 My name is David Karky. I'm with SDSU Extension and work as agronomy field specialist but for last last two years or so I and my colleague Amanda Bachman out of peer regional center Are also co-co-ordinating SEAR efforts in the state and our next speaker Ryan Schmidt who received Partnership grant from North Central SEAR So our next speaker Ryan will share his project So Ryan Schmidt has been a research scientist with egg-dissist Foundation since 2018 I hope I read the egg-dissist or egg-dissist correctly, but you can see you can correct me later He credits his upbringing on a family farm For honing his interest to work with farmers and ranchers to develop Practical solutions to their problems When not building roller crimpers his time is spent investigating services provided By the arthropods in agro ecosystems So let's invite Ryan for his presentation. He's a second our second speaker this morning. All right. Thank you Happy to be here this morning Yeah, I'm gonna be talking about a roller crimper build that we did with some local farmers in our area So just to start off with I'd like to get a little bit info. How many people are familiar with what a roller crimper is And what it's supposed to be doing Okay. All right, quite a few hands, but not everyone so maybe we'll go over some of the basics here So in our area I work with a lot of big commodity producers a lot of corn soy producers a lot of cattle producers as well and we we like to have a coffee club with some of the local folks in the area and One of the issues they have every spring is they like planting cover crops into their fields for the soil health benefits like this field you see here and A lot of times they they'll plant zero rye. That's the big one right now That works really well and the corn soy systems and they can plant in Green into that is what they call it. They're planting their soybeans green into that rye And then typically to deal with that rye They don't want it competing with their cover their cover crop of rye competing with their cash crop They have a couple of different methods If they're not organic a lot of times they'd like to use a burn down application of herbicides After they have their their roundup ready soybeans planted in there Or if there's some of the organic producers that we work with They'll typically till up the field and then plant their their soybeans into that so those are the two methods the But there's you know the the conventional guys that are into cover crops They want to reduce their herbicides as much as possible. They don't like messing with that stuff For for various reasons from health health reasons, too. They just don't like it They they want to reduce their herbicide patches to reduce their fuel costs The tillage guys know what they're doing to their soil by tilling it up But they don't have much of an option since they're organic folks So they started tossing around this idea They've seen a lot of research out there on roller crimping and they are wondering could we do that in our area and So we said we think you can but it's going to cost you about 30 to 35,000 bucks to get a roller crimper and They kind of got quiet because that's that's a big investment for something that they're unsure about And and so we're like we're sitting around the table having coffee and we said it's not that complicated of a machine We think we have the expertise to do this so We we decided we're gonna build a roller crimper for these folks with their help so We called around and we said this is our basic frame That we're gonna use for our equipment we we went out and we found just an old salvage disc Little tip if you're thinking about doing this on your own place Anything below 30 foot a dealership in our area doesn't want to touch so they typically sit in tree lines right now and The farmer will sell it to you for thousand two thousand bucks So they're quite a bit cheaper The reason being no conventional farmer nowadays has anything less than a 30-foot disc So they have no trade-in value so we could find those really cheap and we picked this one up right here and We wanted to turn it into something like that and To do that we did a little bit of planning like I said I am I research insects So I have no idea what I'm doing with a lot of this stuff So we just started spitballing ideas and we're lucky at our partnership grant the farmers that were on that grant were Experts at actually one was a machinist professional machinist another one was a professional welder And then the other one taught at SDSU taught engineering And manufacturing at SDSU for a while So they helped us come up with this schematic and just to kind of go through for folks that are familiar with roller crimpers They typically have a chevron pattern. It's like a V on the drums and The idea for this grant was that we wanted Anybody to be able to build this in their farm shop and the chevron patterns can be a little bit difficult for your typical farm shop to produce because they're they have to curve over the drum as well as Together and meet in the middle and it all has to be pretty perfect So that's that's something most folks can't do so we just Said, you know, we found a company up in in Canada that was just taking steel bars And just running them across a couple feet and then alternating them like that The reason for that alternating pattern if you would run that steel bar across that you're crimping bar all the way across It would bounce so much it would drive you crazy as you're driving down the down the field so by alternating it like that it reduces the bounce at least that was the hope for us and Yeah, this is kind of the the side view of the drum here And we went with a 16 inch outside diameter drum because we stole that from the manufacturers as well So no reason to overthink it if somebody else has done it and done it well And we'll take their good ideas every day So I don't have time to go over all the specifics We're gonna have a video series coming out here in January with How to video of how if you want to you can build this yourself along with the plans for it as well with all the accurate measurements and whatnot so That'll be coming later, but I'll just give you guys a brief overview And if you have questions you can you can talk to me later But first thing is get your supplies like I said we went with the 30 foot. This is an international 490 pretty common in our area Really easy to find and really cheap Take off the disc gangs and find yourself some roller drums These are salvage ones from the oil fields out in North Dakota And they just were out of salvage yards right next to us 20 miles down the road And they're pretty pretty easy to find really cheap And then oh I should mention On those drums you gotta you gotta weld your crimper blades and Rather than find those salvage. It was easier to go to a max steel which is up the road from us in Watertown And they just had all the supplies there. We needed for about the same price as a salvage yard So we just got it from there and they cut it up for us that saves you an immense amount of time If you're gonna be doing this yourself if somebody has a laser cutter and can do it for you cheap do that So next you put it on and just to prepare you if you're going with our method here These are the steel bars that we melt weld on instead of a Chevron steel bar pattern. You better be prepared for a lot of welding Stick welding you can do it But you're gonna go through a lot of sticks so I'd recommend a wire feed welder and We kind of coached folks through On the measurements and how to make sure that everything's accurate on those drums there in our video series So we won't go over that today Next was just mounting those drums Right here. Here's one of our completed drums on to our disc frame. We have our supervisor cat right there And this is this is Ali Vincent He was he was the professional welder and kind of coached us through a lot of this stuff This is Mike Bredesen. He was other scientist that helped me with this and we just took an old Another salvage piece of equipment that was in the tree line. This is the toolbar off of a international planner And we made up these brackets and kind of used that as a yoke to set over the wings of our Wing of the the disc right there. So that's the trickiest part But we were able to figure it out Mike and I have no shop experience at all So if we can figure it out, you guys can can definitely figure it out then You're much much handier than we are at this kind of stuff So we got it on there and then it was time to test it out So we took it to another farmer that was partnering with us today and On this project, excuse me and he we tested out on a field He had a field of volunteer rye come up So it wasn't a great spot to test but we just wanted to make sure the thing didn't rattle itself to pieces and fall apart So here it is out in the field And you can see here. It's rolling pretty smooth along And and we were pretty happy nothing fell off. They are happy only issue is With this kind of design. I'll say if you don't have a thick stand a rye, which this gentleman didn't It will get some mud if it's wet it will get some mud packed in there And there are some workarounds to that that we've figured out So in the future we would do some modifications to it so that there would be less chance to get mud into it And this is a nice stand of rye. We had with another cooperating farmer And it pulled much better We didn't have the mud issues in this field because you have thick stand a rye and it crimped it really nicely So we were really happy the farmer was also really happy We also had some folks that said they wanted to use it on their weeds It crimped down thistles in a big thistle patch in a field for us And I took it out because I wanted to test it out to one day and get rid of these rag weeds That were behind the lab, so and those are still falling down or they're still knocked down So it did a good job of that too And just to show you here it does crimp quite nicely We got a crimp here on the same plant there. It's about every 12 13 inches it crimped It's supposed to be every seven inches But I think that was a weight issue and we resolved that now we can add more weight to it so that it can better And just to show you the the main purpose of this is we're kind of cheap So we wanted to build this for less than $30,000 right now in materials is 5,000 I still have a couple bills that are out there, so it'll be about 6,000 when it's all done Which is considerably cheaper. I just looked up a professionally built one. It's about 32,000 right now for something really similar and If you didn't want to build it yourself The the machinists and the weld shop said they could build it if we could get the supplies for about 6,000 bucks so if you didn't want to do the work and you just got the supplies together You could have this put together for you for 11,000 total and I should mention that this was a partnership grant was there And it was definitely a community project We had a lot of folks come and help and work on this and believe me Mike and I have never Welded in our lives. We've never taken a machine class at all So if we did a lot of the welding and a lot of the work on it We just needed some coaching and some expertise from our farmer partners and they did some of the dangerous stuff for us Like Seth right here So if we can do it anybody can do it, but they were a huge help so If anyone has any questions or or or anything like that they can email me or just get a hold of me at the conference Thanks Can you talk about importance of building relationships for these projects? Yeah In short our project wouldn't have happened if we didn't have relationships. It came from Having a coffee club with our farmers just to chat and find out where they're at with things and what's important to them and And that's what it built into Was a was a huge project as well as the project just wouldn't have gotten done We did not have the expertise to pull this off So we relied heavily on our relationships with the farmers in the area to gather supplies and Do all the work What advice would you have for somebody who's interested in applying for a grant? Especially on the Sarah grants I know Beth Nelson at a University of Minnesota is really in charge of a lot of that and I'd say she's Helped me a lot as we were getting through the application process as far as what reviewers might be looking for You know is this project meet The what the criteria that the grant is designed for as well. She was she was a big help