20 Years of Cover Crop Research: What Works in the Midwest

0:00 Thanks everybody for joining. This is our I believe our sixth one in this series of looking at great research that is being done at our land grant universities and universities across the country, and it's been a great series and there's been a lot of good things going on. So we appreciate that. So our guest today, Dr. Joel Gruber has spent nearly two decades at Western Illinois University which is in Macomb, Illinois. If you don't know where that's at, it's about an hour and a half south of the Quad Cities. And he helps thousands of students and farmers understand what healthy soil actually looks like from the ground up. And I love how he brings that. He's got really hands-on curiosity. He speaks at lots of meetings. In fact, this guy is so busy that I can almost never get him on a podcast or on a webinar. So we're very excited that he was able to join us today. And I think it's super cool, Joel, that you're doing this as part of your class. Maybe if any of our participants who are watching are like really really close to graduating, they just need a credit or two, maybe we can get them a credit through WIU to get them to graduate here. But Dr. Gruber runs the WIU organic research program and he was the National NOEL Educator of the Year in 2015. He's constantly sending me pictures of the great things that they're researching out there at the organic farm. We swap ideas back and forth on cover crops all the time. And oftentimes when I'm thinking about trying something and I reach out to him, they're already doing it. And I just love that fact that he gets his hands dirty as well as he's very involved in the classroom as well. So Joel, thank you for joining us students in the Conservation 405 class. It's very exciting to have you here as well. And I'm going to let you take over, Joel, for the presentation. Then when you get done, I'll jump back on and help kind of curate some of the questions coming in.

2:01 Okay, that sounds great. So welcome to everybody both live and remote, and we'll get started. So my task, at least the task I assigned myself, what I was told by Keith was that I just should think about my research program and share what I've learned. And as I thought about this, I realized I'm coming up on the end of my second decade here at WIU. This is my 20th season, my 20th spring semester. And so I started reflecting about what has happened over those two decades. And the first thing that came to mind was just all the great people that I've been able to interact with here at WIU. And I'll just acknowledge the guy in the coveralls. That's who I worked with for 16 years. And more recently, I've worked with Dr. Venturi that some of you know. And then that's a student worker in the middle. She was a fantastic addition to our program for two years.

3:12 But as you guys know, I love teaching. Teaching is my top priority. And this is a class that was not Soil and Water Conservation, but had a similar gender ratio to my first time teaching this class. I think I told you guys I had one woman and 32 guys the first time I taught this class. And you can see that same kind of ratio in that class. But of course, the people who have made my life such a great experience for 20 years include many other people, students, the people that I directly work with also include farmers. And so this is a neighbor up near the Allison farm. And when you interact with Leroy Kappy, you just get a whole lot more than his equipment. You also get his technical support and his network. You know, when he's trying to figure out how to make his guidance system work or his yield monitor work, he calls his guy and then that guy is helping us. So we've had access to an incredible amount of technology that made things possible through working with local farmers. Every once in a while, of course, we did have to just improvise and use what we had. And so there is a legendary viral video of this. Maybe some of you have seen it. That car has been retired, but it put in its hard work at the Allison Park. Okay, of course, I also need to think back even more than 20 years. My master's adviser at the University of Maryland has played a key role in my soil health saga. This is Dr. Ray Wild and I remember this field day very distinctly. The field day had actually ended when this picture was taken and I think I was asking Dr. Wild something like this because this is a tomato field, a long-term no-till field that grew tomatoes in rotation with radishes and a few other species as cover crops. And of

5:23 Of course, the guy who brought radishes to the marketplace, this guy right here, Steve Gro, long-term notiller, who I was really privileged to do some of my master's research on his farm. And it was Dr. Wild's research program that brought radish seed, a 50 pound bag that Steve Brock, and you know, the rest is history. He's moved on from being in the seed business but he has continued to have a huge impact and he's been interviewed by WIU students and has spoken to a number of classes as well.

6:03 And I guess just to think all the way back to the beginning, my foundation is of course my family. And so here's a classic picture of a root seller in Riverland. This is by Roots. And there are some potatoes, not exactly Roots Coopers, I guess we would say. But there's even a worm condominium. And this is my foundation and thinking about soil and crops and livestock is growing up on this farm.

6:36 So I give most of my farmer presentations in the winter and I encourage farmers to reflect, to think about what is their context, what makes their farm unique, what should be guiding their decision making. But the fact is it's not winter anymore. This is the time of year to get things done. And so, of course, we have a little break right now because we just had a heavy rain on Monday. But the reality is that most of us in production agriculture are working really hard right now. And of course, you guys, whether you're in production A, you're working hard to wrap up the semester. And so, this happens to be last week, just one week ago, we were terminating medium red clover because we were seeing that the soil had just dried out from a heavy rain. We saw the rain coming in the forecast and so we got that done just in time and that was after teaching three classes. This was on Wednesday last week.

7:41 So I really appreciate this opportunity to do some reflection even though it's a very busy time and it's hard to reflect when you're super busy. But I've had a few chances during my career to reflect and this was one of them. 10 years ago, I was asked to give a presentation about my first 10 years here at WIU. And so, at the Practical Farmers of Iowa Winter meeting 2017, I gave a presentation where I did some retrospection of reflection. And the fact is while I've been here at WIU, I've given hundreds of presentations at farmer meetings. And when I put together that tenure reflection, I look back at lots of presentations. And then the same thing early this morning, I started going through a whole bunch of slide sets. Some of you will recognize because some of these slides are from lectures for this class or other classes, but some of these are slide sets that probably you've never seen before. But this is one of my favorites from about 10 years ago: 'Evolving, not revolving for improved management.' I was talking about crop rotation. Crop rotations can just go round and round and round. Sometimes that's what we should be doing. But other times, the context changes for market or something changes and we need to adjust for that. Adaptive management is more important than just rotation, that we need to be able to adapt when the context changes.

9:22 Another presentation that I gave, this was at my national meeting, that really I think was one of my most significant contributions in the last 10 years. So, organic matter, a fulcrum with many forms and functions, gave this in St. Louis 2018. And some of you have certainly seen pieces of this presentation because I talk about these concepts in mature soil. I talk about these concepts in this class.

9:58 The a word here that we need to hone in on that some of you probably recall is this word right here, the fulcrum. What is that concept? Well, hopefully this looks familiar to some of you guys. This is one of the ways that I invented to talk about soil organic matter. Soil organic matter is a small part of the weight of most soils, just a few percent. And when we talk about building soil organic matter, we're talking about normally tenths of a percent. A very small part of the soil organic matter can have a disproportionate positive impact on soil health. We talked about the disproportionate benefits hypothesis in this class, right? Remember that prairie strips could have a whole lot more impact than you might expect from just a small part of the field being in prairie strips.

10:52 Well, so organic matter is similar. And this is kind of the way I think about it. The fulcrum effect is the fulcrum is not the lever but is what you leverage on. And so a little more organic matter allows our management the right side here to have more positive impact on the outcome which is our production. Right? So a little bit of organic matter can make your management have more positive impact.

11:28 This goes way back, much farther than 20 years, but I've been talking about this in classes for most of my time. And I remember this, this was something I talked about during that organic matter presentation in St. Louis. So if you've never read this classic commentary, you should track it down sometime. Conventional row crop agriculture, putting America's soils on a white bread diet. What in the world does that mean? Another way to think about it is what are the symptoms of the high carb feast famine diet that most US soils receive.

12:02 You could think about if you're an athlete, what your performance would be if you only ate white bread. You get plenty of carbs, but you might be deficient in protein or vitamins or minerals, right? Well, our soils get plenty of carbs. In Illinois, we grow high yields of corn and soybeans and that returns lots and lots of residue. But the fact is that high carb diet, just like high carb diets for people, is not ideal. And this feast famine part of it is also not ideal.

12:40 Imagine if you only ate, let's say, three days of the week. Your metabolism would respond. That would not be normal. You would not be at maximum performance if you only ate a couple days a week. But that's what we do. We only feed our soils for about four months of the year. And obviously, we have residues out there more than four months of the year. But we have the best diet, which is coming from the roots, is happening just when we have living crops. And most of our fields only have living crops for about four months of the year. So what are the symptoms? Well, degraded soil structure is what? Because what's coming from the roots is building structure and gluing structure together. And when we don't have the ideal diet for our soils, we end up with degraded soil structure which leads to slower infiltration resulting in more runoff and erosion. So exactly what we talk about in this class, soil and water conservation is directly related to what we feed our soils.

13:51 And then back to the soil organic matter piece of this, we have a huge amount of residue coming into our soil because we grow high yields, but we have much less efficient conversion of those residues into soil organic matter because of the diet. Your body responds differently if you binge and then eat nothing for a large portion of the week, right? And that's what is happening to our soil. We're revving up their metabolism, but then we're not building, in athletic terms, building the muscle. We're not building that organic matter in our soils.

14:29 So this probably looks familiar if you've taken intro soils with me, but the key concept here is that any soil has a potential to hold organic matter, and that's largely defined by the soil type. But are we achieving that potential? Well, essentially never. We're achieving what's practically attainable, maybe. But the reality is the actual amount of soil organic matter or carbon the main ingredient in soil organic matter is substantially less than the potential. And so if the potential is defined by the soil type, the actual, the practical is defined by the management. And so the management basically is related to our inputs. What are we feeding the soil? Input factors like residue deals, shoot root ratio, residue quality, but then also the disturbance factors. Disturbance of course is physical disturbance from tillage, but it can be other types of disturbances as well, even chemical disturbance, not the pesticides that we use. So the bottom line is if the actual is less than the potential, we have a deficit.

15:45 This is kind of a technical term saturation deficit. But the potential carbon we can think of as the soil is saturated with carbon. Anything below that is the deficit. And deficit is kind of the negative term. I like to use a positive word. Opportunity. Our opportunity to build organic matter is however much we are below the potential.

16:11 So how do we know what the potential is? I joke with athletes in my classes sometimes like Logan. I say, 'Well, so do you know what your

16:23 You know, it would be ideal if you're an athlete and you could say, you know, I know that I have a potential run for the 5K. Right now, I'm at 14 minutes. So I've got a minute that I've got to figure out how to improve that much with soil. You think about soil organic matter.

16:43 I talk about the simplest very accessible way to check what your soil's potential is is to take a look at the fence row. And this isn't purple because fence rows, you know, are not all the same age. They don't all have the same management or lack of management. But fence rows are a simple way to estimate a soil type's capacity for carbon accumulation. We can compare what's in the fence row soil to the adjacent field. And normally we don't go too far from the fence row. We're at the same soil type, same landscape position. And we can see that maybe the fence row has twice as much organic matter as the crop field. That suggests we have a lot of opportunity for improvement. Fields or portions of fields that are far below capacity are the best places to implement the soil building.

17:42 But in terms of understanding why we want to build organic matter, this is a really classic quote that I share with students and farmers. Our goal isn't really just to hoard organic matter. We're not just trying to build a soil with organic matter. We have to recognize that organic matter functions mainly as it is decayed and destroyed. Its value lies in its dynamic nature.

18:10 And the way I talk about this in intro soils, some of you probably remember this, the hydroelectric dam. We need water to be coming out of the dam going through the turbines. Otherwise, we're not making any power, right?

18:28 The fact is it's this dynamic process of water coming out that gives us most of the value. But we do need to have some in reserve because we might have a drought. We have to keep some water in reserve. Just like we need to have organic matter in reserve in our soils. The fact is that many of our soils are way below their capacity. And so if you have only half the capacity in your reservoir, you're not prepared for that drought that might occur. You might end up having, you know, a challenge to continue to produce some power.

19:09 So if we want to think about how much organic matter is in a soil, the most common method used in the Midwest is loss of ignition. These might look familiar. Some of you actually weighed these out. These are crucibles full of soil, black prairie soils that are going to look a little different after 4 hours at 400 Celsius. The loss on ignition method starts with that, ends up with that, and then you compare the weight, how much mass loss occurred when you burn off the organic matter. Now, if you use a temperature that's way too high, you will lose some of the sand, silt, and clay. But if you use that 400° C for four hours, you burn off the organic matter. And that's the number one way that in the Midwest we determine soil organic matter.

20:08 The total organic matter in the soil is a useful measurement. Most soil test reports contain that. But you only are able to detect large differences using total organic matter. Smaller differences resulting from a new soil building practice are likely to be detected sooner by an active organic matter test. So you can take a look here. These soils look different. There's a little bit of difference in color. Certainly a difference in structure, different, you know, more roots on the right side. The reality is that you might not be able to measure a difference in total organic matter. But in the field you can certainly feel a difference and this might be the result of a difference in crop rotation. For example, one might have saw in the rotation the other might be straight corn.

21:00 So what do I mean by active organic matter test? Well, some of you are familiar with this idea that rather than measuring the total organic matter or carbon, we can measure just part of it that is more sensitive to management. So Dr. Wild and a number of other students and I developed a test for active organic matter. And this test we found was more sensitive to changes in management, more sensitive to tillage, more sensitive to cover crops. And of course, this is the permanganate oxidizable carbon method. So we just talked about this camera. Remember this, the purple stuff. We put in some ascorbic acid and it suddenly became clear because ascorbic acid it receives up its electrons really fast.

21:54 Real soil carbon doesn't give up its electrons as fast but permanganate stops being purple when it receives the electrons. And so that's how that test works. You can measure this change in purple color and it's non-toxic. It's easy to do and it is a measure that is more sensitive than total organic matter.

22:15 Of course, there are lots of other things you can do. This is essentially a check on soil structure. So we have three soils that look pretty similar up top, but when we add water, we see a difference. The one on the left with a better sponge than the one on the right. The same amount of water was added. And then of course we can look after the soils have dried out in the bottom and what do we see on the right? A crust is going to form. That crust is going to make the next rainfall event more likely to run off or might impede the emergence of a seedling.

22:56 Of course, this is nothing new. You know this concept of looking at how management impacts structure was nothing new. In the 1950s the USDA put out this publication, your soil crumbling or clotting. And obviously our goal is to have crumbly soil.

23:17 Very quick tangent here, but some of you might be aware of this. We haven't done this actually for a few years, but the idea of comparing fence row soils versus crop field soils is something that I developed a very simple low tech low cost methodology. The soil health bucket contained $200 worth of supplies. And these were all basically very simple things that you could use or you know easily acquired things that you could do simple tests to compare differences between the vegetable soil that field.

23:58 So what was the purpose of this soil health bucket? Well, the basic idea right here, we wanted people to think about fitness of soil just like I think about your physical fitness. The word fitness is useful when discussing soil health because students know that healthy lifestyle choices like good nutrition and exercise can improve human fitness. We all know that. There's nobody who doesn't know that. But the reality is that we don't all live our lives to achieve fitness, right? I mean, if you just think about your personal situation, some of you are very dedicated to fitness and some of you are not. Whether it be your physical activity or your diet or whatever. We all know that some friends and family members are dedicated to fitness, but many have other priorities, and they only begin to exercise or improve their diet when faced with a disturbing diagnosis or a debilitating loss of fitness. What do I mean by that?

25:02 I've seen way too many students take the elevator because when they walk up the stairs, they can hardly carry out a conversation up to here. They're that out of shape. And these are people who maybe were elite athletes in high school and then two years at WIU they are out of shape.

25:23 That happens in our fields when we see all of a sudden the soil that used to have good structure now has degraded structure. It's compacted. We have more runoff. We have problems. So sometimes the farmer notices that type of change that kind of shocks them into wanting to change their practices. So while some farmers have a long-standing dedication to soil stewardship, many have shorter term economic priorities and they adopt soil health enhanced practices only after an event or an experience imparts a longer term perspective.

25:59 It's so easy to say, well, all farmers want to have healthy soils. All of you want to be healthy, right? But do all of you have a great diet and a high level of physical activity? We know we don't all have that, right? That's just the way it works and farmers have a similar perspective.

26:19 Okay, shifting gears. This is coming back directly to this class. Soil water conservation is something that is not just a set of practices. It is a culture. Some people have this culture. Other people need to work on it.

26:35 So you guys did this interview. Most of you have collected interesting answers and we all need to read through these questions very much. But this very last one is one that I always am intrigued by how farmers answered. How different do you think the use of conservation practices will be in your community if there were no government programs providing financial or technical support?

27:00 So here are some answers that you guys collected. I think a lot of guys that adopted no till or cover crops that were getting paid for it would never have tried it.

27:11 There wouldn't be as many conservation practices happening because it can be expensive. I'm not sure. I think the situation would be messy. Soils would be destroyed and possibly unproductive.

27:23 Most of these answers are very similar. And then we have this one at the bottom: 'Honestly, not much different seeing as barely anyone participates in conservation practice effectively.' That's kind of a harsh perspective, but every year we do similar questions. We don't always do exactly the same set, but I ask this type of question and there are always some farmers that say that government programs interfere with conservation, do not promote conservation, create problems. Where the majority opinion is what you can read here that most farmers do say that there is more conservation because of conservation program and there will be much less if we didn't have the program.

28:11 Another key way that I interact with farmers is not just through you guys being my spies or my ambassadors maybe I can say, but I also directly interact through various forums like a talk and so I don't know if anybody in our remote audience has read any of these threads, but this is just in the last month and I don't participate very much anymore. I used to do this a lot, but I post pictures, the same pictures that I send to Keith Burns, who introduced me, got posted here. New views of the Wu Organic Research Club. Then, you know, maybe sometimes 5,000, sometimes 10,000 people view those and, you know, sometimes there are no comments at all, but then other times it turns into an interesting discussion.

28:57 We host a big field day every year. Actually, somebody texted me today, right at the start of this class, five minutes before class, asking me when our field day was in 2026. And that's in August. That's a long way from now. I have not even thought about that yet, but I will think about it. Hopefully some of you either live attendees or remote can attend but we typically have 100 to 200 farmers and we also have some other farmer focused events during the year and one of the things that many of you have participated in are our twilight tours where we have students come out but we also have farmers and other community members and it's always an interesting interaction between the farmers and the students.

29:49 Okay, so that picture or the last two slides were pictures of the Wu organic research farm, also called the Alistister farm. And I want to give you a little bit of reflection on what I've learned from the Alistister farm over the last 20 years. So, I was just out there yesterday and at least one of you were out there with me. Camera was about there and it was pretty green, right? It was even greener than this view right here. And the surrounding fields, were they green? Not so green. Basically, you saw a lot of black soil, some with residue on it, but it was not looking very green except for the Allison farm.

30:35 We've got amazing soils. Musketune are the top rated soils in Illinois for productivity. Sable are a little bit behind because they're not as well drained, but we have no modern tile and so you can see the wetness around. We're not the only wet farm. All farms in this area are wet, but the water leaves our fields a little slower without that modern tile.

31:00 We typically do about 10 large scale randomized replicated experiments per year. When I say large scale, this plot here is 60 feet wide and 500 ft long. And that would be one of our smaller plot sizes. We often have plots that are quarter mile long. You think about what Dr. Pippen does. He has plots that are five feet wide and maybe 10 feet long or 20 feet long. Right? So that's a very common thing to do small scale research. We do large scale research.

31:37 So what have we learned? Basically, we have confirmed what thousands and thousands of farmers in the Midwest already know. Maybe they have not actually used this practice, but people know that the tried and true way to bring a legume into rotation, a legume cover crop, is to frost seed clover to a small grain. I have tried many alternatives to this and it's really hard to find something that is better than this system. Okay, of course you have to grow the small grain. If you're not going to grow wheat or oats or barley or pie, you're going to have a hard time getting bread all over your system. But the frost seeding happens in February or March for us and it just works year after year. We are trying some small variations on this. For example, we are

32:35 Adding some other species. So this happens to be Italian rygrass added in with the red clover. And the Italian rygrass increased the root biomass. So probably we built the structure a little better. The main focus of bringing that red clover in is supply nitrogen to a following corn crop. But the roots of course are building structure. We've also tried different clover. So also more tolerant of wetness. So that also has helped us because we have wet areas at the farm.

33:10 Of course, not all types of clover are equivalent. I got this clover, the clover that's shown in this picture from Keith Burns green cover seed, and it grew tremendously. I was really pleased with it except it grew much taller than the oats. That happened to be a wet year. And so what's happening in this picture? Does anybody know? This is called swapping. Okay, this is normally what they do in the drier regions of North America and other parts of the world. They cut it like cutting hay. They let the windrow dry out. So if you have really weedy crops, this is one thing you can do. If you have a forage like wheat clover, human sweet clover that is so much bigger than the oats, what would happen if we ran that material through the combine? We'd have a big mess. So we swapped it. We let it dry out like hay and then we had a combine with a pickup head that was able to harvest the oats. But that was very challenging.

34:20 The frost frost seeded hub sweet clover. It grew tremendously. It had beautiful flowers and attracted the honey beans and all sorts of other pollinators. And in that particular wet year, it was a foot taller than the oats and was a disaster. Fortunately, we were able to salvage the oat brought by swapping. But I'm not going to plant with oats ever again. But I still am glad that he recommended I try it because I think it has tremendous potential.

34:53 Our most reliable brass cover profit serial r. And that's also nothing new. I mean people knew that long before I demonstrated that at the Allison farm. What we have here is I had spun on cereal rye with a you know with a spinner cedar a herd cedar and then I'm incorporated and so in this case I'm using a disc but in some cases I'll use a vertical tillage tool and I'm just lightly incorporating the seed while I'm also cutting up the stocks a little bit and you can see I'm going at an angle. I get better action when I do that.

35:31 Here I am with cereal rye and I actually planted it mixed with oats in October. A little late for oats in October, but the idea is the oats grow much more rapidly in the fall and then the rye comes on in the spring. You can see how tall that rye is. It's about knee high. Okay, that's about the height we want it to be if we're going to do a conventional tillage system where we want to terminate it and have it somewhat digested before we are planting.

36:04 So here we are planted. So that's what it looked like when we were terminating. That would be maybe two weeks later. We are planted and we have lots of residue, but it's well sized, partially digested, and the plant is working great. What do we have over here on the left? That serial r that we could wait another month and take it all the way to brain. But this is actually where we were going to do no till filling. Talk about that more in a bit. Well sized residue actually will flow right through this time weer. I've been very surprised how much residue can go through that if it's well sized. We also do row cultivation for our conventional kill soybeans and corn. And look at all that residue. Looks a little scary to me, but it flowed through that cultivator quite well if you have proper adjustment of cultivator.

37:02 This is something that's a state where if you take a look here, this is actually mostly red clover, but normally we follow red clover with corn. In this case, I was following red clover with beans, soybeans, and I don't need all of that nitrogen. So what did I do? I drilled rye into the clover because my goal was to not have as much nitrogen available for the beans and I wanted to make the nitrogen more available longer term for the corn in 2024.

37:42 Okay. So my goal was to improve weed control in the soybeans and then tie up clover nitrogen for greater release a year later. We have done no till soybeans for a long time. This is actually the 17th year.

43:27 About the effects of long-term sod manure, but those effects are long-term. It's a long-term legacy. Okay, the question that we've been trying to explore is how much benefit can be achieved with just one year of high biomass ballot. Okay, and so the idea here with legacies is this is complicated stuff. Okay, we know that there are things like chemical compound changes in the microbiome, changes in the soil food web that cause changes in the next crop. Okay. But the fact is we don't know how this works very well. This is something the understanding legacy effects is something we're trying to figure out.

44:11 This is how I describe it in the soil fertility class. I say we're trying to grow strategic sequences of crops and cover crops create a positive cycle of root zone improvement. We want the corn roots this year to really enjoy following whatever preceded them. Okay. So we've done a lot of different things to try and figure this out. I'm just going to rapidly wrap this up. We have been dedicating whole seasons to growing cover crops. Not growing a single cash crop in this year. Okay. So, 2022, rather than growing a grain crop, we dedicated the entire season to growing this giant mix of cover crops. And then that's the next spring and then that's the crop. We grew a tremendous crop of corn. Grew some of our highest yields of corn ever following that high biomass cover crop.

45:08 Now the challenge of course is we had a whole year where we had no revenue. We had only cost. What we need is either for Lane or Dexter to bring us some cows to graze. Then we can have some revenue by growing all that biomass. Or we need to have such a high yield of corn and such a reliable low input system that it actually pays to have a year of just soil building. Okay, but these are the kind of effects that we're seeing. That's after the regenerative year. That's after soybeans. Anyway, we got to keep moving along here. We're trying various things like this grazing mix. The challenge is we haven't been able to bring the livestock to the farms. We haven't been able to get grades. We also tried something we called a motil mix where we wanted to do a light tillage and get lots of seed that was produced by the cover crop to volunteer and bank a second crop.

46:04 The other thing we're trying to try and make cover crops build soil more effectively is to grow them in solar corridors. Ally spread out the corn rows and we can grow a whole lot more biomass if we have a lot more light between the cornrows. Okay, so just to wrap this up. We would love to actually have some cover crops that we take all the way to seed carpet. Okay. And so, does anybody recognize this incredible taprooted summer cover crop? We were down in Louisiana, we'd be flicking our lips, getting ready to make some gumbo. That's okrow. Okay, so that's one where we are trying to grow the seed.

46:59 But to wrap up everything for today, we just have two last slides here. One is we need to think about what these guys are doing. This was the very first image in this slide set. What are these guys doing? Help me out here, Lane.

47:13 They are checking for planter performance. You can have a half a million dollar planter with all the bells and whistles on it. You still have to get off the planter and check because this is what it's all about. This is what we need. Continuous improvement. Wherever we're at, we need to get better. And how do you get better? You start by making a plan. Then you take some action, you check, and then you take another action. And it just goes round and round and round. So it could be organic management. It could be conventional management. The bottom line is we need continuous improvement. We need to recognize there are things that aren't working as well as they could. Are organic matter plants half of where they should be? And we need to figure out how to build organic or improve water quality or reduce our herbicide resistant weed problem all those things require this type of cycle.

48:10 So we will wrap right there thank you guys everybody in the audience here. I know you have a question. Yeah, are we going to have a quiz on Friday? We'll decide that tomorrow okay. Yeah we'll have a more normal class tomorrow and we'll figure out what we're going to do on Friday. So hey, I am done with class. Keith, why don't you tell me whether there are any questions that our remote people have here.

48:38 Okay. Yeah. Thank you. That was great. Yeah. As folks, as you

48:43 Have questions, go ahead and put them in the Q&A box and we will get to them here. I've got a ton of things I'd like to ask. First of all, we can chat sometime about growing okra seed. We tried that one year and it can be very successful, but it's very challenging too because it is such an indeterminate plant. But I definitely think it could be done. And I agree, I love the tap root on okra. It really goes down deep.

49:11 I'm just curious, Joel, you know, you've been there 20 years. How have you seen the student population change? Not just in the types of students that you're getting now versus 20 years ago, but the types of things that they're interested in that they want to study, maybe the career choices that they're looking at. How have you seen that change over the last 20 years?

49:38 The biggest change is probably the shift towards having a lot more women. And I would say part of that is kind of the flip side that we have less men and more women results in a big change in the ratio. During COVID, just a lot of guys decided they didn't want to go to college or they were in college and they decided that experience of being so remote and not hands-on and engaged, it's not for them. So that shift in the demographic has been across all of my classes that I teach.

50:25 You know, it's been good in some ways. It's great to have more women in the classes, but I don't have as many students now that are really knowledgeable about production. I don't have as many students where I can just talk farmer talk and they understand everything. I have to break things down into more accessible explanations. So that's different but even back in the early days we had some people that weren't farmers and so it probably wasn't ideal when we would just kind of go into farmer talk and talk about all these production things and then there would be some students in the class that would not know what was going on. So it's been valuable I think to learn how to communicate about production things but in terms that other people can understand.

51:18 I think there's always been an interest in these types of conservation issues that we discuss in this class. And there's been curiosity about organics. But what I've learned is the key thing you need to do to talk about organics with a conventional audience is talk about innovation. You know, talk about the things that are being done that are not just old school practices, but the new ways that we do organic, the way we're bringing technology or solving problems in ways that might actually really also be useful in conventional systems. The students, if you pitch it as innovation, the students find it interesting.

52:02 I'm going to run out for just about 30 seconds because I need to give a student an exam to take.

52:17 I don't know how many of you are watching that classroom interaction, how many it makes you want to go back to school or you're glad you're not in school. Probably a little bit of both for me. You know, I had some really great college classes, but I'm not sure I'd want to go back. It's fun to have been there, but it's great to continue the learning outside of the classroom. And that's one of the things I always appreciate with Joel is there's a lot of learning going on outside the classroom. So Joel, we got some questions here. Evan from southwest Iowa is asking how much worse is insect pressure in cover crops and do you think corn on corn is a viable option with cover crops as part of that corn on corn rotation?

53:09 Yeah, that is a tough question that I don't think I have enough expertise to answer. What I experienced last fall, I taught an IPM class, integrated pest management. I'd never taught before and I learned a tremendous amount. And you know, we have a lot of tools in the conventional toolbox available to help us manage insect pests. You know the various BT traits and RNAi and obviously lots of different pesticides. And what we have to figure out is how to have our cropping systems.

53:55 Help our tools to stay useful. If we just depend on these tools that may be incredibly big hammers or sharp swords, we wear them out. And so my main concern about continuous corn is it's not giving you the insect control through crop rotation. And so you're basically much more dependent on our tools like BT traits, and I don't want those traits to be worn out. I don't want our modes of action, insecticide modes of action to be worn out. And I think cover crops may be able to help with that. But I'm not sure we can really get the full benefit of a rotation just by rotating a cover crop in between continuous corn.

54:50 There are a few farmers I know like Terry Taylor in southeast Illinois that have a hairy vetch continuous corn system. And I'm not sure how his insect pressure has been impacted by the hairy vetch. I should ask Terry. But the bottom line is I think we need to be, you know, it may be possible to do it if we control insects using some of the tools in the toolbox, but we might also wear out our tools a little fast.

55:23 I'm curious, Joel. You're showing the pictures of your regenerative year, that high biomass year, and I agree if you were able to graze that, get some grazing income off that, then that would change the economics of doing that a lot. How much of that benefit you were showing 26 plus bushels yield gain on that corn after that regenerative year versus just following soybeans. How much of that benefit do you think you would get if you had a serial grain crop, say wheat or cereal rye, that you took out the grain harvest, you harvested that, and then you came right back in and you planted a high biomass cover crop like what you're doing, but now you're planting that more the first part of July instead of the first part of June. Do you think you would capture most of those benefits or some of those benefits or what would that look like?

56:19 That is a very good question, Keith. What we've been trying to do is dedicate a whole year to growing the high biomass cover crop. But if you think about what's tried and true, it's just having a small grain that we either follow with frost seeded clover or we follow with high biomass cover crops. And my experience is that the frost seated clover is more reliable than the high biomass summer cover crop mix. Reliable in terms of it's just better weather conditions to establish that clover in the early spring. Whereas after wheat harvest and early or mid-July, we often are dry.

57:11 We're rolling the dice and sometimes it works just fine. Other times it's a month before we get enough moisture to get that cover crop mix established.

57:24 So I guess the real question I'm wrestling with is, is planting that high biomass mix after wheat better than red clover or when is it better than red clover? I think there are certain times like in an organic situation, if you just go into the clover, you're not controlling perennial weeds, and so like bindweed or Canada thistle, having a tillage event in the middle of the summer is when you get the most effective termination of any type of vegetation because it's just hot and dry.

58:07 Yeah, and then follow that up with another cover. So you might do your tillage, keep things, maybe do a tillage event, get a flush of weeds, do another tillage event, and then plant your summer cover crop mix. And that has worked well for us. But I think the lowest cost, lowest risk system is the clover or some type of frost seated mix built around clovers.

58:35 We did have a couple of questions in here kind of related to that. What kind of testing have you done? What kind of nitrogen production do you think you're getting out of that red clover? And how much of that do you think you're getting into that next corn crop?

58:52 I would say reliably 50 to 75 pounds of nitrogen comes from a good clover crop. Could be even more than that. We just tilled in some red clover last week, and right before doing that tillage, I collected biomass samples, and so the total nitrogen in that clover biomass was in the range of 150 pounds of nitrogen.

59:25 Maybe a little more than that. And so if you expect that 50% of that would be plant available then that might be 75 pounds of nitrogen.

59:36 But what we have found another issue that we have wrestled with with these high biomass summer cover mixes is you get the most biomass if you include grasses like sorghum. But then you have a carbon penalty is what we're seeing. You're not getting you've grown this tremendous biomass, but it doesn't feed the corn very well the next year. Even if you grew quite a bit of sun hemp or cowpeas, you have a significant amount of sorghum, you know, you've built soil, but you're not feeding the nitrogen in a timely way to the next corn crop.

1:00:16 And so we're wrestling with that. How to have the, you know, the right C:N ratio in our mix and then what to do between you know, the growing that summer cover crop mix and planting the corn to get the best release of nitrogen to the following corn crop. I think we're making some progress, but that, you know, it's not as simple as just grow as much biomass as possible, just then you end up with less nitrogen available to the next corn crop.

1:00:48 Yeah, it's definitely a balancing act and that's where it's as much of an art as it is a science when it comes to the timing and the management on both the planting and the termination of these things. We'll do one last question here and then we'll kind of wrap it up here. But we have somebody asking if you notice an increase in your pollinators, the pollinator population when you're doing these cover crops, whether it's that big full season one or you know with your clover out there, the buckwheat that I saw in some pictures. What are you seeing with pollinators?

1:01:22 Well, that's not something that we have quantified very much. We have put in pitfall traps and so we have seen that we are we have more insects and spiders and you know related arthropods running around on the ground and falling into pitfall traps. But in terms of the flying species and you know pollinator species we observe them. We have honey bees on the farm and we're getting more honey when we have a lot of sunflowers or a few other, you know, the hubam sweet clover was great for the bees. But we haven't done studies where we were using sweep nets or other methods of quantifying the pollinators.

1:02:14 Yeah. So we would love to do that, but we think we're, you know, we think we're seeing a lot more pollinators when we have lots of flowers at the farm. And I mean, one, you know, beautiful thing is we have lots of monarchs out on the red clover in the, you know, in the late summer, early fall. And in fact, we have so many monarchs, we have trees where in the evening the monarchs come off of the clover and they cover whole branches of trees on the farm. So, it's amazing.

1:02:46 Beautiful. It'd be beautiful to see. Yeah, that's great. Well, perhaps you need to be growing hubam clover for us. You could probably harvest several hundred pounds of honey and several hundred pounds of clover seed at the same time and just skip the oats part of what you're trying to do there. So.

1:03:08 I got lots of ideas I'm going to follow up with you on because that triggered a number of things that I'm thinking about here. But, Joel, thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule. I know you got field work to do. You've got lots of students there and we're just very grateful that you took time to share some of your research with us, some of your insights and we appreciate all that you're doing.

1:03:32 Well, I was very happy to be involved. I think it worked well to do this hybrid approach with a class here, a live audience. We got at least one question from a student in, you know, during the presentation and people should feel free to reach out to me. This is a very busy time, but I'll do my best to respond. And Keith, you have all my contact info, so you can share that as you see fit.

1:03:57 Yeah. Well, we appreciate that. And thank you folks for joining us. We've had over a hundred people watch these live every week and thousands more will watch them on our YouTube channel. So folks, if you like this content and you didn't see the first five, we encourage you to go to the YouTube channel to watch that. But thanks everyone for joining us. Jump on our YouTube channel. We're posting new podcast episodes every couple weeks and we're always putting new content out there. So thanks everybody. Have a safe spring and summer and we'll talk to you next time.

1:04:32 Thanks guys. Talk to you later.