 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 I Grow South Dakota State University Extension for delivering these seminars with the latest soil health and productivity technology to South Dakota farmers and ranchers. So I put in the presentation just to think about why we're no-telling. This is a dish that's filled up with sediment. It would be just north and west of two falls. I have a big brain there, a little tune. And this is me with my graduate student who's since left the program to farm in Minnesota. So I'm happy for him, but difficult for me. But this is a sediment fan from that same ray. Probably a foot and a half or two feet of sediment there. So this last year in our trials at the southeast farm, we really didn't see a big difference in yield between a no-tail and conventional field. But when you consider some of these factors and some of these costs, it makes the no-tail look a lot better. So with that, we move on to the cover crop part of it. Kind of taking a big picture, look at it. When we think about a natural system in the spring and in the fall and through the whole year you've got this vegetation there. And all the time it's turning sunlight into organic matter. And that's doing two things for you. One thing is covering the soil, but it's feeding the whole soil food well. When we go to an annual cropping system, all the way from April till our corn and soybean system, all the way up until sometime in the middle of June, we're not making full use of the sunlight that's coming down. On the other hand, we get into August, late August, September, somewhere in early mid-September, our warm season crops shut down. And again, we're wasting resources, sunlight is being lost. So we can't fully mimic perennial system with angles. And as Dwayne said, we should have more perennials in our cropping system. But one step towards addressing that is using cover crops, either before or after our grain crops, trying to make use of that light to feed the soil. And there's a lot of potential benefits. Avroganic matter improves soil structure, reduces compaction, protects the soil from erosion. We have potential to increase nutrient availability, because we're pulling nutrients from deep from the profile and concentrating them at the surface. Depending on what you do, it can help alleviate disease problems. We did some work where I used to be in Maine with mustard for suppressing soil pathogens of some success. So there's potential for that versus storage for livestock. In terms of yield, the broadest data I ran across is a Sarah surveys over across the Midwest about 1,900 respondents. In 2013, we have about picked up on average a five bushel per acre yield benefit for corn and two for soybeans. 2012 was the drop year, just twice that. So there's some potential for yield benefits also on the short term. This graph's looking at soil microgoban mass. This is out of some work out of Ohio. Actually, a quick literature review. This is after corn raised for silage. And we've got two cover crops, the old rye blend, the annual rye grass, and a soil with no cover crop. And we're looking at microbial carbon. So this is a measurement of microbial biomass in the soil taken the following day. And we see we're going to cover crops at about three times as much microbial biomass in the soil the next spring. Those microbes are helping us out. Of course, they can be helping with suppressing diseases. They're also definitely helping out, including soils. This is just by looking at nitrates in groundwater. This has been further raised again, but kind of demonstrates the point. This is groundwater near the surface under a winter rye cover crop versus fallow. And the winter rye basically is acting as a living filter. So whether it's nitrogen or phosphorus around the nutrients, you're cover crops pulling them up out of the soil like kitchen from being lost, but it also concentrates them at the surface. So even if you're in an environment where you're not worried about leaching, it's still a benefit, I think, to concentrate on the nutrients at the surface where the next crop can take off. And this is some work looking at mycorrhizal infection rates. And this is a study out of Australia. They looked at wheat as the first crop. And then they came back with a number of different crops just to look at what I'm useful. They looked at a number of wheat, flax, canola, mustard as a fallow. As the first year and the second year they cropped the whole thing to wheat and looked at mycorrhizal infection. And basically, we're going to have wheat and flax as in previous crop. They're much higher mycorrhizal infection rates. And that's something that we usually don't think of as forming mycorrhizal associations still are better than others. So basically what this is saying is we can influence the mycorrhizal infection rate of our crop by the cover crop we raised before. And then the mycorrhizae again helped with nutrient capture. So those are all positive things. We're building soil microbial biomass that's helping us out with soil aggregation, soil structure. It can help us out with suppressing diseases. We can concentrate nutrients at the surface. And we can try and build a network, build the mycorrhizal network to benefit the next crop. Cover crops can do all those things for us. Cons of cover crops, we have potential to use limited soil moisture. And that's a lot depends on how the cover crops manage when it's killed. You have potential to sequester nitrogen, which if you're going into soybeans or legume crop that's not a bad thing. Tie the nitrogen up, the weeds can't get it, the soybeans don't need it. But if you're going into corn crop, then if you don't play your cards right, you can tie up some nitrogen that you couldn't use. There's a potential for it to act as a host or reservoir for disease problems. So, for example, harry vetch is a host for soybean cyst nematode. So if you have a soybean cyst nematode problem, and you use harry vetch as a cover crop in your rotation, why don't you just intensify the soybean cyst nematode potential for problems there anyway. In other words, the soybean cyst nematodes can grow and multiply on that harry vetch. So they'll be there all the more the next time you cycle back to soybeans. So you have to think about is your cover crop a host for a disease that's an issue for you. And if the cover crop overwinners, you'll have to be able to kill it the next year. We've got a little bit of trouble with red bull over with that, but it just takes time. And the establishment cost, of course, anything is a cost associated with it. Okay, so with that, I'm going to share some information from work we've done at the Southeast Research Farm, and I'm talking about some of my experiences there. This is some foreign yield data from this last year, and we had six different treatments. We have a low residue plant, a broad leaf plant. These two plants are primarily rassicas and legumes, radishes, turnips, peas, cowpeas, and more plastics. I have an harry vetch plant, which didn't overwinner very well this last year, so we didn't get much vetch out of it. Excuse me. Let's just talk to it. And then control with basically no cover crop. A high residue plant does 75% grasses. So it was mostly millet, sorghum, sudan grass, oats. And then I had a red clover. And we can see the trend here, the control and the high residue, mostly grass, cover crop, did the same. So the grass didn't do a lot for us, even just numerically. The cool season broadly, we picked up a trend for about a 6 to 7 bushel per acre yield done. The red clover hurt us a bit, but that's because we didn't have good control with our initial burn down. And we picked it up later with a van bill. But that's an example of a cover crop overwinners, and you have to be able to control it. So that's my fault. Okay. For those cover crops, we looked at five different levels of nitrogen for each of them. And there wasn't any significant difference. So I just bought this out for simplicity. This was the average response. And we picked out about 150 pounds per acre. I did just to show you, put in the controls are these red points. And the average of the broadleaf, cool season broadleafs are the green point. We kind of have this anomaly out here that I think lost us. But you can see the trend where cool season broadleafs do a little better. And kind of a trend where we might be, they might have saved us a little bit of nitrogen from this point of being up here. But we need to do this for a few more years to be counted. Okay. This is kind of a worst case scenario for Southeast farm anyway for drought. This is data from the 2012 season. We've got a number of different cover crops to look at. For 2012 was the driest year on record at the Southeast farm. And if we include the data from Senator Bill Leck records go back to 1898. So pretty severe drought stress. And you can see the average yield was 26, 27 bushels per acre. So we really got hammered. But even under this severe drought stress, our cover crop plots did better than the no cover crop plots. I'll note all these winter fields. We didn't have any that came over in the spring. So even in our environment with a very nasty drought, which I hope we never did this year again, we picked up 10 bushels per acre where we had cool season cover crops. Yeah. This would have been after winter week. So this would have been winter week 2011. Then these cover crops were seeded in August 2011. And then the whole thing was seeded to corn the next year. So yeah, the point is, at least in our environment, our experience in 2011 was not the tail end of 2011. There wasn't a lot of moisture there either. Even under dry situation where we had cover crops that were winter killed, we were the benefits that we gained in terms of snow catch, the benefits that we gained in terms of improved ability of the roots to exploit and explore resources in the soil. We didn't have terrain water that we could use. Okay, so we'll take a little bit of a look at some work we've done with nutrient and then we did some mesh bag studies. I was interested in seeing how different materials broke down and released nutrients. This is some work the previous graduates do to mine. Gregory Lane worked on. Jeff Hall helped with this too. So we deliberately took a mesh bag that had kind of large pores so little critters would crawl in and out of it. And we put about eight grams of either kale, alfalfa hay, grass hay, oat straw, or wood chips in them. And then we put those out in a no-till field. We zoom in here a little bit. You can see there's the mesh bag. So we set these out in the spring. And then came back every two weeks and took a look at the residue that was left and also took a look at how much nitrogen was in that residue. So this blue line is a kale. You can see that crashed really fast. This yellow line is alfalfa, grass hay, oat straw, hay chips. So we can see that the material with relatively low fiber content broke down very fast. And the kale really melted away. Within about six, seven weeks it was pretty much gone. You almost had to use your imagination to see it there. If we look at the nitrogen remaining, now we can see that the kale released the nitrogen right within four weeks, which is mostly all released. Alfalfa, a little slower going on for six weeks. The oats straw didn't release much and wood chips just were there. They were relatively inert. So what we can do is take this slope, express it as a negative long rhythm, and as a measure it's an indicator of how fast the material breaks down. So I did that. And I plotted that slope versus the NDF level. So this is neutral nitrogen fiber. So on this axis, zero means it's basically not breaking down. It's static. The more negative it is, the faster it breaks down. So as you go down on this y-axis, it's breaking down faster. So we got the kale broke down the fastest. Then alfalfa, hay, grass hay, oats straw, wood shading basically didn't break down almost zero of the composition. And we've got a linear function to end the up. Actually it just fits better than the problem that I keep it at. So basically, the reason I present this is I think this can be a tool that you might be able to use when you're thinking about managing residue. If you select the things that are high fiber content, they're going to attempt to persist, break down slower and last longer. If you're selecting for things with low fiber content, they'll tend to break down and melt quickly. So if you think of it, your radishes and your turnips don't have any fiber, they melt and they're gone very fast. If you think of your small grains, especially if they get in, if they start to joint and put on any stem growth, you've got a lot of fibers there and they're going to persist longer. So if you can think about the fiber content and the things that you're putting together, at least that's how I try to put a handle on where the residue is going to stick around or go away. Okay, this is some data from... a little bit older data from 2011. This is in the spring. You've got a probably cover crop blend control and we're looking at residue levels that we have less residue where we had a cover crop than the follow ground. And I think Wayne's observed this many times when you have a cover crop, you're keeping the soil a little warmer in the fall. You're holding it in moisture. Also, you're accumulating all those nutrients at the surface and as that winter kills, it all melts down on that straw. So now you've got a little warmer environment that you're going to break down faster and you're providing more nutrients for the microorganisms. So you actually end up with less residue depending on what you choose in the spring than you would if you didn't use a cover crop. So again, this is a cover crop management tool. If you want to get rid of residue, if you choose things that are low in fiber, if you want that residue there and you need it, then you can start to think about things that are high fiber. I think we'll just skip this slide, but it's basically looking at nitrogen release, showing this axis of nitrogen release for the following crop. This is a literature review idea. We've got legume average and radish, cereal side cereal. Basically what this means is the legumes and the radishes are releasing nitrogen to break them down. These low cereals are tying up nitrogen because they're adding more carbon to the system, more energy for the microorganisms, but they're not supplying as much nitrogen. So the microorganisms are competing with the next crop. Okay, so switch gears here a little bit and look at some work we've done with winter rye after corn and of course, soybeans. So this is corn and soybean system, and basically we're looking at putting in rye after the corn and killing it out ahead of the beans. So this is data from this last year on farm trial with Alpira and at Crooks and also at the Brewster Research Station, and we don't see any significant difference with them without the rye number crop. Al's been, we've been doing this at Al's place for I think four years now, and this is probably the third cycle on this particular field, and we're starting to see the trend for it to be statistically significant. Point one, one means we're about better than 80% sure this difference is really going to also support showing up. So we think maybe if we keep doing this, because we're always putting them in the same place, that the benefits will accrue and we'll see the yield benefit down the road. But to this point, we haven't seen this. This is another trial. We looked at broadcast seeding versus drilling. So the broadcast seeding went in around that stage or just before. And then the drill was after harvest. This is picture taken the following spring. And we pretty much have pretty decent stands as far as the cover crop goes. This is broadcast seeding. You don't see it fall, but it comes in the spring. And this is again data from 2013. We looked at four different forms, relative majorities, 75, 85, 95, 105. And each one we broadcast rye in and then after the corn came off we drilled in rye. And in our environment anyway, we have the broadcasting that works pretty well. This year we flew on some rye. Finally found somebody that would do that in our neighborhood. So we'll see how that works. The preliminary, it looks all right. So there's another side to this story. And that is sometimes when you go through the drill we lose some residue because of the wind blowing. So this is picture from house close. This is data in May. And you can see right here. Over here is where the drill went. Over there, didn't go. And we lost some trash here. And I went through and we did took samples in our plots at Beersford at the research farm and Sarah Burr did that. And we didn't get a statistically significant difference but numerically we lost about 30. For biomass, this is in June the following year with about 30% lower where we went through with the drill versus where we did it. So there's kind of a hidden cost. And again, that wasn't statistically significant so maybe we'll do it some more time otherwise. But it looks like we're losing 25, 30% of our residue just from the action of the drill going and picking up the stubble going in the wind. So that's a factor to consider and that's another reason really we're interested in flying it out of this point. So we'll see how that goes. I think it will work out right because even if we don't get a catch in the fall we get enough snow and rain and freezing is fine when the winter comes in the spring. Okay, this is the soybean yield. The problem is different rye treatments and we hate this crop and we didn't really see any difference in soybean yields and the broadcast and drill treatments were then ceded the first week of July and the control would have went in the third week of May. So in 2013 we didn't see an effect. However, in 2012 we had a different effect. We did the same thing at a rye biomass crop. We took it off for A and we only got five bushels per acre there because we went into that very severe drought and there wasn't enough moisture there for the soybeans to get established. Where we had no rye control we picked up, you know, the yield we weren't happy with but it was much better than the rye biomass. So that's 20 bushels per acre. Okay, if we look at a couple other places the same year but not quite as severe or strong stress. This is data from Crookes and Arlington so out here are the co-operator Crookes and Jess Holland and Arlington and these guys weren't as greedy as we were. So we took that rye off for hay which was a mistake of course, I'm the size of my butt, but it's part of this bureau. But these guys weren't as greedy about it. They sprayed the rye off, they sprayed the cover crops out in early May and they didn't see any yield loss. So what's that chance we can infer from that is if you're going into dry weather when you kill the rye or the winter cover crop it's going to be a big factor on whether it becomes a liability or not. And here we, the yield is essentially the same with the control on the winter rye. Jess had neither wheat rye, tree cali and control, no cover crops. And he tended to have a little better yield with the cover crop but it wasn't just this year. Jess really had a good year though so that wasn't a drop of the year there. Okay, this is just kind of some data to illustrate that. This isn't from our studies but it kind of shows the effect. This is out from Minnesota. We're looking at soil water on this axis and bait along here and the black line is a foul treatment and the red lines are soil moisture under a winter rye cover crop. And the solid lines of the top photosynol and cash onto the second floor. But the main point when they have two sites, Morris and St. Paul. But the main point is out here until we get to the, you know, middle of A there's not a lot of difference. We get out here as we progress further into May we get some separation as rye's using out moisture. And in our case we were greedy we let the rye grow, cut it for hay, hope for rain and didn't get it and we got hammered. Al and Jess were sensible. They sprayed it out early and they didn't see any yield loss. So in terms of thinking about cons if you've got a cover crop and it's over wintering and you want to use moisture that's great. If moisture's a concern you better kill it early. And this is some data from Pennsylvania and it kind of illustrates the same point we're running out of time here pretty soon. But basically they were looking at hairy vetch cover crop with different rates of nitrogen in form. In 2007 they had a good year they looked at killing the vetch in middle of May versus late May and it did as well as their well fertilized corncloth. Next year they later they let the vetch grow the worse the yield got and the corn following the late May killed vetch cover crop yielded more than the unfertilized control with no cover crop. And what happened here was they went into a spell of dry weather. So this is just another example of having a winter annual cover crop letting it go long and if you go into dry weather the outcome isn't good. Okay we did a little bit of work so looking at grazing and this is, we're grazing winter rise it's grazing again between corn and soybean crop and we looked at fall and spring graze only spring graze and ungraze and we're looking at soybean yields here now the fall grazing was pretty much continuous grazing the fields just fenced off and the cows are growing they were out there for a few or four weeks. The spring graze the plots were basically mob graze so the cattle were only on a given plot for one day and then they moved to the next one. So we didn't let them stay out there very long in the spring they were going from place to place every day. And basically we didn't see any negative impact on the soybean yield and the trend is for a little better yield toward that grazing. So it looks like the grazing didn't hurt as many helped us in this situation but again the spring grazing was pretty negative. I think with that I'm about half the time. Can you add five to two people? Oh I got two too! I thought I could go home for five. I guess so. I could tell some stories now. Well for some reason I have to my mind I need to be done at 145 so I guess I need to add one. Okay so let me see that here. Yeah. Okay so we picked up basically we didn't see any ill effect on grazing. Again this is a system with corn. We seeded winter rye after corn. The cows really didn't I mean the winter rye was pretty small in the fall so I don't think cows got much winter rye the two on the fall. They were more feeding towards cows. Then in the spring they were after the winter rye. So I think this could be a tool again as far as nutrient cycling if we're trying to increase nutrient cycling if we want to because we're in a wetter environment want to reduce resident levels that grazing could be a tool. Okay this is another trial we're looking at grazing and the forage. So in this particular trial we replaced the grain crop with the old pea forage mixture. Went through a trip raise that came back and receded behind it the sorghum to the anglars cowpea mixture and grazed that again and tried to get a second grazing. So basically went through it three times during the third time there wasn't a lot of growth and we only had two replications so the data has to be taken with a grain of salt. But basically looking in the field we didn't see any difference and grazing versus ungrazed we didn't see any significant effect of grazing on the corn yield. So we can at least say that grazing is not hurtless. I think if we put our cards right we didn't get it to help us but for sure we can say it's not hurtless. And this was kind of a nice little plot because we had about five acres that we took out of production but because we had that in the cycling through there then we were able to graze them later on from across the corn stock. So that five acres that we took out actually penciled out pretty good because of all the value we got from the forage and the rest of the system. Just a little bit of anecdotal information again there's only two graphs but this is those corn plots and looking down the road and I put my hat there right where the fence was and this is wild proso milk right in front. So where do you think the wild proso milk is? On the grazing or ungrazed side? It's on the ungrazed side. This side of it we gave the votes on and that side over there I'm putting my hat on that side, this side over here it got grazed. So this was ungrazed three times. This was ungrazed and we came through in the spring we used dual sharpened tree emergence and then we used glyphosate and vandal post-emergence but this wild foxtail milk came in after the glyphosate and vandal but there's something going on here where grazing is out helping us with controlling these annual weeds and this is I don't plan on just the end of the test day and night difference you could walk out there and you could just right down the line, right where the fence was and this is about 450 500 pounds per acre a week on this here so some points to consider and I feel like I'm preaching to the choir but I'm going to go ahead anyway Blands are better than single species corn yields are here's for in our experience we tend to do well with full season broadening plants so plants that are high in grass doesn't like them, corn tends to favor that when we go with plants that are high in grasses we don't see much either we get a low benefit or no benefit so we have a resident breakdown related to fiber and protein content so that's a point you can manage you can think about as you're selecting a cover crop when is this plan going to be high or low on fiber and you can get an idea how well it's going to persist and what's going to affect your resident levels for the next week to manage that with over-wintering cover crops there's potential to lose yield if the cover crops killed too late so as in our case we've been looking at rye as a biomass crop we decided to lay it off and see what we got and when that was fine that didn't hurt as of 2013 2012 killed it so if it looks like you're going into dry weather and moisture is a concern you want to get the cover crop knocked down early you can also lose some yield due to competition and nutrient sequestration we did plant some soybeans in the rye that was just about to head out about this fall and we planted it into a green this is another crop and sprayed it out again with a little bit of centaur sharpen and duel of life you can tell we don't want to have any less in just a week and we knocked the rye down but the soybeans didn't look quite as good through the year and we didn't see a significant difference but I think that we might have lost a couple of little breakers anyway letting that rye go too late definitely is not going to help you and it might tie out something ok and so far to this point in our experience we haven't seen any short term yield responses from rye as a cover crop I had raised anything I think those benefits should accrue over time I think if we keep going we'll see if benefits down the road but to this point having run it at that short term basis we're not seeing it yet ok next point is just the obvious one choose cover crops that won't be a hardware or be a reservoir for the next crop and just to increase your diversity in your system you want to try to select species that are not related to your grain crops if at all possible and for us that's not the reason I think the brassicas and cool season broadleaves are good because we don't raise peas we don't raise canola we don't raise cool season broadleaves of grain crops so when we have a brassica, pea, lentil mix those crops are all create a break in the cycle ok, use species selection and time to control cover crops to minimize costs so that's really the name of the game if you want to think about the cons use species selection and then killing it in a timely manner and we haven't seen any yield losses with well managed grazing and I guess I take on the cover crop deal it's a long term investment in soil quality depending on the situation and the year sometimes we picked up 10 bushels in acre and corn 6 or 7 bushels we picked up a trend this last year and outplaced a couple bushels on the beans but other times we haven't gotten anything but it's a long term investment in your soil and you're building capital for the future depending on whether you may or may not see a big return in the short term so with that I think that is my talk questions or comments other people have other experiences to be all better from we talk about minimizing or avoiding related species what extent are you following or no grass or certain species of grass in the mix we put some grasses in just to have some diversity so we'll run like 20% with old all together 20% of the mix and then 80% of it will be more of assay radishes through a few copies of one season so I don't exclude them all together milliton seems to have heard that we've worked with milliton that corn doesn't seem to mind that so I would say you probably want the majority of your blend 75% or more but it could be something else but on the other hand if you're in a situation where you want a residue there then you might play that differently and you might want some more species in there that are high in fiber content so in that case you might want more oats maybe barley already mentioned milliton black things that are high in fiber content if you want that fiber in here we don't want the residue in here we don't want the residue in here because we're generally 2F people but if you're in a dryer environment you might want that the things that would be really closely related to corn would be like sorghum so if you're going into corn I would avoid those but keep them really small part of it I'll answer your question I'm here live some thoughts on the soybeans next year on the seed bed in comparison with the control was there a better seed bed how did you prepare for seeding in well we didn't have money to do like soil quality analysis but when you looked at the fields and the spraying you had the riot the soil looked better it smelled better had better texture I'm just talking about visual assessment you just gave a shoveling and it seemed like it was a better form but we didn't see a yield we haven't seen we haven't seen anything but I think I just visited with some guys from Nebraska that have been doing this longer and they said it took them 5 or 6 cycles and now they pretty much always see a yield so I don't that's what we've seen the plots at Al's place are pretty big with 2,000 feet long it's a little bit longer so those are big plots we're not talking a little plot the plots of the research farm are small yeah the winter ride goes in after the corn comes out middle but in our experience anyway winter ride is really tough and you provide it in October and you can go out there in December and you can see only one or two percent emergence and the first time I visited that I heard about it was going to get and it's out there in April and there it is so it's tough I guess the main focus I remember right is close your eyes and plan when the corn comes out home with the plan on their plan that works raise and fall and then it's spring when it gets ready do you go along well we only did that one year and we didn't have we didn't get money and also the cattle were only in given area one day so it was man the spring basin was managed pretty tightly they got money we could pull them on and even if it wasn't money they went in one spot for more than a day there's that spot they're there today tomorrow they're there so they don't need to get a big chance and we only did it once so I don't want to say you don't have to pull it through but we did the one time we did it we didn't hurt them do you have any economics on that as spring raising we will I've got a master's student working on that for his thesis so I don't have that in hand but he's supposed to generate all that okay let's thank Dr. Sexton for coming today