Management Intensive Grazing with Cover Crops: Real Results from a Texas Operation

0:08 Presentation. So we're going to see if it works. So here we go. If you'll indulge me in this: fallen leaves and faded twigs will eventually return to nature as soil.

0:30 Micro and microscopic animals are the primary dwellers on the fallen leaves, subsequently followed by microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi, and actino that are invisible to the naked eyes. The screen shows how fungi invade the leaf tissues.

0:57 Here you see a swarm of bacteria feeding on fallen leaves, which are gradually decomposed soil.

1:19 Under the fallen leaves, sunlight doesn't reach this far. A lively world of tiny animals helps decompose organic matter into soil. The root grows firmly, pushing the soil aside.

1:53 Countless hairs begin to grow at the sides of the root. The roots of both crops and weeds break the hard soil to make it softer, thus playing an impressive part in soil improvement.

2:22 Now let's observe a root growth under a microscope. Root hairs are growing sideways. A plant absorbs water and nutrients using its root.

2:53 Hairs what's now happening around the rot. This is the growing point at the root tip. The elongation of roots takes place right here. The growing point is quite active in metabolism. The old sections continually peel off.

3:23 We can see something still moving in plant cells which have come off. Then microorganisms prey on them. Although invisible, nutrients are flowing out of the whole root. A large number of microorganisms are attracted there. They multiply by feeding on the nutrients secreting out of the root. When dead, the crop will then feed on their remains.

4:03 Seen around the root are bacteria. Numerous protozoa are also observed. Microorganisms survive by cooperating with the root, creating a world very similar to intestinal bacteria in human beings.

4:22 Many kinds of nematode in soil feed on fungi and bacteria, while some fungi eat nematode. This fungi prepared a trap with its own body and nematodes got caught in it. Now the fungus eats it.

4:53 Up bacteria also feed on a dead nematode.

5:13 All right, I saw that a couple years ago and it just got me really excited.

5:19 About soil health it helps me to see things and see all those gizmos going on under my pasture in all of yours. I was already doing cover crops at the time and so it really began to make sense. My goals are to be economically sustainable and ecologically sustainable so that means I need to make a profit and like you I want to leave the land better than I found it. I live in an area where we get in a normal year 38 inches of rain. I don't have wheat I just have. I'm a grass-based operation with around 500 acres, most of it leased and I've divided that into about 85, approximately 5 acre paddocks and I have right now around 350 head. I develop heifers.

6:13 This is a map of some of my land showing some of the paddocks I want to call your attention to. In the top of the picture up in there that pink stuff, that's where I do cover crops. Right in there there is a pond and before I started doing cover crops it would stay full. People in this room know why I've had trouble keeping it full since I've started doing cover crops. The thing you need to understand about my operation is that I do this management intensive grazing and I think that is the key to my profitability and I think the cover crops fit really well into it economically and of course ecologically and I just think that's real important for me. I want to try to establish a forage chain so.

7:09 That I'd love to always have green growing forage in front of my animals because I'm trying to grow calves. I used to do stockers and now I do heifers and develop them and breed them, and so I wish I didn't have to ever feed feed or hay. So I am really pulling for the Noble Foundation to develop that fescue that'll have a friendly knight and sustain itself, because that's the big hole in my operation in the late fall and in early winter.

7:42 I started out in that field I was showing you. I had Max Q Fescue, and so I plowed this ground back in 2005 and over time the Fescue just sort of died out. It just declined, and so finally I just terminated it and I started no till tilling wheat or oats in the cool season and then I would just let it grow with Johnson grass or whatever come up in the summer season.

8:13 A few things to point out about this picture. You can see the alleged residue there that's left over, rye grass and dead grazed out wheat or oats or whatever. And I can tell you that ground is very hot in the summer. All that stuff we saw going on in that video cannot possibly be going on in my hard, hard dry clay, tight clay when it was so hot. Also you can see there's not much volume there. My kids were home at the time, we have a pond, they love to fish, we could never find any earthworms on the pond. And I am pretty faithful about taking soil tests, and so I just have a soil test probe that's.

8:57 Shaped like a T and in that ground when I plowed it the clouds are just so massive that it was really hard to get it broken up enough to be able to seed that Fescue back in '05.

9:09 Well ever since then I know you don't dare try to take a soil sample unless you just had a rain because I mean I'll get out there and I'll just bounce up and down on that probe and I'll get about this much in my probe and then I'll just about have to get a hammer to get it out to get it in my sack to go to the next spot.

9:31 So the Noble Foundation and GLCI maybe four years ago suggested that I go to a double crop cover crop mix. Well I had never heard of that and so I'm a former CPA and so I'm proud it's a bag of honor to be called tight, okay, and I like to get as much out of my money as I can. And so double crop, yeah, let me talk about it and I wasn't sure it would work. I was worried about water, worried about the soil having enough moisture just like y'all were. Well it is made a huge difference.

10:12 And one other comment, when I used to no-till that wheat or oats in September or whenever I'd have to set, I have a 10-foot Krauss no-till drill. I would have the highest down pressure setting is a four, you know, the four spring or whatever. I always had to have it on four to try to hammer that seed in there and get it.

10:34 Let's see if we can go to the next one. There we go. So for me, the thing that I've really liked about the cover crops is I get a very high volume of high-quality forage at a previously unproductive time of year for me in July or August. So a lot of times when I was buying stockers or buying four-weight heifers, I would get them out of sale barns in July and August at 400 lbs or something, and so I would have to battle the sickness, you know, the shipping fever, pneumonia, even at that time of year. And man, I hate to lose a calf, you know, I really do, so I'd hand out a lot of antibiotics.

11:26 Well, putting new cattle on a cover crop at that time of year is very high-quality forage. I immediately noticed much better health. I'll show you some data about that in a minute, but that's been a big improvement. They also gain great when you can get a vulnerable fresh calf that doesn't know, not wean, doesn't know where mama is, and get him on something he likes, he'll eat, and you and I know that he'll feel better if he'll just eat.

11:57 And this double cropping system, I only top-dress with 50 units of N in February for the cool season crop and I keep my phosphorus every once in a while. I use 18-46-0, but I never ever have to put fertilizer for the warm season crop. And you're about to see the volume that this warm season crop generates and I'm just using a multicrop mix of, you know, N9 to 15 seeds. Jim Johnson with the Noble Foundation helps.

12:27 Let me select my seeds. So let me see if we can go to the next. There we go, okay, now I'm going to admit a mistake here. This is the cover crop for this year when it first germinated, and you'll notice there are no rows out there, and there's a story behind that. We had a friend that's here characterized this last year for us as the year with two floods and one drought. And so up till July 4th, we had unbelievable amounts of rain. I was fighting the mud and we were late getting my heifers out, and heifers get kind of tough when you have to run them through the shoot four times. They get kind of intelligent, so I was afraid to let them out where I might not be able to get them back when you're synchronizing them and doing all that kind of stuff.

13:17 The cover crop from last year, cool season crop, got away from me. I mean, it was really too high to effectively graze, and I would have pugged it. So I made a mistake and I didn't graze it. Well, I didn't know that it was going to rain however many million inches in June, but anyway, the cover crop died. It all went to seed. It was so tall. It was a mixture of all the cereal grains, had a lot of volunteer rye grass, volunteer air leaf clover, had crimson peas, vetch. It would have been great. So I thought, well, I'll just cut it for hay. I admit it, that was a wrong thing to do. So I rolled it up. It made terrible, terrible hay. It really helped me seeing the videos of you guys no tilling into stuff.

15:51 Four months basically from July 4th to October 31st and then it rained 7 inches. But in mid-October, my local NRCS office called up and said we want to have a soil health seminar and we wondered if we could have it at your place and we want to have it pretty quick, by the end of September 30th. So we needed a soil test to see how much my soil had changed.

16:23 I kind of gritted my teeth knowing what I would face and I got my soil probe and I went out there in these fields and I stuck it down and it went pretty deep. I mean, it went pretty deep and I thought, well, now I must have hit a crack. So I walk 40 yards or whatever and I do another one—it goes in deep too. I mean my bag's filling up. Well, that's just an example. That's evidence that I see how these cover crops are softening the soil. That's more evidence right there.

16:52 And then on my drill setting, when we drilled before our big rain in late September—remember, I'm setting the drill on two. That's half of what it used to be and it's almost too deep. And we hadn't had any rain. I mean, this is four months of Texas summer, which, you know, y'all understand.

17:17 That NRCS pond that was an equipment project that I showed you a minute ago—it's right there. So it drains all of this area. There is plenty there to keep it full and I know it used to always be full.

17:34 Because before I started planting cover crops well this year I actually had to have a guy out there and do a little bit of grading to try to direct more water so that it would actually fill up because it was we were getting normal rainfall years and it wasn't filling up.

17:52 I hate to ask y'all to have to take a lawyer's word for anything, but I didn't know I was going to be speaking a couple years ago so I really loved y'all's examples of the snow you know that blew across from the neighbors and the color of the water in the jars and in the ring from Jimmy's wheat field or whatever that he didn't, but I ain't got that kind of evidence. You're just going to have to take my word for it. And then one more picture, okay I told you I was going to give you some data and some results.

18:24 Those are 700 lb heifers that just got turned out in that warm season cover crop and that's just a mixture of the sorghum and the millets, cow peas, soybeans. I don't have near the aversion to sun hemp but there's some of that in there too.

18:47 So one for here is some data I turned out 200 695 pound heifers on August 1st rotated in a 30 acre cell with seven paddocks for 20 days. Heifers with no supplement no implant and no fertilizer in August in Texas gained 2.45 pounds heads per pound per head per day and that's really really good for me. I mean I was just, I didn't, I wasn't sure anybody would believe me and I have about a hundred acres.

19:18 That year of cover crop, so now I should have probably gone ahead and figured out the dollars in and dollars out like Jimmy did, but I promise you it's working for me economically. It's profitable. And then at the same time, closer to my barn, I received 140 fresh unweaned vulnerable 400 lb heifers and I only had to give 10 a shot of antibiotics and I only lost one. And I really, that one, I mean I don't know what happened to it. I found it dead out there. It was in the sun. I wondered if it got a thyon deficiency or something, and couldn't, I don't know, but anyway, that again was very, very good results for my operation.

20:00 Okay, if we can go to the next slide, here's another picture of them grazing. When I first turn them into it, they just run into it. They just can hardly believe what they're finding now. If you could go to the next slide, I just had to show you this picture. There's a little fawn there, you know, he is not in my Bermuda. He's not in my beat all bluestem. He's not in my Johnson grass fields. He's not even in my native grass big blue, little blue, indiangrass, and switch field. He's in the cover crop, and there were three more just like him. I'd seen those do hanging around, and I finally found one. But this, this is so I got a, just, you know, I think it's clear from that my operation is profitable. I'm leaving the land better and I find it's making my goals. And if actions speak louder than word, I bought another 70 acres worth of seed this year.

20:59 This has been a great conference. I got a real quick story for you. I said this to Bill Buckner last night because it applies to the Noble Foundation and it applies to y'all too. But the story is that there's a guy named W Phillips that was from Oklahoma and he donated about a 200,000 acre ranch in New Mexico to the Boy Scouts of America. And you know that ranch is the Philmont Scout Ranch. And out of a nation of 300 million people, 20,000 boys and their dads go through that every summer. And the impact that's making—I bet if I ask y'all to raise your hands, a lot of you would have had a family member that has gone through Philmont.

21:42 Wait's favorite saying was he wanted to plant an acorn that would grow into a mighty oak tree that would shade someone else that wouldn't shade him, right? If you think about it, that's what Mr. Noble did. He gave $10 million in 1950 and it's done so much. It even developed Elbon Rye, which is the most popular seed for cover crops. In 2015, I bet he never thought about that. You guys are figuring out how to rejuvenate our soils, and if you're successful at that, it could spread all through the world to rejuvenate our soils and bless future generations that we haven't even thought about how that might work.

22:28 Anyway, this has been a great conference and I've learned a lot. Thank you very much.