Cover Crops, Herbicides, and Livestock Selection: What Farmers Are Actually Doing

0:08 First question here for Jimmy: the question is what herbicides are you using on your wheat? We don't use any herbicides over a week because I want the option plant cover crop seed and if we do that that limits us. So since we went into our rotation with cover crops, our weed pressure went down and so we don't use any. How about anybody else? Does anybody using herbicides in your wheat and if so what are you using so that you can do cover crops?

0:39 Some fields we have wild buckwheat problems and we'll come in with something like a generic harmony, something with no residual to take care of that. We like, like Jimmy said, we don't limit ourselves by using long residual herbicides in wheat because it will almost always plant something after the week.

1:06 Yes, I meant to mention that in my presentation. We don't obviously do herbicides for wheat production because we don't combine or go that route. But on these summer cover crops, the stress that we had on the moisture we went ahead and planted, and sometimes we do spray a little bit of 24D around, which I don't spray anything like I used to. But that really created an issue in terms of adjacent fields and drift issues. I talked to Jim about it and he had asked me you might want to mention that to people, that just heighten their awareness where you put these summer cover crops with that kind of a broadleaf legume mix. My goodness, drift is tremendously a problem and I just really caution people on that for adjacent fields.

1:48 Okay, Alan, a question: Alan mentioned you had mentioned putting lime on. The question is do you incorporate the lime into the soil or do you believe the lime on top the ground, and if left on top how long does it take the lime to get into the ground?

2:06 Good question. I've been no-till for 20 years. That's how I started my farmer career. I don't do any tillage, so we put the lime on top. We'll put on two tons at a time until we've got the field where we want it, usually two tons per lease term, which is three to five years. And then we'll, we just put it on top. The effectiveness is how fine it is and how much rain you get. This little deal here that we had, we put on, I put on two tons and then we got 22 inches in the next month. We got some action on that. It's just a matter of rainfall to get it in. Usually the pH problem is always in the top 22 to 24 inches anyway. We address that problem.

3:02 The first year I bought some new farms and my consultant said well got to work that in, and I said I don't know how I'm going to be a no tiller if I work that in. And he said well you think it's going to work, and I said well there's one way to find out. And since then he's recommending all his customers did no till. I think what a lot of people find is the biological activity, the more biologically active.

3:30 Your soils are the faster that line will be effective as well. So if you're just starting no till and just starting some of this, it may take a little bit longer, but give it a little bit of time and it will work. Yeah, we know scores of no tillers who are not incorporated in their lime and it works very well.

3:52 Human question for you: you said that a long period a fallow is starving your soil biology. What is your definition a long fallow in terms of days or months? What's your definition of long fallow? I'd say anything more than a couple weeks is considered fallow, but in my area some of the longer periods if you think about somebody pulling combining weed in July and they aren't going back to corn until the next May, you know that's nine months. That ground's just laying there with no plants or photosynthesizing. You don't always think about the fallow between the crops. You think all winters come in so it don't count those, but you have to think about the periods in between crops. It's just not the long fallow period.

4:40 Anybody else want to address the fallow period issue? I try not to address it. That's where that's where you come in, Keith—is a cover crops. And I've just seen rotations change immensely, and now we can implement cover crops. We can start implementing cattle. The doors now are just opening up. That's what's exciting about the possibilities of utilizing sun energy. You know, I talked about it earlier that sun is giving free energy and we're not utilizing it. It's called a sun splash when it hits pavement. It's not used. Why don't we utilize what God's given us and growing something with it? Keeping plants growing there.

5:38 You know, we oftentimes will have people ask: how long does a cover crop have to grow in order to be effective, you know, to get my money's worth out of it? And when we've asked some soil microbiologists, they basically are saying if you can get at three weeks of growth, you're having significant root growth and significant carbon being put into the soil. So they're saying it's worth it at three weeks. Economically, it's probably not quite worth it with just three weeks of growth. We would really like to see five to six weeks of growth, but we have had people do cover crops that they only let grow for 30 days and then they terminated or graze it or do something to go to the next crop. But yeah, if you leave that soil bare and with nothing growing, you're certainly going to be hurting your biology with that.

6:24 Let's see: is there a cover crop that can be planted in coastal Bermuda grass in the spring? My cow peas were choked out last year by the coastal. So for any of you that are working with Bermuda grass, what types of things could you intercede in the spring? And we also have a question here about interceding.

6:45 Maybe even later in the fall. So for you folks that have me grass pastures and have been working with planting some covers in that, either in the spring or the fall, why don't you just talk about what you've seen work or what you think might work late, early winter plus or early winter seating of small grains will work in Bermuda. Very early spring oak plantings will work. You've got to have enough time. This Bermuda is so competitive, it's really hard to get anything started in Bermuda once it starts to green up. You've got to get in there before and let that forage get a jump on it. And even then, by the time it the Bermuda greens up, it will be starting to compete with whatever's even ahead of it by a month or more.

7:37 Alan, you've had quite a bit of experience with Bermuda also. Do you want to address that? The next Alan, sorry, shouldn't put the two Alans right next to each other. Yeah, you can pretty much do anything you want to in the fall. Yeah, we're cool seasons and that's typically done all through the south. So you can come in with about any kind of cool season mix that you want and it's going to work very well. But I agree with Alan in terms of the, you know, if you're going to get anything in the spring, the earlier you can get it in the better to out-compete.

8:08 So the key to getting anything established into a perennial is you've got to pick the time when the perennial is the most dormant and has the least amount of growth. Because if they're both growing, the perennial or the established plant will always win. So you always want to attack it at its weakest point. And you're not trying to kill it, you're just trying to use the season that it's not growing. So wait for it to go dormant or like they said, plant as early as you can in the spring. It's probably easier to get cool season things growing into a dormant warm season pasture than the other way around. So you folks it's got Bermuda, have a lot of opportunities with that.

8:51 We have a question here about can we get access or copies of slide presentations. And we will be able to make that available to folks. We'll at the end of the conference here, we'll be sending out an email with the names and email addresses of everybody that's here, just so that you can continue to network with each other. And we'll get permission from all of the speakers to have their PowerPoints available. And we'll put those somewhere where you can download them if you'd like to do that. So good question on that.

9:22 Alan Williams, a question for you. You had a comment about reduced to inorganic, you reduced inorganic inputs by fifty-five percent. Please discuss the trade-off of using inorganic inputs to build soil biology versus organic inputs to build soil biology. Okay, the, you know, it is. We all know, particularly when we use in organic nitrogens, then we, you know, we

9:53 Can get caught in the trap of, with high use applications we're going to acidify the soil then we have to come back in lime and it just becomes sort of a vicious cycle. But basically what we're looking at is by building soil biology, implementing of course nitrogen-fixing legumes and cover crops coupled with nitrogen fixing bacteria. So the more that we can build that soil microbial activity the more nitrogen that we have available in the soil. We've been able to come in and particularly reduce those nitrogen inputs quite significantly and we have some data where in growing corn crops and all of that we've been able to reduce nitrogen inputs by seventy plus percent and have equal or slightly better yields than we will be using one hundred percent recommended application.

11:03 Okay great, here's a question that several of you can probably address. Travis, John, maybe Terry, even for those of you who are in multi-generational type operations, how have you handled making these changes with fathers or grandfathers around or how was one generation dealt with with the next generation and what do they think about what you're doing? Is it well accepted from one generation to the next?

11:31 I dragged my dad to a couple of these conferences because I went to a couple on my own and came back with these ideas and he thought I was a crazy kid that he had. What am I doing? But that night was able to drag him along to some of these and see the presentations and he started changing his opinion. So I think it's a big part of it is just educating them and letting them know and then trying it on your place maybe just on a small scale and let him see what happens.

12:03 Yeah, so when I came back in 2011 and took over the ranch my dad pretty much just handed it to me and he's a big advocate for making the land better and he realized what we were doing for years and years wasn't working so he was pretty much open to it. Get after it and you can only fail if you try so he was more than welcome to it and he's probably my biggest fan. So it's good to have that support at home because you're not going to get it in the coffee shop or any other place because they're definitely going to be telling you all the things that you're doing wrong so it helps to have some family support definitely.

13:05 Come on now, okay, family operations are probably the most difficult thing to be in I would think. I got a lot of friends that are but they're also one of the biggest blessings you can possibly have. My dad passed away before we started to no-till so it was all on me it was.

13:25 Either going to be I was going to be the hero or the or not and right now I'm probably not because my youngest son is very involved in the horse part of our operation and my oldest son runs the wildlife part of our operation. They both farmed 24 hours a day somebody dragged the you know midnight shift and we ran the tractors and Robert and Clay both participated in all that. Well in Jefferson County Robert sees a lot of the tills ground looking better than our no-till at this point in time. He's going to be my biggest obstacle because as they come up I have got to be able to convince him that what we're doing and all the benefits that you all have all spoken about today. I just told Jimmy I've got so many more questions than I have answers but convincing my child might be the hardest thing I'm going to have to do.

14:22 Yeah one of the things that I talk about a lot of times my father passed on about 20 years ago so he missed that but we often we and I lump all of us into we talk about how we've degraded the soil and what a poor job we done but I want to point out that my grandfather walking behind the plow behind the horse was doing the best he could do with the equipment he had then so as my dad and then while they were plowed it it was better because they were minding the carbon out of the soil but they did not know that and I just want to say that I don't intentionally point fingers at that generations because they were the best they could with what they had and I think that's what we need to do today is do the best that we can do with what we have and we have a lot more tools than they used to have because my dad we could have never planted and stuff like Alan was planting in while ago with the equipment the my granddad had. The first rubber tire tractor in our county but he couldn't have planted with his drill into that kind of residue so it was clean till was the only option so that is a hard barrier to change what we've always done but if you keep doing the same old thing you're going to get the same old results.

16:02 I think that's a great point you know you have to educate them you know like what John was saying you know get get your whether it's your father or uncle or son or whoever try to get them to some of these conferences or get them to watch some YouTube presentations that you know would have similar content and do it in such a way that you don't make them feel guilty about you know because yeah you're exactly right they they did an incredible job with the tools that they had. Here's a question for Steve how much have you decrease your fertilizer on your cropland about this time? I'm about half from where I was at I'm still it depends on the field the history of it where I'm at. I'll tell you the biggest.

16:46 Thing that has helped is adding peas into that rotation and something I didn't talk about my presentation but the ability to put in a legume when you saw the rotations that my grandfather had for years was wheat summer fallow. We started putting corn into it. Those things don't—you don't get much benefit out of it. You got to put a legume back into the system and then a legume with cover crops. You know, cover crops with the legume into it. And I think now adding cattle and livestock into the equations going to put a whole nother dynamic into it.

17:20 So I really, John and I live about 20 miles apart and we talked to each other quite a bit. And what makes me mad is when I have to talk to him and he says I just bought a microscope, so I have to buy a microscope. He's putting—I have an air drill, he has an air drill. He's putting compost pellets on now, I got to put compost pellets on. Alright, I'm not going to let him get ahead of me. So now it's a competition and I'm bigger than him and I'm going to win. So peer pressure is alive and well. That is so I'm working to keep up with John to get it down to nothing.

18:03 Anybody want to else I want to address reduction in fertilizer on any of your ground? Well, maybe you ought to address a little bit about when you start cover crops, there is a dynamic where you do need some input back into it as an urgent. Yeah, and we a lot of times we'll get that question, you know, should I fertilize my cover crops? And you know, the answer is, you know, it depends. Depends on what your goal is. If your goal is to produce the maximum amount of tonnage for grazing, then yeah, you're probably going to need to add some, especially if you're going into a soil that has very little, especially residual nitrogen. It all depends on what your rotation has been, what your soil health is, and what your goals are.

18:42 Oftentimes if we're not going to graze a cover crop, we rarely will fertilize it. We want to make it work on its own. But if we're doing that, we want to have enough legumes in there so it can produce its own nitrogen. And you know, that's going to cost a little more. A mix it has a fair amount of legumes is going to cost more than a mix it doesn't because legumes are just more expensive seed. So there are situations where we do recommend putting some fertility with cover crops, particularly if you are really dependent upon the grazing tonnage. But once you get into a system like this and your grazing, you know, eighty percent of the nutrients from that cover crop are going to go right back into the soil if you're grazing it. If you hey it a hundred percent of those nutrients are leaving the field unless you bring the manure back. And if you're taking a grain crop off, you know, probably seventy-five or eighty percent of the nutrients are leaving the field.

19:35 And so those have to be replaced. So a lot of it has to do with the type of system that are in a heavily grazing based system will need far fewer inputs, maybe not at first, but eventually once you kind of get that system into equilibrium and get it going.

19:53 Question for Yates, a very interesting question. Yates, would you be willing to talk about the Sabbath your arrest and soil forage health? Yeah, I'd be glad to. You don't get to hear about this very much, but I'll tell you what, the Bible gives a pretty good illustration of range land management, just land management, and it's in Leviticus and it talks about how to set that land aside and let it rest. And under that protocol, every seven years, let your land rest. And that's, and I thought that was pretty unique. And we thought, well, it's pretty hard to let everything lay out in seven years and maintain a cow herd, so we went through there and we kind of took some of these farms and we let one seventh of the farm just be stripped off and not graze that year.

20:45 Now you got to keep in mind, I want to infiltrate some of the pressures that I've had to work under. One comes from my education as maximize production efficiency and ramp all that up as educated from one of the major land grant universities in the 80s. So that's what I came through. And I also worked under an individual that if there was anything left on that field, will you wasted that? I'll probably ever, you know what that is? So those were some of the mindsets that had to be overcame. I guarantee you, stand and grass is never a waste.

21:20 And when that one seventh of that land was laid out, and it's real easy to do, just figure out what it is, stretch a hot wire across there and just don't graze it that year. And I'll tell you what, go back in there the first part of the next year, roll up your fence or just open the gate and put some cows in there. But you need to walk across it first because it will walk across different than the rest of your land. First off, it'll feel like you're walking on something it just got a new carpet but got a double pad underneath it. Boy, it will be spongy, it'll be soft feeling, and it will produce like you cannot imagine. And I say that from the standpoint when you bite that off and you leave that residue and go to the next paddock, the recharge rate on that grass out perform the rest of our fields. It really opened my eyes what rest period can do and what a biblical approach to that management was.

22:22 It's really interesting. I want to come, I want to compare that to a story I had a little paddock that I had to get into Sunday night about dark before I left and it was a Bermuda midland Bermuda grass trap and I haven't been in it in about a year and I happen to pull in there with the pickup.

25:39 The mechanical equipment out of there as much as possible. We're also doing some aerial spraying with a helicopter on the rougher stuff and we've done it one year so far. We like it, just pretty expensive. I think the key there is to keep on top of it, not let them get away from you.

26:01 Here's a question about a watering system: how do you gravity feed watering tanks from a stock pond? Well, the first thing you got to pay attention to is slope, so you have adequate slope. If you're coming out of your levies, you got to make sure that your lines are running downhill to the troughs. What we do is use typically like a two inch line that goes into the trough, neck down to one inch, and we run to the middle. We go in at the bottom of the trough, run to the middle, come up with a slight riser, and then have our— we use either a float or we've used pressure valves as well. That works pretty well and allows us to flow very well. We don't have any issue, but again it's all dependent on your own slope. I think the key to any good watering system is to really plan it out well, have a good plan, and do it right the first time, even if it takes some investment. It'll pay off in the end.

27:18 Here's a follow-up question on letting the land rest: if you let the land rest for a year, is there any particular crop that you would plant for the rest so it's not laying bare? I would assume this would mean like in farm ground because obviously your grass pastures are going to have grass there. But if you had farm ground and you were going to let it rest for a year, what would you plant for that year's rest? Alfalfa or maybe yellow clover. Biennial is a two-year thing, something that will grow continuously in our country would be something like an alfalfa with staggering through most of the winter. It's cheap alfalfa seed.

28:06 How about anybody else, John? What would you do? I would probably put a mixed cover crop mixture in of warm and cool season broadleaves and grasses. If you got those in early enough, some of those would probably go into seed production, reseed themselves, and come up and grow as another plant. But with those different warm and cool seasons in there, you can bridge your growing gaps. When the frost comes or growing conditions aren't right for that one plant, the other plants will start taking off. Yeah, I think the key there is whatever you do, make sure you have something growing as much as possible, even if that means having to seed things in there twice.

28:48 Able to do it with one mix. Here's a good question, kind of for anybody that's got the livestock operation: do you have while rotating through these different paddocks or are you calving as you're rotating through? I'll go first on that. The short answer is yes we do. We rotate all the time. So when we're calving, we don't suspend that. We just use the single strand poly wire and it's just using common sense. First of all, if you have a cow that just calved and you open up and move the cows into the next paddock, let her stay back. Leave the gate open and we just have a student single strand poly wire gate so we leave the darn thing open, let her come in with her calf and rejoin the rest of them when she's ready to. It's that simple. And also the calves, the baby calves will learn to scoot right up under that wire pretty easily, pretty quickly. And until they get big enough that the wire stops them, they'll creep graze out ahead of their mothers anyway and get some of the freshest bites of grass.

29:59 Anyone else would know. Yes, I want to. I probably have a little different viewpoint. I think most definitely it depends. I don't know what size groups that you're familiar with, but what we've seen there is an optimal size herd to run and Nancy and I are still debating what that is. We think we have seen what is way too large and confusion happens despite however you managed. And I don't know. Maybe somewhere three, four hundred head I think you start getting that. On the smaller places that you know, we might have smaller herds. It is no problem with your animal husbandry. You need to kind of be on the game and on top of your game there, but it's just not an issue on smaller herds. But large herds and really rough areas and large areas that you might be rotating through, I personally would not take a risk. You've got too much to lose on large, large herds. I would not disagree with that at all.

31:05 So yeah, I'm talking relative. We typically run three to four hundred head units so everything's running units, but the land's broken up so you know we have units running through there. But with a three to four hundred head or cow unit, then we generally don't have any issues whatsoever. But you're probably right. If you're running a thousand, eighteen hundred, two thousand cows, then you may need to transition to a calving pasture and then start your rotation again. Very good. They keep rolling in, that's great.

31:38 Question about cedar designed to plant into heavy cover. You know, what types of drills, what type of cedars are using? Coulters? How do you get through all of that stuff? Just a single disc opener is what I prefer. Case IH has got a great machine. John Deere's got a good.

31:58 Machine too. I'm sure there's a few others out there, but I much prefer a single disc over a double disc. I'm in the minority. Today I'll use a double disc. The reason I done that was cost up front. It's all about everything else in life—it's about timing. If we have a lot of heavy-duty material like we're talking about green, it's better to cut through then spray and wait two or three weeks before that starts getting woody. So I get along fine, but it's all about timing.

32:37 Sometimes our Great Plains HD series will need a little bit more shove or like said, plant into green. You know, we get that question a lot, and our standard answer for what is the best drill to no-till with is it's one that gets it in the ground and can get the seed covered up and that can come in just about any color. One of the biggest keys is you got to have very sharp blades and you have to have enough weight on your drill to get those blades in the ground.

33:12 When you first start no-tilling or if your ground is exceptionally dry, you're going to need a lot of weight. The longer you're in it, the more mellow your soils become—you'll be able to start backing off that some. The ideal is to not have to cut through much of anything. Just well-managed upright residue is the best plant into. Yeah, and upright residue is the key because it's much easier to plant into something standing than something laying down.

33:39 We're running out of time. I do want to get a few more questions. And Travis, somebody's asking what kind of alfalfa do you use? You know, a lot of people have concerns about grazing alfalfa. You mentioned wet alfalfa in your mix. I'm not real sure—I got it from green courtesy. I think it was just the clam and alfalfa. I think the origin said it was from South Dakota or something like that, but I wasn't real worried about it because I figured, well, it's just going to be a waste of money and I'll never have to worry about it. But if it proved me wrong and I failed to mention too that was the second year on my slide that it was growing, so I would assume it would come back. They say four or five years, so hopefully we can get a little more production out of it.

34:28 Jim Johnston and I talked about it this year. It's all about diversity. And yeah, if you had all one hundred percent alfalfa, there is some risk there, but if you put that in a mix regardless where it's a sorghum Sudan, grazing corn, alfalfa, if you put that in a mix, cattle or just like I said, a buffet line—if they take a bite of something it makes them feel a little bit queasy, they're not going to select that. They'll select through that, and that's the great thing. You want as much diversity in the mix as you can get. And there's kind of a follow-up question that goes along with that. It says you know, since livestock

35:10 Can be somewhat selective. How concerned do we need to be with you? No prussic acid nitrates, you know, blow, etc. in a diverse mix you're in? I think you kind of answered that, but how diverse does that mix have to be?

35:25 That this summer when Jim came up, we went out to watch the cattle graze, and that was a 14-way blend that we got from y'all. His concern was some of the acid in drought times and whatnot. We watched them, and I don't know if the rest of you guys, I'm sure you have it, how an owl will rub her nose up the side of the leaf, and the debate is where is she smelling it or where she's absorbing some of the taste in her saliva or what she's doing? There's definitely something about how they select that when they're going through that mix. And I still say if there's some toxicity in something she samples, they're just like us. If something doesn't taste good on the buffet line, I'm not going to eat in there more, because I've got six or eight or ten more species to eat on.

36:23 That's a great point, but at Jimmy, I don't want to see you running your nose up and down the lettuce over here in the buffet line tonight if I'm behind you. Well, you know, we'll try not to do that. Now Jim got on to me that day because he wanted to talk to me, and my cattle kept going away from him while he was talking. I said we don't talk around her cattle, and he kept saying you've got to talk to your cattle. There's a great debate that day, but we had to be quiet to finally watch my cattle rub her nose.

36:53 Yeah, Dr. Williams, when you address that, first of all, I agree with what Jimmy said. But what we have found is that where you have those issues is where you have basically a monoculture or near monoculture. But when you have a pretty diverse mix, we rarely ever have any issues with nitrate or prussic acid anything like that. And you are absolutely correct. If you, that's one of the beauties of moving cattle around us frequently as you, you have more time to actually observe what they're doing and how they're grazing. Is you turn them into a paddock, and if you pay attention to that, they will do that very thing. A lot of that goes back to what I mentioned in my talk this morning about not only the primary nutrient compounds but those secondary and tertiary nutrient compounds. They put out chemical signals that these cattle can pick up, and when they have that opportunity to make that selectivity, you know, in there, they will absolutely do that.

37:57 You got to give them the choices. You got to give them the choices, folks. We're running a little bit behind time, so I think I'm going to kind of shut it down there. That was a great question. And on, let's give all of our speakers a hand for the day.