No-Till and Cover Crops on a Grazing Ranch in Western Oklahoma

0:00 Foreign. I'm not great at public speaking and this is definitely not a speech class right off the bat, so that's my disclaimer. You guys are just going to have to put up with me.

0:14 I managed the Stuart Ranch, which has been in my family since 1868. We ranch on both sides of I-35. We branch in Jefferson and Stevens County in Western Oklahoma and Bryan and Atoka counties in Eastern Oklahoma, and it is night and day on both sides. Today I'm just going to talk about the ranch in Jefferson County.

0:36 We're very diverse. We have a cow-calf operation and we have February, March as well as September and October.

0:42 We run yearlands. We have a quarter horse operation. We show horses and we have a breeding herd of Mayors. We also have a wildlife and hunting operation. We hunt near all year long. We hunt deer on both sides of the interstate. We have turkey, we have Rio Grande as well as the Eastern. We also have waterfowl and geese in Jefferson County. We hunt pigs all year long, so we're always busy.

1:10 Somebody asked me about downtime and I'm not really sure when that is, but maybe we'll find that anyway.

1:18 Cropland. Jim asked me to mention to you.

1:20 About our cropland when we came over to Jefferson County it had all been tilled. Basically everybody in Jefferson County believes that you cannot no-till because I'm sure there was a lot of comment, 'Terry, you are the dumbest person on the entire Earth.' Maybe so, but anyway in 2009 I'd been looking at no-till and but was still reluctant to do it.

1:45 I'm a native grass rancher, period. I do not know anything about farming, so that just let's clarify that right off the bat. Also cows, horses and grass I can handle it. But I watched our tanks, we also surface.

2:01 Water dependent in our country we have no groundwater. All right, so this creates a lot of limitations on what we're going to do.

2:11 I am not a farmer, but I have responsibility for about 3,500 acres of crop grounds. So therefore we've tilled it, we put it into wheat, we raise our spring calves, go to wheat, we sell them off. Wheat, I run a lot of pears on wheat. We run replacement heifers on wheat. All is good.

2:30 2009, I had the man that was helping me with the farming, he had a heart attack, and I thought, okay, this might be the—

2:38 Year to switch, so cold turkey, whole cotton picking ranch. I sell the tractor and buy a no-till drill and we no-tilled everything November 5th. I had my calves on wheat and had eight inches of wheat and I thought I was the smartest person in Oklahoma. It was a great year, phenomenal, and then 2010 rolled around.

3:03 Things started getting dry. 2010 wasn't as bad but it wasn't as good as it was, then comes 2011. Well, we're running out of water. Not only our grass wasn't our limiting factor that year, it became tank water and it.

3:18 Was going fast what tanks we did have were drying up or too boggy to put cattle in. My point being in all this is probably since we started to no-till I've had the worst conditions known to man on trying to do something like this. We are a straight grazing operation so you can imagine the compaction I have. In 2007 we'd actually bought a disc gripper and ripped the entire country trying to get our compaction broken up, but it probably worked for a little bit but it didn't solve our problems.

3:52 2013 Keith I think was the first year.

3:55 We decided to try to do some cover crops. Actually had a little moisture in the ground and thought it would work. I have at this point in time custom I own a drill but don't own a tractor and I had a gentleman that was going to help me get everything farmed.

4:10 Talked with Jim Johnson who's been instrumental in helping us no-till and also Keith and we decided to do some cover crops. Actually had a field day I think at the ranch that year and we dug down and we got roots going sideways in all which ways so we

5:08 Residue issue. I'd like to see cows eat it, so I've got some issues that I've got to work with also as far as our operation. And I know we have challenges probably that a lot of you don't have, but I think for me we did some more cover crops this year. We got into a too wet situation this year, for instance. We're in a give or take 35 inch rainfall area in Jefferson County, what they say is normal, which I don't know what that means.

5:44 But we had over close to 50 inches this year in Brian and Atoka counties 80, 80 inches of rain this year. We deal with drought a whole lot better than we deal with too wet and way better. I mean to be honest with you in my opinion the challenges are too wet are greater than the challenges of too dry. Had grass as tall as I was and it wasn't worth anything. I mean they're just we grow a lot of forage and which is one reason I felt like the no-till would work so well for us because as I mentioned before where surface.

6:19 Water dependent well we weren't running water off because we had enough forage to keep that water from running into the tanks in a lot of ways so it was one of those catch-22s you know you're growing grass and you stop the runoff which is what you're supposed to do but you know what I need water in those tanks so we actually needed a rain like we got this spring to fill up our tanks. I think Waurika Lake was at 10 or 15 percent I'm talking drinking water people it was getting bad.

6:49 But those are some challenges that we've had I know most of you don't but I'm a

6:54 Firm believer I think the no-till is good. I need a lot more information on the cover crops we are going to be users of them. My problem right now is probably the cost and I've, I think there are ways to work through that. I would like the and I appreciated your comments too, very very much so. I would like to work through some of the ideas because my goals would be to not have to run the fertilizer truck, to not have to run that spray truck. I want to eliminate those kind of costs to our operation.

7:28 My grandson was born, he's always about six, how old is he now, 14, 15 months. That's the sixth generation on our land and for me to leave this place in a much better way than what I found it is a big goal of mine and I believe we can do it this way. And I'm hearing that today and I'm, it certainly is encouraged.