 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 think that Mike and Brent did a wonderful job on the panel and they're a little praised. They're both on my board of directors and they're just excellent. Board members, Aids, New Heart Series and other board member minds. We have a really good board that had to go to Aids. The thing about Mike is he'll eventually have candidates. He has two daughters. He sends them to the University of Nebraska. One of the two of them is going to bring home a cowboy. That's the thing that's really holding him up. A lot of what they talked about today sounds kind of goofy but when my grandfather planted oaks, he planted oaks with sweet coal. My father did the same thing. When my grandfather ran his horse-drawn binder through his oats to bind it and get into bundles, he threw dwarf-essics rake seed out of a bucket between his legs out on the ground behind the horses on the bare ground. Then when they got the oats in shock, they turned out to sheep because the sheep wouldn't bother that oats and they would eat the sweet clover and the weeds and then when they got the oats hauled off to the threshing machine they could turn out to cows. This is not new stuff. It's stuff we've forgotten how to do. When I went into the South Dakota Hall of Fame seven or eight years ago I made that exact statement, I'm going into the Hall of Fame doing the stuff I learned from my grandfather and my father and reminding people of what that is. The thing they did is tillage but if you want a new tillage with a horse or a sea tractor you're welcome to do all the goddamn tillage you can do right now. I found one of those sea tractors with an iron seat, narrow front end and no radium so you're welcome to use it. Coal Age Research Farm is the reason we're here. It's owned by Farmer which is incredibly important and as I said I got 11 member board of directors. That's wonderful. We do a lot of the funding of our research from the production enterprise and we talk a lot today about why we do what we do in our production enterprise. This is a photo of part of the farm and then we've got some land up north. Most of this is mill borough soils and then down toward the river we've got some less dried soils and up north it's all promised and opals are real true burnisols. So we mostly have west river soil. We're on the wrong side of the river but this is what it looks like from our land is mixed grass prairie. It doesn't look the similar from the south. We were driving around on yesterday just about 10 miles this way in terms of trees and the ravines and most of the rest of it is kind of a mixed grass prairie. And the soils were similar. Farmer manages ecosystems that take sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide and makes them into products to be sold. We've got so many people that think they're wheat farmers or cow farmers or corn growers or soybean growers or whatever forget what their true vision is and it's to manage that ecosystem and take this sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide doesn't say anything here about nitrogen and make them into products to be sold. And Gabe talked about, and so did Ray talked about carbon. That's what it's all about, about harvesting the sunlight turning it into a carbon compound with a dry ecosystem. There's 270 to 350 parts per million carbon in the air in this room. It used to be about 180. In a few years it was going to be about 400. But 400 parts per million, there's almost 800,000 parts per million nitrogen. So just think of that, 280 to 800,000. That's what they're talking about. We're all hung up on nitrogen, but it's really all about driving that energy and that energy that goes in the soil makes is what's used to bring the nitrogen on the atmosphere to the ground. So what we're doing is we're managing ecosystem processes. That's what they're trying to tell you this morning in their fancy terms. We have a water cycle, an energy flow, a mineral cycle, and community dynamics. Does rain keep plants and recharges ground water? Does it run off and cause erosion and water quality degradation? Just look at your land and see what happens to my rain. And that's pretty easy when you're in Iowa or you're in your Red River Valley, it runs off where it goes down into Green Tile and it all ends up in the river before it does anything but eat good. The Dakota Lakes Research Farm began to use diverse disturbance, no-till and cover property to control runoff from center pivots. We really didn't start with dry land in terms of our no-till system. Our no-till system started trying to make water go in the ground under pivots. This is north of Peer Act, up around Gettysburg with the Missouri River. These guys would irrigate the water and run back to the river. Not an efficient thing. They were putting on an inch of water in 40 minutes and we now put in two inches of water on in nine minutes with no runoff. And if you've never been to the farm in the summer when we're irrigating, you need to come. Because once you see what we do with water, then you will change your mind about everything you do. The reason that happens is we have macro ports. These large holes that are root channels and worm channels, not so big as gopher, I mean, badger holes. That's a macro, that drills ultra macro ports, right? The thing that they miss that they don't kill is rattlesnakes. We don't kill rattlesnakes. We move them. But a rattlesnake kills mice. If you have badgers, it's because you have mice. So if you leave the coyotes alone and if you leave the snakes alone, they'll take care of most of the problems for you. This is, I named Cladifco, I think she's from Purdue. And she had a graduate student that took some latex and poured it on the ground in a no-till field. And these are all the macro ports, the large wormholes and rootworms. So that's where the water goes in the ground. In our system, and that's the way it goes in the ground, in the prairie, you never worry about a prairie in terms of water going into the prairie. Because it goes in unless it's overgrazed or poorly grazed. But a good grazing system, for any, it'll take water like crazy. And it goes in the macro ports. And the question today earlier that came up, somebody threw a softball game and he just whipped it. But they said, you know, you worry about cows being on fields when it's wet. You never worry about cows being on a pasture when it's wet. Why not? But a pasture has soil structure. Your fields don't have soil structure yet. And one of the reasons we haven't put livestock into Coat Lakes until we're going to this coming year, is to start bringing livestock into the system until we had to get our soil structure to the point where we felt we could do that. This is being reported. That's fine. So if you dye the water, you get this kind of a view and it comes down and then soaks into these areas. And the roots will actually follow these channels. There's an earthworm that didn't really like the color of the dye. If you have good soil structure, it'll first do this and then the exercise will come down in like that, but it won't run off. Energy flow. How much sunlight strikes green leaves and makes food for the ecosystem? Because that's what you're trying to do is make food for the ecosystem and then take some for the humans if you want to. But in the old days, if food came to the ecosystem, nothing really left. And then how much falls on dead vegetation or buried around it? And you need to ask yourself that question. The Nicolay Feastworms Farm uses covered forage crops to fine-tune crop rotation. It's one part of a big picture. To increase this carbon capture, sequester nutrients that would get away from us otherwise, to fix nitrogen, like Gabe talked about, or courage-friendly, which is Dan Forgey. You read Farm Journal and you see all this stuff with Howard Buckford Foundation and Cronin Farm where Dan Forgey's a guy who's writing about it. He's also on their board, but he calls predators these things that help us not have to use and insecticide as friendly. We have not used and insecticide had to co-relate in about 12 years. We haven't had to. Okay? This is what we did with our German summer students this year. If you want somebody that's pretty convinced that you should tell everything at least 10 times before you plant a crop, get a German student. So he was very convinced I was totally mad and stupid and whatever. So we had him making clay seed balls. And if you don't know what clay seed balls are, you're really interested in this idea of just Google one straw revolution. And there's a little book there that you can read where this whole farming system, where all they do is throw seeds coated in clay and feed fertilizer and whatever in the field of growing crops so when that first crop dies, the second crop takes off. That's one of the ways we're looking to make this cover crop thing easier for us. It's a used clay seed ball, but we think we might also be able to do our main crops that way. So often people talk about no-tales, well, it's really wet out there. We're not going to plant it. Well, then Western South Dakota being wet is a good thing, isn't it? So if we could just go out there and float across it with a four-wheeler and spread out some clay seed balls and have our crop grow, then I really wouldn't worry about it being too wet. It's an engineering problem, not a biological problem. So here's some of our cover crops and one of the things that Gabe talked about and Ray as well is we look to have a mixture and there's stuff growing down underneath there. What you see here is cowpeas, mostly, and it's warm and it's in weeks double and it's going early. And you've got a couple of fat farmers, me included a batter down that was then. This was back in 2006, but the cowpeas are growing fine because it's in August. And as soon as it gets down to about 36 or 38 degrees at night, the cowpeas decide they'd rather be in Oklahoma so they leave. They just die. They go, that's too dang cold for me. And then the brassicas and things come on. And we will actually put in some at times a flower in the late fall like this to feed our predators, to actually attract some insects that our predators will eat. And then the next year we'll plant in right into that. You can see that brassica stem standing there yet. But we've almost no residue, just like Gabe. It's not really bare soil and there comes up the corn. That all was done with just one herbicide application. From the time we harvest the wheat, we can tell this picture to the station. It's really like Mike Harnley said, it's not a complex thing. Once you have the system working because you're smarter than the weeds in the bucks. The mineral cycle, are the nutrients available for plant use in environmental services which means building more organic matter, or have they been leased? They're transported from the landscape. Ecocessants that leak nutrients become deserts. Phthalane seeds indicate you're leaking and what you're leaking is your fertilizer nutrients. It's not salt. It is a salt. I used to teach chemistry. It is a salt but it's stuff with nitrate. It's calcium sulfate which is known as gypsum. It's calcium carbonate which is known as lime. If your pHs are going down it means you're leaking lime out of your system. Tracy pH indicates leakage. One unit train of soybeans contains one million pounds of phosphorus. Our governors and our political candidates rail about not having enough trains. I know Jerry Cook likes trains because he buys stuff and sells it to other places, right? But if we only sell stuff we leak out our phosphorus. We need to have more livestock in the state so we don't have to sell so much stuff out of state. Now that we're growing more crops with no tail and good rotation we need to utilize that to keep the livestock here. Think of where a lot of our calves go and I said this 25 years ago. Our calves from the poor pure livestock go to Oklahoma and Kansas to eat corn that's raised by using fossil fuels to pump water to irrigate corn in the pump from the water from an aquifer that's going dry, right? And now our distillers bringing bottles of damn calves to Oklahoma. I mean it doesn't make any sense what we're doing. We need to be doing the livestock here and maybe not in feedlots, maybe patting them on fields. So here's the saline season. If you don't use the water here it's going to go down and come out here. Here's the thing we did with the barns last year as part of the cluster thing that had to do with livestock. This is pearl millet and German millet and some cowpeas mixed together. And they're going to swath graze that. Their first crop they grew on in a piece of land was oats and peas. So they grew the oats and peas. Those are harvested as forage in June. Right behind the baler they're planting this stuff. And this was in September and then as soon as they got that done he came in and seeded winter treated cali between the swaths and the idea was to bring the oats bales back out and spread them out this way and use them to hold the fence so they could control these cows and then swath graze all winter. And by just moving you use those oats bales to hold the wire post for the wires. So when you got to move you just pull the post out of the bale and move the whole fence over to the next row of bales. Very easy to do. They didn't get that part done because they'd already hauled the bales to the buildings. But I got one picture later where they cleaned this up pretty well even though those cattle were in control. But there's no sense in bringing them cattle in and bringing the manure in and then taking it back out. And the nitrogen from the urine if you take it into the building never makes you back to the field. Most nitrogen in the feed hall does not make you back to the field and most nitrogen in the feed consumes the field remains there. It's a big deal. Do many species great or small have fair to stable populations of all ages and populations of just a few species fluctuate widely. If you do killage you go from having quite a few bit of biology to having no biology to having quite a bit of bacteria biology and then it crashes as soon as it runs out of stuff. It's just constantly doing this. I heard a really funny thing the other day. The governor of Minnesota is having a summit to try to figure out why there's no pheasants in Minnesota. I could have saved him a whole bunch of money. You know if you're more plowing the whole day I'm saved there's no pheasants going to be there. Right? They need residue. They need cover. Weeds and disease are nature's way of adding diversity to a system that lacks diversity. And once you start adding cover crops and diverse rotations and Mike currently mentioned this his weeks that problems kind of went away with diversity and lack of disturbance. And so what we did in the beginning nature's efforts to add diversity can be countered by adding diversity of our own. Cover crops do that and you put them in there's a bare space between weed and when you're going to go to corn or something one of the things they do is compete with weeds. They're a tool. Cover crops and forage crops and I used to call these green pallows cover crops instead of cover crops. They're a tool not an end. We're kind of in this phase now when everybody wants to talk about cover crops and they don't do cover crops they should be taken out and shot. What we're really looking at is just a way to help us do this diversity thing a little better to find two. Right? So they they're a way to improve rotation diversity and intensity meaning water use while providing competition. Cover and forage crops provide the opportunity to increase both intensity diversity and situation production of a grain crop would not be crop possible. So after we go into corn you're not going to do a second crop there. Season is too short. There's not enough water. Even if you irrigate there's not enough time. Right? So we can't do a grain crop if we try to do a grain crop it's going to be unprofitable or too risky. In human environments tall grass furrier or wetter eastern south to put down in Minnesota the goal should be to have something growing at all times where we have limited growing season we need to do this with cover crops not with double crops. In subhuman that's what you guys semi-arid environment cover crops can be utilized to increase organic matter and biological activity. We're somewhere between subhuman and semi-arid. Yes, I had my website survey out and they tell you in the name of what your soil is we're trying to moisture you'd have there but you have to know they're lingo. So the NRCS people here probably know it. I know it a lot of farmers don't but most of the stuff we saw yesterday were over off city semi-arid was really where we're at. Right? They're all used to. So we're going to use this little extra time and moisture that we got to increase organic matter and biological activity. Now, ten things to know about cover crops decide what you want to do before you start. That's really obvious, right? But the first thing everybody does is they go in and they say I want a new cover crop and what do you want to do? I want radishes. Right? That would be one of the last things I would put out in most of my situations. They're too expensive the holes are too big. I'm going to use a brass and I'm going to use grapeseed. It's that's my grandfather used. That's a good thing to use. It gives you more grazing in my opinion for the dollar. Okay? But figure out what you want to do. Do you need to get rid of some moisture? Do you want to change the color of the residue? If you got weeks double you're going to go to corn. You want it warmer in the spring. If you grow a cover crop in there, you change the color from a light color which reflects light to a dark color which absorbs light. Okay? That really helps in the spring. Think of a cover crop with just another component as your rotation. You don't want it causing you problems. Using a mixture like Dave said that cover crops allow the meaning several goals simultaneously. Measures add more diversity, grow it different times better compete with weeds and optimize nutrient cycling and do a bunch of other things. You can get a little too goofy. They have too many. Everybody wants to have 12. You go, why 12? I don't know. Somebody said we had to have 12. Think about what you're trying to do and then get a species in there to do that. One of our favorite ones is to use flax. As part of something because flax is stiff it's a broadleaf but it's stiff and so it will catch a lot of snow over the winter. So if I use some moisture after weeks double going into corn the next year it'll have that flax to catch a bunch of that again. But it's dark color and it's also highly mycorrhizal so it really jump starts the mycorrhizal system. Both Ray and Gabe mentioned this idea of having a legume feed an odd legume. So here's a silage corn with no nitrogen. Look at the nitrogen deficiencies there. Right? Because we didn't put fertilizer on it and then right next to there we put soybeans between the corn rows. So the soybeans gave their nitrogen in the corn in return for carbon. It doesn't happen when you do tillage. It happens when you do no till and have mycorrhizae and you're going to cut this for silage or graze it you've got better feed. We have a field that we've done corn on corn for 24 years now and we are trying to grow alfalfa as an under story crop as a perennial cover crop. And we're going to continue to work with that where the alfalfa will feed the nitrogen. We're not trying to harvest alfalfa. We're just using it as something that will suck deep nutrients up bring them back to the surface so they don't escape and also make some nitrogen for the corn crop. Creating conditions beneficial next crop is just one of the primary goals. Water and nutrient management is another primary goal. The cover crop during the non-crop period can often be regained during the growing season because of better infiltration reduced runoff and improved crop of water relation. The big thing is that we need to maintain the cover and one of the things we saw the brassicas do to us and Jason was involved in this Jason Miller, when we put too many brassicas in our wheat, post-wheat mix it went bare and it burned our corn yield so I buy almost 20 bushels of acre next year. So it isn't really the water that it uses but the fact that it's bare now and we lose more water during the growing season to evaporation. I had a graduate student that actually grew up not too far from him from here, from Belcouche Mr. Hansen and this is his data okay this is the water in the fall with different cover crops and we got oats, millet, lentil and monocrats, cowpea, radish and a mix of all those and then we have a jack where we had no cover crop and then we had these different mixes and here B is chickling batch C is F is flax, P is peas and C is canola I think and R is chlorophysic trachea but you can see there's a big difference in the fall some of them use a lot of water but if we maintain the residue they all came back up by this is in April, this was taken the 4th of November and this is the end of April okay the water came back it caught the snow and the one that you see understanding rainfall patterns water holding characteristics use your web soil survey and I've got a program that will do this for you and just email me and I'll send it to you that helps you understand how to do how much does your water hold how much water does your soil hold if your soil doesn't hold very much water it doesn't do any good to try to put too much water in I'll use some right away cover crop seed must be inexpensive in terms of potential benefits for the volume breaker requiring less tank fills large seeds grow better in heavy residue small seeds grow better on the surface but I don't like surface broadcasting either and just as Gabe said the large seed will help the small seeds get out of the residue using Harrows or some kind of thing like that just doesn't make any sense okay now one important goal is to use a cover crop to balance the diet of the soil organism high carbon residue like wheat stubble or corn stocks requires low carbon or high protein like feed and cows just think of your soil organism with little tiny cows tiny ears and sheep cover crops to balance their diet low residue crops require high residue cover crops so if you're coming out of something with lots of residue put in something that's high in protein more guesswork than science right now rotation sanitation and competition are tools that we use to press control having livestock integration here's some cover crops at Cronin Farms being grazed in the fall we call this catch and release nutrients hacks they got this term from one of our farmers that's going to be on the program Thursday okay here's Dan Porgy taking a soil sample with cows that's sitting there he's a variable rate guy so the cows are sitting there asking whether to poop now or not remember what we started with in the prairie we started with something that had roots that went this deep and were this massive and these are our three daughters and they're all in college now so they'd kill me if they knew that we'd show that photo today but we're not even close to that in terms of matching what Mother Nature did with root systems we started with this wonderful factory in the soil and we've been mining it for years and this is the problem here is a photo we took you've seen this in Afghanistan Afghanistan this used to be this Hindu Kush this used to be all trees and they cut the trees down and they needed just a little more energy just a little bit more and one more time right now the only place they can grow anything is down here is this no kill no there's no residue he's got a cedar that works okay where did the residue go Abdull took it and if you look root closely he pulled it up by the roots and he's going to haul it away because he doesn't somebody else will but we've got the US government that's actually encouraging people to take corn stalks out to make ethanol out of in Iowa where they're already going to kill and they put them on their semis or their straight trucks and they take them into the building because this is what he's got all he has to feed maybe the goat that his kids get milked from we're not in that situation but let's not get into that situation here's Argentina in the late 1990s they did seven years of pastures and seven years of cropping and when they cropped they used cover crops and diverse rotations and here's a cover crop versus no cover crop and see that difference there but look at the soil when he sees the seed when he sees the soil and then the Argentine government outlawed the sale of beef the export of beef the only reason you have good beef price in the United States is the Argentines don't export it and so all the farmers had to quit a lot of the farmers had to quit doing beef because there's not that much beef eating in Argentina that up for all their production they had to export to make it work beef production went to doing all grain production and don't do this anymore the reason that the government did that is they want more taxes this is that same location in 2006 2010 it was totally destroyed that soil in less than 10 years within all the sexual groups organic matter increased from 1 to 3% available water holding capacity doubles seeing all these water storage capacity is low if you have low water holding capacity because you have to grade your soil much to the rain during extended periods of precipitation is lost in contrast to high water storage capacity combined with effective capture rain macro cores and things and snowmelt over the fall winter and spring during extended periods of dry cover crop went winter wheat into cover crops that are dying and they're going to feed their nutrients to the wheat that's coming out all tillage to destroy soil structure all tillage to decrease water importation all tillage to reduce organic matter all tillage to increase wheat tillage is to agriculture what fracking is to petroleum thing what fracking does it breaks apart that shale so more of the oil can come out what tillage does is breaks apart the soil so we can get more of the nitrogen organic matter to decompose to feed our crop but they both increase the speed and extend the nutrient removal both the speed and extent the nutrient removal from a resource leaving the resource degraded tillage is to agriculture what fracking is to petroleum I hope the camera is on continuous low disturbance no tilling combination with diverse rotations in cover crops the biological answer to a biological problem when we do tillage we're looking backwards when we're doing an o-till we're looking forward I got this from Sarah Singleton in France thank you any questions any questions yes carbons increasing yeah carbons increasing in the air yeah but I think like plants good without having it at 320 or 400 in fact when it gets up to 400 we're going to start having some issues because the C3 plants which are mostly the weeds will start having better growth patterns versus some of our C4 stuff you know it's a different discussion than whether you know what we're talking about is the amount of carbon in the atmosphere right now relative to nitrogen there's quite a bit of difference it always has to but to take natural gas and turn it into nitrogen in Ukraine and ship it here and up the Mississippi River and then by train to the Mississippi River to Rapid City as compared to getting it from the air and into the ground it's kind of a pretty obvious thing and that's kind of what I was trying to say probably better to try to learn how to do this well it's almost a reverse of that and I think it could work the problem you have there now this is under irrigation where I'm doing it oh repeat the question does anybody try to just plant corn into an alfalfa field without killing the alfalfa basically what you're saying and I'm not sure anybody has but that will be a little bit tougher than what we did where we introduced the alfalfa later and then we're keeping keeping it alive from year to year we probably got four years on it it's getting pretty thin now so what we're going to do this year we're going to plant 20 inch rows we're going to plant two rows of corn one row of alfalfa two rows of corn that kind of a pattern all the way across the field and then leave the alfalfa in that one row and with our precision or RTK whatever we can actually plant and leave that alfalfa alone and we still have net 30 inch rows so we'll raise our seeding rate up because we're now 30 inch rows in 20 inch pattern and we're going to see if that works because we have a little bit of an issue here with the alfalfa getting out of the competition yeah well the grazing part isn't no the grazing part would be fine and that would be one of the advantages but if you let it go to seed before you plant it in the corn that's one of the tricks we've tried to use it here is to wait a little longer until alfalfa is getting relatively mature and not as competitive but this really there's a guy in Australia you can google grain and graze and see that grows tall grass prairie plants big blue stem of switch grass they don't call them that they call them kangaroo grass and something else big blue stem of switch grass he grows those in their hot by summer and then he suppresses them during their rainy cool winter and grows wheat and canola in the wintertime and grazes the C4 grass so he's got grazing in one season and grain in another so it's called pasture cropping or grain and grazing so that colon size is his name it's an interesting thing as well thanks for coming it was a good day