Seed Production & Soil Recovery: Building Cover Crop Success from Degraded Ground

0:09 Okay like Keith said, my focus is seed production. I grow soft wheat, rye, oats, millets, chickpeas, peas, mung beans, just about anything that I can fit into my rotations for forages and cover crop seed. Also grow corn, milo, ingredients for bird seed as well as supply of the feed meals.

0:38 This picture was taken last winter and I wanted to get this picture in to illustrate why I do what I do. This was a pond that I cleaned out on my home farm. It drains about 660 acres of crop land. That's about it—took about 30 years to do that, that was before I started no-tilling. And it's just amazing how much just a little bit.

1:16 Of erosion, oh it's not bad, it's just a few ditches and that's it. My father has a wall full of conservation awards and this is the result. This is what I don't tolerate on any of my farms. The vast majority of my farms that I rent are all zero relationship where they're up for bid every term or their one-year leases and I treat them all the same because somebody's going to have to make a living on that farm when I'm gone. And that's the way I look at how I farm. It's not just me making a living, it's me helping the next guy down the road.

2:00 But like I said, this is a shallow end of it. It was about 12 feet deep in the middle and it's just amazing how much comes off of even a small amount of land. This is another thing that I feel real strongly about in our area: low pH.

2:21 Is a huge problem. We have a lime pit just right in the middle of everything I farm. I don't know why, but almost nobody limes. There's fields in our area that won't grow wheat because of the pH is in the mid-fours.

2:41 But when you're thinking about doing forage crops, cover crops, the first thing you need to do is get a soil test. Noble Foundation can do that. Know what you're starting with because I've seen so many failures of no-till in crop rotations simply because the pH was so low you couldn't grow broadleaf on it, you couldn't grow a legume on it.

3:11 And this right here, this is gyps, and we also have a gypsum mine in our backyard. We do a lot of gypsum.

3:18 Spreading as well as liming when I get a new farm it's just it's almost a guaranteed it's going to take two ton of lime just to get started. I've put as much as six ton of 68% lime on some of the fields because the pH is just so bad but this it's just another symptom of bad management. Just my area just seems to be endemic we've got a lot of Bureau Indian Affairs trust land it's never been taken care of and it's gotten to the point after 80, 90 years where it's just gotten really bad.

4:04 This is how this is some of my seating equipment. This is how we seed a lot of stuff we do a lot of second crops after wheat in our country we get about 32 in normally 31 in. This past year we had 22 inches just in the month of May and had our annual.

4:24 Rainfall by the 1st of June, so it was an extremely wet year and it created a lot of opportunities. We planted a lot of second crops that made very well.

4:47 How do I go backwards on this? Oh, there it is. There's the planter that I use, and notice on the ground it's covered. I strive to never have bare ground on anything. We always plan into heavy cover if we possibly can at all. And for the person that asked, can you have too much cover? No, you can't, not in my country.

5:21 I tried this when we started cover cropping back in '05. This picture has been around a long time. There's 70 bushel wheat stubble underneath that forage sorghum, and I'm planting peas into.

5:37 We were trying to do everything we could to keep the ground covered. We were having huge problems running out of residue and having bare ground. This field was going to be planted to cotton, which I don't plant anymore, and I wanted 100% residue cover when the cotton was harvested. That's why we did this sort of thing to keep cover on the ground.

6:02 Of course this was '05-'06, it never rained. This was the only field to dry land cotton in my entire county that even got harvested because we saved the moisture that we had from the winter before. Since it never rained in the growing season.

6:23 This is a cover mix that I planted this year. It's part of a conservation Innovation Grant with Dr. Jason Warren at OSU. He's monitoring it. Doesn't pay for anything, but at least he.

6:40 Monitors it and documents it for me. This is a one-third legumes and two-thirds grasses and got a few broadleaves thrown in with it, some buckwheat and sunflower.

7:00 Up until last year, this is the first time I ever had cattle on any of my places on purpose. During the droughts, my neighbors' fences fell down quite often, but the purpose of this is I had a new set of farms with heavy, heavy tillage, low pH, very abused ground. And there's another farm actually across the road from this one, and I wanted to see if I could convert it to no-till with forages and cattle better than I could the way I normally do it, which is where I just start cropping it. So we had grain sorghum across.

8:54 Days later I'm planting the cool season mix directly into it and that same afternoon we came back and sprayed a quarter glyphosate across the top of that to kill what was left and we got a good stand of U soft wheat, rape seed and radish mixed in with it.

9:21 This is what it looked like immediately after planting. It's like even when we graze I still don't want to see any dirt if I can help it. That's why we left a lot of residue on this farm.

9:39 Here's a little better view of it. This is a few weeks later we've got a good stand. We killed out everything and the ground is covered good. We've had several flooding rains in November and December and.

9:58 This farm was notorious. It's very steep, lots of terraces. It's notorious for breaking terraces, for washing erosion problems. And the owner of this farm just couldn't believe it. He said I cannot believe that you didn't break any terraces out there. He had farmed it his entire life, and then he rented it to another guy and then finally to me. But he was really impressed, and I know I'll have these farms as long as he's around.

10:37 This is a picture of the same field just Sunday I guess it was. I took these pictures last weekend. There's a lot of forage out there. We haven't put any cattle on it yet. We intended to, but the guy that had the cattle backed out. I'm kind of glad.

10:58 He did because it's been so wet, but we intend to move cattle in here and graze this out and go back to another warm season forage crop. We're going to do this for at least two full years for Dr. Warren to get some good information on it.

11:19 This is another picture—a couple of the radishes everybody likes to take pictures of big radishes. These things are about a foot to 16 inches long, probably 3 inches thick. There's another thing: we had a lot of hard pan on this farm, and I wanted the forage rape and the radishes in here to try to help bust that up, as well as having the sunflowers in the warm season mixes to get through this hard pan.

12:01 This is another, this is a little strip trial. The cow peas on the left are just for production, but on the other side we grew this. My house is right in the background, but I did this strip and then I did right on the other side of it a pollinator mix, and my wife now says I have to do that every year because she loves to take pictures. We had all kinds of bees and butterflies and every kind of bug you could imagine, and we had doe deer raising fawns in that strip. It's only 30 feet wide, but they were in there all summer long, and then all winter they bed down in this thing right here next to the house, and she thought that was pretty neat.

12:54 This is a picture of that same mix, and I wanted to point out the cow peas climbed about six feet up into this mess. It's just a massive amount of forage. It was really impressive. And we're going to try to do some more stuff like that, like on a field scale, and do some grazing on it.