 South Dakota's educational effort to raise awareness about the importance of soil health continues. The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a cooperative agreement with the South Dakota No-Tel Association and IGRO South Dakota State University Extension for delivering these seminars with the latest soil health and productivity technology to South Dakota farmers and ranchers. I'm from Canada, South Dakota, Wyoming County and used to hear about 170 miles. Geographically challenged friends from this area that I am last year ever. They say that I'm not, but they mainly clasp us. We also farm some at Martin and Bennett County, which is pretty much straight loam soils. And then straight south here in Fall River, we farm south of Old Rix, which is Fall River County. And there's a lot of mainly clay soils and some salt soils. Don't know if my friends are out here thinking that it's the Cheyenne River you call East River or West River from, but I tell them that in Old Rix, I'm not west of the Cheyenne like they are, but I am pretty much where it starts. So we cover a lot of different soils and ground. We started in the No-Tel back about 22 years ago. Had a meeting with the Dakota Lakes Farm and decided I wanted to try the No-Tel. Mainly with the reasons for economic. Came home and talked to the finance officer as my dad because he had to be on board. We had from Kansas, I thought that was going to be a hard sell, but he was pretty much retired. He was tired of losing the soil down to correct his whole career. He was on board, so we gave him a try. I think throughout the battle, we could see that the economics and the erosion was getting a lot better. But really over the years, that's really been kicking in more. There's a lot of us being talked about today and that would be the diverse rotation system. The benefits are more than I imagine they would be when you grow six, seven, eight crops. It becomes easier to, the economics of the farming become lower. I think management, at first it seems a lot harder, but it actually becomes easier. You're not trying to correct problems that are a wreck all the time. If you've got a good system, it seems like a lot of problems go away. I think that that's something that, when you start these real diverse rotations, you don't think that that's going to happen, and it actually does. I'll probably just sit. My name is Brent Ireland. I'm from down in the Martin area, where Mike mentioned that he has a land that you're going to be on, which is about 120 miles south of east of here, fairly close to the start of the sand fields. My operation actually was started by my great-grandfather, so it's been in the family for a long time. But as we're all the farms there, it's kind of developed into a standard, where we follow rotation. And it was that way for my dad, my uncle, in the early 1980s, decided that they'd like to get into no-till-earth farming. There were some benefits to doing so anyway. So the first entry into it would be that they bought an April alternator. We got a pick-up sprayer. I just put the bag in the pick-up. We sprayed winter wheat stubble, planted my lawn with that winter wheat stubble, and then we turned around. That probably kind of went along for about another 10 years, and I have to admit that I'm a little bit out of that loop, because that's about the time that I got out of high school. And during that time that I wasn't around, they transitioned to a chandelier to have been there since. We've kind of primarily gone to the forward year rotation, spring wheat, or sometimes millet, then corn, or sometimes mild, and then a broad wheat. Primarily, it's been sunflowers. We have sap flowers, soybeans. I think for us, originally, as I talked to my dad and uncle, and their thoughts as they first got into no-till, one of the things they thought was that right away it was going to allow them to grow a high-water use crop, like hyaluronicus. Today we think, well, maybe we better plant a hyaluronicus. So that's a little bit of a change. I think we were starting to have wheat issues, some cheap grass, some downy groans, a bit of a problem there, feral rye, certainly some other things as well. I think going to no-till and just the diversity of our rotation, we've cleaned up a lot of those, but other things have kind of developed. So we know that it's not a perfect system, at least our system isn't perfect, and we've got some work to do yet. We have not yet got into doing cover crops, and that is a hard to do list to get there, but we have not yet done it. So I guess that's been perfect. Any questions to start off with? It'll make my job too hard. Any questions to start off with? Roger, we got a question. So Brett, what are the resource concerns that you would address with cover crops? You said you're thinking about going that way, and why would you want to do that? What is Brett's resource concerns? If you could start a new cover crop, what would you want to address? I should have mentioned that we do have livestock and better integrate them into our cropping system. To date, all we do pretty much is raise our corn stocks and flower stocks. And so that would be one thing. I think too, as I look at it, I think we could increase our organic matters like this area, we get 17 inches or so, a lot of average. But they're kind of our soils. I talk about loamy soils, but they're anywhere from sandy loamy to silvery loamy. And so some of it is very sandy. The question was the Mike. How has he, or what has he changed as farming from lime and coming into further west? I think further west would go to our challenge of this. It's do less aggressive rotations out west. It's hard to predict what the future is in a crop. A couple years ago I decided that I was going to try to get some flowers and some flower out of the rotation to become a little less aggressive. And one thought I had was it seemed like the springing wasn't working as good and I'm not sure. It was the cooler spring. But I don't want to use the spot rotation for weed and springing because winter weed is the best crop. So I tried to do shorter, less moisture intense rotations about last year then since last, a year ago, October this October in the fall we were kind of about 38 inches of moisture. So that one didn't work out like I thought. Sometimes it's more than six inches of moisture, time or eight. It's... I took it around as good as we've done and behind the colony on the soils, we've been doing this for years, you kind of don't realize how much the soils are grouping. We went to the Fall River Farm. We got Ray Warders out for a bus tour and he dug up the chunk of dirt. We've just been there a year and he handed him a piece of dirt that was about the size of a bowling ball that was heavier. It's like a rock. I think I can drop. It's so heavy it can pack. And that soil has been eight, nine years later. It's not like this back home but it's greatly improved. It's just kind of amazing that we can really not that long at the time see improvements in our soil. But I truly believe that the further west we'll the rotation will be more challenging and the options may be not quite as much but part of my problem too is I feel that I do not have livestock and that's probably a big part of the equation the further west we go and I just... that's not in our system. I think so. You need to have some more questions out there. Back there. During the winter we look at snow as our main source of water for the livestock and as a matter of fact we're getting a little nervous here in the last few days as it was warming up because we got a group of cattle on the quarter land where there is no water so it's snowing up but our cow calf bears we leave the cows on the cows till the end of March so they're out there all winter around the cows we allow them access if they'd like to walk back usually it's up to a mile for water but very few do if there's a storm coming they'll walk back to get out of the winter but water they do just fine on the snow and it's just a matter of getting your cattle acclimated and if you have a problem just don't check your cattle for it the question was are we mob grazing all the time it doesn't matter the species whether it's cows, cow calf bears, age class and the answer is no we're using mob grazing as a tool no till is a tool cover crops are tools, crop diversity is a tool they're all just tools we'll only mob graze when we want to address a specific resource that's concerned on a specific piece of land so typically we do not do what we call mob grazing with cow calf bears we'll run them at 150,000 approximately pounds of live weight per acre which does not mob grazing mob grazing to me is you gotta get over 500,000 pounds live weight per acre or something and that's when we want to address a resource concern the other thing is what class of livestock we're grazing like I mentioned in the presentation like the grass-finished animals we're letting them be selected because we want to put on maximum gain we'll use different classes as a tool like our heifers what we typically do with our heifers is we run all our heifers in one group and then we just dump in a bunch of bulls for 30 days what breeds, breeds, what doesn't and those heifers then can be used as a tool and will mob graze them because they'll put our weight and gain on about anything it seems so we can use different classes of the cattle to do what we want and obviously we're not mob grazing the pigs sheep we sure can but I tell people our sheep are on a plant grazing system I don't know on that story what resource concern would you use for the mob grazing what resource concern would we use for mob grazing for instance the analogy I showed were trying to lay down higher carbon and we'll do that time meant permit this morning for us to go through our whole perennial type system but on the perennials we're grazing different classes the grass minister on there the heifers are on there and if we have like there's one whole segment where North Dakota gave a fish department came to us and they had a section of land that was heavily infested with noxious weeds I mean they were spending 15,000 a year spraying noxious weeds and they came to us would you take over management of this section of land and take care of the noxious weeds and we said sure first thing we would spray it second thing is you can impose no restrictions as far as number AUN then we went in there with high stock density grazing because the reason they had so much noxious weeds they were letting that land go very low AUN 40 animal units all they were putting on there and you had all this litter build up then you get noxious weeds so we went in there with very high stock density knocked down all the noxious weeds and now we're getting a lot of issues so you can use noxious weeds to address different resources use it as a tool we have plenty of time far away do they see any difference in the effectiveness of dry fertilizer versus liquid fertilizer for Mike and Brett do you see any difference between dry fertilizer versus liquid fertilizer the main difference I see is that one it's everything still sticky not very fun to mess with and so we primarily use dry but it doesn't really address your question I guess I don't have a good answer for you I don't know that I have seen we do put our dry fertilizer in in the ground so let's see to the side right in front I haven't really had a lot with that the only liquid that we have used over the years we did use liquid starter with our planner for a few years I guess I can't say the thing that is nice about liquid obviously is that you can get better blends or easier blends to get what you want but I've seen a difference in terms of power response on the air seeder now all really we do not broadcast to Rhea I don't like doing that to use your band liquid fertilizer a lot of us like to do this with liquid fertilizer it goes on top and serves I like to bury it but that becomes a cost to because it slows up your planning eventually over in the ground so you've got more disturbance, mud issues when you're planning it it's not a it's not easy we set up a planner from last week banding the liquid in a band beside the row on top of the ground I do it on a nervous level I don't like it being on top of the ground I feel more comfortable with it planning somewhere or something early planning some parts late June makes me nervous see we do the liquid fertilizer we use a streamed bar of the weed and we think we're going to have a big crop that's a 30% fertilizer I think that you can really get a very good luck when you do that and it's like it it's you should try to timeline it's usually the warm it's kind of warm but whenever I don't bury the fertilizer I will send it in my response when it's hard to always get that done do you when you've been trying to look do you see any residue that's opposed to the breaks there I've done very little I've done very little of the broadcast to get the mounds out there in it it definitely makes it raw some people say I think that's positive I don't necessarily agree with that but we did it basically was a way to alleviate the fertilizer and planning time I think there's some advantages to that I guess overall I guess what we used to bury the fertilizer would be the residue on the surface okay you know I had a question for maybe Gabe he was talking about your cover crop you lay flat trash whippers on your corn plumber have you had issues with the stand and cold soils in a wet spring and the other one is about stripper heads and weed did you guys use the stripper heads okay the question about residue and flat now we don't always put the residue flat there's lots of times I grow on covers we're not grazing them and we'll just no-till right in but I don't use trash whippers at all because I don't want that to stir as far as cold soils I really believe that as your biology increases your soils will warm up much quicker and it only makes sense and we can we've had many examples where we'll get a snowfall and our soils will be you know they don't melt off immediately and the neighbor will have snow on it that tells me my soil tends to warm I've found that as we improve and advance soil health we've been able to extend the growing season significantly before or after you know earlier in the year and then later in the year and part of that it's just healthier now in starting now you will have a problem with cold soils then you address it according to you know carbon-nitrogen ratios and as far as cycling that through and you can do that according to which crop species that you you seed or plant as far as stripper headers we don't use stripper headers I know guys I do and they work great I just you know I don't want to write the chat I want to make an experience with them you can possibly come with them and perhaps we melt or sometimes we get two weeks in a row next year going back to corn sometimes actually doesn't look too good a job sometimes we do there when that happens instead of planting corn we want to go to something large kind of later then our rotational switch to plant but we usually use mytle then flowergrounds a lot of our residents check the soil for the mytle crop then there's a little black ground for us for the mytle to help them make a journey I like the stripper heads I like 90% of which stripper head does I guess 10% you know and you can't get a plant yeah we too use stripper heads and like what they do for us by and large it's easier for us to plant behind the stripper that it is a stripper head year before we get behind and you can see that plus we like this difference in snow catch especially on dry dry streams it stands out pretty easily I don't know that of course our soils are a little heavier and longer so I'm just so much clay so I don't know that we have a lot of problems the residue it does go flat we really have an engine any questions keep in touch if you didn't lay down how do you get your new crop do I need the cash crop into a cover crop that we didn't lay down what's the question there's absolutely no issue with climbing into a standing cover assuming it's terminated and we'll always use winter to our advantage and have it terminated by winter seed so that the residue isn't an issue and that's one thing we're just careful of we don't use biome or perennial species in our covers if we're going to a cash crop so then we don't have to worry about carrying that over a summer to a fall yeah well we're going to either be harvesting whether it's an early seeded pea crop or a winter wheat crop or something that'll be terminated there because it'll harvest it then we'll go away with our fall seeded crops the shortest window for a cover well during the growing season if I think I have 40 days rather than leave that land with nothing growing for 40 days I'm going to be growing something and we can go in there with buckwheat, millet berry, cowpea, something that doesn't take very long to establish some cover to go in there with in the fall though all I need like this year I was seeding fall biennials on October 8th but we had our first killing frost September 10th October 8th is getting kind of late for us but as long as I can break germ on it we'll get it over with in our soils so I'll do it as long as I can if it's a fall biennial the biennials we had a lot of options with as I was showing you I mean we've had many times established a biennial earlier like maybe by mid-August and took advantage of the fall let it grow and then a spring will let it grow and terminated going with another different cash crop a reason to do that now I'm usually pretty through with where I'm not going to terminate something living just to grow something else but we have done that on that occasion like when there was the raw open corn prices we terminated some fall biennials and planted corn but normally we'll use it to our advantage either harvest it or graze it or you know combine it with whatever option we see we'll make this the most fun yeah biennial I'm talking about wheat, winter tree, jaly, harry bash you know something like rye something like that you know, cheap grass and realize that we don't have any cheap grass problems in our perennial dashes we just don't see that we see a little bit of cheap grass on some crop land but that's easily addressed with you know our crop rotation but as far as lawn grazing cheap grass I don't have any experience with it I guess any other questions so you have some time Randy you gotta have a question you always have a question this gentleman is all this blue grass any other solutions to address all this blue grass I'm not familiar with it but there was another question somewhere here back there you know from homes in grump fields and hay fields it was a starter okay we don't have prairie dogs we do have pocket tool for some that for one thing we never shoot a coyote hawk any of the predators we just don't and we don't allow hunters to shoot them on our operation and on hay fields that's where if we really run into a problem with them we run high stock density grazing over and just let them pound it down and the last thing we do is we just slow it down wait that's it we just slow it down they're just speed bumps so that's all we do as far as prairie dogs I think we do our best to get rid of them the others yeah we mostly just slow down in years of no till you get badly mowed under rattles and dig them out and by the over time they'll go away or at least you get to a point where they don't seem like you're getting any worse than you made these days certainly that was an issue and we still have to look out for yeah we'd love to cover grump on sunflowers sunflowers this year yeah I'd go in there with a very early seeded crop something like an old pea crop you know use old peas as the main component of that mix then I'd always add a forage digrass to get like a hunter hybrid turnip or something in there and then I'd race that off you know make sure and leave residual then we could you know terminate that and quite when are we going to do that obviously you want to do that soon enough so you don't have a bridge there between the oats and the winter but we'd grace that early seeded mix you know I'm talking about pocket gophers in that I was in Australia they have long bats you ought to see them those long bats they'll dig through pier shale and a long bad hole we got a picture of me standing in that up to my waist you talk I mean a combine tiger can fall in that thing it's amazing so we're lucky over here they think badgers are a piece of cake here why once a plow it's genetically embedded it has to be because otherwise why would you do something so stupid you know I mean when it rains where do you drive across the plow field or the pasture you know it makes no sense so they do it because they think they have to get rid of the residue but if they have to promper biology and soil life it'll take care of it for them you know we can show you pictures where we start with a lot of residue and in no time it's down to nothing in a healthy soil the reason they do that is because they destroyed their soil the life and function of the soil like I said that was an easy question and you too anyone else that's a good question and I think we probably thought about it for several years and haven't done anything one of them is I think I'm not real thrilled with the equipment that I have for seeding a cover crop into I think right now where I think it fits best is into my winter week that's going to sit there with nothing growing on it until I plant corn that's an easy one there are a lot of other places you could probably be doing it like ages and I I'm probably not prepared to do that just yet but that's an easy one I'm not real thrilled with Mike but I think it's a little bit too high of his and not too much of that residue down that I want so that's probably the main thing right now that's getting good we have that what we try to do is after a week it seems like I can get it there to do it timely it's pretty dry until later in the fall or we're in a real wet cycle it's hard to get in to get it done give it enough growth on it before freezing we have a pit on it I'm not with enough success to do it a lot but we have tried to have the success that I was hoping for I think probably some of it is we're not doing our right situation we had some preventive plant acres this year and it's I was looking to go wet until late in the fall or mid August and I didn't when we could finally get the plant to cover crops I was worried about the plant to cover crops I wanted to leave back in there and I thought if we dried it out I would get the weed started in the fall I think that's an obvious spot for us as we're ground before the plant leave but we want to have enough moisture so that's probably probably not I think the cow will be the biggest hold on for itself or utilize the advantages of it do you address those barriers oh we don't have much time the biggest barrier right now to the whole soil health movement is the very farm growth it's totally antagonistic to a healthy soil ecosystem and if we would just do away with the old farm program it'd be amazing number of people would be going growing colors I mean everybody would be doing it and they'd be doing it for the right reasons you know it's known for some time and Duane and Ray can answer this but you know anywhere 40 to 60 percent of the synthetic fertilizer we apply is not taken up by the plants we know that so in other words all the checks you write 40 to 60 percent is going down the watershed anyway well why not instead of investing in that way invest in soil health then you can lower the expenses it's just plain and simple and as far as you know it's up to each individual operation if they want to run livestock or whatever but I would say this if you don't have livestock and you don't care to get livestock there's dozens of young producers out there who love to form a partnership with you and bring livestock down to your operation and we've seen that we've done quite a bit of work with that up in North Dakota where we will partner up straight cash drain producers with young livestock producers grow covers on the cash drain land young livestock producers will come and harvest that covers with livestock it's a win-win situation for both we're advancing soil health on the cash drain operations and allowing a lot more grazing for the young livestock producers so there's ways around that that are relatively easy to to address if you want but it's up to each operation we have about another five minutes in this crazy scene you ever thought of doing but you must have been able to do it Salah obviously agriculture related I assume well that's a good question I'm pretty much right over here I wanted to try that's an easy one for me I want to go right down to the Red River Valley right where I-29 and 94 intersect and I want to just start covering crops, integrating livestock and just prove to them that it can be done that's what I really want to do that's good enough one more here another question on your cover crops I'm along with this and I'd like to integrate this into winter wheat going to corn maybe you know I kind of have the hard time dragging your expensive drill across the ground but I don't know game do you drill yours in or do you do you lose like a candy box or have you had that much luck like aerial we just we've tried aerial we've tried broadcasting and our dire environment drill is by far the best result so that's going to depend on your moisture but it's you know we've done enough for this to know that we will improve soil health I can't tell you the number of cover crops I planted where I only got this much above ground growth but what it's you know four times that below the ground you keep doing that for a number of years what I tell producers is take one field whatever side you know you feel comfortable and then even if it has to be behind the hills where none of the neighbors see and commit for five years on that field and I've done this with producers all over the world I have yet to have anyone make it through five years of dedicating themselves to cover crop in a cash crop rotation and go back after a year or two because they didn't have the fortitude to stick with it but once they see because every year your soil health will advance enough and that's the beauty with the any test you can start really realizing the benefit to back off and I strongly recommend like I said earlier all cash grain producers use that any test because you will notice a significant reduction in your input cost and it'll really benefit you know but that's the thing you've got to stick with it and see is it pretty easy to get frustrated after a year question Mike there you said earlier yeah usually radishes planted early in the spring they'll just bolt and go to seed I don't know it's something with just the genetic makeup of radishes do you know what I'm not a scientist I can't tell you but when we when we planted that late June early July then they'll get the big tubers that you want why that is oh it's daily thank you yeah okay after the 21st of June after the 21st of June huh see I learned something else okay we're done what you guys said like that gave this like can we talk about the any test in your fertilizer yeah the question was with the any test and that haven't fertilized now if you've been if your land's used to synthetics you need to actually increase those because of what I said my presentation this morning does that have a negative effect on biology somewhat but the benefits will outweigh that starting out and then because you need to grow biomeds in order to improve organic matter, improve nutrient cycle etc etc and you're going to be propagating the numbers of biology so that will offset any negative of the synthetics right away but then definitely use the Haiti test and start backing off when you can one of the things we're seeing you know our county, Burley county where I'm from when I started O-Tail in 93 I was the only O-Tail or drew an O-Tailer in that county now 70% of the crop line in that county is 0-Tail I mean 0-Tail and a lot of the producers when they started to diversify the rotations they're not taking their reward so to speak and they kept using synthetics using synthetics and synthetics well take your reward and if you've built the soil health start putting it in your pocket instead of just writing jacks and now we're seeing because of the Haiti test a lot of the producers really significantly reducing their synthetic fertilizer use without it negatively affecting yields whatsoever they're getting better yields because of things like the mycorrhizal function that I described this morning has CRP improved soil health I'm sure there are situations where it has the big thing I see with CRP is I really think they should have made it be seeded to native perennial species like up our way and we do have a plan that we leased that was in CRP for 20 years we've converted it to a grazing system but it was 95% smooth roam 5% noxious weeds which we don't want we see smooth roam as an invasive up there they didn't improve soil health what's going to happen is it's just going to become stagnant you're going to get noxious weeds it worked very short term but that was just a program that wasn't very well thought and yes I am very critical of our program and I don't mind saying so the question was by going into native perennials I'll get biology established faster than with cover crops no what I was trying to get across that is that native perennials will sequester more carbon and as Ray and I both said it's carbon that drives the system so we got to get perennials back into the system for that reason a very diverse mix of annuals will jump start things faster simply because you have the dying decay and roots and organic material for that biology to be on so faster it will be with perennials but long term carbon sequestration is what perennials one question left one question left brush isn't sitting I'm not familiar with it we don't know we give the new tools all over the country with noxious weeds we don't know we don't know so we'll use the great reeds in the north in the mountains we don't have that much ok guys that leads us up to our break we'll have a 15 minute break and we'll make a DNA 238 thanks to the panel