 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 Pierce. Right now it's our, seven, eight years ago, ten years ago, I used to think cows were really a detriment to our farm, to compaction, took all our residue. And now I wish we had more cows. Another thing is what happened, the best thing that happened to us was $6 corn. Because when everybody goes after $6 corn, it leaves all them minor crops alone. And that did us more good than anything because we raised ten cash crops and ten cash crops and that's nothing but a plus. And not only by finding different markets and doing a lot more work finding them, what it's done to our soil. It's just unreal what helped when we diversified so much what it did to us. And there's all the different things like the flocks and the mycorrhizae. And the more you get into the rotation, the more you like it. The best one of what you have is behind flocks, field peas and lentils. But another thing that is our cover crops. So we plant cover crops on 10% of our accrues, it's usually on winter wheat. We've flirted with platinum on corn stocks, on irrigated corn stocks. We have six pivots and with some limited success. Dwayne's working with the clay seed ball, we hope that happens. Our pivots were corn beans and now we're in a three to four year rotation. And one of our crops that's helped on that rotation is we plant teff grass for cattle. We've taken it for grain. If you guys have cattle and haven't experienced teff grass, I encourage you to. But there's a lot of the cover crop on our grazing. We're going into full season cover crop. We're bringing our stuff home and that works. We like that full season cover crop. Then we also have a lot of short season cover crop degrades. Our cows were still going out, we'll feed them a light feeding and then they'll still go out and graze the cover crop. Are we paddock, no, should be be yes, but we're not. But so our cows will basically winter on two sections and half of that will be planned to cover. But so I'm a big believer in cover, a big believer in soil biology. And I think it's been a really good meeting. One other thing I'd like to say, I think we really need to thank Jason and Ruth because there's a lot of work being done put on this meeting. And so I really think we've got to give them a round of applause. Okay, next up either Steve or Jerry. You guys want to arm wrestle or who wants to volunteer? I'm Jerry Webb. I farm south of Harold and we farm south of Highmore over in Hyde County also. We've been out there for a while. We're a fifth generation, I'm a fifth generation farmer. Hopefully we'll have a sixth generation. It was not as good as it has been the last few years. And of course right now of course we're heading into more what I call normal farming times. My sons don't really know what it's like cuz they came back five, six years ago and I said this has kind of been the golden years for us but I remember back when I got out of high school and it was in the 70s and there was a time when I was convinced that we could never grow corn in central South Dakota. Of course since the advent of no till it's turned into a fantastic situation growing corn and with the technology that came about and like I said I have a great appreciation for Dr. Beck for what he's did for all of us and just the whole cover crop thing that we've I've jumped on board with that I think we started I started dabbling with things like peas and things 10-12 years ago or maybe even a little longer and actually grown some cover crop for seed lentils batch and radishes and I've seen a lot of agronomic benefit from putting the cover crops in and I guess if grain markets get much lower and I even talked about it last year maybe going to full season cover crops just you know you might as well work on your bank account one way rather than growing stuff just for practice but I've jumped into some of the other programs with the cover crops like the CSP and equip because I really like the pollinator program I think those are good things for helping out the bees and things like that because a lot of our ground has been taken out of native species and I know back in the 70s when we were primarily a ranch I kind of got tired of cows I remember feeding cows out with a feed wagon for what 26 months straight and you just think about how profitable was that but so I was kind of happy to get out of the cattle for a while but now because of the cover crops I'm starting to realize that we need to have them as part of our program for our soil biology and I guess I kind of have cows I were raising put together a herd of low lines it started out as a hobby and I kind of like them they're not quite as big they don't kick quite as hard and we got one barrel in that yet it's not quite as intimidating as those 1600 pound cows used to be but anyway we've had a lot of support from the NRCS and Jason he's did some work out at our place with the solvita testing and and the cover crop stuff we've been working on and I don't know maybe Jason you want to show us some of these pictures yeah we this was a picture of in June of our July 15th of our equip acre or equip pollinator acres and we had about seven or eight different species in there you can see them listed all up there it takes me a while just to figure out which one is which but of course I'm a big radish fan but it was kind of fun to watch them grow and to see all the bee activity out in the field I know I think I got stung more times this year than I ever had but it usually wasn't the good bees the honey bees but I've learned to not like bumble bees anyway they must have got quite a little honey because my the guy that puts the cops the hives out he left me a substantial amount of honey so but anyway we got good growth out there and like said I think it's it's something that we we need to think more about probably we we can't you know when we go to mono cropping systems I were definitely probably harming the environment by not letting mother nature do all of the things that she does for us but maybe Jason can tell you about some of this I don't know how much I can tell you for sure it's just that the local office bill and law the district conservationists and his staff went out to Jerry Webb's place throughout the summer and they did one of the soil health tests the salvia test here on the cover crop portion of it the one in the blue and Jerry actually split this field where he had spring weed on the other half and that's just orange line bar is but the salvia scores here in May we're both at 86 July very close to very similar low 40s and then in August we saw the cover crappy just a little bit lower compared to the August one don't understand for sure a hundred percent what's going on there but I know there was a rain that occurred about 10 days before that visiting visiting with Lance a little bit earlier this morning asking about that and some of that could have been the cover crop use of water and those active those root systems may have absorbed some of that respiration and so forth but then in October when we looked at those two sites the cover crop was starting to basically go backwards or start to decompose we would have had more respiration there compared to the here and then the black bar would have been just a nearby pastor that was grazed not hard but it was it was left great that was 162 but I believe the local office is going to continue to monitor this site for the next couple years so with that Jerry I guess Steve okay just tell everybody what I did Jason called and asked if I could share I guess some of my experience with cover crops I've been planting them probably four years now you know we've heard today all the great things they do for the soil biological activity but they also have cattle and I'm sure many people in this room same way and I think there's a great opportunity for cattle producers anyway here's here's what I planted started right after right after weed harvest basically the first of August plant a mixture at 10 pounds of votes 5p and turnips radishes and rapeseed and I've been tinkering with the the balance of what to plant for a while and finally I did what I should have did long ago I called Brian Jorgensen said if you had to plant one thing what would you do this is what he recommended and I guess I was really happy with it here's the picture August 20th you know the stuff is emerging it's been in about pushing three weeks there's a same time frame you can you can roll it good and keep in mind this year you know it's most people in South Dakota know we had substantial amount of rain so everything was perfect if we could get this to happen every year I'd buy more cows is what would happen because it's tremendous feed here it is September 4th it's been in the ground just over a over a month and then here it is September 25th and I have my range are parked out there just for size so you know what you're dealing with but the oats in there actually actually got waist high and headed out and put seed on planted August one I never would have dropped that but my cows were standing at the fence saying when you're gonna open the gate daily once once I got to this stage but fantastic feed as we all know the key to farm ranch profitability is efficiency so what I did is I just ran some quick numbers just some farmer math here seed cost was about ten bucks per acre planting costs you know you you can punch in whatever you want I just threw in fifteen bucks an acre you can't hire done for that but if you're doing it yourself so cost me 25 bucks an acre and I had one quarter that I graced specifically up for a amount of time so I kept track of that great 160 acres for 45 days with 200 animal units in there that's basically the equivalent of 300 animal units a month so for 4,000 bucks it converts down to the monthly cost was $13.33 per annual unit month so that was pretty really cheap grazing and fantastic feed so I just did a comparative cost if I was feeding hay for that month and this is without supplements or anything else in the hay 80 bucks a ton it's just a ballpark figure for 30 days so 45 or 40 bucks a month so this year again we gotta keep in mind the amount of rainfall we had but for those 200 200 head it saved me about 5,300 bucks a month and I tried to graze cattle out mine are still out grazing right now they're getting some protein tubs but that's all they're grazing cover crops corn stocks Milo stocks and and just trying graze them as long as I can I'd like to stretch it out to mid-march at some point the first month I used to always wean my calves November one we just always did that but we always used to start calving March one well now I've slid that back I'm calving April one and I thought you know what this cover crop looks so good I'm gonna leave the calves on the cows for an extra month both of them just really shined on that stuff I mean they put a lot of weight on those calves I couldn't have weaned those calves off and fed them enough to make them look that good same with the cows I think I think you'd have to have at least 10 pounds of corn or more in that hay ration to have your cows be in as good a condition as they came off that cover crop that's just a pitcher January 10th they're still out grazing digging around the snow doing pretty well the next couple are just I wanted cow pitchers but I didn't have any so this is might a muzzle loader deer tag this year so I'm sending the deer blind I can only shoot about a shoot about a hundred hundred yards and this is actually took this through my spotting scope but this is a field that hasn't been grazed yet my cows are going to go on their last before they go into my calving pasture but you can see that those deer would stick their head down all the way into their ears and then you can see their head moving around down there and pretty soon update come if you look closely he's got a green leaf sticking out of his mouth yet so that stuff is still green still very good underneath and the cows and deer and everything will dig around and get it so that that's all I got thank you you guys just want to come up or to stand up we're going to open up for questions and answers you can kind of opinion here because we got two two mics going here but first question you have a question for the value of the value of pheasant hunting oh okay the impacts economically on from row crops CRP versus cover crops well I'll try to touch on how much as I can I should back up a little bit and I didn't really introduce myself but I operate you know a cow calf operation farming operation and the hunting operation and actually all these things work really well together for me is the mix of the three the winter wheat the the cattle or I mean excuse me the pheasants they love to nest in the winter wheat you harvest that and they'll slide into the into the corner my lawyer row crop but then I also have CRP and the the nice thing about that is the CRP is you were allowed to have portion of that every year that let that's my cattle feed that I'll be feeding from the time I pull them off this stuff so diversity is a key I think in pheasants and just the combination of the three can maximize I will tell you this year on that slide where you saw my four-wheeler out there opening weekend we went out and started started to chase around some food plots and we couldn't figure out for sure where all the birds were they were in that stuff they absolutely loved it so it's a little daunting we got a quarter section of that and you're going out trying to chase them but we had to do it and that's we had good luck out there but the pheasants love it the deer love it I mean the wildlife really likes the cover crops so I don't know if that answered exactly what you wanted but I just think diversity is the key to to the fezzling operate operation and and also it's just nice to have your your separate operations overlap a little bit where the CRP can help your cattle the farming obviously it as you could see the cattle I'm getting a lot of good use for that with the cattle too so you guys have anything you want to add to that yep you know in our operation we're taking a lot back to perennials and in some of our salinity areas especially around the farm we're going back to switch grass and and the cows love it it's a good loafing place for them but we've we've helped our pheasant population by doing this and and another thing they like is our tef grass we'll usually take one cut in the tef grass and we'll let the residue come back so residue will get you know 18 inches tall and we'll leave that either for grazing or to plan into and you talk about a pheasant habitat I mean it's just unreal like a lot of times the same thing what Steve said when them guys were hunting pheasants they'd go out and they'd wonder where the pheasants were and that's where they are they're in that habitat it's not real good for hunt but it's good for the pheasants okay next question back there talking about managing and establishing a tef grass the tef grass oh this could be a question for Dr. Beck but and you can ask him to we started growing tef grass first time in 2007 and it's about the time you haven't figured out you don't have it figured out we don't if we have our choice we don't like to have coated tef a lot of it because that's just if you have to plant an extra pound and a half because of the coating on the tef you plant as shallow as you can get it we did one trick that we learned from our neighbors we planned it then we rolled it and I didn't like to do that but we did it and but if you're getting established stand and then it's it takes off and it's good so if everything goes right in about 50 days you'll have your first cutting and there's a guy over by Brookings that got three cuttings in one year off it if you cut it right at boot it's tremendous feed it's easy it's once you get it established you've got it I mean because you'll get two cuttings for sure we always like to residue for the second one usually runs about 15% protein and your horses will really love it I mean it's just a it's a it's a good feed but and then you can take about all the broadleaf out I think through some of the stuff that had been used around here you can take the grasses out you can take the broadleafs out so it's a pretty easy deal but if one thing you don't want to plant it too early either it doesn't like frost so you know like the last few days of May the first part of June and we usually plant oh five to six pounds is all you need and if you shop around you can get seed for three bucks but shop around a little bit and get the seed for $3 and then it doesn't take a lot of urea a lot of nitrogen I mean like 60 to 75 pounds of of nitrogen's plenty but it's a it's a good crop I mean we we like it and it's in our it's in our rotation because it's such a good rotational crop and like I say we could go back and get our second cutting just about every year last this last year we had you know last two years we've had some this high that we leave and this year we grazed that a lot of times we'll plant corn into it no we you know and Dwayne does that and we don't because we tried it in it I don't know we just when we try something we want it Jason ask if we tied our closing wheels up on our drill and Dwayne does and he has tremendous success with ours you know you tie him up on a 40-foot drill and all of a sudden a couple fall down and all of a sudden it's pretty easy for a farmer to throw your hands up but what we'll do is we'll plant shallow if we're gonna if we're gonna err we're gonna be error on planted shallow because if stuff is on top the ground or close to the top the ground it would come up if you get a rain and like 30 40 hundreds it'll be seeded and and you guys when Dwayne comes up for you can ask him more on cover crop because or excuse me on Taft because he's grown you know as much as anybody has to okay next question the residue wheels what are your thoughts on getting rid of the residue wheels the managers all residue managers what are your thoughts on getting rid of residue managers start here you know the residue managers you guys we use them we've got new matting so we raise them up a little bit if we don't need them but we'll always run residue managers it's just a lot of times we don't they're barely turning but we'll usually always use residue managers but we'll do what we have to with them it's not the old days where you set them down we don't like to move a lot of dirt we soil we don't like to mark fosters shaking his finger at me but anyway anyway we don't like to move a lot of soil and so a lot of times we just have them spinning a little bit and another thing is what Paul said Paul asset said is and I really agree with him is you leave that but we strippers now but leave that stubble leave that stubble long if we have the old spreaders with the rubber belts on them that's what you want I mean we don't before we had our shell borings we never chopped or stumbled on we let it all come out whole we use the floating Martins and they're not really too aggressive mine are getting a little war but we're going to get some new ones so I don't know maybe that'll be but I prefer the trash whippers I agree with what these guys say I mean in our area if we get there the really heavy wheat residue and things go down you know there there is a need and a time but there's there's years where we don't use them at all so it has to be okay next question the question was who planted corn three inches deep Jerry hands after listening to Paul after a couple times last winter we are working a little deeper that we go three inches no but we you know like that two and a quarter worse we're really make sure we're at two and a quarter I thought that was really interested about planting close to the row because you know like on our sunflowers and stuff I mean I'm really interested to try that I think that's going to be a I think that's gonna be kind of fun to work with and what kind of success was it three inches deep you know it came up a little slower I was kind of kind of worried about it at the time because with the trash and everything that soil can be pretty cold and but it turned out all right and I think I'll probably go a little deeper than I have been usually shoot her for two but after today's meeting I think I'm going to try some different things so okay next question okay who's runner stripper heads and do you like him or what don't you like about him we've only had him for two years and so far we like him but we've never had a really mat down but you know we especially plant one of we try to we're 10 inch spaces we're we were a hundred percent low disturbance I mean we're going to be low disturbance or we're not going to do it so what we'll do in our 10 inch space and we'll try to plan in between our winter wheat and that really helps with the stripper but you know another thing with the strippers we strip our flocks and then we also stripped our tough grass so we do spring wheat winter wheat if you're going to take tough grass to seed tough grass and then we'll strip our flocks but so far we like our we like our stripper heads one thing that and it's gonna some guys up there are running the strippers on spring and then not on winter they're running their drapers and the reason they are you go out there and our soils are so active you go out there like three weeks after harvesting you pick your you grab a handful strong the roots are pruned off and so and then someone and I think that sometimes has had the tendency to blow we haven't experienced that yet but it's you know maybe we're just lucky all I'd say is it's on my wish list this trip ahead okay next question and that brings up a whole hey the question one from Pam was do you graze the pollinator mix and in his situation with under equip the guidelines are somewhat a little not hundred percent correct and trying to be politically correct here Jeff can't raise it until after November 1st I think if I remember right and that would have brought up another question for Jerry is is he concerned since he planted May 9th and 10th you saw all that all that material all the seeds out there my concern is it could be a potential weed you know problem next year so maybe thoughts on that Jerry I love trash because it seems like we never have enough water and the more trash I've got sticking up in the air the more snow we can seem to collect and we contemplated the possibility of my sons a real pessimist and these telling us how many weed issues we're gonna have and I said well I know we don't like to use any more chemical than we have to but nowadays there's enough stuff out there I've planted into some pretty ugly fields and we've been able to work it out in fact I had a field of cover crop I grew some lentils and you can't use a lot of chemical on them back they were the old Indian heads and it turned out it was a weed patch like this and you couldn't hardly see the lentils and I had my neighbor come up out here Arlen mayor who's here I said well Arlen what should I do with this he said well you could hate of course I didn't have any cows at that time so it wasn't a very good option plus I kind of needed to make a little money but we ended up burning them down and it wasn't much fun to combine but I made quite a bit of money on those lentils for seeds so yeah weeds are an issue but we've got a lot of tools in the toolbox to handle a lot of those problems you need to think about it for the next year's crop for sure you know getting back to the stripperhead to you guys be stripperhead or oats and I love oats because oats you know when they were four dollars they were a lot of fun and now even at two dollars they're never go out of our rotation because they're a rotation and they're a heavy heavy residue crop our old shoes you get up to chest high and that's just exactly what I want because you know after harvest we have we harvest them with the stripperhead but then there's enough residue it really slows the weeds down there's some volunteer oats comes but that doesn't really hurt you another thing if you're going to go into winter wheat on oats just think about it it's a instead of a brother on a brother like spring wheat and then winter wheat it's their cousins so oats and winter wheat are cousins and not brothers so you get away from a lot of the diseases oats will always be in our rotation are they going to really be a big player no but then a lot of the crops we raise on our farm aren't big players I mean they we've got a lot of minor crops it's just helps our rotation okay next question okay you have trouble having the oats dry down when you're going to cut with a stripperheader no we don't and then we've been doing it now for three years and we've never with the strippers and we've never had an issue with it and they just always dry down I mean it's just you know and we usually if anything we wait till they're ready we don't we don't push them at all when we used to straight cut them we'd go in and maybe push harvest a little bit now we we wait the straw is still green but not real green but we've always had dry oats I mean and another thing I like about that is to you know like going them straighter with the strippers because when we used to put them in a swath we'd always end up with 35 36 pound oats and now that we're straight and a more stripper and we're getting up to 42 we had some 46 pound rock for two years ago our oats this year weighed 43 so I mean it's just and I think that's just because you're letting them go to the full maturity though as college has got a really good oats now to a you know a Hayden you guys so if you're we really liked rockford but the college has got a good oats called Hayden and the grain millers accepted it for milling so I mean it's a nice oats years of limited rainfall are you feeling your cover crops hurt the following year's cash crop okay it's going down the line this time you know that I was really worried this year you know everybody talked about excess rain and we didn't have it I saw also we do our own soil sample and I got a pickup probe and the fall of 2014 I couldn't hold a corn in the probe it had fall out it was that dry come spring we had about six inches of moisture everything worked right but you know we just had the timely rains timely rains timely rains the stuff we had on cover crop I was tremendously nervous because I said what if I use that little bit of rain we had what on what if we stubble what if I did what if I did it didn't show up at all and the last the second time that's happened where we've been extreme and we were extremely dry last fall and and it never really showed up on our fall harvest so right now I'm going to say no I one thing I've got to say is I think that I'm getting away from I do the way that when you plant your cover crop the way it used to be is you'd always think well you know if this is work a little bit more I'll be better and now I go by the NRCS chart and I really stick with that and I don't plant any more than a half to a lot of times you get done you say only 36 pounds I'm planting but it might only be 17 pounds oats and whatever whatever but a lot of times thick isn't always better on cover crop just get something growing and and then you'll get more growth but as far as the moisture deal I'm not really too concerned I mean I you know I strike me dead if I might be wrong but I'm really not too concerned when I first started cover crops I would have to say I was quite concerned but after doing it as many years as I have it's really not a big issue I think even on the worst case scenario I think you're still going to get more benefits from the cover crop than whatever moisture that you would think you might lose I just don't think you really do kind of like these guys I was skeptical at first you know when you first when you first started hearing about cover crops they were talking about being able to use your excess moisture and in this part of the state everybody goes what excess moisture but anyway I haven't seen any negative results from from planting it you know obviously there's some years you plant it and it doesn't may not come up 2012 comes to mind but you know overall the following following crop I haven't seen anything to make me believe that it drew the moisture out enough to hurt it so okay we got time for another question back there how long are you stretching rotations out four years five years yeah four and four in my case and I I haven't been doing a hundred percent of my weed acres basically I've been doing it where where I could graze ease of grazing where I had water fences whatever but it's it's something that every year I'm adding more and more to where I will be I think a hundred percent of my following my winter wheat crop pretty soon but right now it's every four years on my farm yeah I'm every five years but like I said I would love to hit it a lot harder than that said we have some poor prices this year I would love to throw in some extra covered crops in place in my spring wheat just for the soil we're a little bit of everything we've got some four years to seven years we've got 13 different rotations so you know and nothing's really written in stone but I really want to protect a residue like most guys that have been in a long time our soils are active enough to where residue is a big a big issue like one thing on that when I'm planting cover crop it really I made a mistake one year by having too many brassicas and and legumes in my mix and and it took me a long time to kind of make up on that quarter so I I really I try to protect our residue and that's why a lot of times I we're really high residue crops uh as far as I'm concerned our soils are going to our soils are there we're going to feed them but I if I got a chance to grow some residue that's what we're going to do can I say something else you guys I'm not trying to you know I just want to there's there's a couple things that you really have to watch and on cover crops and that's the chemicals used last year and then the and then so this is just like a whole new deal so you have to plan ahead on everything you do one year we had one year we flew some stuff on down at the river and it worked the next year we flew that worked so then we flew more well the only thing is I used the chemical that took all the brassicas out and that was self I didn't realize it never even thought to look at the label and maybe I'm the only one but I mean if you can learn from my mistakes so you guys whatever you do pay attention so think ahead so if you're going to plant a cover crop on winter wheat in rcs there's a sdsu they've got a lot of article a lot of pages out about what chemicals that you can use it cannot use and get by with so just just be as easy as doing it that way than doing it the way I did it one last burning question for anyone Raleigh sorry you guys seeing that better infiltration that following spring before before the rainy rainy season hits for a couple weeks yeah it was out of doubt it's a better rain I agree 100 roley I mean I think that's a good comment a great comment because a lot of times it'll you know we were on a well a heavy oats double plant corn last year and we picked up 30 hundreds of rain and we immediately moved to a field that had cover they ended up yielding the same but I mean at least we could plant in the cover so it's uh no that's a good point I mean very good point