 In 2013, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a cooperative agreement with the South Dakota No-Till Association and IGRO, SDSU Extension, for delivering the latest soil health and productivity technology to South Dakota farmers and ranchers. A series of two local events were held in South Dakota, in Lemon and Fort Peer. I had a good crowd today. We've got a doctor in the house in case anybody needs one, so if you pass out from something I say, then we're in luck. The Colisex Research Farm started a long time ago. It's associated with South Dakota State University. My boss worries a lot that I don't say that often enough, so I put it on there today. So everybody knows, because they're our scientific home and I actually work for SDSU and then I work with a group of board of directors, the farmers, and by the way, my board of director guys, you could stand up if you want to if you need a little exercise, but we have a board meeting after this over at the regional office. But it's probably the only really true farmer-organized research center and that I think is important because SDSU plays a big role and the farmers pay a big role in keeping things headed toward practicality. A lot of times you go to a research station and it's all focused on little tiny stuff instead of the big picture. So this is the picture of the main station right along Missouri River. Water quality is a big issue to us because of that. We're doing a lot of things with water quality. I'm not going to talk about that today, but a couple of weeks ago I was at Indianapolis for the National No-Till Association. They spent half a day on the Lake Erie thing. If you remember two years ago, they had to shut down the water treatment plant, domestic water treatment plant for the city of Toledo because they had a toxic algal bloom in Lake Erie. The toxins were three times more toxic than cyanide. If you swam in the bay where they were getting their water, it would kill you in less than three minutes. Now, that was all coming from phosphorus, from farm fields, a good share of it, and it was coming out of drain tiles. Remember a couple of years ago when somebody said that phosphorus didn't move in drain tiles? And somebody was saying it did? Well, it does. It's too late. Anyway, key is success. We try to mimic Mother Nature's systems. How many people have not been in this center before? What a view, eh? And think of what over here is where the Lavandre brothers claimed this part of North America for France. They buried that lead plate over here where the flags are if you didn't know that. And down at the bottom of the hill here is where Lewis and Clark had the little issue with the Native Americans. And one of the things I was able to do is to go to Lewis and Clark's Journal and go through what they wrote as they walked across the southern side of the Dakota Lakes Research Farm, right here. Because they were going up here, and you can just think of the Big Meander down by Fort Thompson or Lower Brule. That was on their, so I knew when they were there, and then they were around the pocket, what we call the pocket, and then they hit the gray. The creek coming in at the gray, so that's like a mile and a half east of us. And then there's Twin Bridges, that's about a mile and a half or two miles west of us. So I could know exactly when they walked across this part of the world. Native vegetation that time was mixed grass perry with lots of big blue stem switch grass, Indian grass, maximum in sunflowers. And we turned it in across the wheat grass, but managed it poorly. So what we're really going to talk about, the key is managing our ecosystems. So they match what's native to this place, and then learning to make food doing that, right? So the first thing we got to do is no-till. And there's a lot of people now that don't want to say the word no-till. They go, oh, some farmers don't like to term no-till. Too bad, mother nature doesn't do tillage, get over it. Low disturbance, no-till, period. If you don't do no-till, I would like to be able to seed. Danny talked about her clay seed balls. I want to seed without ever putting a blade in the ground. Because mother nature never put blades in the ground. So you just put the seeds on top of the ground, okay? Then we have to have diversity, not just diversity, lots of diversity. Diverse crop rotations, we can use cover crops to add to that. We can use perennial sequences to add to that. And then mother nature has livestock. And not just little livestock, we did a thing here a few years ago. Think it was at our annual meeting we tied in with Ruth? All creatures great and small. Five years, just a few years ago, and you get old, they go really fast. We did a thing called all creatures great and small. We talked about big animals and little animals, you know? So there's introducing livestock's nothing new. Now, we had to wait at the Coal Lakes until we had the ability to do them. But when you get those things together, you get soil health, okay? So we finally have cows. I just wrote an article for that Buffett series entitled, Articles as the Cows Have Come Home, right? They would just have things that wait till the cows come home when the cows have come home. This is some of our swath grazing residue. That's what it looked like, it's nice and green. There's our cows. You can see they're grazing the swaths. This was growing after harvesting a wheat crop. We put in hay millet notes. It's going to go to soybeans next year. And we're moving the fence in front of them. We move the fence from here to here. And they'd had a few hours, and then they cleaned it up. Now, if I don't put a fence in there, they'll just trample everything, okay? So you can see that they leave the wheat straw, but they take the green stuff. And then we're making our first shot at a self-propelled grazing cell, which you've heard me talk about a bunch of times. We took our lateral move machine. We tied some, this was much easier than I thought it was going to be. We just tied some ropes down. Three of them per span, tied a bucket there. Put an electric fence post, and then there's a wire. Two wires going like that. And all you got to do to move the cows is just push the button. And the irrigator moves, and the cows move. And had a guy come out yesterday. We have a little windbreak type thing that the cows stand behind when they're not grazing. And he came out to watch it run. Irrigation guy. And he said, do we have to get the cows out of there before you move it? I said, no, just watch this. I pushed the button, and the wheels started making noise, and here come the cows on dead run. It's lunchtime, right? I mean, he didn't know much about cows. So, just cross that thing. We've got corn stocks and whatever. Here they came. This I took actually yesterday. And within five minutes, they were spread out all along that irrigator. And they got corn stocks here in swath grades, and here's a balanced diet. So we've got two machines. They're just tied together. The wire goes all the way across. Now, what's important things that we learned some important things today? It seemed like there's a controversy between Paul and everybody else about planting depth. But remember, Paul was saying uniformity. Uniformity. If your residue isn't uniform like Paul's, you need to have residue managers to help you get uniformity. And I always say it's awful hard to put the combine in reverse when you're reaching for the fire extinguisher. Okay? What do I mean by that? When I stop in a field, when I'm combining, I always put it in reverse so it spreads the straw evenly. Because if you stop, it'll make a big dump of straw. But if you're reaching for the fire extinguisher, you don't remember to do that, right? So you have these places out there where your straw is a little deeper than you like it to be. It's not uniform. And we'll run our residue managers about this far off the surface just to make sure that it clears that little bit of stuff out. You'll notice Paul, he had his silver cedar just perfect, right? But he's better farmer than we are. Okay? One of the important things is short-term studies are not accurate in evaluating treatments such as tillage rotations that have long-term impacts. You'll see all these studies that are done about tillage is good, tillage is bad, do this or do that, make sure they're long-term. The one thing that Dakota Lakes does is long-term. We're 20-some years. A farmer manages ecosystems and takes sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide and makes them into products to be sold. I think I stole that from Rick Bieber who I think probably stole it from somebody else, but maybe he made it up, right? But think about that. You're not a corn farmer. You're a farmer. You're going to make things that somebody's going to buy. A lot of our corn and soybeans in the corn belt go to making beef in feedlots. That doesn't really make any sense. If we want beef, let's make beef in those fields instead of corn and soybeans that go to feedlots. We have a lot less trouble with antibiotic resistance in microbiology. We have a lot less trouble with nutrient movement. If you think about all the nutrients that move from the field to the feedlot, I was kind of joking earlier today. There's a picture up here of Jorgensen's. I said, that's kind of a funny-looking cow. Society's cut her if you're far enough with back. I said, well, that's a funny-looking cow. I don't know where he got that cow. But if we can figure out a way to do it in the field, it's better for nutrient cycling, better for biology. Let's focus on ecosystem processes. Water cycle, energy flow, mineral cycle, community dynamics. What are we doing on our farm with each of those? You need to ask yourself that question. Does your rain feed plants and recharge ground water? Does it run off and cause erosion, water quality, and degradation? You've got to have soils that take water. We got started in Otil to make water go in the ground, under irrigation. Danny Forge was farm manager at the time this happened, weren't you, Danny? He had water run off the field going back to the river, putting in irrigators, because we had the water to do it now, putting in irrigators, spent a lot of energy pumping up the hill, letting it run back to the river. Not a very smart way of doing things. And so the first thing we did was try to make water go in the ground. We can now make two inches of water go in the ground in nine minutes with these irrigators. No problem. That's how we irrigate. Because we have this armor, like Jay Fuhrer would say, we got macro pores. We have this surface mulch there all the time. And we got the macro pores so the water goes down the holes, instead of soaking in like a matrix. If you powder it up like Lance was saying, then the water doesn't go in. It just sits on top. Think of making bread. You put a bunch of flour in a bowl, throw some water on top, and the water just sits there. That's what happens when you do tillage. It's just like flour. For you young guys, that picture Paul showed was the guys walking on the moon, in case you didn't know that. Paul, there's people here that don't remember that. I mean, my God, you've got to explain it for the young folks. How much sunlight strikes green leaves that makes food. And this is really important. And Lance referred to this as the energy part. We need to have energy to drive that ecosystem. If we haul stuff off, that guy called me this morning before I came here. And he has land that he just has people make hay on and sell the hay. And he's asking me how to manage it. And I said, that's a God awful way to manage it. Because it's mining. You're taking all the nutrients and all the energy off of this land and putting it somewhere else. It's not going to make it back. How much sunlight falls on dead vegetation or bare ground? 1975, 80, 90, when we were doing half or a third of our ground in summerfowl in this country. Not only did it blow away, just think of how much energy we wasted that we needed to put back into the ecosystem. We use cover and forage crops to fine tune crop rotations. They are not, no till is not an end. It's a tool. Somebody said that today. Cover crops are not an end. They're a tool. There's times we don't use cover crops because it is too dry. Our rotation's too tight. But one of the things that we can get by with doing a lot of things with cover crops we didn't think we could do as long as we don't lose the residue. And as soon as we put in too many brass because there are too many broad leaves and we lose the surface residue, I got lots of data that shows it will take 20 bushel out of corn, whiz bang. Jason saw that too. I came up and said to Jason, I said, you were standing there. Why don't you just jump in and talk about that? Can't let the residue, the real key, is taking the E out of ET, surface residue. That matter residue is your friend. We use them to increase carbon capture, sequester, nutrients, fixed nitrogen, and encourage friendlies, these beneficial insects. Danny mentioned the clay seed ball thing. This is some work we did a couple of years ago with the German intern. If you want somebody that's really anti-notial, have a German intern come. And you can always tell a German, but you can't tell him much. So we, yeah, well, my parental names are back in Brumbau on my dad's side, so that's pretty German. And then I got Dutch on the other side that's probably almost as bad. So I know what I speak of here. But anyway, there's his clay seed balls. A death's a problem instead of treating the symptom. I love to show this picture. This is terraces. Jay, if you're at one time, build more miles of terraces in Burley County than anybody ever had, right, Jay? And then he came to Dakota Lakes, he came to a meeting again, and I showed this slide, and then he felt really bad. And he turned into a cover crop and soil health guy. So we're glad we did that. This is north of Pierre. There's terraces. Well, they put terraces in because water was running out of the field. Didn't do anything for water running. Red means something that's healthy. The water just ran down to the edge of the terraces and soaked in there. Didn't stop the water running, stopped it from getting out of the field. Okay? Mother nature's an opportunity to tunists. If you have a problem, you've provided the opportunity. If you've got resistant weeds, stuff like that. You've done something that has given that weed an opportunity to take over, because in natural systems, you don't really have the whole ecosystem go to heck because you have so much diversity. There isn't the opportunity for anything to take off. And Dale will tell you in medicine, often diseases are caused because somebody who does stupid things, right? A lot of diseases because humans do stupid things, right? Like ride these hoverboards. Resistant weeds are not a big issue. If you have diversity, where do they have the resistant weeds? Where they have low diversity rotations, the corn belt, wheat fallow belt, Australia, where they do wheat canola, wheat canola, wheat canola, or wheat lupin, wheat lupin, right? Two crop monocultures. Strive to produce a crop which is healthy, not one that doesn't get sick. And again, the same way with soils, health. What's that mean? Well, if I look around here, there's nobody that's sick. No oxygen tubes or anything. So that's all hop on the bike and go out and do about 20 miles. Right? I can do that. My butt gets sore, but I can do that kind of ride. It's fine. I couldn't, 10 or 15 years ago. Okay? That's what you've got to try to do with soils. And adding organic matter makes them resilient, makes them healthy, makes your crop healthy. That's what our goal is. It's a system. And you change all these things. What happened with no till was people took tillage out, but didn't change any of this. And the circle collapsed. You're building a whole new system. Ralph Holsworth, one of our guys who is one of, really primary in both no till and Dakota lakes, always talks about it as a brain transplant. Somebody comes to Ralph and starts talking about being a no tiller. He says, you got to get your brain transplant first. You got to start to think differently. Interesting fact about Dakota lakes. When we started in 1990, I had a board of 11 guys. All of them were irrigators. Not one of them was a no tiller. Okay? And I said, if we build this thing to be a tillage-based farm, I have to have this big of pumps and this big of irrigators, this much machinery. And if we do it in no till, and I think I can, think I can manage it entirely in no till, we can do it cheaper. And Ralph said, I already know how to farm with tillage. Let's do it in no till. Okay? How's that for forethought? And 10 other guys went along with it. So farming does simplify us a little bit, that circle, cultural practices of technology and management, cultural practices, or the crop rotations of diversity. Tillage is one of these cultural practices, sanitation, competition, rotation. In nature, tillage is a catastrophic event. It doesn't happen. Mother Nature doesn't do tillage. I got a question from the audience the other day in Indianapolis. Go, what do you think about organic? I said, there's nothing natural about organic. There's nothing natural about taking a big diesel tractor out there and ripping up the ground. Mother Nature doesn't do that. Last year in France, Ruth and I were traveling in France, and I kept getting the question, can you do no till organic? Of course, this is all through translators, so it's really hard. And finally, I decided I'd answer that by saying I think you can, but it takes seven species of animal. Not just cows. You got to have cows and sheep and chickens and, you know, to do all these different things in your system that you would do with some technology. And when, as soon as I said that, everybody quit asking the question. Worked pretty good, and we got back here, and then somebody asked me that here, and I told that story. It's like it did now, and Ruth later says, I thought you knew. I didn't know you were just making up. It's kind of like Ray, you know, seven's a number, right? Ray in that test, okay? So we can't do this. This is stupid. That's what we've done. We've eroded people from France, came here. People from Germany came here because they degraded the soils in Europe to the point they couldn't make a living and they had to immigrate someplace. George Washington, when he was president, said we're going to have to move west because we're degrading the soils so bad that we won't be able to maintain the country unless we can go find new land. Well, there isn't any new land. Time we learn not to do that anymore, okay? Catastrophic event. It's not an option. You don't have healthy soils if you do tillage, period. And in Indianapolis, I said, what about the word no, don't you understand? Right? Because we have all these vertical tillage machines and whatever. It's kind of told them to look up the naval definition of rape. But I'll leave that alone. You got to be really old to remember that one, right, Paul? The Pueblo in North Vietnam. So you can go back and Google that, all you young guys, and then you'll know what it says. Now we have to use GPS and variable rate technology to take care of the variability accentuated by tillage erosion, okay? Technology is a tool, but it's not an answer, okay? So if we take tillage out, we're more dependent on rotation, sanitation, competition. We don't want weeds going to seed out there. That's one of those, what they say, that's a natural cover crop. We don't kill our coyotes. We don't kill our rattlesnakes. And people think I'm totally nuts, but the rattlesnakes eat a lot of mice and things. We spread our residues. This is an example of what not to do, and Paul talked about that. Now you've got to have something to help you out to get a uniform seed bed. Residue management is okay if you run them shallow. When you're in heavy wheat residue, that type of thing. But move no soil. Danny said we don't want to move. We don't want to move a little bit of dirt. You don't want to move any dirt. But if I can do something like this where it's nice and uniform, or it doesn't blow back over, if you start moving too much stuff, it blows back over top. So Paul's right there. Start moving around. Put fertilizer close. Very important. Get no till. So you got seed here, fertilizer there. I want to keep this in place. Last year's residue until this year's, last year's canopy until this year's canopy forms. That's my best weed control. 10 points reduced. And no till systems favor inclusion of alternative crops. Corn soybean guys, you don't tell it, you're going to do corn soybean. Two season interval between growing and giving crop. Another crop type is preferred, especially in some broadleaves. Chem fallow. In the old days they used to do, NRCS pushed this idea of chem fallow. And all you end up with a lot of weed and disease and insect cycles because nothing was there, wasn't any biology to cycle it out. So what I'm saying here is if you grow a crop or cover crop, black fallow, green fallow, used to call them green fallows, or production of a properly chosen crop is better than not doing anything because you're adding biological time. And when Jason was with us, we developed this diversity index that was based on years first. Where did Jason run to? There he is. Chronological time. And then all of a sudden I went to Argentina and went, oh, hell, that doesn't work, right? Remember that? I came back and said, oh, we got to do biological time. How much biology have between this crop and this crop for that disease to go away? Rotation should be sequenced to make it easy to prevent volunteer plants from previous crops. So Jerry's got this really diverse cover crop thing out there and his son is worried about weeds. But they look like they're mostly broadleaves or cool season guys. So he put corn in there, it's not a problem. Right? Produces with livestock enterprises find it less difficult to introduce diversity. That's really key. Use of forage and flexible forage grain crops and green fallow enhanceability, tailor rotational intensity and diversity. One of the reasons we're bringing livestock in is it gives you a lot more flexibility to do things. Now it's paying the butts, we're going to automate it. I should be able to move my machines by taking out my smartphone and moving them. I shouldn't have to go out there and push a button. And that's where we're heading is to be able to do that. Crops destined to direct human food use pose the highest risk and offer the highest potential return. Think of the guys in California that grow vegetables and they have no water. Right? What are they going to do? I was supposed to go to a meeting a couple weeks ago and talk to these guys. I was in Indianapolis instead. I went to Indianapolis instead of Arizona. But a conference called with them. They have some real issues and they really need to go back and really start looking at the whole thing again. If we try to increase diversity and intensity needs to be balanced with profitability, you can have too many crops. And Dan Forge gets on the edge of that at times. Right? And Bonnie goes, okay Dan, you've got enough stuff here because you've got to sell all those different crops. Soil moisture storage is affected by soil characteristics, surface residue, bouts. That's important. Inter crop periods, snow catchability is double. People talked about this all day today. Jerry Webb's saying, oh, I want that stuff sticking up to catch snow. Right? Precipitation patterns and other factors. If we're going cover crop after a week, going to corn, we probably have room to do that quite often as long as we keep the residue there. If I'm trying to do a cover crop after flax going to wheat, there's not enough time, not enough moisture. See, there's times you can and can't. Seed bed conditions at the time of seeding can be controlled through the use of crops with different characteristics in regard to residue color, level distribution and architecture. If you live up north around Bismarck and want to grow Milo, sorghum, right? I had a call yesterday on that. I said, well, you're going to have to plant, if you're going to be successful, you're going to try it anyway. Plant it into pea stubble or soybean stubble or sunflower because it's dark. At one time, I had the guys at Brookings trying to work on a black straw at wheat because the wheat would be straw would be darker. They looked at me kind of weird. I mean, the breeder's going up. The song says amber waves are green. Right? They couldn't make it express in the field. They could breed it and it would express in the greenhouse, but it wouldn't express in the field, which is kind of interesting. Sequence is only one component of rotation. Proper intensity, adequate diversity gives us stability, okay? A crop rotation allows time for natural enemies. It's biological time to destroy the passage of one crop when unrelated crop is growing. And sequences, I keep saying this, sequence is only one component of rotation. I'm going to show you why. Proper intensity, adequate diversity, again, stable and sustainable. Native vegetation is your best indicator of the range of intensities. It tells you what you can do. Whenever I travel, the first thing I do is look at the native vegetation. I will not talk to a farmer. I won't talk to a group. They have to show me the native vegetation first, because that tells me what they can do there. Integrates the soil and the climate and all these things. It tells me what they can do, and then you can have a conversation. Most of plant growth problems blame the no-tiller result of inadequate diversity and proper intensity. If it gets too wet, it's because you're not growing enough things. And you've got to play the long-term probability. You're going to have times when a cover crop is going to cost you a little bit, because it was an extraordinarily dry year. But you can't farm for an extraordinarily dry year. The fallow guys used to do that. Wheat fallow, we're going to farm for that really dry year. What's that mean? It means that even in the really dry year, they didn't have wheat that was worth much. If you remember, Georgia's no enough to remember. You don't remember your dad not no-tilling, do you? Very little. Very little, see? This is interesting. These guys, okay? But for you old guys, you didn't really get great crops in the dry years anyway. But in the wet year, you maybe got an okay crop, but the rotation sucks so bad, it wasn't that good. And you lost the opportunity to have done something in the fallow ground and in all these other years, when it's decent. So you lost the opportunity that normal to weather the normal year. So you've got to play long-term averages, right? Well, high water use crops, cover double crops, proper intensity reduces risk. Are the nutrients available for plant use environmental services or have they been leached, eroded, transported from the landscape? Ecosystems that leak nutrients become deserts. And I didn't put any of my frant slides in, but everybody took us to see their castle. And they'd show you their castle and they said, this area here they stored grain. And I go, where'd they grow the grain? Round the castle. That ground's all degraded. You can't grow anything on that ground. Oh, most of them hadn't thought about that. The reason the castle's no longer occupied is because they degraded the ground around the castle. Saline seeps indicate leakage. You've got to saline seep, it's because you're not using the water like you should. Decreasing pH, or your pH's are going down, your leaking line out the bottom. Right? I got my little president chemist here. I'm a chemist too. One unit train of soybeans contains a half a million pounds of phosphorus. So when they build these circly tracks out here and they ship the soybeans to Taiwan and the governor's all happy about that, we just send them a half a million pounds of phosphorus so we're not going to get back. They're not going to load their poop in the same container and ship it back to us and let us spread it on the ground. So, saline seeps, because water goes in here, isn't used here, ends up going out here. Saline seep has nitrates, calcium, sulfur, gypsum, fertilizers. That's what it has in it. Now, some soils you will get some sodium, but most time it's fertilizers. Am I right? Yeah, see. Covering forage crops give us an opportunity to increase this intensity and diversity where production of grain crop would not be possible. So in those windows in between, okay, in humid environments, tall grass per year weather, not most of you guys, Elmer and maybe. The goal should be to have something growing at all times. In areas with limited growing season, cold areas, this will require use of cover crops or forage double crops. In sub-humid and semi-arid and arid areas like pier, cover crops can be utilized to increase organic matter and biological activity or they can be used as a forage crop, right? A friend of mine North Dakota calls this catch and release nutrients. Again, think of carbon as a nutrient, energy that drives that system and catch the carbon coming by, put it in the ground for energy. You can use that plant to catch nitrogen coming by, put it in the ground. You can use that plant to get the nitrogen and sulfur that's going to go deep and the lime is going to go deep and bring it back and put it on top. Catch and release nutrients. It'll release it for you. Here's an experiment we did at the farm several years ago. We had a field that was in, it's in a corn corn soybean, wheat wheat corn corn soybean soybean rate rotation. After the wheat, we planted a cover crop of lentils, chickling vetch and turnip. We had 108 pounds of acre of nitrate in the next spring because most of it's in this organic phase. You'll go 220 bushels of acre. If we put on no pounds of nitrogen, we got 176. We put on 36 pounds of nitrogen, we got 236. And we got 214 and 233. These all three are the same. So we only need 36 pounds in in that case because we caught enough to do that. That's under irrigation. If you get stranded in the back 40 in the rain, do you drive home across for plowed field or the pasture? Right? No day there was all it can no till it was too wet to get out there in the spring. Wow. Not if you got soil structure. Weeds and diseases are nature's way of adding diversity to a system that lacks it. I got that from Ellen Savry and Elle Savry probably stole it from somebody else. Right? We encounter these by adding diversity of our own. Beneficial diversity. We want at least three crop types long intervals of two to four years are needed to break some disease cycles. Let's look at water hemp, this thing in the corn belt. If I have 10 water humps that develop resistance and each of them have 100 viable seeds and I really actually have 10,000 or so. What happens to different rotations? Well if I do corn soybean with roundup ready in one of them, it does this. If I do corn, corn, soybean, soybean, it does this. I get 10 million of them in either six years or seven years or 13 years. Or if I do wheat corn beans, I don't get any build up because I control them two years out of three. If I do this rotation, here is continuous corn or corn, soybean, both with roundup ready. I have 10 million of them in three years. So the guys in the corn belt go, oh we got these resistant wheat, this is terrible. No, you got to be smarter than the wheat. Smarter than the bug. Here's a field that we seeded years ago, most of our wheat we don't put it on the other side. So this is where I still had auto-steer. Auto-steer better, see. Now I have auto-steer that I get rid of those gaps. But there's no other side been put on there and no wheat. Normally if you leave a skip, you got wheat because you don't have competition. So we want to see diversity in seeding date, diversity in rooting pattern. This is important, you do some of this with cover crop, diversity in root architecture, reservoir type, insect pests or beneficials, wheat suppression, microorganisms, harvest date, beneficials and more. So simple rotations. A lot of us do these kinds. Winter wheat corn canola spring, winter wheat corn sunflower. The trouble with these corn soybeans the advantages are simple. Limble number of crops to manage the market. And every crop follows predictably. So you can tell the hired man go out and spray all the wheat stubble with atrazine because we're going to go all the wheat stubble is going to go to corn next year, right? Simple. Don't have to worry about getting confused. But all corn is behind wheat. So if it's a wet year, it's too wet. And we can't get it planted maybe, right? All winter wheat's in the spring wheat. We get a high disease year. That's not a good thing. Rotations of perennial sequences, which is where I think we need to head eventually is where we do a rotation and then put it in perennials for a while. A simple one would be corn, soybean, corn, soybean, corn, soybean and then four years old. By the time this thing starts to blow up from a weed standpoint, you just hit the reset button with four years of alfalfa or four years of perennial grass and graze it. And the other thing it does is go down and pick up all those deep nutrients and pull them back up the top and it builds a bunch of soil structure and it does a whole bunch of things, not with alfalfa but with the perennial grasses. It's still a limited number of annual crops. X in place that's spread in manure probably can produce more soil structure than annual crops if you have a grass or grass mixture. And if we're going to make biomass out of biomass energy crops, this is where we should do it and this is how we should do it, not with annual crops. And I still think that's stupid, you know, but anyway. Biomass crops and energy crops are the future and always will be. Think about that. See, you can laugh later. It's difficult to manage the sufficient percentage of land in perennial crop without grazing. But if we graze, that's a good thing. Okay. Using less perennial minimizes the impact. Marketing is an issue unless you graze. Compound rotations, where we take two simple rotations to put them back to back this, my mother-in-law or banker rotation. Half of my corn's into wheat stubble, half my corn's into soybeans. Right? My mother-in-law comes in June or my banker comes in June, I show them the corn into beans. So it looks great. They come in September, appear, we usually go look at the stuff that's planted into wheat because there's more moisture. Spreads the risk. Don't need the crop insurance. Lemon number crops, still three crops there in that example. Limitability to spread workload because they only have three crops. See, that's rotations where crop with the same crop type, very barley, winter wheat, corn, sunflower, millet, pea, that kind of thing. We do a lot of stuff with corn and sorghum, both. Danny Forge is doing oats in winter wheat. That's a similar example of that where you start mixing them in. You can really create a lot of different situations there. Complementarity in sorghum and corn, for instance. Sorghum has none of the same diseases really as corn. I kind of break all those things up. Chires more management skills. But that's why we pay you the big bucks as you manage. Used to be we paid you big bucks to drive. Don't need that anymore. You got autostere, push a button. So you don't need to take all your time going across the field to do some management. And then stack rotations where we put two, two and two, that kind of thing. There's some real power here because it unleashes the long residual thing and it gives us these long breaks. Now I have a paper that covers all this stuff that if you just email me, I'll email you a copy of it. We try to keep this pest population confused because the sequences and intervals change. The reason we got it resisted corn rootworm beetles in the Eastern South Dakota is we had corn, soybean every other year. The normal habit is for the rootworm mother to lay her eggs at the base of the corn plant. Kid hatches the next spring. Choose out the roots of corn if it's planted corn again. If it's soybeans, the kid died. But her secret was she always had some extended dipods. She had some eggs that didn't hatch for two years. And by everybody doing corn, soybean, we develop the whole species to not hatch for two years. Predominant trait, right? So by having a mix of sequences, we confuse them. It also gives us a chance to do a mix of long and short residuals. Your oversight programs, they do atrazine on the first one, for instance, and then round up ready on the second one. Two year break between corn and wheat in that instance there. So anyway, the goal is to be inconsistent both sequence and interval. Here's some rotations that I talk about this one is my favorite where a guy in Kansas did wheat until he got it joining gold grass and then did sorghum every year until he got shatter cane and then he did sunflowers every year until he got white mold. But that's smarter than a guy doing corn, soybean, corn, soybean, corn, soybean and not figuring out why he's having trouble, okay? It's all. There's no set recipe or best rotation. Individual fields may need differing treatments due to soil's location, proximity, history, landlord, understand the power of the rotations. Here's the thing that Danny forgy did for me. There's corn with no nitrogen, no companion crop. Here's corn with soybean companion crop. These soybeans are feeding nitrogen to this corn and change for carbon. That works in no-till. We're doing some of that now with alfalfa between corn rows under irrigation and we leave it there year after year to get nitrogen because nitrogen is that big energy animal we live with. But don't forget about the carbon. Here's a rotation, low residue rotation that we have. This is a dry year. That's what it looks like in a normal or wetter than normal year. No, this is the same year where we had a higher carbon rotation. Corn, pea, winter wheat, soybean, corn, pea, winter wheat. The two years before winter wheat are still pea and corn. The difference is after 10 or 15 years of doing that, this one got mined out of carbon. So when people are talking to you about you want low carbon stuff in your rotation, no, you need to get carbon pork in there. Think of the prairie being 90-some percent grasses. Right? Here's that same comparison. 2006 dry year, 7.9 precipitation, the 12 months preceding harvest. 60 versus 29. Corn, pea, winter wheat in the wet year, 23 inches, the 12 months before harvest. 92 versus 57. Low residue, high residue. In 2002, 6.4. Same thing. We get much higher yields consistently in that high carbon rotation. In our irrigated stuff, corn belt things. This is 2013. Corn, corn, soybean wheat, soybean. First year soybean yields are 73. Second year is 81.2. So corn, soybean rotation, we average 62. More diverse rotation, almost 80. In corn, we get the same kind of thing. Continuous corn, 203. Corn, soybean, 217. In this more diverse rotation, we average 235. If I put that on the basis of 5,000 acres or whatever, this is how much you get. Million bushels of corn. But what we're doing with this more diverse rotation versus corn, soybean, we're trading 72,500 bushels of corn for 120,000 bushels of wheat plus 350 bushels of soybeans. People say corn, soybean makes me most money and can't afford to grow wheat. Yeah, you can. Right? Look at those numbers. And it's cheaper. We went to Argentina the first time in 1996. They were doing seven years of pastures and seven years of cropping in their system and cover crops. So this is cover crop. According to soybean, this is without cover crop. This is a field that had seven years of pastures before that. If you want to know what soil health looks like. What if soils should look like. That's what it should look like. I went back to that same field in 2006 after the lady outlawed to export a beef and everybody switched from having the pastures just doing corn and soybean and mostly soybean. And within 10 years, this is what it looked like. Organic matter makes a difference. For an architecture group, this organic matter increased from 1 to 3% available water capacity doubles. Okay? 4% organic matter, 60% of the available water holding capacity. The problem we had here is we degraded the soils that didn't hold as much water as they should. When the soil water storage capacity is low much of the rain that falls during expended periods of precipitation is lost. Most of the guys that used to irrigate here don't irrigate anymore. Because it doesn't pay. Forging and cronins do because they have low left. But anytime you're up over a couple hundred foot of left it doesn't pay. Okay? This is what was here. These are my daughters. Don't tell Sam that I showed that picture. The youngest one here is a good friend of Dr. Vizcara's daughter and they're both sophomores in college. But this is a native prairie plant. Look at that root system. Think of what you're putting in there with corn and soybeans and wheat. Not even close. Okay? All tillage tool destroys soil structure. All tillage tools decrease water infiltration. All tillage tools reduce organic matter. All tillage tools increase weeds. We've got data for all that. What about the word no? Don't you understand? Right? Vertical tillage, my ass. Okay? Tillage is to agriculture what fracking is to petroleum. They both increase the speed and extent of nutrient removal from a resource. Right? You kill it and you can get the nutrients out. And we're in France and they're tilling this deep now. Up and down the hill. They've got hills that are plowing that they can't plow up because they don't have big enough tractors. They drive up and plow it out. Some experts propose using tillage as a mean of addressing weed resistance. If tillage was so good at getting rid of weeds, they should all be gone. That's all you have to tell them. You know? Yeah, they should be gone. We shouldn't have anymore. Continuous low disturbance, no tilling, in combination with diverse rotation cover crops is a biological answer to a biological problem. Looking backwards. Sarah Singler, a really good friend of mine from France. I went to her place when we were there. This is her grandfather plowing in France in the 70s. They're no tilling now in France. And he's looking forward when he's plowing, he was looking backwards. Thank you. And Ruth has something to say. Well, I don't know. Don't you want to get rid of them? No, I don't. Oh. Any questions or you guys want to go have drinks? You know, we started going down, and now we're kind of leveling off with two, six, four, no. Explain how that all- Well, your lime calcium, like if you take a fence post, you go down three, three and a half feet. And if you put acid on that, it fizzes. That's lime. That's where your free lime is, three and a half, three, three and a half, four feet, depending on your soil. For Steve Halverson, it's shallower, right? And that's lime. And as you crop and you get these high rainfall years, that moves beyond the depth of where your plants can go get it, your annual plants. Now, if you would put perennials in there, switch grass or whatever for five years, that pH will come right back up. Because it's going to go down and get that and bring it up. Now, if you put switch grass in there and take all the hay off, the lime goes off in the hay. The easiest way to degrade the soil is to put alfalfa and take all the hay off and don't put them in their back. I mean, that's a huge detriment. And the calcium doesn't go out by itself. It goes out with nitrates or goes out with carbonates. And those are the things that move sideways and become your saline seed. First one that moves is gypsum. That's deeper. I know your soils. Your gypsum is about a little over four feet, around four feet. And then two and a half, three feet, you got your lime. Are you used to it?