 Hi, I'm Kelly Cooper, I'm the research agronomist at the Oaks Irrigation Research Site, right here where we're at in near Oaks North Dakota and standing next to me is my old buddy and pal, Joe Brecker. Joe Farms, well tell them where you farm at Joe. I farm 30 miles straight east of here. Straight east, 20 miles straight east of my place. We kind of grew up together. Well we did grow up together. Went to high school, went to college and then eventually Joe got me into conservation work, which is a long story. It is. But to get to the point, get to our subject today of 60 inch corn or more specifically wide roll corn. Wide roll corn, right? Yeah, yeah, so we're just remembering in February of 2019, phone rings, I pick it up, it's Joe and he says, I got a crazy idea for you Kelly. I said, what's that, 60 inch corn and well 60 inch high, no, 60 inch wide corn rows. And that everything has gone to narrower corn rows over the period of time and we talked a little bit about it. I think it was, where did it come from? I was at a university cap grant meeting that Marisol Birdie had put together and a gentleman from Iowa who was working with the professional farmers of Iowa doing some work on wide space corn and he was telling me some of the things he was seeing and the thing that caught my ear was the biomass that they were able to grow between the wide rows of corn and not affect significantly affect the corn yield or at all affect the corn yield. So that was like because we had been trying with Abby Wick, Dr. Abby Wick, we'd been trying interplanting our corn with cover crops in 30 inch rows and with modest, well actually less than modest success and the corn, the competition from the corn was actually out competing the cover crops. So it's kind of like, okay, it's working, not really working, where do we go from here? And when that gentleman told me that the cover crop stayed alive, not only stayed alive but actually was a significant portion of the biomass in the field, that was like light bulb you know time and I had to try it on my farm and now I got you going on it. Yeah, after that phone call I had to sit there, I still thought it was crazy idea but I got to thinking about our plot equipment and I realized we could actually do this, it would be in a small scale so anyway in 2019 we did a couple three plots, just kind of demonstration and of course from a conservation point of view this is just wonderful that you can get this cover crop in the floor of your corn crop and it does all those wonderful conservation things like it keeps the soil in place, stops soil erosion, it adds diversity which we all like that, a diversity of plants. Now there is a challenge with weed control right Joe? Absolutely and that's the part that I'm still going through on my own farm, I'm looking at it day to day, I'm seeing some really interesting things though, is that as long as there is cover crop there the weed component doesn't seem to be any different there than it really is in narrow row corn or standard row corn. If there's not a cover crop to compete with it then that's when you can have significant weed issues that are quite robust. Yeah and what I found here without going into great details on herbicides apparently if you give the herbicide a couple of weeks you can plant a lot of these cover crops in and not have any really big effect on the cover crop. In fact last year we were amazed at how vigorous especially the buckwheat, the tame buckwheat, I mean we had buckwheat four to five feet tall in our corn with a lot of pollinators and it and we ended up with about a five percent yield hit so there was a slight yield hit but but it wasn't because of the cover crop. No no we had cover crop and no cover crop and they yielded they yielded the same and we had 30 inch corn and we had 60 inch corn same variety planted the same day now this wasn't replicated it was more demonstration we had very similar yields a little bit less on the 60 inch corn so we're we're quite encouraged so this year we uh we did actually two full replicated studies here at the Oaks research site one is looking at 30 inch versus 60 inch north south planted versus east west. Now this is you know when you're dealing with these wide roll corn the sun is going to hit the north south and the east west a little bit differently different times of the day for sure yep so that may change the cover crop that you have um it may change the variety of the corn that you're looking at they talk about corn that's more upright leaves versus wider leaves so there's a lot of little nuances I think that at the research site that we can tease out but now Joe tell them a little bit about your planter Joe got so excited he built his own planter this spring. So so based on the single row 60 and the work that we were able to look at whether we're searching twitter for people that had had limited experience with it or not but there appeared to be uh if you put more rows even wide but so I went with I decided to try pair row 60 inch so I could not find a toolbar uh that I could just buy off the market and put my row units at various widths because I wanted to try from eight inch down to single row and uh so I ended up this winter working with a local weld shop and we put together our own toolbar and it worked out great so I bought uh precision row units to put on this toolbar and uh had a great planting season and the first field I planted I I have passes throughout the field that are eight inch pair row eight inch 60 right or centered on eight inch uh sorry centered on 60 inch spacing but the pair rows are eight inches apart then I went to six inch four inch two inch and single row like you have behind us here yeah there's four comparison purposes and the the entire purpose of it is so that I can decide which one to kind of settle in on do I is eight row higher eight inch pair row higher yielding than four inch pair row how do they harvest how how does the when you start spacing the rows back out there is a difference on the shading for the cover crop um now I as long as the cover crop survives I am not quite as concerned about how much biomass I produce I just want it to be a a even growth and uh have it be so that my overwintering species like for example in my mix this year I have rye and alfalfa I want them to establish survive the winter and come up next spring uh and in the in the 30 inch corn where we had interceded years previous several years previous uh the corn in a lot of cases actually reduced the sand I mean almost to zero at at times so uh I really want there to be just enough light in that canopy to get the cover crops to establish grow and survive if if they're overwintering species I I think that there's if you are somebody that was looking to maximize the uh cover crop biomass that you were planting in there then you might want to you know play with those row widths right right and maybe corn types and leaf types and all that because Joe used to have cattle but you don't anymore but there's a lot of livestock people that are very interested in this system because of the aftermath grazing potential where you could really enhance not only the quality of feed but the duration of the time and and you can you can play around again with this this gives an opportunity for spring calving you could have the cover crop over winter you've got a nice place to turn your cows out to calf um we last year with our first 60 inch corn experiment we planted a 82 day corn June 3rd and June 6th now remember this was last year when about half the corn in North Dakota in areas didn't even get harvested and our 82 day corn did mature so it you know it's a one year a one time thing but it just shows you could grow corn early day corn in Southern North Dakota where we're at and you can mature the corn but you could still utilize some of these cover crop opportunities so uh so one of the things we were talking about uh was the weed control aspect of it and and that you know that is paramount I see when I when I talk to producers about widening those rows out one of their first questions is yeah but what about weed control and and certainly we you have to go through a series of experimental phases through this to discover uh what what you're going to settle in on but I agree with you what you comment you said that there there there are opportunities to pick the cover crops and still use uh residual herbicides that will give you uh longer into the season I I venture to say there probably isn't anything that's full season weed control without canopy right correct but if you can get long enough season weed control to get your cover crops to help with that canopy then it looks like really weed control is is attainable in these wide space corn yes but it's going to take some practice yes it is practice and and experimentation right right so um so we ended up I say we've got two replicated studies here at Oaks and one is the one I mentioned with the north south uh population another one is a variety trial that's dry land we planted it just like our 30 inch trial but it's in 60 inch and then we've got six demos uh one is a 30 inch 60 inch strip till now that's another dimension into this I think Joe you're all no till with your planter right right and some people like a little tillage some people like strip till so we had a strip till machine that we could utilize and we took every other row unit off so we could do 60 inch strips but Kelly and we we can come back to this I am strip tilling but with plants yes yes yeah well we'll come back to them we'll come back to that because that's that's really unique and with fertilizer yeah um but we've got a paired row single single row sixties paired row sixties with two different varieties we have a uh a cover crop demo that right behind us here we've only got like three different cover crops uh but we're looking at that and then we we did have some 60 inch corn last year so we stripped tilled through that and kept going through some conventional corn so we want to see if there's a difference where you have that wide row corn if the next year corn actually does a little bit better than where it's going into the corn residue and then uh kind of a fun one I've got a a weed patch now we're not talking about how weeds can be a problem well I had an area that was full of dandelions it was basically sod so we went in with 60 inch corn on that and because this corn is so wide I can drive a four wheeler between it so it gives me the opportunity to use several different herbicides through the season quite easily that you couldn't use or wouldn't use as easily in a narrow row right so so we'll see how uh how that turns out but but yeah tell us about your uh so um our history Kelly and my history really uh after in our adult life uh uh got uh got really interesting when we started a group of farmers started a research farm at Foreman North Dakota called CCSP and Kelly was the manager of our uh research farm at Foreman and one of the things that came by trial and error basically was using cover crops planted after cereal grain harvest uh and planting them in rows intended to be planted back on the next year and that system became known as by us but as biostriptile so it was actually a process that Kelly working at CCSP came up with and then I was so intrigued by it because I really I'd done strip till since the late 80s early 90s with tillage I uh I saw the benefits of the of it but I also saw saw the downside at times like you know if you have any slopes and you have some heavy rains you can get washing down that furrow down that tillage row a lot of erosion sometimes you know if you don't get your tillage done in the fall and you're forced to do it in the springtime you you don't always have ideal conditions but yet you're kind of forced to because that's your system so uh when when when Kelly came across this this uh use of cover crops in line with next year's corn it just all of a sudden again it's one of those kind of light ball moments uh we need to do some work with this so I took that concept to my farm and I've been experimenting with different plants in a row to follow my corn back with and one of the things that we started out we had radish as where the corn followed uh and had the peas in between because we had discovered already that peas can be difficult the next spring because of their vineiness and stringiness and planning them in between the rows they were less trouble but I I have since switched to a fava bean and what I found with fava bean is when they die they have a chocolate brown residue and no vineiness whatsoever like peas they just die and fall apart on the ground uh very dark in color and it influences the temperature in that band that you're planting your corn at absolutely so uh so that's what I'm I've been doing the last two or three years and it really does seem to work and I love it it's it's my strip till version of bio strip till and I I get not only the benefit of the warming of the ground from it but uh I can still stay true no till yeah and then cut that erosion and cut that erosion don't have that risk right involved in it so it's awesome so far got how many trials do you have in your own farm with your new planter you've got so so what I'm testing this year is the one field is just testing the width of the pair rows down to single row um I have a field that I have a 30 inch planter uh a cousin that came in with their 30 inch planter so I have replicated comparisons of 30 inch versus pair row 60 um I did another field on my farm where I actually moved over 30 inches with the same planter reduced the population in half and I have pair row 30 versus pair row 60 at the same population same variety you know everything's the same uh and then I have two neighbors that left me places in their 20 inch plantings to come in with my twin row 60 so lots of comparisons yeah lots of things to look at Joe do you have any idea how many farmers are trying wide real corn across North Dakota um no but I can think off the top of my head of of at least probably a dozen that are doing some level of experimentation with wide real corn and there may be many more than that yeah I've been surprised uh last winter this thing really kind of took off I was surprised at the interest I think I had more interest in this project than any other project I've ever ever done in the conservation or out the field trials a lot of phone calls a lot of twitter followers it just and it's people it's livestock people it's conservation people some are just curious but I I think between what we're doing at the research site here what Joe was doing I know eddy county has uh has a research project I I think this winter will be very interesting that we'll have a lot of data to share I think we'll have a lot of stories um I believe we will so uh and and abby I believe is going to have something at the dirt uh conference yeah so hopefully she's able to have the dirt conference yeah yeah or it may be virtual or maybe it's virtual she's she's still in that planning process so so anyway we're hopeful we're hopeful we can learn something and uh we can increase conservation diversity and uh hopefully help the livestock guys too and at the end of the day Kelly it's really all about soil health that's right that's right it's more plants uh remember that goal we talked about about what 15 years ago now live root 360 days a year yep and we can get there with this system that this is one of the components that we were missing before exactly all right well thanks Joe