 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. This event was held in Mitchell. And thank you for the introduction, and it always embraces me when you read all those things. I was, and I watched the Dakota Lake drain, I guess it would be, after the glaciers, but Dan is down to Salina and I talked about taking deep soil samples and I teased him a little bit and said, you can't take anything deeper than two feet in South Dakota because he hit rocks. Then I realized you're out there in that good soil where Beck is farming, and there's some good soils in South Dakota, but it was kind of funny. Then Jerry mentioned that, what, 100 tons of soil loss? Do you know that John Pesic was the Department Chair of Soil Science at Iowa State in, when I was at South Dakota State, about 1970, we met down at Sioux City, four states together. And John Pesic made the comment that we can lose 100 tons of soil and put 100 pounds of nitrogen on and we can grow 100 bushel corn. That's how we felt about erosion at that time. Just unbelievable what we do, and you understand that part, that's Don Robkowski's slide and I like to use that because that's what we're doing is burning up organic matter. And so in my home county, which is south of Lincoln, Sling County, second county north of the Kansas border, 1879, and some guy accused me of being there, but I read this in a book. In Sling County, a county 24 miles by 24 miles, in 1879, had 57,000 acres of corn growing 40 bushel corn. What kind of corn was growing in the 1870s? Open pollinated. And so then in 1889, it was 48 bushel. Can you imagine picking all that corn by hand, 134,000 acres, and that intrigues me too of thinking about that. And so the next highest yield, these are an old soil survey, so I had to yield every tenth a year. And so 29 was the next highest yield of 33 bushel. So things are starting to deteriorate. And so I graduated high school in 1955, 56, and so we're organic farmers. And we cultivated corn four times to mineralize organic matter, and we got rid of organic matter. And so we're really in bad shape, and then I went to college and learned that you could put fertilizer on and start growing crops. And so this soil health thing that we're talking about, what Jerry talked about in that whole thing and where I'm coming from is on the nutrient side, and then on slide he had there in that long-term no-till, more than 20 years that Juca saw put in there, I can use less fertilizer. Now, it doesn't make any sense to me if you're going to be growing better yields and as Beck said, hauling this stuff off and sending it to China, how can you use less and keep the soil in good condition for 100 years or 500 years from now? So we've got to take care of that resource now, and we start with this, and you showed me your app from IP&I, and I stepped my yield goal to 240, so it doesn't quite match what you had. But in IP&I, every bushel corn we take off the land, we're taking off three quarters of a pound of nitrogen, taking off 3,500 or a third of a pound of phosphate, a quarter of a pound of potash, and then 800 to a pound of sulfur and some zinc. But all the other nutrients are there also, and it got all the crops, it got different crops you can do those things for, but just think about that. And we harvested corn from 1870s to 1950s, that's about 80 years, never put anything on except the manure that we fed our cows, when they were milking cows and then hauled that back on the farm, grew some sweet clover, grew some alfalfa, moving the nutrients off all the time and not putting on anything because we sold a lot of the grain at that time. And the trace elements are there also, and so you got, now it's 140 years of farming and we haven't, sometimes we haven't put any of these nutrients on. There's a soil going to run out, and so if we're going to have soil health and we're going to build all this stuff up and do all these grandiose things, I think the fertility is a really important part of that. How are we going to keep these soils going? And then I had a, I spoke yesterday in Carney at a CCA meeting and he said, how are we going to keep, what are we going to do when new old guys are gone and how are we going to get the young people involved in this? And you know, you think about that a little bit and I, my wife was up there a while ago and I said, are you up there? I don't think she's there. She went, oh, there she is, there she is, done chopping already. So, well we had Dr. Nick Ward is working for us in our laboratory, Ward Laboratories in Carney. Nick got his Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln last August and he's got two degrees from K-State, he's a grandson, we've got Chelsea McCullough-Wetz that is getting a two-year agribusiness degree from Community College at Hastings, a granddaughter, and her brother is majoring in agronomy and ag business at UNL and I think what's hope is that he can come work for grandpa also. So that's how we're transitioning our business over and hopefully you guys are doing the same kind of thing. We've got to get these young people involved and I'm going to stay mentoring and try to teach them as fast as I can of answering farmer questions and they can run the business and those kind of things. But these other things kind of really, you think about, you know, most of us think about what are we going to do this year and right now it's really tough thinking about how are you going to make any money this year. But think about how are you going to keep civilization going. Dave Montgomery spoke down at Solina and he had this book on soils and lost civilizations and I think it was a sixth chapter before he started talking about nutrient cycling. And the civilizations, you know, they'd settle in valleys, they'd grow crops in these river valleys and then over time they'd go up the hillsides and erosion and it would kind of kill the whole civilization. Well what was happening was that the bottom lands, they have to harvest crops or food for a long time and don't return the nutrients, the production goes down and so then they would expand out and that's kind of it. So if they would, in China there was communities or civilizations that recycled everything and I think Beck said this one time but if they had guests over their house they were asked to go to the garden and relieve themselves before they went home to keep the nutrients on their farm. That would be fun, wouldn't it sometimes have your guests over and tell them? Well, so this is what deteriorated their land and when Jerry talks, he acts like we're over the hump, we can't come back, it's sometimes a little bit more scary but we did a little land work and then they had to level it, put in some big terraces and put these tiles in so we could farm across the waterways because our equipment's getting bigger, it's on our land down at Western and then you get more of those. I don't know, I remember as a kid we had these kinds of rains all the time with what Jerry's talking about, I don't quite understand but we got one of these haleish rains and you had that erosion so here's the native soil, it probably got about two feet, it's down southeast Nebraska, 18 inches, two feet of good topsoil. Over at Bayard we had a field day, here's about two inches of topsoil left and about eight inches of bee horizon left, rest of it is sea, sea horizon, parent material and that's how a lot of our soils on the slopes look today, we've lost probably, I guess made on our farm, 15, 18 inches of topsoil, average off the hills and now we want to build this stuff back, it's going to take some time to do that but these are the things we look at and the first thing that I look at in starting the no-till farming in the soil health is improving soil structure, you have to do that first and then you can get water in and those kind of things and I just threw this in here to say the soil structure and soil structure is important because it retains, it transports water and nutrients, it retains nutrients and helps to transport water into the soil, it's habitat for microbes and it reduces soil erosion if you have good soil structure, the granular structure in the topsoil and prismatic structure in the subsoil. So here is an example, a crusted soil, about a two inch layer of crust, crop can't get through there. Now Jerry talked about this, it's oxygen, lack of oxygen, so you have this soil sealed and that white, that's sand, so the raindrops pounding on the soil and you're separating the sand, silt and clay and they seal that soil, we call it the crust and in the old days when we did all the tillage where we had this crust and now with keeping the ground covered you protect the soil from the raindrop and our soil is more stable and the water goes in, so you have to stop and do that and that crust, I calculated one time a farmer down in Halstead, Kansas said something that a field day in, so maybe realize that in one gram of soil about that much, if you have the largest clay particles, two microns in diameter, but if you put 5,000 those edge to edge you'd have one centimeter or three eighths of an inch, made a square on that 5,000 times 5,000 is 25 million, you build that up to 3 eighths of an inch cube, you'd have 5,000 times 25 million is 125 billion clay particles in that little tiny place and then you think air can get through that once that seals it can't and so then you have a lack of oxygen for microbes and plants or the roots in the soil and nothing grows, so to get the good soil how started first thing you got to do is build soil structure, so then you get air exchange and do all those things and this is the culprit, so you got to protect the land from the raindrop splash, that's the first thing you got to think of is how do I do that, well it's a land cover here, just make sure you got the land covered all the time and then the cover crop things, we talked a lot about weeds this morning, this is Jody sat off at Hildreth but they were planting cover crop over here in wheat stubble and then they're planting in an angle, had this little skip and he just made a comment the mother nature likes cover crops too and if you don't put something in there she's going to put some weeds in there, in this case a mare's tail and pigweed but out here where we have a cover crop there's not many weeds, so in the soil health thing then in the cover crop thing is how do we get all this other stuff working and of course then the microbes you can see the mycelium here that you can see it's a granular structure and so all these things are working together and I put together a slide here it says I was introduced to no-till planting in the mid-seventies, Kentucky was planting corn in the fescue, they sprayed the fescue with with periquette or whatever the other chemical is and then I had I took another sentence out and I said in my thought process was I was working on Oklahoma State well we don't have fescue in Nebraska so we can't do that you know that's how we think you know and then this guy up there I run this irrigation farm up at Redfield they hired me to go up there and start this research and extension center and then I left and went to Oklahoma State and Dwayne come up there after a while and was doing stuff it was just unheard of kind of crap and I just couldn't believe he could do that and that's that that tillage type thing that is engraved in there but in 92 visiting with Martin Jorgensen at Ideal is when I become convinced that no-till is the way to go and so we've been no-till in our farm since 92 and Ideal South to go to one is that South to go state in the 60s was winter wheat summerfell that was all it was and then he just made a comment that we can't afford to grow wheat and he's growing to continuous crops it's kind of funny residue on the ground maybe realize that this protective soil from the raindrops splash protection of the soil protection as water savings at the start so so you think about that you was you want to save the soil but when you cover the ground right away you start to save water and in that and that's for us that's pretty important then then the next thing I noticed he got in my soil health tool I asked NRCS guy in Lincoln what would be the best soil health tool and he just said tile spade you know take a spade out and look at your soil just you have to look at and that's what I do and of course I did that when I was even at South to go state but that worm activity just intrigued me and then we're trying to get cover crops in there now and there here's a worm and you know in this the worm castings there I caught him doing that got the picture but so how's soil develop you got the worms and and when we have these field days with Kansas or the field trips of Kansas guys and come and spread the trash out and blow and get kind of chaff out of the way you can see all these worm castings right on top of the soil where you have that residue there and and I was talking to a guy from was Keith Thompson from Osage City Kansas about I think I think the soil develops at the at the top not you know and when I was in college you kind of thought that it went down this way but I think the development's a top and he said oh Darwin reported that in the 1880s and why the hell didn't I talk to him and he sent me the paper 1881 Darwin said the reason artifacts sink in the soil is because the worms are putting the soil up on top so that hundred-year-old house or the sidewalk sink and know the soils build up so you have to have worm activity in in areas where we have worms you have to have the worm activity to get that soil to build until age taking the residue off in none of that's there so you got to keep the keeper protected by this all health is keeping everything fed and it's been alluded to a lot of times now my tenant we're on a 50-50 lease and and we've been doing the cover crop and he's been watching that so he's doing some now and it's on these other land and he had corn stock cows and corn stocks cows and cover crop and you and I didn't ask him this question but he said he wanted to get the cows home because there's no storm coming in and I was too kind to him and say what in the hell do you want to do that for because I've learned that your cows can stand to the graze and Beck showed the pictures there I'm grazing in the snow so buddy buddy had a couple bales in the truck and they went out in this corn stocks and the cows just following through the corral got him home he went over to the cover crop field is pretty much broadly Nebraska's and the cows just looked at him he said he had a heck of a time getting them in the crowd to get them loaded and then he took them home and they wouldn't even look at those bales when you got them in the in his home yard so and so that's that's feeding and corn stocks is not a very good feed compared to fresh roots growing in the soil so so that's where the cover crop thing comes in because you're feeding that microbes and then if we mine the nutrients out of the soil and do not replace them soil health declines and you know we can grow nitrogen we got 79% of the atmosphere is nitrogen so we got things that can fix nitrogen but we don't get any free phosphorus or potassium we're on down the line we don't even get a free sulfur anymore in Nebraska that's important but so what I'd like to do in a little bit of time we got is go through some of the soil tests and what would be an ideal soil test to have to have good soil health because I think you need to you need to look at the fertility part to make sure and and here neutral at pH 6 2 to 7 2 if you could be in that range that's kind of ideal pH you don't have to have a narrow range it can be a whole unit apart if you're very acid I don't know if there'd be any soils like that I got one on our farm it's 4.9 and I don't know it got so damn low but the so we have so we have some of that and we've been liming it too in the moderate of the acid and then Alkohon 7 3 to 7 8 cut a lot of those in South Dakota then very Alkohon 7.9 8.4 if your pH is above 8.4 you got real problems and we'll talk about sodium a little bit later but so if you could be if you're acid to break it the lime up and had a gentleman asked me swarming out of pH 8 how do I drop that I don't worry about it the you can't and I did I calculated one time if you had 4% calcium carbonate in your soil to a foot deep and take 16 tons of elemental sulfur to neutralize that a lime you just can't change it so so that you need to maybe put a little bit of sulfur on all the time except we got some real high sulfur test to see you have to kind of know but if in the high pH only have the calcareous soil the free lime when you get wet conditions a lime starts to dissolve and you get bicarbonate ions bicarbonate moves into the plant precipitates iron in the plant and makes it yellow iron chlorotic they've said it's iron deficient but it's got but those yellow plants have more iron in them than the green plants and so I know that the plants getting that iron it's getting iron in there but it's been precipitated by the bicarbonate so the other thing that mass flows in is sulfate so you put sulfur on and now you got sulfate and bicarbonate going in and you have less bicarbonate going in and that alleviates some of the iron corrosive problem if you have these high pH's so if you have a high pH you know 30 probably 100 pounds 150 pounds of ammonium sulfate may be a good source of a of a sulfur fertilizer do that but on the other soils and it's a little easier to take care of then the buffer pH if you do have pH is here very acid or in that 5 1 to 5 so I tell guys in the 5 1 to 5 6 you know you're going to have to lime you maybe don't have to do it this year but you got to get get ready to do it but when you're below when you're 5 1 or below 5 1 you really need to be putting lime on and we determine that but with the buffer pH and the buffer measures total acidity where pH measures active acidity so the pH measures the hydrogen ions out in the soil solution and then there's hydrogen ions setting on the exchange complex we can't exchange capacity they're sitting on there and the buffer pH comes along and it scrapes those hydrogens off of the exchange complex puts in a solution and the more hydrogen there that it scrapes off it lowers the buffer pH so every one-tenth of a unit drop in the buffer pH it says it needs four-tenths ton of lime to that's how much hydrogen's in there four-tenths a ton of lime would neutralize that that amount of hydrogen so you take 7 minus a buffer pH times 4 and that equals tons of 100 percent lime or four-tenths a ton of effective calcium carbonate is what ECC stands for then you divide that by the effect if it's 60 percent effective you divide by 0.6 to get the rate of lime you put on if you're leasing your land lime is a capital expenditure and in probably in Southeast Nebraska we've been using six years I pay for the lime upfront and then I charge half of the lime cost back to the tenant over a six-year period it's kind of how we're doing that and and that's something you need to think about because if you have if you put the lime on and you pay for it and then the guy gets rid of you you need to have in the lease that you get paid for however many years of that lime and probably in South Dakota I use maybe eight eight years instead of six but how do you want to do that but it's something that needs to be considered soluble salts and I like we read soluble salts on every sample because it does a couple of things for us and and if you have a if you have that white stuff around some of the lower areas you know the salts you know those and we can we can detect those and and the other thing that if we have this point one the point seven five no crop hazard EC can be an indicator of soil life remember mineralization in organic matter mineralization if you're kicking out some nitrate and some sulfate out of the organic matter that would be detected as the EC and if it's less than point one you can be sure you have a pretty dead soil and and so that's why I use the point one point seven five to one point five reduction sensitive crops and most of our crops and fall in a here moderate yield reduction if you're above one point five and we see we see those up the in this Mitchell area or in the southern part of South Dakota where we get samples we'll have some up above three even in those high really high sulfur tests and some of that kind of stuff as they go on this stuff you got any questions why please please ask as we're going along this is organic matter we talked about a raisin organic matter and I know Anthony had a deal in his talk this morning on the carbon nitrogen ratio he was talking about the the residue or the not the residue but the crop the cover crop and what its ratio should be if it's 24 to one or less it will start releasing nitrogen for the crop but in the soil the carbon nitrogen ratio is closer to 10 to one so so here we're getting one percent organic matter then in six and six or seven inches soil one percent organic matter it would have a thousand pounds of nitrogen 220 pounds of phosphate 140 pounds of sulfur and all the other nutrients and you know they get a lot lower concentration but understand the reason we talk about organic matter being so important is it has all the nutrients in it when the when the pioneers broke the land broke our side they got all the nutrients out of that organic matter and now we're trying to put it back together and so if you just do N and P and you need something else you're not going to build organic matter and I think the guys that that put on farmyard or or composted manure or the perfect blend of Jerry mentioned that supplies all the nutrients because that was all in that manure now understand that when we eat whatever we ate for lunch today we eat that to get the energy out of it to maintain our bodies bodies life we our cells replace minerals but we don't retain minerals and so all the minerals that we ate today goes out in the sewage system in the case of humans in the case of animals we call it manure and so all the nutrients that you take off your land all those plant nutrients and some others is when the when the animals eat that almost all that is treated back out in the manure so the manure needs to go back on the land and I think those guys are using manure or compost have a lot better time increasing soil health than those that don't because we don't get all the nutrients but back that is in the farmland manure but understand this if the guys increase organic matter one percent you increase what two percent or one and a half percent and so you've increased the nitrogen that much in your soil and that's not from poor nitrogen fertilizer on that's from cover crops and in a good rotation and legumes in the rotation all that and then the residual nitrate and ask Anthony about that we just you know the Haney test in the soil health test we got the Haney Haney ignored the subsoil nitrate which kind of disgusts me but but so we're changing our our soil health test I don't know how soon we're going to have it done but sometime this spring we're going to tie our nitrate our subsoil nitrate to the Haney test which right now they're kind of separate test and that is available for the next crop nitrate soluble and move of the soil water so you know this is an interesting thing the nitrate we talked a lot about leaching and yesterday reminded the guys to we're talking about a lot about nitrate leaching nitrate but you know to have an anion nitrates an anion and to have nitrate goal you have to have a cation with it and in which one are you leaching out potassium or calcium or magnesium and I think usually it's calcium but but when you have high sodium in the soil they recommend applying gypsum right and the gypsum the calcium goes on and kicks the sodium like say on the off the exchange complex and the softers there to carry the sodium down leach it down and so all those things are there and in the tile water you might be losing nitrate but you're probably losing a lot of other important things in that water too and I asked Jerry because one of the things we're losing is carbon is bicarbonate in the water and it just just interesting things that I think about sometimes and then don't have time to do much about it but so I threw in the Haney test here because the one thing that that Rick is doing is is evaluating nitrogen organic nitrogen how much can be released from there and I don't have any more details on this one right here then then here and he said traditionally is measuring nitrate so here we had 14 pounds of nitrate and then he had ammonia and organic nitrogen so he's getting getting the Haney test is 37 pounds so the difference is 23.6 pounds and then this nitrogen's price is a little high but save $15 and and that's kind of the way Haney sold his test because he showed you guys that you could save money by using his test and it's one of those things that goes like that or you're why the hell didn't we tell you that for years you know we've been testing this oil and tell you how much you got to spend not how much you're saving and so he's done a good job of marketing that but but there's some good things to show you a little bit more and then the nitrogen requirement and Anthony I thank you wherever you are that I'm been thinking about you know I'm using 1.1 pound of nitrogen not 1.2 likes out to go state but when I you think about changing that to one and and I drop mine from 1.2 after 2012 I dropped mine to 1.1 but think about this you're putting I say you need points that you take off the grain you take off point says six seven pound of nitrogen but I'm telling you need 1.1 so there's 0.43 pound of nitrogen that you're putting on or you have in the soil but the crop is using it that's returned every year point point three point four three point four three where's that going well some is going organic matter but I think we might be a little high yet and so these are these are the things that Anthony I appreciate you're reporting on that and the week I asked back about the wheat because Haney's using 1.2 and we're using 2.4 so there's big difference in our recommendations but but Bex has keep a word is right now yeah that that we don't think about protein Dan and so yeah we're too far south we grow wheat so you guys get a chance to get some money and you get hammered on everything else so that's a wheat is okay to take and we do grow wheat on our farm but I this would be 12% protein I think at 2.4 and and I haven't you know thought too much about ass Dwayne I'm thinking about change the dropping a little bit because how in the heck you gonna afford to fertilize wheat and when it's 380 or whatever it is up here but but understand that in the crops that long-term thing and that when the corn pollinates the corn still taking up 30% of its nitrogen now some of it's coming out of the stocks and the leaves and stuff but you still got time so we need to have a long-term kind of nitrogen thing and in the irrigation we talked to the guys about putting a lot of nitrogen through the pivot and on the dry land I think we shouldn't consider side-dressing and now they got getting high boys that you could put it on later too to make it more efficient so maybe you don't have to put quite as much on and these farmers about you know the cow if you took a load of hay the cow and said now I come back next year and feed you she probably wouldn't do very well but you put the nitrogen on tell corn well that's it get what you can it's kind of dumb maybe what we're doing to if we want to get the efficiency but so we kind of compensate for putting more on and and so that's understand those uptakes phosphorus we said it attacks the soil particles the one thing that yes phosphorus does move in the soil because we taught you for years the phosphorus doesn't move and now we got guys that got phosphorus test of 500 part per million in top soil 120 part per million in the subsoil and all I know is that's moving to the groundwater and so if we kind of missed touches some some things and then phosphorus is not fixed but remains available for the plants for a number of years the old calcareous thing soils you might have a lower phosphorus test but but sometimes you have really high phosphorus test in the calcareous soil and it's available that the lime does not tie it up all the lime did was made a break that's no good it was a salt that's is wrong not to not the application and so I got Malik three breaky one and then Olson ratings here and where on the dry land should you be to kind of maintain soil health and maybe have a year when it's tight you wouldn't have to put phosphorus on and and I would say at the top of this medium range here 25 or 15 if you're sitting there you could skip a year and not hurt yourself and you'd still maintain good production and always trying to maintain kind of the top end of that medium on on your soil and I think now the irrigators I've kind of get that up up to the high I haven't gone clear to 50 yet we do recommend a little up to 50 but probably around 35 to 40 for the guys growing 280 bushel corn and we're starting to get now questions on 300 recommendations corn so so it's going to take more nutrients because you're hauling more off all the time 300 bushel corn you remove 200 pounds of 52 a year at 12 alfalfa is 12 pounds per ton 12 pounds of petal 5 per ton and Haney test has that with there's three different parts of Haney test and one part is H3a extractant and that is three organic acids that plant roots leak out to feed microbes and then the microbes that bring them nutrients and if they're lacking some nutrient they need they leak out different compounds and but the three they have is citric oxalic and mollic acid and and then I compare that with our fosters our Malik fosters test Malik three over here and if you guys don't know how to read a graph you can see there's a relationship between those here's a top Malik was in North Carolina Bray was in Illinois in the 40s and 50s developing these tests and it's amazing that they develop something that mimics plants and what the plants doing so I think we I think what we've been doing has been good for you guys and it's not and and and we can use this data then to give better fertilizer recommendations off the Haney than what we're doing right now in the fosters understand that about 40 percent of the fosters taken up after pollination and so so you get this fertilizer right with the seed or right behind the press wheel or right in front of the two by two or wherever and you get the quick growth response early and yet 40 percent of the fosters is taken up after pollination so you kind of need fosters out where the roots are growing to take that fosters up and and so you have to and that's why we need that good fosters test to feed that crop later on the season the early response might go into the field it might not depends on the year and you know the perfect day sometimes you get it sometimes you don't and then potassium and you guys are watching my time aren't you well this guy's gone I'm in I'm in great shape then oh there you are up there I figured you had to be here somewhere it potassium here I I just like to be at up to 200 maybe the dry land guys somewhere it'd be 160 and and I was talking to a gentleman earlier and he says he's getting response of potassium kind of anywhere and and then you ask him some of the quite I think you know chloride is important and 0060 is potassium chloride is 60 percent K2O and 45 percent chloride or CL so it's a good it's a good chloride source but but when we're you know the guys are complaining that the potassium tester drop and we used to set not have any issues with it now I remember even even a South Dakota state in the 60s I did a summary one time because there's guys up northeast South Dakota saying that they needed a potash in their soils because that IPH and we did a summary and had it we had it all categorized by great saw group or saw by group saw groups and sure enough northeast South Dakota there was an area there that 60 percent of the soils had we were calling for potassium and it it was kind of interesting when we did the summary to find that true so this one keep watching that potassium because if it's dropping quite a bit you might want to start putting some on just to kind of maintain keep your productivity up if you're not if it's not dropping you don't need to worry about it and then the H3A test in a potassium again there are different readings but but it's still related to our ammonium acetate extraction thing but but to understand that plants on potassium the main potassium use are taken up is when the plants are growing rapidly doesn't matter which one it is in the case of corn by time it tassels 90 90 95 percent of potassium is taken up so when the corn is growing real rapidly in that you know when it's on this knee height the head high might only take two weeks to do that you're taking up a lot of potassium that's why we want that potassium test pretty high because you got a supply of the potassium in that time frame maybe eight to ten pounds of potassium going in a day on the plant now when you take the grain off you want to take off quarter pound per bushel so that's but most of potassium is in the stocks and the leaves so that recycles every year and so we don't it won't drop as fast you don't need a lot to put on sulfur tests and in South Dakota this is real critical we got some soils that are just higher and heck and sulfur and then others that are really pretty darn low and we do a lot of subsoil testing for sulfur and we'll have those thousand part of a million sulfur tests and we'll have two part million sulfur tests sometimes in the same darn for the same farmer so I don't if they're in the same field or just different fields so so kind of watch that and if you're on sandy soils you really need to make sure you have some sulfur early but most of the plant most of the sulfur and nitrogen goes into proteins in the plant they kind of go together so it's always a good idea if you want to put sulfur on to put apart if you're using liquid nitrogen to go ahead and mix 28 or 32 and in thiosulfate if you're wanting to do that with the herbicide you got the style sulfates kind of a tough but otherwise you can mix those two together calcium magnesium sodium and there's lots of talk about that but part of the base saturation should add up to 70% or greater calcium magnesium I got sodium here I should have potassium in there also sorry about that so calcium magnesium sodium and potassium should be greater than 70% of the base saturation I think if you're if you're above 30% you better be putting lime on there's some people say that that's a different but but yeah that's in this slide here some of the calcium magnesium racial concepts unproven and should not be used as a basis for fertilization so and that's not my slide I copied that from somebody so the hydrogen that the other cation up here in the base saturation is hydrogen and that's acidity and so that would tell you if you're acid or not and if that's less than 30 I wouldn't worry about it but if it's above 30 if you're working your pH one or if you should put lime on look at the base saturation if it's above 30 get it get it put on the other problem with the base saturation is sodium if that sodium percentage is greater than 5% there is a problem and normally called out of alkali or sodic soil and so we there we can recommend gypsum if it's a EC soluble salt reading above one and a half that's a saline condition if it's sodium greater than 5% that's a sodic there are two different things and some people want to put gypsum on a saline soil and all gypsum is another salt that you're putting out there so you're increasing the salinity but if you have a sodium problem then you need to put gypsum on because a calcium sulfate will get rid of sodium but if you have a saline alkali soil or saline sodic soil and you put it in a tiled line to start draining that then you need to get the soluble salts out first and when the salts drop then put the gypsum on for the sodium don't put that you just waste your gypsum until you get the salts leached out Anthony is that right you're sitting back there and I learned a lot of these things working in South Dakota on the salinity thing so that's the that's the way I would handle that and then we saw this one in zinc we I think most of those things are fairly decent in South Dakota on a glacial soils in Nebraska one or one blown deposit or less soils our soils are natively low in zinc and of course we let put a lot of zinc on a special in irrigated crops and and we're pretty high now but we need to have this above one I don't think you need to be any higher than that and when you make recommendations for zinc these rates here are the pounds per acre and there's a big range because like alfalfa really doesn't meet need much zinc but corn corn's the most sensitive to zinc and if you got corn in the rotation then you got to build that zinc up if you got wheat and alfalfa and those kind of things you could get by with the lower part lower part here and but if I the recommendation we make I say divide the rate by six amount per year if you don't want to put all of it on at one time the other the other thing if you're wanting to mix zinc with 1034 all you can bet one pound of zinc with seven gallons of 1034 all and you can use a monated zinc or a chelated zinc other than edta the polyphosphate sequestered the zinc and holds it so it's so you can use a monated zinc or one the lower-cost chelates now if you use in a low salt fertilizer that's got orthophosphate you only chelate only zinc you can use as edta chelate because orthophosphate precipitates zinc like that and you'll end up with a hard white powder in your pump if you do that so so if you're using an orthophosphate fertilizer use edta zinc if you're using 1034 all you can use a monated zinc or a cheaper one and there's even some relationship with h3a and our regular d2pa zinc test so so we're going to be able to to work on these things I think manganese we got three here as high do you know there's soils in this this area here that we have over a hundred part-per-million manganese in them and I think these are wet soils that are lack of oxygen maybe and I wonder sometimes there's some of the problems with the Jerry mentioned yellow crops and lack of oxygen and if there's manganese toxicity but that's one thing that I would watch a little bit if you got really high manganese might be time to get it sold but and I don't know because there might be other problems but but just kind of watch that if you have now the manganese most of the time would be worth the high pH would be this but but we see the high pH in there like 80 to 100 120 part-per-million manganese and so there's something going on I don't know what that is and then copper Anthony thanks again for having all those those tests because this confirms that when you have high tests you don't need any of that stuff and so so a copper if we're about point two we don't need to put any copper on except the potato guys in Nebraska and they're from Watertown the CSS farms they want to copper test at point six so we recommend copper for potatoes but we don't for any other crop and then boron we're getting in northeast Nebraska we're getting some low boron and I think what I've seen in South Dakota most time it's pretty good in the tests we get and be careful with it in when I started it's out to go to state they still talked about using borax borax as a solsteroid so you could you can ruin things if you put too much boron on so be careful with it and then chloride is the one and this is case state is South Dakota state higher net Anthony a two and this is a two-foot test and we go up to six are you cutting off at six or eight you say okay 60 in case eight once 30 so in Nebraska I use 45 now understand when I first started this talk I talked about structure in the soil health situation and then we talked about nutrients but the main thing you need for nutrient uptake for root growth is oxygen and you think about that when you when when you get rain water goes in the soil and air comes out which is carbon dioxide and then the plant uses the water and air comes in which is oxygen and if you have good soil structure all you have is a the earth is a great big lung breathing in and out carbon dioxide and bringing in oxygen and that's what we're trying that's what soil health is all about I think is and how we do that with the microbes all that you've heard plenty of those other things so the soil health the progression I see the improvements in our soils Haney test indicator soil biological life if biological activity increases my soil increases in my soil can I reduce my fertilizer and pesticide inputs that's that's that's what this is all about and and I know the fertility we might be able to get more efficient on the fertility because we're not washing any soil away so we said be able to maintain our soil tests easier but it doesn't mean that we have to put can put less on if we've been taking good care of our soil and so I had a I got a PFA test on one of my soils and the diversity index was 1.6 which is land says is the highest you can have and so I went to a lands that kind of reduced my fertilizer and he thought for a little bit and he says no he said but I think you can reduce your other input costs and this diversity in this weed thing that Steve talked about this morning those are the things that were were issued and that's what we got to work on how to how do we get things that we need to learn to work with mother nature instead of fighter all the time and and then is this the system of the future and of course I think it is but these are the kind of questions that we have so I appreciate you guys letting me come talk to you and enjoyed it enjoyed the program today so if if you graze and I and I did this with corn in the feed lot I had a bunker of corn and I went took a picture of it and decided how much of that phosphorus in the corn is in the manure and I want is about 92% and on the nitrogen I think it may be as closer to 85% is returned in the manure so there is you know the muscles got some protein in and that kind of thing so and you retain a few minerals but but the reason we eat the reason animals eat things is for energy number one and then when we grow we might retain a little bit of nutrient but but almost all of that is excreted back out and and then the other good thing about that Dan is that you got the microbes in a rumen that is increasing your soil life in the soil so I think there's advantage to that part too working down so you are going to put a lime on no telly so you use the same rate of those acidic spots or you have to use less because you don't raise the real top the H2I the short answer is don't worry about it go ahead and put it on and and I was I was an advocate of split put it splitting at three ways and put one third on and two years later put another third on two years late and as in Americans I've gone in meetings in a poster section walking through Dr. Larry Bundy from Wisconsin had a poster about lime application no tell and I said red a little bit I said you can do that you said yeah don't worry about it so so I never have worried about it since then so I think you can put it all on and you know the worm activity and the microbe activity and all that it moves that pretty fast