 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. Bentley Bly is currently serving as the SDSU Soil Field Specialist based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Anthony was raised and is still active in the farming within the family farm near Sioux Falls. He received his undergraduate and master's degrees from SDSU and worked from 1992 to 2011 with SDSU's Plant Science Department Soil Group. In 2011 he left the SDSU to help start Agile Express, a soil tissue of a nerve testing lab located in Sioux Falls. He served in his current position with the SDSU Extension since the fall of 2013. And Dr. Dwayne Bax will read that too so you can just jump up here when it's time. Dwayne Bax is currently the manager of the SDSU Dakota Lakes Research Farm near here. He has managed the research farm for 25 years with diverse no-tel crowning systems. With strong performance no-tel systems he is recognized worldwide for his research efforts in this area. Okay with that Anthony I will turn it over to you. It's working now? We're putting it back here so we have some trouble before. Okay. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I guess when we were putting the program together we talked about possible topics and there is a number of research projects just dedicated to no-tel and we have quite a few producers here. And so coming before you with that first of all I'd like to acknowledge Sarah Byrd here as well. She's actually the research manager for soil fertility and testing projects and without her help a lot of this won't hold it when deprived impossible. Then I'd like to also acknowledge Dr. Ray Ward and the Ward Laboratories. I have some soil testing results for the Haney test that he did for me and I appreciate that very much. But just to kind of lead into what I want to talk about today I'm going to be having a nitrogen today and just a thought provoker here. I've got the price of urea over the last 10 or so years and the price of corn and so which one is driving which one? It looked pretty parallel quite frankly and the urea price maybe is following the corn price a little bit but it's kind of hard to tell but we see those peaks and valleys and the drastic one here in 08 of course with the economic problems back then but basically those peaks line up pretty well. So nitrogen is very important in corn production and so we're going to work on that a little bit. First of all the South Dakota nitrogen rate calculator that we currently have is up there at the top yield goal times 1.2 minus the soil test then in the top two feet and minus only u-credit. I have a few three scenarios there. If you change that coefficient from 1.2 to 1 what that does to the nitrogen recommendation and it drops at about 35 pounds which is very significant. So really this calculator gives you a lot of flexibility. You're looking at what's left in the soil in the nitrate test. You're looking at a previous crop if it's a legume and you're looking at your yield goal. So it's really tailored to your operation more so than what the price ratio approach does here from Minnesota or Eastern states. And so what I did is I made a table comparing the price of urea 375 to 425 and then the price of corn and so their recommendation when you have 350 corn or 375 urea would be 103 pounds of nitrogen per acre. What I really wanted to point out is there's not a lot of difference on this table isn't it? It doesn't look like it's very flexible. So hence I think the importance for a calculator type approach for nitrogen it does give you that more flexibility on your operation. Now that coefficient has not been static. It's been changed over the years. In 1975 it was near 1.5. In 82 they changed it to 1.3. In 91 they changed it to 1.2. And we're currently working on that again. And so the bulk of what I'm going to talk about is about that recalibration work. There is a note up in the corner that currently for no till we do at 30 pounds we do recommend that. And quite frankly that recommendation came from some very short term no till 5 to 10 year no till work. And so as we get into longer term no till we're hoping that the need for that extra end isn't there. And that just comes from the fact that we're building organic matter really rapidly and that carbon and nitrogen ratio wants to balance out. So we need some extra end to do that. I think I have some data to support that. And here's the data that we use to get that extra end. Recommendation for no till. We have side by side comparisons of tillage and there with till and no till. At the Beersford station in 1998 we also have some other data from Brookings and I believe Watertown too. But basically they show the same thing. When you plot out these nitrogen response curves here you see that maximum yield is reached a little bit later in the no till. It's essentially similar to the till but there's about a 30 pound difference. So when we look at that difference that's where that extra end recommendation is coming from. Currently Sarah Berg, who I previously mentioned is working on her master's degree and part of that her work, her research work is looking at this and trying to see if it's going to change and her projects at Beersford is on a long term conventional till and no till site and hopefully that impact will be measured there. So just looking at most all of the nitrogen data in South Dakota from the last 20 or so years plotted on a relative scale. I know if you'd like to see bushels but basically a relative scale. So what that means is that any one of these points below here was a response to add it in. Below that 100. And so we can see as we increase soil test in and fertilizer in our response goes up. Pretty typical of nitrogen response curves but there's some interesting things here as well. Our first maximum meal point is attained there about 110 pounds of end and then there seems to be an inflection point here where we're coming together at maximum meals no matter what the rate at about 108 pounds of end per acre. So between those two points gives us that range of what we can work with with yield goal and soil testing. I did put separate the no till and the tillage apart to see if there was any relationship there and the responses are the same. You add in the no till you get a yield response and it's similar to conventional till. Summarizing the data a little bit here took the linear, the average of the check plots for conventional till and no till. We can see that because of the tillage and the mineralization of the organic matter and the nitrogen being produced from that we get a higher check plot meal at 124 bushels per acre. The no till somewhat less at 70. So we're holding that nitrogen back and we're holding it in the soil and we're not mineralizing it out as we build organic matter in that no till. We take that 54 bushel yield difference and just put one pound of end on that and assign that we get about 54 pounds of end. We look at conventional till max yield versus no till what do we see? We see essentially the same number though. So across all those site years for that 20 year period for a nitrogen work max would be yield essentially the same for both of those tillage layers. Now if we look at the soil test in the soil after we do that work and those check plots we see in that conventional till check plot soil is 63 pounds of end left in the top 2B versus that no till at 46. So a lot less there and hence due to that reduced mineralization because of the lack of tillage. So the difference there about 17 pounds. So if we subtract the 17 from the 54 here we get about that 37 pound deficit. It's pretty close to that 30 pounds of extra end that we recommend for a no till. Again it goes back to building organic matter and we need to build nitrogen as well if we build carbon in the soil. So I think with cover crops and improving the biology of the soil with longer term no till maybe we'll see that go away and that's what we're talking about. So in 2013 and 2014 this is a look at where we did our recalibration work for nitrogen. You can see in the red all the no till sites that we had and the yellow the conventional till. You can see it's heavy on the no till isn't it? I don't know why that is got a lot of no till in South Dakota obviously but that's the way it is. We may have some goals in here where we need to fill in some sites but other than that it's heavy on the no till. So at these sites on it quickly just say what we do you know we find a grower we want to work with we want to work with us we just go identify a place in the field take soil samples. The grower doesn't apply any fertilizer to that site. He agrees to maintain the weeds and the pests and plant them on the crop and after he does that we go out and fight those plots and we apply our nitrogen rates and any other fertilizer that's deficient we would apply it that time too. So throughout the growing season we monitor that and in the fall we come back and hand pick those plots because they're very small and we have a lot of plots in one area. So if it isn't an example of precision or site-specific farming management I don't know what is because it's a very small spot that we're doing that work on. And then after the field harvest is harvested by the grower we come back and take soil samples of those selected plots and see what's left in the soil. This is a plot plan for those sites in Lyman County near Kinebeck. So very small, 15 feet by 30 feet and you can see our end rates here are randomized by replication. We have four replicates and we are using SuperU which is urea with DCD and agertain on it. So it protects it from fertilization as well as nitrification. So we're slowing down that nitrification. The reason that we went to SuperU is because you almost got to sign your life away if you want to buy ammonium nitrate. So in soil fertility research that kind of hurt when we couldn't get ammonium nitrate. And so that's why the SuperU. So this is the responses for 2013. Looks kind of like a mess but that's what it is. Got some sites here that aren't responsive that had high soil dust nitrate at the beginning of the season and then we got some real responsive sites. And you can see that the mid county site was up there 260 bushels per acre at maximum yield. The 2014 site basically all of them very responsive to nitrogen rain. You can see nitrogen rain here across the bottom. So very nice yield response curves there in all the sites. I want to talk about estimated optimum nitrogen rate and we do this for every site. We come in and we determine maximum yield. It's basically an average of those top yields that aren't any different from each other. These yields are all the same. So we draw a line through that at that average of those points back to the linear line related to the rates. And so we just come down where they intersect and we get the optimal end rate at that site was 98 pounds per acre. That's how we determine optimal nitrogen rate at that site. Now there's many other ways to look at nitrogen use efficiency. This is the one that Dr. Ron Gelberman taught me and so I guess this is the one I'm going to use. But I'm also aware of maximum return to nitrogen, economic optimum nitrogen rain. There's a lot of different ways to look at that. So if we look at excuse me so that coefficient is determined from that maximum yield divided by that optimum nitrogen rain plus the soil test in at that site plus a little human credit we had soybeans there previous to that and so that comes out to be 1.02 pounds of end per bushel of corn at that site. Okay so if we look at those coefficients for all those site years from 2013 and 2014 we can see that the average overall average of 2013 is about one and it is also about one in 2014. And so Ron saw me give this talk at another place he said well that's really good data that's really neat he said usually it's a lot messier than that so hopefully if we get a chance to do this a third year we can get more data as well. Now in 2013 since we had no-till and conventional till I just separated that out and essentially they're the same. Corn just needs a certain amount of end and it doesn't care how it gets it it's just going to need it it's one of them. So kind of going into the HANY test that I talked about that Dr. Ward ran for me the HANY nitrogen wreck as I understand it from discussing with people that know a little bit more about that is it considers the yield goal and a factor of one pound of end per bushel and it also subtracts out the organic nitrogen that's in the soil I got that wrong I should say the nitrogen in the soil the nitrate and the ammonia and the potential organic end release from the soil and that potential organic end release is determined from the carbon to nitrogen ratio and the solvita score and that solvita score is just a quick respiratory test of the soil to see how the microbes reacted at 24 hour periods let's leave it at that but Ward laboratories how their organic end release will never exceed what they measure in the soil so it's capped at what they actually measure at the time that that sample is taken and so generally soil with a higher soil health score will have more organic end release and they if you've done a HANY test in some of your samples you get back a whole bunch of data and the interpretation of that is what what this inorganic agronomist is trying to understand so I'm really lacking in the biology part of that but anyway that's how it works so what I did to try to bring all that data together in this very complicated thing is these are all our insights from 2013 and 2014 what type of tillage and then an estimated yield goal for that site now if I had a little more time I would call every cooperator and said what do you think your yield goal is at that site but I used my best knowledge and where the location was to kind of estimate a yield goal and we got to have an estimated optimum end rate for each one of those sites you can see there's quite a bunch of variability in there as well and so then I calculated what the university recommendation would have been for each one of those sites at 1.2 our current and 1.0 and then the Haney recommendation that I got from Dr. Ward's lab and so I just determined the difference between those three procedures for determining nitrogen rate and so you can see that our 1.2 equation is really overestimating nitrogen nitrogen ratio nitrogen recommendation and we know that and the data from 2013 shows that and so I just did that one as well and we get a little bit closer we still have a couple in there that are pretty big but we're a lot closer and then the Haney seems to be pretty close to the 1.0 and it should be because they both use 1.0 don't they although the Haney is using that expected organic end release the 1.0 equation it's kind of built in because we measured the yield after the year that we applied the end and we got mineralization so it's kind of built in so if we look at the average our current recommendation 1.2 is way over at 67 pounds the 1.0 is closer at 31 and the Haney at 39 so a good comparison there of those ways to get nitrogen recommendation is there any questions about that I'm kind of going to switch here a little bit Haney doesn't use de-nitrogen no it doesn't no for the university one does so okay so another study that was done this year at no till corn looking at this side dressing, top dressing, whatever you want to call it can we take some of these fertilizer materials such as ESN polycoated urea is what it is or SuperU and can we kind of in a sense say that that's our side dress or our top dress because really what those fertilizer materials are designed to do is delay that end transformation later so it would be like you went out and put on nitrogen later and so at a site we had this and the bulk of those treatments were made at 80 pounds of end we're not looking for maximum yield we're looking for sensitivity between our treatments but we did put out a 200 pound rate to see if we had attained maximum yield of those 80s and you can see we did because 200 pounds in gave us almost 200 bushels of corn and the rest of those treatments are in that 160 70 bushel range so now taking a look at what we did we had one treatment 100% urea applied 100% pre plant now this is on the soil surface the second treatment was 100% urea but we did 50 pre plant 50 top dress and the top dress was at v6 v7 growth stage the fourth treatment was 50% urea 50% ESN the poly coated urea so it's a slow release nitrogen all that pre plant the fifth treatment was 100% of super u at all of that pre plant 100% super u split and then 50 ESN 50 super u pre plant and then our 200 as well so you kind of see what we're trying to look at there does using a combination or blend of these nitrogen sources does that does that support higher yield and can it mimic top dress but when we look at the yield basically all these are the same so there really was no effect of that ESN or that super u one little note is treatments with ESN had the lowest yield 161 and 167 and it has been noted that ESN is is known to hold on its end too long and so I think that's evident here it could be but again those were not different so just to try at instead of running that equipment across that field and that top dress or side dress can we blend up some different fertilizer material to get that out there so okay I'm going to diverge away from nitrogen and I need to talk about soil health because it's what I believe in and basically ever since I started in this soil work but I've got four crutches here taken about a month ago maybe a month and a half not too far from where I live I hope they're not too dark but four pictures probably oh this one here and these three are about two miles apart a field that I know and so can anyone point to the no-till field yeah are you seeing a lot of dirt in the ditches this winter yeah I have too saw it last month as well I think it's worse this winter in some cases I wish there's a way we could measure it but there isn't so this is what they are a low residue crop no-till this is leeward side of the field so most of the wind is blowing that snow off not enough residue to catch it is there but it's clean it's clean I didn't think here we got the conventional till low residue as well same crop, no tillings, nothing going on soil surfaces got soybean residue on it but we see black snow there as well I don't remember that happening when I was a kid maybe I wasn't paying attention in FFA in 4-H and going to college I just didn't see a lot of black snow but this one you know that's interesting so then we'll go to the low residue conventional till with fall anhygis or monium maybe a little bit more than this situation pictures really don't tell the the whole truth but it tried to do the best I could and then we'll go to this bad one down here low residue crop, conventional till bailed it off and fall anhygis or monium soil out there, that's soil that's on top of snow that's not bare soil and so it's really warm and so yeah, there's a need for keeping the soil covered how am I doing Dwayne? can't see it a lot of racing okay, I'll go on with this just wanted to point out some other research on the farm there that we want to promote and do with the send in a bail on Alviron and Nate Strohsheim's farm your crooks I wanted to share with you what they were doing inviting me to participate in that basically wanted to evaluate a send a growth promoter, growth regulator and a bail polymer that is supposed to make phosphorus more available and so I'm going to explain to you what they did this is their planter and it's a planter of course with two split boxes here that supply seeds each half of the planter and then they pull a montagne cart with their fur lice and so with the send they basically did a split planter comparison where they put seeds without a send in one box and seeds with the send in another and planted the Lofius I think they did 200 plus acres that way and kept track of where they were and it's very important to do your technology right in your cab when you start planting that field and you know so mark and where you're at so with the avail they used the same planter situation but they only have one fertilizer container so what they did is they put fertilizer in the montag without a bail on it and planted 80 acres every other planter pass so every 80 feet they planted and then they put fertilizer in there with the bail on it and then they filled in okay so we have strips 16 rows of strips all across the field with and without a bail and again Al Miron and Nate Storeshine and so we measured some things I had two hybrids with the send with and without didn't make a difference on the plant dry matter and I dug roots and weighed those roots and there wasn't a difference with the root dry matter either with either hybrids I did a combination and not being there as well the ascend rate was 1.6 ounces on 8,000 that's the ascend rate I looked at corn emergence throughout the early part of the growing season and if you remember at least in the eastern part this day were really cold and it took a long time for corn to come out of the ground and this is pretty evident here this corn was planted the last few days in April and I started I didn't count any plants on May 21st and so it was struggling and so really a perfect situation for a growth regulator promoter to really do its job I would think so as we see as I return to count and more we see a nice increase in stand there across these dates two of those measurement dates were significant for ascend ascend did have higher plant population here at May 23rd with this hybrid and on May 30th for the other hybrids other sampling dates were not significant another caveat here is both of these hybrids were planted at the same rate and it looks like the conditions were a little bit harder on the one of them looking at plant nutrient uptake again with those two hybrids and statistically no differences in all of those measured nutrients very easy this is the field that we did they did the ascend work in the two hybrids here the one hybrid showing a little higher yield here in this part of the field and the other with more yield there that part of the field yields here looking at all of the data points from the yield monitor for these two hybrids 179 there for with and without ascend 198 200 with and without ascend for that hybrid as well now we we wanted to kind of do some statistics because good infield research generally has very low coefficients of variation you can really do some good work and get down to some really small comparisons so what we did is Joe my buddy at Brookings the ag leader technology expert he went in and he cut out each pass and gave me the yield for each pass so I generated 16 reps of data for 4812 and 33 reps of data for 53 56 and when you have that many reps you can really crank down on an LSD however the 4812 was not significant comparison very little difference but the 53 56 was but it went against the sin didn't it 210 versus 208 it sold non significant there's that field then we go on and look at the avail treatments that we put out were our control and auto avail course we did 65 75 65 22 3 inches from the row any plants ok and then the treatment with avail about a half a gallon per ton on a gap got on a little more and they don't we don't know exactly why that happened but we can attribute to the fact that that fertilizer may have been a little bit better and so the rate just went up and so 20 817 22 22 those are the rates not a huge difference but enough to report and tell you about we look at plant tissue data from replicated plots out there no significant difference in any of those as well looking at yield for all the grain points across the field from the yield monitor here's the field without avail 176 again is that different we have to really do some statistics so I had Joe do that again go in and specifically tell me the yield of each strip so I had 13 replications there and by golly with them without avail 176.3 with 178.4 are they significant they sure are because the CV's under 1% ok that's what makes them significant but if you look at the net return to just the avail and don't look at the extra nutrients it's only 7 cents so just wanted to share that with you as well if you have any questions I can sure answer them and I'll turn it over to DeWayne I think that you've thought all my time being stuck between lunch and you guys it's the only thing that can be worse than that than being between you and happy hours so at least we're not doing that commonality among all tillies tillies destroy soil structure all tillies' tules increase decrease water infiltration all tillies' tules reduce organic matter and all tillies' tules increase wheat Ruth and I spent a couple weeks in the UK and France we saw enough damn tillies to do us for the rest of her life tilling up and down hills and those kind of things and we're there with a group speaking to a group of guys that are trying to do the right thing but it's very, very difficult because of their farm programs and stuff and because of the mentality in the school's like-minded attack the ag colleges or ag schools that they have to go to in order to be able to farm need a license to farm all tillies around they have their own little fields and everything's all over the spot so we had some frank and open discussions about those things when we were there tillage is to agriculture what fracking is to petroleum think about that they both increase the speed and extent that resources can be extracted and they both leave their resources degraded I told the people in Europe that my ancestors left there to come here to find some new land to degrade and they did very good and they used their money and they sent me to college and all that stuff but we can't do that anymore and I saw this mess in France and the UK and then I went to Ghana and I found truly sustainable agriculture in the rainforest of Ghana and it was totally amazing and if you have Howard Buffett's book just read that chapter of Kofi Boys by the guy we take out the organic matter which is what we've been doing and that's the thing Cheryl didn't talk about in terms of salinity is that after we forgot that Cheryl you had all the other slides in there and you just didn't have time you couldn't have given her two semesters and she could have got through that all when you decrease your organic matter you decrease the water only to pass through the soil and that makes that salinity thing worse because when you get a rain your soil doesn't hold as much anymore your bucket's much smaller and you move more water down to the water table which is moving that water table up so that's the other factor and the answer she showed us the answer is we put in perennial sequence that's what we need to do and we've known that for years and we need to do that for rotations and we need to tell some congressmen and senators and whatever that we need farm bills that allow us to do those kind of things okay high disturbance techniques increase weed pressure and cause tillage erosion we saw a lot of this in France in the UK places where they just had nothing but chalk on top of the hill limestone soils all they had left on top of the hill was limestone they were plowing up and down the hill or in some cases they were plowing down the hill because they couldn't have been a big enough tractor plow up the hill so they plowed down the hill drove empty up to plow down and the reason they're plowing the hill is because when they had animal traction with cows and horses you couldn't plow the hill suck they were too steep but now they can so they are and you go look at everybody's castle and these nice castles they have and all around their castle the soil is degraded so then they move someplace else and build another big ass castle and you've got to go see the castle I really kind of lost interest in looking at castles after about a fifth one because all you saw is this you saw the erosion around there we were in France when they didn't go there but I'm going to we were in France right after the Charlie Hebdo thing where the guys came in and shot the cartoonists and people that do the satirical thing and we had supper at some people's house and they were talking about well that Charlie Hebdo had done this whole article on no-till and direct seating and they drug it out and showed it to us it meant nothing because we can't speak French but they they translated the cartoon in the cartoon this is in France now we never do this in the United States they had this cartoon in the cartoon the man and woman in bed and the guy is saying to the woman your husband keeps asking me what I'm doing with all the time I'm saving by being a no-tiller no-tiller ecosystems that leak nutrients for extended periods of time become deserts carbon is a nutrient saline seeds are symptoms of improper nutrient water cycling because the annual crop do not mimic adequately what you can do with perennial what that needing so at the very least we need to throw in those perennial sequences like grandpa and grandma used to do and then the nutrient placement is part of cycling when Anthony talks about all the fertility he's talking about broadcast treatment that's not the most efficient way to do fertilizer concentrate on having your soil moist during the dry part of the year we get so hung up on trying to have it dry during that wet part of the year so we can be the first guy to plant that we often run out of moisture later in the season focused on having and this is really important the soil cool during the hot part of the year the roots and those kind of things in soil biology does much better when it's a little cool instead of just focusing on having it warm during the cool part of the year and when I was in Ghana and we watched I watched Kofi Bowa talk about managing his rainforest it was eerie because it could have been me talking about managing the prairie nitrogen nutrient cycling using the water keeping the ground covered diversity it was just amazing now he's doing it with a machete but he's tripled and quadrupled the yields of these ladies have run these small one and two acre farms and they now can educate their children and stuff and if you go to Farm Future Magazine's website there's an article there about it fertility is what we're going to talk about today we need to have the right weight the right formulation, the right place and the right time we all hung up talking about rate but we forget about some of these other things and Anthony talks a little bit about formulation too when he talks a little bit about time but you got to get into all of them and why is nitrogen important well if you're a conventional tiller which I know there's none of them guys here they'd have left by now but if you're a conventional tiller you might use 10 gallons an acre for tillage seeding and harvest of diesel fuel you'll lose at 150 pounds of in per acre you use 30 gallons of diesel fuel to make your nitrogen okay if you're a no tiller that ratio is much greater you know it's probably 5 times or 6 times as much energy dollars go into your fertilizer as your tillage and seeding and harvest if you're not doing the tillage anymore so real hot topic for years has been strip till but when are you going to do that if you do it in the fall it's a wrong time okay if the response that people claim to get from strip till fertilizer response or response to closing wheels and then what if you don't get it done in the fall what do you do in the spring and I've got guys that well then I just broadcast well then you lose the advantage of the placement okay and then you got some other issues one of the things about going to other countries especially when they had somebody translating some of your jokes absolutely do not work you gotta leave because I always like this one and say this guy ought to steer better right auto steer thing right but that doesn't work but anyway I took this picture just outside Mitchell several years ago like how are you going to follow that because you want to be the right distance from your corn plant to give it the advantage and then you're causing a whole bunch of weeks to grow we tried we tried to strip till in the 1980 and Lee Gatsky and I both did that well he's usually here but he's not here now he's a little under the weather but he's under the weather I think but we both tried this in the 1980s and decided it was too complex too hard even with auto steer going around hills and whatever just gets to be too hard but let's take a look at some of these old data here's the thing that they did Monsanto did and they did no till strip till and conventional and gee the strip till looked better not a lot better but better but if you look at they got three bushels the acre and they were getting $1.74 let's say we're getting $4 today I think that's a day it's worth $5.22 for them or $12 for us the cost of strip till for them was 14 is probably $22 maybe higher and they needed to have 5.5 bushels to make that pay is there a better way to do it and the other thing they didn't tell everybody is that when they did their strip till in the fall they put extra fertilizer on so the strip till treatment had more fertilizer than their two treatments and I said well gee you can't do that you gotta have the fertilizer be the same why don't you get that extra fertilizer treatment in the fall in your strip till so what they did the next year is they come in and did it the way they did it with fertilizer both times strip till 2 was done the same as the no till with no fertilizer in the fall just the tillage and then the no till 1 the reason that we quit doing it is we got a dry year and we had that disturbance out there we couldn't figure out whether to plant close to the fertilizer where it was dry or where we had moisture right I mean it's just like duh don't want to do that so starting in the 80s we've concentrated on being able to put fertilizer on with our corn plant and finding ways of doing that more efficient we use this colder up here actually got a different one on now but we use this this fertilizer opener to cut the residue so I could move the residue without doing much disturbance if you don't cut it it's hard to get a residue manager to pull it apart and one of the things we did see in Ghana is John Deere's bringing corn plants over there right he can hire a guy for 3 bucks a day and for 3 bucks a day in 6 days they can take an acre of grain force down and have it ready to plant corn that's 18 bucks an acre how cheap can you do that with it with a tractor you know not even close $50,000 tractor to mower and all that stuff is not going to be close so they're going to have some issues there but here's our fertilizer opener 3 inches away from our seed now Mike Arnoldy on his planter way long years ago he had these John Deere openers on this will knock her bar to lean the stalks and then the residue manager behind he's doing the same thing and almost all the guys and Potter and Soli and those kind of areas are doing this they like to have the fertilizer with their planters so we've looked at this for years I'm going to show you some old data just to remind you 28% on top put the starter some phosphorus on top put a little pop up that's what a lot of guys are doing broadcast the N and the P put a little pop up on 194, 23% but if I put Urea in that side band put the starter in the side and then put the pop up 207, 21% and you look at these other renditions in their wetter and they don't yield as well and that's very consistent and these are on our website you can go through and look at all these if you want to but it's very consistent if you're doing this fertilizer placement now if you came to the farm this summer we dug up roots for you same thing here whatever it's never less and it's always drier 2009 pop up only broadcast N 166 where I'm doing the right thing 194 if you go to the Corn Belt one of the things that's really I'm really excited about we've got right now this year we've got Ken Ferry Corn College talking about the value of starter fertilizer right? in the farm journal and then I heard the hefties talking about the value of banding fertilizer and when I'm starting to agree with Ken Ferry and the hefty brothers now all I've got to do is make the pope of Methodist and then right? so if you take conventional till response to starter fertilizer 1 out of 11 if you take no till with response to starter placement 8 out of 11 okay? so placement 728 bushels our numbers are closer to 10 but why is that? well where does the plant root go? here's corn plant, little guy here it comes, this little root here the radical is too much and as soon as your plant perceives light then it starts growing these roots here these roots pretty much don't do anything in the summer we would dig up corn plant and show people where that little radical went where the roots were going they're not going right straight down right underneath that plant they're going sideways and then down the map report and where you want your fertilizer is right there the roots decide the same depth as the seed so when people say 2 by 2 that doesn't mean 2 inches deeper it means same depth as the seed a lot of guys are trying to go deep with their fertilizer and then getting mud thrown at get the fertilizer in the ground same depth as the seed not a big deal soil becomes a dominant pea source once you get to be 2 then it's it's really the seed itself and maybe that little bit of pop up ok so over a little residue if you want to place the fertilizer 3 inches away you'll never consistently be 3 inches away if you do strip tilt your auto steers are not that good you start further away and too close when we had a happen this year somebody used anhyzer and a strip tilt thing and got to laundry and they had spots of dead corn because they wandered back across that in hydrogen ok again it's showing you that in case you're a slow learner it's showing you that in case you're a slow learner the biggest problem with this is you've had a bunch of weed seeds now that are going to grow the other problem with strip tilt is you get a rain if you're going up and down hills and you get a rain you get this now you've got to get the no-till disc out you guys know what an oxymoron is of course they don't go together clinical reality military intelligence right no-till disc ok what do you do with that now there's a little corn plant trying to grow there it's a mess I'd rather do it this way ok we don't move a lot of residue we've changed our closing system quite a bit one of the things that John Deere did when they sent the planters to Ghana they got bubble collars and rubber wheels on the back closing wheels so we came home and I called Matt Hagey from Exaptus and said ok Matt we've got to get some things over there to Ghana because these guys do not have the right stuff to make them no-till planters work and we're all we're planning on where to ship them and whatever and then all of a sudden we've got this kind of email going we have to make sure that Howard's ok with this because he's got an agreement with John Deere John Deere may not be happy and I told the guys don't worry about it I've made John Deere unhappy before but this is our closing system we've got a vertical wheel instead of the Keaton and we've got a closing thing that just folds right on the back with John Deere they can take two bolts and drop everything out what I wanted to show you is people say well I'll just go in and I'll put some nitrogen right over the road and back up one see how close this is these are really narrow they're running vertical so what I did is I put the end to the side this all has has pop-ups this one doesn't but these all have pop-ups but here we're just looking at nitrogen where it's going so we've got it to the side with a pop-up we've got it to the side with a starter and no pop-up and then we took the tube and put it right over that road right between them closing it was a real tight band right over top of the road and then the bottom one we just took that two buttons shot it between the roads like a broadcast look at the difference 17, 214, 198, 197 as soon as you pulled it out of the ground not the same broadcasting so when Anthony is telling you we're broadcasting that's different and one of those trials not the one this year that Anthony was doing but the one last year that that Brian Gelderman was doing the farmer in Potter County you can see that square at the end of the field it was yellow yellow and all the stuff around it was dark green because the guy around the edges put the side band on yeah yeah, well most of my variable rate P is going down that three inches to the side too I'm just putting a little phasal rate of P with the seed here right so we've got two places we're putting the P to the side a little bit with the seed and here we're putting it over the road and P over the road but this isn't a P response this is a nitrogen response and I'll show you that in the next thing we have intentionally drawn our Olsen P's down to five parts per million or less on our irrigated ground because it's close to the river and be watching in the next five years you're going to hear all this stuff about phosphorus going into the river right, it's an issue so we knew this was coming now we're trying to figure out where we get response so here we have the nitrogen to the side in all cases but we've got starter plus pop-up 206 no starter but pop-up 212 starter no pop-up 206 and nothing no phosphorus 204 we get almost no phosphorus even at five parts per million why is that because we've got mycorrhizic we've got all these things all this biology going we've got penicilliums we've got the huge root systems so phosphorus is probably not as big an issue for us as nitrogen but there we are going through 20 inch rows over 200 bunch of corn you can see last year's corn two years ago last year's and then this year's so you can go in and go through that stuff if you want to lots of residue now how do we do some starter feed with the seed other nutrients placed near the row of seeding time we're on the soil surface after crop canopy and that's only if we have to broadcasting fertilizers before red seeding increases weed the big key is this available nutrient oyster root okay if you've got a huge root system like we have in no-till with mycorrhizae and whatever then you can have your available nutrient at a lower level and still get enough in your crop but when you're doing tillage and you don't have the mycorrhizae and that kind of stuff then you need more or if you've got bad rotation you need more okay that's what wheat growing in high soil, highly invested with root passages going to lack rotation maybe it's one to five percent fertilizer even when high concentration of the nutrient fertilizer available that's old data okay by logical control of soil rather than having fast weeds in the crop by not growing wheat or corn or soybeans more often than every second or third year okay so that's the basic stuff we're going to show you what rotation does now we're going to go into that one if I do just cover crops it's not a rotation it's a true crop monoculture and there's not enough carbon there to drive the no-till system so no-till corn soybean doesn't come but I've got to deal with no-till corn soybeans since 1990 if I put cover crop in there I get 7.3 bushel acre more beans right so on 213 our soybeans with cover crop was 62.9 you would have gotten 2.6 without the cover crop but we don't do that anymore so 62.9 with corn bean that same year in a rotation that corn corn soybean wheat soybean a little more diverse first year soybean this one here without a cover crop was 76.2 and the second year soybean is 81.3 just simply because of rotation more diverse and it's got more carbon it's got that big cover crop it's given us the energy that you need to drive the ecosystem so cover crop increased to yield by 7.3 but more diverse rotation to get a 15.9 so if I look at corn soybean 62.9 the average of another two soybeans in this rotation is 78.8 that's a big difference so what does that mean well let's look at corn continuous corn again since 1990 203 bushel corn soybean 217 and the average of the corn corn soybean wheat soybean the average of those two corns is 235 the second one is like 217 and the first one is higher okay so I just look at the numbers if I have 2,000 acres if I have all continuous corn I got 406,000 bushel corn and a big grain dryer and a big grain cart and a really big fat semi right and when I do corn soybean I got 1,000 acres each I got 217,000 bushel of corn and 62,000 bushel of soybeans in a week if I do this rotation corn corn soybean wheat soybean I get 63,000 bushel of soybean more soybean about 40% of my acres 800 acres then I got 1,000 acres and that's neat and if I put my corn in I can get my acres I get wheat 48,000 bushel of wheat but we're trading 29,000 bushel of corn for 48,000 bushel of wheat would you make that trade today chat yeah I'd probably make that trade today not a bad deal and then if I do the more diverse rotation I can have more acres should I make more money black with donalds is open for breakfast but soil water storage capacity there's not much of the rain that falls during a standard period of precipitation lost those released in the runoff the contrast, the high water storage capacity combined with the rest of the capture rain and snowmelt over the small winters spring and support the brothers who I'm not going to be but they had trouble the first few years too as we were trying to get these soils to recover the sequins then we're recovering right within all texture groups 1-3% of bill water has to catch them double cover crops there's corn there's no nitrogen and with no companion crop here's corn with no nitrogen the soybean is growing between kofi doesn't use any fertilizer in Ghana because he grows companion crops he can't eat all the nitrogen he can to eat corn roots are important so is lunch thank you