In-Field Pollinator Strips and Companion Crops for Grain Sorghum

0:00 [Music]

0:08 So today we're gonna talk a little bit about Apollinaire strips and companion crops. Now there's lots of different words that you use for companion crops. I like companions because much like marriage you got to plan a companion that will not over compete, not take over, and not rule.

0:28 I can't rule over Gingers, she can't rule over there, it won't work. You know, she lasts a lot about we're we're an anchor and a sail. She's the anchor holding me back, I'm the one wants to go full blast. You know, if I married somebody want to go full blast, we'd be crashed and burned. So it's pretty good relationship.

0:54 So we're going to talk about the five principles in this. Once again, Jeff had a little different twist in in rangeland. I don't want, I want to keep my soil armor just like you heard from Paul. I want little disturbance, I want to increase the diversity, keep a living root in, and integrate livestock.

1:17 So this here is a summer cover crop that I'd planted. I also got some more diversity in there, got cool season collards in a plant that behind wheat. We graze that, we've got a little frost can't be opened up and look at the collards come. So we run the cattle back through that again.

1:35 Now I'm going to go into grain sorghum, not your typical mix. This is two years ago when we first started this. These are companions. This is what that consisted of: three pounds of Milo because I'm gonna drill it at two and a half pounds of buckwheat. Two reasons I'm gonna plant buckwheat: one, it's gonna flower continuously after about 30 days, it's

2:02 Also really good to help cycle phosphorus. I'm gonna plant flax several over your route to the plowshare stay. We saw flax, we saw cattle walking over. They don't care for it, they're not going to graze on it. The flax is wonderful for mycorrhizal fungi, but it also has a different colored flower than the buckwheat.

2:21 So we're going to attract different insects with different colors and different aromas. Then we're going to plant mung beans for some nitrogen. Now we want all this in the FIR in the same row as a companion. Now remember the companions got to work with, not overtake.

2:45 Now we're going to plant a pollinator strip and all flowering species in another field. This is what that seed mix is going to look like. We're gonna plant a 12-foot wide strip this year, no-till on the plains. Dr. Jonathan Lundgren out of Brookings South Dakota teamed up with several producers. There's six of us in the trial, three of us in Oklahoma, three in southern Kansas where we planted these strips.

3:14 We run a sweet net over them strips every two weeks. Some of us buried that day a little bit. We froze what we caught, we ship them to Jonathan. They're gonna do ID and count to see what we're attracting. So that date is coming. This is what's in that mix, so we've got lots of diversity in there. I will tell you that this year I had trouble with the wildlife eating the diversity up here, so it's pretty good grazing mix.

3:51 This is what we want. See the ladybugs here on the underneath the Milo? This is a year ago. You'll see that all this dis buckwheat, everything's down.

4:06 In the canopy it's not taking the mile over at the flax here. You look at the buckwheat but all the seed that's making yet is still blooming. It will never bloom continuously almost. I really like that this is the grain sorghum last year at my house didn't rain exactly when I'd like for it to, and we can't control but you see that the companion is not showing up there. They're still underneath the canopy. You know, we were wanting to attract the beneficials for the sugar cane aphids that's been a tremendous problem over the years here in the last several years for grain sorghum.

4:49 I'm happy to say that a year ago we didn't have to spray for any sugar cane aphids. But I told everybody, you know, that's just one year and do not and I repeat do you not go home and say Jimmy said that this will work and I'm not going to have to spray because that's just one year of data and did we get lucky? Did they not vector over and come in? We didn't know. So that's reason that we wanted to do some more research.

5:22 You see here this is late in the season, blacks are still blooming for us. You look here you can see, yeah, murders a foreigner. Well, you can see in the canopy here everything's below the heads.

5:51 So once again it wasn't a great Milo that year. We made 58 bushel. My neighbors, one to the right of us and one to the left, sprayed for sugarcane aphids. One sprayed once, one sprayed twice in that year is about 25 dollars an acre, 27 to get that.

6:09 They made 70 bushels, I made 58. Doesn't take very long to do the math that I don't have to have the biggest yield to be the most profitable. We were pretty pleased. Just like Paul was talking, mostly in our area everybody would be done, they would be turning cattle in on this, but I'm going to plant today, I harvest. That's one thing that we started about six years ago. We're not going to mess around, we're going to plant, hopefully as soon as we get that day or the next day, but that always didn't work out.

6:49 Here's just a few weeks later, wheat's coming up. We're going to go to seed wheat production in this field. I went ahead and turned cattle out shortly thereafter and we had some great gains. This is Willie. You'll hear more from Willie tomorrow. This is a proscope on an iPhone, one of the greatest tools that I've run across. It really magnifies what's in the ground, and if we don't start understanding what's below ground and how you can work with us, you're missing it. Earthworms, how important they are. Pretty good technology. I've got some really cool pictures that I'll have at no-till on Plains later in the spring. Look at the root hairs growing there. I've got some really good pictures of exudates actually on the roots and how that process works that I'm going to be sharing.

7:51 Pretty good wheat. A lot of people say you can't plant wheat behind grain sorghum. It's all in your soil health systems and how you design that system to work. We run cattle on that. Had 49 steers on 65 acres. They went in weighing 625. He gained 3.2 pounds a

8:12 Day through the winter. Everybody says wow, that's pretty good game. Well, y'all had grain form, had dry matter for him, and had wheat for him. Remember diversity, how important diversity is? Not bad. Now we're moving forward to this year. This is our pollinator strip that we had down the middle of the field. A doctor, Dr. Lundgren, says he thinks we can get benefits of about 500 feet each way from the pollinator strip. So we measured off in this field there's a 500 to the left, more than that to the right. So we're trying to look and see if that's correct, if we get more benefits. Some people say well you should plant around the outside. Well, that's all right if it's not more than 500 feet. If you're gonna get benefits from 500 feet, we wanted to see what that was. So, and that's that seed mix I showed you a little bit ago there, and we're just getting started.

9:14 So if I'm gonna have flowers, this must have little sweetness to go with that. So we started in the bees, diversifying a little bit. I grew up with my granddad had bees all my youth years, and then we started spraying and had alfalfa and spraying for long. Guess what? We didn't have any bees. We're trying to reverse that. So we're very conscious now while we spray if we have to spray and what we do at the bees and how we protect them.

9:49 This is our grain store you see here that we have a few little spots that we didn't have the best stand. It was dry early. Jim Johnston came out a noble research when we've taken in this time period. This has been in a soil health.

10:05 System now going on the fifth year. This year we were extremely dry when Jim was out there. You could take your bare fingers and dig down four to five inches in the soil, and so it proved that no-till does not get hard and this hard get worked with our soils getting softer and better every day. This particular field that some of you were at my field day a year ago, we were running cattle on a summer cover mix. Here when we're making daily moves we grazed that. We terminated that. We went to a cool season. We've done the same thing with the same herd of cattle. We run them through in the spring. We pull them cattle off in time. Let that regrowth maybe boot high, something like that.

10:58 My neighbor across the road, a good friend of mine that we grew up with, he's been wanting me to help him, and so I've been planting the covers for about a year now. He inherited this from his brother, from his dad's estate, and his brother had put drilling mud soil farm. This abused it. The weeds were horrendous. And I kept telling him you're gonna have to develop this system and your family is not known for leaving much residue. If you do not manage your residue, this is not gonna work.

11:33 The day that I terminated my covers, like I said they're about this tall, he had me spray his and it looked like this carpet, except this carpet may be taller than his cover. I planted Milo at his place first, drove across the road, planted mine, and he called me two weeks later and he said, 'When you gonna plant my Milo?' I said, 'I did.' He said, 'I don't have a dang thing out there,' and he didn't say it.

12:05 Quite that nice we've had a big rain. Well yeah it crusted he said but your model looks great I said the system you've got to understand the system you cannot take everything when people take everything it turns into the desert so we've got a pretty good-looking crop.

12:24 This is this year it was beautiful at this time we had a 70 mile an hour wind event broke several of these heads over they were so big so we wound up not making the yield that we thought we were going to make but once again Plan B is always cattle it's not a waste it's just a different way to run it through the system doesn't have to go through the combine to be profitable.

12:55 Once again we did not have to spray for aphids this year now I don't have all the data back from Dr. Longer and then and that's coming and we're pretty excited about that because it will prove what we're attracting what we're not attracting something that we might want to tweak in the mix it's kind of like the garden project you don't always have the perfect scenario.

13:19 This field this year I didn't put companions in I put companions in two other fields and a lot of times people say well you always talk about your success you don't ever talk about your failures well here's the failure this year we up the companion a little more diversity Jimmy's trying to stretch the envelope a little bit what I didn't figure on my summer covers that are grazed my brown top millet is they're very good I love it for wildlife but it goes to seed very quick and very early when you're grazing once I plant in my companion Milo we got.

16:01 Run out of water a few weeks before this picture and the millet that I had planting in that field as companion was starting to over compete with the flowers. So I went out with a little select and took my millet out. I left the rest of the broadleaves in there because it was not raining and once again sometimes when it doesn't rain it didn't matter. So we had a good crop of flowers, very successful.

16:30 Once again the 70 mile an hour winds that we had in the grain sorghum, it is not a friend of sunflowers. And I know you're going to get tired of this, but plan A was to harvest sunflowers, which we did. The plan B is cattle. Cattle really do well on sunflowers with all in a plus all the companions in ahead. We're still grazing that right now. My goal here is to make it another 30 days.

17:00 They've been after about 30 days now since we harvested. They're getting nothing. They're picking up the sunflower heads. You'll go by and you'll see a big head laying there and there'll be two bites out of it. They're kind of like my little dog Freckles. They've got it laying there and they're going to come back by and every time I go out there there's less and less heads. So it's been a good year. It's maybe not the best that you would want in goal A, but if you don't have a system and have a plan A, B, or C in order, you've got to be adaptive.

17:38 That's one thing I love. You're going to hear Richard Teague talk tomorrow about adaptive grazing. That's the reason I love that term is adaptive. You better be adaptive in a system. Sunflower mix basically in this mix we

17:56 Got mustards, flax, German millet. We also have some war mung beans and cow peas in here for nitrogen fixation. But basically the goals with the companion millet, companion sunflower mix is to attract as many beneficial insects as possible. We want to be able to control the headworms, other insects that may cause pest issues on sunflowers in a monoculture. But also what we really look at here is weed suppression in between the sunflowers. As you can see with the millets and the companions, there's a lot more weed suppression going on versus over here in the monocultures where there's a lot of bare ground, a lot of potential for big weeds to come in.

19:07 So basically Jimmy will harvest these sunflowers this fall. There's a strip in here he said 40 foot, yeah it's 40 foot wide that we've had no companion, so there will be a strip in here with no companions to really compare the weed suppression this fall. Going in the winter, ground coverage is another big issue. With sunflowers, typically sunflowers don't leave a lot of residue behind—they'll leave a stalk but not much ground coverage. So the companions will also help out this fall with water and wind erosion. It's been very interesting to see all the difference with the companions and how you can see the flax is blooming here and the buckwheat, so we have lots of activity buzzing around, especially with the flowers blooming. Very interesting. We'll see how it progresses. Thanks a lot.

20:10 So in that strip, the flowers where we didn't have the companions, we're better.

20:16 Deal wise I don't have the yield day to back off the combine yet, we're in that process. But just riding in the combine, we're probably making a ton flowers where there was no companions. We're gonna make a thousand to twelve hundred pounds where we had two companions, and everybody said, whoa, it's a big difference. It is. But now I've got my cow herd out there grazing on that. You always can't look at yield. If you look at yield and you chase yield, the system's not gonna work. Now I'm looking at 60 days of grazing, then I'm resting my native range, and I'm really using the companions. Plus I'm feeding the biology, and I put the manure and the urine out there where it needs to be. And I'm not gonna look back because I'm not going that way.

21:09 I tell the story when I was growing up. Now they nicknamed me crash when I was going to college. There's a reason they nicknamed me crash, and I still got a heavy foot. The one thing that my dad taught me when I was about 13 or 14, he's teaching me to drive on the highway. I've been driving for years on the farm. We're going to town one day. Dad said, speed up, you're not going fast enough. So I sped up. We got up about 65, 70 mile an hour, and he said, now drive off in the bar ditch. What he said, now son, I grew up just like you with a heavy foot. Our fact one night North Elk City he hit the railroad tracks, drag race. And know everything is doing pretty good till the drive shaft come off the front and it's getting down there. The bad thing, the second set of railroad tracks caught the drive shaft and twisted the

22:07 Rear end out for Murray's car so he said I'm telling you you better learn to drive in the bar ditch at maximum speed if you're gonna be a good driver. And he always taught me don't be looking back. You might want to glance back there once in awhile but you better be paying attention to the road in front of you, bud. And that's my motto today in a soil health system I'm not looking back. It's balls to the wall, fast as we can go and try to figure the system out.

22:40 Will Rogers said it better than anybody. Even if you're on the right track, if you sit there you're gonna get run over. You better pay attention to that because how true is that? Even if I'm doing everything right, if I get complacent and think I've got it all figured out, Keith, I'm gonna get run over because there's another train coming.

23:10 This is how you can get ahold of me. This is some of the things that we've got. We've got several videos out. I don't have one of an air seater coming unhooked yet. I do watch the depan quite frequently anymore. Always check the hitch but make sure it's the right one is what I've been told so I appreciate your truth intense looks today and listening.

23:39 Remember companions, we don't have it all figured out yet. The data is coming. I'm not telling you if you plant pollinator strips or companions in grain sorghum that your problems as sure cane havens are done this year. At my house in the covers that we had plans, we had sugar cane aprons a half-mile from there we had none. One theory is you change the aroma of the field with the flowers and the other theory is we're attracting the beneficials that will take care of the Athens. I really don't care which one of them. If one, if all of that's right, all I'm concerned about is controlling the nature's lace. It doesn't hurt my bees.