How Macauley Kincaid Farms 650 Acres No-Till with Cover Crops and Livestock

0:00 Start it and it's being recorded.

0:24 Okay looks like we've got some people joined and it looks like we're live on Facebook too so that's good news. For those of you joining, we'll start in a couple minutes here and wait for the rest of everyone to join. Everybody is muted except for Mac and myself, and so we'll have time for question and answer at the end. We'll go ahead and let Matt talk for 45 minutes and then do 10 or 15 minutes of questions. So you can put that in the comments on the Facebook live as that's how you're joining, or there's a chat or Q&A box here on the Zoom stream. We'll do some question and answer at the end. Mac's always good for answering some questions and looks forward to that.

1:14 We'll give it a couple more minutes. I might have to reiterate what I just said there. I'll let people keep joining. I'll take questions for the next hour after the webinar if people want to. The only person that won't like that's my wife.

1:33 Well we'll have to have you on back for just a Q&A segment maybe some week.

2:00 Who gave you that nicer Radish hat, Jacob? I stole it from the office today so don't tell Doris. I think probably she has claimed it. We've had several of these around so it's important supporting the products, I guess. That's right.

2:24 I need a Korean Lespedeza hat. I'm surprised you don't have one already. It's just a matter of time now. That's funny.

2:34 It is 5:30 now. Like I mentioned a minute ago, we'll let Matt go for 45 minutes talking about his presentation there and what he's doing, and then we'll have time for 10 to 15 minutes of question and answer at the end. Again, everybody's muted except Mac and myself, so we'll just do the Q&A afterwards on the chat box and Q&A. So while Mac shares his screen, I'll just give a short kind of brief intro and then let him take it away from there.

3:12 Mac has been farming from a very young age and although he is still young, he has a wealth of experience because he's been doing it for a while. He's 100% no-till across all of his acres and implementing cover crops on those acres as well as applying soil health principles and livestock to his land. Just this year, Mac received the Young Regenerative Producer of the Year Award from Soil Health U. Mac, hats off to you my friend. It's always a pleasure and joy to talk to you, so I'm really excited for all of these folks tonight to hear what you have to say as well. Take it away.

3:50 Well, thank you Jacob for that and thanks to Keith Burns and the rest of Green Cover Seed staff for having me. I'm excited to present today and maybe help spread the knowledge. So first of all, we'll start off with my family there—that's my wife Kayla, my son Jax, Emma, and Evie going down the road there. That's what I call my herd, the original herd. That's really one reason I farm—you know, is to leave something for my kids. You know, if they want to have a part of agriculture, I want them to have something that's in a better place than whenever I got it.

4:22 How I got started performing—when I was 20 years old, my dad passed away from cancer and I inherited my first piece of ground. So I kind of got a clear go at that. The first 59 acres that I ever had, I was paid off and clear. It's now 74 acres total. We've added a little bit to it that borders it, and it kind of got me help started farming. So we're at 650 acres now, so we've grown a little bit from where I started. You know, I'm 27 now, so this has been a seven-year process. We're not quite at 100 acres a year that we're adding, but next March I'm taking over another 140 acres of row crop ground. I've got a better contract for another year, so that's good. We also run 80 cow-calf pairs. We custom graze anywhere from around 80 to 150 cow-calf pairs. We have laying hens. Like I said, I like to make the joke that my laying hens are a non-profit organization. I probably don't make any money out of them, but it's something to do and my kids enjoy them, so it's something good to have. I also sell cover crop seed.

5:37 Right there on the map, that's where Jasper's located—it's about 30 miles north of Joplin. So I'm in southwest Missouri, a fairly warm climate and a 42-inch rainfall environment. You know, we can put in cover crops just about year-round. I put in cover crops in every month of the year so far and I don't really see when there's not a time to put cover crops in. But here's a typical southwest Missouri soils. The soil on the right is actually a picture of one of my farms, and that's the major reason why I don't till. You know, Michael Thompson—he's a friend of mine—he told me years ago. He said, Mac, buy the land that you can afford, not the land that you want. So what I can afford is the pile of rocks that you see there on the right.

6:21 The left, that's just a farm about four or five miles away from this other farm, and it's under a very conventional system—heavy tillage, deep tillage. Every year they just take the disc on through that area and it just keeps getting worse and worse. That picture there, it's about three feet deep. If you get a tractor tire from there, you're probably hung, and you can just see the massive amount of soil erosion.

6:42 Our ground in our area, I'm kind of in a pocket that's fairly flat. There are some hills around us, the Ozarks and stuff, but I'm kind of in a pocket that's flatter. I've got some hills but not much.

6:56 On my farm, we focus on the principles. We don't focus on practices or products. What I mean by that is I don't get caught up in intercropping or relay cropping and things like that. I think those have a place—I believe intercropping has a place up north. I believe if you're after phytonutrients and phytochemicals, intercropping with different plant species would be very important. With products, I don't use any kind of biologicals on my farm. We're not using very much fertilizer anymore. We're down to one herbicide pass an acre on a farm, sometimes none an entire year.

7:32 I hope we're all familiar with the soil health principles. I'm not going to really take a whole lot of time to address those, but those are what the principles are, and that's what my farm is really about. I try to focus on all of those principles and implement those principles on every acre, every single year. I'm proud to say that in 2021, we are now 100% fenced on all the land that I own, so we can get livestock on every acre of ground I own. Some of the rented ground I can't on 180, but all the rest I can.

8:02 That's really big. Animal integration, as we talk about later, is huge, and you can see I'm changing my soil. That's a picture of some cereal rye, and my soil's starting to get darker. I'll go into why that is. Hopefully everyone kind of knows a little bit about that. Just follow the principles. Don't focus on practices and products. I think that's how we can be successful in this.

8:31 Yeah, I love that, and I think a lot of people are familiar with the principles. Do you want to kind of expand on what context—that first one—kind of means to you? I don't think it's new, but I think it's interesting to hear different people's perspective on that.

8:45 So context, to me, it's a spiritual context. I do things because I believe it's right and I believe that's the way that God wants me to treat my farm. Also, another part of my context, like I said at the very beginning, was I want to leave something for my kids to have. My ecological context—my rainfall—that was the reason why I talked about where I'm from. If you're from a drier land or a drier place, you might have to think about different cover crop species you're using. The principles still work anywhere, but the main thing is understanding your personal context. That's what it means to me.

9:22 In 2012, I started with no-till. It started with no-till soybeans. That's my son Jack out there in a soybean field. He's about two or three when that picture was taken. I tell everybody, I feel completely safe with my son being out there. There's not any unwanted pesticides out there anymore. There's no neonics on the beans, corn, or wheat. I don't use any fungicide passes over the top. I've limited my insecticides to none, typically. I do manage that though. If I do see a complete issue like an armyworm infestation, I've got to make the decision and spray sometimes. I'm not 100% anti-insecticide, I guess you could say, but if I can keep from it, I try to keep a home and habitat for the predators. But it doesn't always happen like that.

10:11 First cover crop was in 2013. It was a prevent plant situation on double-crop soybeans. I went to an organic conference the year before, and I was pretty lucky to hear some presenters talk about how cover crops were doing for their organic farms. It kind of set the seed. I was at that time full-board tillage, doing multiple passes of nitrogen, fungicides, neonics on my seed treatment, planting high-population corn. I was down deep with some of those high-yielding guys. I was on top of that stuff, but it wasn't working. It wasn't paying the bills, and I had to change. In 2013, my very first cover crop was just oats, radish, turnips, and crimson clover—really simple. I planted and strip-till corn into it the following year. The corn did all right, wasn't anything to brag about—I think it was like 110 bushels an acre—and I still had a lot of inputs in that. That's just kind of my first stepping stones into cover crops.

11:07 2016 rolled around. Everybody told me, okay, you can no-till soybeans, you're no-tilling wheat, but you cannot no-till corn in our environment. We're just too wet in the springs. It's going to be a failure. It's not going to work. They said it essentially couldn't be done. Well, in 2016, I harvested 98 bushels of corn, and everyone else around me harvested 120 bushels of corn. So instead, I believe we're right. I don't believe no-till corn alone will work very well. That's when I started doing some research. I was in a very bad situation.

11:39 Financial place the time to say the least. The wife wasn't very happy, the banker definitely was not happy. So we had to make some major changes on my farm. I was kind of like this cow, I was stuck in a bad place and I need to get on over that fence and take some steps. So I got the good fortune to hear these guys.

12:03 The first time I ever heard Gabe Brown talk was on a YouTube video and I thought my goodness, this guy doesn't know anything about farming. I said he doesn't know the first thing about farming. I shut them off. I kept researching, I kept coming up with cover crops is the way, the key to no-till. Well, I come across a video from Ray Archuleta. Like I said, this is a couple months after I'd watched a video from Gabe, and Ray talked about how Gabe Brown. Well, that name rang a bell with me in my head and I was like, okay, I'm gonna go back. So I went back to YouTube, I found Gabe Brown. That second time I heard him, everything just clicked for me. I mean, it was 100 percent like, okay, I get it. I get the principles. I understand them. If he can make this work in the northern desert, surely I can make this work down in southwest Missouri.

12:47 So by fall 2016, I was 100 percent committed to following the principles and I changed some major things on my farm. Whole crop soybeans were gone. At the time, I was in a wheat double crop bean corn rotation. I cut out double crop beans. Every acre was then covered. I have not been fallow since 2016. Every single year, I get a cover crop in. I don't care if it's December, I'm putting a cover crop out there.

13:13 I stretched my rotation. I got away from that two-year rotation. I'm now on three and four-year rotation. I adjusted my planting dates. I started planting my beans earlier in April and started planting my corn later in May to maximize nitrogen production from cover crops. I changed my maturity on my hybrids. I created a farm budget that was pretty important because I would say my spending was kind of getting out of hand before I created a budget.

13:36 I've essentially turned my farm into Dave Ramsey's farm. If Dave Ramsey could run a farm, you know, I would hope that he would be proud of me. Besides my debt, you know, I'm still co-owners with the bank on some land, but besides that, I hope he would be happy with me.

13:51 I've diversified my cash crops. I'm no longer just raising wheat, corn, and beans. I raise a variety of different crops. I'll go into later. Started building fence. This is a key component here. I became intentional. If you understand the principles, you need to be intentional with the principles because you can understand them, but if you are not intentional with understanding carbon nitrogen ratios, understanding you know, not to put a bunch of legumes in front of soybeans because that might be a nitrogen crash, if you become intentional and start doing your research, you'll be successful.

14:23 And then I went to daily moves on the cattle. I believe that cattle are the quickest way to change your soil. I think that if you on the landscape themselves, cattle and livestock in general can do more for your land than anything else.

14:40 I put this slide up there because I like to kind of talk about how my grade school, my son in grade school and other kids in grade school can probably tell you more about how a soil ecosystem works over the average farmer. And what I mean by that is, I'm not trying to be degrading there or anything, but what I'm trying to mean by that is, you know, we do things on our farm that has an effect on everything else. So like neonics, for example, okay, we have to understand that they have a negative impact on something on our farm, whether that's insects or water or something. We have to understand that. So we focus on that first key component of, like, let's say, killing a root worm, but you know, as we learned back in grade school, when we think about the food chain, what happens when we take a piece of the food chain, okay, that's not good. So if we keep taking pieces out of the food chain, we're eventually gonna run ourselves out of the food chain. These neonics, we've learned, are very hard on honeybees. If we don't have honeybees, folks, we don't have food, and that's just plain and simple how it's gonna be.

15:41 So shifting gears here a little bit, I put this up there. I want to show you this from the University of Minnesota. Give credit to them. You know, they show the cost of tillage. You know, I know there's some organic folks that are still doing some tillage things like that, but I really believe that we need to get away from tillage. Number one, first step in all this, you know, is getting away from tillage. And I've seen that very early on. I was paying like upwards of twenty dollars an acre to have someone come and till my ground. That was not profitable at all. And I think nowadays, even if you own your own equipment, I'm going to say a minimum of twenty dollars an acre is what it costs you per pass because we think about the inflation of fuel prices, the cost that we put back to buy the next piece of equipment, whether that's the next disc or the next big tractor to pull that equipment. We are always setting that money back aside to buy the next piece. So that has to go into our acre rate. And then as well as, you know, farmers tell me all the time, well, my time's not worth anything. So I can sit a tractor and work around all day. And my next question then is, okay, if your time is worth nothing, can you come work for me for free then? Then they put up the red flag. Whoa, whoa, my time is not for free. Well, then you need to be charging that to that too.

16:49 So you know, this right here says that, you know, to the planter pass on no-till.

16:53 Is 20.15 per acre, maybe that's figuring more wear and tear on your seed discs. I'm not really sure, I'd actually disagree with that because what I've seen, my tractor has the fuel consumption indicator and I've actually noticed that whenever I plant on my cover crop ground it actually uses less fuel than I plant on bare soil. So that's pretty big actually if you think about it—you're saving a little bit of fuel costs with that.

17:20 This is my fault tillage. You know, everyone talks about radishes, you need radishes breaking compaction. That's not necessarily true. I actually disagree with that statement as well. You need those grasses at first. Those grasses will help alleviate those small micro pores and expand those pores. Grasses have much more fibrous roots so they'll be able to find those little channels and expand those channels. So really, if you're wanting to break up compaction, I really would recommend putting in grasses first over these brassicas. There's also many other reasons why I would recommend that. You know, and never go with just a solid brassica cover crop mix if that's one of the most hard things on your soil.

18:00 So speaking of tillage, in 2019 we had record rainfall. We had over 100 inches of rain on my farm and this was—I took that picture there on the left after a five or six inch rain was coming in. And these two fields here across the road from each other, the only thing that divides these two fields is a rope, and my farm, of course, is the picture on the bottom right that was a warm season cover crop mix that I had grazed out and then I put a cool season mix half of that. And the picture on the top right was a chiseled fill. Now, if you're trying to diversify your cash crop with raising catfish down the channels, the chisel rows, I would highly recommend doing that top right system. But I believe from a soil health perspective that the system on the bottom right, my system, is a lot better.

18:53 You know, you can tell I'm infiltrating that water. We had that huge rain and it's going down on my soil profile. Now I will say in spring I am wetter. It takes me a little bit longer to dry out. The tillage guys are always planning before I am. I'm sitting on my hands trying to be as patient as I can. And I understand, you know, but think about that. If we go dry in the summertime, that same principle applies. What's going to dry out faster? That tilled soil is going to dry out faster.

19:20 The worms—the first time Ray let it come to my farm, Ray put a shovel in the ground, of course, and you know he complimented me on the amount of worms I have. Now I've got a lot of night crawlers which is a good thing, but I've created a home and habitat for the worms. You know, when you raise these large cover crops and then you graze them down and they're laid flat along the soil surface along the stratosphere, you know those worms are going to pull that plant material down. So I'm giving them a bed and breakfast. I'm not destroying their home with a piece of tillage equipment every single day.

19:53 And you know people ask me, well, what do worms matter? Well, this is an analysis on worm casting. So worm castings are 26 percent carbon. Now that's pretty important. I want you guys to pay attention. The largest percent of the worm casting itself is carbon. I didn't lay out everything that was on that test. I just wanted to highlight the main components of it. But another one that sticks out to me is 3.7 percent calcium. I have never applied any lime on my farm since I've owned my farms and I believe this is a part of the reason why. Those worms are cycling you know that plant residue and particles of the soil back through their bodies and helping to bring calcium available to my following cash crops and or in my cover crops, whatever you're going after. And that right there is a picture of my farm. That's actually the top of the soil. That is not soil irrigation—I wish it was—that's actually worm castings, but it still does look really pretty.

20:43 So we were talking about my—I spread out my crop rotation earlier and this is another reason why I did this is a 10-year study done by Professor Joe Lauer. And this is just showing corn, wheat, and soybeans. Just by spreading out the rotation, you know we can increase yields. You know we're looking at 10 to 18 percent yield increase on some of this just by spreading out the rotation. If you look down wheat fallow, you know, 30 bushels compared to you know wheat after corn is 60 bushel. That's twice as much wheat just by rotation. And you know, that's how important rotation is. And rotation goes in to understand your carbon nitrogen ratios as well. If we want to better balance and have better and higher yielding cash crops as well as more profitable cash crops, we need to diversify rotation. Corn and soybeans is not good enough and corn, wheat, soybeans is not good enough either. We really need to diversify. Also, if we want better prices for corn and soybeans, if we quit raising corn and soybeans on more acres, our price will be better, as well as every other crop. It's kind of supply and demand.

21:49 So here's just a little bit of diversity on my farm. Here's some of the cash crops I raise. I've got warm season, cool seasons. As you can tell, I have more warm season crops on my farm because I'm in a warmer climate. If you're from up north, you'll probably have more cool season species in your cash crops. There's a list of some of the cover crops I use on my farm. You know, I just want to show you guys how important plant diversity is on our farm. You know, we need all of these different roots in the soil releasing different.

22:18 Root exudates to feed different forms of biology. We need these different plants out there collecting sunlight from different angles, pumping that, you know. We're not going to try to let any sunshine spill off my farm if we have different plants out there—short, tall, wide, skinny—we're collecting sunlight from all the different points. And so then we can photosynthesize more, and that's really important. So, you know, just diversity. Diversify our cash crops. A typical three-year rotation on my farm would be a wheat, a double crop sunflower with the cover crop underneath them, corn, and then back to soybeans. And of course I'd have a cover crop after the corn, probably a high carbon cover crop like cereal rye or something like that. It just depends on what I'm trying to accomplish on that particular farm.

23:02 And then, you know, what my four rotations would be: milo, a cool season cover crop with some legume component to go to corn, then a cool season cover intended to go to beans, and then following that back to a cereal grain such as wheat, barley, or oats.

23:18 Understand your resource concerns first. You know, I was talking about that earlier. You know, I just listed a few here. This is so important and so overlooked. We have to be intentional, folks, if we want cover crops to work and we want cover crops to save us money. We have to understand what cover crops can bring to our system. You know, you can reach out to me or Colton or anybody else from these companies that understand resource goals and resource concerns, and we can help you with that. You know, if you're not as educated in that department, reach out to someone who is educating that department to help you. I just listed, like I said, a few up here—you know, what cover crops can do for your farm—and there's many others that I didn't list on here that they can do.

23:58 So everyone asked me, okay, we know you can get nitrogen from the atmosphere via the rhizobia bacteria in legumes, but what about P and K? Well, I've reduced my P and K, my nitrogen and potash, by about eighty percent on my farm. This year I only applied P and K on 50 acres of my 650-acre farm.

24:16 So, you know, I listed off a few different ways of how we can acquire nutrients from cover crops, but the key is the living root. You know, we have to have that living root there as long as possible, and we have to have plants growing.

24:34 The main takeaway too is we don't want to be planting too early. So if the cover crop is four inches tall, you know, we're not going to change our soil very quickly. We need to let these covers get a lot of biomass, and the more biomass you have out there, the more nutrients are in that biomass. So if we're really wanting to save on nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash, we need to have that biomass. And once again, you know, what eats first? The biology eats first before the plant eats. So we have to have the biology out there as well to be able to cycle these nutrients through. I'm not going to say you can cut out eighty percent of your P and K the first year. This is the building, you know. This is a building process. You know, we're building this up slowly. We're stacking this residue, you know, as Dale Strickler likes to say—we're building this lasagna, as you could say—but that's important. If we want to save on P and K, we have to let the cover crops grow. We have to gain biomass, and we have to have a lot of biomass. Plus, we have to have a less intense cash crop rotation. We have to give time for those cover crops to do their job.

25:34 And that's what this will look like, you know. That's my son Jackson in the picture on the right. That's what a typical corn or milo cover crop looked like for me. You know, you can see some peas, some vetch—there was crimson clover out there before. There's a little bit of rye out there, not too much, because once again I need to balance that carbon-nitrogen ratio. Right now I like my carbon-nitrogen ratios to be around a 40 to 1 because that's where I'm at according to my soil test, my handy soil test. But you know, early on, you know, a 20 to 1 was perfect. But as I'm cycling now, you know, I have more water-extractable carbon out there, and I need to increase my carbon in my cover crop to feed my biology.

26:11 And this is a picture from my friend Mike Imhoff. I love that picture of him lifting up the residue. His system is pretty similar to how I operate my farm system, and so I want to show that. I just love that picture right there of him lifting up the residue. Think about what that batch will do for suppressing weeds, retaining moisture, you know, keeping the sunlight from hitting that bare soil. I mean, that's just huge. We got to think about this stuff, guys. We had to armor that soil.

26:38 So nature is powerful. And you know, this is a hay field, a prairie hay field that my family has had since 1939. Now, this is not my farm. This is not a part of my operation at all. I don't do any hay on my operation, but it is a part of my grandfather's operation. So he's hayed this field. My family's had this field since 1939, and they've never applied any nitrogen, phosphorus, or potash on this farm. So I decided I would take a soil test, a handy soil test. And so if you look at the handy soil test, we're at 3.9 organic matter. You know, typically in our tests in our area we're around 1.8 to 2.2 organic matter. So 3.9 is some of the highest that I've seen on a test coming from our area. You know, the soil health score is at 25. You know, most of our soils around our area are 6 to 9, so this is what the soil test is showing—that the soil is actually doing really well for having nutrients extracted off of it for so many years. I also took a tissue sample on the biomass of the hay itself, and look at that. Isn't that funny? Almost everything shows deficient except for the micronutrients—so sufficient.

27:43 The calcium showed high, which is kind of funny because there's a bunch of limestone rocks out there that are actually sticking above the ground. So I believe that the prairie plants are actually making that mineral available, which is the calcium that they're getting from the limestone.

28:00 You know, like I said, the same tonnage since 1934 without anything applied on it. Literally, no nothing. And so that really got me thinking, and I asked my grandfather one time. I said, 'Well, how come the prairies can do that?' And my grandpa just said, 'They're magic. I don't know how it works.'

28:17 I want to dive into this a little bit deeper of why that is. And I got a hold of Dr. Buzz Clue, a friend of mine, and he did this three-year study. He applied no P and K for three years, and he added up the total bushels off the three crops. And what he got off of them, so he actually had more yield by applying no P and K. But if you look, there was a cover crop between every one of the cash crops, and that was the key. He was maximizing biomass. He was following the principles. That's so important, guys. Follow the principles. Everything becomes so easy. You don't have to have all this different kind of knowledge that all these presenters know. If you just follow the principles, and you have a little bit of help from some different mentors like I had when I was younger, so you know, looking at that, I decided to take that full board. You know me, I just kind of jump into things. I go all in.

29:19 In 2019, I got the 63-acre field that has not ever had any P and K applied on it since I've owned it. And this is what everyone calls the weedy beans field. So the weedy bean field was not a prescription cover crop. It was a very wet year the year before, and weeds took over. I mean, I'm not exaggerating. There was weeds everywhere out there, and I no-till planted soybeans in that field.

29:46 I've got over a hundred different weed species tissue samples. And this can teach you a lot by tissue sampling these different kinds of weeds. We can see the different nutrients that are in these weeds. And the same thing applies to cover crops. You can start understanding why these weeds are out there. So if you look at pigweeds, pigweeds have 169 parts per million iron compared to nutsedge which is 155. Or even look at manganese: 139 compared to 398. But if you look at boron on pigweeds, pigweeds actually do a really good job of rendering boron available. What these tissue samples of the weeds are showing me is that different plants are helping make these secondary micro and macronutrients available. And just by having diversity, I'm not saying you should let your farm go to weeds, but take this in the context of cover crops as well. You know, all the different cover crops have different nutrients in them.

30:50 Here's what we did with that weedy bean field: 140 dollar land payment, ten dollars of property tax, fifteen dollars miscellaneous expense, twenty dollar crop insurance, zero dollar cover crop, zero P and K, twenty-two dollars in soybean seed. I planted green, 25 herbicide costs, and 35 dollars for combining and hauling. So total soybean cost production was 287 dollars. Now my land payment might be a little higher than some of you guys or a little bit less, but doing something like this occasionally, you can make money. I mean, the net income's 208 dollars an acre. You're not going to get filthy rich with that, but I am making money, so that's important.

31:27 This is where we're at right now with soybeans. The year 2021 is the first year I do this. I use what I call the Aaron Silva method, which is a little bit different than how some other producers do it, such as Rick Clark and Chad Christensen. What I'm using is I'm actually using Elbon rye mixed with my Secretariat barley—both barely very early maturing cereal grains. So how I do this is I'll plant beans. This year I planted soybeans on April 1st, and I did not roll this cover crop until May 20th. I wanted the rye and the barley full in pieces, which means they were fully flowered. Now I used my roller crimper and the beans at this stage were B2 and a half. So that's very important. If they go past that, you will probably kill some of them. So it's very important that this is a timing factor. And this takes a little bit more management than I would say some of the standard things, but this is what we did with this field this year.

32:28 This is my highest yielding beans that I've ever had. This is on my mom's place. I call it the farm I inherited from my dad. I have a zero dollar land payment because I don't owe anything on it. Ten dollar property tax, fifteen dollar miscellaneous expense. The reason I put that 15 miscellaneous expense on every one of my acres is because I just slap it on there for when I go and grab grease or oil or whatever. I just forget things, you know, so I just add that on there to be safe. I have 20 property insurance. My cover crop mix was 32 an acre. In the broadcast, I broadcasted that cover crop. That was eight dollars an acre. Zero P and K. Eighteen an acre non-GMO soybeans, planting cost of twenty dollars. Roller crimper cost eight dollars. The herbicide was 18 an acre with application. All I used was a half rate of Anthem Max. I did have weeds out there. I'm not going to tell you I did not have weeds out there.

33:18 The cleanest field you know in the world. So total soybean cost production was 184 dollars an acre and these soybeans yield 74.2. Now I did have some very timely rains this year which helped.

33:32 But you know this system here can be done in a lot of places across the United States. We can maximize production of our cover crop as well as maximizing sunlight on our soybeans. So I plant a 4-9 early which is kind of counterintuitive what other people do. A lot of people plant shorter maturity earlier so they can harvest quicker but that's not really a part of my rotation. I actually plant a 4-9 earlier and I was one day away from my soybeans when they first flowered the longest day of the year.

34:00 So that's so important. If we can capture as much sunlight as we possibly can when the soybeans are blooming, that can be huge to set more pods.

34:10 And I like this picture. I put this picture up of that field. I want to show you the weed control I have out there. You know with an eighteen herbicide cost, you know that's pretty darn good. You know, like I said, there were areas out there that were a lot weedier. I'm going to say that you know I had some smart weight issues for sure and the yield monitor would go anywhere from 45 all the way up over 90. But you know average was 74.2. I sold those beans to a non-GMO premium market for 14.63. So my net income an acre was 901.55 cents. That's pretty darn good guys. We can make money with that.

34:42 I also raised Korean Lespedeza. Korean Lespedeza is a really good cash crop for me. It's one of my better cash crops and it's an underutilized cover crop. It has a lot of potential. It's a non-bloating legume so you can graze it when it's fully bloomed. It has a very good shade tolerance. It is very drought tolerant as well as heat tolerant. And you know it kind of it starts hitting peak production about that late August period. So in like let's say if you're in a Kentucky 31 area where you have Kentucky 31 fescue, interceding Lespedezas in your pasture, we just broadcast. We frost that's how we feed it. You know can actually really help you know extend maybe extend your grazing season.

35:28 Now Green Cover Seeds supports me on my Korean Lespedeza. They purchase Korean Lespedezas so if you're buying Queen Lespedeza from them it was probably produced from my farm. So I'm very thankful to have that market with them. And I also sell it to some different companies for bird seed. So it's kind of neat. But what the University of Missouri tells me is that Korean Lespedeza is actually a really good food winter food source for quail and other wildlife.

35:55 And you know speaking of wildlife, you know we're essentially raising giant food plots with our cover crops. That big buck there was shot on my property. You know that there also that fish was there was cooking on one of my farms. You know we are bringing in the deer when all these other when all this other ground around me is fallow. You know we're bringing them in. We're bringing the deer in and a lot you know so we're getting animal integration from the wildlife as well.

36:22 And you know I'm going to just touch a little bit on my chickens here. You know my chickens, everything likes to eat chickens. I go through so many chickens every single year. I hate to say I also sell eggs. You know we float through chickens but I'm not going to go into them a lot but we do sell eggs. There's my little punch line. If you're swinging by my farm come buy some eggs.

36:40 And you know the main livestock of my farmer cattle. You know and I utilize AMP grazing on my farm. You know that's adaptive multi-paddant grazing. If you want to learn a little bit more about that I would watch any kind of video from Dr. Alan Williams. Alan Williams you know really goes into that about you know compounding cascading effects plan disturbances, you know fluctuating stock density. That's essentially what the system means. You know don't get in any kind of rotation. Take yourself out of a rotation. Don't think you're going to go around clockwise every year on your farm. Don't think you're going to grace the same stocking rate every single year. That will fail. We need we need to diversify our grazing as well as our system.

37:23 So do we really need to feed hay for six months? Here's my cows out there grazing through some snow. Yes we do get a little bit of snow in South Missouri so I wanted to take a picture of the one day we did get snow to prove it. The cows are grazing just fine under the Kentucky 31s underneath that snow canopy.

37:41 You know this is the typical thing you see in Southwest Missouri. This is how most farmers feed their animals in a confined area. Doesn't that just look yummy? Doesn't that make you want to go eat a bunch of beef? You know that's just nasty. It's inefficient. It's not profitable and why would you want to go and get your pickup stuck every single day in that mud hole? You know that makes no sense to me. So if you're going to feed hay let's do it like this. Let's think smarter not harder. Let's bail grade. Let's start the tractor up one time a year and let's say November. Let's set the bales up to be grazed and then let's just move a polywire to however many bales you need to supply for your herd. You don't have to go and fire up a tractor every day or pick up every day and take the cows out there and fight mud. Typically you know winters are wet. Why would you want to do that? Why don't we just bell grade it? Just makes so much more sense to me. Or better yet instead of bail grazing, you know I believe God gave cows four.

43:44 To show that I'm getting better. But like I said, look at the mushrooms there and I am in a warmer, wetter environment so I think that might help speed up. I can increase biology faster here in the south than you folks up north can, but you folks up north can build organic matter faster than I can down here in the south because I'm cycling so much longer. So we have advantages in both.

44:05 So this is how I custom graze. I'm not going deep into this, I'm going to dive deep into that, but always have a contract. That's the most important and you can add about another hundred dollars an acre to your profit. That's profit. Gross is around normally about, you know, 120 for me is about average growth, but when I figure in my time, wear and tear on my poly reels and things like that, you know, that takes about 20 an acre away. In profits so about a hundred dollars an acre. So even you guys that are corn soybean farmers, if you've got fences on your farm, think about how much another hundred dollars an acre can bring to your operation. You know, maybe that can help pay off some more land debt or maybe that can help, you know, send your kids to college or something like that, whatever you want to do with it.

44:47 So Austin Campbell, he's a friend of mine from Missouri. He did a study with University Missouri about water holding percentage in the soil with cover crops and no-till and what I want to show on this slide is how no-till alone is not good enough. We have to have the cover crops in there, guys. Look at this: 41 percent increase in the water percentage underneath the corn canopy, 44 underneath the soybeans. So think about how huge that would be you guys in western Kansas and up north where you're drier or California, just by adding these cover crops to your system. You can increase your water holding percentage by 44. That's huge. And this is just a one-year study. This isn't like a 10-year study of increasing infiltration rates for 10 years of coverage. This is a one-year study, so we can make a difference in one year, especially with water voltage capacity.

45:37 So at the very beginning I talked about how my first born no-till corn trial was a failure. This is 2020. So this is last year. Last summer we were fairly dry. I don't want to say the word drought because the guys in western Kansas are killing it by said the word drought, but we went about three months without much rainfall at all. These pictures here were taken. This is the same field. These are right, they're not the same though. I'm sorry. These two pictures are from farms that are right across the road from each other. Now the picture, the corn on the left was planting a little bit sooner but look how drought stricken it is. Look at those leaves and look at the soil underneath it. You know, that soil right there, if you mowed off that cornfield, you put up a couple basketball hoops, you could have a court right there with how hard that field is. And over in my field, over on my field, you can see the residue, the plants, the corn plants are not hurting for moisture at all. And this was the dead heat of summer. I think when I took this picture it was almost 100 degrees that day. And the corn is looking just fine. And this is what we did.

46:34 The corn yield, 160 bushel. I will say there is a difference in hybrids. I had another hybrid on this farm, it was 50 bushel less, guys, on the same barn with the same management. So hybrids do matter. One thing I will say about picking a corn hybrid for a cover crop system: make sure it's a workhorse, make sure it has good standability and it has a very good emergence. Those are the three main things. Also, I like longer maturities. I've got longer maturities on my corn. It seems like they can take the heat better. And even though I'm planting later, I'm trying to, like I said earlier, I was trying to maximize nitrogen production. I'm still planting what longer maturing corn plants. But yeah, that's my economics. I only applied 80 units of nitrogen. So that's, you know, that's a half a unit nitrogen applied, or that's a bushel of corn per half unit nitrogen applied. That's a really good return. And I had tuned that to my cover crop. My cover crop seeding ratio last year was a 32 to 1 according to my biomass sample. And it was facility annual rye grass, a little bit of cereal, a little bit of barley, belongs to crimson vetch. And that was sown on October 4th and I planted June 5th. I don't think I put my planning. I planted June 5th of last year. So that's pretty good. Net income, $401 an acre. We can make money with that, guys. You know, I like to put up the slides with corn and beans because it's relatable. I have other cash crops I can make a lot more money on, but corn soybeans is a good stepping stone. And if I show you guys how I make my system work, you know, that might set the seed so you guys can try to change your system a little bit with soil health in mind.

48:07 So what's new for 2021? I went out and took the picture on the left today. I wanted to showcase what I was doing. Today what we're working on is companion cropping, raising a cash crop with a cover crop going underneath it. I stole this idea from your dad, Keith. Keith was the first one I knew about, and then I think Gabe may have been one of the first. I'm not sure, to raise sunflowers with cover crops underneath them with the intent to harvest sunflowers over the top and then have a cover crop underneath. The picture on the left is black oats. This, like I said, this picture is taken today on the left. That is black oats with fava beans, peas and turnips. So I will harvest the black oats and I'm trying to bring diversity to my system, guys. You know, corn and soybean.

48:53 Monocultures are not good enough for our farm. We have to diversify our systems and this is what I'm really trying to do. I want to get away from monocultures. My goal in the next four or five years is to no longer be raising monocultures, and that means I'm probably going to give up soybeans. Soybeans are hurting my soil anyways, but I can make money with soybeans. They're pretty consistent, but I think in about five years most of my farmland will be paid.

49:15 So I've only got a couple slides here left. I just asked the question: which of these systems is better for the environment? Is this tillage-based system with the soil eroding off into the rivers and the phosphorus and nitrogen getting in the river, the lack of habitat for wildlife, the lack of habitat for insects—is that system really better than the system that I'm talking about with cover crops?

49:40 Cover crops and no-till provide not only more food for us—because I have seen higher yields since I started using cover crops, my yields have increased—but it also provides so much food and habitat for so much wildlife. And I just wish that more farmers would start turning to this. It's really important to me that we start changing things on our farms. This is probably a picture that's made me famous, I don't know. This is a field that are literally bordering each other—this is my longest-running no-till cover crop field compared to my neighbor's field. The reason why the soil on my right hand there is darker is because of the carbon. I talked about carbon earlier. The plants exude carbon. If you look at the tissue samples, the plants are the worm casting—it's all carbon. Carbon's the highest percentage. So the more carbon we add to our system, the more organic matter we'll have. Organic matter is approximately 50 to 58 percent carbon. So the more carbon we add to our system, the more organic matter we'll have.

50:41 Thank you, Green Cover Steve. Once again I went over about a minute. This is my phone number. You guys can add me on Facebook if you have any more questions. You can call me. I have my phone on me seven days a week. I answer text and phone calls throughout the day all the way up throughout the night, so I go to bed. So just try not to reach me on Sunday if you could. I'd like to have just that one day if I could. Thank you.

51:01 Well, thanks so much, Mac. I think that was a really good presentation. Yeah, really good stuff there. I am monitoring the questions on Facebook or on the Zoom. Please get those to us and we can do a few minutes of questions. Mac, I kind of had one written down before we even started, and I think you kind of answered it. I was going to ask something about: do you think regenerative farming is profitable or more profitable? But kind of what you displayed shows pretty well that that is. I kind of follow that up by maybe asking: what do you think is the biggest obstacle that prevents producers from going down that regenerative path?

51:50 Mindset. You have to change your mindset. The very first step in going to a system like that is changing your mind. And this has been a complete change in my life. I was going through a pretty rough patch there when my dad passed away, and regenerative agriculture has brought life to my farm. Every day I'm dealing with life. I love when Gabe talks about just the only thing he does different than any other farmer is he brings life to his farm, and I love that. I love bringing animals on my farm. That's why we have chickens. Yeah, the chickens don't make us much money, but life's so enjoyable. Yesterday my wife and I, our incubator hatched a couple baby chicks. I think working with life is so much more enjoyable than working with or killing something every day. So the first step in going to this system is changing your mind. That's the very first step.

52:40 We have one question here from Nicholas. He says: any tips for cover crop mix ahead of wheat?

52:58 Okay, so one thing I will say on that: I'm not gonna answer that question for you because I need to understand your resource goals—what you're trying to do with the cover crop—and also whether we're talking spring wheat or if we're talking winter wheat. If we're talking winter wheat, you're not going to be able to get much nitrogen from a cover crop going to wheat, and the reason for that is because biology is slowed down in the winter. You're not cycling as fast, so you're not cycling as many nutrients. So you might have a straight legume cover crop in the summer and then plant no-till plant wheat in it, but you're not going to get very much nitrogen from that just because your biology is not cycling that much in the winter.

53:40 Yeah, a lot of that would depend on context and your goals. Also, I would ask where they're from, you know? Yeah, where they're from is very important to know, and with your goals as well. I think you made a good point that just popped to my head about compaction and things like that. You were talking about the radishes and brassicas. I think, starting with compaction, the radishes are kind of a cool one. You would think they would do a good job at that, and it's a good aspect of that. But yeah, the grasses—especially warm-season grasses like sorghums—and if you get a good graze off of them, that stimulates the root.

54:20 Growth. Yeah, grasses are really underrated for compaction. Yeah, I thought that was a great point. Let's see, one plant I will say is really good at breaking out compaction.

54:36 One plant I will say that's very good about bringing up compaction is annual rye grass. Annual rye grass is very good about breaking compaction layers. Also, annual ryegrass is really good at rendering kale available. Annual ryegrass is one of the few plants that releases gas and sulfate potassium chloride sodium nitrate and sodium fluoride from the roots, so it does a very good job of breaking apart rock material and decay organic matter and turning that into available TNK.

55:09 I'm not sure where Dan is from but he asked how the fishing is around there. The fishing, yeah, I'd say it's pretty good around here. Yeah, the fishing's pretty good. You got a lot of night crawlers for it, that's for sure. Yeah, that's right, I got plenty of worms.

55:46 Let's see, I'm trying to see if there's any other questions here. Another one I kind of have that I like to hear the answer is just, and maybe you kind of already included it in your talk, but what's one thing that you would tell a producer to kind of change on their operation, a little bit different than the mindset, but maybe just kind of a practical step or just kind of a piece of advice you'd give to a producer trying to get started in this.

56:14 Sell all your tillage equipment, take that equity and buy cover crops. I like it. Is that good enough for you? Yeah, yep, that's great. Yeah, I think that's really good. Let's see, Dan the fishing guy says he's in Illinois, so that's where he's at.

56:48 Any other things, see if we get another question here. You know, if you guys have any questions, yeah, you guys can hopefully reach out to me. Sure, absolutely. Any anything else at the end do you want to plug or kind of give an update about, you know, any other speaking engagements or anything else exciting you have going on here soon.

57:13 Yeah, I guess I'll give a plug for the no-till national no-till convention. I'll be hosting a classroom during that. I've also got some other things throughout the winter. I got another conference, I got a couple conferences in Kansas I'm speaking at. I don't have the dates off the top of my head for them, and then I've got a couple other webinars to do as well. You know, the University of Missouri, they have seemed to really reach out to me and guys like Rob Myers. Rob is just so influential, you know, about me. He just is so helpful, and I actually taught him a few things. You know, he asked me, well, what cover crops or winter annual cover crops do you feel do best on what soils? And my number one and number two is, number one is annual rye grass and number two is Balanza. I don't know why, but it seems like Balanza can tolerate wet soils very, very well.

58:08 So, you know, where we're at, we have waterlogged soils a lot. I know that's kind of weird to think that we have too much water, but sometimes we really do have too much water. I feel like that actually hurts my soil health. You know, whenever your soil is just ponded, it's, I'm always just trying to keep as many roots as I can in the ground, but there's only so much you can do. And these systems, I'm not working very much soil. Jake, I mean, a lot of my farms have maybe a half inch of soil. I mean, it's hard for me to get a soil test on my farm because I just hit solid rock, you know. Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. I totally understand that.

58:43 Mac, are you able to see the chat, see this question here from Madison? Or I can read it to you. Let me go up here. Yeah, just read it to me. Okay. What resource has been most invaluable for understanding different plant species and how they interact with each other and the soil in regards to designing a cover crop.

59:17 Probably the SARA book. You can download that for free. That was, when I was early on, that was a book I read early on that talks about the different cover crop species. You know, really, one thing that I've done a lot of is I've just researched the individual species themselves and really just memorized that stuff. You know, the more research you do and the more you're familiar with them, another resource is actually Green Cover Seed's website. I've used that for years. Green Cover Seed, they have a really good resource on, you know, basic carbonation ratios of fully reproductive plants and species. They also just, you know, tell a little bit about what the different cover crops do. It's not really super in detail, but that's a good resource too if you're just starting out, you know, to learn more about cover crops.

1:00:14 Kind of a follow-up, that same person asked, what animals do you plan to integrate next besides ducks. Besides ducks, okay. So I mean, I've, I had used in the past, you know, I've had four or five years.

1:00:36 Yeah that was a disaster. They're tough to keep in. I need better genetics. I need Colton to sell me some good news. I was actually talking to Colton Catterson today and I need some good genetics. I need some U's that are really fat and tall that'll stay into one polymer. That's what I need. So I'd say probably sheep will be the next thing I integrate on my farm if I had to guess.

1:01:00 Okay, another one here. Do you plant your rye grass with a drill or do you broadcast? I know we've done it several different ways.

1:01:18 I don't ever plant rye grass by itself. I never have individually. I always, if you can drill a cover crop, drill it if conditions are good or good enough. It's worth the drill pass because you're going to get a more even stand and that's going to help everything. I mean, that's even going to help you the following year because if you have a good stand, that's going to help with weed suppression. If you're trying to pull some nitrogen from the atmosphere or make a home for some nitrogen-fixing bacteria, it's just important to have a really good stand. I feel like drilling is your best chance of having a good stand. But I have broadcasted on wet years. This fall I've put in 160 acres of my covers that were broadcasted with an Amazon spreader. It's not mine, it's a co-op spreader. But on wet years, you just got to do what you can do. I mean, it doesn't matter if it's wet, get the cover crop out there because every 27 days your aggregates are breaking down. If you don't have a living root, you have to have a living root there as long as possible. So get the cover crop out there. I don't care how you do it. Like I said earlier, my cutoff date on my cover crops for me personally is Christmas. I will proceed with something and I promise you I'll still put in something in the spring. So just get a cover crop in there as much as you can.

1:02:44 I would agree with that. If you are going to broadcast, it's just helpful to get that incorporated somehow or another, get good soil contact. Really, it just brings in more variables with timely rainfall. But yeah, if you have good moisture, it can get established just fine.

1:03:04 Let's see, we'll just do this last question and then probably wrap up. Do you measure bricks? Yeah, I will say on that, one thing that yes, I do. That's the reason why I move my cows around 2 and 3 p.m. in evenings. And also, I've measured bricks in soybeans and corn plants. I've also tried applying some different forms of sugar to increase bricks, and that has helped. But don't get too caught up in bricks levels. There is something to say with insect pressure and stuff. But like I said earlier, if you focus on the principles and you have someone helping with cover crop blends, if you have a consultant or something, somebody come to your farm and help you understand the principles, that's step number one. You don't get caught up in all this extra stuff.

1:04:06 What were you going to say? Sorry, I cut you off on the broadcasting.

1:04:11 My internet's a little lagged. What I was going to say was if I'm going to broadcast cover crops, what I do is I'll wait for the best chance of rain and then I'll have the co-op broadcast that day before. And I don't incorporate the seeds in the soil. I'll use smaller-seeded cover crop species. So if I'm going to do milo like I have done on some of my fields I had to broadcast, I used a higher rate of belonging to clear than I normally would, just because that stuff's like sand. It's going to find soil when you get those hard rains. And I'll specifically look for cover crop varieties like rye and triticale that have a higher seeds per pound. That's the reason why I also increased my seeding rate by 30. So those are just a few things that I do if I'm broadcasting.

1:05:11 Yeah, that sounds good. Well, thanks again for sharing. I look forward to working with you and speaking with you in the future and appreciate you coming on. I forgot to mention in the beginning, I'm not Noah. Noah is out and he just had a baby, so we wish him and his family the best. He's still doing a lot of late work behind these webinars, so we appreciate his work. Next week is a webinar at 5:30 to 6:30 central time with David Johnson and the Johnson Sue Bioreactor, so I hope I'm right on that information, but be sure to join us. I believe Keith Dad is going to be hosting that one, so we're excited for that as well. Any closing thoughts, Mac?

1:06:24 Biggest takeaway, once again, I keep beating the dead horse. Just follow the principles. Try to implement the principles on your farm. Everything else just comes into play if you just follow the principles.

1:06:36 Amen to that. Appreciate it. All right, thanks for joining and we'll talk to you later. Hope you all have a good night.