 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 four local events were held in South Dakota in Sioux Falls, Watertown, Belfouche, and Mitchell. Everybody keeps asking me when I'm going to retire, you know, and that must mean they think I'm old. We actually did a No-Till at Redfield. We started managing Redfield in 83 and left there in 1990. Ray always likes to say that he ran, he opened Redfield farm and I closed it, that's not quite true. They have a farm there in the 50s, and you're not that old, Ray. But when I started at Redfield, there was 1,900 acres of soybeans in Springton, Brown County, Mline. And I almost didn't pass my PhD because I made the stupid statement. When they asked me what I was going to do at Redfield, I made the stupid statement of telling Larry Fine that I thought we could grow soybeans in the Dimmer Valley without irrigation. And Larry Fine, for you guys that are old enough to remember, was the irrigation research guy that spent his lifetime working on the Wally Project. And most of the young guys here don't even know the Wally Project, so we won't go into that. One of the things that we keep talking about is different kinds of tillage and hotel and whatever. An hotel is a tool that helps us control our ecosystem, and that's really what we do. We've got a lot of things, vertical tillage and all kinds of different tillage things. There's no commonality among these, they're all different. But there is commonality amongst tillage tools. All tillage tools destroy soil structure. All tillage tools decrease water infiltration. If you take a long-term hotel field that has a bit of aquifers and pull vertical tillage tools through it, you'll cut the infiltration rate in half. We got into no-till because we wanted to make water go on the soil under irrigation. And we wanted to maximize our water efficiency under irrigation. We took it to Garland because it's a much better idea under Garland than under irrigation. Under irrigation, if you don't live in Texas or someplace and you have enough money, you can actually pump more water if you waste some. The reason I say Texas, they overuse their waters and how they're being restricted. All tillage tools reduce organic matter. All tillage tools increase weeds. You saw all those things today. See, I'm supposed to wrap it up. It's 27,000 gallons of water with 1% organic matter and 6 inches of soil. This is a quarter of an inch. If we can increase organic matter by 4%, which is going to take a while, that is 1 inch in the top, 6 inches and 2 inches in the top foot. Think of what will find a place that hasn't been tilled. And see how much organic matter and then use these numbers. And then think about in the old days when Grandpa was farming it and he got a big rain or he got these big rains and that soil filled up, but it didn't get waterlogged. Now we take the organic matter out and we get these rains and we get waterlogged. So our response is not to go back and put organic matter in there like we should have. Our response is to put in drain time to get rid of the water. We have South Dakota. When Ruth and I drove down here today, we came from Chamberlain to Mitchell. I grew up in Platt. I spent a lot of time in this circle. Kind of like when the moose show up from Canada. You know, they're looking for something. When you're an adolescent male, you do a lot of traveling around. So I did that. Obviously it wasn't a success by going all the way to Canada to find a way. But you know, it gets dry here. We're doing a better job of managing water, but we're not in Iowa. And Iowa is starting to get in the same thing. Just think about how often they're too dry and then they're too wet and then they get flooding and then they're too dry and then they're too wet and then they get flooding. And we get flooding because the soils aren't holding the water like these. And sooner or later somebody's got to tell the truth. I know you guys do manure here. We can put manure on in no tilt. Compost can be, that's a composter. And young kids could make money running around farm to farm and doing this. Right? That's not a fancy thing. It can be injected with a lot of our low disturbance openers. You can put it in the air seeder and go out and put it on. It can be applied on the surface under a growing crop. Liquid can be applied on the surface under a growing crop. That's the way the Danish farmers do it. I've got some more Danish people coming here. They have to do that. It can be injected with a low disturbance opener. It can be applied on the surface. Legally in South Dakota for your own term. No tiller, but you lose a lot of the animals. And then putting cattle on the land is the best way to do it. Now, one of the big controversies this year was pheasants. Why don't we have any pheasants? Because we don't have anything habitat. It's that easy. Right? We need habitat. You need to have small grains and un-disturbed habitat in the spring. That's why Jackson Limited gave Dakota's research firm $20,000 long time ago. Because we allowed them to do... No tilling allowed them to take winter week way further north. Which really helps it up. And it was our help in them doing that. That is important. And ducks is also important to the pheasants. So they have un-disturbed habitat with lots of residue. So plant it into wheat stubble with something early in the spring. And that's one of the places where that stack of wheat stubble, for instance, does wonders. What do baby chicks eat? Pheasants. Insects. Thank you. So what happens if you go out and spray a fungicide and herbicide in an egg and insecticide and you spray your wheat all at the same time? Don't have any bugs. We don't have any habitat. And then our wheat stubble or wheat crown doesn't have any bugs if we do that. Well, what about bugs? Aphids are the real bad guy. Aphids are pregnant females that give birth to pregnant females. Women's live on steroids, right? So once they're there, aren't they... Aren't you just going to have no other option but to kill them? Because they're just going to keep having more and more babies. Well, not necessarily. There's a lot of things that impact them. Temperatures and natural enemies and whatever. One seven-spotted lady beetle female eats 115 soybean aphids in 24 hours. The male's 878 and the instar's the little baby's ate 105. So if you're going to go count your aphids, you better count your lady birds. You're friendly, okay? I've got more of those data, but we'll go on to... This is a fungi that affects aphids. There are actually hundreds of fungi that kill aphids. In fact, the number one thing that gets aphids dead is fungi. So if you go out and spray a bunch of fungi sites in your soybean spring just because it's going to make it look healthier and you put a little insecticide in it too, you're going to kill your friendlies and you're going to kill your fungi. If I leave this alone, it costs an 84% infection and an outbreak of soybean aphids in 2003 after which the aphid population crashed. It overused the fungi sites cause its insect outbreaks. Yeah, okay? We take out the beneficial fungi the insects will take off and this is a documented case in potatoes. One of the things we do with our cover crop is we try to have some that flower to attract predators in the fall. I had one of my farmers came over and we had a bunch of insects in this mighty mustard. He said, don't you think you should spray this? I said, what for? He said, we've got to spray these bugs. They said, no, they're feeding my predators. I'm not going to spray these bugs. They're feeding me any predators. I want my predators here when my insects, the bad insects show up the next spring. Over reliance on herbicides leads to resistant weed. Randy Anderson did a really good job. They talked about the weed thing. So I'm not going to spend very much time on that. But if we're using only herbicides, if you're spraying around up on a given weed at the same time every year cause you're doing rounder spreading corn, rounder spreading soybean, there's really no surprise that you're going to get resistant weeds. If you get to Farm Journal, read that little article I wrote about Nolan Ryan. Nolan Ryan was a good pitcher because he did more than a fastball. All he did was a fastball, everybody was hitting right out of the park, the same way with your herbicide. If you use your factors too frequently, they may increase disease issues. What's the big disease issue in corn right now? Cost as well. Cost as well, what is cost as well? Bacteria. The bacteria. When did we use to get this guy? This guy's good. We're going to give him PhD here. He gets Nolan, right? When did we use to get cost as well? Hail storms, wind storms, dust storms, something that damaged the waxy leaf on the corn. When did we use to get bacteria like wheat? When we had something that damaged the waxy leaf on the wheat. Same way with bacterial diseases on soybean. What are we doing now to damage the waxy leaf on the plant? We're using surfactants. What's the number one thing that makes the dealer the most money? Surfactants, insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides. Surfactants are the most market. Fungicides, herbicides, and insecticides cause volatile damage. They are a disturbance, just like killage or anything else. We're trying to use chloride to take care of some of the tan spotting things. And I think gray things, it's important in corn as well, right? So to have our chloride levels up to keep our disease levels down. High disturbance techniques increase wheat pressure. Andy talked about that. They cause killage erosion. And yeah, Anthony talked about that. Okay, so I don't have to. Sanitation, rotation, and competition are primary methods of pest control. Herbicides are only part of sanitation. Keep weeds from going to seed. They're only part of competition. They keep that weed down until I can get a good crop canopy. It's all I need to use herbicides for. I don't have to kill something. I just have to knock it down until my clients, my beneficials, gets ahead. Pesticides are only part of sanitation. They're only part of rotation and competition. Herbicides replacement is really important to give my crops a head start. Ecosystems that leak nutrients. If I put in a drain tile, and it takes my lime and my gypsum, so that's what's in the saline seat, right? Aerial array here. Aeriality thing. If that takes them to the ocean, then I turn my area into a desert. People want us to be organic, but if we're going to export nutrients, a one big unit train of soybeans carries a million pounds of phosphorus. If we're going to export our nutrients, we have to put it back on. We export them if we had to go out in drain tile. We export them if we had to go down where we can't recover them. We export them if we sell them and don't replace them. Sailing seats are simple. You don't have your nutrient water cycling right. What you need to do is cycle your nutrients in water. Now, nutrient placement is part of cycling. In that, I put it where my clients most likely get it instead of where it can go away. I'm a farmer. I take sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide and turn them into products we can sell. That's it. Who said that first this morning? Ray did. These guys are really good, right? Because you're eating sunlight. Concentrate on having your soil moist during the dry part of the year. Think about that. You know, we're so worried about having the dry so I can be the first guy to have them planted. I've got a kiddie corn across the road from me that beats up this little 40 acre patch and gets it planted. Got all this fertilizer on it and the whites just start bringing it pretty as field day into June. Irrigated, gravely irrigated corn. Everybody goes and comes in and they look at my corn where it's got the stubble behind it. It doesn't look as big. It's actually just as big but it doesn't look as big. They go, that guy's corn over there is better than yours. And I've begun now to just say, oh, you harvest corn in June and look very confused and walk away. But we want to dry during the wet part of the year. That's what everybody wants. Concentrate on having it wet during the dry part of the year. Concentrate on having the soil cool during the hot part of the year because roots don't like hot soil and they don't function. These microbes don't function well. They're in dry soils or hot soils. If you study Hans Hieny, right, right, remember Hans Hieny? I don't remember him. I'm not that old. Really? Factors with soil formation, 1937, Paul Carson studied with Hans Hieny. Paul Carson was our major professor. As you get cooler environments, your organic matter goes up. As you get warmer environments, remember this stuff he showed from Texas, where the ground of that land is just white because they have hot soils and they kill the hell out of it in Texas. They turn to quite. We're going to build organic matter. The more you keep it cool, the faster you're going to build your organic matter. The more we try to heat it up and the more we try to heat it up. So if we're going to heat anything, we're only going to have that little tiny patch. Covered forage crops are just one tool. It gives us a chance to provide an increase in diversity and intensity where we can't do it otherwise. You can grow crops and get diversity and not ever do a cover crop climb. So don't get too excited about cover crops. They're the only thing. Remember that if you can build soil structure, then you can start planting earlier. You get stranded in the back 40 in the rain and you drive home across the pasture to the pile of field. You guys seem to use this for 20 years. There's a whole lot of that hotel where you just can't get on in the spring. We drive around out in the pasture. I'm worried about my cows out on my ground and they're going to pack it. If you put them out in the pasture, they're okay. The difference is you have soil structure in the pasture, right? You have an environment, tall grass, prairie, or wetter. I'll be east of here. You should have something growing at all times. We have to figure out how to do that yet and get these things started and something we need to do with a lot of research to do on this. But there's no money for doing this research because there's no grants available to do this research to speak up because there's no way it's going to make tons of money on it. Other than you. That's part of it. Inside of you, it's semi-arid areas right here and where we use them when we have the opportunity. We'll do lots of cover cropping on our dry-landed pier for obvious reasons, unless we're going to do some kind of a 4-H thing. So 10 things. You know, anybody that always has 10 things. Decide what you want to do before trying to choose a cover crop or a 4-H crop or whatever. Everybody goes, oh, my neighbor's doing a cover crop. I better do that. Radish. Right? Odette Menard the other day at the Indian Conference in Kansas that she participated with Ray and I doing. Just raised all kinds. She's from Quebec. She's equipped by Qua. She's a French-speaking Canadian. She just raised all kinds of hell with radishes. She said, if you want to take care of compaction, you need little groups, not great big groups. Notice with pictures you saw other radishes. Things sticking up by the ground. We went down there, hit that hard spot, and went, oh, go this way. Right? And it's not going to stay open. It's too big. You want a bunch of little tiny roots that go through there and stabilize that soil and hold it from getting together. You want lots of little tiny roots. And I do brassica, but I do dwarf as a travesty. They have a thing about like this and fine things. Think of a cover crop with just another component, your rotation using a mixture of cover crops which we do a lot of adds a lot more diversity and kind of each of them fills a ditch and one of the things we do in this fall thing is we'll have oats and hay mellow. And the hay mellow gets whacked by the frost and the oats starts coming through. That's an example. Cowpeas and peas and chickling batch and lentils and the cowpeas dies when it gets to be about 37 degrees. And they just go south, right? And then the next one comes on. That's the way the native furry works. Great conditions beneficial. The next crop is the most important thing. Okay? What you're there for. Water nutrient management. That's what a lot of guys mentioned. Using this excess water, you do have excess water if you try to wait until July because that's when your corn is going to start using water. How much water does your soil hold? Use your web soil survey. Find out. The best ones are 10 inches. Most of them are 8 inches. Well, you get a lot more than 8 inches between when you harvest wheat and when you plant corn. Okay? So instead of wasting it, let's use it for something beneficial. Understand your rainfall patterns. Use your web soil survey, they must be inexpensive. Not necessarily cheap but inexpensive relative to their potential impact. And one of the things we do is look in the shed. Whatever seed we got left over, that makes a good start. Okay? Small seeds grow better on the surface. If you're going to search for broadcast, larger seeds usually merge better through a matter of residue. And that's one of the things against a matter of residue, the larger seeds do that. If you're going to put small seeds and you've got a matter of residue, put some large seeds with them to show them the way. And that actually works. Grand boys used to put oats with alfalfa. And every while he did that because it shaded the alfalfa or did something, right? No, I guess it helped the damn alfalfa get out of the ground. That's really what I think most of the oats did. If you were a hero or something, you know, to try to get your cover crop to grow is going to make the wheat trouble. Going to do what Randy Anderson said. Vertical tillage to do the same thing. It just makes the wheat really mad. They all start growing. Okay? One important goal is to use the cover crop to balance the diet of the soil organisms. And that's really all you have to think about. Just pretend that they're little tiny cows. And you're just going to balance the diet. So if you've got a big corn wheat crop thing and you want to turn that into organic matter, you've got to add some nitrogen to it. So then you put a nitrogen cover crop in there. But if you're not going to feed 50-50 to a cop, you're going to have about 70-80% carbohydrate and some protein. So a lot of guys get way too carried away on the broadleaves and they burn up. If you put too many broadleaves and you burn up organic matter and not build organic matter. Organic matter is very high in carbon. Okay? Most of the cover crop guys who put it in don't have enough carbon in it. Still a bit of gas work. Okay? Should be no use. You need to use ground-agent components to seed a cover crop. We should be able to use something like Clay Seapolts. Just go blast them out there. And Google One-Straw Revolution. And there's a guy in Japan that's doing that. They have these little balls of clay, peat and seed, whatever, and they just throw them out there and then they grow. Okay? Using a perennial sequence or perennial cover crop will be necessary here. If we try to do only annual cropping, one of the reasons we've got so many saline seeds, we've got too many annual crops. They don't have root systems like the perennial. Rambo used to come along very so often he'd put in grass and alfalfa and these kind of things and he'd hit the resets a lot and he'd build his organic matter. He'd get rid of the weeds, right? He'd suck up a bunch of this nutrient that had gotten beyond the depth that you can get with annual crops. He'd bring that back to the surface and how many guys here have pH's that are going down? Most of you. It's because you're leaking lime and stuff and you're not cycling it back to the surface. If you put that into perennial for three years that pH would jump right back up again. If you go down and get that lime I noticed in Charlie picture he had a bunch of three lines that picture his hole, right? Just got to get that back to the surface. The lime's here. Now the guys who are putting in the drain tile want to sell you lime and gypsum. First they give you the drain tile to get rid of your lime and gypsum and then they're going to sell you something to replace it. They have a business point. I mean I really admire the business savvy of some of these guys. So they help you. The perennials help you with your nutrient cycle with your rotational flexibility and building organic medicine. Do all these things. Ship tail still has some proponent, right? Is it? If you don't want corn beans it's not mine, right? Is it a fertilizer response or a closing wheel response? And Anthony talked about the closing wheel thing. That's a lot of the reasons the guys started to ship tail. It's going to be a good stand because they had traffic closing weeks. What if you don't get it down and you don't have your thing set up to do fertilizer? I took this picture just west of Mitchell several years ago and I love this one You know, he's got this thing here. This is a strip tail and he's going to try and talk about trying to follow their stuff because RTK wasn't right. This guy got auto-steer. Auto-steer better than that. See that? If you love to cultivate you love strip tail. We get strip tail in the 80s. God, we have all these problems with it. More weeds is the same as what Randy said. Look how many more weeds you're going to have. And I said that to Monsanto, I said not a problem because we got around the pretty corn. Okay, well now it's a problem, right? So, okay, now. And if they do it right strip tail here may be a little bit more than no tail but what they're doing is they're doing a different fertility treatment. They were putting extra phosphorus on the strip tail. Okay, so they're putting a bunch of plastics down plus a papa and I said, okay, let's do it the same or even here they didn't make any money on it and if they did it the same you have to compare this one to this one. These are the same. No tail one. Okay, the other one's a fertility difference, see? So, let's do it all at one time that way it's done. We've done this for years I've never not done this actually since probably the 80s where we put our fertility on when we plant. We cut the residue at the front move the residue with the little residue manager plant corn and then put a little bit of phosphorus with the seed but this cutter here helps us get through residue without doing much disturbance. Very low disturbance saying the fertilizer's right next door we don't have any weeds here that can grow because they're covered with residue remember Andy Anderson stuff and then there we have the fertility right next to the row so it gets off to a fast start and doesn't have a chance. I have this one here because I was making fun of Mike Arnoldy the other day and I just left him and Mike Arnoldy from Canada back a lot of people have trouble with stocks jumping up and grabbing their gatherings and stuff, right? Well, the industry wants you to get these topping corn hips they're, I don't know, a hundred something thousand dollars a piece Mike put this bar on here this is a piece of rebar this kind of leans in his direction so he doesn't have to worry about it so I was making fun of him the other day now what I did is I rearranged the pointer isn't all so I rearranged this but the only ones are on top so you can just read down, right? These are fertilizer studies we've done forever looking at placement urea in the side starter to the side pop up with the seed, that's what those numbers are and just look every time you'll see that treatment where we're doing all three of those is pretty much on top but for sure that urea or that nitrogen to the side is always up there near the top and we have the 28% on top of the treatment surface that's what a lot of guys do and maybe a little bit of pop up that's at the bottom now it's not a big deal it's only 11 bushels right? a little more now 6 and 7, 13 bushels and that used to be a big deal on the worst $7 corn but now it's $4 corn not a big deal 13 times 4, right? it's only 50 bucks I'm joking right? slow people slow people urea with the seed there you're going to read the size at the top now 215 versus 215 bushels here there's not much bushels the difference is only 3 okay? but it's never less okay? they figured that out the last part of the journal they came on and said there's a response to start fertilizers so the people have known me for 20 years they're going, yeah we knew that on time ago in the corn valley where they do conventional till they only get one response but they get 8 out of 11 this is old days we've known that for a long time one of the problems with the motel is people try to motel without fertilizer placement so where do we want to put the fertilizer? under the seed everybody says so here's the corn see? see? and that little radical does not take up any nutrients so seed is a dominant p-source through v1 which is when that first leaf opened up first true leaf no fertilizer nutrients are needed but if you get too much in the trench it hurts you put a little bit in there it's fine and then once you get past v1 and I think it perceives light and puts those roots up right underneath the soil surface those are the roots that do defeating the fertilizer to be is right where that blue line is right here 2 inches, 3 inches to the side and at the same depth as the seed in motel not 2 inches below 2 inches below in conventional till because it's two named drives for root to grow in the surface okay? so this is our little resident manager doesn't have to be very aggressive just like that in case you're a slow learner sleeping through that I want to do script till think of the weeds think what else happened this was from Aberdeen, Big Rain and now what do you do? I know what you do you get out of your motel desk hahahaha it makes a lot more sense I just don't understand why we're doing all this stuff this is our closing system here that we use it's got a vertical wheel instead of the Keaton the Keatons are okay but I don't like them much we've got a vertical wheel that thinks it's better but notice how close these are together at the back now I want to show you some experiments we did with where we placed the phosphorus okay? the Olsen P on this field is less than 5 parts per million think about how low that is okay? very low so we went and we put on all of these we put 60 pounds in some place put the starter P some places to the side in that side band and then we had to pop up and then here we had no pop up deal with those two to the side and then here we put the M over the row in between those two blades at the end so it was concentrated right over the row but on the surface almost a universal difference and then here we put it in the middle just the same with all those other ones get it in the ground get it in proximity now let's look at if it's an M thing or a P thing in this case we put all the nitrogen in the side band so those are all the same and then we put starter P in the side band or not so the first one we had or the pop up so the first one we had no starter P a little bit of pop up 212 starter starter P and pop up 206 right starter P no pop up 206 no pop up 204 5 parts really what's happening how can that be then what Mike said Mike Layman is talking about all these hyphae out there that we have now this was 20 some years ago they're out there helping us get phosphorus from the soil there's actually several hundred pounds of total phosphorus there what the Olsen test is telling us is that it's not in this real soluble form but we have kind of a phosphorus and just helps me get that now if I went out in that field and did tillage and killed the mycorrhizae and then did this test I get a huge response to phosphorus and what Ray is doing he can't assume when he gives a recommendation he can't assume that the guy is a long-term hotelor good mycorrhizae isn't too and their mycorrhizae are fungi so if I overuse fungi side they kill mycorrhizae too but I'm not doing that interesting data let's start planting corn into corn but that's how you do that we do have a lot of sphere keep the residue in place from last year's crop until this crop this year's crop is established we put our fertilizer in proximity to sea or we put it on the surface after crop canopy we put it on before then it encourages weeds the three key factors are available nutrient moisture roots what I have is very very big root system so if I have bigger root systems because I do better rotations I don't need as much available nutrient and that's really what it is and that's not easy to do cook and base that when we grow the soil highly infested with root pathogens going to lack of rotation we'll see response to the phosphorus fertilizer even when high concentrations are available so you can have lots of phosphorus there and have a phosphorus deficiency if you've got a crappy root and you often see that you'll rich still get gage when the guy's got too close to where their cutaway gets they get potassium deficiencies because they cut off the roots ok? say we might be affected in the amount of fertilized irrigation water in healthy roots biological control of the soil the residue that happened has to lead to conflict we're not growing wheat more frequently in every second or third year I can put corn there so these guys are going to go corn on corn on corn and I've got a field of corn we've done since 1990 it's not as easy as when I rotate ok? crop rotation allows time for these things to go away naturally so we choose a sustainable economic approach that takes advantage of nature's system adequate diversity at least three crop types long intervals two to four years and go on my website we've got a really nice paper on crop rotation there ok? just looking at what Randy Anderson was saying I'm not going to do any more than this but if you've got resistant weeds like amaranthus or whatever if you do a continuous round up thing corn bean every other year at the same time you get 10 million really fast if you do real diverse rotations you get no problem let's just look at a little bit data corn soybean rotation where we use cover crops we get 7.3 bushelinger on average over where no cover crop is used in corn soybean rotation under irrigation here in 2013 this year soybean with cover crop yielded 62.9 we would have expected around 55.6 we don't do any without cover crop anymore every bed of our corn ground gets a cover crop of winter or cereal rye or stuff like that planted after we harvest the corn we don't care if it comes up or not we get that so 62.9 if I do that the first rotation in corn corn soybean week soybean the first year soybean this year we're 76.3 the second year soybeans we're 81.2 that's a huge difference in soybean yield people say I can't make money on soybean anymore here they don't compete with corn not if you're doing them every other year that's too often to do soybean we just started a new rotation which is corn corn soybean week taking the second soybean out okay so cover crop decreased soybean yield by 7.3 but that diverse rotation increased soybean yield by 15.9 on average continuous corn 203 that's a long term average 203 bushels of acre corn soybean 217 and our more diverse rotation average by 235 so if I could and on my whole farm I'm going to continue this corn I get on 5,000 acres I get a million bushels of corn and after only 18 town buying 200 grain dryers right? I mean think about that how hard that it would be to harvest 5,000 acres of continuous corn corn soybean I get death and then corn corn soybean week soybean I get that if I get more realistic I can say 2,000 acres total total money is 1.5 9.5 9.9 million for continuous corn this is what you'd expect if I do this more diverse rotation it's more 1.7 4,000,000 if I put in that wheat and whatever in there still in the same 2,000 acres it's cheaper to grow this is just gross income and this is way cheaper to grow and then if I did that corn corn soybean week wanted to be 1.66 if I get more realistic I can say if I'm going to continue corn 2,000 acres about yet maybe I can do 3 or 4,000 acres if I do this other one I might be able to do 5,000 that's really one of the magic things there the big thing about what we're trying to do is build soil structure this is the structure I took in Argentina in 1996 and it was they did 7 years of pasture 7 years of cropping and their cropping was diverse with cover crop so you see a black oak cover crop on the far side there and then oak cover crop on this side and I have my friend Ron Elverson who I brought my beer today hold some soil so I can take a picture of it everybody talks soil health define what it takes to be healthy a healthy soil I like to challenge people to define a handsome man or a beautiful woman right down to definition you can't do it it's not possible but we all know one when we see one this is one okay that's a healthy soil and then the Argentine government outlawed this export of beef so everybody quick growing cattle took out their pastures cropping and mostly doing savings and savings and savings because the roads won't really allow them to export corn too many bushels and too bad a road okay I went back to that same field in 19 or 2000 and set 10 years later there's the same soil absolutely insane and that's what we've done I find ladies soil all over and corn soybean is just not enough diversity but it's not enough carbon 80 per with 80% grasses so we got to somehow get our carbon up because we're just mining the organic matter out of our soil so we put in high carbon cover crops this would be that old hay mill thing there's old spot ready to come up from underneath in there he's headed you can see on the left that's a check here's one that we did with the Buffett project with forgy from the forgy this is the oak v mixture that they swathed and harvested forks for bales they put the bales over the edges field and they put in hay millets and pearl millets that kind of stuff and they harvested that for forage you can see they swathed it for forage and then they planted between the swath with that was my idea it worked so good it was really neat they planted between the swath swath with their little 750 drill right and then they were supposed to put the oak vail back out use them in a string to the cow so they could do real intensive swath raising but we didn't get that part of it done I think it's that you, is that you? yes it is, they're traagers I didn't see them earlier he's here, he's one of the next generation and anyway they're swath grazed that's, you see how the cows are eating it and they eat it on down to the point where now they're starting to eat the stuff between okay when soil water storage capacity is low which we've done now to our soils much of the rain that falls during extended periods of precipitation is lost in contrast to high water storage capacity in soil combined with the effect you've had for rain with macro pores and all this kind of stuff and somal over the fall, winter and spring can support crops that extend the record as easy as it gets that's within all types of groups the matter increases from 1 to 3% to available water capacity approximately doubled when organic matter comes in it increases 4% it then accounted for more than 60% of the available water rolling past it okay some of the things you hear man this is that cronin that straight corn, they're going to cut this for silage and this is corn with soybeans planted in between both without nitrogen they're right to allow the corn to get nitrogen from the soybean the way it works in the herd okay here's our alfalfa that we in our continuous corn out under irrigation we have an understory of alfalfa and that's my perennial cover crop the other one that you'll see in Australia is switchgrass used as a summer grazer and then they grow over the wintertime, broken old and weak and whatever during their rainy winter period then when that's hard they let the grass come back and use it as a grazer look up there you see the root system on the prairie we're not even close to doing that these are my three daughters it's several years ago one of the rice and alfalfa's went to graduate college one of the less than junior they just got paid why do we still have people who don't use no-tail rotations or have livestock what's the problem? we've got the technology to do this we know how to do it some political or whatever could it be that the total subsidy for crop insurance in 2013 was $14 billion federal government subsidy was $14 billion for crop insurance we'll have the small part of the farm bill the big part is stamp well, there's 14 million people who get food stamps they get $80 billion a year at $1,700 per person I don't think I'd want to try to feed myself from $1,700 a year crop insurance was $1.2 million in the crop insurance policy to a subsidy $14 billion so each of those policies averaged to $1,700 for the subsidy if Sunset Crop Insurance is good then Sunset Health Insurance must be good also, right? you can't have it both ways Jack and Charlie's mom is a very good friend of mine and we and we're having this discussion and they put this to Jan one day and they don't Sunset Crop Insurance and they go yes they do and they say no they don't so I asked that today if you haven't had that discussion if you haven't had that discussion with you so you must believe me the total $14 billion for Sunset Crop Insurance the total federal budget for agriculture research last year was $2.6 billion $1.6 billion this month just think about it $1.3 billion of that were short-term grants the NIFA from the federal government to the states and their one or two year grant USDA the guy like Mike Layman and the direct grants to the states that used to be the way they supported research or the other $1.3 so the only long-term research is that little part of that $1.3 that comes out to the state so is an answer to give the processor something or part of it to the states to the direct grant let them work on research and developing these sustainable systems alternative energy and switch would we make that trade-off say well if you're going to spend that money let's do this instead but you've got to ask for that spend some of that money educating the public what the good growers are doing so you don't have people asking ready for organic farming not understanding what's going on ecosystems are connected we can't just ignore what's happening in China and the rest of the world in terms of pollution because it includes them as polluting us so take the E out of ET and take the T out of camp let mother nature do it thank you Dwayne I realize you're out by pier but you know the problem we run into is we've got some soils that are heavy and wet and maybe if you're in a no-kill system long enough but I mean we get those big rains in the spring and without some sort of airing it out you lose a couple of weeks of planning time or delay it that much sometimes it's a trade-off to run some sort of minimum tillage I don't know you got an answer for that well you've got to remember I started this at Redfield on lacustrine soils and lacustrine soils are old glacial lake bottom let's start with that so I'm very familiar with what you're talking about and I grew up in the flat and the big thing is soil structure so if you're really challenging you've got some challenging soils the first thing you've got to do is probably throw them in perennials for a couple of years and they come out of that I mean the guys that had the CRP have a perfect chance to do that but you've got to be building soil structure so what you do is we start with a couple of years a week and really try to build soil structures spring, week, winter week then you're planting you're planting in the fall the second year and then you get the cover crop in after that and that really gets you kind of rolling that does make sense because I mean I had some CRP that came out it was a wet year and no tilled into it and like say you could if you had good flotation of the tractor you could drive through standing water and it turned out pretty decent you notice the size of the tires on that tractor very 800 ventures very big fat tires low pressure tires that's part of the answer but you know when we moved here we had some really degraded soil terrible and I actually had for the first year or two we had issues with dropping through and whatever even there because I was going well I'm out of here now we have the same problem there in fact we probably have more problems because we have to be more conservative in terms of a rotation we can't use all over we can't push the cover crops as hard because we may not get that rain in the spring you guys are more likely to get makes sense because like say that would be a good answer to it because when you're out there and you plug up a plan it's pretty easy to get that vertical tilt but we're asking the wrong question I had that real brief slide in there that says we shouldn't need a ground engaging tool to plant a crop right now buzz it through place heat wall here's the other one take something that looks like this this is an alti we can have seed stakes that look like this and then all you have to do is go across to the hovercraft and shoot them in the ground that'd probably be pretty cheap we haven't really wrapped our mind around we don't want to disturb the soil how are we going to do this see we haven't quite given up that tillage thing what we're really doing is we're tilling that little zone we haven't quite given up on the fact that we really shouldn't be doing any of that whether nature has never done tillage a big red cedar when the guy from the PD guy from case IH flew to South Dakota to meet with me one March day and said what's the best no-till cedar ever made meaning what one can we buy and paint a red called a case right and I said well the buffalo he said oh the one out in Nebraska I said no the brown one was horn hahahaha it's seen as a prairie for millennia before we got here right and they will do it when we leave what else prior to corn we were saying we need more carbon and you can get more carbon by let it be more mature you can get more carbon by using something like plaques which is the thing that's in almost all of our great number of our rotation because it's stiff and high carbon it is a broadly you can think back what Mike Lehmann said Mike Lehmann how to keep giving all these plugs that get out of the room that's not going to give me money oats oats in front of remember how good oats look in front of corn so if you're coming in and you're going to put a bunch of broadleaf in there you have oats with your broadleaf remember what I showed with the corn taking the nitrogen from the legumes so you put a legume and a non-legume together and then that that non-legume makes the legume work harder and gets more nitrogen into this form and Ray would tell you that it takes carbon and nitrogen to make organic matter so just having the radish and stuff out there they don't have enough carbon and that stuff just burns out and so you're not really making more organic matter you're burning off organic matter so some oats in there give you a nice fiber fruit system so if you would drive by Dakota Lakes today and look at field 27 it had a mixture of cow peas peas, lentils dwarf fessy trade seed flax oats and annual rye grass and that was planted into wheat stubble going to corn so it had volunteer wheat so it's got a lot of these high carbon things in there oats to corn now you didn't hear me say mill it you didn't hear me say mill it any kind of mill because that's the one that don't take it from but it's all trade on but we want to build that's a field that's very badly it's been corn soybean for twenty some years and it's been degraded but that was part of what we were trying to prove so now we're going to jump start really crank it up do you have one more question for Dwayne and how do you do your chili I don't I told somebody I'd give you an M with an H with a steel seat and go with an M plow when you want to and go radio right but you know one of the things that and I'll do this and I quit my grandfather who's homestead in Brill County when he planted his oats he had sweet clover with and then when he ran the binder behind the horses he sat on the platform and spread more plastics or some kind of rape seed from the seat and then when they had the shocks built they turned the sheep out because the sheep would not bother the shocks if they had to feed and then when they got the shocks thrashed then they turned the cows out same thing we're doing now you know I mean it's really not that dissimilar and I think that one with clover in the lead is one we really need to drop hard that's one of the things that's overseen that gets by this but how do we get something started we got to do some research on that but there just isn't there isn't the impetus to do that but there's a lot of research that could really make this work better