Planting Green Into Hairy Vetch and Rye: Rolling, Termination & Weed Control

0:08 Hey everybody, Keith Berns and Dale circular with green cover seat here, and we've got some really cool things to show you. This is our experiment into kind of a planting crane and planting into massive amounts of cover. What we're standing in here is a rye hairy vetch combination that was planted last fall.

0:28 Actually, the batch was planted in the end of July with buckwheat because we double crop that. Day laughter we harvested spring triticale. If you remember, we had a big spring triticale crop out here, and then we double crop the buckwheat and we put 15 pounds of hairy vetch in with the buckwheat. We harvested the buckwheat the first week in October, and then we came in and we planted rye into that. So the vetch has actually been going since the end of July, about 15 pounds of that, and then the rye was seeded after buckwheat harvest.

1:00 So the result of all that is this massive amount of biomass that we're looking at here. What would you estimate is here, Dale, for dry matter and just overall tonnage? I would guess just eyeballing this, there's probably about three tons out here and fair percentage of hairy vetch.

1:20 Of course, this can accomplish several things. Number one, weed control and erosion control. I mean, we had how hard did the wind blow here the other night? That's probably 40, 50 mile-an-hour winds. Yeah, and that's blowing everywhere, and you know, complete soil protection here. And when you park the canopy, there are no weeds off, so we have no weeds underneath. And then once this is terminated and put down on the ground, that soil protection remains.

1:59 In addition, both rye and vetch contain allelopathic compounds that keep controlling weeds even after they're dead. The mulch prevents weed seedlings from getting sunlight. And this vetch, being a legume, it's a great nitrogen fixer. I don't know what the biomass it is here will have an analysis later. We think we sent two tests into Ward Labs yesterday, right? How much of the nitrogen or how much nitrogen is contained in this biomass we can get a reasonable estimate of how much nitrogen will be released.

2:39 But one nice thing about the nitrogen in this form is it's not in the form of nitrate. And I was taught in school that you want nitrate for your plants. Now we're finding out that nitrate, even though it gets into plants easily, we really don't want plants taking up a lot of their nitrogen in the form of nitrate. We prefer that they take it up as ammonium or intact amino acids. There's some real benefits.

3:07 To having your nitrogen in an organic form that slow-release. I think some of John Kemp's work shows that when it's in the nitrate form the plant has to expend a lot more energy to convert to that ammonia form. So if you can have it in that or an amino acids form it's much easier. The plant has to expend far less resources. Can write in it then that's more energy for it to grow.

3:32 Yeah, if you think about what's going on in the soil, like this is nitrogen in the form of protein. When that goes on the soil, there are microbes that take that protein, use it as an energy source, and take those amino acids. There are other microbes that take those amino acids, use them as an energy source. So they're pulling energy out, kick out ammonium. And then there's another bacteria that takes ammonium, takes energy out of it, and that's at night, right? And then another bacteria that takes nitrite, pulls energy out, and creates nitrate. And that's, and we were taught that that's the nitrogen the plants want because it moves. It's the form of nitrogen that moves with water and gets into the plant.

4:16 Well, if you've got a plant with a very limited root system and no mycorrhizal fungi, that that's important to have nitrogen that moves with water or limited water supply, right? And so, but once that nitrate gets into the plant, then the plant has to add energy to change it to ammonia, right? More energy to change the nitrite to ammonium. And then a bunch of energy, I mean a lot of energy, to change that ammonium into an amino acid and then more energy yet to change it into protein. If you can have protein to begin with, just use the protein and you don't have to. The plant doesn't have to expend all that energy.

5:04 Plus, most weeds have to have the nitrate. They are. Our weeds fulfill an ecological niche of bare soil, disturbed soil. They are nature's scab. And because of that, they are adapted to use nitrogen in the nitrate form. Yeah, and if you do not have an abundance of nitrogen in the nitrate form in the field, weeds just don't do well. They just don't grow well. So bare soils and a lot of nitrates, you're just asking for a weed issue, and ask and you shall receive.

5:50 If you can provide this as a combination, I mean to me this is the ultimate weed and feed. This is much better weed and feed than pendimethalin coded urea. This is going to provide weed control and slow-release nitrogen in the protein or amino acid form that we'd prefer that our plants have. Because I'm going to go out on a limb here and I'm going to estimate what I'm seeing here. I'm going to say this is probably somewhere between 120 and 140 pounds of nitrogen is what.

6:28 This is going to return and we'll have those results back from the lab soon, yes. And about half that's probably available. Carbon nitrogen ratio, my guess is going to be around 20 to 25 in this, which means half that's probably going to come available, yeah. And in that carbon nitrogen range, but like you said, remember in the soil the microbes always sit at the table first, so they're going to incorporate what nitrogen they need to meet their needs, and then they will in turn be consumed by nematodes and beneficial nematodes, protozoans, and they're going to kick out amino acids and ammonium that the plants can then utilize.

7:13 Yeah, so in other words, this system would still work very good for weed control if I didn't have a lot of biology, but from cycling the nutrients and providing nitrogen for this next crop that's coming, it's not going to be nearly as effective if I don't have a big biological bank down here, which we've been building on this farm because we've been doing no-till and we had new cover crops. Like I said, this had actually three crops planted on it just last year—the triticale, the buckwheat, the batch, and well four actually, and then the rye—so four different crops growing here. So we're pretty confident how much biology we have, and it'll be really interesting. We'll do periodic updates to see how fast all of this massive amount of biomass disappears in cycles.

8:03 Yeah, and the people watching this video, unfortunately there's no way we can—they—the way it smells or sounds. Yeah, I mean just the smell, it's like a freshly mown alfalfa field. Yes, when we look at what's been rolled down, it's pretty amazing. And then, you know, when we were out here planting this, we have some good footage of it being rolled. I commented to Davis, I said I think there's 20 pounds an acre of nitrogen out here just in the insects. I mean it was just a swarm as that roller went through—it was just a swarm. Unfortunately, a lot of those are mosquitoes that are still here, yeah. If we could, but there's bees and wasps and all sorts of other things just flying all over in this small strip that we left for this demo.

9:02 They talked about what percentage of the phosphorus in the Great Plains soils originated not from the rocks that are here, which contained very little phosphorus or the geologic material—it came from the manure of seabirds that migrated in from the Gulf of Mexico anyway that just deposited. And so, yeah, animal migration, yeah, and animal impact, whether it's insects or birds or whatever, does have an effect on your soil, and insects probably much more.

9:37 So than bird because an insect is just applying package of nutrients yes cycle that back through your system so yeah better yeah yeah and and you know just from a from a maturity standpoint now we're we're shooting this video I think it's June 11 so it's it's getting pretty late what we're going to look at these fields that have been planted a little earlier we had a cold spring so this is all kind of slowed down from that cold spring normally we would want to hope to see rye and batch at this stage ideally around the third week in May you know so that you could roll in plant in that time frame it's getting a little late and this this certainly is a little beyond what is crime rolling I mean the Rye has already shed its pollen there's no more pollen on here if you look at this vet you know it's starting to form seed pods and it's starting to put seed in those pods so the ideal rolling time for them probably seven to ten days ago and and that's when a lot of this that we're going to look at here what was planted and it works pretty well but we did want to leave this as a demonstration and we'll we'll come in here and plant something in a strip yeah and see how well it rolls down and I think it along the value you know we've talked a lot about companion cropping and you know interceding corn and 60 inch rows and then planting companion crops in between or our corn and 30 inch rows planting companion crops or cover crops interceded in between and one of the biggest obstacles to people doing that is well there's no way I can control the weeds because we have this you know our only weed control is either tillage which we don't promote or chemistry yep and the both of them are disturbances but right them or toss money right and so how can you plant a corn crop or a sunflower crop or whatever crop that you want to provide companions with and without herbicides yeah well there you go yeah weed and feed weed and feed yeah talking about the weed control portion this is the spot that we clipped Davis clipped this and this is what we sent in to ward labs so we could get an accurate test of how much nitrogen how much carbon c2 n ratio biomass and all that so this has had all the residue removed but I mean look at this there's not a there's not a weed in there anywhere he clipped this just a few days ago but you can see that there's good residue there from the previous triticale crop on the layer and Sandy bug right there there's our insecticide so yeah yep natural natural insect control with insects so yeah very.

12:25 Impressive, you know this, the holy grail of soil health. I've always said the holy grail of soil health is organic no-till. This type of system makes me think that that is much more possible than I ever thought before.

12:49 Okay Dale, so this, this right here, what we have is what we were just standing in with all that mayo mass, but this is Friday. This was planted in Tuesday, so you know, four days ago. And what they did here, this is a field we have a five acre patch here where we're doing Russian mammoth sunflowers. So that's the sunflowers, they're supposed to get like ten feet high and have huge heads. Well, we're trying to grow some of those. So what we did is we came in here with our planter, John Deere stacker planter. This year we put the Don ZRX rollers, crop rollers on it. So that ran through, planted the sunflowers in thirty inch rows. And then after that we came back through with the air cedar with seven and a half inch disc spacings and we seeded our companion crops. So there's clover and there's buckwheat and there's flax and there's mung beans and all manner of other types of things that will grow in the understory here. And this has had no herbicides on it. This probably hasn't had any herbicides on it since I've probably a year and a half. And so this vetch and the rye has been completely killed just mechanically. But it took two passes to really do this.

14:04 It will look at another field where it just had that planter and the rollers. There's so much biomass, those ZRX rollers. I don't think we had enough weight on a planter. We didn't have enough down pressure to completely kill it in a crimp. But the combination of the planter and the crimpers and then the drill with a disc rolling every seven and a half inches was very effective. I'm going to say, you know, we're going to have at ninety-nine point five percent killed on all of this biomass air hold. And when we look at it, go ahead and let's pull this back. Yeah, I mean it just looks like you took office labs and laid it out here. Yeah, I've planted the garden and I've just taken flakes of alfalfa hay and laid it. And we've got a seven and a half inch white flake of alfalfa hay essentially here, except it's rye and bench cover crop. So we didn't have to buy it and break it apart and put it here.

14:57 This hook was all done during the planting process. Yes, this is not a separate operation from the planning. This was all accomplished at planning. And this is, we're talking earlier how this is like lasagna. You've got a layer of pasta here and then you've got last year's, if you, you can

15:16 Pull this up. There's last year's pasta here and then if you look at this crumbly stuff, that was the previous year's pasta. Last year's pasta. This year's. Last year. So the crumbly stuff has to be the ground beef. We can't. We can't. It was on your day. All right, we have to have our coniferous part there. That may be the meats. All the microbes that are eating the vegan f.

15:47 So again, this essentially this is not organic because it's not certified organic, but it's going to be grown essentially with no chemicals. Yeah. And no core. I don't think we'll need any fertility inputs on this. There should be sufficient nitrogen here. You know, if we were estimating 120 to 140, we can get half of that to release, plus with the other biology and the great efficiency of this type of nitrogen, that should be enough nitrogen to grow a pretty good sunflower crop.

16:15 Now what we will do here, we will run some nitrogen strips through this to see if added nitrogen did help with yield or if it didn't make any difference. We'll do some strips and test that theory to see if we have enough ore for leaving yield on the table out there by not having. And some observations from people that have done stuff like this is that if you do this one year, you know, like you said, there's probably going to be about 140 pounds of total nitrogen in this iron 20, and about half that's going to be available. That's not enough to raise the two of our own crop by itself, but if you do this year after year, there's something similar to this. You get half of last year's, 1/4 of the years before, 1/8 of the year before. Yeah. You know, you add all those fractions together and you start a buildup. Yeah. And where your banking things. Yes. And you're building not just the legume, but also the free-living nitrogen-fixing bacteria Zoda Becker, the azo spiral. The Bayer Inca. All those organisms start to thrive in the absence of soluble nitrate fertilizer, and you can start getting biology to creating fertility for you.

17:36 Plus the fact that again, as we talked about this, there's nitrogen being in the protein and amino acid form. It's going to be much more efficient getting into the plants. And you know, so I wouldn't have to put 200 pounds of nitrogen out if it's in the right form. You probably only need 120 to 130. They'll reduce 200 bushel corn. There's some evidence of that. You know. And the plant, because it's expending less of its energy to upgrade the nitrate into amino acids. Yeah. More that energy produced through photosynthesis is available for root exudates to feed free living night engine well. So here's kind of the.

18:20 Double-edged sword of this though because this has a fairly low carbon nitrogen ratio that's a good thing in the fact that it's going to cycle quickly and this nitrogen is going to be available for this crop of sunflowers. The bad side, the flip side to that is this is going to cycle pretty quickly and the residue is going to disappear, opening me up to weeds coming.

18:42 So that's the reason that we planted this twice, once with the sunflowers and the second time with the companion crops, because we know that this residue is going to be excellent weed control here for the next probably 30 to 45 days. Yes, but after that, enough to get out of that, it's going to start disappearing, cycling. That's what we want, that's what you need, but you have to replace that with something. Otherwise I'm going to have plenty of weed bank out here and those weeds would come if we give them an opportunity.

19:11 So that's we're hoping our companion crops will fill in and we'll have a second layer of a canopy coming, a living canopy this time, and we've selected things that will stay relatively short, relatively low water users, and then the sunflowers of course will get tall and we can harvest and have that companion growing down below.

19:30 Yeah, and you know one way of looking at weeds, weeds are a sign from God that we are not using all the sunlight and the moisture and the soil nutrients. He's making pretty loudly use more of what I'm giving you.

19:50 I mean they're a sign that we are not fully utilizing the resources provided to us. Yeah, people out west say well we can't grow anything in wheat stubble. So well, if nothing grows in wheat stubble why are you running your sprayers out there four times? You know that weeds are a sign of unutilized resources. So anytime you've got a cropping system with the situation where you've got weeds growing, that's a sign that you need to increase your cropping content. So there's resources that you need to be taking advantage of. If you don't take advantage of it weeds will.

20:26 Yeah, and the gaps in between our crops may be one of those things. So we put something in here on purpose to take advantage. As we know that this is going to break down in about 30 days, and then if we don't plan something there will be getting weeds now.

21:00 The Dale, now we're looking at a little patch that we planted in our milpa garden. We've talked a lot about the milpa garden concept and we pride it for several years and it had mixed success, mostly because weeds, the soils came in and just kind of took over. So this year.

24:03 Then you know, and one of the things from the first meltdown here—there is a big ground beetle crawling around here and he's since hidden. That ground beetle is a predator of slugs, and so the things that we harbor here, whether it's birds or ground beetles or wolf spiders or any of the other things here, you can create a habitat where it controls a lot of our problems. And if you listen you can hear a lot of birds. Even though we're not—there's some trees around but not super close—but there's birds right out in all this because those needles are a food source for the birds as well.

24:45 Yep, and that one's very annoyed that we are out here. And nobody was there—that might be her nest right here. Yeah, come on guys, that's Mike, that's my kids' own there. But yeah, so this is creating problem and I think it's odd. Sometimes people say, well, can you give me a mix but I don't want anything too complicated? I'm like, why? Well, I can't manage complicated. No, the more complex the mix gets, the less management you have.

25:20 Do you know it? When you get a diverse enough mix, you get a diverse enough system, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to spray and herbicides, you know, have to spray insecticides. It's not saying that you may never have to, but it really decreases the odds of any one thing becoming a big issue. Yeah, yeah, and and this—people say, well, when I have all that stuff mixed together I can't pull weeds, I can't—oh, Eddie, I can't call the baby, I don't want to do that anyway, right? I don't want to do that anyway. So let's set up a system where you don't have to wear weeds simply. You create the conditions where weeds do not thrive. You know, thick mulch, nitrogen in the form of protein rather than soluble.

26:29 Okay Dale, now we're in the same field again. All this biomass that they got rolled down, this particular part of the field was planted again about four days ago or five days ago, and this was not drilled, it was just planted. So this is popcorn that we're growing for to harvest for cover crop seed, and so this was just hit with the planter and the Don ZRX rollers. And so there's areas of it like this where we had almost a complete kill. Looks really, really well. And then there's areas like over here where it just kind of dinged it up but it's obviously coming back pretty well.

27:11 This section did get sprayed. I think they came in with some Liberty to just kind of knock the batch out. It's pretty amazing. 100% kill on the rye I would say from controller, but probably only—I don't know—50% kill on the badge. I think had.

27:29 We don't think we had enough down pressure because when you're running that roll or on your planter it's difficult to have enough down pressure for the rollers and all your planter. Yes, it takes a lot of way. If we'd had just a regular dedicated cover crop roller, I think we would have gotten a better kill. Or like where we looked at where the sunflowers are growing, had we hit it with another pass with the air seat or a drill and had another opportunity to cramp and roll and mash that down, I think we would have seen a lot, a lot of matches a bit of a finer stem than what the rye is. And so it, you got a, it needs a little more down pressure to get that good crimp back. Yeah, but it's still very impressive. We, you know, again, same thing with the massive amounts of ground cover. The smell, that's all this batch is just, you know, some really sweet smelling, but what's impressive is that this popcorn, it's already up. Yeah, and it's only been, I say, about a week, you know, maybe a week or so, and it's already up and going.

28:35 One thing about planting late like this is that your corn does not set in the ground for ten, 14:20 days. Where it comes up, it gets up and it gets going fast. Yeah, yeah. So by delaying your planting two or three weeks, you may only really be delaying your crop by half that time because it gets going so much faster in these warm soils. Yeah, and you might save yourself some disease issues. Yeah, you don't need treated seed if you're planting into soils we're coming up. See, yeah, there's some things you can get away from. And again, you wouldn't do this on all your field that you might consider the later planting on some fields because there are benefits of doing that. Yeah, again, diversity. You spread your risk. Oh yeah.

29:24 So, you know, again, this, this, this would not be this is not going to be grown in an organic system because we did have to supplement some herbicide to help knock this out. Looking back, what perhaps what we could have done, we could have maybe run the drill through here and drilled the companion crop of clover. In fact, we may, we may still try that on a strip or two here. There's nothing says we can't do that. Typically we don't like to intercede in the corn at the same time you plant the corn because of the competition issue, but clovers I think are slowing upcoming if we didn't have the rate too high. And especially with all this residue would really slow a clover down, I think it's still calm, but it would come slowly. Yeah, so we may still try that and just see how that works because, you know, that one-two punch may.

30:11 Be what it needs to really get this stuff terminated. Yeah, and I don't necessarily want to do horrible Hannah clay myself, although it's getting more and more tempting because it looks like I can do it more and more physically. Yeah, you could do it without the tillage. Yeah, thank you very little. You know, and the big drawback to me with organic farming has been I didn't want to do any tillage, but if I can do organic farming without tillage and cash in on those premiums and do a good job of weed control and providing fertility, why not? You know, at least I have the option and even if I don't go do an organic farm, fewer inputs. I write fewer checks. That appeals and you know there's no perfect system.

31:06 If we were doing this in an organic setting and we would have seen how what kind of job that planter was doing because we knew that it was not going to kill this batch immediately just by the way that it looked, so then we would have had to go to some sort of Plan B, which could have been hitting it again with those rollers or running the drill through here to kind of chop it up and further crimp it. So there's other things we could have done had this been an organic situation without this batch. Because I guarantee you if nothing had been done to this batch, it would continue to grow and it would severely hurt this corn. In fact, it would probably literally zero yield in these areas where this veg to dock. Yeah, but you know, I think we've seen plenty of examples over the last 10 years where herbicides don't always work.

32:13 Now we're standing in a strip of batch only that nothing has been done to since the buckwheat was harvested last October. And the reason this is here, the pivot sets right here and we didn't get any rye planted here last fall because the pivot was here and we just didn't take time to move it or swing it all the way out. So this is vat by itself and a relatively thinner stand is only planted at about 15 pounds per acre. Normally if we would plant vats for seeds production or something, we speed 30 to 35 pounds seeding rate. So this is only about a half rate of batch, but yet we've got a good stand. There's no weeds here whatsoever. But one of the things that strikes me is how much shorter this batch is than it was over there where it had the rye to kind of climb up. Now there may be just as much biomass because it is a very binding crop and you know it's all tangled together and when you pull it off, I mean there's a lot of that's there, but it's just lighter to the ground.

33:10 There's no doubt, yes, yeah. And there's not a big area here, so I don't know if we'll try to harvest it for seed. We might just to see how it works. This is going to be hard to harvest because this is going to be flat on the ground, but it is a carpet, it's a mat. Again, zero weeds because of just how this intertwines. That it just makes it trying to be a weed growing in this.

33:32 You're gonna get sucked down. And sometimes I'll put together and make it for somebody and they'll say, well I just want because I want all the nitrogen I can get. Well, that sounds good in theory, but in practice, I mean the field or the mixture that we saw before because of the ability of the vets to climb exposes more leaf area to sunlight because all that nitrogen fixation is driven by photosynthesis and photosynthesis occurs because of leaf area exposed to sunlight.

34:09 If you give this the ability to climb, right, because these bottom leaves are getting anything? No, they're falling off, they're yellow and brown down below there. So if you can make a corrugated field, yeah, like this way more surface area, more surface area exposed to sun. So you have the occasional tall plant that vets can climb up, same idea with calk and no. People say I want a summer nitrogen fixer, getting cow peas or mung beans. I said that you want cow peas with something, put sunflowers in there. I said, well I don't want sunflowers, I don't want to pay for them because they all fix nitrogen. Said, well by having a few sunflowers in there you get that corrugated canopy, more leaves to size. Same way with adding a little bit of siv and there they don't fix nitrogen, they give you that corrugated canopy and smooth diversity. And the amount of bees and butterflies and other insects in here, birds is the course, they have the pivot they can set on right here and there's the fence row and whatnot. But it's truly impressive how much biological life is here, partly because it hasn't been disturbed.

35:22 We'll probably leave this like, say we may try to see if we can do a little bit of a practice. You know, I always tell people that is one of the easiest crops to grow. It's one of the absolute partners, he wants to harvest because it's very indeterminate. This stuff will still have blooms on it, you know, two months from now. I have a lot of people say I want to raise bets, but looks like a goldmine, yeah, yeah.

35:51 So but I think if you want to raise batch and you have the ability to separate the seed, what we looked at before where the veteran rider on together is gonna be way way easier to harvest than this right here. The birds that have this take down into their territory are not happy with us. We're interfering with their back home. Got a lot of good investment.