 In 2013, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a cooperative agreement with the South Dakota No-Till Association and IGROW, SDSU Extension, for delivering the latest soil health and productivity technology to South Dakota farmers and ranchers. A series of two local events were held in South Dakota, in Lemon and Fort Peer. I'm with Dakota Lakes Research Farm with South Dakota State University. It's one of the research farms they have. It's different from most. It's owned by farmers, which is really important. And I have 11 member board of directors that I work with and my phone is set to be on sideline except with one of the board calls and one of the board guys calls this morning and it went on loud. But this is our main station. It's right along the Missouri River, which is important. You can see we've got some rough ground there to the north of us that we don't own and we have some opal promise ground up to the north, which is the kind of West River soils and you guys, and actually the north side of our farm is heavy clay soils as well and this stuff down by the river is pretty good. So a lot of what I'm going to talk about today is stuff that we've done and then this idea of diverse no-till rotations and whatever. They hired a new director for the West River Rags Center, which would be the people that serve you and her name is Kristy Kamak and she's going to start in July, I believe. And she's originally from Platt and she's married to one of the Kamaks from Union Center so I think she'll probably hang around for a while. But in the process of interviewing her, one of the things we were trying to assess is how she planned to determine where to take the research program, which is really important. And one of the things that I discussed with her was the fact that in 1985 if we had asked everybody in Central South Dakota what they needed, there's not one person that said we need diverse no-till rotations. So you can't necessarily go out and just ask people what they need. Sometimes you and the university people together have to start trying to figure out where the heck you're going to be in the next number of years and at Hague Horizons I talked about planning for 600 years in the future because that helps you. And one of the things I talked about is we will not be irrigating out of the Missouri River in 50 or 60 years because that will be filled with silt. So we won't be doing that. We're not planning on being able to do that. We're going to have to have a different plan if we're going to do anything with irrigation which we don't do a lot. This is all dry land here and the stuff up north is all dry land. And one of the things that really drove my thinking there to a certain extent and the fact that I wanted to talk about is Ruth and I had the chance to spend a few weeks in France and England this winter and actually talking to farmers and staying with farmers and whatever. It was really more of a farmer to farmer thing. We had our own car with an English speaking GPS and the way we went. And we learned all the French swear words because of the mistakes we made. So we learned a lot of French swear words. The only in French gestures which some of those are the same as here. But every city you went to they wanted to show you their castle. Everybody had a castle that somebody built four, five, six, seven hundred years ago. And they'd show you the castle and they'd say well this is where they store all the grain and I said well where did they grow the grain? Well around the castle and you look at the soil around the castle and it looked like this. You know that's actually soil I believe, that's not snow up there, that's just soil that's been eroded to the point that it's just nothing there and they're working on getting this the same down here if they can. And every place they did lots of tillage. And one of the things I said to them is that my ancestors and your ancestors, most of you, left Europe to come to the United States so they could mine soils here because the soils there were so degraded they no longer could support the community. And we've only been here 100, 150 years and we've done a pretty good job of it. And only recently have we started to rethink how we're doing things. So we saw a lot of really crappy soils, right, and lots of tillage. So that makes me emphasize that short term studies are not accurate in evaluating treatments such as tillage or rotations which have long term impact. But we really don't have the choice to continue tillage because it just degrades the soil. So let's look at it a different way. Water manages ecosystems and takes sunlight, water and carbon dioxide makes them into products to be sold. You know, we're not really wheat growers or lentil growers or whatever. We just whatever somebody wants, if we can grow it, we should be growing it in an environmental way. And a lot of what we do in the United States is we grow corn and soybean to haul to feed lots, to feed the cattle. If we want cattle, we should just grow cattle and figure out how to do beef without all these intermediate steps. And one of the questions I asked the candidates that were interviewing for the West River Ag Center, I said, do you think there will be feed lots in 50 years? And the response was this, this, this, this. And I kept looking at them and finally both of the finalists that were in the hunt, one of them said no and one of them said probably not. Because of E. Coli and animal rights and nutrient movement and all these things that are wrong with having animals in confinement, which you can really see if you go to Europe and you can see if you go to other parts of the United States, not so much at Lehman. So let's look at what we have to do to mimic natural processes, water cycle, energy flow, mineral cycle and community dynamics. A lot of people are talking about cover crops, but cover crops are just tools. No-till is a tool to help us manage our ecosystem. What you're doing is you're managing an ecosystem out there, your farm ground, whether it's grass or farm ground or mixed farm ground and grass, whatever. Does the rain feed plants and recharge your groundwater? Does the runoff and cause erosion and water quality degradation? We had a ray archer that came to visit the farm, had a little hu-ha there this summer. And we went up to our north unit, the heavy soils, the opal soils, and did some infiltration stuff on our ground. And then right across the fence in grassland, somebody is grazing. Huge difference. Our ground took the water in. The graze ground didn't, because the guy grazed it poorly. Just because you're grazing doesn't mean you're optimizing that ecosystem, okay? So it makes a difference. What happens on your place? The Coleg Research Farm began to use diverse low disturbance no-till and cover cropping to control runoff from center pivots. We were started by a group of irrigators. This was at Gettysburg. They pumped the water out of the river, and bring it up and run right back to the river. It doesn't make a lot of sense, and it costs a lot of money, and it's a real water quality issue. Okay? We now will put on two inches of water in nine minutes. And some of you have been there when we've done this, and we'll walk right behind those irrigators and you won't get your feet muddy. Because we have that kind of soil structure. Once we have that kind of soil structure, now we think we can start really doing the grazing, integrating the grazing thing well, okay? We have surface cover. We have macro pores. These macro pores take water in. This is Eileen Cladifco from Purdue that she pours latex, kind of real kind of liquid rubber stuff, and then it goes down in holes. And then when it, when it solidifies, she digs, digs it out. And that's what the soil would look like there. Not like a fun job to do. Some people use dye and shows you how the water goes in the ground. It doesn't soak in uniformly everywhere, it goes in holes. And if you keep those holes open to the surface, they're a function. If you close them, they don't. So if I take a vertical tillage tool, which everybody seems to really think is a good deal, and run across my no-till field, it'll cut the infiltration rate in half. That's not what you want to do, and it'll cause all the weeds to grow. So we don't want to do that kind of stuff. Energy flow, how much sunlight strikes green leaves and makes food for the ecosystem? And how much falls on dead vegetation and bare ground? Think of the old wheat summerfowl program. What percentage of the year did you catch the sunlight? Not very damn much, right? Out of the two years. Okay, we weren't doing a good job of harvesting sunlight. And that's really what it's all about, is harvesting sunlight. So again, if you're going to do cover crops, that's the thing you do with a cover crop, is you use that as a tool. The Dakota Lakes Research Farm uses covered and forged crops to fine-tune our crop rotations. They're just part of a crop rotation. And we want to increase this carbon capture, because you don't increase organic matter without having some carbon to put in there. And you'll hear a lot of stuff about cover crops, high carbon, nitrogen, ratios, and whatever. And a lot of people are telling you, well, you really don't want to have a high carbon and nitrogen rotation, because you'll want the nitrogen to get the nitrogen and release it for your crop. But if you do that, you're really mining the organic matter. And we're really finding that we've got a really pump biggest limiting factor in ecosystems is carbon. Not all these other things you hear about, carbon. So when you increase the carbon capture, then that sequesters, nutrients, and we fix the nitrogen. You don't fix nitrogen into your soil without having carbon to go with it. And also encourage our friendlies, what Dan Forgey calls friendlies, or beneficial insects. Now, part of the things we work on is ways to make the cover crop thing work better. If you wait until you harvest, get lemon in it here, till you harvest weed and then try to get a cover crop in and get it grow and get any size to it, it's pretty hard. So we're putting a lot of effort into trying to do things like clay seed balls. These are seeds in clothes and little balls of clay and peed and in this case, I think cow manure, which is a good binding agent, I had a German intern that was really a gung-ho and I told him one day, well, if you put some cow manure in there, that ball would stay together better. Next thing I know, he's across the road, following and looking for patties to grind up and stick in there. So we gave him an A for effort. He was, crop rotation allows time for natural enemies to destroy pathogens to one crop while an unrelated crop is grown. We've known about crop rotations forever. We don't like to use them but they're our best tool and that's the thing we've done a lot of work on and I've got lots of stuff and we're gonna cover a little bit on crop rotations but sequence is only one component of a crop rotation. Sequence is if you put peas behind wheat, that's just one part, but what do you do the rest of the time? And in the United States, we got a lot of people doing corn, soybean, corn, soybean, corn, soybean, and that's like a two crop monoculture. It's very predictable and that's why they're having all these resistance problems and then you go to North Dakota and Canada and they do wheat, lentil, wheat, lentil, wheat, lentil, right? I mean it's like, okay guys, every other year is not the right thing. So crop rotation, proper intensity. Use the water you get. Now here you can not do what they do in Iowa or Illinois, but if you don't use the water you get, you're gonna get saline seeps and those kinds of things. And one of the bad things that happened with no till was people would no till not change their intensity and the water went in the ground better and they'd just increase the amount of saline seeps, which wasn't a good thing because they hadn't cranked up intensity. Adequate diversity. I was talking to a guy this morning, one of the farmers that I work with or my neighbor actually and he grows a lot of field peas and he's trying to figure out where he's gonna grow, you know, if he should grow a whole bunch of lentils too and I just told him you can't have too many crops. You're growing both peas and lentils, you've got to sell peas, you've got to sell lentils and they're not that much different. Are you ready to have more grain bins because you gotta have more grain bins because you can't just take those to the elevator. If you get this stuff done then you get your stable, sustainable profitability. Native vegetation is the best indicator of range, the range of intensities that are appropriate for a location and Ruth will tell you, as we drive down the road and Molly's talking about what the native vegetation is and I've got three daughters that are so sick and tired of hearing about native vegetation. They're all successfully off to college and they're happy they don't have to hear about that anymore but most of the problems we've had blamed on no till result of not having enough diversity or not having enough intensity and you've got to look at those things first. Put the water you saved to work by using more high water use crops and cover crops or double crops and get a fine tuning. You don't have enough time between wheat harvest and fall and enough moisture in wheat harvest and fall to grow another grain crop but you can grow a cover crop and I used to call these forage crops. I was doing this when I was still at Redfield before I ever went to peer. So in the 80s we were doing this kind of stuff because we had livestock at Redfield and we'd use them for forage crops and now we're getting livestock again. Proper intensity reduces the risk. Are the nutrients available for plant use or environmental services or are they being leached, eroded or transported from the landscape? Well, ecosystems that leak nutrients become deserts. That's kind of what's happened in parts of Europe. You could see that in the soils. They're about ready to become deserts, parts of Africa, desertation. Sailing seeps indicate leakage. What's in a saline seep? Salt, everybody says salt, right? Darren Hefty said that to me one day and I asked him that question and I said, that's fine. What kind of salts? If you're taking chemistry in high school, I taught chemistry so that, not egg, I taught chemistry and physics. So you take an acid base, you make a salt. There's lots of different salts. What kind of salts would be in most saline seeps? The number one in most of South Dakota would be some form of nitrate, calcium nitrate or whatever. The nitrate fertilizer you put on go to the saline seep. If they don't, if you don't use it. Okay, so the stuff you don't use gets leached down and goes sideways. Number two is calcium carbonate, lime. So that question came up earlier today should you be putting lime on? If you're dropping your pH and have to start using lime at lemons out to Cody, you don't have enough intensity. You're leaching. Now, if you've ever dug a post hole and everybody in here has that white stuff you find about this to this deep is what, Sarah? Yeah, calcium carbonate, lime. And the way they know that when they're doing tests is they put a little acid on it if it fizzes its lime. If it doesn't fizz, what is it? No, it's gypsum. Calcium sulfate, the other one, okay? So if those things are down there you need to get a root down there and bring it back to the surface. And your annual crops, if all you're doing is wheat and stuff it's gonna get away from you. You need the deeper roots or you do what grandpa used to do and you put in the perennials, perennial grasses and bring it and graze it and bring it back up to the surface and deposit on the surface, right? So if somebody tells you what's in the saline seats say fertilizer. So the kids that go to Votek and Watertown have been trained now because they've come to visit me and if they say anything other than fertilizer I just give them all kinds of help. So they get warned before they come there. Oh, he asked you this question. So decreasing pH indicates leakage because your lime's going away. One unit train of soybeans contains a million pounds of phosphorus. The other way you can leak nutrients as you send them to China or Taiwan or India or Arkansas, all those foreign countries. So rainfall comes in, goes down, comes across it. If you don't pull that back up and hold it up here it gets washed away. Covering forage crops provide opportunity to increase both the intensity and diversity in a situation where you can't produce another crop or that wouldn't be possible, it would be un-possible, it would be extremely risky because you use too much, don't have enough time or whatever. In human environments, these tall grass prairies are wetter. The goal should be to have something growing at all times. That's not necessary to you guys. In areas with limited growing season this will require the use of cover crops or forage double crops. But wet, wet areas, wetter areas. In sub-human, semi-arid and arid areas like we are and you are, environment, cover crops can be utilized, increased organic matter, biological activity, they're just fine-tuning. But it's not like we're gonna use them like the guys do in Illinois and Indiana and whatever. I like to use a thing that a kid probably 45 in North Dakota used one day and I stole it. I said, I need the South Dakota rights and then I'm still far enough away from North Dakota I can use it. Catch and release nutrients. That's really what you're trying to do. And I said carbon is, ecosystems are carbon limited, right? You guys, if I asked you what limited ecosystem, what would you be most likely have told me if I wouldn't told you the answer? Nitrogen, everybody worries about nitrogen, okay? So in this room, how many parts per million of carbon dioxide do we have? 400, maybe a little more, right? Cause we're all breathing, right? 400 parts per million. Outside we might be 320, used to be 250 or something, but we've raised that with plowing and using fossil fuels and up until, what was it, the 1940 or 50, most of the CO2 that man caused came from tillage, from the soil and then it started to switch over and used to be fossil fuel, but still tillage causes a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere. But still we're looking at about four and parts per million. How many parts per million in the atmosphere of nitrogen? 800,000 parts per million, right? 80% or 70%, 78%. 780,000 parts per million. So there's really no shortage of nitrogen. We just, I get the nitrogen from here into the ground and the plants do that with the microorganisms. The limiting thing is carbon to give them the energy to do that, okay? And that's really what we're talking about. Catch the sunlight, use that sunlight energy, put it in there. So here's us catching and releasing nitrogen. This is a mixture of oats and hay millet that was swath right after I took this picture. But you can see how big it is. This is my pickup. So we had a nice stand of hay millet and oats and we swathed it and the oats would regrow after that. This is our cow's grazing. Here's the hot wire. This would turn them in. They're eating the regrowth on the oats in the winter wheat that was in there. And then also you can see the swaths kind of coming across. Can't see it real well there. You can see just the remnants of the swath going up. They eat all the green stuff and then they start eating the swath. And then we'll move the wire when the swath gets cleaned up. And if you walk on that today, there's nothing there in terms of loose stuff but all this long stuff and the wheat straw is all still there. Because we don't let them sit in camp and hammer it. We're constantly moving them. And one of our big initiatives is we're gonna try to make a self-propelled grazing cell where we can actually just have this mobile thing that I can move and whatever. I was listening to all the guys this morning going, yeah, if he'd cows and wind was blowing it away and whatever, well I fed my cows this morning because they're just out there. And we move them every three days. We don't have the self-propelled grazing cell yet but they're out there and we move them every three days. Just move that wire. We've got them on corn stocks right now. We had 12 inches of, 10 to 12 inches of snow and where we have the cows just, we have eight groups of cows. Four of them have a field they just have. And they'll have that for 48 days and then four of the groups are moved every three days. Well, where the snow was, these guys are getting pretty hungry because there are a lot of snow was covering thing and same time I took that picture, this is the one, this is the group that's moving and they're about ready to move but because they're concentrated in a little narrow area there's a lot more hoof action and the residue, snow gets trampled through the residue and they have more access to the residue. It's kind of interesting. I didn't think of that when we started doing this. What we did yesterday is we took a drone and flew over those fields, taking pictures and infrareds and whatever. This is tough grass in the back here but we flew over them so we can see the patterns of grazing. What's happened in the different things and because we're halfway through and it has to be over 40 degrees for him to fly. So we did it yesterday, Saturday we'll be halfway through and then so we have the ground in those strips the ones are moving and half of it's not been grazed yet. Catch and release. Here's an experiment we did several years ago. We had some irrigated corn, grew cover crops, lentil, chickling vetch, which is grass pea, turnip, peas, that kind of stuff after we'd harvest going to corn the next year. And then we had a yield goal of 220 bushels of the acre. We put on no nitrogen, got 176. We put on 36 pounds of nature and got 236, 72 pounds. No difference 214, 233. How do we predict that? I don't know. One of the nice things about living at Lemon, South Dakota if you use an nitrate soil test and you over apply your nitrogen it'll be there next year and you'll get it in your soil test and you can use it next year. If you lived in Iowa or someplace and you had drain tile it would all go in the drain town go in the Mississippi River and be gone. So one of the nice things here North Dakota, South Dakota you can use. The nitrate soil test works really well, right? And if you want to know whether you can really take that nitrogen credit for long-term no-till or not you can't in South Dakota but if you go across the border in North Dakota you can take, was it 40 John or 50 pounds? 50 pounds an acre if for long-term no-till you take that nitrogen credit. So depends, you know, what the hell? I thought that. I was thinking of the railroad tracks here. You know, I'm going, yeah, okay, we can do that. And people will say, well if I no-till if I no-till then it's too wet and all that kind of stuff. If you get stranded in the rain the back 40 drive home across the field of the pasture. Tilled field or a pasture you drive home across the pasture. And so once you get the soil structure I mean the problem with soupy wet soils and stuff in no-till is that first trying to get the soil structure back into that ground. And same way with cows trampling. You know that picture I showed you of the corn stalks those cows hadn't mutted up that field at all. 12 inches of snow and it melted and you know they're penetrating just about this far a little bit in places. But if I have them camping there just turn the cows out where we just turn them out and gonna come back and get them in 48 days we're gonna get, we're getting trails. And we're getting areas around the tanks that are tore up. Weeds and diseases, nature's way of adding diversity of system lacks diversity. So you battle weeds by having diverse rotations and have lots of competition. And we have lots of guys on our doing cover crops and they reduce their weed pressure a lot because if you're not growing something out there the weed will go okay if you're not gonna use that ground I will, right? That's kind of what happens. But if you're gonna have a cover crop out there you won't have the weeds. And in France they're doing a lot of stuff with cover crops now. My good friend, Frederick, that had us over there they're doing a lot of the cover crops thinking that's the way that they're gonna get the guys that quit doing tillage. Because they get them growing cover crops to the benefit of that and then they don't have time to do all their dang tillage. Well, it's working kind of, you know it's kind of interesting but we're gonna take care of it by adding we wanna see at least three crop types long intervals of two to four years are needed to break some disease in weed cycle. We're not afraid of resistant weeds. That's a big talk in the corn belt is all these resistant weeds. It doesn't scare us a bit. There's also a benefit to yield. And I show this because the weed commission is fun, you know, Reed is here and so I'm gonna beat that drum a little bit. The weed commission of all the commissions has been the best one at funding all the research we've done on these systems. I think John Richardson who's now in North Dakota that came from South Dakota would agree. So here's an old study that we did years ago on different rotations with all with no till. Alternate year weed, if we did wheat fallow, wheat, pea, wheat, flax, these are all every other year wheat thing. We had 46 bushel wheat. Two years out of wheat is wheat corn, pea, wheat corn, flax, wheat corn, that fallow, that same thing. We picked up seven, roughly seven, six, seven bushels by just having that extra year. And then we did a rotation, we had spring with winter wheat corn and then this broadleaf. And we did that because of the farm program at the time for all you young guys. You had to try to keep a 50% wheat base if you're a wheat fallow. If you didn't keep your 50% wheat base, you lost money on the program. But if you're gonna do a half wheat, you're better off to do two wheats and two out versus every other year. So a guy in the corn belt would be better off doing corn, corn, soybean, soybean. Now the problem with corn, corn, soybean, soybean, or corn, soybean, or wheat, canola, those kind of things is there's not enough carbon. What's your native vegetation here? How many percent grass? 90, 95% grasses? And you go out there and put in a rotation that's half grass and think you're, you know, you've got to have more carbon in there. Our best rotation right now that we are working with on the farm, we have wheat, wheat, sorghum corn or corn corn, and then one broadleaf, 80% high residue. And it just blows things away because now we're getting in more stuff. In terms of money, I showed this to the guys. This is numbers from back then. They're pretty good numbers now. If I can grow wheat for 245, I'm okay. Wheat Fallow 460, wheat corn Fallow 379, wheat corn P245, but I had a guy one day say, well, can you make any money in them damn peas? And I said, don't have to make money on peas. I just have to lose my last money and it cost me to do summerfowl, right? So that's part of what you think about when you do rotation. We've got a lot of guys calling now wanting to grow lentils because that's the only thing that's worth anything. If everybody that calls me grows lentils, they won't be worth anything next year. And I keep telling them that, you know, like it's interlastic demand. As soon as they get the last lentil they need, they're not worth anything. They're five cent a pound pig feed, right? Weeds, we can use cheatgrass or whatever here for the weed, but what this is saying is we got 10 weeds per acre, each has a hundred seeds that are gonna grow the next year. What happens if we use different rotations, okay? Well, if I have every other year, wheat, fallow, whatever, and I have 10 weeds and whatever, in year seven, this is year seven, I guess that didn't pop up. Year seven, we have 10 million of them, okay? If I do wheat corn fallow or wheat corn pea or whatever, it never does blow up. If I'm going to do every other year something, I'm better off doing wheat, wheat, corn, broadleaf, in that case, then it takes about 13 years for it to get to be a problem. You can use that with water, hamper, anything else. If you do continuous, and what the guys in the cornbell are doing is corn soybeans with Roundup Ready, they blow up in three years because they're using Roundup same time, okay? All time. This is winter wheat that we seeded where my auto-steer didn't work well. My auto-steer better than that. But no herbicide, it's normal for us to not really have to put herbicide on a winter wheat. So we want diversity in seed, date, rooting pattern, root architecture, residue, insects, microorganisms, harvest date, beneficials. So, simple rotations, wheat, corn, fallow, wheat, corn, canola. This is what you think of as a rotation. Corn, soybeans, and what it is, is it's simple. The wheat always goes to corn, always goes to fallow. It's easy if you have a hired man, right? You go, well, all the wheat stuff is gonna go to corn, so that's where you go put your spray on, right? Or where the guy's from the co-op. You don't have to worry about him getting in the wrong field. But it's simple. Limited number of crops to manage the market. The problem is we're consistent in both sequence and interval. The corn is always behind wheat and all the winter wheat's into spring wheat and whatever. So if you have something that's gonna be a problem, it's a problem everywhere, okay? Rotations with perennial sequences are really good. You can do short, stupid rotations for about six years, and then you start getting trouble and then you go off to a perennial. And you kind of hit the reset button and then you come back and do this again. That works really well. Now one of the problems with this, if you take that alfalfa off as hay and all the way and don't put manure and stuff back there, it's the most degrading thing you can do to a piece of ground. Everybody thinks alfalfa's great for soils. If you take the alfalfa off, taking all the nutrients, all the carbon, not bring it back. If you're grazing it, it's different. Same way if you're taking it off, hay, grass hay and doing the same thing, taking it off. Very, very degrading. Our north unit was hayed for probably 60 years before we bought it. It was an incredibly degraded piece of opal promised soil. And we now have it, so it's functioning. But there's a limited number of annual crops to manage your market. That's an advantage. Excellent place to spread manure on the perennial because the weeds don't have, the annual weeds don't have much of a chance. Probably can produce more soil structure when you're using grass. And grass mixtures, grass seed. My father used to, we grew grass seed. That was our perennial thing. We had livestock and we grew grass seed and then we grazed the aftermath. Biomass crops may hold potential if you're gonna make ethanol out of biomass, it should be out of perennial grasses, not out of corn stalks. Difficult to manage the fishing percentage of land and perennial crop without grazing. Using less perennial minimizes the impact unless you have diverse rotations and perennial and it works pretty good. Compound rotations where we do a little bit of bull spring wheat, winter wheat, corn, soybean. Half, I call this my mother-in-law rotation. Half the corn's in wheat stubble, half the corn's in soybeans. So if your mother-in-law or your banker shows up in June, you're over in East, for the east of here, mother-in-law shows up in June, you show her the corn that was planted into soybeans because it's nice and big and it looks great. And they show up in August or early September, you show them the stuff that was in wheat stubble. Right? It spreads your risk. In a wet year, the stuff behind beans makes you lots of money. That high-risk corn makes you a lot of money. And with crop insurance, sometimes it makes sense to take advantage of them. I don't know. Still have the same number of limited crops to manage, but we create a new sequence for some crop types. In the eastern corn belt, we have a corn root worm that flies from the corn fields to soybean fields to lay their eggs. Because they know that the dumb guys in the eastern corn belt is going to plant his corn there. I call that the blonde, sir, I call that the blonde corn root worm beetle. Yeah. Because everybody thinks it's dumb, but it's really smart. Did I get my way out of that one? Sorry. Okay. And then, because they get the, in the western corn belt, when we do this, we get the extended dipos corn root beetle where the eggs don't hatch for two years. So that's why everybody has to use BT every year on corn, even if they're rotating, because the bugs have gotten smarter than the farmers in the corn belt. Rotations where, with complex rotation, where we use some barley instead of all wheat, instead of spring, we would have barley or oats. We have corn, sunflower, millet, and pea. There's still millet or sorghum and corn. We're starting to grow a lot of sorghum in parts of South Dakota now because it breaks up a lot of the corn diseases and insects, and it's more drought tolerant. Okay. So we can do a lot of things with those, and I've got a paper on this, so I'm going fast, you can just go on my website or email me and we'll send it to you. Okay. And then, the stacked rotation where we do wheat, wheat, corn, corn, soybean, soybean. Do you think of that corn root womb beetle that flew from the corn field to the soybean field to lay her eggs? That's fine, that works in this field, but then you screw her up here, right? Because it's not gonna go back, and this one's not gonna go back, your corn's gonna go to soybean, so she screwed up there, she screwed up here because it's gonna go to wheat. You've broken that habit. So even though it looks less diverse to us, it's more diverse to them, and the other thing it does do is it gives us a place to use long residual herbicides. So I talk about that. Long breaks are great for doing some things that it, if you do long grape without using the same crop two times in a row, that's even better. So sorghum corn is a great stack sequence. So we attempt to keep the past population diverse or confused, mix the long and short residual herbicide programs. It reduces the risk of developing this biotype resistance. I say it's not well tested, we've been doing it long enough now that I'm getting a lot of confidence in it. The goal is to be inconsistent in both sequence and interval. So here's some other rotations that we use for different things. I use this, we don't use this one. There's a guy in Kansas that used that, and the Kansas people were telling me about it one day. We got it done, he goes, wheat until he gets goat grass, and he goes sorghum sorghum sorghum until he gets shatter cane, then he goes sunflower, until he gets squaritania. And he said, what a dummy. And I said, he's not as dumb as a guy that does corn soybean, corn soybean, corn soybean. At least he's responding to what's going on. So there's some that we use. All of them have a place, but there's no set recipe or best rotation in individual fields and any different treatments due to soils, location, proximity, history, land, lord, and ownership. Does it make a difference how much carbon you have? Yeah, here's one of our rotations where we have every other year, broadleaf crops that's low in carbon. This was corn, soybean, pea, winter wheat. Both of these fields of winter wheat followed pea. Both of these fields of winter wheat followed corn. The only difference here is over about a 12 year period we had an extra low residue crop in there. And the yields, 60 versus 29, when we had 7.9 inches of rain in 12 months, 92 versus 57, we had a high rainfall year and 56 versus 28 when we had low rainfall year. So this rotation here this year will switch and it'll just be winter wheat corn pea again and this field here will go into perennial grass. So that's how we're gonna fix that, okay? With that, I think I'll quit Ruth, is it lunchtime? Oh, I got a couple minutes, okay. Here's our irrigated stuff which isn't as much interest to you but it shows you that the guys in the corn boulder are not looking correctly at their situation. On our irrigated ground we do have, excuse me, one field that's corn, soybean, has been since 1990. All of our rotations have run since 1990 which when I have college kids come out and we show them what we're doing and I remind them that we started doing this before they were born. It's as scary as hell. But anyway, corn, soybean, if we use a cover crop in there we get 7.3 bushels to the cover crop versus no cover crop. We put a cover crop behind the corn going to soybean. In 2013 soybeans with cover crop 62.9, we would have expected about 55.6 without the cover crop. We didn't do that without the cover crop. We have a rotation that's corn, corn, soybean, wheat, soybean and here's where we have that big cover crop I showed you we're grazing with the cows that hay millet and oats and whatever gave us an opportunity to do all that grazing in there. But this was before we were doing the grazing. The first is soybeans don't have a cover crop in this instance right here. We don't do a cover crop there. 73.6 bushels, second year, 82, 81.2. So if I average those two, it's 78.8 versus 62.9. So in this rotation, this system, we get 62.9 and this system are soybeans average 78.8. So let's look what happens with continuous corn. We have a field that's been continuous corn. 203 bushel corn, soybean 217 and this corn, corn, soybean, wheat, soybean, the corn's better too, so we average 235. So that's better. So let's say if we had 5,000 acres of continuous corn, number one, you have to have 10 cowmblings and a bunch of semis and dryers and harvest a million bushels of corn. But anyway, we get a half a million bushels of corn and corn soybeans, 157,000 bushels of soybeans and no wheat. In this rotation, we don't get quite as much corn as we do in this one, but we get more beans on less acres. Here we would have 2,000 acres of soybeans, give us 157,600 and here we would have 2,500 acres of soybeans, give us less soybeans. That's really an interesting number. And then we get this 1,200 bushels a week. 120,000 bushels a week. So if we look at this, would you trade 72,500 bushels of corn for 120,000 bushels a week? That's really what you gotta ask a guy from the Corn Belt. And the answer should be I would. Plus my wheat control costs are less, my insecticide costs are less. Right? Makes no sense for them to say we gotta do corn and soybeans. They could feed it. For the cheepers they're producing that wheat, they could feed it instead of corn. Anyway, I did the estimate of the difference in economics. And then in reality, they could only probably do 2,000 acres of continuous corn with the same equipment. They could do 4,000 acres of corn soybeans and 5,000 acres of this. And then a new rotation, we're just started with corn, corn soybean wheat. So it's heavy on the corn yet but it's lighter on the wheat. I've traveled some to Argentina, it's kinda interesting, Argentina's in the news again because they just had an election and they're gonna start becoming a real country again, hopefully. But when I first went there, they were doing seven years of pastures and seven years of cropping. So they had a seven-year perennial that they grazed and they produced lots of grass-fed beef and they were a big thorn in our sides from a beef standpoint. And we went to a field, they used cover crops, this is a hairy vetch and rye cover crop going to beans, this is no cover crop here. And look at the soil structure. If you wanna know what soil structure looks like, that's what it looks like. Just looks like chocolate cake and dark and whatever. And then they outlawed, they got a just new leadership that just went out but it's been there for a long time and that new leadership outlawed the export of beef. And the idea they said was so that the poor people in Argentina could afford to buy beef but in reality we all know what happened as they switched from livestock production to all grain production and exported more and the way that the government gets money in Argentina is they take 34% of the soybeans that hit the port go into the government's bins. Okay, so they were trying to get more soybean production. So we went back in 2000, was there two years ago, was there four years ago, right? Whatever. But the last time, not the last time of the time before that that I went back, we went to this exact same field. And once they quit doing the pastures they started doing corn soybeans and mostly soybean soybeans. In that same spot, look at the soil. Let's see that again. And it's probably took about 10 years for that to happen. I think I did this in 2006 when I took this. Organic matter makes a difference. Within all texture groups, the organic matter increased from one to 3% available water holding capacity doubles. You're not short of moisture here, what you're short of here is water holding capacity of soils now. When your grandfather came here your soils were way better than they are now. And he produced relatively better crops and better grass on his pastures and stuff because it hasn't been degraded. When the soil storage capacity is low, much of the rain that falls during extended precipitation is lost. That's why we see more flooding in the corn belt and stuff now because their soils are degraded and more runs off. If you had a bucket, you used to hold 10 inches and now it holds six. As soon as you get a rain, it's full. And they don't have the perennial in there to go down and take that deep water down to 12 feet out so that when you do get a wet year it fills that 12 feet back up again. And the same thing kind of is true here. So we do a lot of stuff with cover crops. We call this catch and release nutrients. A lot of people trying to get you hooked on doing some things with vertical tillage and all this kind of stuff. And I just made this slide up one day and I heard somebody talking about that. All tillage tools destroy soil structure, meaning the water don't go in the ground. So all tillage tools decrease water infiltration. All tillage tools reduce organic matter. They're burning up the organic matter. And all tillage tools stir the weeds around and increase weeds. We've got a lot of data that shows that too. Tillage is the agriculture which fracking us to petroleum. What tillage did for our ancestors is they used it to get at all that stored nutrient that was put there over centuries. In speed it's availability to our crop. So they both increase the speed and extent of nutrient removal from a resource leaving the resource degraded. They're plowing like this now in France trying to get the last little bit of goodie out of that soil. But there isn't a hell of a lot of goodie left there as you could tell by looking at it. It's just, it's amazing. And then they just pour a lot of stuff on. Continuous low disturbance no-till in combination with diverse rotation and cover crops is a biological answer to a biological problem. When I was in France I got to visit one of my favorite people. It's a young Nuffel scholar. We get these Nuffel scholars from Europe and Australia and whatever but she was the first one from France. It's a British thing and now they're branching out. Name is Sarah Singler and this is her farm. She no-tills, this is her grandfather used to do, used to do plowing. And so she had a picture of him plowing. She was looking backwards and now her grandfather still does a lot of the seeding looking forward. Thank you. Don't get that chance very often for me to say that. We're gonna see next spring if there's a lot of difference in weeds. I'll repeat the question. Are the cows causing more weeds? There's two issues there. One is if they're stirring it. And we had absolutely no hoof damage other than, you know, and with our little squares we're gonna be able to tell exactly when we're getting it but probably getting just a little bit now so maybe we'll see some more weeds. The other way you'll get weeds with cattle is they'll have them in the room and as they come in it takes three, four days for that or in their hair or whatever but in the room in that three or four days for them to clean out. And so we're doing some fecal sampling. He's giving me fecal sampling. I say we because I have a graduate student. When you have to do things like fecal sampling you say we did this and it was actually the graduate student that does it. It's our dirty little secret. But we're doing fecal sampling and what's kind of happening is the ones that are on the continuous are running out of energy right now, which is kind of interesting but they're also looking at weed seed stuff in there. And the ones that were moving every three days they pick up quite a bit of energy that first day because nobody's been there before. And then by the third day they're starting to run out but then we move them again. That's the reason for the three day. You can give a cow protein once every three days and she's fine or whatever that kind of stoke up the room and then you keep her from getting too stoked up too and we didn't have enough that we got anybody sick from having them in the continuous stuff because I'm a better combine operator than that. But and we didn't have any hybrids in that in those fields that really blew off a lot of years. So yeah. No, no, you don't make it work. I grow them in the same sequences every year after wheat, we'll put them in there. But the idea is to try to start them before you harvest the wheat. If you can pick up, if you really get them started about the time the wheat goes to soft dough or between anthesis and soft dough if you could actually start the cover crop then then you don't have weeds. What happens is by the time you get to harvest you have weeds starting. Well the seed ball. And then you run either your tram lines in wheat or you run your tram lines where you sprayed with your ground sprayer and spread it with that or you have an airplane. And the airplane guys here aren't into this yet but that's one of the things I think we can get them talked into. So we have a lot of work going on right now with seed coatings. We got a grant from Howard Buffett Foundation to do some things. And we were free to do whatever we wanted to but that board of directors and Beau used to be on the board of directors so he knows our strategic plans and everything. He could tell you what they are and one of them was livestock. Has been for a long time and one was to do something with making sure we can get these things to start. And it might be we're gonna plan them at the same time and one thing has a delay on it so crop A starts and crop B comes later but right now we're looking at having something that makes them grow on top of the ground. Yes. Yeah what about doing actually a double four inch crop and that's a slam dunk. That's an automatic. And for guys that are livestock people and then one of those slides that flashed by you know livestock guys have a lot better opportunity to do these things because you do have the opportunity to take that first crop off and then do a second crop. In the farm journal thing that we're doing with Cronin's which are you know just right basically straight across. They were taking oats and oats peahay and baling it and then what the plan was is to put those off on the edge of the field and plant pearl millet and hay millet and cow peas and some of those things. And those got swaths and swath grazing is really slick. If you you know if you want to come down and see what happens it's kind of good if there's anybody here doing it. There's probably somebody on that panel this afternoon that does it so. But they'd swath and then they were planting Triticali between the swaths so they took a 15 foot John Deere drill and planted Triticali when they swath for the swath grazing. Then the plan was to move the bales back out in lines across the field and use them to hold the posts for the hot wire. And then all you have to do is just kind of move enough hot wire to it and they'd have the oats bales they'd have the hay millet and that kind of thing and they'd have the growing Triticali. And the only thing they did wrong is they hauled the bales home and didn't put up the hot wires, right? And it still worked pretty well, but they didn't have the Dan Forge came down and he's on our board and he walked through where we're swath grazing. Our swaths are all spread out and gone. So they're not got those little piles in them and theirs had the little piles because the cows would go here and then they go over there and then somebody poop on this one and then whatever, how that goes. And so then he went home and he had all the guys come down and look at our swath grazing. So you have to go down there. So we'll see if that's enough to inspire them to start doing some fence. But fencing is a pain in the butt. So that's why the South Pell Grazing Cell will have shelter, water, just be a big pin. It'll have shelter, it'll have water, it'll go move up and down the field and we can call it up on our smart phones and look at our cows and, you know. We have the technology to do all that now, but we prefer to put all our money into hauling crap to the house and hop back and whatever. You're supposed to sit at home and listen to the radio and sit in the cab whether your wife is there. See it's like. Wait a minute. You better stop now. But do what I do, get your wife a job. Anyway.