 In 2013, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a cooperative agreement with the South Dakota No-Till Association and IGRO, SDSU Extension, for delivering the latest soil health and productivity technology to South Dakota farmers and ranchers. A series of two local events were held in South Dakota, in Lemmon and Fort Peer. Yeah, thank you, and on the program it says, systems approach to no-till. I don't put the word no-till in my title slide to be truthful. No-till is a tool. My first word up there is residue. It's residue is going to make that system work. Now, granted, I do a lot of work in Nebraska, a lot of work at a research farm where I have those long-term plots. It's about 10 miles east of Lincoln. So a little ways south of you guys, but I do a lot of traveling around the countryside. In fact, I even slipped a few South Dakota slides in this presentation. But again, when it comes to residue, that's the key. Protect that soil. Keep the sun and wind off of it. Absorb energy. Impact. Cycle those nutrients of the residue into your next crop. One of the things I hate most is the guys who think they got to get rid of the residue or get rid of the protection for that soil. Uniformity. I like uniformity every day of the year when I look at my fields. A lot of people think about a uniform picket fence stand on planting, for instance, or a uniform pesticide application. I like uniformity every day. Right now it's uniform snow cover, perhaps. But again, systems approach because in no-till, every step affects the next. Now it could be in the olden days with tillage, you know, if you screwed up a little bit on the tillage, you just did another pass. If you screwed up a herbicide application, you just did another herbicide application or another cultivation or another tillage pass or whatever. If you start thinking ahead, then you're more careful in each step. So again, we start thinking about it. Tillage has never built soil structure. Tillage always destroys soil structure. It destroys soil biological life. It started comparing different tillage systems years ago and figuring that real fast. Again, Mother Nature never does tillage. Farmers have gotten a lot better. There are even some residue out there that reduce tillage. The 85 Farm Bill, you know, made people start thinking about that for some erosion control. They weren't thinking about soil biological life, though. We got to think about that as well. And again, given talks before on compaction, again, tillage causes compaction because it destroys soil structure such that there's nothing there to support you. I mentioned the raindrop compaction this morning. Again, residue out there, just take care of that. Living roots, take care of that. Again, compaction is not an issue when you get in long-term establish no-till. And driving on and telling the wet soils main problem with compaction but even when it comes to soil biological life, soil structure, any tillage is bad. Now, a lot of people ask me about vertical tillage, and I'm only going this deep. No, that's exactly the way or you don't want to disturb. That's the way that all the biological activity is going on. This one I do have to show you, though. I said tillage has never built soil structure. In this case, it has. This is an organic producer. The ground surface is just about where the screen is being mounted here. And this is an organic wheat producer in Western Nebraska. Wheatfella rotation. After harvest, through the fallow year, onto the next year, so roughly 14 months, he has anything from 15 to 20 tillage trips since he's organic. He does that to control his weeds. He has built soil structure. He's beat every poor lot of soil. He's built something we call massive soil structure. Again, tillage is not good. These layers down here were interesting. That's where you add in sweets or blades at different depths. You could actually pull those layers out and see the smears on there. Again, below this, though, beautiful soil structure. Free soil, wetting and drying. But if you can't get water roots down through this, it doesn't matter what's down here. I hate people who come along and erase that, where it goes all the way to the soil surface. Now, wheatfella rotation organic wheat, this is what wheat look like. Again, when it comes to soil biological life, do you see any? Does my footprint there look that much different than this one? We know there's no life there. I think it's pretty close to no life there as well. Again, at same area, the native soil structure. You know, there's roots down there, putting carbon from the carbon dioxide down into the soil. Mother Nature did that with the living root in that soil profile. Maybe we were at 10, 12 months a year. Now, it may not have been echoing, but it was there. We come along doing crop production. We got that living root there maybe only five months a year. Again, that's where it covers perennials and the rotations, whatever. Let's get those living roots back into the soil system. Again, build soil aggregates. This is about 10 years plus no-till. Just walked across the fence. This is a conventional till. So again, we got to build that. So again, that's just sort of reinforcing some of the things we heard from speakers this morning. Stop talking about some of my experiences then. 1981, I started actually in 78, I started working with no-till. 1981, I had a little three-year grant, and I did tillage comparisons. And this slide is taken about 20 years after that. Those plots are still going. Grant ended. I thought, well, I'm going to have to plow up the no-till. It's never going to work. In about three years, it took me to figure out how to no-till. Think back to 1981, we didn't have the herbicides or the equipment we have today. It's a lot easier today. Again, here's soybeans planted in the grain sugar residue that year. There's some beans under a crust. There's some beans laying in dry soil. Some beans are never going to grow. On the no-till side, virtually every bean is up and growing. I love no-till. I love that time. We didn't have roundup ready crops. Roundup was $100 a gallon. I learned to no-till without roundup. We put down our early pre-plant herbicide and when it's drained and activated, we have weed-free environments when we plant. I like that. I don't find up resistance. That's making a comeback, residual herbicides. I've got a separate, all-around presentation on water savings and no-till. But again, by parking the tillage, we save water. Reducing evaporation of the mulch out there, we save water. Better infiltration, we save water. I have a question mark here because in my presentation, I've got a six-inch rain that happened overnight. But again, we start looking at water savings. That's what I want to put to use. And when it comes to putting it to use, 2000 was a year that we only had 13 inches of rainfall during the entire year. All of our neighbors are harvesting 25 bushel beans, felt pretty good with that little rain till they heard my no-till, went 47. Grades serving that year to the line again, till versus the no-till. Again, using that water, I love the no-till system. 2008 or 2009, somewhere in there, I had phone calls from farmers saying, boy, my no-till doesn't look good compared to tilled. And I says, why is that? Well, it was a cool, wet spring. I went out there and started looking, and there's to the line. I go, like, they don't look that bad. And again, when you start thinking about it, in the early days of no-till, when you don't have a soil biological life, you don't have the soil structure, you don't have the aggregate there, it could be a minor problem. The quicker you get that healthy soil system, the problem goes away. Now, it was interesting, though, as I walked out here and I faced the no-till side and snapped that picture. Looks fairly uniform. Remember I said I like uniformity every day of the year. You may look at that, and this is after 28 years of continuous no-till. See how little residue I've got? It's a corn bean rotation at this time. I've got so much biological activity, my residue is disappearing too fast. And again, when a producer calls me, he says, how do you deal with this residue? I know they don't have soil biological activity. Get that going, your residue cycles for you. Now, it's the no-till side. Turn to the till side. Not near as uniform. It was planted the same day. That uniformity, lack of uniformity in this case, costs you on yield, uniformity every day of the year. 2009, good rainfall year to the line. No-till, till, look at standability. Again, the tillage destroys soil structure, the root system there, you get a heavy rain, wet soil, wind blows. Standability issues gone away for us as well when we go to the no-till. We plant deeper, better root system. 2015, so this is now 35 years of tillage versus, tillage down here versus no-till. This is dry land production, 10 miles east of Lincoln. I like the no-till. Oops, I just mentioned one thing here. 2007, I used to have a no-till with crop cultivation. I changed that to no-till with cover crop. I used to have two disquings versus one disquing. I changed that to two disquings with the cover crop. And I did that because I don't have enough residue out there. I'm trying to grow some more residue. Now, there's a lot of producers who just look at this and say, well, look how much yield you gave up with having the cover crop out there. I say, look how much yield you gave up by doing tillage. I'm still ahead of the tillage and I'm growing a healthier soil there. Again, when it comes to tillage, a lot of people think no-till is parked this, just plant. No, it's systems approach. Harvest, for instance, uniform height through residue, uniform spread of residue, uniformity every day of the year. Now, here's one of our fields already planted. When did the combine run the year before harvesting those soybeans? If you can see that in your fields, you've got a problem. We want a uniform cover of residue everywhere. It's found a corn bean rotation there. Now, a lot of people ask me, don't you run residue movers? I go, why? Right now, every seed is under the same residue cover in the same soil moisture in the same soil temperature. It's gonna give you your most uniform stands, your best yields. I hate residue disturbance. Also, our herbicide's already raining and activated. I hate round-up ready corn because I like round-up ready beans. But in our corn herbicide, we put down a broadleaf, the grass control early, made some 2-4-D for the emerged winter annuals. Come back and post-emerge two different modes of action. Perhaps, in our beans, we put down a grass control early, we use round-up. Across the corn bean rotation, I get seven different modes of action. I'm not worried about weed resistance either. Again, systems approach. We'll start thinking about things like that, how it all fits together. Again, when we have the combine around the year before, you know, a lot of people don't think too much that little pile of residue back there in the axle of the combine. I don't think too much of it either when it plugs up the drill, the fertilizer rig, the planter, whatever. This was on a drilling where we had problems with residue distribution. Taking the extra 10 minutes to set the combine, this problem goes away. Again, systems approach, each step affects the next. You know, on a platform head, you need to have chaff distribution. Choppers, in the early days of no-till, you'll love them because the residue's broken up and break down fast. Longer you're in no-till, you're gonna hate them because it opens up, residue breaks down fast. We got rid of choppers years ago. Chaff spreaders are a must because right now I got a windrow of pods here. Less here, another windrow of pods. Next spring, that's two different soil temperatures, two different soil moisters. Put chaff distribution on platform heads. Again, here's an example. Producer called me, says, I got trouble with my wheat stand. Before I even got there, he says, I already figured it out. He says, the wrong combine harvested the soybeans. I said, what wrong combine? He says, we've got two, one with chaff spreader, one without. And again, you can tell where his pod windrow was and his 30-foot head out there. Here's one that went the other way. This is a little six-robe combine when it harvested the soybeans before and planted the grain sorghum here. The good grain sorghum is where the chaff windrow was because he's got extra moisture there, cooler soil there. And so again, uniform residue distribution, I want that out there in the field. You know, too many people just think about the harvest. No, spend the money, get that stuff spread out. If you're gonna harvest that residue off, maybe windrows is great. But even if you're gonna do tillage here, all right, too many tillage can handle a windrow like that. The ones that really bother me are those of these guys. Convert it to income. I will sell my corn residue in large round bales at $250 a ton. I don't know anybody who'll pay that because that's about what I'm giving up per acre when I bail off the residue. Leave the residue out there. Just every one of these 1,000-pound corn bales is a $20 bill when it comes to nutrient value alone. And I know guys selling it for $20 a ton to the feedlots. They're losing double already. But when you think about what's going on out there, I can go to the co-op, buy the NPKS, makes those $20 up, but I can't buy the carbon that I'm losing. There's a lot of carbon going away there. You know, if you need the livestock feed, they got legs, bring them out there because as I heard this morning, about 80% of it stays behind as far as the nutrients. Now, this one needs a few cross fences. You greatly improve manure distribution if they cattle are more concentrated and moving more often. Again, when you're not nutrient distribution, uniformity every day of the year, the cross fences helps reduce this problem. But again, when it comes to the carbon removal, you know, a lot of people say, I got plenty of residue out there. You know, the NRCS years ago, an 85 farm bill, they said if I leave half the residue out there, I'm gonna cut erosion in half, or leave 30% cover, I'm sorry. 30% cover cuts erosion in half. I got more than 30% cover there. That's all I need for water conservation, right? Not quite. Norm Cloughy down at Garden City, Kansas was doing work on evaporation from the soil surface, bare 800 inch per day. Now, let's just for a quick math, say I'm growing 100-day corn, that's eight inches lost to evaporation off of bare soil. Leaving some cover there, wait a minute, 75% cover is only 700, that's 100 days, that's one inch water saved. They didn't cut it in half, did it? 100% cover is down here, that's three inches of water saved in the growing season just by leaving the cover out there. Again, when it comes to sowing residue, that's yield you just gave up if you lost three inches of water. I asked Norm about that, I says, what even, 30% cover cuts erosion in half, what happens here? He says, build the best house you can. Our 19 insulation, the walls are 38 insulation, the ceiling, triple pane windows, and when the kids go out the door, they leave the door open, all the heat gets out. Water, vapor and soil does the same thing, perforantial flow, you need 100% cover. Too often I see people who bail up their wheat straw, they let weeds grow. Some people say, oh, this is poor man's cover crop, well, not quite, it's not very uniform, but anytime I got bare soil exposed to the sun, I got problems. Now, what's interesting though, a lot of people think those weeds are using water. When you go out there with a soil moisture probe, there's probably less water here than there is underneath that weed. It's because the sun and wind are kept off that soil surface. That's where I want a cover crop. The cover crop, I manage it, I don't let it go to seed. Also, it's managed because it's uniform standout there. Again, we gotta treat our wheat stubbles. Well, I used to think that. I plant the cover crop now. If I got a cover crop growing there, my wheat stubble doesn't need treating. In fact, I don't spray for volunteer wheat anymore because my cover crop gets seeded immediately after wheat harvest. That takes care of volunteer wheat for me as well. Because my seeds in the ground, the volunteer wheat seed is on top of the ground. That's the ones that mice and bugs eat. My cover crop grows. Again, chaff distribution is important. Straw distribution is important. This one, you don't see any wind rows out there. That's what I want to see. Again, if you're doing a double crop or a cover crop, get that out there seeded right away. A lot of guys doing the double crop and cover crop, they'll say, I'm the chopper out there because I don't want long pieces of straw out there. No, we leave ours unchopped. Leave it as long as possible. But again, here's the double crop. Right as the combine's leaving the field, they're seeding right away. But again, that standing residue, Nielsen, Akron, two extra inches of water in the non-growing season. That reduced evaporation Norm was talking about was during the growing season. Take those three inches there and two more here if your soil can store it. That's more water. Residues out there making it work. And again, the taller residues, a lot of guys go into the stripper header. Leave that residue taller yet. Leave it where it's attached and you don't have to spread it. Here's over here at Martin's house because of an iron's planter. Minimal soil disturbance. Out there planting the day I visited was planting sunflowers in stripper head harvested wheat stubble. Now, some people don't like the stripper head harvested stuff when that wet snow comes with a little bit of wind because it all goes flat. Others love it because that's 100% cover out there. So again, manage the system. Now when you have a long piece of straw out there, that's when you're gonna get rid of residue movers that turn and twist because a lot of times they'll just wrap up residue. Especially when you start going into some tall cover crops. You wanna get rid of the residue movers as well. Again, here's Mark Watson out of Alliance, Nebraska. Stripper head harvested wheat stubble. Planting right through it, no residue movers. Our combine, we're in a silver cedar. We don't run chopper on the back. It's a small farm. Got terraces, only 15 feet wide. Silver cedar, something like that. All right. Again, we don't run the chopper. We leave the straw as long as possible. My next spring, that straw's gone. But we leave our residue as tall as we can because it's not touching soil microbes. Now, a lot of people say I'm gonna cut down short, get all the contact with the soil. If you got soil biological life, that residue would disappear. If you don't have soil biological life, you're gonna have a matter of residue you can't get through next year. Cut it tall. Leave residue as tall as possible. Anything that's standing upright is anchored and attached. Soil will be holding it so their equipment can pass through it. If it's standing upright, you don't have to cut it. If corn harvest, we don't need the chaff spreader. We're all lazy though, we don't take it off. This is a producer I worked with. This is a, the year I took this picture, he had a seven pivot average of 265 corn. On the slopes, he needs the no-till-for-road control. If you're looking close, those are 18, 20-inch rails going through that big cat, roughly 265 corn, and that's all those stuff's coming out the back. The corn head processes your residue for you if your corn head's working properly. Worst thing you can do is put a corn reel on and push all that stock to the nears and leaves. Well, you want the ears to go in, but you don't need the rest of the stuff going through the combine. Corn head should process it for you. Again, uniform height, processed. The cat combine has a knife-to-knife snap and roll design on there. A lot of people say, well, I can process the residue with a separate trip. Or I can buy a shredder, it goes on the bottom of the corn head. No, that takes money, it takes horsepower. I don't like those. I hate cutting residue loose. It's going to blow in the wind. It's going to move with flowing water. Again, it's wasted operation in my book. Now here's the field. Day after combining. Who'd be afraid of no-tilling to that one? One's honest over here. Chains on your meters, good idea. This is the harvest of the six-row combine. What if you had a 12-row planter? You start planting, and these first six rows are leading in the same direction as the planters. You want the next six rows are coming right back at you. Every hose, wire, cable, chain just got caught snagged near a custom no-till. Systems approach would tell me if my combine is half as wide as my planter, you combine two paths the same direction, two paths the same direction, plant the same direction the stalks are leaning. Little things add up when you start thinking about it. This is actually a combine with intermeshing snapping rolls. As such, when one flute hits the stalk leans this way, another one leans this way, you get some ear toss out the side of the combine head, so you're in the combine head up high. And this stalk has never gone through the snapping rolls. There's nothing there to process it. Now, if you want it to hang around for a while, that's great. I love that. Now, some guys will say, oh, spray some liquid nitrogen on there or feed the microbes to break that residue down. How many soil microbes do you see up here? Don't spray nitrogen on there to feed the microbes, unless the more microbes are there, that means the residue's touching the soil. And if you've got a good balance system, they don't need the extra food. So again, think little things adding up. Here's the intermeshing snapping rolls. Right behind the intake screw, Warren right there, stripper plate's Warren right there. That's why those stalks are leaning. You're physically just combing the ears off those stalks. Now, John Deere had the intermeshing snapping rolls for years, they've changed their snapping roll design in the new corn heads. They actually, in their old corn heads, they had tapered snapping rolls. I love the tapered snapping rolls. The stalk gets through there, goes on up, where it's distributed. A lot easier to no tail behind that. Here's a farmer I met in Kansas. He says, you know, put a lean bar out front. Lean the stalks over to protect all those hoses, wires, cables, chains. He added some extra weight. He's got his fertilizer, he's doing everything in one pass. Some guys love the one pass system. I know, Dwayne's a huge fan of the one pass system. And it's because if you've got a wide crop rotation, one pass makes sense. We've got some guys in Nebraska that do irrigation, do only corn. How many days you got to plant corn before you lose yield? 20, 30 days? How many weeks do you have that you can be putting on your fertilizer? 20 or 30 weeks. Why would you slow the planter down? Now, if I got a wide crop rotation, I'm doing some early spring crops, some corn beans, all the way to fall crops. Now it could be that I got this planter as busy now doing everything because I can't come back to that field later to put on that fertilizer. Again, I mean, start thinking systems approach. One pass might be great for labor savings, but is it true timing to get everything done properly? Again, I love the one pass system if you've got a lot of crop rotation, crop variety. I know I put in Foggy over here. They like the one pass, but he's got, I don't know, I don't want you to discount what 10 different crops going out there. Yeah, and here's an air seeder. This guy even filled his full of concrete just to make sure he leans the stalks over. He's planting into sunflower stalks. Here's a modern Richter's drill. Again, lean butt out front, lean those stalks over. Just little things start to add up. Here's one of our fields. This is when we used to run knife-to-knife snapper rolls on a red combine. And we had, that's the day after combine about two and a bush of corn. Previous one was 90 bush of corn. This one was too much processing once our no-till system got established. When I say too much processing, well, the knife-to-knife snapper roll does not cut the stalk off. It just runs that close together. And as it rotates, that opens up to the stalk, basically goes straight down, crushed, scored. Here's what our fields look like. There's, again, two and a bush of corn residue the next spring with our soil-bodgic activity. We got rid of the knife-to-knife snapper rolls who was processing the residue too much. We got rid of that combine and went to our silver seeder with tapered snapper rolls. Run the corn head a lot higher and let that residue hang around until next spring because we don't want to process the residue. And again, if you're in first year no-till, you're gonna love processing residue. If you're in long-term no-till and you have all this activity, stop processing the residue. And again, this is about 220 bush of corn. Look how little residue is coming out of the back of the combine. Corn head is processing the stalks. Again, uniformity every day of the year. We got snow cover right now. We like tall stalks to catch the snow. Uniform cover. We like the tall stalks. That's not corn stalks there, that's grain sorghum. There's 24 inches of snow out there. That's extra water for us. And a uniform snow cover. Too often I see things like this. Here's till on this side versus no-till here. That's a little more uniform. But over here he says, wow, I want the snow to blow off so it warms up. Well, you add that little warm up, it'll dry out. But it also freezes harder because there's no insulated blanket there. We got a weather station on our research farm 10 miles east of Lincoln. Our ground is not frozen yet to two inches. We've had nighttime low this last week. It was seven degrees below. We're not frozen yet because we got insulated blanket on top, residue, and a living root. Cool season cover, soil biology going on. We'll go through some winters we don't even freeze two to four inches for much more than about a week. People worry about cold wet soils in the spring. Not ours. But again, think about this over here. It's gonna freeze harder. And in the spring, yes, it's gonna warm up, dry out. But where the drift is, it's gonna stay cold and wet. So much for uniformity, taller residue out there. Again, tiles being full of soil from our long-term tillage plots. This is from no-till, a piece caved off here. This is from the till. There's some research coming out of France that is saying in no-till, the soil temperature in the spring are actually warmer because heat can rise from below. On the till, it can't come up through this layer. We see the same thing. We can plant our no-till sooner than our tilled neighbors can plant their fields. Our goal is to have all of our corn beans and myeloplana by May one when even our own university researchers say you can't plant soy beans till May fifth because the soil is not warm enough in tilled soils. Ours are already up and growing. So again, think about soil structure. I failed to point it out on mine. I showed that till versus no-till. If you may have noticed that tilled side was lower elevation tillage beat down the soil structure. Hey, state plots, same thing. The till plots are shorter than the no-till plots. Tillage beats down the soil structure. I get a better soil structure, more pore space there, store water, more space for air exchange. But I had a lot of farmers who tell me why no-till? In Nebraska, no-till are corned into bean residue. To make no-till work, you need continuous no-till. You know, they don't have residue here. They don't have soil structure here. Yes, he planted without tillage. He saved the tillage dollars that year, but as far as the soil's concerned, it's still till soil. You go further east, you go to Ohio, 95% of their soybeans are no-till. They till before they plant their corn. No, you had till nothing. Every crop has to be no-till to make it work, and diversity in their rotation. Now, and again, in that first year, when you don't have soil life, you got a little bit of crust there, you got something there. There's a lot of companies out there that want to sell you something. Airway here, there's Phillips hairls, Phoenix hairls. There's all sorts of vertical tillage tools. They'll say, you go out there and you fluff that layer of residue, fluff that top layer of soil such that it'll warm up and dry out. Here's a follow-up demonstration. You just created a mat here. You're gonna have problems next spring. The guys who run the fluffing hairls, as they're called, will run it half day in front of the planter on a soil that has no structure, no soil biological life. It might be a transition tool. To me, it's still full of tillage. It's not a no-till tool. Ridge tail for irrigation. There's a company in Nebraska that's pushing this thing, pulls the heart of the root stump out. They actually brought it up from Texas from Cotton Country, pulling out stumps for a bull wheel of control. And it says, well, planter run a lot smoother. We found out every place we ran it, planting it on top of these ridges, we lost five, seven bushels per acre. Because we've got areas without residue, had areas with extra residue, we got some big holes there with the rip balls pulled out. We got non-uniform stand compared to where we no-till on top of the ridge. There is more uniform, wasted trip. Here's one of the fields we did. A lot of water backed up on us. Didn't need the plot map. You can tell where we pulled it loose. Again, I hate cutting residue loose. Leave it anchored attached. Here's a producer who had high yielding corn. He went out and rented a vertical tillage tool. Called me in the spring and says, what do I do? And I looked at that and I go, what did you do? He cut all his residue loose. The deepest drift we found was about a foot deep. Now, how wet is it there versus there? Again, non-uniformity. I hate cutting residue loose. Deanne Presley, K-State's done some work on these vertical tillage tools. She's found that one past the vertical tillage tool disturbing that layer that I said you don't want to disturb, cuts infiltration in half and doubles the runoff. Don't do it. Now, after saying that, I run vertical tillage. People, when I ask them, why do you run a vertical tillage tool? They'll say it cuts and sizes the residue. I says, so does my drill. It takes the residue and puts it in contact with the soil microbes. I said, so does my drill. My drill puts the seed in the ground at the same time to feed the soil biology. Here's about 220 bucks of corn residue the day after harvest. That's when I seed my cover crops. There's March 15th and next spring. Where's all that corn residue? My vertical tillage tool took care of it with the soil biology, with the living root, with Austrian winter peas there, fixing nitrogen for me. Now, March 15th, by the time I was ready to plant corn, it can fix 100 pounds of an in a nice warm spring. I've had cool springs that at corn planting time, the Austrian winter peas this big didn't fix any an. You can't always plant on that, depends upon the weather. Now, some people say, I gotta till it to get rid of the corn stalks. My long-term tillage plots, this picture was taken in 2014, so this is 34 years of no-till versus 34 years, this side is fall chiseled. This side is no-till for 34 years with the last seven being with cover crop. You see any difference in soil biology breaking down residue? Again, tillage doesn't get rid of residue if you don't have soil biology there to digest it. Maria Acasa of Iowa State just came out with a paper saying that he looked at BT versus non-BT, he looked at tillage versus no-till, he looked at several different things. Found out it's the soil biology that breaks down your residue, not the tillage. I love the cover crops, I plant them the day after harvest, get them up and growing right away. That drill I showed you earlier, left my corn stalks in, drill leaves my wheat stubble stand, that's already drilled to a cover crop. Looks like that when it's coming up. Now, all of our wheat ground gets cover crop that's got at least two cool season grasses, two warm season grasses, two cool season legumes, two warm season legumes, and then some extra things. We always end up with about 12 things in there. Got buckwheat in there for pollinators. But again, the cover crops are really paying for us in that wheat stubble to build a soil biological life. Again, here is a corn bean wheat rotation. After the corn harvest, this is just simply cereal rye by itself. This is no cover crop. See the difference in soil biology? That project's now, this is about the 10th year on it, in the corn bean wheat rotation. The cereal rye or Austrian winter peas after the corn harvest plant beans the next year. Wheat goes in immediately after the beans. There's no room for a cover crop. In the wheat stubble, I go either binner and milder or binner and soy beans. What I'm doing is comparing carbon cover crops to lagoon cover crops. Again, just different research projects. I think even the stalks as tall as possible. You know, there were been on the axle of the tractor and on the planter itself. Here's a couple of visitors from United Kingdom. Couldn't believe we were planting and stuff that tall. I had to snap pictures. I had to snap pictures of them, snap them pictures. But again, air gets down to the soil surface because my residue's standing up. If you create a matter of residue, then you're in trouble. Now, I let the planter knock the stalks over because for me in Nebraska, rain drop impact those spring rains, I want some flattened residue after planting. This is actually planting soybeans here. I always plant on the rows. I'll talk more about that. Now, I have those long-term tellage plots. I went out there the day I was gonna do my spring disking on the till plots. I walked up to a corn stalk, grabbed hold of the stalk and pulled. Went over the no-till, grabbed hold of one and pulled. Hold them up, snap the picture. Which one's which? That's the tilled. There's no biology activity there to ride off the root balls. This is the no-till. This yields 10, 20 bushel better than that every year. The biology activities there are riding off the roots. And I said, because when I plant down the old row, I don't roll out any root balls. My long-term no-till has the biology activity. Now, first year in, you don't have the biology activity planting beside the old row. And after a few years, then you start planting on the row. I love planting on the row because I didn't drive there last year, so I never planted a wheel track. Here's what it looks like a few weeks later. This is the same field. Now that I put that residue in contact with the soil, that residue is disappearing because now it's touching soil microbes. So again, once you get the soil biology activity, leave the residue standing as long as you can. I want the residue to break down when the next crop is growing so the carbon beam release goes into the canopy and the nutrients go back in the soil system. Again, I've worked with farmers across Nebraska. This is in the 80s. The planters we had back then, this old five-by-seven toolbar, should have pulled the one weed, right? But here he is planting herbicides already reined in and activated, planting soybeans in a stand lift like that. Again, that was back in the 80s. We can do it. Now, where do you plant? This is the way I learned most interesting thing on where do you plant? This farmer is on 36-inch rows for his corn. For his soybeans, he thought he was giving up the yield so he had the blacksmith make a hitch that shifted the plant over five inches. That's why it's so close to this wheel. And people walked here so you can't quite tell it. But in the background here, you can see sort of two rows of corn. He had his corn planted here. He's got RTK guidance. He planted corn on corn. The next year, he planted over five inches. Then he came in with soybeans. He's gonna go down, come back on the exact same path. Since he's offset, he's gonna have beans, paired row, effectively an 18-inch on the 36. Now, on his pass down, there's standing residue from last year. There's dead root balls from the year before. One row goes straight in those dead root balls. When he comes back, there's a row over here what I call no man's land. There's no root ball there from a year ago. He said, I have trouble with my stand. The good row there is the one that went in the root balls from two years ago where there's some soil biologic activity. The poor row is the one that went into the no man's land where there's no soil biologic life. If he planted it down the old row where the most biological life is, the stand's even better yet. That's the reason I plant down the old row because of soil biology, like Jay talked about this morning. Now, if you got drove crops, you get more soil biology everywhere, but if you're only row crops, I learned a lot watching this one. Can he get the good seed placement? Oh yes. That's a whole separate hour-long talk on my planters. Now, a lot of guys say, plant between the rows. You know, that's where I drove last year, so I got some rows now in wheel tracks and some not in wheel tracks. I also drive on the residue, wear out the tractor tires real fast. We never drive on the residue. So again, I don't like planting between the rows. That's the least biologically active area of the field. Corn on corn, we plant right beside the old row. Put narrow depth gauges on your planter, you can get darn close to that old row because that's where the most soil biology is. We do that. And again, I leave all the residue in place because there are roots right there. If you've got residue, if you take away the residue, there's no roots there. You know, until soil, there were no roots up here at all. Now, with a mulch there and no till, I've got moisture, I've got roots, I've got that quick rain that soaks in only a half inch, it gets used. Until soil, that quick-inch, half-inch rain makes a crust up here because there's no residue and there's no roots there to take it up anyway. So again, systems approach is build that better root system. That residue keeps that soil surface cooler. Here's my long-term tillage plots a few years ago. Grain, soil, five days in a row, first week in June, over 100 degrees. Without residue, it didn't die, but it went dormant because the soil was just too hot with residue, 35 bushel breaker difference. Now, after those five days, it rained, this took off growing and we thought there's gonna be no difference. We were surprised when the combine ran. South Australia, visitor-producer says, yeah, I've been no till in about 15 years. That's what this field looked like. I was there about a week after it was 120 degrees, air temperature. Soil temperatures were reaching about 160 degrees. You cook a steak in the grill, hot, you cook it, so it's safe to eat to kill all the bacteria. 140, 130. This oil's dead, even though he's a no-tiller. He's had a shank opener on his air seeder and he harvest off his wheat straw. This is his wheat straw. This is what his roots look like. This is his neighbor. He had a stripper header. Keeps the sun and wind off the soil surface. Which one has soil biological activity? Again, he's a no-tiller, but he has no soil biological activity because he doesn't protect the soil with residue, residues that makes it work. And again, stripper header harvested easy to plant through. Take off the residue movers and go. Ours, platform header. Planting soybeans, April 15th. And again, remember our soybean physiologists say you can't plant soybeans for May 5th because the soils aren't warm enough. We're going no-tilling to heavy wheat straw. No problem. Once the soil structure's built, excess water drains down stored later in the season. Now, if I got a tillage pan up here and that spring rain sits here and can't soak in, it will be cold and wet. So make a continuous no-till build soil structure. People ask about residue movers, think uniformity. If this producer, he's in his second year no-till. He just moved over a little bit, planted again, moved over. But what if he decided to plant this direction? He's got cool or warm dry here, cool wet, warm dry, cool wet. If you put residue movers on to kick all this out, you have a more uniform stand as yield would go up. I can agree with that because it's more uniform. We found though, when we were on residue movers, our yields go down because we already had residue everywhere. Planted the corn. The wind blows in Nebraska and some residue blew back. So here's warm dry, come up quick. Here's cool wet, it's a little slower. Warm dry, cool wet, and this one actually leafed out under the residue. We lose yield when we're on residue movers because the wind blows and makes it non-uniform. So again, the more uniform you can get, the better yields you get. And we had a research project going on. All our high-pile researchers got together and said, we're gonna raise 300 bushels of corn in five years. This is their fifth year. You're getting corn on corn, planting right beside the old row. And this is actually portion of the field where there's a 44,000 population on a 44,000 population. Now that row looks a little stomach because he's on the edge of the wheel track, but it doesn't look too bad there. They never made their 300. The best they did was 267. In the corn bean rotation, they made 289. Rotation is better. But again, it can be done. Nice and nice, snap rolls in the combine process, process the residue, no residue movers on the planter. Just plant. Now in back of the planter, the residue movers I don't like in back. Keaton seed frimmer I like for seed to soil contact, but more importantly, I like it for uniform seeding depth or some sort of attachment for that. Crumbled CV closed versus packing it closed. It depends upon your soil. I'm a fan of the crumbling because this is less likely to open back up if you plant when it's too wet. You may close the CV perfect the day you're planting but once the soil dries and it shrinks, it can open back up. The crumbled soil is not gonna open back up as much. I just have to pick on Duane. He's an agronomist by training. He plays more than equipment. I'm the engineer by training. I play more with the system. A lot of people call that their motor planter. Here's our old butter planter. This is a foggy morning. A lot of people say you can't handle residue when it's wet. Foggy morning, we're out there planting. You can see some full length soybean straw out there because we don't run the chopper. It's foggy. It's a planting date study. That was the date I was supposed to plant. It rained an inch and a quarter of the day before. We're out planting on a foggy morning. Mineral soil disturbance. Here's the fun picture. Look at the depth gauge was on the planter. They never run on soil. They're always running on residue. Uniform seeding depth. I got a Keaton seed firmer hiding underneath there. Yes, I'm picking up a little bit here. I've got crumblers there. Give me some loose soil there. But again, the seed's already placed. Very seldom do we get rained out because we've got good soil structure. We've got residue and even when it does rain, we can usually get in day or two or sooner than neighbors can. Mention the Keaton seed firmer or the Shaffer rebounder. They both pay by getting the seeds to the bottom of the seed v so you get that uniform seeding depth. There's other devices showing up in the market now. Uniform seeding depth is what I'm after. Seed to soil contact. If you're in dry conditions, you'll love it. If you're in wet conditions, it's not nearest critical. But what you do is avoid this type of problem. This is in no-till. This has been heavily grazed. They planted it off to the side here. These seeds started growing right away. This one was actually up on the side of the seed v lane in dry soil and sat there for a couple of weeks till rain came. That's losing yield. That's where the Keaton or rebounder or something similar will pay more uniform depth. These are two adjacent stocks in a field that had problems with planar bounce. Again, this one was about two and a half inches deep. Nice ear. This is only about an inch and a quarter deep. Not near the root system. Not near the yield potential. Minimize bounce. I put extra weight in the planar unit. To get uniform seeding depth, I plant deeper. If I do bounce out of the ground, I still got the seed in the ground and still get a good root system. When I say I plant deeper, I've been at meetings telling people we plant three and a half inches deep on our corn. Here's a farmer who says, oh, I'm gonna run a replicated research to prove you wrong. You know where he plants two and a quarter. He went to three. Here's what his yield did across six reps under irrigation. He likes planting deeper. Now, people say, when the cold and winter down there goes so, I say it's more uniform down there. If you're up shallow, going across the field, you're gonna have variability in soil temperature and soil moisture. Deeper you go, the more buffered it is, the more uniform your stand will be. We plant deeper. Like I say, we're three and a half on our corn now. Again, we leave all the residue in place. Again, this is corn on corn. Just beside, we get better root system, better standability going deeper. Doing some demonstration plots. This is 102-day maturity, 112-day maturity. This is corn on corn, one inch, two inch, three inch. You think I'm afraid of going deeper into heavy residue? I get better nutrient uptake, better water uptake, better yields. Here's the surprising thing though, this is that same field, corn on corn, under irrigation. Come harvest time, look how little residue's there. You get a lot of farmers say, I can't no tell I'm gonna have a matter of residue this deep. You do if you don't have soil biology. We've got soil biology. I like wheat in the rotation. It's cool season grass. I like looking for cool season broadleaf. I don't have near as many options that far south. You guys do up here and you got things like peas and other things to look at the pulses. Again, with wheat rotation, I get opportunities now for more cover crops. You got more root system out there. You get different timing in my workload. Here's wheat stubble. Already fertilized to plant our corn. Gotta look closer. There are five anhydrous knife marks on there. We use anhydrous. Keep as formal nitrogen as there is. Five knife marks because I got minimal soil disturbance on our anhydrous applicator. Closed on a couple of thoughts from Ralph Dirps. Some of you guys have heard of him before. Crop consultant lives in Paraguay. Down in South America, the cover crops are basically everywhere for erosion control. Once they learned about the erosion control, then they all started learning about the soil house soil biology. But they get a lot of rainfall, a lot of slopes they needed to protect that soil. That's where the name cover came from. Rise and cover. The thing is they find out too what it does for soil biology. Again, from Ralph, a long-term no-till soil looks like. Growing that out there. Again, cover crops helps take care of that. Crop rotation helps take care of the diversity, takes care of that. Cover crops. To me, you can't have too much cover. Producer friend of mine, he got out of the tractor to take the picture. That's why it looks a little odd there. He's out in Kansas after wheat harvest or a cover crop that all frost killed. A lot of circumstances down in there, but he's got some shorter things in there, not too many as you can see now. But again, there's plenty of residue there to help put carbon in the soil. We're harvesting carbon dioxide and sunlight in the off season to put them in the soil. And I say off season compared to your cash crops. So again, standing up, he can plant right through that. Now, what if you would have come in there with a shredder and made a mat and cut it all loose? Oops. Oh, build the system, manure, livestock. If you don't have the livestock yourself, have a neighbor to have some manure. Thing is, I hear from a lot of people say you can't spread manure in no-till. Like, why not? Well, the soil gets so slimy, the manure is such big piles, you learn to spread the manure and you do it at an agronomic rate. This is an agronomic rate of beef feedlot manure when it comes to phosphorus. And again, that's what we would get regulated on in Nebraska for phosphorus runoff. Too often, people are putting on what I call a waste rate. It's out there this thick, and you're gonna have problems. I guarantee you, you put it on an agronomic rate, it's no problem. You get a spreader that's gonna do a uniform distribution of manure as well. Now, if you bring livestock in yourself, then that's even better yet. A little commercial for CropWatch, our crop production crop scouting newsletter out of Nebraska. It's also a portal for all of our extension information on crop production. But, attend field days. Look at the soil, dig soil pits. Look into the soil. Learn about it. The soil pits really open your eyes up. This is on our research farm. We did a soil pit there many years ago for field day. This is, according to the soil survey, has less than six inches of topsoil. I looked there and it's got a lot more than six inches now. According to the soil survey, the organic matter should be between 2.2 and 2.5 or something like this for this solidly-clay loam soil. Intake rate, it's supposed to be only about two-tenths to six-tenths inch per hour. You can see with this kind of structure we have built, with this kind of carbon, we're measuring intake rates over four inches per hour. Water's soaking in, not running off. We had a researcher out there this summer, this past summer I shouldn't say now, he took a soil sample to characterize where his plots were, and he came back from more laboratories at a 5.2% organic matter. When in soil survey it says it's supposed to be 2.2 to 2.4. He said, that's wrong, took another sample, sent it in, and away. Came back at 5.3. He was in a corn bean wheat rotation with cover crops after the wheat. We are growing carbon back into our soil. That's why we're raising 200 plus corn, where the county average for tea, for insurance purposes, if you don't have your own average, is 119 for dry land. 171 for irrigated. Our yield goes over 200. We're growing healthier soils, growing healthier crops. With that, I even save some time for questions. In Nebraska, that may work in South Dakota. If you have soil structure, I'm not concerned about the temperature. I've done, I didn't have it in this presentation. I talked to planners, I got it in there. I set the planner for three inches deep, half rate planted. Reset it to one inch deep, came back and planted the other half rate. And I couldn't be there daily, but I asked the farm manager to keep track of when they emerged. He says he doubts there's 12 hours difference. But we have good soil structure, the soil temperature at three, the soil temperature at one's the same when you have good soil structure. Now, it's also got the same insulating blanket on top, it's got the same everything. It's more buffered. Now, that couldn't tell the difference coming up. A July thunderstorm came through. The three inch planted deep are standing up, the one inch are all leaning. Again, another reason we go deep, the better root system translates to better yield. I tell you guys, I tell every audience, don't go to three and a half, I can guarantee you're not gonna be happy. But go out there and plant two rounds, half inch deeper than you used to. Flag it, follow it through to yield. I'll be willing to bet next year you're gonna plant the entire field half inch deeper, and you're gonna have two rounds, another half inch deeper. And the guys who've done that, I've got a lot of guys who are down at three inches deep now who used to be an inch and a quarter, or second knuckle or whatever rule they used to use. But that better root system will pay. The more buffered, more uniform soil, temperature more soil, uniform soil moisture, give you a more uniform stand, that'll pay beside it. And that's until we get soil biological life going. Once soil biological life is there, we plant down the old row. And the reason we tell soil biological life is there when you're planting down the old root balls, they'll roll out. And now you got a hole that's as big as a root ball. You can't get good seed to soil contact. Yep. And again, that's why I didn't drive last year. The roots that are there, if it breaks over the hill, water tries to run, those roots will break up the water. The residue that's there will reduce crusting because it's gonna absorb the rain drop impact. There are several reasons to plant down the old row. This year, sorry, I didn't repeat the questions earlier. You guys may hear, but on the tape, they probably don't hear them. Hairpinning. The question of hairpinning the residue, pushing it down in the seed slot. Hairpinning is a function of planting too shallow for the opener you have. It's as simple as that. If you look at the diameter of a corn planter disc, there are typically 15 inches. Corn planters were developed with the disc openers and corn pine depths are two to three inches deep until soils. A 15 inch diameter running at three inches deep has a good angle to cut residue. Running an inch and a quarter deep will hairpin residue, pushes it down because there's no cutting action to it. Now, white with their new 9,000 series planter disc came out, went from a 15 to a 16 inch disc and they are proud they say they can plant four inches deep now. Industry's even doing this as well. Now, think of a little grass drill. You see native grass is what, three quarter inch deep. Did they have 15 inch openers? No, they had 12 inch openers. Because again, a 12 inch opener running an inch deep has that same residue cutting angle. So again, if you're hairpinning, you're planting two shallow for what your opener is designed for, or your soil is loose, something loosened it. And one of the worst cases I know of is that Turbotill or whatever that fluffs that top layer and cuts the residue loose and now you've got nothing firm to cut. Other questions? No. I'm taking those in the row. That's where the part is. Yeah. You mentioned the PLFA. I showed you my Austrian rare peas and I said here's my cereal where I and the corn residue was disappearing. I started that project 2005. As corn bean wheat rotation where I slip in two extra carbons or two extra legumes. So the base rotation is what I call two to one carbon to legume. With extra carbons in there, it's a four to one or the extra legumes in there, it's a two to three. Now you'll say so. I said so. My yields are running here to years of some differences but long trend cover crop pays. But after I went through the cycle of rotation twice. So this four to one went through twice now and the two to three went through twice. I pulled PLFA tests across all those. So here's my three reps of three treatments and they're numbered one through nine. I gave them to Joe Clapperton. I told him what the treatments were. I did not tell her which numbers were which. She looked at those nine tests and she got seven of the nine right. She knew the difference in soil biology by having extra carbon versus extra legume versus having neither. The two she had reversed but seven out of nine she could tell the difference in soil biology. I still say so. I'm not sure that corn plant growing there can tell the difference in the biology at least enough. I don't know. I'm playing into my time.