean corn and then soybean. What that does is, if you're in a corn soybean, you would be over here. So if you look at my diagram of soybeans, we see that are produced in soybeans drop down to the soy. So year number one, if you were in a till system, if you had one, you would have 100 seedlings that arrived. Well, if you happen to be in a system where you have soybeans, we're going to weed those in corn. What you do is you move the corn over to year number three. If you happen to be in a no-tilt system, you would have only four seedlings. In other words, by the time you plant corn, if you're in a two-year rotation on tillage, you will have 100 seedlings in your corn in contrast to the cycle before you have only four. You have only four seedlings. In other words, the system gave you 96 percent weed control even before you do the herbicide. The reason that after this, in winter, we would have such a different growth period that when you harvest your crops, you prevent or you can have more probability of preventing those weed seeds in our common in corn and soybeans using weed seeds. So therefore, the system provides you with benefit for weed control. And because you have a diversity, you tap into the no-tilt benefit. If you happen to be in a no-tilt and you sit with a contained store of corn and soybeans, you really don't have much impact, much benefit. If you can get that out of diversity, that helps you. Now, if you were to use extremely high rates of herbicides and ensure that all the plants in your corn and soybeans die, you would gain this benefit too. The drawback with that is that one point was that if you do intensive herbicide control to try to gain this benefit, first what you do is you accelerate the appearance of your system weeds. So the key point there from no-tilt can be a benefit from you if you could figure out ways to increase the diversity across different life cycles. Also, the cover crops itself can be quite a benefit. On the title of my slide, I'm talking plant mulch. I'm not trying to add it's just that crop residues are after harvest residues, they're also so I'm just putting them together. Cover crops and plant mulches and crop residues are the same as in the channel term of plant mulches. This could be a benefit for weed control. This is actually related to the quantity of material that you have on the soil circles. So if you're thinking about suppressing weeds after winter harvest or after corn harvest or using a cover crop and then spraying it down, the impact on a weed wouldn't be related to mulch quantity. This is a study that I've done in, an example I'm going to give you is a study done in Nebraska, what he did is he established quantities of winter weed residues on the soil surface and for the following year he monitored the number of weeds that emerged compared to their control. Look here, I have percentages, this would be an amount of reduction. This is the residue level 1,500 of the 6,000. You'll note that when they have this bar here, represents this value of 16, means that if you add 100 seedlings in your control, you get 84 in this treatment and a 16% reduction in the number of weeds. If you look over at the 6,000, you get 70%. The key point is with more quantity you have the greater suppression of reduction of the number of weeds. It's almost a direct line, pretty close to about 10% for 1,000 miles of that material. The reason why this happens is when you put the residue on the soil surface, one thing it does is reduces the amount of light and reaches down to the soil surface. Some weed species are sensitive to light, when you get a certain quantity of light or maybe a quality of light, it stimulates them to germinate. Another aspect is that when you put the residue on a soil surface, it alters the temperature range. A lot of species actually respond to the highs and lows, so when you put the residue on it, you actually moderate that and therefore it's outside of the optimum temperature range for the weed to germinate. You've probably heard a lot about levopathy. A lot of times these compounds, the after harvest residues will release a compound that will suppress germination of a weed. In physical impedance, what that means is sometimes it's hard for the seedling to grow through all the residue and survive. Also, another factor that affects this is that species vary in their response to the plant volumes. This is a study where they put on 3,000 pounds in the springtime and they monitor the response of these various species. The green hawk's tail, redwood pigweed, common lamb's quarter, marineric grass, and all of the things. These are just the abbreviations I'll use in the next slide. What I show here is the percent reduction, so this would be the green hawk's tail, redwood pigweed, common lamb's quarter, marineric grass, and all of the things. To compare, like green hawk's tail, we have a value of 78. In other words, in our control, if we got a hundred seedlings, we'd only get 22 green hawks. So there's a tremendous suppression of the species. If you look at velvet, we only had a 26. In other words, it varies some of the species. Velvet, we had a very large seedling to grow through a lot of material lying on the small surface. So the key point is the amount of residue impacts how much we control you again, but also the species vary in their response to the residue. I thought I'd show you a little bit about field trials and which benefit mulches can be. What we did here is we examined the impact of red cobalt when we did this week. We were in a sequence of winter wheat growing in support. So what we did is we planted under-seedling clover into winter wheat and also into spring wheat. We planted it in the fall as soon as it warmed up in the spring. In early April, we planted the clover. We also planted the spring wheat and clover together on the same day. This is what it looks like here. This is the under-seed clover after harvesting to look over there. This is our control with a lot of weeds, a lot of oxhose on the land score. When we examined the wheat it fell after about six weeks. We reduced wheat bile last 90 percent. In other words, the under-seed clover wouldn't eliminate it in April herbicide after a week. We did examine, we had wheat free versus clover under-seeded. The winter wheat was not affected by it. The fact that we harvested winter wheat after clover was maybe three or four inches tall. When we did, with spring wheat, we lost 17 percent of our yield. That's kind of logical because of the under-seeded clover started growing at the same time of spring wheat. In contrast with the winter wheat, which I serve up tillers. Also, in the same study, we did a further follow-up. We had downy grown that has come in some parts of our plants. So we monitored the impact of this mulch on the downy grown growth. So what we did is we had a series of fruits along with the under-seeded clover. We had an over-peat mix. This was planted after we harvested either rather than winter wheat or spring wheat. It was planted in early August. We had our control, and the downy grown at this time all emerged about the same time that we planted the over-peat ones who had been in early August. What I have here is the number of seeds per quadrant. So what I did is I went out and identified quadrants about the first of September. We had somewhere around 35 plants per quadrant. I monitored them over time and then in the spring, I counted the number of seeds per quadrant. When we had our control, we had about 35 plants and they produced somewhere over 7,000 seeds. We picked the same plants in the under-seeded clover. We had only 75 seeds. Because we were moderating these over time, we were able to recognize that the 35 plants in the control, there's about 32 of them still alive in springtime. In the clover, 35 plants emerged, but the great majority of them died in the clover. In other words, the clover out-competed them. So when we got to the spring where they had any downy grown, those 75 seeds came from plants that emerged in the spring. If you look at the value for the old peas, we had about 4,000 or we suppressed downy grown seed production by 40%. The reason I include that and show the how much variation you can have with the type of cover crop that you use. If you get a head jump on the weeds, they're much more effective than if the weeds start emerging at the same time. Another benefit of this is this produced 50 to 80 pounds of biological nitrogen, so from your following crop, it's going to work very well. So one is a little bit with you about integrating this in weed management. We recognize that no-till can be a benefit for helping weeds cease to die over time, and then the plant mulch was came by suppressing convergence. We had actually integrated some other factors. We did not believe that no-tilling cover crops could control weeds on their own. I used to be on the Colorado and one of the reasons why I talked about this diversity is producers out there if they were to grow, rotate the seeds, two cool season crops followed by two warm season crops, they reduced the herbicide, used tremendously. In fact, they could grow three crops up before without using any herbicides. They were doing things like dry peas where we followed my corn and crux of milk. And so for them, weeds are not even an issue. We said it's one of the smaller branches of the production tree. So when I moved to South Dakota, I thought I'd explore the impact of winter weed growths into soil. You can see what kind of impact it had on the weeds in the soil beans. I also included a dry cover crop. So one treatment I had was complete no-tilling, and I had it at home. I got that after harvest crop residue from both small grains, and I had it dry. Then I've had it tilt control, and tilt between each of the crops to control the weeds. And I monitored the weed emergence in the soil beans. So what I did is I sprayed out the soil beans in the control, and also in the where I had the no-till. At the time of planting, then I did not use any more herbicides at all. I just monitored what happened inside the crop. What I have here is the number of weed plants, 200 square meters. This is an average over four years. We're pretty close to May 15th for our planting day. Business shows a calendar day. On May 22nd, the first week, we'll note that we did not have anything in no-till. We had somewhere around 12, 13 years of no-tilling. In the second week, we're going to be about May 29th. We had two or three plants in no-tills. We would have over 40 in our tilt. In other words, we had more than 50 plants, 50 weeds, infested in tilt, and we only had two in no-till. If you continue on, you'll notice that the no-till line is quite a bit low. In fact, you put them all together. The weed density is five times higher in the tilt, and not only that, it emerged two to three weeks earlier. We looked at that. We measured the weed biomass. This was done seven weeks after soil being immersed. I have a no-till and a tilt. You notice in our no-till, we have 10 grams of dry matter per square meter. We have 100 we can, or we control the suppression of 91 percent. We then wanted, we also split our plots in half, where we had one half completely weed-free and the other half we just let these weeds grow for the whole season. We only had two percent yield loss in our no-till. There's no herbicides for the entire year. We used it at any time, and then we only had two percent yield loss in our tilt system. We had 43 percent. Over there's a 24 difference in the impact of weeds, simply because we had more weeds with tellage, and they appeared quite a bit over here. I'm continuing this exploring and trying to help the organic farmers get to a no-till system. So what I did was a very similar treatment. I maintained a no-till for winter weed folks, and in soybean, I talked about the under-seeding clover. How does that into this? It's trying to control weeds here. I'm using well-seed and radish, but it kills on its own, so it's not using herbicides. And we also compare that to the tilt system. We found here in our no-till plus the mulch, we had 49 grams of dry matter, we had 135 in our tilt. What's kind of unusual in a way is we actually tilt it plenty time here, and get that one third. This is what came after tilt plenty time. The 49, I'm sure, included some of that diversion over winter in the spring, although we didn't have a chance to control any of that. If we look at our yield loss, we reduced the yield loss to the weeds I wouldn't have. Now if you happen to be in a system where you did have herbicides, it would be very easy to limit them. But the point is, the use of no-till into the system and also the use of cover crops is helping us to suppress the impact of weeds. I'll give you a figure of the nine photos. This is the tilt system. No mulch. This person has a no-till and we include the mulch in the paper. So this is the first year that we're getting this done. So there was like a second yard. And there's a problem with weeds in here. Compared back to what I found on my table, it's quite a bit bigger than what we were getting. I'd like to deviate just a little bit. I got involved in studying the interactions between plants. And we noticed that there are some plants seem to have an unusual impact on the following plants. In other words, these moral waters are more resource-use-efficient. The example I'm working here with is dry peas. There was quite a bit of work on this in the country of Australia. What they found is that a winter wheat following dry peas was more efficient in using water than following several other crops. And the second thing that I noticed was that this impact is much greater in no-till. In other words, when winter wheat followed dry peas compared to following the ocean or the canola or marlite or even follow, in the tilt system it would produce five hundred percent more yield with the same water supply. When it was in no-till, it would produce 25 percent more. In other words, the synergism was three times greater in a no-till system. And so I got interested in this. I explored this for the impact of dry peas on corn. What I did here was for two-year study. The first year I grew corn, soybean, spring wheat, and dry peas. Then in the second year I planted corn across all of the same plots. And in the corn year only, I split the plots into wheat-free and wheat-infested. I used foxtail millet as an indicator species because I wanted to have a uniform infestation level of weeds. At the sites that I picked, we were in no-till and we had at least seven years of no-till. So we're trying to tap into the no-till effect that seems to enhance the synergism. This shows the wheat-free I'm expressing here in yields of bushels per acre. If you look at this white bar, this is when these bars represent corn yields. This is a corn yield following dry peas. This is following spring wheat, following soybean, and following corn. Now you'll notice that the corn yield is only 69 bushels per acre. At our location in eastern South Dakota, our soils can be awfully wet and awful cool in the spring. And corn is actually toxic to the south. And this toxicity is actually greater when you have cold soils and high water. And so this system set up for a lot of toxic corn, so we have 69 bushels per acre. If you look at the yields in these other three alternative crops, they're above 100 bushels. It's bringing in any crop other than corn, eliminating that toxicity, and having a corn residue there. But you'll notice when in fallow spring wheat and soybeans, we average 105 bushels. And corn following dry peas, we get 120 months. 15 bushels per yield. I'm not really sure why that is, but we also notice that in another trend, when we brought the weeds, we hear the shows that wheat invested at a uniform milling level of competition. You'll notice here, corn after corn, we got about 13 bushels. And the toxicity of corn through itself was not toxic to the hawks and milling, so we allowed the hawks and mills to lay hammered corn. When you get episode beans in spring wheat, you're more than doubled those corn. But look what happened when we had dry peas as a recent crop. We got twice as much yield with the same wheat investigation as if we did the hawk and soybeans. In other words, dry peas brings something special to the table. We're not really sure what it is. I believe it's related to microbial changes, which Mike has talked about earlier. In Canada, they've studied this quite a bit, and they feel that dry peas have a very favorable impact on what they call a class of bacteria called rhizomacteria. And it's also very favorable in microbiota. And that these two actually synergize. They enhance the growth of the crop somewhere between 20 and 30 percent when you put the two of them together. But again, we're not really sure exactly why it's something very special going on. Well, the reason I'm mentioning this is this dry pea effect occurs even if you grow it only six or three weeks. In other words, if you grew it as a cover crop, you would still get this benefit. And so if you can improve your resource use efficiency somewhere between 15 and 20 percent, that means you can use that seed. When we examined our stock of corn, it was not related to nitrogen. In fact, this impact was created during the years that we put on too much stress. During the stress years. Notice when we had wheat, it was only as stressed the impact of dry peas was even greater. In Australia, they've also found that lupins have a very favorable impact on the following crop. Increase in resource use efficiency. The difference with this though, is related to how much loudness of lupins that you have. In other words, if you only have a small amount, you're going to get a very limited impact. Also, I put on lentils here. When I worked on this synergism, I was trying to identify, I'm working with catch crops, I was trying to identify all the crops that possibly would show this. And worse than research, it showed lentils and a small effect on half of what I've ever tried. The only other crop that I've seen this happen is corn synergistic down the crops that follow it, such as soybeans and also personal. Out of a summary, I know in the field that we science, we've been trying to help producers reduce a lot of herbicides that they need. And there's been some assessments of producers who have been new-following integrated system approaches. And what they did is this is based on producer actual data on experimental stuff that was farmers were actually applying. And in these studies, one was in Netherlands, I showed them how to follow these integrated systems. They reduced the use of pesticides, herbicides, 28%. In the country of England, they reduced them 32%. And then also in the US 20%. There were two main factors that were involved with this reduction in pesticide herbicides. One was that you use complex rotations, rotations that had a diversity of life side of, such as corn and winter wheat. This doesn't really work if you stick with the rotational corn, so it needs more winter wheat and corals. You need to have a diversity of life. The second thing that they would have, both on tactic management, which those would be one of the factors, another might be any fertilizers. Now you'll notice that the values from the Netherlands and England are quite a bit lower than the Great Plains. There is a reason for that. In those two countries, the producers were using reduced. In other words, they were tilling maybe once a cycle or maybe once every two years. For some reason, they continued to till. In the Central Great Plains, this was continuous no-till for at least 10 years before they started to assess what the producers were doing, and they monitored this over a six-year interval. To give you an example of what they were doing, like in the Central Great Plains, they identified eight producers who were doing what they call innovative farming, and they would pair them up with a conventional producer, and that was very close to them. So we had eight pairs that generated this data. And the point was that I mentioned earlier, the innovators in the Great Plains actually pated me and said, you don't have to worry about the weeds anymore. They're simply not a problem for us in their integrated system for they're doing, like giving poor crop rotation, a field job. They felt starting the synergism work. They felt that was much more meaningful for them in their future management. One last thing I'd like to mention is, as you listen to the other speakers, they're talking about tying in with nature a lot more. I think the weed management system, the weeds scientists have been starting to recognize this too, and we're trying to tap more into nature. When you think about the thesis term nature-based, no-till and cover crops help us get there. You know, we're a developing system, and we're not quite so dependent on herbicides. It's a question I got it in Great Plains. Herbicides are actually our last resort rather than the first resort. They wouldn't want to use herbicides if they had to. In fact, in a poor crop rotation, there were a couple of tree crops without even using any herbicides and getting some of the highest you know, things. You try to take any questions if you have something. I had a question with, how did I intercede winter wheat? I don't know, red clover interweave. We did it two ways. We planted and we also broadcast. I was kind of a skeptic about the broadcast. They do a lot of broadcasting in Michigan, and that appears to work well. I don't know what the problem would be if you have any wind at all. That's seizureally slow, but it has some gaps. If it's windy, winter's a lot too. Yes, we planned to winter wheat in September, and we came back in early April, so we did winter wheat in the same way as we did the spring wheat. Some of the synergies between the dry peas and the corn, did you see the same things, or have you seen the same things in your harvest that you can feed the year towards the cash crop, or the sugar players? The question was about the dry peas synergies in the corn. Did we get the same results from the harvest for cash crop versus picking an effect for the crop? The work that I did, we always did it for cash crop, and also for steaming it. We did have one year where our dry peas were sprayed out, and our farm manager used the harvest for soybean that he thought would work with dry peas in a bin. We only had 60 weeks growth in that year, and we could not tell the year difference. We did this over four years, therefore it did not matter from the early weeks versus the good for the whole season. In Australia, they monitored the amount of biomass produced by the dry peas in the year before. They found that had no effect on its impact in the following cause. The reason being that they felt that if you get 60 weeks growth, you do have a never-grown tea impact, and that's where we felt the change. I think you could use dry peas in the crop. So how do you kill out the clover in here? We doubled that. What I was doing is, I was hoping just to have winter killed. If we had some problems, we weren't using mammoth red clover. We must have got a contaminated seed so we got medium. So that didn't work so good. So we're switching over to test crimson clover and also bursam clover. Bursam is an annual that will not survive. Crimson is an annual that does not have good winter hardiness. You can survive a winter two or three hardiness no one saw it with us, but it will not survive. One more question? No, I wouldn't think that that wouldn't win our kill. Plus, you're going to have to spray it out until the end. The reason I'm doing this is I'm trying to sort of do it again and people will be right. But it would work if you had your business.