 Today's event is a joint effort of the South Dakota No-Till Association, the Mitchell NRCS off-field office, SDSU Extension, and the NRCS. And one of the first things I'd like to do is thank all our sponsors that helped us put together and provide input and money for today's event. I'm going to just read through the list. South Dakota Wheat Commission, Farm Credit Services of America, Wheat Growers, Mustang Seed, Monsanto, Prairie State Seeds, Next-Level Ag LLC, Millboard Seeds, La Crosse Seeds, Dakota Best Seed, Agronomy Plus, Farmers Eliacs, Mitchell, First Dakota National Bank, C&D Operations and Davis County Amplement, Scott Supply, Crop Tech, Ducks Unlimited, Aurora County Conservation District, Davis County Conservation District, Hanson County Conservation District, South Dakota No-Till Association, SDSU Extension, USDA and NRCS and Pioneer Hybrids of Dupont. So let's give them all a welcome round of applause. Our next topic is going to be on cover crops, old tools for new systems and our speaker is John Pike. John Pike is from Marion, Illinois and operates Pike Ag LLC. Pike Ag provides economic consulting and contract research services for the ag industry. He's also a cover crop specialist for ZMA's foundation in the Southern Illinois Coordinator for Nitrogen Management Research conducted by Illinois Fertilizer and Chemical Association. He has many other educational and practical experience qualifications and I think he will give us a lot of good information on cover crops and how we can utilize them on our farms and in our systems. Thanks. It's a pleasure to be here today. I had to sign a release form a little bit ago for the video and I don't know why they'd want to use me because I've got a face made for radio. I've been told that many times. Pleasure to be here. It's the first time that I've ever been to South Dakota. I thought when I was out on my bucket list that I'd come up to hunt or something not to talk at a cover crop meeting but maybe I can do some scouting while I'm up here but glad to be here and really enjoyed the talks from the first two speakers and kind of glad to know that many of the things that I have experience with as far as cover crop species and some of the rotational and seasonal considerations up here even though we're different dealing with a different length of a growing season where I met in Southern Illinois. The concepts are still pretty much the same so we'll kind of keep going on that track. One of the things that I wanted to make sure that I did while we were up here is to make sure that my presentation was relevant for the region. I know at times around different parts of the country we have some different industry programs that are put together where they have speakers kind of do the road show and I know that in my experience in working with University of Illinois Extension and the Crop Sciences Department at U of I running a crops research farm in deep Southern Illinois it seemed like a lot of times after those speakers came to the region my phone would ring off of the wall for about the next month with people taking ideas and comments that these folks had and tried to apply them to their farm and a lot of times when they applied to Ohio they didn't apply to Southern Illinois or southeast Missouri so we'll try to try to keep things general and and move on just a little bit about where I'm from in geography Illinois is a long state I live down in here in the almost the suburbs of Kentucky where you might think a lot of a lot of differences in Illinois a lot of people think of Chicago when they think of Illinois others Central Illinois the corn and soybean production down in my area we have a lot of row crop production but it is smaller fields highly erodible land a lot of no till a lot of cover crops need more no till and more cover crops like me like many area do but a lot of diverse things though we've got the Shawnee National Forest a lot of neat places to go for recreation almost kind of mountainous areas that are in the foothill of the Ozark Mountain Range and then also where the Ohio and Mississippi rivers come together has been a traditional hot spot for a waterfowl hunting and on the farm that I grew up on we run a commercial goose and duck hunting operation the goose hunting kind of changed when conservation tillage came the theme in Central Illinois and has slowed down the migration of geese from what it was 25 or 30 years ago but our duck hunting is still pretty good and we're probably only about an hour and a half from northeast Arkansas so way down in there but a lot of a lot of things going on in that area just a historical point of view my family was in the hybrid seed corn business back in the 30s and 40s and into the into the 50s that's my great-grandpa and grandma there and my grandpa and great uncle there that were in part of the seed company and I've got a lot of this memorabilia that hangs in my my house and as I was getting ready to pack up to come in here the other day I looked and there was a this was a brochure out of a 1959 seed catalog of my family seed company and there's a reference to a fiends truck in Davis South Dakota is anybody here from Davis or no any of them there's a there's a what's that it's our RO fiends truck yeah okay well I'll be darned but anyway I thought that yes hang on this is good probably a bunch I my family moved from Pontiac down to the to the end of the of the state when I when I was real little so I've got memories of up there but they I I don't have any context anybody that's buried in the in the landfill yeah that it's it's it's quite a it's quite a monument too because it's very flat up there in that area and you've got this landfill and it's probably 150 feet high and some place like they're building a pyramid so anyway anyway a lot of a lot of interesting things there so that's kind of some some history of things but you know look at the that's some of the old memorabilia there but also another thing in the news this this last week down in southeast Missouri and we get a lot of our news from southeast Missouri and into Arkansas and there's a lot of let's say unique folks down in in that area this was on this was on the TV news the other day a guy guy tried to use a combine to pull a truck out after he got stuck in a field and cause $65,000 worth of damage so you can't make this stuff up but anyway well we'll get to the serious part of the matter now right off the bat I wanted to hit on my take-home message if it so if anybody wants to go get a Dairy Queen or something else the rest of the presentation this pretty much sums it up and I think ties in pretty good with what the first two speakers talked about in there the big thing with cover crops is developing a system that's suited to your particular environment cropping systems the resources and equipment that you have available to you but you know a cover crop success in my mind and the with the producers that I work with in the in a big region of the of the state of Illinois that have been long-term no tillers and cover croppers they approach this as a system and they've had very good luck with this thing it takes time to reach reach your goals but the folks that have been successful in these in these adventures they they very much see cover crops as a system and a total new system much like moving from conventional tillage into a no-till system and it's also been my observation that a lot of the failures that come that you hear about with cover crop experiences those failures come about because the cover crop is just seen merely as an additional input to a conventional system and I so I think it's very important that you kind of put this in in perspective and we hear a lot of the resistance to cover crops and in some cases about well you know I can't there's an extra expense from seeding the cover crop and if we're just looking that as 50 pounds more nitrogen or another seed treatment or whatever other additive input that we bring to the operation that is not the systems type of thinking that we need to do to kind of get to the next frontier so to speak and so I I kind of liken it to this picture of the elephant they you know a lot of these things get sent around on internet and Facebook things I never throw them away because that's material but you know how many how many legs do you see on this elephant well depending on where you look at it there's legs sticking out all over the place and I think that that holds a lot of truth to cover crop management systems one it's not a one-size-fits-all situation it's not a silver bullet that we're finding but it's a matter of putting together a system that works in in your area on your particular farm and sometimes on a field-by-field basis depending on what the particular challenges are that we're we're facing in those in those operations I think another thing that we need to be careful of is to keep considering that you know everything because we're dealing with a switch to no till or trying to perfect our no till or interested in cover crops and that type of thing we don't want to get tunnel vision whenever we talk about any of any aspect of our production system we want to keep in mind that all of these things are still vitally important just like they always were nitrogen or nutrient management the hybrid and variety selection that we have observations of plant health their stand all of these things are important and it's a matter of optimizing each piece of the puzzle and putting together that plan that works in your situation I think this is an example here of a field that's it has cereal rye planted on on one side of it it's just no till or had had not and hyders put on there but one of the and one of the problems that that we see with a lot of the information that comes out about cover crops it seems that when you read about it in in whether that some of the ag press it's either an interview with somebody to where a cover crop is the end all you know thing plant just go out there and spew a little bit around and that'll answer all your problems or the next interview or person that you encounter will say well cover I tried cover crops once in it and it didn't work and I think it's important then to decide where your source of information comes from meetings like this that are focused pretty specifically on soil health and no till that's usually a pretty good place to interact with a lot of people that have had various experiences with this type of issue and you know sometimes the information pipeline that we're used to getting production information from though it in as far as cover crops from what I've seen as coming from a university system isn't always very well suited to practical applications in many cases one of the things that we've done in in Illinois a big project is with nitrogen management and have plots all around the the state that were replicated in on farm trials and things and then they decided well this cover crop thing we need to get a handle on that so we go out in a in a conventional system and then we add cover crops to one side of the field but yet we don't manage the cover crop side as a cover crop system we look at that as a as an added input on there so a lot of the results that we get back from our nitrogen trials and our yield results from that really show that the cover crop system puts us at a at a negative advantage on in many cases and it if we look at that at from a systems approach and if we would manage the cover crop side of the field in a cover crop system you know we can balance those things out and get to where we want to be over over time so we as we look at these things we've got different issues that build up you know as far as equipment what what species of cover crops we want to have on the field right on down the the line but you know nutrient management is important is very important and these these lines that squiggle around here we won't get real in depth of that but basically what this is showing is the nitrogen availability in a no cover crop system versus a cover crop we can see that there's more nitrogen available in that no cover crop system and this is in a conventional comparison we put a cover crop on that we've got less nitrogen in the system at this time of planting and early crop growth that's that's something that we need to address you know it can be a disadvantage if we fail to address that but if we go into that this the development of our system with our eyes open we have some extra fertility in there early with whether it's starter or some other type of application to give us that bounce up and we don't go into a period of nitrogen deficiency there you know there we put our system on level playing field you know a lot of different things that we've looked at about where the where the nitrogen is held in the field if we look at at fall nitrogen application here in our part of the of the world we can go out there and we can measure we can see that that nitrogen is truly in the ground when we've got a cover crop system you know some of that nitrogen and a big part of that nitrogen in a lot of cases is going to be held in the cover crop biomass by the time we get to the point where we where we're going to plant so considering taking those those aspects into consideration in our management plan is going to be very very important the timing of planting these cover crops and their ability to take up nitrogen and development and all of those things so it's not just as simple many times as saying well I planted cereal rye as my cover crop our results from that year in and year out might be a little bit different according to the time of the the planting date of that cover crop the season that we had after that I know in in our part of the world this year and I think you know we've had a mild winter across a big part of our of our region here we went into the after our harvest was very dry in southern Illinois so there was a good chance to plant some cover crops probably a little bit later than we normally would have and many people stopped planting the cover crops because of the timing of the year where as it ended up we had plenty growing season to get things up and running so if we've got a time sometimes we can have an early planting of our cover crops but if we have an early end of the growing season of what with the with cold weather coming in we're not going to get that development and so that's going to make for a different result on of that cover crop that versus a time when we would have a longer growing season get more fall development and then go in and if we get a time when we have an early spring where it warms up you know that the differences in in the development of the crop when it gets to planting time for our corn or soybeans or whatever our summer crop is going to be can be very very different so that very ability from one it one year to the next and the ability to kind of adjust to that year in and year out is where a lot of our our success lies because we don't want to get stuck in the fact that I do this and this and this and this we've got to have maintained some flexibility through the time to really get the good out of the of the system and you know it's it's neat that I get to go around and work with a lot of fellas that are involved in long term cover crop and no till systems and one of the things that sticks in my mind about working with these fellas is that I've never met one of them that was into this into the system more than five years or so that would ever dream about turning around and cutting cover crops out of their system or going back to a tillage environment but if you in that one to three year phase right there some folks get a little bit impatient with that and they turn back before they truly do see the result so that can be a major major problem we've got nutrient management is a huge issue of all across the the country we with our access or or location in the major river system and good drainage through Illinois we've had a lot of emphasis that was put on nitrogen management over the last few years and I think all the states that are in a in the watershed of the Mississippi River that drains into the to the Gulf of Mexico where the hypoxia issue have been a problem lately have a some type of a nutrient management plan and this has been a big part of the studies of a lot of the nitrogen management and fertilizer applications in Illinois you know I think that one of the things that we have found with our nutrient loss reduction strategy is that any way you cut it cover crops appear to be our biggest excuse me they appear to be how we can get to the goals of reducing nitrogen and phosphorus runoff into our water system as as fast as anything and we've got this goal to reduce our contribution in of nitrogen and phosphorus by 45% by by the year 2525 and that's a lot of that's a big reduction to think about but we've we've gone to the point of figuring that if we could get cover crops on a significant acreage across the state that that would be one of the few ways that we could really legitimately have an opportunity to meet those goals without that they're there's without cover crops into the into the system in a big way there's probably nothing that we can do as far as split application with nitrogen rates or any of the other inputs or management decisions that we would make that that would really get us to where we need to be in any time of a point of time so change can be challenging when we talk about these things kind of feel like these mouse they're not in a very good they're not very good place but I think most of us are are a little bit better off than that but I think that you know we also remember that the electric light didn't come from continuous improvement of candles you know there had to be some point where we put the candles away and we run it run an electric cord into the into the house so it's kind of the same way with many of these management decisions on taking the leap or you know moving in a direction to where we get these the results that we need because standing our ground and doing the same way that we've always done things isn't going to get us to the results in the long term that we that we need to financially and environmentally both when we talk about the big picture of of agriculture across a big part of the of the Midwest another organization that we have working in Illinois on this nutrient management issue and heavily involved in in the aspects of evaluating cover crops and their impact on the farming system is the Illinois Nutrient Research and Education Council and they they collect a fee on every ton of bulk fertilizer that's sold in Illinois we we assess 75 cents a ton and that goes into a pool that funds a lot of the nutrient management and cover crop work that's related to that in the in the state of Illinois so if you watch the news you know that how many good things have you heard coming out of Illinois in the last couple of years well probably not well in rec is one of the good things so you can say you heard heard something so anyway but they are there a that's that money is held outside of state government and that's the that's the big big part of that anything that we could do to keep money out of our state government is definitely a good thing and in the point of this is that that money we know that it's going to stay and be devoted for the purpose that it was it was collected for so a lot of work that's been done with this is on farm nitrogen studies as it was mentioned in the in the opening I'm coordinating these studies in the southern third from about st. Louis south in in Illinois we've got replicated nitrogen studies that are going on around the state and some of these were doing in cover crop systems some not to kind of get an idea about different things and as a result of this we get a lot of squiggly lines and and graphs and things so you can see that as we go through this we can make recommendations at the beginning of the season the the yellow the yellow triangles on these graphs is that after the after harvest that's the determined optimum of the calculated optimum in rate for that crop we can see these we've got some lines that are pretty high and lines that are pretty low so a lot of variation across the state and as we make our recommendation it's kind of our best estimate about what a sound nitrogen recommendation would be when we get to the end we can see that it's kind of somewhere in the in the middle but probably not right on for for everything so from one year we go and you know we take a lot more tests and a lot more tests but I think that it's good information to have for sure but it's important for me as I bring take the program to the southern part of the state to be able to work with some of our producers that are in long-term no-till cover crop systems so we can get an action an accurate estimate about how these how nitrogen response and other factors work in these in these systems so I'm looking forward to doing that in the next three years as part of this program you know here's a field that we planted a cereal rye after the cover car after the corn crop was was harvested the numbers there show the different nitrogen rates in there and you can see the various colorations of the of the rye crop so it's do it's able to do what it's planted there to do to sequester leftover nitrogen after a corn crop or any type of a crop that would take nitrogen as a as a big input on there so you know the the cover crops are able to do a lot of things in our nutrient management and environmentally above and beyond the soil health component that's important to all of us so you know as we've seen corn yields from back in the 1800s we get here man it's really gone up we've made a lot of improvements and a lot of headway on improving corn yields across the the country but you know I think that many many of us would think well gosh or to the untrained eye so we're doing better so our soils have to be better is that right well I don't think anybody in here would agree with that we've been able to get to those higher yield plateaus by the uses of technology and a lot of different inputs and systems to bring us along a long way but I think you know it's amazing to think about where we might be if soil health would have been a primary goal of our agricultural planning along through this time so you know we can think of whatever the big yield for your area is or my area you know if we had the ability to go back in time and implement a lot of these heavy cover crops in the soil health aspects into our production systems back 50 years ago you know with those yields how high could those yields be and if they weren't even substantially higher how much more profitability would be in the system right now because we would have a better handle on our nutrient management we would be growing the a lot of the nutrient and having it mineralized naturally or the ability for that would be much greater so a lot of opportunities there moving forward but I think that you know it's we're to the point that we need to start moving in that direction as a whole because if we don't maybe not in our lifetimes or the lifetimes of the next generation but at some point down the line somebody's going to look back and say gosh I wish we'd have done this a little bit a little bit sooner and you know for those of you who are in the room and able to participate in observations on your own farm and field days and meetings like this I think it goes it goes a long way to move the move the industry forward so you know as we start to think about our cover crops and where where we start of putting a plan together that or a system that that's going to address the needs for your particular farm is important so you know before you think about just going out and well let's do some cover crops we need to have some type of goal or objective for our our operation or that field what problem or what goal what problem are we going to address what goal are we looking to get to at the at the end of what's our current tillage and cropping system now where are we located I think that's a that's a huge thing as far as information goes we all know the seasonal differences between where we're sitting today and where I'm going to go home to tomorrow just seasonally there's a lot difference but where your information comes from is huge because I read a lot of the information that comes out in various farm farm magazines and a lot of really good results and a lot of compelling stories involved with cover cropping across the country but every time I read one of those articles I see things that gosh they did that might work good in Ohio or wherever the story came from but I could see ways that that could be done different or things that might not work so well in in our particular area so keep our keep our eyes open for that but you know the drainage of the soils what's a growing season are we looking for a cover crop system to go after a corner soybean crop or we're looking at something that would be planted after a wheat crop to where we have a longer part of the growing season where we could get more aggressive with the the mix of cover crop species or the addition of organic matter at the end by creating more more biomass and just a whole whole number of things many of the benefits of cover crops we've already heard about today excuse me I eat that big meal it makes me dry could anybody else go for a dilly bar I'm telling you after a big meal like that dilly bar really hit spot not complaining a bit it was an excellent it was an excellent meal and I do appreciate beef because I'm allergic to poultry so most time I go to about 40 meetings in the winter time I have green beans and corns and biscuits so this was just a great great place to sit down but you know a lot of a lot of things advantages that we can get and these have been talked about erosion control you know it's just a no-brainer if we have things something green out there growing through the course of the of the winter time that's going to go a long way to slow erosion if we've got any problem with leftover nutrients especially nitrogen in the system we can put together a cover crop program that's very effective in holding that nitrogen in the system and carrying it over for the for the next year's crop the soil and organic matter issues are huge we get down to you know wildlife habitat and things like that that's one thing that has had a big driving effect in some parts of the southern half of Illinois is that there's a value to white-tailed deer hunting and many of the producers or the farm the farmers in these areas where the deer hunting is involved they've been some of the pioneers and the more aggressive folks that looking at cover crops in their particular rotation as a way to increase the habitat for the management of white-tailed deer on their acreage or the land that they have least so you know there's a lot of different angles that we can come through this I know ducks unlimited as a sponsor here today a lot of similar aspects to things in the in the pothole region with reproduction of ducks and things so you know there's a lot of different things that are involved in this and a lot of benefits that can come out of cover crop programs that are above and beyond what comes out in the you know in the in the grain tank at the end of the year in the combine so as we look to assess these benefits of cover crops I think it's important to kind of have an idea about the short-term expectations and long-term things that are going on in your particular operation and you know sometimes I there's a lot of land in Illinois that is cash rented or managed by bank managers from absentee landowners and so the the duration of the of your time to farm some of this this ground might not be long-term so if you're looking at some something that you might have a three or a five-year lease versus something that is family owned ground or something that you have had a long-term agreements with you can afford to be more aggressive with some of these systems but I think whether or not you know on either side of the of the case there whatever your term of lease might be there's options to involve cover crops in in that system long-term I think if we can have assist an idea about keeping that land whether it's family land or something that is going to be a little bit more long-term you know the the opera the options for benefits are far far in a way worth some of the short-term challenges for so you know all of these things fit in we're going to we're going to see more long-term benefits and benefits that are going to be opt realize quicker in a no-till system but we can find that and find some of this options for the guys that are involved in tillage also so you know selecting the right cover crops for the for the farm is important whether it's a mix between grasses and legumes or whatever that brassicas whatever the the case might be the options are certainly there and we've talked about some different species selection today and I won't get into that real deep maybe in some questions we can we can answer those types of things or address it with some of the other folks in the room but I think that you know selecting the right cover crop for the for the job is important if we are confronting an issue of compaction or maybe it is salinity as was discussed this morning there are certain cover crops that can help address those those situations and if we choose poorly sometimes we're not going to be able to get the benefits that that we're looking for so having that plan to put in place right off the bat is is important I think right off the bat also it's important to look under the soil surface to see what's going on you know carry a shovel in the in the back of the truck get a backhoe out or something dig a hole and see what's going on down in your soil so we can actually identify what what the good and the bad and the ugly so to speak about what what's going on in there so if we have issues of compaction or you know whatever that that might be put together a plan that we can get to the the end of that that's going to get some benefit out of moisture management is everything I know we've had several mentions of that already today even in my neck of the woods where it rains quite a bit you know it's usually either feast or famine will win this year you know in July we had something like 19 inches of rain in August we had about 17 inches of rain on on my farm and in those two months combined normally maybe if we get seven inches that would be a lot so what happens with issues of runoff in things I could see where we could been a lot better shape if we would have had more cover crop and more no-till ground on there because we're dealing with fan feast or famine one end of the other so in cover crops can help us do that by helping us increase the infiltration rates in our soils as well as improving the water holding capacity of those soils so we can we can gain on both sides of the of the fence right there I know that in our on our area where people are pushing always to push corn planting earlier you know if the soils are slower to dry in that time of the year but guys want to push want to push want to push and what we're seeing is is that for the the patient no-till cover crop guys that are actually waiting until the ground is ready they're able to get out in the field and plant a couple days sooner than the conventional till guys but with one exception a lot of times the conventional guys will get out there two or three days before it's really fit to go they'll push it so people will see planners running a couple of days but you know what was planted in those first two or three days really isn't wasn't planted very well and what we waited to do right in the in the no-till system you know not only have we not had to burn the diesel fuel and and have some of that intensive expensive tillage equipment in involved in the in the operation but you know we've saved in a lot of in a lot of different ways there so but moisture management is key and that goes that's true whether you have a little bit or a lot and you're trying to plant early and and all of those things we also see advantages to moisture management with planting green that that growing cover crop is there and by the time you're it gets to you're getting close to thinking about planting corn that it's starting to warm up in the spring and that cover crop it when it's there and we've got a green cover crop growing in the spring it's taking up a lot of moisture out of the ground in that case so that's gonna that's gonna dry the soils and allow us to get in earlier than we might also so a lot of different things there if we want to kill that cover crop on time termination is huge I know that we've had some problems with issues with cereal rye a lot of guys will get cereal rye is a good thing to plant because it's very adaptable to you there's a long window of opportunity to get it planted in the fall it'll do good during the spring and when it kicks off you know it'll get get pretty big ones that gosh you know that's getting getting awful big so let's go out there and kill it well that's all fine and dandy but if you kill that and it's it's pretty good size that's all gonna knock down and what's that's gonna do that's gonna keep the sunlight from getting to the ground it's gonna keep the ground wetter just act like a sponge so but early termination can cause a lot of problems in many cases that that we don't kind of think about if we don't have the right plan put in place another thing is get making sure our planters ready for cover crops a lot of the row cleaners and the pack wheels and those types of things on a conventional planner or a no-till planner if we're in a no-till system where we're planning without cover crops a lot of the attachments that are very good at handling last year's crop residue that's dead and loose to move it away from the from the row area and and and make a clean planning environment a lot of those things that are very effective for that are completely worthless when we talk about getting into an aggressive cover crop situation because we've got things there that are wrapping we've got parts of the the growing plant that's still attached to the soil versus a corn stock that's been ground up you know run through a corn head and that type of thing so the differences in planning attachments are huge the press wheels the various spike configurations and offsets and things there's a lot of different options there and also with the amount of residue that we're planning through so we've got some some of the settings and configurations that can create problems with extra extra force and and different things that would cause a problem in a conventional type of a system once we get to a no-till cover crop system those types of things are good because they can help alleviate some of the challenges of those high residues where we've got gauge wheels and pack wheels that are riding up on that residue we need some extra pressure sometime to get in and do a good job of obtaining good seed to soil contact and getting that even emergence that that we need one of the big things that gets not considered as much as it should many times is residue distribution a lot of the problems and challenges that I see with with the establishment of cover crops especially if we're in a situation where we're using aerial seeding or some other form of even even plant even when we drill it in if we don't have it to have a good even distribution of whatever type of crop was growing in that field if we've got the strips out in there like this and this is a not a real good example but there there's a lot of lot of places where it's real evident when we're running 35 and 40 foot heads now that we don't necessarily have the the spreader attachment the right spreader attachment on the back or it's not adjusted to get that even distribution across that wide width of that header and that can impact things such as the cover crop stand establishment you know your herbicide issues it can create a lot of problems so at the base if we can whatever we can do to get that crop residue distributed evenly that's going to be a plus it's going to help us in a cover crop system especially when we get to the benefits of things that this is a pretty interesting long-term study that Mike Plummer was involved with with a producer that we both work with with now that's in kind of southeast Illinois but would be pretty close to Evansville Indiana if anybody is familiar where where that is but on the Illinois side of the of the river long-term they started in 2000 to 2014 it was a long-term no-till system and then cover crops were introduced 15 years ago and this is continuous corn we're in an annual ryegrass cover crop and this is highly eroded really light timber soils so we talked you know Lance talked earlier about the issues in the soil test where you can actually see the incorporation of cover crops and you see a negative with those soil health tests and I think this illustrates that if we can see the the red when we get out here so if we follow the red is the cover crop system the blue is the county average for corn yields across this this county so we can see here we started out in 2000 with the with the county average was actually above the the average of this field so we were somewhere in the hundred and 120 to 130 bushel range right there and as we look to what happened over over the course of time we started off with the in the in this cover crop system with annual ryegrass we see that the yield you know the yield trends both both systems follow the county yield trends but as we go down we get out here to about year three and the red line magically comes above the blue line so at that point the cover crop system had surpassed the the county average in the in this system and we can see that that maintained that increase all the way out to the end of time to where when we get out here you know this is 200 bushels on this line so this is 230 bushel corn we've got versus 200 no 100 and figure 170 bushel corn so we've got a 49 bushel per acre yield increase over the county average by the end by the end of this study that's that's pretty huge so if we look at this in the short-term evaluation we think gosh this is the worst damn thing that I ever could have thought about in the first three years of here but with the patients to make it through that you know I would just about bet you that all of these added as the red line is above the blue line out to here if we would look at the profitability and or the revenue generated at the very least off of this ground off at this point you know from from here out to here the accumulation of that added revenue sure offsets what what we lost over here and you know this was a bad year out here anyway so that's just an example of the benefits that we can see from this this long-term utilization of cover crops so you think well how did this happen and what's going on out there we've got cover crops that are growing well yeah was it moisture management which is or what was it well it was all of the above I don't know that this screen doesn't show up near as good as that screen but if you can look that this is the at to the left we're looking at the beginning of the of the study so these soil cores these these first three soil cores here are the is the soil profile when we started these first three there so you can see that there's a pretty distinct gray line in there everybody see that that is this is a very dense fragile pan type soil so what we've got we've got the top soil in there just probably about 16 inches and then we get down and we get into this it's a gray real fine silty layer and in the in the summertime in June July August when it dries up that that silt sets up like concrete so it's pretty much an impermeable layer to root development so what we've got going on at the beginning of the of the project the field was pretty much operating at a 16 inch root depth or thereabouts as we move out into the as the study goes on at the end here these last four you can see what happened we started out with the gray up here well now we've got the gray that's down here it's not as distinct and even even oh shoot get to a good point hit the wrong button so you know we get out here to this to this far of soil core here and that these were these were all pulled out in the in the same field you can see where in this that it's faint it's almost completely done away with that fragile pan layer so in the case we get out here at the end instead of having a 16 or 18 inch rooted corn crop we've got corn we've got corn roots that are going down 48 inches and below I think that when they when they did the final dig on this they had corn roots that were down 72 inches in the ground and this this is not loose flat you know black glacial till ground that that should be doing that that is fragile pan hard ground unglaciated so it's pretty it's some pretty tough ground but over time we see this and that that comes from the the ability of the roots of that cover crop to penetrate that year after year and as the cover crop roots think about the environment that your cover crop is developing in as the spring season warms up okay it's wet in the in the wintertime and that wetness goes all the way down you know we've got wet soils it and so when that grant when that is in the wintertime and it's wet you know it it's soft and those roots can penetrate down through there's no corn roots that are bean roots that are growing at that time whenever the rye kicks up and grows in the in the wintertime or the spring green up as those roots penetrate down through that layer or year after year those roots are going to die and then the corn roots come in and that creates a channel for a corn root to follow that down through that layer and that after time time it it it breaks that up so you over time you increase your rooting depth on those soils so now instead of having 16 inches of of access to moisture we've got down to 72 inches so we've got all its moisture management remember back couple slides ago we've got access to a lot more mineral nutrient availability we've got more more water availability all of this stuff it's just a good a good thing and every situation is going to be a little bit different but these are the types of long-term benefits that we're really after and it you know you you're not dealing with the fragile pan soil I'm sure but the issues and the challenges with your soil with the right cover crop plan can no doubt be addressed similarly to this if we get the right plan and stick to it over over time with the right strategy another thing that we look at here that this just shows this was in 2012 and I don't know if it's dry here in 2012 but it didn't rain in Illinois it was terrible we had many of the research trials that the at the U of I farm where I was working there then we took a bush hog to him because there wasn't anything out there to to harvest and and there was thousands of acres of corn in southern Illinois that were destroyed at that time in the last slide let's see here we go back here we can see down in 2012 in this example you know our our cover crop system what was about 30 bushels an acre more it wasn't a great yield but it's 30 bushels an acre more and now I think that's the big thing is that we don't see a lot of times in the best years of the best that the cover crop system is going to give us 30 bushels an acre more than anything else but in the times of stress you know those are when the when the cover crop system is able to shine because of that those moisture management issues so as a risk management tool you know that's another reason why cover crops that can be a valuable tool to our various operations so just just real quick here at different nitrogen rates and the nitrogen rate in 2012 was immaterial because we didn't have the moisture to drive the yields anyway but we can see that that this top line here was the annual ryegrass we had a different various corn mixes soybean or radish different cover crops that are going in here and then the look the last lowest line here or you know lowest yield was where there was no cover crop used and this was not a long-term type of a study this was done by Bex seed company it was a central Illinois trial so it wasn't a long-term no-till cover crop but you can see in that year of stress the annual ryegrass and the other cover crops had a definite advantage over the the lack of cover crops in that in that situation again our pictures are kind of hard to see but we can see the the silt layer just in a no-till system with no cover crop over time we can see some impacts and its improvements into soil no doubt but when we've got the cover crop growing out there and we've got that early development of the of the roots or the impact going into the the fall of the year when we get some moisture in the ground many times that can help us to alleviate some of those stratification problems that that we see we've talked a little bit about grazing potential for these things too if you get a magnifying glass out in your in your handout that this is one of the things that's on the slide but one of my counterparts working with one of the community colleges in in central Illinois did a a nutrient an animal nutrient test on the different cover crops it's tremendous tremendous feed value there and and managed correctly it can really put a boost short term on the bottom line and make that cover crop pay off just a no-brainer and and also help to manage that for the maximization of the benefits of that to your to your soil so you know just a lot of things that are that are going on there another another benefit that we're seeing out of out of cover crops is weed suppression and I wouldn't say that by any means that we're eliminating the use of herbicides and moving towards an organic type of a system but the possibility is there and there's some some people that are doing this but you know that this is you can see this line through here and right there that the left side of the screen is is kind of a brown colored dead cover crop the green side all of that green that looks you know we could tell you it was a nice cover crop blend but all of that is foxtail and water hemp that's coming up right there and that was the ground this was ground that was prevented planted last year this I took this picture the end of June and you know there was virtually no weeds had come up on the on the cover crop side of the of the field it was clean we had the dead cover crop biomass there but there wasn't any weeds coming through this and on this side of the field where there wasn't any cover crops you know that was a that was a mess so basically the farm all the acres that were prevented planted that had the cover crop on we didn't have to do any management as far as tillage or or herbicide control until we planted the the cover crop into the into the fall but all of this other stuff had to be had to be sprayed to control the weeds so just a huge impact that we're seeing with the right system for for weed suppression and cover crops on the short-term end of that the clean part of the of the field there was where a hired man got crazy with a drill and drilled serial rye around the edge of a field came back in and got him stopped but it was it was interesting because the rest of the field had this water hemp sticking up that was about head high on me the only place and that had been that all of that had been sprayed with a you know a customary herbicide application burned down plus plus something post-emergence but you know after even after the second spray we've got this mess here and the only difference is is that there was cover crop planted where we're we're clean on that side another thing where we saw last year we had some with it being so wet and late planted beans in our area we had some problems with emergence in the in some areas where we had some blank spots out in the field in these cover crop fields this this is a serial rye and annual rye grass that was matted down there planted into you know it virtually kept the fields clean there where the sunlight didn't hit the ground we had clean any place that that was a conventionally tilled field where we had soil on there all of that whole area would have been water hemp just as much as you could have got growing in there so water hemp is a you got any water hemp up here oh okay that was good because I've got I've I brought up a jug in my suitcase I was gonna sprinkle some out I didn't want you to go without is that that stuff it's just terrible but all of our all of our conventional herbicide programs pretty much do a good job of selecting for that because they kill everything but and you know the plants got the natural ability to adapt and all kinds of good good advantages going for that but the more that we do to control other weeds around that the better that the water hemp does but water hemp is a sissy when it comes to any type of mulch cover on the ground it doesn't like the a little bit of extra cool it doesn't like the extra moisture it does best if we've got bare dry hot ground it'll really do good and anything we can do to cover that is is just amazing but we you know we got good results with that and these are just observations that that were out around but just a good a good extra plan to have in your in your weed control toolbox and they're again putting together a plan for whatever it is in this particular geography on your fields what it whatever the challenges might be the option is out there to move in that direction you know this was a this was a skip in a corn field we left a couple rows out so we could walk down here to plots and I was pretty hesitant to do this and this was working with the grower that had the farm with the with the map or the the graph I showed just a little bit ago and junior has worked with Mike for a long time and he's a pretty pretty unique gentleman and in the fact that he'll try anything he's a you couldn't ask for a better cooperator to work with from a researcher standpoint because if you come up with an idea you go and sit down at his table at the shop and explain to him what you need and why it's makes sense to move that direction and he'll go build equipment to make it work not only let let you use the field so pretty good guy to work with so he convinced he says I says don't worry about that all if it if it gets woolly I'll come back and spray it well again this is cover crop residue that was just rolled down there and that all that all that has on it is a roundup burn down there's been no no residual herbicides put on that that strip right there so you know we get into the challenges we've talked about some of the these things already but and we'll we'll move on through this pretty pretty quick but you know establishment in in the crop after the row so and I know or after the row crop comes off having enough of the season after you get your corner soybean crop harvested to be able to get in the field and drill that in and get the development that you need especially if it's a crop that's going to be terminated by a by a freeze so we know we can talk about aerial seeding and those types of things and I know that you've got some of the same challenges that that we do around here anything that we can do to get in that in the field and drill that in the ground get that seed to soil contact is probably going to be a benefit but you know there are some different cover crop mixes and some conditions especially if we can play the weather right that can open up an opportunity to make use of effective aerial seeding so we shouldn't rule out anything just maintain the flexibility to know that some years that's not going to be a good bet at all and a lot of years it's going to be have quite a bit of risk with it but we need to keep that that in mind so you know let's see we've hit on that another thing that we find is herbicide carryover problems if a farmer calls me and says that they have they've had problems of establishing a stand of cover crops especially if they're new cover croppers nine times out of ten it has something to do with the residual herbicide program that they had on the corn and soybean crop earlier in the in the season so we need to look at what the chemistry was because a lot of those heavy-duty residual herbicide programs that we have available now to control things like water hemp that will germinate from the beginning of the spring all the way up until harvest they're also very effective programs at terminating and controlling cover crops so we need to have the right plan in there make sure that we address our time of application there's a lot of the crops that we we need to have at least a 60 day window between the application of residual and the in the cover crop seeding and if we get into a time of year when we've got a late planted crop and we've got some weed escapes and those types of things be careful with those late season applications because what you do to clean up a field in the summer can really have a major impact on the establishment of those cover crops as we go into the to the fall of the year so most times that that's something that needs to be addressed even when we have a good stand of cover crops many times they're not completely controlled but we don't get a vigorous stand like like we would always have this shows some herbicide interactions going on here you know we really know that there's a problem there that we would have to look at and even when we get a good general stand sometimes there there has been some type of of damage to that so how good you know would that what how much development has have we lost in that crop right there by the herbicide interactions that we've got going on there so if there is a doubt I would encourage you to go out and collect some soil samples in just off of the top inch or two in the in your in your growing crop and do a bioassay you can do it in the shop put it out it's warm enough you know at that time of the year you probably set it out on a picnic table in your in your backyard get some cover crop seeds plant that in there and see what the impact is to your cover crop seeds and if you've got certain species that don't grow well in the pot of soil on your picnic table you probably don't want to put it on the field that you that you harvest it out out of so you know just keep those those things in mind because that can go a long way to avoid some of the pitfalls that that we see you know we want a good vigorous stand of that and you know that's that's hairy vetch right there and maybe not something that that you would get that aggressive with up here but you know hairy vetch kind of grows as a vine and I've seen planners grow through the field with the row cleaners down and you could see the vines pulling from that into the room to that into the room the whole field just comes to you so if you want to if you want to get closer to to God you know you try that it'll it'll it'll really come all into into into visions with that so you know we'll look at just a few things here some of the with brassicas especially if you're using those in your in your mixes and plans you know certain chemistries are going to be more conducive to damage on those the same way with grasses so we can see those those problems picking up and I'll just one one final thing here and then I'll wrap it up with this this producer that that we worked with Mike and I have for a long time he was interested in some type of a precision planting option to plant cover crops so he could take advantage of some of the the lighter less vigorous cover crops that were easier to plant in and still get benefit out of the more aggressive cover crops that he likes to plant into green so we put together a program with him and he went into the shop and he built this this is a person it looks like Mad Max but it's a precision cover crop planter this is a two-row version it's got boxes that you can plant we can segregate on certain species that would be on the row seven and a half inches to the side of the row or whatever was dead dead center in the in the middle of the row to establish cover crop plantings like this this is clover and cereal rye and some oats and the oat the the the corn crop the cornrow will be in the in the oat row in this case so when we get to the to planting we've got these we've got these open strips here where it's basically a bio till type of a thing or you're planting into a just a no cover crop no till strip but you've still got the cover crop there and we know the roots of the cover crops are going in between by the time we get to the end of the year so you know farther on in into the season we've got things like that and they're you know long we've got the cover crop in there real vigorous but still we've got kind of this strip till even though that's not been tilled we've got a good no till strip in there to where we can get a planter in between that and do a good job of planting in and that's something that we've looked at and there's several other slides here we won't go all the way through that but what was interesting and it was a hard year in in our area and we didn't push top yields by any means the the average corn yield around a big part of that area was probably in the 70-80 bushel range not not a very good year at all but every one of the treatments that we had with this precision planted cover crop system was out yielded the check that was just straight no till without any cover crops on there by anywhere from 15 to 37 bushels to the acre so we've got that planted again and looking for that but you know just a lot of things that you can play around with to fine-tune systems on your particular farm and and region so a lot of things that are that are out there and with that I'll turn it back over there I have really appreciated being here with you today and talking with with several of you and the and the rest of the meeting so it's I hope that you've enjoyed the the day and have a good safe cropping season to come