 South Dakota's educational effort to raise awareness about the importance of soil health continues. The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a cooperative agreement with the South Dakota No-Tel Association and IGRO South Dakota State University Extension for delivering these seminars with the latest soil health and productivity technology to South Dakota farmers and ranchers. Thank you. Somebody asked me when I was speaking and I said right after everybody leaves. So that's usually what happens when you're the last speaker. It went from being too cold and too hot and we're pretty fast, so I don't know. The Coal Lake Research Farm is east of Pierce House, Dakota. We have over there Gated Dry Land. We're going to talk a little bit about what we do. I'm going to talk a little bit about where what we do started. A lot of you may not know that we actually started a lot of this in the Denver Valley. The James Alley Research Center east of Redfield, we ran that for about eight years before we went to Redfield. And the little bit about the geology here is it's the La Custry and Lake Dakota Plain. And what does that mean? It's an old glacial lake. That's why it's flat. It's very similar to the Red River Valley. And what happens in a glacial lake is when you get melting in the spring, you get a bunch of sediment that comes into that glacial lake. Glacial time, this is a big lake, very large lake. And then the first thing that settles out is the sand and then you get layers of silt and clay. And then next year you get another layer of sand and then silt and clay comes out later. So you have this Oreo looking thing. You take a soil probe and go out and poke a hole deep enough and you'll see all these layers. The layers are called barbs. And what barbs do is they make it very hard to make water go vertical into the soil because it has to saturate that clay layer before the water will move into the sand. And then once it moves into the sand it lets up that next clay layer but that has to saturate before it moves into the next one. So it's very slow infiltration rate. But what we found when we started no tilling is we got macro pores that took care of that. But if you want to run a vertical tilling machine across the top of that thing you're going to plug that channel just like everybody's been talking, Ray and everybody else. You plug that channel and then that macro pore doesn't function anymore. So all this silliness that's happened since I left here when we first brought no till here. When I started at Redfield there's 1,900 acres of soybeans and spanking brown honey combined. And I almost didn't get my PhD because I made this statement. I thought we could grow corn and soybeans in different valleys. We just quit doing tillage. But we're not quite doing it right. So I'm going to talk about some of that today and why we're having trouble in there. Short-term studies are not accurate in evaluating treatments such as tillage or rotations which have long-term impact. Too much of what we do is based on short-term stuff now. A farmer manages ecosystems and takes sunlight, water and carbon dioxide and makes them into products to be sold. Everybody gets hung up on being, would you turn me down? You just shut me off and then go home. We get hung up on being corn growers or wheat growers or soybean growers or cowboys or whatever. The thing we have to sell is sunlight. Period. That's what you're doing. You're harvesting sunlight and some water and the carbon dioxide. Nobody's sending blood nitrogen and all those things, right? And we manage these ecosystem processes. The water cycle, the energy flow, the mineral cycle and community dynamics. These are the things you're managing, not corn and soybeans and whatever. Those will do fine if you're doing fine with these. Does rain feed plants and recharge groundwater? Does it run off because erosion and water quality degradation? You get the water to go in the ground and feed plants. If you don't have plants there, then it goes into groundwater. Drain tiles are great for getting salinity out of somebody's field in North Dakota and going to the Red River Valley which runs north and goes into Lake Winnipeg and screws up somebody's lake cabin. That's a serious problem. If you're going to put in drain tiles, figure out where you're going to put the water. But if you've got the salinity there because you're not managing your land life, why don't you take care of that instead of shoving your problem off on somebody else? Go make research work. Begin to use the first low disturbance. Low disturbance, no-till cover property to control runoff under center pivot. I think Mike Cronin's probably still in the room. These were Dan Cronin's pivots at one time and he wouldn't work well because that's what everybody told him to do. And they put the water on and ran back into the river. And then when the price energy went real high and they wanted to use low pressure sprinklers, they couldn't do that anymore. They had to find a way to handle water better. We now could put on two inches of water in nine minutes and have no runoff. And if you've never been to Dakota Lakes in the summer, so you can walk behind us when we're irrigating, walk behind those irrigators and not get your feet muddy, you need to come and do that. But we did the same thing at Redfield, known as the Custron Soils. Exactly the same thing with the same irrigators basically. The reason is we have this surface residue, we have these macro ports, and those take the water into the soil. Here, mine isn't as good as Ray's. Ray showed a picture of this that was nice and clear, but this is Ileane Cladifco. This is where you got those pictures from. And they threw latex on some soils and then traced. This latex comes in and then hardens and then they dig it out. So these are earthworm burls. Here's earthworm burls. And the water comes in there and then soaps into the soil sideways. So if you've got barbed soil, there's no pictures of barbed soil that are done this way, but you have these layers, and the water soaps in sideways into those layers. And this is what earthworms have been like to die. If you've got lots of worms in termites and whatever that are making little macropores up here, and the transient burrowing worms do that, you get this kind of effect, and then the big ones have you going down in there like that. How much sunlight strikes green leaves and makes food for the ecosystem? What we're really trying to do is capture energy from the sun and turn it into this source of energy for the soil biology, which does all of our work for the ecosystem. And how much falls on dead vegetation and bare ground? If it falls on dead vegetation and bare ground, then you start getting the saline seed problems. So we use cover of 4-inch crops to bind to crop rotations, increase carbon capture, sequestered nutrients, fixed niters, and do a bunch of things, encourage these friend lakes. And Dan Ford, he calls them. The predators, we haven't had to use an insecticide in over 12 years at the Code Lakes because we have all these predators that eat things. They're bugs that show up there. We have to learn better ways of seeding the cover crops. That's a challenge in this area. This, we had a German intern this summer. He went somewhere that's really pro-Tilly to get a German intern. He's pretty damn sure I was totally nuts. The first thing we did, right, Jay, is we sent him up to Jay's cures in North Dakota for a tour with a bunch of guys from Nebraska that were coming through, and they gave him a brain transplant. That was the first thing we did. And then his job that I gave him was to make clay seed balls. Now, if you've never heard of clay seed balls, go home and Google one straw revolution. There's people in this world that farm without ever using a machine that cuts open the ground. They just throw these seeds that are coated in clay and peat and whatever so they'll grow on top of the ground. They just throw them out on the ground. So they throw them into their wheat before wheat harvest and the cover crop starts to grow. And they throw them into the cover crop before they flood the field to grow rice and the rice starts to grow and then they flood it and kill the cover crop. So we worry about going out and being able to take Jeremy, for instance, getting his big ass tractor stuck trying to seed, right? If all we had to do was go out there and spread a bunch of clay seed balls out there with a four-wheeler, not a problem, okay? But we keep focusing on these little tiny things so we're going to do more work with you but that was his job at some point. Crop rotation allows time for natural enemies to destroy the passage into one crop while the only related crops are grown. When I came to Redfield in 1983, some of you weren't alive, quite a few of you weren't alive, in 1983, we had a big problem in general revaling with Hessian plot for you old guys. You remember that. We had all these Hessian plots just growing up our spring week and we had breeding programs and insecticide programs and we're going to get rid of Hessian plot. You ever hear about Hessian flying more? Now, we started a rotating. One of the reasons that three soybeans in is it fixed the Hessian fly crop. But we've been spending all this money in SDSU to try to kill the Hessian fly or to have resistance to it and all we had to do is go away and let the Hessian fly die on its own. Sequence is only one component of a rotation. Corn after beans is one sequence. But if you just do corn, bean, corn, bean, corn, bean and your interval is always one year, then you get extended dipositor and ruber beetle like they have in water town. Right? So, proper rotations, proper intensity, adequate diversity, stable, sustainable profitability. Proper intensity means using the water. No kill saves water. That's a good thing. But if you don't use that water, makes the water go in the ground, where it falls, if you don't screw around the map before, it gets more of it in the ground. But if you don't use it beneficially, then it gives you trouble. And what we've done is we're not really using that water like we should, so our intensity isn't right. Adequate diversity, you need enough diversity so you don't have all these weed problems. We should not have resistant weeds. It doesn't make any sense that we have resistant weeds. And stable and sustainable profitability. Native vegetation is the best indicator of the range of intensity which is appropriate for our location. This is a tall grass prairie. The Jim River is a tall grass prairie. So is the Red River. Both be growing these big, tall, warm-season grasses with root systems that go 10, 12, 14 feet deep. Most of plant growth problems blame the no-till as a result of inadequate diversity or improper intensity. It's not no-till fault. You just haven't gotten the rotation right. You put this water you saved with no-till to work. Now what we do with it is try to grow crops, first of all, and then if we do this with more high-water use crops, cover crops, and double crops is the second thing. So we use more high-water use crops. So you used to grow spring-leaf-barry, spring-leaf-barry, spring-leaf-barry in Jim River Valley. Maybe a little slacks on this. Can't grow corn. That's why they were going to build a canal from the Missouri River all the way over to Jim River to grow water here so you guys could grow corn and beans, right? The Wahee Project? I think I was stupid that one. But I almost didn't get my PhD because I said, I think we don't need that. We probably have enough water here if we use it better. Don't have to build that thing, whatever it was. Can you imagine this country all cut up with little canals? But we can't always do it just with high-water use crops. Corn beans, that's okay, but they're only three months of the year. We need these cover crops and double crops and also need to go back and put some other lower-intensity crops. And their proper intensity reduces your rest. Are the nutrients available for plant use or environmental services? Or have they been leached? You wrote it or transported from the landscape? Well, leached means they go to saline seeds, right? He wrote it, they run off or transport it from the landscape. It means they go on somebody's grain tile and go away. What's in a saline seed? He told you, it's a quiz. He just got done telling you. Calcium carbonate, calcium sulfate. What's the common name for those? Lime and gypsum. They have to be boys who sell those to you. Right? The number one thing there, though, is nitrates. They'll sell you those, too. And phosphates go out in saline seeds. They'll sell you those, too. But why not keep them there? What's in saline seeds is fertilizer. Don't say it's salt, say it's fertilizer. If they're thinking of it as fertilizer. Ecosystems that leak nutrients become deserts. Saline seeds indicate leakage. Decreasing pH indicates leaking. Somebody asked today, do you use lime? You have to use lime, it means you're losing lime, because you're not cycling it well. A unit train, another way to lose nutrients is you ship them out. A unit train of soybeans contains one million pounds of phosphorus. How many unit trains of soybeans go out in South Dakota every year? Everybody's saying we need more trains to get the grain out of here. That's shipping phosphorus. We need more cows and chickens and pigs to eat the grain here, so the nutrients stay here. Okay? And maybe those cows should be on the fields. So here's just like the last speaker. Rainfall comes in, if you're not using the water up here, it's going to seep out down here. Covered forest crop provides this opportunity to increase its intensity and add to the diversity and situation for production of grain crop would not be possible, would be unprofitably excessively risky. You can't grow a crop of wheat and crop of soybeans in the same year as Aberdeen. There's not enough time. Not enough moisture. Even with irrigation, you couldn't do it. Not enough time. Okay? You couldn't do it well. So that's where cover crops come in. We were growing cover crops at the Redfield farm. Every year, when we harvested wheat or barley, we had forage sorghums and those kind of things followed. That was a standard operational procedure. That was almost 30 years ago. In human environments, callgrass, prairie or wetter, which is here, the goal should be to have something growing at all times. In areas where women are growing season like here, it's where they require the use of cover crops or forage double crops. And I like to term forage crops, and that's what we used to call them. And that's really what we think they are. In sub-human, like we are, semi-arid at peer and arid environments, cover crops can be utilized and increased organic matter and biological activity. We don't use them as much. Under Island out there, because we're pretty marginal and rain sometimes. Okay? I stole this in Jeremy Wilson. Every time I say this, I credit you, by the way. I don't send you money to just say this. Can't you release nutrients? I saw him do this a couple of years ago. I just walked up after he gave me a talk and said I'm going to steal that. And that was it. So here we look at the irrigated corn by previous crop that wheat, wheat, corn, corn, soybean, soybean rotation we use under irrigation. And we had a graduate student that was doing some work there, and we did some cover crop with Reynolds-chickling vets turnip after wheat harvest going to corn. And we had 12 tests, 108 pounds acre nitrate nitrogen, yield goal 220 bushels acre, which is pretty okay. With zero nitrogen, about 176 bushels with 36 pounds of nitrogen, we got 236 bushels. 80% of the air you breathe is nitrogen. And if we work at that, we can get nitrogen into the ground. We don't have to have it made with fossil fuels. Now, if you're going to sell your soybeans to China, you have to replace that fossil. Right? Because it went away. But the nitrogen comes back in the air, so you can sell nitrogen and bring it back in with your do the legumes and things right. And it didn't do us any good to add any more nitrogen. If you get stranded in a rain in the back 40, do you drive home across the killed field or the pasture? Everybody said, oh, no till is too wet. If you have good soil structure because you're doing no till right, you can actually drive on it if you can kill the ground. Trust me. Weeds and diseases are nature's way of adding diversity to a system that lacks diversity. And what we do and what you should do is counter this by adding beneficial diversity. And again, cover crops can play a role. Cover crops are tools. They're not in the end. We want to see at least three crop types. Long intervals of two to four years are needed to break some disease is a two crop monoculture. Corn beans doesn't have enough carbon. The native prairie here was 80 some percent, 90 percent grasses. High-residue crops. You can't put in half beans, half corn. They're just not enough carbon there to drive your system. And then you start shrinking the carbon capacity. So let's say that we look at a resistant weed issue. Something like water hymn. What happens with different crop rotations? You're doing a two way rotation like corn bean and you control it one year out of two. You look pretty good till about year seven and then you have 10 million seeds. If you do a rotation that's two years out, wheat corn beans for instance 10 years out of three it doesn't blow up on you. If you're low disturbance no till. You're high disturbance till whatever then nothing works. If you want to be half something then two in and two out is better. So let's say wheat wheat corn beans is better for wheat resistant type weeds it doesn't blow up till about year 15. Here's some other things but if you're like you are with round up ready stuff where you're doing round up both years you'll blow up in three years. My favorite story has to do with ALS resistance pursuit. Way back years ago we finally got pursuit for soybeans worked great. And then they made what they called at that time imicorn which we now call clearfield corn. And then the young producers say oh I don't have to worry about rotation anymore Dwayne because I've got imicorn and beans I can break pursuit every year every year I won't have wheat. And I said well you'll have resistant wheat. So I got a letter threatening a lawsuit because there's no evidence there's going to be resistance to ALS herbicides. Think about that. 1994 meeting in Denver I predicted round up resistance. Monsanto never sent me a letter I think they already knew in 1994 they didn't admit it until the late 90's. Here's a wheat field that we never sprayed with herbicide and we left to skip. We don't spend a lot of money on herbicides. Not because of the rotation work well. But you need diversity you need diversity and seeding aid to do this. You also want diversity in the rooting pattern, the root architecture to make your soil structure right you want diversity in the residue type you want diversity in these insect pests wheat suppression microorganisms, harvest aid beneficials etc. So let's talk about some rotations guys. And I've actually got a paper on our website so you can go get this paper and explain so we'll go through them past it's called winter wheat corn, winter wheat corn canola that kind of thing where it's the same sequence and variable every time winter wheat always follows canola corn always follows winter wheat that type of thing it's simple it's one of the number of crops to manage the market but all corn is behind wheat and all winter wheat is behind spring wheat makes you vulnerable the extended dipause corn rootworm will occur because there's always an interval of one year between corn crops what happened in the eastern corn belt they have resistant corn rootworm too resistant to corn soybean the pregnant females in Illinois pregnant rootworm females who apply from corn fields to soybean fields to lay their eggs called the soybean vermin I call it the blonde corn rootworm beetle one time got in trouble well the blonde one was a smart one she flew over there if we put all our corn into wheat stubble we would get poor rootworm beetles that flew to wheat stubble to lay their eggs if everybody did that rotation with perennials and this is the one I think you need to bring back grandpa did these this would take care of your salinity problem and that's where you do three or four years of perennial and then you can do a stupid rotation if you want to because corn bean, corn bean, corn bean and by the time somebody catches on you go to alfalfa for a while or go to perennial grass for a while now the problem is the good thing is it's still simple it's an excellent place to spread manure it can produce more soil structure and annual crops especially if you're using grasses and biomass crops may hold potential they're going to make ethanol a lot of something it should be out of the perennials not out of annuals not out of corn stocks that's just degrading the soils even more okay so we could do that it's difficult to manage enough acres of land and perennial that lets you graze it but you could graze that perennial faith that'd be great if you want beef let's learn how to grow beef that way harvesting 40% of your farm as forages is tough and lets you graze it you got 40% of your land in alfalfa just do not even get done if you use less perennial then maybe 40% it's going to have the same impact and this marketing thing is an issue you got to get the farm government program to not honey shoot for doing the right thing compound rotations what we do is we take a rotation like spring wheat winter wheat corn soybean which is a simple rotation and corn soybean which is a simple rotation and we stick them in the end okay I call this my mother-in-law rotation spring wheat winter wheat corn soybean corn soybean half my corn is in wheat stubble half my corn is in soybean residue my mother-in-law comes to visit in June I show her this corn find the soybean it looks really good in June don't harvest corn in June but but it looks really good June if she comes back in August at pier I'm going to show her this stuff in wheat stubble because it's going to look better it's going to have more moisture but it spreads the risk of wet dry years right give you some diversity soybean's way behind corn that's okay winter wheat in the spring wheat that's good and you've got this big long break from corn and soybeans kind of clean things up and then you do the stupid rotation corn soybean corn soybean for a couple years and then come back still have only three types of crops to manage it creates more than one sequence crop types like the wheat in the corn you still have like three wheat workload days complex rotations where we start doing barley instead of spring wheat we got different crop types sunflower and soybeans and peas and all kinds of things we can really create a lot of conditions with all the different crop types lots of opportunity it requires a lot of crop management, marketing and skill but that's why we're paying farmers a big bucks crop management and marketing we don't pay a farmer to be a good driver you got autosteer right any damn monkey can drive a tractor now so you're not going to pay for being a good driver and this is the one that's most interesting to a lot of people because they like to name factory rotations it's an adolescent male thing but what we do is we take two wheat two corn two soybeans why do we do that well it creates a lot of diversity even though we as humans look at it and say it's very predictable but to a bug it's not and there's a lot of things that happen there it allows this sufficient time for pest pressure to decline and that's really the goal is to leave these four year breaks in there right we keep the pest population diverse or confused because corn rewarder some of the corn is corn on corn some of the corn is four year break it doesn't know we can't get in sync with it right next in law a long and short residual oversight program first year corn I put two pounds of hatches in now don't have to worry about carry over second year corn I go ahead and use roundup ready well at least I'm not using roundup ready two years in a row same way with the soybeans I can put down a long residual thing like the old scepter and some of those real cheap old guys and in the first year because it's going to go back to soybeans again the next year right and it really is going to take care of resistance biotype changes it gives us a two year break between the last corn and the first weed if you're worried about headscarf it gives you that two year break between the corn and weed when you do your first weed it reduces this risk of developing biotype resistance and it reduces the cost of herbicide programs a bunch when I wrote this I said not well tested I have quite a bit of confidence in this right now in that double weed double corn thing in the Gettysburg beer area on their dry land and then throw in one broadly again they want to be inconsistent of both sequence and intervals when you look at a rotation other nature figures it out if you're consistent in either your sequence or interval ok here are some other rotations I have this one I always like to laugh about because I was in Kansas doing this one time and one of the extension guys said well I hope we've got a farmer he does weed weed weed until he gets during boat grass and then he starts planting sorghum and plants sorghum until he gets shatter paint and then he plants sunflowers until he gets white mold then he goes back to planting weed and then everybody laughs and I say well that's smarter than the guy in the corn bell doing corn bean corn bean corn bean and calling up Monsen or so here's something that we use we got weed weed corn usually sorghum first but can be corn or sorghum in another corn and then one broadleaf this is one of our better rotations 80% grasses high residue crops we throw some cover crops in when we get a chance if we have one that's real low residue like this one half broadleafs it fails irrigated we've got a field that's been in corn since 1990 we've got a field that's been in corn soybeans since 1990 if you haven't been there to look at the soil difference in those two fields you need to come and as soon as you do that you'll see why you shouldn't do corn soybean okay and then we have these more diverse ones like these and these are our best best rotation there's no separate recipe or best rotation individual fields may need different treatment due to the difference in soils or location or proximity or history of an animal or ownership you got to understand how to do this stuff but to show you the importance of the rotation here's that low residue wheat rotation in a dry year where we have half low residue crops this wheat followed peas which followed corn in both rotations the wheat followed peas the peas followed the corn because in this rotation we have a soybean before the corn so a soybean corn peas wheat dry year 2006 and there's the same right across the road winter wheat same variety of winter wheat here this is behind peas that was behind corn that was behind wheat but it's wheat corn peas not that extra broad even there so it's 66% higher residue the other one is 50% there's it looked like from the air there you'll pose so here's the yield 2006 dry year 60 bush a week in that high residue the whole residue of that extra soybean 29 we had 7.9 inches of rain from the time we harvested the peas until we harvested the winter wheat that year the next year 2005 or the year before 2005 we had 23 inches in that little over a year 92 versus 57 and in 2002 56 versus 28 on 6.4 organic matter makes a difference look at some irrigated stuff corn soybean rotation 2013 we did not just historically increase our soybean yield by 7.3 bush a acre where we put cover crop behind corn going to soybeans this would be a winter cereal we didn't have any non-cover crop stuff so in 2013 soybeans with cover crop was 62.9 we would have expected about 55 without the cover crop and then in this rotation corn corn soybean wheat soybean first year soybean yield notice that we've got this two year break in here this is important no cover crop 73.6 bush a second year soybean which is this guy 82.1 look at the difference in yield just by slapping that rotation apart a little bit soybean, reading our trouble with soybean you've got them every other year if you read the book when you're in a drama school it should be any more often than every poor so cover crop crops increases the yield 7.3 bush a bit more diverse rotation increases by 15.9 right 62.9 versus 78.8 when I averaged those two years of soybeans in this rotation averaged this one and this one so how about corn I've got a feeling it's been a continuous corn since 1990 interesting 203 bushel corn soybean in 2013-2017 the average of these two was 235 the second one's about 217 the first one is more up in the 250s so if I did 5000 acres of continuous corn I'd get a million bushels of corn I'd also have beets on by lots of trucks big dryers and all those things so I'm going to have a million bushels of corn if I did corn soybeans I'd have over a half a million bushels of corn because it's better yielding I have this many 157,000 bushels of soybean if I did this one on 40% of my acres I'd have almost half as much corn here because you'll get that and my soybean yield is more it's the same see this is interesting 40% of my acres give me the same yield or more yield than 50% of my acres here see and I get this wheat creep so let's look at it we had 2000 acres and put numbers on it I can't remember when I did this but I just took out a number about $4 corn at that time so it's not that good right now the difference is the same 1.5 million on 2000 acres corn soybean I get 1.5 million on 2000 acres actually a little less than here but the costs are a little lower probably if I do this rotation I get 1.7 million on 2000 acres and this one I get 1.6 so these two are making me more people I can't do wheat doesn't make as much money well I don't find that that's not what I'm finding and these are cheaper corns and beans to grow okay now if I really do it right I can only do 2,000 acres of corn and get it done in time that's 1.5 million 1.6 million I can do 4,000 acres of corn soybeans because I've got different windows so that makes 3 million versus 1.5 if I do this one I can do 5,000 acres because I've got this wheat I can plant so that's 4.3 and if I do corn corn soybeans wheat which is another one we do it's 3.4 or 3.5 so saying you can't grow wheat because it doesn't make any money it does versus if I give you a chance to do cover crops and really do some things okay how much per acre? Continuous corn average 7.99 grows per acre corn soybeans 7.73 this rotation 8.72 and this rotation 8.73 but these are on way more acres so I have a lot more Vegas money years ago when I first started going to Argentina they did 7 years of pastures and 7 years of cropping years ago when I was a kid my grandfather and father used to put perennial sequences in their crop rotation and grazed and made hay and did that kind of stuff and then put it back in crop production and the Argentines did that and then the rotation when they did crop they usually had cover crops in there this was without and this was with but this is what the soil looked like when Ray talked about cottage cheese if you talk about healthy soil I mean talking about healthy soil like talking about beautiful women we can't really define them with word but we all know one when we see one right? so this is one and then they outlawed the sale of the export of beef in Argentina can't export beef anymore so the guys had to quit doing cattle on that extent because it couldn't export beef that's the only reason our beef prices are so high and so they had to do, I'm sorry growing soybeans on soybeans with just a little more now and then that same soil that same spot now looks like this and that was in 2010, this was in 1996 2010 organic matter makes a difference with all the taxable groups is organic matter increased from 1 to 3% of elbow water capacity approximately doubled when organic matter content increased to 4% and then it comes from more than 6% of total available water water capacity soybeans are mining organic matter your water holding capacity is going down so when you get a big rain your bucket is smaller than it used to be when grandpa broke this ground in the Timber Valley a problem with a 7% or 8% organic matter now what do you have? think of this number here so instead of holding water in your soil you're now holding 6% so when you get a big rain your wet and salt come to the top and all this stuff you've got to build that organic matter that bucket back up again grandpa mined it now we've got to fix it a bit the other thing is where you have the perennial sequence is you suck the water out flowing down to 12 or 14 feet in a dry year so when you do get a wet year there's a place for that excess water to go right now you're running with water tables at 3 and 4 feet all the time as soon as you get a wet year you're wet you don't have any room that's been sucked out down below when soil water storage capacity is low much of the rain that falls during extended periods of precipitation is lost or caused a problem in contrast to combined with the affected capture of rain and snow melt with macro pores over the fall winter in springtime the port of cops or extended drive period could have a big bucket so this is an Argentine drill we've got a really good opener we're making that into a real drill but look how low disturbance that is and as this crop dies and feeds nutrients to the wheat that grows it's captured a bunch of nitrogen that's going to feed the wheat and when I have time it means trade delegation there they say well that means you don't need to use fertilizer and I say well yeah I do if I'm going to sell you the wheat I need to replace that phosphorus unless you're willing to go into your sewage and load some containers of poop up and send it back and they got this reel once it translated translated it all like this you know and also boy I'm not going to go in the diplomatic corps and then also they thought about it and they all started making shoveling things and laughing because they understand that in China in old times in China if you went to somebody's house for supper the plight thing to do was to go to the bathroom before you left because you're going to take nutrients home with you and you need to leave some to replace the ones you're taking home was this true why? they did it in Korea too when they were there in the 50's okay see all tillage tools destroy soil structure all tillage tools increase water, you don't care vertical tillage whatever the hell you want to call that stuff all tillage tools reduce organic matter and all tillage tools increase wheat tillage is to agriculture what fracking is to petroleum tillage is designed to do is to increase the speed and extend the nutrient removal from the soil just like fracking increases the speed and the extent that you can remove oil from shape and it leaves the resource degraded so if you're in the mining business tillage is good and that's kind of what grandpa did he came to native stuff and he's minded but then he put perennial back in and built it back up again and then he built it back up again and then he minded again and what we're doing is we're just mining continuous low disturbance no-till the combination of diverse rotation and cover crops is a biological biological problem we look backward when we do tillage we look forward when we're doing no-till thank you put nitrogen and I didn't show the data but the only way to put nitrogen on corn is to place it three inches to the side and that's the same depth as the seed when you're planting it's cheaper to put your planter to do that than to buy an air seeder I know but you're going to wear it out faster it's just not even close I can show you all kinds of data it's at least 20 bushel difference I've done this over and over and over again 20 bushel difference if I put fertilizer three inches to the side versus anything else I do it you're on the seeder over do they test it again putting it three inches to the side because the other thing you do when you're just broadcasting or going out and putting it out in the fall it's the wrong time first of all you can get lost but the other thing you're doing is you're feeding the weeds one of the big keys to our weed control being cheap is we're putting our fertilizer on so it doesn't our crops get it but our weeds don't so you're feeding the weeds and they go out okay I can kill them but you really can't kill them anymore but yes what about side dressing well side dressing is okay other than I'm in 20 in throws and that's tough we still want that starter on corn plant to get the big corn in June to get it off to an early start because one of the problems with no-till is that the nitrogen doesn't come free as fast and the no-till is cooler which is good because it comes free later but we've got to give it a stop start and that's that's why we get that big difference but on our irrigated ground we just put the nitrogen on some of it with the corn plant that goes for the irrigator which is basically side dressing but on dry land we put it all out in planting time what about foliar spraying plants have a root for a reason Mother Nature never fertilized the only place for a foliar is to try to to ding up your raise your protein on spring weeks and stuff like that you can modify you can do some things with foliar on spring weeks to try to bump their protein up a bit but that's the only one that I think makes any sense you've got healthy roots see one of the things with bad rotation you've got shitty roots so you don't really explore yes way back in the back 3 inches is over that's pretty much your sweet spot well 3 inches is outside the 2-1.5 inch depth wheel the planter goes so if it happens that single disc fertilizer opener happens to peel up a little bit of mud or something you're not getting it on the depth wheel and it's far enough out you never really have any dink so I can go as high as I want to on the urea urea ammonium sulfate stuff that goes in there and goes as high as I want very good raising it and get really high well okay and weed it's a different thing so that 5-inch off is the right answer for weed because if you give too much nitrogen to weed early it makes too many tillers and if you ever look at a weed plant when it's mature the first head is big and the next head smaller and the next head smaller yet so Ruth ran away on me Ruth did her master's degree free stuff at redfield starting this high yield weed thing where we we plan heavy advantage of nitrogen to try to keep from tillering and all that kind of stuff and she started that there and we had people that continue it and that's kind of how we manage the nitrogen is to try to try to 5-inch it off is about right put it in the sea trench put it in the sea trench probably is not a good idea put a little postures in the sea trench but not nitrogen you gotta get it off the side yeah and if it's too close if it's 3 inches it's too close that weed gets it too fast and still tillers quite a bit corn's bred not to tiller and you can breed you can breed wheat not to tiller but we don't have any of them in the United States they have them in Europe they're called unicorn weeds one seed gives you one head just like corn and that's why they have the real high yields in Europe too you gotta get the same thing with those and things like that do the same thing with those yeah what kind of the starter will use either a map or a mes you know a mes is the one that's got the zinc in so for corn 1034 yeah 1034 is the other one where you put the zinc with it and that's the other one you can do the reason the mes is better than using a zinc sulfate in the starter zinc sulfate just wouldn't have enough particles you have a particle here and particle there and particle there where the mes is a little bit of zinc in every particle and there's 40 rocks got the same thing it's not just the one people that make it there's more people that make it what about fertilizer with the seed in plant corn when we plant corn we put a little bit of phosphorus with the seed but not the nitrogen but if all you're doing is just the phosphorus with the seed that doesn't give you the pop you get your response in long-term no-till you get your response from the nitrogen not from the phosphorus it's really interesting Wayne what do you think about you know all by theory we have a lot of trouble getting a lot of growth out of our cover crops on a cow to drive us tonight what would the variance be in a year where we're just going to be practicing farming the crop if we if we just decide to go a full season cover crop when he asked what if we just do a full season cover crop one that we did with Cronin Farms and Mike Cronin's here we did one last year as part of that Buffett thing where they did OSP early after hay and then they did pearl millet and German millet together Mike and then some kind of a broad link and they're supposed to have as your second crops you have two four-inch crops and then they swath that that second crop and they swath grates that and and what they were supposed to do was they didn't do it they're supposed to bring the oats back out put them across you put the bales this way and then you use the bales to hold your wires as your frontal grates you stick the bales in post in the bales and then put your wire across and then all you have to do is move to the next row of bales and you expose or a half a row or whatever but you expose some bales and just keep moving to the next row of bales with your wires so you have a balanced diet out there oats and peas and hay millet the cow always kind of like that right Mike the swath grazing yeah they were the ones that were supposed to move put the bales out there they didn't like that part but I mean that those kind of approaches the Canadians do this a lot so it's not they can't do it where the weather's bad because and the reason that they did it before we were doing it is because they had the BSE problem like an old cow in Canada is worth a dime a pound they really can't sell them I think they're getting so they can now but ten years ago an old cow there was worth ten cents a pound for dog food and that was it so they had to figure out some way to take a lot of cost out of their cow cap operation they do it with swath grazing and bales grazing if you've got salinity in the low ground and you can put a cover crop out there or whatever and then bale up swath or bale up swath the high ground bale up the low ground and take that salty bale from the bottom and put it on top of the hill and then do this kind of thing so now you've got your salt going back to the top of the hill where it came from right? so that one makes a lot of sense and if you've got salinity put in perennials that's going to fix it pretty fast put in four or five year perennials fix it but it's been fun thanks for watching