Cover Crops for Cattle and Crop Ground: What Tyler Tobald Learned Going No-Till

0:00 Hey everybody, welcome to the Green Cover podcast where we have really interesting conversations with some of the top regenerative farmers and experts in the industry. Join us as we learn together how to regenerate God's creation for future generations.

0:14 You know, I think most of us are familiar with a Swiss Army knife or a multi-tool like this thing here. It's got a corkscrew and a bottle opener and a pocket knife, got all kinds of different things. Tyler's got one here too. We talk about cover crops as being kind of the multi-function tool of agriculture because they can do so many different things. And when you get the right tools in the right settings, you can accomplish lots of goals.

0:41 And our guest today, Mr. Tyler Tobalt, he's kind of the multi-purpose tool of regenerative agriculture in Nebraska and Kansas anyway because he's done a lot of different things—everything from being a sheriff's deputy to being an accomplished bassoon player and piano tuner in addition to being a father and a husband and a regenerative farmer. So we're going to have a really great conversation today. He's here in person. He's here picking up cover crop seed to plant after wheat. So we had the opportunity to sit down with Tyler in person. So Tyler, welcome to the podcast.

1:14 Well, I appreciate you having me. Thank you.

1:16 Yeah. Why don't you start out just give us a little bit of background? I mean, your background is so interesting and very.

1:22 The best way to describe me is I'm really bummed I never came up with this one. First was an oddity wrapped up in a contradiction. I have a degree in bassoon performance from Kansas State University. Due to some medical issues, my career in that got cut short very early. Nothing puts the fear of God into your conductor when you start when your principal bassoonist starts hacking and coughing blood in the middle of a concert.

1:52 That got really unpleasant and thought we got it fixed. Unfortunately, that just wasn't the way the universe wanted to roll. So I kind of flamed out, came back home, tried to figure out what I wanted to do next in my life.

2:06 Tell people where home is.

2:08 In Glasgow, Kansas. So North Central Kansas. Yep. And just back on the farm, middle of nowhere, trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life because I thought about going into the repair side of things. It just didn't really interest me that much and probably not a big market for retired bassoonists in Glasgow.

2:28 No. Nope. So I just worked on the farm and in four and a half months back on the farm, I had more fun than four and a half years in college. Worked harder, learned more, and asked myself, why did I ever leave?

2:43 And farming with family.

2:45 Yeah. We used to farm with a big family, but then I kind of split up—too many chefs, not enough kitchen. And so we kind of broke up a little bit, but my dad and I and my one uncle, we still work together.

3:00 Okay. And we run an Angus, polled Hereford beef herd, spring calves, and then we do now I would say what's typical in my area for crops—wheat, milo, maybe a little corn, beans, and then cover crop and then wheat and rinse and repeat till the heat death of the universe.

3:28 But yeah, after I came back, I had no actual schooling in agriculture. I was easily the dumbest person in every room I walked into and people would talk about fertilizer. My favorite thing was talking about poundage with fertilizer and I was like, 'Oh, well that's how many pounds you're spreading out. That's how much fertilizer I get.' I'm like, no no no, 32% of that. I'm like, what? That's how bad it was. So I'm largely self-taught. I picked up as many books as I could find that were retired out of the university ones—you know, oh well we changed the comma on this one so you got to buy a new book. I bought a couple of the old books back and went to learning.

4:20 So I'm largely self-taught but I think that's actually the beauty of my background is that I didn't have just the traditional you got to do this, you got to do this, you got to do this, and then you'll be a successful farmer. I missed out. I was able to skip the cookie cutter side of things and start learning different ways of doing things. And that's when I started looking at cover crops at first. And my uncle, one of my uncles tried it and I was like, bunch of weeds. Can't make money on weeds.

5:00 And then saw the cows just took to it just like a pig to slop. They just lasered in on it. They left the corn stubble to come to the cover crop and did very well on them.

5:10 Yes. And then I'm like, okay, maybe there's something here. So I came up to one of your field days and picked up one of the early guides—I think it was like the second or third guide.

5:23 Which we're coming out in version 12. So it tells you how long ago that was.

5:27 Yeah, it's been quite a while. I wrote up with my uncle when it was just your guys's shop in like one canvas shed. I said I've been watching, I've been growing. I have been growing with you guys over all these years and I got more and more into it and my dad was—I was dragging my dad into more no-till stuff and then we got into cover crops a little bit, basically me just.

5:58 Taking every penny I had and just bet it on whether or not the cover crop was going to work.

6:04 Dad was trying to get me. He was kind of hesitant. I'm like, 'Dad, I will find all the seed. I will get it all mixed together. I'll load it. I'll plant it. I'll do, I'll take care of everything. If you like it, pay me back. If not, we will never talk about it again.'

6:20 I went for broke on about 200 acres and that was, I hit it lucky. It's like spinning the roulette wheel and hitting that one number you needed to hit. And it was amazing. The cows did great on it. The following milo crop was the best milo crop we've ever had. Like everything just the stars lined up perfectly for me. And I got that into it. And then we started doing different types of experiments trying to figure out what we wanted, different blends.

6:53 Then met my wife. One of the things that I, one of our dates, we didn't actually go on like a normal date to like our eighth or ninth date. Like one of the early dates was we were walking out in the cover crops and I love the cuc blend. Love the first, it was just the mini pumpkins and she loved those. Those were a hit and still something I throw in the blend every year because I love them so much.

7:27 That was, I remember that as one of our early dates.

7:30 If we'd have had that showy flower mix back then, she probably gotten married six months earlier.

7:34 Oh, I know. That would have been awesome. Yeah, she loves the sunflowers in them. So always try to put just a little extra sunflowers in.

7:46 So we got married and we live right there on the farm right across the road. So a lot of times, every three years we'll have a multispecies cover crop right out of our front door.

7:57 And so it's just beautiful to pull the curtains open in the morning.

8:02 There it is right out in front of you.

8:04 Yeah, that's great. That's, you know, a lot of people say cover crops make farming fun again. And that's part of it. It makes it interesting because you're creating things. You're building things instead of destroying and tearing things down.

8:19 Yeah, I've ruffled a few feathers these days when I say regular modern farming is boring.

8:26 It's corn and beans, beans and corn, rinse and repeat. It's, you know, does this herbicide work? Nope. Okay, well we'll try a different herbicide next year. And it's just boring anymore. I, my favorite time of the year is right after wheat is done and I get to roll in with multispecies cover crop. That's easily my favorite time of year because I know what the potential is in there and I know how happy it makes the soil, how happy it makes the cows and also the first few years it was just people would drive by it and go, 'What the heck is that?' That's half the fun anyways.

9:11 Yes, yes. And you can always tell a little bit about a person's personality and how they feel about the neighbors looking at them and watching them. And we always like to do things right on the highway.

9:23 Yep. So people can see it, good, bad, or ugly.

9:26 Exactly, exactly. Just put it out there.

9:30 So planting cover crops after wheat harvest, which is where we're at. Your truck's up there right now getting loaded. So you'll be getting these in the ground here very soon. Tell us a little bit about how you design those blends because you more than anybody else are able to get a lot of diversity in and you're not breaking the bank doing it.

9:51 Yeah, I love a highly diverse blend. It was something that I can't take all the credit for it. You guys' smart mix calculator, that's honestly a huge game changer trying to figure out different blends and everything else. That is like the greatest thing ever for building them.

10:09 And the, it actually originally came back, came from a discussion my dad and I had, which is a lot of my focus on social media with cover crops is cover crop ROI. That was actually the first little niche I carved out for myself a long time ago. And where it came from was a conversation my dad and I had. I had this like opulent blend I like to call it. It was like nine things or something like that, but the cost on it was like $48, $52 an acre just in the seed. And Dad looked at that, looked at me, he's like, 'You've lost your mind.' And I was, you know, typical kid, I know everything. If you don't believe me, just ask. And I was arguing it very vehemently with him. And he told me:

10:54 'You're not going to save the planet, the world, the soil, the farm, nothing if you go bankrupt in the process. This has to cash flow, otherwise it's just another expense.'

11:05 I swear he could have hit me with a phone book and it would have been less of a shake awake. I was like, 'Oh, that's a good point.'

11:16 So parents do know what they're talking about.

11:18 Yeah, right. That's crazy how it works. And I got in and I just started putting stuff in. I was like, 'Okay, I want to throw a bunch of stuff in here. I just want to, and then I'm going to start pulling stuff out and seeing.' I probably spent four hours messing, and then all of a sudden I realized I'm like, 'Wow, I've got like 18, 19 things in here. That's actually a pretty good price.' I had, I think that first year was the first year that I finally worked that up, it was like $23.

11:47 An acre, something like that. And I was like, 'Hey, under $25 an acre seed.' I had 18 things. And I had a couple of things at home that I blended in as I loaded it up in the cedar and I had it like it was 2021 or something like that that year. I was like this is awesome. I used up some old seed got a lot of diversity in here and I kept that price down under 25 bucks.

12:11 Yeah. And now with typical inflation as the years have gone by this year's blend is under 30. I think it was 2980 or something like that an acre and seed. And how many I saw the mix come through. There I maxed out the smart max the smart mix. It's it limit it stops me at 20 and that's where I was. It was 20 and I have three things that I'm going to throw in at home. So I'll have 23 things in it this year. It's a wonderful blend. There's a lot of I have a few things in there that are kind of the foundations of my.

12:47 Such as like sunhemp is a must have for me. I yes the cows don't eat it but at the same time in our area it's hot it's dry that sunhemp will if it has any sort of moisture it'll take off and just it's gone like in 2018 that was our best cover crop year ever that sunhemp was almost 12 feet tall fixing a lot of nitrogen yes and that's probably why that next crop partly why it did so well.

13:14 Yeah it's you know got to have turnips and radishes I I I tend to I've kind of I was doing a lot of purple tops. Then I went with the hybrid and then I decided to go back again to the purple tops because I have some surface compaction that I'm a little more I have a little more problems with this year than I have in a couple other years just because we accidentally overgrazed a couple places.

13:38 Sure. And also we cut wheat and ground was just a little bit wet. Little bit. So it needs it's going to need some surface relief. Yeah. But yeah, I had the turnips, radishes, sunhemp is a those are the big three. I love doing cowpeas, and mung beans. The mung beans for me don't do anything except provide a barrier. Those mung beans are the first things absolutely nuked by any sort of like bad bug or anything like that.

14:08 They won't touch anything else in that entire blend. They will stay on the mung beans and that's where they and that's where they end because later on those beneficial insects show up and whatever was on those mung beans doesn't stay there long. They get hammered. They get yeah. They hammer the mung beans and most of them don't quite make it. But whatever else all the other beneficial insects, they come in, they just hammer them and it's all of a sudden.

14:32 Well, they got them all concentrated in one spot. It's easy hunting. The mung beans just seem to be a more softer the easily attackable. They you can almost smell as you get close to them that there's there's a it must be something that pheromone or something they release and I'm like wow okay.

14:51 Bit of a sacrifice crop but yeah so to play yeah so what people would say like 'oh well that doesn't work' I'm like 'oh no no no that has a job to do.' That's you know it's like a pawn in chess that you never lead with the queen you always lead with the pawn and so those are a big thing in there now I'll try some other things tried sainfoin once. I had a hard time getting it established. Fenugreek last year was the first time I tried that. Last year was a real tough time getting anything started. But what did come up last year's cover crop I'd say tonnage wise be about a third of what we'd typically see just because it was so dry.

15:30 Yeah. We were typically our county gets 28 inches of rain. Last year we got 16 and a half or something like that. It was a bad year. Yeah. And we were still able though to get cover crops established, all being a little lighter, but still get cover crops established after a week. But grasses, millet isn't always is a nice filler. Pearl or foxtail. It doesn't matter to me really, which it's usually the old man. It gets, he's like, 'I don't know. I want to do pearl again this.' All right, we'll put pearl in. That's fine. You know, it's he likes to I'll come to him with the blend and he'll be like, 'Let's change that a little bit. Let's change that.' You got it, Dad. Let's He likes to play with it, too.

16:12 Yeah. And Sedan, grazing corn. That's my dad told me this year to throw in a little grazing popcorn. Like, heck yeah, let's do it. Let's see if See if something comes up on them. That'd be pretty cool.

16:28 Yeah. And and of course sunflowers and the cucid blend. I remember 2018 was the year that you guys had that one you had a load of seeded watermelons and we we we typically turn our weaned calves out onto there and they're you know weaned calves are kind of dumb. They didn't know what to do with them at first until one of them stepped on them. And then the third or fifth or seventh one back stopped and looked down and went, 'Hey, that smells pretty good.' And just started going to town on it. And all of a sudden, they realized that, 'Oh, wow. These things are like little candy.' So they started stomping them open and just cleaning out the inside of that watermelon. And after that, like that's I I even I got a couple buddies that do.

17:17 Some big green houses and nurseries and stuff. They'll say, 'Hey, got any watermelon seed? That's I need like 50 pounds.' They're like, 'You don't want to buy 50 pounds of watermelon seed.' And they're right. That's a pricey seed.

17:32 But yeah, the cucumber blend is just like my dad will go out, he'll pick the cucumbers and the zucchinis out. Like it's he made probably 40, 50 loaves of zucchini bread last year. Put them in the freezer.

17:46 And when you're talking about doing that, you're not talking about putting a couple pounds in. You're talking about fractions of a pound.

17:52 Yeah, that's a lot of it's only like two or three pounds, four pound. Like the total poundage per acre this year is just under 30. It was like I think it's 29.9 lbs.

18:03 With 20 different species. Yeah, with 20 different species. So it's super diverse, but not super high poundage. And I realized really quick that like I don't mind a five, seven. I don't begrudge any of those blends, but I did notice real quick when we started our first experiments that in those less diverse blends, if one single species just fell flat on its face.

18:34 Which still happens once in a while. Yeah. Due to environment. Yep. Or, you know, not getting them planted correctly. There's so many different variables and all of a sudden you're like, 'Oh, wow. Quarter of that field is bare.' And then you've got weed problems. And then you get all those people that are like, 'No, cover crops that don't work.' I'm like, 'No, it was a management issue.'

18:55 And I like that with all of those extra species in there, I have if one falls, the other one can step in and take the slack. Next man up.

19:05 Yep. Exactly. And the cucurbit blend is even better for this kind of issue because the year that I had some issue with the same fine just because I put it in a little too deep for the same point. Doesn't like inch and a half.

19:19 That was management on me. But what the cucurbit blend did is it crawled. Yeah, it it found every open spot and it would just curl all over the field finding every open place it could and it would shade that portion of the ground and every place where it was shade or it was open there's usually something on the vine there.

19:44 Yeah. So putting together a very diverse blend at very modest rates, you can keep that price point down and that's what, you know, that's one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation because I wanted people to understand that just because it's super diverse doesn't mean it's super expensive.

20:01 Yeah. It seems counterintuitive, but once you start playing with you got to really put some time in with that smart mix, you got to really learn your varieties. It's a lot of fun. Like you I had no idea that Fenugreek even existed until I saw it. I'm like, 'What the heck is this?' And I read up on like, 'Well, that's freaking cool. I want that in my blend.' So you just start adding and all of a sudden, you know that I look at it go, 'Oh, yeah. I can deal with that. That's a I mean, and if anyone's using any federal dollars, that's well under what they're like. It's I'm not 100% positive on this. I think NRCS is like 35 or 40.'

20:46 For an equip. Yeah. Multispecies. Yeah. Yeah. It's that's well under that. So that and in today's market where you know margins have gotten really tight with crop stuff. You know if it wasn't for cows it wouldn't make any money at all at this point. It's because this year's fall crop just seems more like a wash than anything. Even if it is a good fall harvest. The cover crops are they are one of they're a great return on investment for us because of our cattle, but they also that's where we get most of our return on investment from. Keeping that price point down helps those margins even more.

21:30 Yeah. And I want to dive into the ROI part of that, but I just want to make sure people understand when you're using that smart mix calculator, one of the great things about it is it shows you in real time exactly what that cost is going to be. Seed cost, inoculent cost, mixing cost. And then if it's more than what you wanted, you just go back and you tweak things a little bit. Yeah.

21:52 Instead of half a pound, I'll do three tenths of the pound. Instead of five pounds, I'll do three pounds. Yep. And then you can just pull that down to where you're comfortable.

22:00 Yep. That's we did that with we actually I that's usually I'll make I'll put everything together with the smart mix. Then after I'm done I'll turn the auto adjust off, go down like my wife loves sunflowers, so I'll add another half pound of sunflowers to it. We were trying the grazing popcorn with the grazing corn. So we were like, 'Okay, well let's drop both of those down just a hair.' And that we custom-tailored it. We have a custom-tailored mix for exactly what we want and all it took me was just a little bit of time and clicking of a mouse and I show up here in my truck and get it loaded up and I'm gone. Like it is about this is about as simple as it could be.

22:43 And we try to build into that tool some functionality of hey Greek I've never heard of that. Well, here's a link you click on that and it takes you to that. So anyway, building all that in return on investment. I know I've heard.

22:57 You talk other places about that. That's a real passion of yours. You know, you said, you know, on a lot of your social media channels, you talk a lot about that.

23:06 How do you measure return on investment for cover crops? I know it's mostly through livestock, but expand on that a little bit. Talk a little bit more about how you're looking at the monetary part of that coming back. And then when we're done with that, let's talk a little bit about for the guy that doesn't have livestock. Can it still can there still be a positive ROI there?

23:28 Yeah. With cows, one of the biggest expenses that we have faced in these last few years with cattle is silage is insanely expensive to grow and take care of. And then the chopping bills do not seem to get smaller every year. They seem to just get bigger and bigger and bigger, and I forget it was like a hundred, it was over $100 an acre to chop silage.

23:57 And then you still got to haul it out of the pit. Exactly. And so by, we, if it wouldn't have been for just our corn failing, we wouldn't have had silage last year. And before the corn failed, we went three years without having to plant any silage because we cut our feed requirements that far back.

24:21 So part of this return on investment comes from acres not having to be into silage. So those acres that would have just been silage then chopped and thrown in the silo then dug out with your tractor and hauled to your cows and then fed your cows in a lot. Those, you know, we only do that now. We only run silage. This year was 47 days. This past year was 47.

24:45 How many cows? Just give us about 200. 200. Okay. So good size operation. Yeah. And that's like during calving season. Yeah. So 150, but I won't count my uncles. Just ours. I'll say 150. But anyway.

25:04 So by not having those acres tied up in silage at, you know, $200 an acre to plant and spray and fertilize for corn, or even if you do sorghum silage, it's still you're still close to that anyways. But so you have all of that ground that's now going to be able to be a cash crop. So now you've got that what hopefully will be a positive return on that, say 100 acres. And then we've also shrunk down our hay requirements as well.

25:41 So instead of having 150, you know, close to 200 acres of alfalfa to deal with, well, now between my dad and my uncle, it's 70. So we have more acres that are doing other things other than just making feed for the winter.

25:56 And those crops are hugely extractive. I mean, you're not just removing grain, you're removing all that biomass. And that's a depletion on the soil. Yeah. That's. If I could, I, before we planted our last patch of alfalfa, I was running numbers trying to figure out if I could just buy hay because I don't enjoy the process of hay because of just alfalfa. Alfalfa has got to be one of the most needy crops on the face of the planet. There is nothing else that requires that much more tending to just to get the thing to plant.

26:35 And you know, it just, I hate dealing with alfalfa. I don't mind millet or whatever on it, you know, for some extra stuff, but boy, alfalfa is a pain to deal with. But now that we've shrunk down that, that's also less hours on the swather, baler, tractor. So we're getting more acres back into normal production. We're having less time on the tractor, on the baler, all of the equipment that costs money per hour to run. All of that now is starting to come back a little bit.

27:08 And then all, and we're also not feeding from the first week of October all the way out till April. You know, now it's we feed for 47 days at the tail end of calving season. You know, we start calving on cover crop or stocks or something like that.

27:24 So this stuff you're planting here in July. Mm-hmm. You'll start grazing in October. Yep. And that will carry you all the way through April. Now, are you grazing some corn stocks and rye and stuff as part of that too? Yeah, we have some milo stocks.

27:39 Typically our crop rotation has us grazing two out of every three planted acres. So it's we have our wheat, then it's followed by cover crop, then after that's either milo or corn. All of it's milo this year, and then after the milo is soybeans, and added back to wheat with that, and we just keep rinsing and repeating. Okay, the wheat acres do not get grazed. Those get a rest year.

28:08 And plus wheat behind soybeans, I mean, it's only like two, three stems going into the winter anyways. So there's not worth the time to try to graze that. So yeah, we graze two out of every three of our crop acres every year. And that way we're getting cattle back out onto that land. We are as less time having to slug through a muddy lot, you know, tear up a pasture, you know, for months on end.

28:38 And one of the biggest returns, you know, yeah. I mean, there's, you know, you can run numbers and stuff on just the money you save on that. And then poundage gained on the cows. You've got your ROI there. But my most important ROI right now is, and it's nothing money can buy, is time. My time is valuable as a mostly one-man band on the farm. Now, my dad and my uncle, I don't discount them at all, but they're both over 70. They're not spring chickens anymore, and they.

29:12 Shouldn't be required to do as much as they once did. So I've picked up the job of about three people. I have to become more efficient with every single minute of my day. And not spending two hours a day or three hours a day stuck in a feed tractor is a good start.

29:32 That allows me to do way more other things. It doesn't take that long to put up hot wire. It's five, six days. We've usually got most of our hot wire up and it's ready to go. I move my fencer, maybe do some strip grazing depending on the size of the field, stuff like that.

29:49 But time is so important, especially now that I've got my little one running around. That's something my wife and I worked for for six years. Took us to finally have our little one. And I want to be able to spend some more time with him. And not just stuck in a feed tractor. You know, occasionally my wife would like to go on a date other than grain cart duty.

30:18 It's I get more time back. And if someone tells you, 'Oh, my time's not worth anything,' you send them to me. I'll pay them double of that because what would it cost to replace you on the farm? For me, that number's I don't mean to toot my own horn, that number's pretty big. Because if you find someone that can do what I do, work the hours I work, you're going to be paying them a lot of money.

30:45 Yeah. And so you need to figure that in on some of your return on investment as well. And that time also affords me the opportunity to do projects that I would normally have to hire out. Like I built a bunch of pens. We revamped our caving system and everything else and we put in new pens and everything. I built most of that.

31:10 And had I been, that's another if I hadn't had that much time back, I would not have been able to build that. I would have had to hire that. And finding a good welder to do that, you're talking a lot of money there too. So it's giving me time. It's giving me money back. We got to figure out how we can make this work for us. Where's the return on investment? Because you start talking to people about their pocketbooks, all of a sudden they start listening. It's a different conversation.

31:37 Yeah. So you've got all the savings on not having to put up hay or silage. You've got the time savings. You mentioned a little bit about the gain on the cattle. Talk a little bit about how, because I'm assuming you're grazing cow-calf pairs mostly on this or are you weaned by that time?

31:55 We're typically weaned. Are you running your, do you sell your weaned calves or you running them on cover crops background? We background them on cover crops. What kind of gains do you see getting on that?

32:07 Depends on the year. Last year was about three a day which I thought was pretty good for the cover crop we had. This is fall and early winter too. Yeah. Yeah. It was a lot of stockpiled stuff. I fed them. Now we in full transparency, we sent our steers down the road. Okay. As soon, I mean, we weaned them on the trailer, got them to town, and people are probably going to come after me for that one. But we kept all of our heifers so we could keep replacements.

32:39 Yeah. So our heifers were they just they went on cover crop and they got 18 bales over the course of the entire season. They didn't get any silage. They didn't need any grain. And when we ran stuff through for pelvic checking and everything, they were all about 900 pounds. They were nice-sized cows or nice-sized heifers getting ready to go out to grass. They were just really nice.

33:01 And we didn't have a bunch of extra hay. Like the hay that I fed them came from the times when it was blizzarding in -30. So where I was like, 'Okay, yeah, let's bundle you all up in here. Let me run roll a bunch of hay, you know, let me tuck you up in this little sacrifice corner. Let's throw out some hay and get you through this. And then you can go back to your regular scheduled programming.'

33:24 And then the more mature cows, they're coming off that in pretty good condition, I would imagine. Yes. Really good condition. One of my favorite things with the sunflowers is if the birds don't get to them first because the black birds will roll in there in force but the cows will, once they figure out that they can eat the heads and get the seed inside, all of a sudden you'll see one, two, and then come back the next day like eight, 20, you know, like there's a bunch of all of a sudden glossy, oily-looking cows like you just shined them up for a showing.

34:01 And the first time it happened, I'm like, what am I seeing out here? This is weird. And I forget who I brought it up to and they're like, oh yeah, they ate the oil seeds. 40% oil in those seeds. Yeah. And they're like, 'Oh yeah.' And that's, you know, sometimes people go, 'Oh, I don't want sunflowers in my mix. I had to cut those out of the field my whole life growing up.' And so you got to explain, you know, that these oil seeds are so much different than the ones that grow wild in the ditch because they have almost no oil, no feed value. And these are going to

34:34 Get eaten by a bird, a rodent, a cricket, or hopefully livestock. Yeah. And the taproot on those sunflowers, those are about some of the most aggressive taproots out there.

34:46 They will punch straight through a hard pan without even thinking about it. Like you could plant them in rock almost in those things and probably figure a way through. I have those are one of my favorite taproots in the entire thing. Like everyone loves radishes, but my big thing I love what those sunflowers can do.

35:04 It's because you know it's I actually think it was Daryl that used this analogy. It was like trying to shove a bail spear into the ground. That's the radishes. Well, if the ground's open enough, yeah, that bail spear will go right through. It'll make a nice big hole. But those your smaller roots, that's like pushing a pencil into the ground. You can push that in a lot further than you can.

35:24 Yeah, bail spear. Yeah. And it's going to get a hole right through. And then that'll make a hole for something else to be able to go through as well.

35:32 And that's that's one of the things I love with the diversity as well. Everything has its own job. You know, one of the things I noticed one year with sunflowers, you know, in a diverse mix, you know, because they're going to winterkill out at 28, 27, 28 degrees, well, they they stand relatively tall, so they're going to catch a lot of snow. Yep.

35:51 But then as that that stock turns black on a on a warm day or on a sunny day, a cold sunny day, that stock's absorbing that heat. And so you'll see a little pool of melted snow around every sunflower stock. And guess where all that melted moisture is going? It's following that stock straight down.

36:11 Yep. And so it's just little little little melting cones all over your field with that, too. I just thought, well, that's such a cool thing. You know, you're getting it in the soil ahead of time and almost like installment payments on your on your soil moisture.

36:27 So, it's pretty much a no-brainer that great return on investment with cover crops, you know, with the cattle. What about without? Because there's a lot of people that either don't have cattle or you maybe have some fields where you're fencing, watering, it's just not possible or practical. How do you go about thinking about either on your own operation or talking to somebody about what's that return on investment look like if you're not running it through an animal?

36:55 That's a that's a much harder thing to pencil out. I have a neighbor that's been really struggling with that the last few years. He loves the idea of cover crops. He's done a couple of smaller scale things trying to kind of figure out where it works for him. And few years back I did some graze rental from him. He's like, I I have an 80. I want you to just flash graze it real fast and then take them off. I was like, I can do that. And we worked out the deal. And he said that paid for the cover crop with just my seed.

37:32 Yeah. Yeah. I paid for the seed and everything pretty much just with the the rate that I we worked out. And he's like 'Okay so I'm at par. Now, what is the cover crop going to do for me?' Well, he was going to go to corn. He made the good decision that year to terminate it quite early. I I at the time I was like, man, it might have been a little too early, but at the time it was looked more like a the rough on a golf course. It was just kind of shaggy. It was before it was going to start shooting up and he took care of it. So, it was just real nice mad almost looked like a sod farm, something like that.

38:10 And we got a couple of really hard rains early on. One of those rains that if you don't have good water infiltration, most of it's running in your ditch. His took it all. It just it the all that extra stuff on top slowed that water down enough so instead of hitting the ground at 30 mph, it hit that canopy at 30 mph. Broke it apart and it all soaked in. He had way more subs soil moisture than almost all of us. And his corn did the best out of anyone around us. He actually had corn that was worth his time to go pick.

38:43 Yeah. And so what would you be willing to pay for an inch of rain when you need it? Exactly. Well, that's part of the return on investment back to that cover crop when you get those hard heavy rains. Yes.

38:56 And you can't infiltrate otherwise. Yeah. The graze renting is a is a great way I think to try to help with that return on investment. How help make it pencil out better.

39:07 Now, you know, in you know, context always matters. You know, you want to you got to find someone that you trust to run their cows on there that isn't going to run, you know, try to, you know, run 200 head of cows on 40 acres in the mud and just destroy your field because no one's helping anybody at that point.

39:28 You've you you got to even if it is your best friend's cousins, former roommate, you're best friends with, still, you got to work out a plan. Yeah. You've got to be like, 'Okay, they're going to be in for this many days, this many head, and then if there's an issue, this is my plan for getting them out.' You got to be able, you got to be very open and transparent with the person that's, you know, that's renting you their ground.

39:56 That's kind of tough. That's, you know, there's a kind of a social element that seems to dis have disappeared a bit from farmers anymore, you know, where you

45:22 Nearly unrecognizable in places from where it used to be.

45:26 That is the I actually just made a quick video about this the other day in No, I don't have it posted yet. Talking about water infiltration. I have some moisture sensors in one of my fields that I was helping a company beta test their first generation of them and now I've got their full commercial product out there and for me yes I was helping them but I also for me selfishly I wanted some data.

45:57 And the data I have from this is tremendous and it's something I am so excited I'm actually we're doing a full field day later on in November where on the deal on this exact field where I'm going to actually I'll have all the scenes and let let us know when you get that scheduled. We can let let people know. Oh, yeah. I can't I'm really excited for this one. So, the same field has two moisture sensors in it. But it goes all the way down to 48 in.

46:26 And sorry, I got something in my eye. Actually, no, it goes down to 60 in. Dang it. Now I can't remember which one it is. 48 or anyways it goes a long ways down in the soil profile and I am getting root activity and moisture or water infiltration all the way down past 36 in in a field that had a hard pan at 10.

46:52 Like you could as back when we were just you know minimum tilling it you know you could scrape it all off and you hit a layer of almost concrete and the roots would get down to that and they just run laterally because there was no way to get through that concrete brick down there. It was just solid. That is not the case anymore though. When someone asked me, you know, how much more how much rain you get? I said all of it. It all goes in. I it that field does not run anymore. It had It used to run something terrible off into the pasture. It doesn't anymore.

47:26 So by farming 36 in instead of 10 in, you've essentially tripled your farm ground. Yes. I I mean cuz we're not just farming this way. We're farming this way, too. Exactly. And having that moisture that far deep. And that's And the root activity that I just mentioned that was just from winter wheat. That wheat doesn't like doesn't typically go that deep. But I you can see I had I have the data where you can see the graphs like yeah it's it's pulling from down there.

47:54 It's stairstepping where it would pull during the day lateral is at night where it's not pulling then during the day it stair step down and it's just keep the stair step pattern they said that is root activity. So at 3 feet down those roots were pulling moisture and that our wheat was able to hold on through probably one of the most brutal early springs that we had ever had for our wheat. We were less than a week away from probably swathing all of our wheat.

48:23 Yeah. There was no no moisture to speak of. Yeah. And it it held on. It kept us and it put up some decent heads and we had much better yields than what we were expecting. So getting that opening up that soil structure is absolutely just tremendous for you know in the middle of July you need every bit of of water holding capacity. You know here in a few more weeks if it decides to stop raining we're going to need it. Those roots are going to need to be able to go deep and they're going to need to be able to go find that moisture and it needs to be there.

48:57 Yeah. As protecting that and having that armor on the soil. It It's a whole game changer for trying to keep crops going in the middle of the summer.

49:10 Okay, I'm going to change subjects just a little bit. All right. You've referenced a couple times social media and you have a good social media following, Tik Tok, other social media channels. Yeah, tell us a little bit about that and and specifically talk about why is it important that we as farmers put some effort into communicating with the public about what we're doing that I originally started out on TikTok. That was and I still get unending amounts of crap from my wife on this because before I was like this is so dumb. This is just an app for people lip-syncing and dancing. This is the dumbest thing ever. And then I downloaded it and I was like then doom scrolled. I'm like, okay, there's actually some pretty neat stuff on here. And then I was like, you know, that was it was after my talk about, you know, we need to have there needs to be more talking about how we make this work instead of why we should make it work. Maybe I can maybe I can do that. Yeah. And then I started, you know, it was right as I was planting some cover crop that year. I was like, you know what? Let's talk about cover crop stuff.

50:27 And since that's where it originally started was me gabbing about cover crops. How many years ago would you say that was? Oh, let's see. That'd be 20 21. Okay. So, right after co Yeah, 22 maybe. It'd be Yeah, I think it might have been 21 or 22. It's not that long ago. Yeah, not that long. And it's that it seemed to be a niche that I just all of a sudden just stumbled right into. And that's connected me with a bunch of other people now that are trying different cover crops and different other things like that. And Tik Tok was my biggest one for quite a while. I I'm, you know, I'm definitely not one of the big, you know, I'm not the big fish in the pool by any stretch.

51:10 But you know, got 40,000 people that show up from time to time to see what I got going on. And like I do lives while I'm out in the different—like once the cover crop gets up and going, I'll go out for most of the day if I can keep my phone from overheating. And I'll go out and walk around the cover crop. People ask questions. I talked to a guy in Bangladesh last year. He was stumbled into that while I was out there in the cover crop and he was wanting me to explain some things to him so he could—they wanted to try something. I guess he's in an area where they have a very bad rainy season. And he goes, 'Our ground just sheets off the side of the hills. Just comes off and just giant slides. We're trying to hold it on the hill better. Is there something with some heavier roots?' So I was talking to him about different things that they grow over there. I'm like, I'm not an expert here, but I can tell you where to go to start looking at some stuff. And he ended up trying some different things. And he's been having some different successes trying to keep their soil where he wants it. Really cool.

52:13 And halfway across the world. Yeah. And that's where it all started. You know, in—you know, it's in the words of Ben Shapiro, two things can be true at the same time. TikTok is a mess of just crazy people and you know just a dumpster fire on one side and on the other side all of a sudden you have knowledge at your fingertips that you never knew before. It's—you know, I don't know why I thought it was so interesting but I watched a guy tear down a 4L60 transmission. I'm like, oh, that's kind of neat how that all works. I had never seen that before. Okay. I learned something. It's something that I never would have thought of before.

52:55 And I love that it brings some people together to have some better conversations. Unfortunately, it kind of gets you more focused on your phone than your neighbors. So you got to be mindful of your balance. There's a balance. Yeah.

53:11 And but yeah, I—that was a lot of fun starting out there. And then I moved over to Facebook. I have an Instagram, but I'm not a huge Instagrammer. I just—that app and I don't get along. We've had numerous problems and I just—I'll deal with Facebook, but Instagram—if it gets—if I get posted on Instagram, it's because I posted on Facebook and it just got defaulted.

53:33 And is that under JTAC Farms? Yep. JTAC Farms. Okay. JTAC Farms. Okay. So you can check that out if you're interested. And like I say, I like the fact that you aren't afraid to teach but to really be an advocate for agriculture because let's face it, you know, in some circles agriculture does not have a great name. No. And sometimes it's deserved and sometimes undeserved, but we need to get the good stories out there.

54:03 Yeah. And one of the things that I try to—I try to push and show people is I will show you the good and the bad. Like you were talking about balance. I believe in balance. If most of any sort of problem in the world is because of an imbalance of sorts. You know that yin yang, you know, all the hippie stuff, but there—we have a lot of too much yang. Exactly. It—every—there needs to be a balance and when you're out of balance you have to compensate to try to get it back to that equilibrium. And I will show you the good and the bad. I will show you my successes and my failures, where I'm where I've nailed it, I've got that balancing act down right, or where I fell off the tightrope to the one side and way out. Last year I showed off one of my most spectacular failures of all time and it was something that I was so excited for going in. I have wanted to do roller crimping on rye or triticale and stuff like that for years. And for everybody watching, it's triticale, not trite—not trite—it's trite. I'm with you on that one. We're in that camp. I dedicated a whole episode to explaining that one. And if you don't believe me, believe Spock. He said it right, too. So.

55:32 But I—last year I wanted to roller crimp triticale so bad so I could not have to do that first round of spring tillage. And it—we were supposed to be getting it—like we were told we were going to be having a very wet spring. I'm like, okay, well, this will be a great time to give this a try. You know, I was looking at some of the different weather mappings and different things and like this looks to be a nice spring to try this. So I was going to—I planted the soybeans green. And I'm like, awesome, done. Now I'm going to roller crimp. I was trying out one of the Petri Brothers roller crimpers and worked. And you know, it was probably two days, three days later I didn't want to wait for it. The tray was maturing a lot faster than what I gave it credit for. So I went ahead and roller crimped it pretty quick. Got what I thought was pretty good, pretty good termination on the roller crimping. We'll get to that in a minute. But we didn't get any rain at all where people were getting five and six inches 30 miles away from us. We got like 30, 40 hundredths. And all of a sudden, you know, when triticale goes reproductive, oh, it just—oh, it starts pulling moisture like nobody's—bounce back up. No, it didn't bounce back. I did get the timing right on it. The—I was talking to an oldtimer about this. He's—

57:03 Like, 'If you ain't plugging your radiator with pollen, you're in it too early.' I'm like, 'Got it.' That's I was plugging the radiator with pollen. So, I was like, 'All right, this is perfect.' And my issue is I wasn't running enough down pressure and my ground is uneven enough. So, I didn't put water in the barrels. I just—he's like, 'Oh, this has got a lot of weight.' I was like, 'Okay, well, I'll just do it empty and see what it does.' I had done it two years prior in Ry with neighbors of mine who he had it on a 16 planter frame and I filled it halfway up with water and did it had great luck that way, but so management issues on my end and then environmental context came back to buy me. I was Icarus flying a little too close to the sun and I had no moisture in the top 14 inches. It was bone dry. And I'm like, oh no.

57:59 And at this point, my soybeans had gotten a little bit of rain to get up and get started, terminated and they're starting to poke up over the top. I'm like, 'Oh man, maybe we get some rain.' We missed every single rain. They were still holding somehow. And then we got a little rain, but the grasshoppers got there first.

58:21 That field, you could watch it. It looked like it was moving. It's a field that my spray guys hate. It has 22 sides. It is got dog legs, switchbacks. It is everything in it. It takes an hour to go around it to open it up because it is the—it is a pain and it's surrounded by pasture ground for the most part. And hiding in all that grass was grasshoppers. Here they come, and they just moved all over that field and they stripped that first crop of beans out to the ground. I'm like, 'Oh boy, was starting to get a little bit of weed pressure back.' I'm like, 'Okay, it's not the end of the world. We can do a replant. I'm still, you know, if I can get them established, get some rain, get those bugs taken care of, I can—I this still has the potential to work out.' It just never got enough. We were so dry last year. Our the best beans on the farm were two miles north that got four more inches of rain than the rest of the farm did and they made 40. The rest, everything else was in the teens and 20s.

59:32 Yeah, that was not even worth my time to cut. But that—and I showed people, okay, you have to respect your environment. Yeah, you cannot, and that's also something that I gripe on with modern agriculture: they tend to try to push past our environmental context and try to make ground do what it's not designed to do, what it was never designed to do. Reminds me of that scene from McLintock, that John Wayne movie where he said, 'This ground was made for buffalo. Works okay for cows, but it hates the plow. We got a lot of ground that should never had a plow stuck in it. We should listen to John Wayne.'

1:00:14 Yes. And by pushing past a lot—a lot of things trying to push past our environmental context is causing a lot of our problems now, like the depletion of the aquifer and stuff like that. And I pushed too hard on a year where the environment wasn't there for it. Now, did I know that going in? I thought I had all the data I needed to make a data-driven decision. I had bad data. Part of that's me being angry at the weathermen. Part of it is also a management issue on my side because I did not completely terminate that triticale.

1:00:52 And this year I had a lot of triticale in my wheat. There was—I had one load to get that got docked 20% because of all the triticale seed in there. I'm like, 'Oh, it's half wheat,' so 'Oh, dock it back to 10%.' That argument didn't work. But it's a good effort though. Yeah. I was like—I was planning on holding it—this I was wanting to hold this field into wheat again for another experiment, but I'm like no, no, all that tray, and then we're going to go to a different—you're going to cover crop and then you're going to—I think I'm probably going to try corn next year, and—

1:01:28 Well, that's the thing about context. You know, context is different for each farmer. Yes. But for the same farmer it's different each year. Yes. Yes. And that's sometimes what we forget is that we have to reset that context every year. Yeah, season. And like you say, it's not as simple as following the directions on the back of a jug. Yeah. This it requires a whole mindset change. That is one of my—that's—you can't just be like, 'Oh, well, I guess I got a couple of prevent plant acres. I'll do some cover cropping,' and and all of a sudden become a master of cover crop. That's not how you master that kind—this kind of variability.

1:02:09 And I won't claim to be a master of it. I've figured out what works as far as our multispecies. I think I've got that pretty well dialed in at this point. Now eventually I'm going to look to do something better. Every year I try to do something better. But if you got to have that mindset of you wanting to change something—that's like our cover or like our crop rotation was not working—some—it was out of balance. It wasn't working. It wasn't right. We just took it, junked it, started over, and you got to have that mindset change.

1:02:46 It's that's what allowed me to put the mental effort and to really go for it to try to make that change and make it work and figure out how to balance my desires, my goals, my environmental context, and my

1:03:06 Pocketbook. Trying to balance all of that at the same time. And what I'm doing isn't going to work down in it isn't going to work. Exactly that way down in eastern or western Oklahoma. Yeah, in the desert land out there. That's going to have to look a little different. There's nothing wrong with that. And that's the thing. I was like, don't take what I'm doing as oh, I got to copy this and do exactly what he's doing. If you want to, that's fine. It's your ground. I'm not going to tell you what to do. But beware, you're copying off of my test. That sometimes doesn't end well in school. Well, and you don't have the same questions on the test. Exactly, exactly.

1:03:52 So, fascinating conversation. Love all the things you're doing. But as we kind of land the plane here on this conversation based on all the things that you've done over the last, you know, 15, 20 years is you've gone down this path and this journey. What are some pieces of advice you'd give to someone who's just getting started, whether they're a new farmer just getting started into this or an experienced farmer who wants to shift over into, you know, a more regenerative way of farming?

1:04:23 My, the first thing is start small, but be aggressive. Fortune favors the bold. It just take eight acres if you're a decent sized farmer. If you go, if you're a decent sized medium-sized farmer, eight acres is not going to bankrupt you. If it does, we've got bigger problems at play. But if you're a super small farmer, even if it's just a backyard paddock, start small, but be aggressive, be intentional, and keep and use the, you know, the Cortez burn the boats mentality on this eight acres. We are not going back. Yeah. I'm going, I, these are my goals. This is what I want to see from it. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to make mistakes, but I'm going to fix those mistakes and address them the next time around. And once you, once you figure out, okay, I think I've got something here. Okay, now maybe try it on 80 acres. You know, don't do it on the whole dang farm because you may not have got the right answer yet. Or you may have the right answer. It might not just be a good year. Who knows? It's but but start small, but be aggressive and intentional. Don't just, you know, find, oh, I guess, well, we'll try a couple turnips and radishes out here and then we'll graze 400 cows on it for a week and feed on it and then be mad when it's a rock next year. It's you got to be intentional and aggressive. You got to have a plan and possibly two or three backups.

1:06:03 Very positive and I really like that word intentional because part of being intentional means you have to spend a lot of time out there observing it on you know a constant basis because with, you know, with biological processes changes very quickly you need to be there to see what those changes are doing so because that's how you learn. Yeah. You learn by watching, learn by observing. Yes, yeah. And then and make notes year after year. That's one of the things I made. One of the biggest mistakes I made early on is not keeping track of what I did, what I noticed, and things to change for the next year. And because I like right now, we don't deal with Mare's tail or horseship, whatever you want to call it. We don't deal with it at all. I don't know when I stopped seeing that. Like all of a sudden, we stopped seeing it. I don't know when it was. It was all I just all of a sudden some guy was asking me like what do you do about your marish tail problem? I'm like, holy crap I don't have marish tail. I don't know. Like it's a question I didn't have a good answer to, but it was a great thing not to have to deal with. That stuff's impossible with turn and all of a sudden I'm like, oh, but yeah, make, you know, as far as being intentional, make notes on what you're seeing, what you're doing, and reference those years after year after year. You know, even you don't have to, you know, the exact humidity on every day, but even like a general idea of the weather at the time, you know, your what kind of subsoil moisture you're looking at, things like that. And but yeah, be aggressive, be intentional, but start small.

1:07:46 I really like that. So, Tyler, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Thanks for coming down and picking up your seed. We'll let you get back on the road and get this seed in the ground and let it start doing its thing. I am really looking forward to it. Of all the years for a good potential for cover crop, this is a great year of potential. We've been getting a lot more rain than normal. We've got a nice bit of moisture banked. It's time to get it in the ground and and make some make some beautiful cover. Let it grow. So, thanks everybody for joining us. Join us next time on the Green Cover podcast.

1:08:23 My brother and I started Green Cover in 2009 because we understand what it's like to be a farmer starting out on the journey to improve soil health. We saw the power of plant and biological diversity on our own farm here in Nebraska. But we found that it was difficult to get the right cover crop seed mix. We also learned that there was a big learning curve in successfully implementing cover crops. That's why we built Green Cover so that farmers like you can access the highest quality cover crop seed put into the right diverse mixes along with the technical advice and the educational resources to help you successfully implement cover crops on your own operation. So contact us today and we'll help you with the right cover crop mix for your farm or ranch so you can regenerate your portion of God's creation for future generations.