7 Things I Learned About Cover Crops

0:49 The theme of our workshop is soil health for a changing climate. So we heard from a climatologist yesterday that talked about trends and weather. Some of the things he told us was that we're in a wet period the last 20 or 30 years and they don't necessarily expect that to continue. That drought is a possibility. He showed us that one of the worst droughts we ever had was from 1952 to 56, so five years of what that we had for 2012. Back in the 50s they had it five years in a row.

1:20 The reason we're having this workshop is we want to discuss soil health and try to figure out how we're going to have soils that can stand up to a drought like they had in the 50s. So some of the things that we discussed yesterday about how we can get a drought resilient soil and how we can get a soil that will actually allow water to infiltrate. One is that we need to think about and farm for our soil organic matter and our soil microorganisms. So our microorganisms are going to help us build soil organic matter. So organic matter is going to allow us to absorb and hold water. The microorganisms are also going to give us nutrient turnover and give us healthier more productive crops. One of the ways that we're going to improve our soil organic matter is to reduce or eliminate tillage and to use cover crops because we can't build organic matter unless we put the building blocks into the soil and the building blocks are year-round cover. A living root year round and one of the ways we do that is with cover crops.

2:24 So now we're going to have Keith Burns talk to us about cover crops. Keith is a cover crop innovator from Bladen, Nebraska. He's the owner of Green Cover Seed. If any of you guys have ever used the smart mix calculator he's world famous for developing that.

2:42 Thank you and good morning. I don't know about world famous, but I'm glad to be here. Glad to be able to speak to you guys on cover crops. I debated for quite a while about what exactly I wanted to talk about. I wasn't exactly sure I've had several different things so I kind of decided that I wanted to just in this opening session, this first session here this morning, I wanted to just share some of the things that I've learned about cover crops over the past six, seven years and try to apply that to you guys' situations as much as possible. Then this afternoon I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the conceptual things that we go through when we help our producers design mixes and just kind of take you through some of the thought processes on putting some of these cover crop mixes together and then demonstrate the tool that Kerry was referencing, the SmartMix calculator, that we use all the time to put these things together.

3:37 So I've entitled this talk Seven Things I've Learned About Cover Crops. There's certainly more than seven things but these are what I want to focus on here this morning. Just a little bit of background on us. My brother and I we farm in south central Nebraska so if you know where Grand Island, Nebraska is, just go straight south almost to the Kansas border and that's where we are at. But we've been no-tilling there for 25 years. Our family's been farming that area for over a hundred. We've been 100 continuous no-till for the last 15 years, predominantly dry land and we're in about a 26 inch rainfall area so we don't get as much rainfall as you guys do where about a third of our ground is irrigated so we've got some options there. Typically we're doing a corn, bean and some sort of a cereal crop rotation. We'll talk more about that later although we have started growing some weird kind of things that we can sell through our seed business. We're growing wooly pod vetch and chickpea and vetch and buckwheat and different things like that.

4:42 We've been doing cover crops for the last five years and we started Green Cover Seed in 2009 so this is the fifth year that we've had the seed business. So again, that's kind of our background. I want to just share some of the things that we have learned in doing this and the first thing that I learned and this may not come as a surprise to my wife certainly but it came as a surprise to me that I learned that I'm not smarter than God. And I mean that's a little bit of a humorous statement because it goes without saying but I think sometimes in our farming practices we do think that we're smarter than God because we're trying to go against the systems that he created.

5:21 So one of the concepts that we basically what we try to do with the cover crops in our operation is we look at how God created plant communities and ecosystems and then we try to learn from that and we try to mimic that in what we're doing on our own farming operation. So when we look at nature, when we look at the systems that God put in place, we see that there's great diversity of plants and roots and animals and I'll talk more about diversity later but that's a huge point in what we're trying to accomplish with cover cropping. But just not cover cropping but the whole farming system as in general we want to see this diversity that is found so often in nature and again we'll talk more about diversity a little bit later. The second thing that we see if we observe natural systems is we see that the soil is always covered. You know you don't go out to a prairie system and see extensive amounts of tillage unless you've been there right after a glacier has moved through or an earthquake.

6:27 You know in nature tillage is a catastrophic event. It is not natural and we see this—you know we pay the penalty when we go against the way that things were created and we try to do extensive amounts of tillage. This picture right here was from 2009 and in 2009 we were very dry. This picture was taken in June about the middle of June and we were already seven inches behind normal for the year by the middle of June. So we had been very dry. We finally get a one inch rain—it's the first one-inch rain we've had in months and months and months. And this is one of my neighbors fields. I'm proud to say this is not mine. But he was an extensive tiller and this was summer fallow of the year before. And he planted milo here after multiple, multiple tillage passes.

7:19 And what you see here—this shiny stuff all the way down through here—that is not water that evaporated, that is water that is still standing in his field. And I took this picture 24 hours after a one inch rainfall in the middle of a drought and he's got water not just standing on his end rows where he turned but all the way down through this field. So this is not just compaction from turn rows, this is tillage compaction. This is soil that has been completely destroyed by tillage and he can't even infiltrate one inch of water during the drought.

7:52 And his milo is puny and scrawny and as you drop down over this hill you can just see that hill is light colored because it's been washed down to the clay. And in the summertime you can look at these hillsides and it's just beautiful white with bindweed blooms. He is a great example of what not to do.

8:12 One mile away this is our field of corn. It was no-tilled into stripped wheat stubble that was followed with a high carbon cover crop. And this is what we got—same situation, we're still seven inches behind normal. We got this one inch rain. How much of that one inch rain did I lose? None. I got every drop of that. There was nothing that ran off of this field because there was no soil exposed. I lost no soil. You know he had erosion here. He had a lot of water loss here and it's simply because I'm keeping the soil covered. And that's so important. And again I've got some other slides later on that will describe this concept more. But when we look at nature you know we see that there's great diversity of plants and animals. We see that the soil is always covered and we see that there's always something alive and growing.

9:03 And even in the dead of the winter you know they're the perennial plants are still alive. They've gone dormant but they're still alive. And so that's what we try to emulate in our cropping systems. Now that's not always easy to do and so we have to figure out how we can make that work within the cropping system.

9:23 So what we do with the cover crops—this picture was taken I think at the end of January several years ago but it was interesting because you can still see snow on the ground but I still had live roots. I think this was a turnip here. There were live roots and that soil wasn't frozen because I had so much residue and we had decent snow covered it, kind of melted away. But when we dug down there we had worm activity you know six, eight inches below the soil surface at the end of January. And that's what we want. We want that soil to be alive. And if we have live roots out there then they're going to support all of the biology and the biology is what's going to drive the system.

10:01 So we want something alive and growing all the time. This picture right here—you can, I don't know how well you can see that—but this corn plant is coming up right through a radish. You can see this radish has been sliced with my double disc openers and that corn plant is growing right up through that old radish carcass. And that's a perfect example of what we want to see. We want to see the next crop growing right up through the previous one. In this case a cover crop.

10:24 Here we're harvesting wheat or triticale, I'm not sure which this is, with a stripper head looks like it hasn't even been harvested because that's how a stripper head will leave the stubble. But we're coming right in behind it same day, you know within literally within minutes we're getting another crop in. I think this happened to be double crop soybeans that particular year because it's under a pivot and I'll talk a little bit more about our double cropping strategies behind the cereals. But if we're not planting a double crop we're planting a cover crop because we want something in there that's going to be alive. We want that root in there to support the soil biology and we want that plant out there to cover and protect the ground so it's not washing away.

11:10 And the fourth thing that we observe when we look at how God created plant communities and ecosystems is that the plants cooperate with each other instead of being highly competitive. And if you look at the native prairie you know you'll see not just two or three or four or even ten or twelve species growing together out there but you'll literally see dozens and dozens and you know even 100, 150. You know the diversity of our prairie systems were incredibly immense. And these plants cooperated with each other instead of being highly competitive.

11:46 And we see some of that same interactions going on within these diverse cover crop mixes like this. When you put the right species together they will cooperate with each other instead of competing with each other. And you know the scientists have observed legume plants actually transferring nitrogen across the mycorrhizal bridge.

12:08 Between a legume plant and a grass plant, and they're sharing nutrients back and forth and they're sharing the resources that are there, and one helps the other. There's a study I'm not smart enough to read the whole thing, but I read the little summary because it's a really long study, but I think it was put out by Brown University, a pretty prestigious institution of learning. But the whole thing had to do with in a stressful situation, how a plant community will become less competitive and more cooperative. And you would think it'd be just the opposite, you know? Humans, if you put humans in a very stressful, limited resource situation, what are they going to do? Every man for themselves. You know, if you don't believe that, you know, look at you when a hurricane's coming in, go to the grocery store and look at how well people are cooperating with each other. It is extremely competitive when resources become scarce amongst humans, but there these researchers at Brown University weren't finding that. They were finding that under a limited resource situation, these plants were actually becoming more cooperative. Now that doesn't mean you're going to get tremendous amounts of growth, but things were staying alive because these plants were cooperating more with each other, especially under these stressful situations. And so that's what, again, that's what we want to emulate with our cover crops.

13:33 Because it's very difficult to do this in our regular cropping situation, so we're going to emulate a lot of what we see in nature. That's what we want to emulate into our cover crops, and so that's kind of the basis of what we try to do when we think about cover crops and when we design cover crops. So that's the first thing I learned: learn that I'm not smarter than God and should never try to. Number two, we learned that a living soil equals a healthy soil equals higher yields, and soil biology is a key to unlocking that yield potential. And so when we can get the soil biology ramped up and we get it right—and there were several good speakers yesterday that talked about the biological aspect of that soil. When we get that ramped up and we get that right, we're going to have healthy soil, and that healthy soil is going to lead to higher yields.

14:27 Now cover crops are one of the best ways that we can improve the biological life of our soil because I think Terry Taylor talked about this: when you don't have something growing in there—and in fact he didn't like soybeans because he felt like soybeans weren't contributing enough to the soil. But when you have something, when you have your soil sitting idle with no living root in there, your soil biological life is either going to go dormant or it's going to die off, and that's what we don't want. We want the biological life of the soil to always be active, always be growing, always be supported, and that can only happen when you have a living root in the soil that's giving out the carbohydrate exudates for those biological life forms to live on. And so cover crops we believe are one of the keys to making that happen. And there's even guys doing companion type cropping, and I know there were some questions about companion crops yesterday. We'll talk a little bit more about that as we go through here, but there's been a lot of documented instances of where guys have planted winter wheat in the fall and they've simply mixed in a couple pounds of radishes or a couple pounds of turnips. They may winter kill or they may get sprayed out the next spring, but then those areas where they had that wheat tend to be more productive than areas where they didn't have the wheat, and nobody really has a definite answer about why they're seeing that yield increase. And it doesn't happen all the time—sometimes you don't see a yield increase—but there's been enough documentation of yield increases that there's something going on there. And I believe it has to be biological somehow. That's it's stimulating additional facets of the soil biology, and that's, I think, releasing additional nitrogen, but there's been a lot of documentation of that sort of thing.

16:16 I was just reading earlier this week in the No-Till Farmer magazine. Dave Robinson is with Legacy Seed, I think it's up in Wisconsin, but he, they just did a cover crop study and No-Till Farmer magazine had this published. And just take a look at this, and I would encourage you to go to the No-Till Farmer website. You don't have to write all this down, but I'm sure if you just go to notillfarmer.com, you'll be able to find this article. But what they did was they'd been using cover crops on their farm for a number of years, okay? So these numbers are coming from a very healthy system. These aren't beginner numbers. This is numbers from a farm that has been using cover crops for many years. But what he did is they finally took a plot, you know, did a set of plots where they had cover crops and where they didn't have cover crops and control, and they just looked at yield on corn after soybeans. So what they did is they seeded these different cover crops, and some of them were monoculture, just like winter rye. Some of them were some mixes or blends, and then they had a control. But they seeded this into standing soybeans, and I believe these guys farm—like I say, I think it's in southern Wisconsin or northern Illinois somewhere up in there in the northern Corn Belt. They seeded in the standing soybeans around the first of September, and this is the results that they got on the corn the following year. And again, you can read this at No-Till Farmer.

17:45 Every cover crop they did led to benefits. It had not only paid for the seed cost but it paid quite a bit more because some of these seed costs here probably range from 20 to maybe forty, fifty dollars on some of the upper limits, but they were finding profit, net profit per acre on all these things. I think this net profit per acre, you know, fifteen bushels of corn would be worth more than 40 dollars back when they did the study. That may be all it's worth now, but they've already subtracted the seed costs out of this net profit. So again, I'm not going to go into detail because this wasn't my study, but there are studies out there showing that cover crops are going to lead to higher yields, but you can't necessarily expect this the first year. I think again Terry did a good job talking about that, that you got to get the system going, but once you have that system up and going, the biological life is going to support that and it's going to continue to drive your system for you.

18:45 The third thing that I've learned in with cover crops, and I just call this 'if you grow it, they will come.' And again, this is focusing a little bit more on the biological aspect of the soil. I am certainly no soil microbiologist, so I'm not going to go into great detail on this. And I can't even pronounce the names of a lot of the little critters that are down there, but we know that they're there. We know that they're working for us. I like worms because I can see them, I can count them, I can feel them, I can touch them. And we know that when we have good healthy earthworm populations, we believe that the rest of the system is working as well. And you know, without getting the microscope out and looking at the really little guys, if we see a lot of worms out there, we believe that we've got a really healthy soil system. And again, cover crops are going to be what stimulate that. They're going to increase that. They're going to keep that soil biology alive.

19:39 Here's another picture. We've got one worm coming out of this piece of soil, but there's one, two, three, four, five, six other wormholes just in this one piece of soil. And you know, when you get a big rain, which a lot of times it seems like when the rains do come, they're coming more intense and less often. When you get a big rain, if you got that many holes in your soil, that water is going in and it's going in quickly. And that's what we want. So not only does the biological life keep the soil alive, but it also helps extensively with water infiltration.

20:19 Here's a close-up of a plant root, and these little strings that you see growing off this plant root, that's the mycorrhizal fungi that you've heard a lot of people talk about. And it is one of the most critical components of the biological life of the soil. It's going to be much more drought tolerant. It's going to be a much more efficient user of the fertility that is out there. So it's absolutely critical that you have good mycorrhizal fungi. And tillage will just completely destroy the system, but if you've got a bridge crop in there, a cover crop, the mycorrhizae can go from one crop to the cover crop and then back to your next crop. And so again, that's why it's important you have a living root there so you can keep these biological components of your soil alive and going.

21:16 The fourth thing that we've learned is there's great power in diversity. And I talked about diversity a little bit in the first point, but I think it's important enough and I want to focus on this one a little bit more, go into some specific examples of how we can introduce more diversity into our cropping systems because we know that in nature there is huge diversity. We've already talked about that, that the native prairie, you know, had a hundred plus different plant species all growing together. And some years you would see certain species expressed more than others because of climate. And that's what gives such resilience to the system. Is when you have all these different species, regardless of the weather conditions, there's going to be something in there that will thrive. There's going to be something in there that will work well. It's not everything every year, but there's going to be something in there that will work well.

22:10 Now in our cropping systems, we don't have that diversity. We typically grow crops in monoculture. And there's good reasons for that because, you know, it makes it very difficult to grow cash crops together. Now there's some guys experimenting with it, and I think you'll see some innovative things coming out, but as of right now, it's very difficult. And you know, it will get you thrown out of most of the insurance programs if you're trying to grow more than one cash crop at the same time. You know, so if you have to have crop insurance, you have to be really careful about how you do this. But for the most part, our cash crops are all monoculture, and that's okay because that's how we can be productive and efficient. But we need to introduce diversity into our cropping systems in other ways because diversity is so important. Because the advantages of diversity—diversity is it gives us more resilience. And again, the resilience part means it can adapt to whatever conditions are out there. And that's why when we do some of these cover crops, especially when it can—

23:17 Be a summer planted cover crop. You know, we like to put 8, 10, 12 things in that cover crop mix because the weather conditions will dictate which things really thrive and which things maybe don't. But I want to have something in there that's really going to thrive, so we're putting a lot of different things in at relatively low amounts so we're not necessarily increasing the cost exponentially from a less diverse mix. But we're just giving more diversity, and this afternoon I'll talk more about how you can add that diversity in there, how you can plan for that diversity, what are some of the thought processes we go through as to which things we put in these mixes. But we definitely get more resilience.

23:58 We have lots more options as well. When you have more diversity in your cropping system, you have a lot more options, and I'll talk some about some of the options coming up here in a little bit. You have a lot of flexibility. If the only thing that you grow is corn, then you're pretty much locked into corn, corn, corn. But if you've got four or five other cash crops that you're growing, if it's too wet to get your corn in, well I've got other options down the road here. If I'm growing one crop and it gets hailed out, well I've got other options because I can come in with a short season crop, you know, maybe sunflowers or millet or buckwheat or something like that. But if you're locked into just one or two crops, you've got very few options if something bad happens.

24:39 And you're obviously going to have more biology because the more diversity that you have, the more biological life you'll have in your soil. And you're going to have less inputs and you're going to have less weeds and less diseases and less insects. And I mean, anybody that's ever taken an agronomy class, you know that's one of the first things you learn about crop rotations: the reason you do crop rotations because it reduces the weed pressure, it reduces the disease pressure, reduces the insect pressure as opposed to doing a monoculture year after year after year. So the diversity within the cropping system will lead to less of these inputs, and it also, I would put out there, it's less risky for you.

25:19 Now it requires a higher level of management, no doubt. It may require some specialized equipment and some specialized knowledge, but anytime that you have a higher management system, your the opportunity for higher rewards is going to be there. And so the guys with more diversity, I think, are going to have less risk and more options. But you have to be willing to work and you have to be willing to learn and you have to be willing to figure out how a lot of this stuff fits in. So let's look at ways we can do that within our regular cropping systems—some practical ways.

25:53 Number one: we can have a better crop rotation, okay. Now in my area, and it may be the same here, I don't know, you know, a typical crop rotation is going to be corn, soybeans. And there are some guys that their crop rotation is, one year it's Pioneer corn and the next year it's in K corn—that's their rotation, you know, they're not doing the same thing every year. They're rotating corn companies, but we need to expand that crop rotation if we want to get the diversity and get all the benefits of having that diversity within that system.

26:28 So the easiest thing to do is to add a cereal crop. You know, instead of just being corn, beans, you look at going corn, beans, wheat, or corn, beans, rye, or some sort of cereal crop, something that you can harvest in the summertime because it's a totally different type of plant. You know, it's a cool season plant versus a warm season plant, and that is going to do wonders in disrupting the cycles and the patterns of your weeds, your insects, and your diseases. And so by adding that that third crop, that summer harvested crop in there, you'll disrupt all those systems.

27:04 Now I know that people will say, but I can't make any money growing wheat, and that may be true for a number of reasons. I think a lot of times people don't really treat wheat like a real crop, you know, they short on inputs and then wonder why they only get 40 bushel wheat. So there are ways that you can grow better wheat, but wheat also gives you the opportunity to add something else in there, especially in your area down here. You've got a longer growing season than we do, and you get more moisture on as a general rule, and so you can have a lot of opportunities coming in after wheat and double crop options.

27:42 Obviously beans are a very popular double crop option, but I think you guys could—and I'll just put it out there right now—I don't like double crop beans, and the main reason why I don't like double crop soybeans is this: because when I harvest those double crop soybeans, I have to run all that nice wheat stubble that I've just produced, I have to run that all back through the combine in the fall. And so now that soil is more like soybean stubble than it is like wheat stubble to go through the winter. It's going to be much more exposed. I'm not going to have any snow catch ability. I've processed a lot of my carbon that I produced, and it's just going to break down and degrade much faster than what I really want.

28:24 So we used to do double crop beans behind our irrigated wheat. We no longer do that, and it's mainly because of a residue issue. I don't want to run that straw back through my combine because we're now raising rye and triticale and we're using a stripper head, so most of my cereal fields have stubble that's four to five feet tall, and it's beautiful and I want to keep it there. I don't want to run that back.

28:49 Through the combine, so what we've started doing is we've double cropped corn. Last year we planted corn on July 8th in Nebraska, and it made about 100 bushel. It was 86-day corn. Now we were fortunate, we were blessed with a relatively late frost and that really helped us. We felt that's really too late to be doing corn, so this year we double crop sunflowers. We finished planting double crop sunflowers July 20th because we were even later because it was a weird spring. Everything was late, the cool weather just kept delaying things. Very wet June, we just couldn't get things to dry down, so it was late. I don't know if those sunflowers are going to make it or not, but we'll see.

29:35 But the nice thing about double crop sunflowers is that sunflowers are going to allow a lot more light penetration through the canopy than corn does. And so now when I planted my double crop sunflowers, I also planted about eight other things in there. I've got winter peas and I've got chickpeas and I've got lentils and I've got crimson clover. I've got buckwheat, I've got mustard. We've got all these other things growing down underneath the sunflowers. The sunflowers will get tall enough that if they mature—which again we're praying for a late frost—but if they mature and we're able to harvest them, that harvesting operation will all go on up above my companion crops, and I won't disturb them when I harvest. So I can take a cash harvest plus I've got all this wonderful diversity going on down below here, and I can turn in and I can get a lot of grazing out of that in the late fall because those flowers will be harvested late. If they get harvested, and if they don't get harvested, I've still got the grazing aspect and I've still got the soil benefits aspect.

30:41 Now we wouldn't have those opportunities if we weren't doing that cereal in our rotation. If all we were doing is corn soybeans, we'd never have that opportunity to do that type of thing. The other thing that you can do is just simply do a grazing cover crop. Dave Brandt, he grows wheat in Ohio and most of his neighbors will plant double crop soybeans. He told me the average, the county average yield, is about 20 bushel soybeans. Dave Brandt no longer does any double crop soybeans because he is making more money by putting a high legume cover crop in and then growing 160 to 180 bushel corn the next year on very little inputs. He's growing his nitrogen. He's basically doing a double crop of nitrogen after his wheat and then planting corn into that, and having phenomenal success. So he sees that he's getting more value out of that.

31:30 So my point is, once you open your mind up to expand your crop rotation, there's a lot of different things that you can do. When you put that third crop in there—that summer harvested crop—gives you a long fallow period, and you can really get creative in what you do. You know, Linus over here, you're double cropping Japanese millet, double cropping sunflowers. You guys could easily double crop buckwheat. I say you could double crop corn here almost every year, I would guess. Now, is it going to make corn every year? Probably not. But I'll bet it makes it more often than it doesn't. And again, you know, if you're looking to harvest something every year, it may not be for you. But the guys that are willing to take that risk, I think, are going to have a lot more reward opportunities out there.

32:18 Another way to increase diversity in your cropping system is to do companion crops. Not going to spend a lot of time on this because we don't know a lot. There's a lot of experimenting being done, a lot of looking being done at this. But companion crop is where you're growing more than one crop at a time. Now it may be that you're harvesting both of them for a cash crop. Again, if I can pick on Linus over here, he's growing cereal rye and hairy vetch together, harvesting them both together, and then his cleaner is getting them separated and he can sell both. Most companion cropping is you have your cash crop and then you have other things down below it growing—like I was talking about with the sunflowers. I'm only harvesting one thing there, but there are other benefits from the companions. Hopefully those legumes will produce some nitrogen to feed my sunflowers.

33:13 Now here's the challenges that we found with companion cropping. So before you go out there and just start throwing companion crops out with all your crops, it's hard. It's really hard. The three biggest challenges that we have faced: number one is weed control. Because once you put that companion crop out there, you're very limited in what you can spray for weed control. Now, if you're in a broadleaf situation like the sunflowers and we didn't put any additional grasses in, we can go out there with Select or Clethodim or something and we can clean up grass issues. I can take care of my volunteer triticale with Clethodim, but any broad leaves—you know, hey, they're they're part of the mix. So weed control is a big thing, and that's one of the challenges you'll have to face if you're going to try this somewhere. I suggest trying it on small plots so if it blows up on you, your damage is limited. That's how we try everything is on relatively small acres until we see what happens.

34:16 The other thing is the nitrogen fixation. You know, it's a great concept to say that my legumes are going to feed my corn crop or my sunflower crop, but the reality of it is we're not willing to risk my yield on those cash crops by not putting nitrogen.

34:36 On early because if I don't get my nitrogen on early that corn or that sunflower really suffers. And when I do put my nitrogen on early, well guess what those legumes do? They're just taking that, they're lazy just like a lot of people. They're going to take the free handout before they have to go to work.

34:54 And so we've really struggled with trying to get our legumes to nodulate and produce nitrogen because they're taking up the free nitrogen that's already in the soil that I put out there for the cash crop. That maybe can be addressed with timing. It maybe can be addressed under some pivots. You know, we're trying to limit how much nitrogen we put on early and then we can put on additional nitrogen later in the season. I don't know, we haven't figured that out yet, but that's one of the big challenges that we have to work through is how do we get that nitrogen on without the legumes just taking it up.

35:27 And maybe it's okay, you know, but just don't plan on that legume totally feeding your crop now. The Dave Brandts and the Gabe Browns, they're getting it to work because they're putting very little commercial nitrogen on because they've got such high organic matters. They've been in cover crops for many years. They're getting tremendous amounts of natural nitrogen release from their soil. And I think that's a much better system.

35:53 The legumes don't take as much of that because it's not just all this free nitrogen sitting in the ground. It's more of a time release from the decomposition of residue and organic matter. And so that's a much better system than putting so much nitrogen out there prior to planting the crop. You know, in that situation the legumes are just going to take it up.

36:12 Crop insurance is another big hurdle you have to jump through if you're doing companion cropping like this. You're probably not going to be eligible for crop insurance on it. That will throw you out of the program. So typically when we're doing companion crops, it is on something that we're double cropping that we don't insure anyway. So just know that if you're going to dabble in this, it may disqualify you from a lot of the crop insurance programs.

36:38 Another way you can introduce diversity into your cropping system is to do forage rotations, do year-round grazing. Now if corn is three dollars and feeder cattle are three dollars, you do the math. And I've got some pictures here of a customer out in western Kansas, and he's done the math and he's going to make a ton of money where a lot of other guys are going to lose money on the corn, so I'll show you those pictures in just a second here.

37:08 And then the, you know, if you don't want to do any of those other things, if you don't want to, if you're not interested in changing your crop rotation, you're happy with the rotation that you have, then the logical way to add diversity to your system if you don't want to do anything with your regular crop rotation is to get cover crops in whenever you can.

37:26 And then it's a very good way to add diversity to your system because you now can put a lot of different things out there without having to learn how to harvest or market new crops. You know, buckwheat would be great, you guys could all grow buckwheat, but if everybody in the room grows buckwheat, you know, maybe three of you would get some sold. There's definitely issues, and if you're not willing to do the marketing or learn how to grow and harvest these things, then get the diversity in through the cover crop mixes.

37:53 I tell people, you know, because people ask well what kind of cover crops can I grow for seed? And my answer to them is you can grow a lot of different cover crops for seed. You know, hairy vetch, it's easy to grow, it's really hard to harvest. Is that right, Linus? A lot of these things, you know, buckwheat, it's easy to grow, it's extremely indeterminate. It's a bear to harvest because you've got to go out there and spray it because it'll bloom for months and it'll have mature seed popping out of the pods.

38:27 And what makes a good cover crop is something that's very indeterminate because it just grows and grows and grows. That's a great cover crop. It's a real pain as a cash harvested crop. And so by using it as a cover crop and not as a cash crop, it lowers the amount of management that you have to do. You don't have to have specialized harvest equipment. You really don't have to have specialized planting equipment because you can just put it in with a grain drill.

38:53 And it gives you the ability to get a lot of diversity into your system without having to add a lot of marketing and harvesting knowledge. So again, a lot of these things are easy to grow, but they're hard to harvest and process and store and sometimes market. So those are some of the options.

39:09 I just got some pictures here of some of the things that we've done. This is that double crop corn that I was telling you about from 2012. This is irrigated corn double cropped into rice level. We planted this at the end of June. We didn't get stuff planted until about July 10th. This picture was taken July 22nd, so that corn had been growing for three weeks.

39:42 One thing about double crop corn: when you plant corn into soil temperatures that are in the mid-80s, it's up in three days, and it is going to grow fast. You know, so don't plan on planting your corn and then coming back a week later to hit it with chemicals that would kill the corn because that corn is going to jump out of the ground. But look at the amount of residue that I

45:41 15 to 16 inch rainfall area on a good year and they've been in several years of a drought and he plant the he got this seed from us probably around the first of May and he planted this probably about the middle of May and he planted it two different times and I just want to read you his comments here and then show you some of the pictures. This field number one plants that seem to be doing good as a grazing corn sunflowers turnips collards and buckwheat.

46:07 I had no idea brassicas would grow so good during the summer and I didn't either, you know, because typically you think of radishes turnips collards rapeseed, you know, typically the general rule of thumb would be well, you know, wait till mid-August to plant those. It's going to be too hot in Western Kansas. Gets hot and it gets windy. It's hotter there than it is here and it's much drier and it's much windier. It's a harsh harsh environment, but he basically said I had no idea these brassicas would grow so good during the summer. They are generally huge and that was very surprising to us as well.

46:40 I think part of what's happening is because they're growing in this massive diversity. You know, the tallest plant out here obviously is the grazing corn and the sorghum and it's providing a shading effect for those brassicas and it's changing the microclimate where those brassicas are growing. And so if it's a hundred degrees out, you know, that corn and that sorghum is taking the brunt of that solar radiation and it's much cooler down under that canopy. You know, it's a higher level humidity because it's got the moisture trapped down there to some extent. It's just a different growing environment and so those things can thrive where if you had just a field of straight turnips growing through Western Kansas July, they'd probably just burn up. But he's getting them to grow because again these plants are cooperating and not competing.

47:36 So he says they're generally huge. The buckwheat is also way bigger than I thought it would be. A lot of it is three feet tall and by the way, we are still not at average rainfall for the year in Wallace County, so don't think this crop is growing on a ton of moisture. 15 to 16 inch rainfall and they're behind and he's still got a crop that looks like that.

47:58 Now he sent me these pictures about three weeks ago and shortly after he sent me these pictures he turned out 600 head of steers into this field. 600 head of steers, those things will easily gain two and a half pounds a day, so he's getting 1500 pounds of gain a day on probably some four and 500 weight steers. And that, what's that gain worth? Between two and a half, three bucks right now, you know, do the math. You know, three thousand thirty five hundred dollars a day. That's for sure going to be three dollar corn out there because with the weather conditions they have, if they grow 80 bushel corn they're thrilled to death on dry land out there. So he's got this figured out. He can do the math.

48:49 Just another picture, he sent me this picture and said something about at first he thought the green cover seed guys had quality control issues so we show this because of the diversity. I really have no idea what they were doing but it was kind of funny, but it gives a little bit of a scale. I mean, you can see this stuff is you know, up about to this guy's armpit. The pineapple I think was introduced by them and not any part of our seed.

49:18 One other thing I do want you to notice though is you see this right here and this other picture had some too. I don't know if you guys have kosha out here. Do you guys have kosher? Okay, kosha is a brutal weed out there for those guys. ALS resistant, starting to be glyphosate resistant. It's one of the weeds they fight the most out there. He's not worried about it at all because kosha at this stage, kosher, when it grows big, it's tumbleweed. Okay, so when you see the tumbleweeds rolling through the old west movies, that's kosha and so it'll get big and it'll get real bushy and it's very unpalatable, but at this stage it's actually a pretty good grazer, fairly high in protein. He's not worried about that kosher growing with that because he's going to put 600 steers out there. He's going to group them up fairly tight. They're either going to eat that kosher, they're going to trample it into the ground. It's not going to be a problem.

50:10 Here's the second field that he planted. He planted this one two weeks behind the other one, hopefully we'll get another two feet of growth in the next three weeks before we put cattle out. So he's going to graze this first field with these 600 steers and then he'll move right over to the other field and what he's doing is he's staging it so that when he's got the steers in there this stuff is at its prime growth. You know, he doesn't want to plant two quarters all at the same time because by the time he gets to the second quarter some of that stuff may be too mature. So we delayed his planting two weeks. Amazing growth on all species. Two foot tall soybeans, 18 inch tall chickpeas, maybe a little too much brassica growth.

50:49 I never thought I'd have somebody tell me they thought their brassicas were growing too much in Western Kansas heat through July and August. That's amazing. We took samples from both fields today so we'll know nutrient and feed values later this week. I don't know if he's got those back. He hasn't sent them to me yet. But you can see this is kind of a

51:07 Close-up, he had four or five different kinds of brassicas in here. I know some of this that he did last year, this stuff was testing out at almost 30 percent protein. In fact, he cut back on how many brassicas he had in his mix this year because he thought it was too hot of a mix last year.

51:29 Just another picture, great diversity. He's got sunflowers in there. Sunflowers are excellent grazing when they're at this stage—the cattle will eat those leaves. They'll even clip the heads off and eat them. The sorghums, the grazing corn, different brassicas, different legumes. He had probably 10 or 12 different things in this mix.

51:47 And again, he's doing the math. And with corn approaching three dollars and feeder cattle approaching three dollars, if any of you guys got cattle, I think you need to seriously consider putting your weight on them, doing this instead of growing. Not the whole farm, but maybe a field. Because you can put some tremendous gains on. And if you don't have cattle, maybe find someone that does and see if you can strike an agreement. Have them pay you on the gain that they would get from your field.

52:15 But the one thing you need to remember, and we always try to stress, because the cowboy in a person a lot of times will overrule the farmer in a person, and you tend to graze way too much. You need to remember to leave at least half of your residue for the critters below the ground. Because all this biological life in your soil, you need to feed them. And if you let the cattle take it all, then you'll actually go backwards on soil health. If you graze it right, you'll get tremendous increases in the amount of soil health, the amount of organic matter that you can accumulate. But if you over graze it or if you mismanage it, you will have a penalty the next year on your crop. We've done it. I know, because a lot of times the way we graze things—and this is the wrong way to do it—when the neighbor calls and says, 'Hey, your cows are out,' it's time to move them. That's not the way to do it. We're working on that, but the guys that got it figured out, and the guys that are intensely grazing and they're trampling a lot of it to the ground, they're having wonderful results.

53:17 Number six: Got to hurry up and finish up here. A cover-up is a good thing. Residue covering the ground makes the whole system work. And again, these are the pictures I showed you earlier, but I want to show them again because it's all about how much residue you can have in your soil. Because you know, the fact that you're not tilling the ground is good, but the main benefit you're getting there is you're keeping the soil covered. And Ralph Derps, who is one of the pioneers, kind of one of the godfathers of the whole no-till movement—he's an agronomist from Paraguay. He, I heard him say this once. He says, 'Almost all the advantages of the no-till system come from the permanent covering of the soil, and only a few of the advantages come from not tilling the soil—the physical act of not tilling. That's important, but it's not nearly as important as keeping that soil covered.'

54:10 We should always aim at full soil cover. And if I had time, I'd show you a couple videos that I took a couple years ago of long-term no-till ground right next to me. The farmer lost his lease on this ground, and it is all within the same family, so it's very dysfunctional. He lost the lease, so he got mad at them. So he says, 'I'm going to show you.' He came in after corn harvest, and he had somebody rake it twice. Well, they went in there with a shredder first and they shredded the stalks to the ground. They ran the rake over it twice, and he hauled off every last little bit of residue that he could to the feed lot. And he did the same thing right across the road. He had a quarter section of beans, dry land, and he raked up every last little bit that he could and hauled it off to the feed lot and probably got 50 bucks a ton.

54:56 So then the next spring, that stuff blew like it was the dust bowl. And there was a little bit of justice, I guess, because he still farmed one quarter right to the north of the one that he had raped and pillaged, and he probably lost 20 acres of his crop because that blowing dust just literally cut his crop off, you know, for the first several hundred feet. But no-till by itself is not going to work if you remove all the residue. And I'm sure you guys have seen the same things around here when you have a no-till system without any residue covering the soil. It is marginally better, and since some instances maybe not even as good as a conventional till system. It's the residue that's driving it, and we have to keep that on there.

55:39 I took this picture when I was in Brazil. I actually went on a tour of Brazil with Ralph Derps in a group with no-till on the planes. This is the guys out there planting corn in Brazil, and this is their planter monitor. Okay, when they run low on seed, he'll throw a clod at the cab of the tractor there so they can stop and fill it up. That's their planter monitor. But the reason I took this picture is they run a big old shank up in front of every row unit, so they're no-tilling, but they've got a lot of soil exposed and they've got a lot of soil disturbance. And that kind of bothered us, but then we thought it looked pretty familiar to a lot of operations we see here in the United States, you know, called strip till. It's really not that much different, you know? You look at this, and you know this is strip till. And yeah, you've got residue here, but look at all the soil that's exposed.

56:33 Our philosophy is we don't need to do that, we don't want to do that. I don't want to see that soil exposed. This is what we want to see. This is how we plant corn. We've taken our residue openers off. They're setting on a pallet. They're for sale if you're interested. We just run double disc openers. We replace them every year. We have plenty of down pressure on a planter. You got to have weight and down pressure and sharp blades, and you can plant through virtually anything.

57:01 And like I say, this was a five feet tall triticale stubble, but the cover crop helps knock it down, helps it get processed. And again, you can see this radish right here, this corn plant coming right up through there.

57:14 Here's some other pictures. I'm almost finished here. I know I'm a little late, but this is irrigated corn planted into cover crop rye. Look at the residue cover that I've got. Now this rye was killed out ten days before I planted. Okay, ten days before I planted. That's typically the recommendation that we would say. We want to get that rye completely dead before we plant.

57:36 But in this field we did an experiment and we took a 90-foot strip and we did not spray that until three weeks after we planted the corn. And that's what the residue looked like here, same day. Took the picture the same day. Look at the difference in residue. This is a rye sprayed out 10 days before planting. This is what it looked like when we sprayed it out three weeks after planting.

58:01 Now you can see here's this 90 foot strip right here. And I would say for the first two months, probably for the first 50 days, you could see this strip was visibly shorter than the rest of the field. After that it caught up and then after that, that 90 foot strip was taller than the rest of the field because that soil was cooler, it was holding more moisture. Now this was under a pivot so we were watering this, and we did have to water. 2012 was very dry for us, and we had to run the pivot earlier than what we normally would have because this strip was dry. There's no doubt about that.

58:39 If this would have been dry land, that would have been a disaster. It would not have worked. But where we had the pivot, we could make it work. Now we didn't really see a tremendous amount of yield difference. There certainly was no yield drag where we did that, but we didn't really necessarily see an increase in yield. But the increase in the residue was phenomenal. Again, here you can see the line. Here's where the rye was sprayed out three weeks after planting. Here's where it was sprayed out 10 days before planting. A huge difference in the amount of residue that we're showing there.

59:13 Let me go back one. The other thing that we tried, and I don't have a picture of it—I wanted to have a picture to show—is that last year, or this spring, the cover crop rye where we were planting soybeans, instead of spraying that rye out with glyphosate, we sprayed it with clethodem or generic Select. And what that did is glyphosate will hammer rye, and that rye will be dead within a few days, especially if you're putting a big load of surfactants in it. And we kind of felt that it was killing that rye too quickly and degrading it too fast.

59:50 And so we sprayed it with clethodem and about a half rate on some of it. And it killed that rye very slowly. And with soybeans, that was great because I had wonderful residue there for those soybeans. And we, it actually didn't completely kill that rye when we came back. When we post-sprayed the soybeans, it finished the rye off. But it kind of stopped it from using moisture, but it allowed it to continue to mature. And so, you know, there's guys doing things like that to try to manage the crop, but yet still maximize the amount of residue and carbon that's out there.

1:00:25 The last thing that we learned is, in spite of everything that's going on, you have to remember to focus on your most important crop. This is my family. My wife and these three girls are here with me. They'll probably be here for this afternoon session, or at least at the end. So, you know, this whole concept of diversity, you know, people think we're taking this a little too far because we've got two kids that are married. My son Simeon, he's married to Kristin, and my daughter Rachel, she's married to Samuel. They've got one's child, and they're both expecting. They'll both have babies in November. Then I've got two boys that are in college, and then we've got these three little girls. So, you know, we're doing our part to have diversity within our family, within our farming operation.

1:01:08 And you know, I told some people, I said, you know, no-till farming, it just takes less time. You're not out on the tractor so much. And I say, you know, I don't know what you guys are doing with your extra time.

1:01:28 Do we have time for questions, or do we need to get on the tours?

1:01:32 Time for a couple questions. Yes, I have a question about the guy in western Kansas. Yes, and he grazed that pretty diverse cover crop. What did he do after that? Did he put a crop in after that?

1:01:45 Well, he's grazing it right now. He sent me these pictures just a couple weeks ago. Most likely he will go to a, if he gets the moisture, he'll probably go to wheat this fall. If he doesn't get the moisture to replenish what that cover crop used, he'll probably hold it over and probably plant grain sorghum next spring. They typically don't plant a lot of corn.

1:02:11 Out there on their dry land acres so he'll probably either go to wheat if he feels like he's got the moisture to do that or he'll go to sorghum next fall or next spring and so he doesn't raise par. He leaves quite a bit of stubble. Well he'll graze it hard but he won't graze it long and so what they'll do is, you know, he'll have cover crop out there probably four feet tall and he'll probably crowd those 600 steers into less than two acre paddocks and probably be moving them a couple times a day. And so they're probably trampling, you know, the 50 percent that he's leaving probably is getting just trampled down. And that's for his soil.

1:02:56 I think it is. Yeah, I think his target is to leave 50 percent. And I suspect after he grazes it, it's early enough. If he catches a rain he'll get enough regrowth, he'll be able to graze it again. If he doesn't get the moisture he probably won't, but if he catches a rain he'll be able to graze that a second time because it's all warm season stuff, it'll regrow very well in the heat. Though while the brassicas aren't warm season but everything else is. And if he doesn't get a rain then he's still, you know, had a lot of good gain and had a lot of good soil benefits, which is what he's after.

1:03:34 Yeah, the question is what's the 10-day connection. I said that's our typical practice of spraying that rye out 10 days ahead of plant corn. You know, there's a lot of talk about rye being allelopathic to corn. And listening to the experts what they say is that when that cereal rye is decomposing it releases some sort of chemical compound that can inhibit the germination of a corn seedling. And the live rye plant doesn't do it and a completely dead rye plant doesn't do it. It's the stage in between where it's kind of dying. And so typically what we recommend to people is that you get that rye completely dead before you plant your corn. Or like what we did in that one strip, plant the corn, let it germinate, let it emerge and then spray it out.

1:04:23 And that's kind of the general rule. We've never seen that on our own ground. I think a lot of what people are seeing that they attribute to allelopathy, maybe nutrient tie up. And I know on the tours they're seeing that out in these plots where they incorporated that rye into the soil and they're just tying up so much of the nitrogen that that corn looks yellow and stunted. Which, you know, some people may attribute to allelopathy but it may just be a nutrient tie up. So you can overcome that and I think Terry talked about this too. You know, if you're using rye as a cover crop, you need to make sure you have a good starter fertilizer program for that corn because that rye is going to be very good at pulling all the nitrogen out of the soil. And then it will release it later as it decomposes. So that's what the 10-day window is. Just to avoid any of that allelopathic effect because we figure in 10 days we can have that rye completely brown if you're using the right additives with your glyphosate. If you don't put any additives with it, it may take two weeks to really get brown but you can put things in it speed it up.

1:05:30 What do we do after double crop soybeans or after double crop corn? Next spring we will typically come back to corn. Typically not, because when we double crop like that, like say you know that corn we left stan in the field till end of November, 1st to December, just try to get it to dry down. Now double crop soybeans, you know, obviously they're going to die with the first frost and then you can harvest them shortly thereafter. We haven't done double crop soybeans for about four years. But typically we figure it's late enough that we probably don't have a lot of other options. Most of our soybeans that we harvest on regular time we will come back with a cereal crop for cash harvest, so rye or triticale. Spring oats or spring barley or spring triticale, something like that. So we typically don't do a cover crop into those acres because they're coming back with a cash crop. And we'll put cereal rye into all the corn acres. And again it was talked about widely yesterday, cereal rye, you can plant that just about any time. You may not get much fall growth but it's going to be there in the spring for you.

1:06:42 What cover crops would work after double crop soybeans? When are you harvesting them? End of October. Cereal rye, hairy vetch, triticale, winter wheat. That's probably about it because you just you've run out of time to get any fall growth of any substantial amount. So you've got to go with things that are going to be very winter hardy. The other option would be is you can wait till the early spring and plant a little bit more of a diverse mix. You could plant oats, peas, rapeseed, some clovers. You could plant that in the early spring, you know, try to get 60 days of growth out of it, then spray it out and then plant your next crop. Some guys are doing that, especially the guys in parts of Kansas. They're planting grain sorghum or soybeans and they don't plant those until like the end of May. So they've got more time to be able to do that. But yeah, there's not a lot of choices when you get to the end of October.

1:07:40 I will be up here. I probably am not going on the tours this time so if you got questions, feel free to come up. I'll be more than happy to discuss those with you, but we probably need to get people on the tractor. Thank you very much, Keith.