 In 2013, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a cooperative agreement with the South Dakota No-Till Association and IGRO, SDSU Extension, for delivering the latest soil health and productivity technology to South Dakota farmers and ranchers. A series of four local events were held in South Dakota in Sioux Falls, Watertown, Belfouche, and Mitchell. Okay, all this has done kind of work. We're going to have our producer panel now. Basically, each producer will come up. And we have three, Charlie Adinger, Crick Staley, and Matt Bainbridge will be our three farm producers, basically. And we're going to have them each give a short little presentation. And then they're going to basically sit on the panel and you guys can ask them questions and they'll try to answer them as best they can. So we really appreciate this. I think this is such a valuable part of any meeting when we get some real life producers up here and tell us what they're doing on their operation. I did have some real short bios, but I think I've changed my mind and let you guys tell us a little bit about yourselves and your operations so nobody knows it better than yourselves. Crick Staley, I farm right in the Mitchell area with my brother Gene. Mitchell's kind of a unique area because it's not really southeast or not really south-central. You go east to Mitchell and you see a lot more diverse crop rotation. We've got more winter weeds. We get farther east and farther west. I mean, west we eventually get more grain sorghum and sunflower. The guys are just doing a lot better job rotating more and more out there. You get very far east to Mitchell and there's not as much an hotel. I think their definition of three-way rotation is like corn, soybeans, Miami. So I'm kind of around that end. For the years in our area, you see some winter wheat and corn. Corn goes to seven bucks and pretty much everybody's like, I think I'm just going to raise corn. They kind of bail out on the wheat a little bit, but I think now we're back. I mean, the benefits of root rotation are so huge and commodity prices. I think you'll see people down back into more wheat. You know, I know the things are getting corn pretty high. My brother, he's always thinking about the financial end. He, last couple of years, he's always asking me about the wheat, how it looks. I finally just asked him, I said, you're not usually interested in wheat. Why are you so interested? He said, well, I was hoping it dies so I could put corn in. But anyways, first started no-till-one back in 1986 and just basically was planting corn and back then we were still raising barley and just started planting the corn in 48-inch rolled corn, planting the barley and that worked pretty good. As me being the guy that used to have to do all the cultivating of the corn, I really liked it because anything to get out of cultivating corn is good as far as I'm concerned. Then I think it was the summer of 89. I mean, there was really no-till-one soybeans yet. I went up, I'll never forget it because I think it was some of the dry year, went up to the Redfield station where Duane, Duane was there for three, four years and he had a field day up there. He'd drive up there and there weren't really any soybeans. It was just small grain corn and it's hot. Everything's burning up in the field. He pulled into the Redfield station and it just looks like this oasis in the middle of the desert. So we all get on and he's got these no-till beans and corn planted, the wheat's done all that. This looks phenomenal. I don't know if there's 50 people. Maybe there was 100. I'd say there's 100 people driving around on these trailers. 99 of them are these huge skeptics. They're just trying to prove, trying to figure out why this looks so good. So he just had to, I'll never forget that, go through and try to answer all their questions in his blunt way and tell them that this is how it is. You know, they respect that. So kind of got started after that. Went home and ordered a new John Deere 750 drill and started a no-till with beans, corn and wheat. And then everything went pretty good until like the wet year of 93 of what they remembered and started having trouble after your no-till for a while. You get residue builds up and it gets in a wet spring. It gets a little bit harder to, especially trying to plant in the winter wheat, plant your corn. You'd start having trouble getting it planted in the spring. So started about, I talked to Jason about 1996. He was trying to figure out what can we do, mainly on the, behind the wheat, how to get that corn planted into the wheat. We started looking and just trying to plant some cover crops in a winter wheat stove. It took a long time to find anything that worked because you just have to try to come up with stuff. Some of the advantages for, obviously for planting cover crop in the wheat stubble, I'm going to talk mainly about wheat stubble, is fixed hydrogen for the next crop, which is kind of marginal. I mean, you can put the different legumes in and you probably get a, it's hard to get very much nodulation in that short period of time. You might get something, but I don't really think you can plan on fixing a whole lot of them like you can in the fuller season. One of the main things behind wheat stubble, obviously was trying to manage your soil moisture in our area. You know, we have a tendency to start out, you know, you can get some pretty heavy rainfalls in the spring of the year. Usually end up drying up by August, but you still have to get the crop in. And be able to provide for a living root system. If you have all that rut mass in the spring, you can, it's a lot easier for crop to build, build the plant across it than if you just have the wheat stubble left standing. The other thing is change the residue color and go from a light colored residue to a dark colored residue to help warm the soils up. So that was some, and also help, which is very important in our field organic manner. You know, we're sitting in South Dakota, I mean, we just don't have, can't be given up organic matter. We're talking somewhere around three percent, you know, we just don't have enough to lose to be destroying organic matter through tillage. I mean, everybody, you know, these tillage, I went to this field day here this last year, and they were showing up to crafters, and we looked at the crafters and they also had a field demonstration on this new greatest tillage implement, where the guy was talking and telling all the wonderful things he could do, and finally one farmer said, he said, I kind of like what this does, but would you tell me how I can use this and still build my organic matter? And that was pretty much the end of it, because you can't. So, I mean, just that point alone tells you, you know, where we're sitting, we just have to try to save or build an organic matter. And I mean, it's so obvious, if you look at, like, yield maps, I mean, most of this ground for the farm may be 60, 70 years, and everybody 40 years ago, all these 40 acre fields scattered, now everybody's taking the fences out, these little 10 acre patches of grass, you know, 20 years ago you took them out and now you're farming crops, but even now you go back and look at a yield map, you can do proper, you know, fertilize the whole field right, you can still see those yield bumps from that pasture, because it's got a higher organic matter. Haven't mined it like you did the other stuff, so I mean, it's just, just looking at stuff like that, that's one great thing about yield maps, you look at some of that stuff and you go, hey, I got to do something, try to save my organic matter, and no till cover crops is going to help very much. Some of the things that you're not going to harvest a crop that you need to look at with cover crops, try to keep your seed costs low, since you're not going to harvest anything. With our short growing season, it has to be easy to establish, easy to plant, be able to use a quit may have. One of the most important things that you find out, trying it for a long period of time, is you have to have aggressive growth. You just don't have enough season if you put it in behind a weed because you have to have something that's going to grow aggressive in the fall in order to get enough plants to do them good. And you have to have something to do a diversifier rotation. You've got to have something that helps your rotation, not hurt you. Obviously, if you're putting corn and you probably want to have, you know, lean to have more broad leaves than legumes in the cover crop, you put the corn back in it. And that's part of what goes on with being that detrimental to the next crop. And you also have to watch the fertilizers. I mean, it's something you don't think about. Like if you're, you got weed in this year, and you want to put a cover crop in, you want to make sure you use something with either no residual or low residual that won't hurt those cover crops. And I mean, it's just, you know, it's one of those things you don't think about a lot. I remember one time when I was trying to find some different cover crops, I had a weed stubble, and I was going to spray it, and I had a bunch of buckwheat. So I thought, you know, it really wasn't, at that time, you did it. I just wasn't thinking about the cover crop that much. So I put it like an ounce of corn on it. And so I sprayed it, killed the buckwheat, and then I started thinking, you know, watch, maybe I'm going to put a crop, you know, it wasn't a very good plan. If I'm going to put a cover crop in there, it's going to be really bad. I got all that residue. It hasn't really rained. I'm thinking, God, it's got to be mostly caught up in that residue. So I tried some sunflowers in there. And plant the sunflowers. It really didn't maybe rain 20, 30 hundreds. Probably had one come up out of a thousand. So I mean, that's, uh, the word is definitely good. You want to keep sunflowers from going even an ounce of it. It would have been my crop. It would have been bad, but since it was just a cover crop. But it makes you think about things like that. Some of the different ways. A lot of my, you know, behind the weed stubble I like to use an 1850 drill. Just because you can, you know, the mixes just work a lot better than trying to plant single, single, or even two, two crop cover crops. I planted some of the vacuum planter. The one thing about planting with the planter, just like planting soybean, you can get by with a little bit of seed and put it in rows. And some of the things that I've tried is the grain sorghum disc a mile is about the same size as hairy vetch. So you can actually plant the vetch. I planted some vetch with my planter. And then also, one year I was able to plant the so there are some things you can use the planter for. And the other thing is the broadcast. I've tried aerial broadcasting a couple times. And it pretty much was the first time I tried just cereal rye. And I think I put it on a little too early. It was probably in the middle of August. I hadn't let the corn head dried up. And where I had, you know, I really thought we could stand the rye as little corners, little thin and some low spots. So I think if I would have waited a little bit until like mid-September to spread that. And then this year I did some more and I'm talking about that in a minute. And anyway, like I say when I first started with Chase and we started with the clovers because we thought that was, you know, I mean that was a good legume behind the wheat and get some growth available corn. And what we found out, I was just talking to Chase and maybe we had the wrong variety it just grew too, way too slow. And just by fall there was hardly any growth in the spring. It didn't take off. And you really would have to wait until, you know, in the June and really have to be enough good to help with the file bands. And then the hairy batch. This is a little more, grows a little bit faster, but I plan this with a planter, but it worked pretty good because I had some preventive ground and I just was able to go out and plant rows. But I plan that probably towards the end of July so I had enough time for it to get enough growth. But if you try putting in behind wheat it just doesn't seem to have quite enough aggressive growth in the fall to do as much good as some of the other crops. And the one that really worked I mean it took, I started like I said in like 96 and then tried all this stuff and none of it worked real good. And then around 2007 everybody started trying this radish, canola, lentil mix. And that's been work really good right away to try it. Mainly because you get so much growth in the fall with the radishes and the canola. And it grows later in the fall I mean it will still be a live Thanksgiving. So get good fall growth the seed cost is pretty affordable and if you could put a legume in there hopefully you can get some kind of a little bit of nitrogen fix but it's kind of iffy. I'm sure everybody's seen the OLC radishes and kind of growth and the tuber on them is phenomenal. And you get good crop canopy. It helps break down that wheat stubble so you can get it planted good in the spring. It's just really amazing what that ground is like after you have a good stand like that in spring. It just plants so much better. Later in the season all that starts breaking down you get some nice nutrient release into your corn and the corn just looks better. You just tell by the health of it it's not planted in the cover crop. And then I was saying about chickling bench and field peas. I planted those with my planter after wheat stubble. And then they did okay but it just still wasn't near as aggressive growth in the fall compared to the radishes. And one thing about it you know put it in the row as you're able to save someone seed costs. Anyway I just I have a list of different cover crops you can try. But I mean really for the ones that really work good either have the radish radish, some kind of radish canola blend no matter what kind of the fume if you want to put lentils or if you're going to graze it you can put some millet with the cow peas. Just a whole lot of options but the main thing is just the radish and canola or the turnips if you're going to graze. The other good thing about the turnips I was going to say that when it gets down to like zero they freeze like little rocks so it really slows the coyote and deer hunters from running across your field at 60 miles an hour. You know it looks pretty slow but but the other one and then just this last September or last spring I started talking to Jay. I wanted to try something I mean everybody knows the canola radish is working the weed stuff but what can we do different in the behind our corn and it's so hard you know by the time you get done cowing behind your corn it's getting so late trying to get out there to drill something and so working with Jay and the coyote here at the NRCS we decided to try burial applying some winter wheat rye grass and oil seed radish like Charlie and Matt they both tried some too some different people in the area anyway we applied that in the corn I think it was September 15 and you know we had good rainfall this spring so it really took off good I think this picture was from January 16 so there was some growth and it'll be really interesting in spring to see what Ashley is under you know if you dig it up and see how much root mass because I'm hoping there'll be a lot of root mass under the ground too I know the winter wheat will overwinter and will have some more growth on that in spring so I'm pretty excited about that I don't know if it's a real dry fall obviously you can probably on time get it established but this year with the rainfall it really took off good and then I have also tried like I said I tried the cereal rye and I mean if you're not winter wheat don't like that rye very much because they're worried about getting contamination but I've planted it with my drill even in December I mean you usually can get some pretty good spring growth on that and you know usually and better than winter wheat but that all depends on what you want to do for how much wheat you've got in the rotation but anyway some of the things I just you know I mean I think the main thing next year's make sure you have a couple of aggressive things like the raddish turnip in there make sure you use high enough seeding rates try to get it planted right after the wheat and I mean the one thing you have to watch you've got so much residue out there to get the drill to plant right I usually don't start planting you know I like to dry out a lot of times just like trying to combine wheat you've got to wait until later on in the day and have some hot rye leather so you can make sure you don't get too much air coming and with the canola the canola and the rape seed they use so much sulfur that you want to make sure the next spring you put some sulfur on through using AMS in your nitrogen mix so you get plenty of sulfur out there so you're not deficient because you can have a lot of trouble with the sulfur deficiency behind those cover crops if you go and if I get enough growth on the cover crop where you usually have some volunteer weed in there I usually, I'll try to spray it a lot of times you get up to 50 degrees in middle of November I'll just go and spray it right then instead of wait until spring if I think I have enough growth and the main thing is just keep trying you know the cover crop thing is not very old yet so I just encourage people to keep trying different mixtures thank you my name is Charlie Edinder my father and my brother I have a hard time speaking up my brother is the doctor I've probably with my brothers yet again I live in Mitchell I've been back here for 17 years now and we've raised wheat, corn, soybeans and cell flowers and in the past we've raised my loathing I guess the main reason why we plant cover crops is we need to use up the excess water basically from July until the following May we have a lot of time to accumulate water and that's our biggest challenge is being able to get the corn crop planted in the summer I get to fly around once along my little ultralight and this is actually what we've got and you can see all the ground about spots out there this is basically a stacked wheat flotation that we did get in before but we do have some drainage issues out there so if you want to try it do as much as we can to help get rid of all that excess water basically healthy soils that contain master floors or in this case I can call them mini tile lines they are created for earthworms roots and orchid business and basically they do this work for free it doesn't cost a thousand bucks an acre to install a pot these tile lines so basically the more roots you have on the soil the healthier it's going to be we also like to break down residue in this picture we have an excessive amount of residue after a wheat harvest last year we did not plant any cover crops into this you can see it looks like there's almost just as much wheat still up there yet as there is corn stocks and we're looking at 2012 wheat crop is probably 70 or 80 percent of the corn stocks this year this year was probably 150 or so growing plants you can break down the residue a little bit too fast I guess in our case in this area we had a lot of time to do that so we kind of felt a little bit fortunate that we actually got the crop planting well in a timely fashion this past spring alright and then on this slide basically the nutrient cycling is another reason because we like to do cover crops we want to move that extra nitrogen back to the surface into an organic matter that's what we're reaching if you look at this salt test basically this is a salt test taken from the same field two different tests before we had wheat stubble and on the left hand side where we kept the wheat stubble clean after August the one on the right is where we let the volunteer eat grow on the inside so you can notice that basically it sucked up all the nitrogen and took that back up the top to the surface where it was not probably reaching I know writer Ward fairly well and I had some questions for him at certain times and then I had to ask him about how fast the nitrates after nitrates reach in the soil and he claims that for this area it's pretty important you want to keep your nitrates higher up in the soil profile as possible and then comparing these two soil tests to all the other soil tests that I had taken in wheat stubble and implanted a cover crop to the highest amount of nitrates that I found in the two-foot sample on any of those soil tests was 20 tons so I felt that we had a lot more residual and remaining after the wheat harvest and though it turned out to be a better wheat crop than we had anticipated basically I think the cover crops and maybe we'll sprinkle the volunteer wheat to get a much better job capturing that nitrogen and take it back to surface so we had some soil samples down to 8-9 pounds per acre so we're just not sure if we expect half of that with next year's crop or more but at least we know it's up to the top where we want to go another reason for the cover crops is to help reduce compaction and I guess my biggest pet peeve on the farm is soil compaction and I guess we'll make an effort to lessen the effects of heavy weather by using tracks as much as possible and then we also make an effort to restore the effects of this compaction to a wide equivalent of cover crops and until it's radish it's kind of my favorite so it's kind of a product choice also we want to keep the organisms active as long as possible basically this is a picture of me soil testing just a month ago and it was pretty amazing how I was taking these frozen cores of soil in this bucket and a year after about 15 seconds of warm air of that rich harvest and active and it's one important thing as you want roots out there and keep all the microorganisms active and we've got tremendous urge for levels that are gross because it's been helped on for so long that's in fact in the spring when I'm chasing planters and making sure the planting is done correctly I kind of feel guilty because I'm killing so many of them when I'm digging up, you know and it's a good thing to see but again I feel good to be guilty of carrying them up so much I guess we've tried various ways of planting cover crops what we currently do and what we've done the last couple years is use basically our hybrid planter it's an air planter it's a bower bar it's got kins of glue in it it's 36 for a 20 inch roll and one thing I like about it is it does a better job than an air seeder to keep it in the seed's place properly and we're able to use our gift residue managers to clear some of the residue out of the way also we drilled with an air seeder and then goal point number 3 about 6 or 8 years ago we had some neighboring farmers that built a broadcast seeder that was able to follow the trend lines and what a week feels after or during the week the growth of the wheat crop so we actually hired them to spread some cover crops about the 3rd week of June and it didn't work that well I think it was just a little bit early and if we had more rain afterwards they might have helped also but the seeds got down there they can't be and whatever did sprout dried out after a few weeks so basically the only luck we had was doing the tire tracks and the cover crop had the chance to get some moisture also we used an air flow machine with the broadcast and the fertilizer and some outstanding stubble and then followed that with some word of the tillers to try to get to the corporate and they didn't have very much luck with that because for the most part they tried it August was a pretty dry month so nothing really got established very well and then the latest method we tried was a small opener I guess the cover crops that we have seeded are listed here I feel like my favorite is the radish it's a very robust plant it does a good job with sucking up nutrients and water helping with salt compaction issues turnips, we need to turn them in I've never really had a high affinity for turnips but they do do a good job to me it seems like you've got a lot of mass above grounds but I know they do a very good job of penetrating them well in dry conditions and then the next bunch rapeseed, intergenital, lower plastics rate you know for cabbage they're all brassicas and they're very good choices because you're able to do tempos in the residue composition lentils are another crop that we've come across and tried in the mix had it done so in the last couple years but they're not as robust and aggressive crops so if you plant them try to use sanitary little beds they're not continuing against any radish to grow up somewhere you know if you have an air seeder you can basically put them in the front of the back rank and then the rest of them in the opposite rank to get a little more opportunity to get your growth to get sooner or later also winter wheat that was done this past fall with an airplane we did not intentionally plant winter wheat I mean when the volunteer comes out there we always make sure that we are burned out before or within days after planted on the crop and the conditions are good and we learned this this past August the cover crops will emerge in three days if the conditions are good one thing I'm thinking about doing for maybe next fall is maybe using that cover crop plant or that planter following corn harvest maybe trying to put down some fertilizer and maybe 30 lbs of winter wheat in 20 inch rows to help bring the conditions to the things turned wet so basically if I were to burn down and turn the position down I would knock it out in the spring and then actually the first cover crop that we ever tried was soybeans and that's the reason why we tried soybeans was I always had a desire to raise a double crop after wheat and this was back probably 10 years ago and we got them planted and they probably 10 to 20% and they were on the backs back in 2012 with the early wheat harvest we actually had planned on trying to plant some but with the forecast looking as bad as it was hopefully someday before I died we can do a double crop alright then this last year's experiences this is a picture actually got from Jason Elter he's a tree away mixer and the rape seed actually was found at the stake in the mix and we kind of got the mix and it just kind of rained because the stuff both of them and the flowers and set seed just hoping it's not going to be an issue for the next spring so we basically planted that mix out and then we got a local source of just straight radishes and then finished up the cover crop like it goes and then this is kind of a similar picture like Craig had I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one that's got corn on the ground out there also but just worked pretty well it was a good fall for cover crops we had shots moisture to get things going the only thing I kind of regret not doing was targeting the field there was less surface residue out there because there was a pretty good shot of all of these double in fact this is the same field we saw earlier so there was a a stack of wheat on the corn stalks so we had that much fewer cover crops to use to hit the soil if they were on the soil I understand but like Craig had mentioned it's going to be interesting to see what happens if we have any and then this is basically same field and that's basically what the next one was and where I rassed a lot of rations other things to consider on our farm the last couple of years just to be able to try to go a reasonable reasonable cover crop I've eliminated any sites that had any type of um residual so I don't want to take any chances and put cover crop in this if you're not looking for and then basically fertility we've been a little bit lax in the fertility end of it this year it turned out well because we had unexpected all the residual nitrogen in the soils but if you want to go up with cover crop you've got to be able to feed it so a lot of times it's nice to have 30, 40, 50 gallons of nitrogen out there to feed the crop also if you raise much for brassicas like Craig said, you want to make sure you have some kind of soil to choose from cover crop then rotation-wise just depends on what you want to accomplish it's easy easy choice and selection on there it's a lot of talk about other rotations and timing issues and crops that just kind of comes down to what you want to accomplish and then again burn down to my head make sure you get it done right before or immediately after you plant your cover crop if you want to have some issues well I'm Matt Bainbridge I farm just south of here by Ethan with my dad Lewis and brother Neil I am the least prepared speaker of hearing is I don't really have the slideshow but I thought that Craig and Charlie did a pretty good job of explaining things and we do a lot of similar things that they do too mostly what we're using cover crops for is after winter wheat we'll go in there with turnips and radishes and veg, we had some oats in there this year too and we usually look for grazing for our cattle and we had really good luck this year, we didn't try any last year this because it was so dry that we didn't even think it was worth it and I guess rightfully so nothing really would have come up last year anyways I don't even know what we have for pictures here this is just some residue that we're planting into this spring you can kind of see we just use a regular, we use a gruff roll cleaner on our planter and we just try to we don't get real aggressive with our roll cleaners we just try to pretty much sweep it and clean off the soil we don't want to move a lot of soil or sometimes I've even kind of erred on taking too little residue off and just trying to not make it super black we don't have the issues of trust in like a lot of the conventional guys do just another view of our planter you can see our homemade tank on front there we run a starter fertilizer with our corn and just have a John Deere corn planter and a John Deere 1990 CCS drill that we plant soybeans and weed and we go across we don't really have much for different pictures here I guess that Craig and Charlie pretty much covered the reasons that we're trying to do all this stuff you know we're trying to build healthier, more resilient soils a little standard to some of these things like drought and to hot spells in the summertime and just trying to get more consistency where we don't have to worry so much about heavy rain washing out our soil or worry about the soils bake in after we plant and not give a stand I think I've been back from the farm now for about 15 years I guess I had some farm land on my own for about 15 years now and we've never replanted a whole field of water we'll go on our left drought out spots and we'll replant those spots but we've never had the trouble with heavy rain trusting over our soil and not give a stand so I think that's really one benefit that you can kind of point to know until some of the new things that we're trying we just bought a fertilizer spreader that we can variable rate with so we're trying to to really manage different parts of the field and we all have those spots that are too wet to plant in the spring that are always just a pain you know on I see a lot of guys now running out tillage or they'll go out and they'll till those spots well our idea and we haven't even done this yet we're hoping to start the summer we're going to put a micro bin on the back of our fertilizer spreader and we're going to try and blow cover crab seed onto those spots so if you have an alkali spot try to put something out there that'll tolerate the salt you know something like a rod or something like that just something to start using that water so that you can start raising a better crowd there and oh we haven't haven't done it yet we've tried a few things just with our no till drill we'll go in this fall after corn harvest I took some rye seed in and we just just tried to plant some of these alkali spots and some of the draws and everything where it's always wet I really wasn't expecting it to get cold right after harvest and stay cold until right now I guess so it didn't come up at all in the fall or in the winter here so we're hoping that some of that will come up in the spring and those are always the spots so we have a hard time planting them too those are the spots without the residue that always seems to want to ball up the planter and let it all up so we're hoping if we can kind of get a mat of something growing out there and we'll kind of try it in the spring if I want to kill it off right away or if I want to let it grow a little bit and then come back right before it comes up and then I'll spray it off so I guess those are some of the new things we're going to try and you know we have a lot of presentations up here and a lot of really intelligent people but this really isn't in exact science yet and there's going to be some failures we've failed quite a few times you know and there's just slight tweaks and everybody's operation is a little bit different but if you try something I think we are headed in the right direction so whether we get there next year probably not but I think that we are headed in the right direction so if we just keep trying and tweaking things and paying attention to what's going on in our fields I think we can really get the nail on the head there I think the fear of failure sometimes keeps us from trying things that you maybe know in our heart are the right things to do but you just don't want to fail to have people laugh at us so we thank you guys for trying some of these things and for being willing to come up here today and share them with us. I think what we'll do now open up for questions I will try to walk around with a mic and get to talking to a mic so you can become famous for a short period of time here but go around get some questions with these guys maybe say who you would like to address the questions whether it's one or all the group so we've got Matt, Charlie, and Craig here so anybody got a question? Everybody shy? OK, you don't have to use a mic if you just have a question The question was have you ever tried sugar beets for any of your swabs? No, we have not The only people I know are the Macklins they actually are not farming a piece of crap brown that we used to own and they are making improvements to it and I was pretty amazed that this was probably 5 or 6 years or maybe longer when they rephrased the sugar beets and true, I just covered crap out there I was, in fact, I'd go out there and check them out myself because I was so impressed but there are still yeah, they help but I don't know those alpha y spots you'll know that you will stress being able to get intense to believe crap in that soil but no, I have not had to show you the example OK, I know you guys are thinking of things you just want to ask me this is your chance we got some good guys up here how do you determine how do you determine canola? yeah like I said I like to spray it out in the fall because if you let it go in the spring it can't take off pretty quickly like a pound of atrazine with roundup usually you don't have much regrowth but I've had canola even when I killed it you know if you have like a lowest spot or something there would be enough seed you'll get some canola in the field that will go to seed but because I've seen it usually over it just keeps getting less and less in a couple years it's gone again it's roundup ready and if it goes to seed you got more roundup ready but what I've seen with the rotation especially with weed it didn't it just kept going after 2-3 years it's gone again so it is a concern but I haven't seen it multiply it after 2-3 years it's gone issues 5-6 years ago when we had to get cabbage in the mix and canola and over-wintered next April was excessively wet you know I started growing with all about the time we were able to get out there by that time it was almost bang and it was a real thing I basically had to strout a stout shot of my mixed mix with some additional stuff I should have actually hired a plane to fly it on because it's so wet because I wanted to spray it on I should have just hired a plane to take it off we actually had trouble on year with the low wind it found out to be hard in the seed so it started growing right away in the spring and it was a I don't remember I think it was canola and the leaf is pretty waxy so it's pretty hard to get around because I didn't know if it was around pretty or not but we used a 240 and clarity mixture when burdened out in the corn anyways so we were able to fry it out pretty easy as long as you have the mic I have a question for you I know you guys have some livestock how do you integrate the cover crops into your livestock operation just to kind of have full fold working in surgery? Yeah I think it works pretty good for us we actually would still be grazing the cover crops right now but the cattle worked over so good we thought we'd better get them off of there because it was getting quite a ways down there but really with the cattle they're just kind of cycling the nutrients one more time too just taking the plant matter and letting it come right out of the back end but yeah it's worked really good for us and the cattle just love it it doesn't look like there's that much out there for MDE but they'll just stay content out there and don't drink much water and really don't eat much mineral and really don't need a whole lot of aid to make it through the winter on that Okay any more questions out there? Yes sir I guess one idea is is to cut your wheat as high as you can and just blow less of the straw I mean the cattle they're just they're just they're just they're just they're just they're just they're just they're just less of the straw and I guess Craig kind of touched on it earlier if you kind of wait until the afternoon when it's nice and warm out there then hopefully you can kind of cut through that and get a pretty good scan I guess we've had pretty good luck so far with our drill that's kind of one reason why I like this and if we have even though it's 20 inch wide rows which is in my opinion a little bit too wide 750 would be better we do have rows of demand in front of it which definitely helps one concept going back is trying this past year is basically setting your depth a little bit deeper and then raising up your folding arms so that you don't have that issue of bearing recede so maybe if you possible might try to cut through it with a deeper setting you know it might work out alright a lot of times what's happened there is you're here pinning that that straw down in there if you've got a stripper head held and like Charlie said we go deeper and then actually tie the folding wheels up on the Drill and so you're actually planting down in that trench and leaving it open especially with the small seeds bigger seeds you don't want to do that but the small seeds on the canola thing the technique did a study on that at peer one time and the sulfonylureas are really tough on it so any of the harmony express type things out there just whack the heck out of the canola and vandals not or clarity or vandals isn't all that good because the Canadians use vandal on canola in the old days before they had around the credit they used to do it off label and use it as weed control in canola that's good any more questions you guys having some success with or do you see the advantage in putting a cover crop in even that late with with corn we're seeing some advantage just seems like to me you're not going to see anything of any value are you talking about in the corn stocks going to beans either in or post post harvest yeah well like I said even when I drilled Matt was talking about drilling that rye and the cereal rye and even if it doesn't get much growth in the fall it's so aggressive that by spring time it's so much more aggressive than weed it'll get on the times I've tried it I mean get I wanted to see what kind of effect it had so I let it get to I had like 30 foot strips of rye and then just strips for the fields I could try it so I let it go till it was in the boot stage and that was just towards the end of May and just spread it out ground up and it was dry that air and that's still if anything yielded I combined the strips and I had the rye and still yielded like a push or better than beans even though it was that dry so you'll get good growth with rye and the spring even if it doesn't come up or anything just a matter of if you've got time to get planted and we'll see on this other mix what happens I guess we're going to find out this is the first year of the group unless it's trying it can't really give you an honest answer but like I said in November next year what we're going to do is try to put some wheat down normally we'll get some corn harvested in the September or back over that it might have time so then that way we could split the rows maybe spread a little residue and have some fertility down along with it I think you just saw a picture recently where they had this annual rye grass but even though the top growth was only a couple of inches when they actually dug down there was a lot more root mass underneath let's see what's actually okay one or two more and then we'll let these guys go that's right ideally that probably the ideal situation but our tool bar is not straight and true as much as it could be and even though we got auto-steer we could nudge things over yeah it'd be nice to go in clear a little residue and then say you're going to be lying on the same spot we don't have a properly tracking tool bar because we've always got like a 14 or 15 inch row 25 on the other end so that is definitely something we want to do in the future but we're not lined up I did a couple of fields that way and then found out that it wasn't staying consistent so I just kind of went in and made it