Nebraska Cover Crop & Soil Health Conference - Jay Fuhrer

University of Nebraska Eastern Nebraska Research and Extension Center Author

02/25/2019 Added

80 Plays

Description

The 2019 Nebraska Cover Crop and Soil Health Conference featured innovative speakers who have worked with cover crops extensively and shared what they have learned. There are many benefits to utilizing cover crops, such as improved soil heath and reduced erosion. It is the details of how and what to do that can present challenges. The focus of the conference was to provide information to growers who are in a corn/soybean rotation and to assist them in understanding the value of cover crops.

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[00:00:28.077]Happy to see that, Ed. Very easily.
[00:00:30.150]And anyway, Jay is gonna share with us
[00:00:34.220]his experiences and knowledge regarding
[00:00:38.550]managing soils and how it may
[00:00:41.500]or how it will enhance the soil health.
[00:00:44.900]So please welcome, from Bismarck, North Dakota,
[00:00:47.600]Jay Fuhrer.
[00:00:48.753](audience applauding)
[00:00:54.720]Well, good morning.
[00:00:55.553]Good morning. Am I coming through okay?
[00:00:57.630]Yes. All right.
[00:00:59.480]I feel a little pressure after the last speaker.
[00:01:01.670]You know how he kinda subtly
[00:01:03.620]turned the valve down a little bit?
[00:01:05.410]You know, he's good at that.
[00:01:06.320]He's professional, right?
[00:01:08.680]So appreciate being here.
[00:01:10.850]My wife and I drove down yesterday, left Bismarck.
[00:01:13.760]And by the time we got to Wahoo,
[00:01:16.610]we had a 60 degree change.
[00:01:20.840]So thank you. (laughs)
[00:01:22.876](audience laughing)
[00:01:26.110]So we appreciate that.
[00:01:28.010]Just kinda wanna share some things with you today.
[00:01:30.100]And if you have a question, holler it out.
[00:01:33.350]I'll do what I do in North Dakota.
[00:01:34.920]I just kind of ignore them and just keep talking.
[00:01:38.200]But go ahead, keep asking, doesn't bother me any.
[00:01:42.080]Nah, seriously, I think I look at this
[00:01:44.370]as we're kind of all in this together.
[00:01:47.010]And I think when I take a look at thinking back a little bit
[00:01:52.520]when David was talking, for many years,
[00:01:55.080]I monitored soils in North Dakota
[00:01:57.330]because I had this opportunity to ride along
[00:02:00.240]on some changes that occurred within the state,
[00:02:03.790]where we went from full-tillage systems
[00:02:07.290]to full no-till systems
[00:02:09.410]to eventually no-till systems with cover crops
[00:02:12.240]and then to eventually some of these systems
[00:02:14.550]evolving in with a livestock aspect as well.
[00:02:17.720]And so I was kinda the guy that had a chance to ride along
[00:02:20.480]and do a little bit of soils work on these systems
[00:02:23.010]because I had done it when it was tillage.
[00:02:26.020]And so therein lied an interesting scenario.
[00:02:29.140]So I can tell you, since a number of these systems
[00:02:32.130]were mixed, mixed operations with livestock
[00:02:36.430]and without livestock, cropland acres, livestock acres,
[00:02:40.280]so I can tell you from a fair bit of soil monitoring
[00:02:43.280]that in that part of the state, in North Dakota,
[00:02:46.000]we had harvested out, in 130-year period of farming,
[00:02:49.760]and that's about what agriculture production was
[00:02:51.950]around that Bismarck area, 130, maybe 135,
[00:02:55.840]in that period of time,
[00:02:57.160]we've harvested out over half the carbon.
[00:03:00.560]I think you saw that figure pop up on David's talk,
[00:03:04.210]and I thought, that's pretty accurate,
[00:03:06.700]'cause if I did some soils work on cropland,
[00:03:10.750]I would also pull some in the native grass.
[00:03:14.300]At the time, I didn't know how valuable that would be,
[00:03:16.880]but as time rolled along, it became more valuable.
[00:03:20.450]So I would go back, and I would look at that,
[00:03:22.730]and in the native range land,
[00:03:24.640]with 100-plus species of plants,
[00:03:27.880]I might end up with six, 7%,
[00:03:31.360]sometimes as high as eight or more
[00:03:33.910]on soil organic matter in the native grasslands.
[00:03:37.657]I'd go to the cropland fields on the same farm.
[00:03:40.510]They would be less than half of that.
[00:03:42.960]So if they were seven in the grasslands,
[00:03:45.100]maybe they were three in the cropland.
[00:03:47.900]Now, think about that.
[00:03:50.130]Because the soil that was on the grassland acres
[00:03:53.530]was considered not as good, right?
[00:03:57.240]Because you went and broke out the better acres, all right?
[00:04:02.010]And so now the better acres are less than half
[00:04:06.430]of the carbon of the so-called not-as-good acres, okay?
[00:04:11.690]So you start putting that in perspective,
[00:04:14.290]that's a bigger hit than half, isn't it?
[00:04:17.860]Yeah, so kind of a sobering thing.
[00:04:20.960]I work during the summers at the Menoken Farm,
[00:04:23.700]and the Menoken Farm is a conservation demonstration farm.
[00:04:27.700]It's owned by the Burleigh County
[00:04:29.550]Soil Conservation District.
[00:04:31.690]But I've got kind of an informal arrangement
[00:04:34.070]where I spend some time there during the summer.
[00:04:36.670]And the interesting thing there is there's a railroad track.
[00:04:40.980]And so 24/7, there's cars going by there.
[00:04:45.100]And these cars are loaded with old sunshine carbon,
[00:04:48.870]right, every one of them.
[00:04:51.790]And so they're loaded up mostly with oil or coal, okay?
[00:04:56.620]And they are typically going east loaded,
[00:04:58.810]coming back west empty, usually, okay?
[00:05:02.240]Very rarely that we ever see a grain cargo
[00:05:05.690]'cause they can't compete.
[00:05:07.120]They can't compete on the rail.
[00:05:09.060]And so most of that ends up in a truck, okay?
[00:05:12.540]And so I'm used to seeing this old sunshine carbon go by,
[00:05:16.300]and I have some photos that sometimes I'm
[00:05:19.120]taking a picture of a cropland field at the Menoken Farm,
[00:05:22.470]and there'll invariably be a train in the back of it.
[00:05:25.370]And I'll always say to them, never in Nebraska,
[00:05:27.540]but these other states, I'll say to them,
[00:05:29.840]I hope that's not too much for you
[00:05:31.980]because I got old sunshine carbon in the back on the rail,
[00:05:34.990]and we got new sunshine carbon
[00:05:36.560]in the cropland field in front of you.
[00:05:38.810]And it's just such a contrast.
[00:05:41.040]It's a contrast of geological time, okay?
[00:05:44.610]And I think our task is how do we learn to farm
[00:05:47.690]with this whole scenario with new sunshine carbon, okay?
[00:05:51.650]And then I might as well just
[00:05:52.930]get all the confession out of my soul right away
[00:05:55.340]and talk to you a little bit more.
[00:05:57.290]First time I looked at cover crops,
[00:05:58.870]I'll tell you my exact opinion.
[00:06:02.230]They're okay for you, but I don't want them.
[00:06:07.420]They're all right.
[00:06:09.170]You go ahead.
[00:06:10.630]If you want them, take all your moisture
[00:06:13.550]and all your nutrient, and you gotta buy them,
[00:06:17.180]and you gotta seed them and blah, blah, blah.
[00:06:20.810]That was my first thought on them.
[00:06:23.670]It took me a while to get my head wrapped around
[00:06:26.263]that if we're gonna pull, if we're gonna be serious
[00:06:28.920]about pulling out of this carbon deficit we're in,
[00:06:32.350]I think David really set the stage well and explained,
[00:06:35.700]especially going back in time, explained what we're in.
[00:06:39.360]If we're gonna seriously pull out of that,
[00:06:42.400]I thought to myself later, probably years later,
[00:06:46.290]yeah, maybe these cover crops are kind of important.
[00:06:50.360]And so I started working with them some
[00:06:52.810]and started in earnest in 2006
[00:06:56.160]with the multi-specie covers.
[00:06:59.140]And then eventually I got to the point
[00:07:01.000]where I thought, okay, these are important.
[00:07:03.880]And more recently, I got to the point where it's like,
[00:07:07.260]I no longer think they're important.
[00:07:08.660]I think they're essential.
[00:07:11.210]There is a principle, soil health principle,
[00:07:13.320]that talks about a continual live plant, right?
[00:07:16.700]We got this soil health principle
[00:07:18.190]that talks about a continual live plant.
[00:07:21.310]How are you gonna do that without the cover crop,
[00:07:23.740]unless you're in a perennial, okay?
[00:07:26.200]But typically, you're not.
[00:07:27.840]You're in annual crop production.
[00:07:30.370]And so I started looking at this whole scenario,
[00:07:33.230]and I was visiting with Dan Gillespie a little bit before,
[00:07:36.320]and I said, you know, the whole thing with cover crops
[00:07:38.520]is it really touches every principle.
[00:07:41.520]It touches armor or the protection of the soil surface,
[00:07:45.070]touches diversity.
[00:07:47.030]It touches continual live plant.
[00:07:48.980]Why do you want that continual live plant?
[00:07:51.640]How else are you gonna harvest the CO2?
[00:07:55.310]I had to get it in my head that every green plant
[00:07:58.200]is a carbon inlet.
[00:08:01.200]Every green plant is a carbon inlet.
[00:08:03.170]And I had to start to understand
[00:08:04.610]that when I don't have a green plant,
[00:08:06.280]I can't harvest carbon.
[00:08:08.440]I'm not bringing in that exudate
[00:08:10.270]that we heard is 30 to 40% of the energy
[00:08:14.730]from the sunlight and the CO2 coming into the plant.
[00:08:17.710]That 30 to 40% of that photosynthetic energy
[00:08:20.920]goes to this exudate out of the plant root.
[00:08:25.240]Is that a small number?
[00:08:27.579]No, that's not a small number.
[00:08:29.750]That's a big number, and that's why we see some changes
[00:08:33.050]in our carbon levels when we bring cover crops in.
[00:08:37.950]That's why we see some of these changes.
[00:08:41.240]And so I had to get my head wrapped around this.
[00:08:43.140]In the first half of my career,
[00:08:45.100]I spent it building structures.
[00:08:47.880]We couldn't get the water in the ground.
[00:08:50.226]It just ran off.
[00:08:52.350]You know, an inch of rain
[00:08:53.210]was not an inch of rain in the profile.
[00:08:56.070]We'd send a fair bit of it down the slope
[00:08:58.920]and to the road ditch and gone.
[00:09:01.280]And so I had to get my head wrapped around that as well,
[00:09:03.410]so I built everything from diversions
[00:09:05.620]to terraces to waterways.
[00:09:08.130]I built them all.
[00:09:09.470]The sad thing about it, I was really good at it.
[00:09:12.040]So Dan, just telling you.
[00:09:13.730]I was tops in the nation at building a structure.
[00:09:16.470]I had more job approval authority
[00:09:18.380]under the engineering umbrella
[00:09:19.810]than probably any employee.
[00:09:22.657]I was really good at it.
[00:09:24.370]The sad thing about it was I was treating the symptom.
[00:09:27.480]It wasn't the problem, it was the symptom.
[00:09:30.310]So you gotta get your head wrapped around that for a while.
[00:09:33.100]Probably the hardest thing for me to accept was later,
[00:09:37.160]a vast majority of those, they were never needed.
[00:09:41.850]What we needed to do was improve our infiltration.
[00:09:45.460]Did that mean a change?
[00:09:48.624]Yes.
[00:09:50.070]Did we need a change?
[00:09:52.420]Yeah, I think so.
[00:09:54.710]And sometimes that's the hard part.
[00:09:56.770]I don't care if you're working in production agriculture
[00:10:00.350]directly as a farmer, or if you're working in the industry.
[00:10:04.750]That change part's kinda hard,
[00:10:06.920]and because what are we concerned about?
[00:10:09.270]Well, we could fail.
[00:10:10.840]I think we rarely ask ourselves,
[00:10:13.000]what are we gonna do if we succeed?
[00:10:17.830]We're much better, especially in the Northern Plains,
[00:10:20.640]German heritage, we're much better at saying,
[00:10:23.070]wow, what if I fail?
[00:10:24.620]You know, we're really good at that part.
[00:10:26.850]And so that was a big change.
[00:10:29.240]And I think at the time, we never envisioned
[00:10:33.430]where it was gonna go.
[00:10:34.310]And we had no idea, we had formed a team,
[00:10:37.610]we had no idea where we were going.
[00:10:40.340]We only knew what we were doing wasn't working.
[00:10:44.730]Now, I'm gonna explain something else to you.
[00:10:46.520]When you look at the whole big picture on this,
[00:10:49.070]it isn't that people weren't economically viable yet
[00:10:52.410]at the time we made the change.
[00:10:55.040]They were still economically viable
[00:10:56.980]because we still had some carbon left to harvest.
[00:11:01.900]Right?
[00:11:03.470]So my question, to start the talk out,
[00:11:06.870]is why do we till in the US?
[00:11:12.340]Why did we till even way beyond
[00:11:14.560]when we needed to till anymore?
[00:11:17.210]We could've gone into no-till systems sooner,
[00:11:19.300]but we till for a lot of the same reason
[00:11:22.160]that we frack an oil well, right?
[00:11:26.350]We frack an oil well because it accelerates
[00:11:28.890]or greatly enhances the production
[00:11:31.350]of oil in that well, right?
[00:11:33.320]So it's a release.
[00:11:34.990]It's a release.
[00:11:36.605]Why did we till?
[00:11:39.090]Big release.
[00:11:40.560]It's a big release of carbon, big release in nutrient.
[00:11:43.460]We mineralized it.
[00:11:45.490]It was a system that served us pretty well in that area
[00:11:49.020]for, like I said, we've been farming it 130 years.
[00:11:52.140]We've been in the no-till systems,
[00:11:53.550]moved into them in the '90s.
[00:11:55.700]So it went for a long time, but it was at the expense
[00:11:59.250]of the resource, so our economics.
[00:12:02.040]So sometimes I'll have somebody ask,
[00:12:04.736]some aspect of tillage, and they'll challenge my economics.
[00:12:07.760]I can be more economical than you can.
[00:12:10.180]My answer usually is I think you can
[00:12:15.760]'cause you're taking something
[00:12:18.040]that I'm accumulating and putting back.
[00:12:21.400]It's really hard to compare apples to oranges, isn't it,
[00:12:25.310]when you wanna do economics.
[00:12:27.670]I get very frustrated with our economics
[00:12:30.170]in production agriculture because many times,
[00:12:33.470]we're comparing two extreme things that don't even relate.
[00:12:38.020]And so I look at that whole situation,
[00:12:41.470]and if we're going to bring community wealth,
[00:12:46.240]that takes carbon in the soil,
[00:12:49.150]if we're gonna bring community wealth.
[00:12:50.760]If we're gonna transfer land within a family,
[00:12:53.580]not just transferring an asset, but transferring a farm
[00:12:57.860]that somebody's going to farm with a conservation ethic,
[00:13:01.830]remember that, remember those days, the conservation ethic,
[00:13:05.030]if you're gonna transfer all of that,
[00:13:06.910]that takes carbon in the soil to be successful.
[00:13:10.900]And if there isn't much carbon left in that soil,
[00:13:13.820]that transfer usually just becomes a transfer of an asset.
[00:13:19.000]So if we're gonna built communities,
[00:13:21.620]and we're going to do these type things,
[00:13:23.260]I think that takes carbon in the soil.
[00:13:26.360]And what I wanna start with today is
[00:13:30.365]I wanna start with doing a few soil demos.
[00:13:34.380]And one of them is I harvested,
[00:13:36.930]I went out to the Menoken Farm
[00:13:38.340]before I left yesterday morning,
[00:13:39.800]and I went out to one of the fields
[00:13:41.260]where I got oats growing, okay,
[00:13:44.900]you're probably too far south to get that one.
[00:13:47.152](audience laughs)
[00:13:47.985]See, we're really frozen solid.
[00:13:51.300]Everything is snow.
[00:13:54.360]So I had this inside.
[00:13:56.290]So I went inside one of the buildings,
[00:13:58.230]and I harvested out some oats, okay,
[00:14:00.830]'cause I wanna start where we need to start.
[00:14:03.070]I wanna start with root mass, okay?
[00:14:05.680]And Mark was good enough
[00:14:08.510]to tolerate all this setup here,
[00:14:12.150]and I said, let's go ahead and take a magnifier.
[00:14:16.000]That's just one of these that you hook into the laptop.
[00:14:21.070]And we have
[00:14:25.480]probably the start of what,
[00:14:26.860]in my opinion, should be the start
[00:14:28.360]of just about any soil health meeting,
[00:14:30.870]we have the root of the matter, right?
[00:14:33.820]And so we start looking at that whole scenario.
[00:14:37.140]So can anybody describe what they're seeing right here,
[00:14:40.340]besides a shaking hand?
[00:14:43.660]What do you see there?
[00:14:44.950]What do you see?
[00:14:46.526]Roots.
[00:14:47.359]Root mass.
[00:14:48.260]What do you see in addition to that?
[00:14:50.650]Clumps of soil.
[00:14:51.483]Yeah, there's some clumps of soil on there.
[00:14:54.510]Okay.
[00:14:55.680]How did those get on there?
[00:14:59.000]Yeah.
[00:15:00.060]Yeah, I don't know you, but I kinda like you, okay.
[00:15:02.895](audience laughs)
[00:15:03.728]And so we had these sugars come off of this,
[00:15:09.790]food, carbon food, who ate it?
[00:15:13.982]Microbes.
[00:15:14.815]Microbes.
[00:15:15.950]We gotta get that in our head, right?
[00:15:18.830]CO2 into the stomata, right,
[00:15:21.560]during the sunlight hours, okay?
[00:15:23.990]And what comes out of the stomata?
[00:15:27.700]Yeah, a little bit of water vapor and oxygen.
[00:15:31.410]And then we got the carbon in the plant,
[00:15:34.060]and we heard David talk about 30 to 40%
[00:15:37.320]coming out is that liquid exudate, okay?
[00:15:40.960]So when we have that carbon sugar,
[00:15:44.135]the biology's going to consume that,
[00:15:45.497]and the feeding frenzy, as he explained to us,
[00:15:47.840]is right around that plant, okay?
[00:15:50.180]So we have something then hanging on that root mass,
[00:15:53.490]especially if it's fibrous.
[00:15:56.070]Now, we had a picture of David Brandt up there,
[00:15:58.100]and you've all seen this David Brandt picture
[00:16:00.010]where he's got this humongous radish root.
[00:16:03.428]Have you ever seen that picture of him with that?
[00:16:05.140]Yeah.
[00:16:05.973]And you notice how, what did that radish look like?
[00:16:09.280]Was it hanging full of soil?
[00:16:11.640]No, it was clean, wasn't it?
[00:16:14.470]Why?
[00:16:16.170]'Cause that's really not,
[00:16:18.160]because you really have to have a fibrous root
[00:16:20.860]to build aggregates.
[00:16:22.540]That radish root's gonna build a bit macropore
[00:16:26.080]into the soil, okay, like a big interstate, a macropore.
[00:16:30.480]Now, what happens if you put the two together?
[00:16:34.120]You have the big radish root, and you have a fibrous.
[00:16:37.410]Now, all of a sudden, you got the macropore,
[00:16:39.810]and you got the ability to build the small pore spaces
[00:16:43.380]or the micropores, the start of improving infiltration,
[00:16:49.500]okay?
[00:16:50.500]Because eventually what you start to see,
[00:16:52.947]and I wanna share a story with you,
[00:16:55.600]eventually what you start to see with a no-till system
[00:16:57.980]that doesn't have enough carbon in it,
[00:17:00.620]you start to get collapsed soils,
[00:17:02.230]and a lot of the water, again, runs off.
[00:17:05.150]Okay, you start to see collapsed soils.
[00:17:07.750]So I'm in Argentina, and I'm on a farm,
[00:17:12.810]and it's the World Congress of CA type meeting.
[00:17:16.940]And some high-profile farmers are there,
[00:17:20.904]and they're gonna take the American out to a farm.
[00:17:24.350]And it's a 25, 30-year no-tiller.
[00:17:27.170]And he said, I have fantastic soils.
[00:17:29.137]And I said, tell me what you've been doing.
[00:17:30.870]Well, he said, I've grown soybeans five years in a row.
[00:17:34.160]But they're all no-till.
[00:17:37.060]Okay.
[00:17:38.917]He said, let's look at the soil.
[00:17:40.240]And I said, no, let's go in and drink coffee.
[00:17:44.630]Why did I say that?
[00:17:48.670]I didn't really want this person to be all that embarrassed.
[00:17:53.760]But he insisted.
[00:17:55.690]And so we got a spade, and we went out
[00:17:57.480]and popped it in the soil.
[00:17:59.030]He probably hadn't put a spade in the soil in a long time.
[00:18:02.280]What do you think we found?
[00:18:05.220]It's collapsed soils.
[00:18:07.320]All the classical horizontal layering.
[00:18:10.530]Why?
[00:18:11.865]It's a no-till system, right?
[00:18:14.360]Why?
[00:18:16.100]There's just not enough carbon.
[00:18:17.440]Soybeans aren't evil.
[00:18:19.700]There's no evil crop.
[00:18:22.610]But if we take a really low food crop
[00:18:25.950]and grow it year after year after year after year,
[00:18:28.740]that's not enough food coming into the system
[00:18:32.660]to build these aggregates.
[00:18:34.880]How long does a soil aggregate last?
[00:18:40.450]Maybe a month.
[00:18:41.720]Maybe a month, maybe days.
[00:18:43.920]Depends how long it took them to eat the glues off of there,
[00:18:47.200]right, 'cause that's a food, also.
[00:18:49.470]So a soil aggregate only lasts, ah,
[00:18:52.110]I've looked at a lot of data, maybe an average,
[00:18:54.830]five, six weeks is maybe an average.
[00:18:56.950]So it's a gluing and a re-gluing continually, right?
[00:19:00.930]So you look at the amount of food,
[00:19:02.660]you take a soybean crop at 29 to one, 30 to one,
[00:19:06.080]whatever the C:N ratio is of soybean, that's pretty close.
[00:19:09.370]You look at corn, which is quite a bit higher,
[00:19:12.420]probably more like 65 to one.
[00:19:15.020]And then you take a look at, let's just go to a small grain,
[00:19:19.320]what would wheat be?
[00:19:20.153]Anybody remember a crop called wheat?
[00:19:22.220]Does anybody remember that? (audience laughing)
[00:19:23.480]What would the C:N ratio of that crop be?
[00:19:27.160]Yeah, 80, 80 to one.
[00:19:29.970]So the higher that number, the more carbon, right,
[00:19:33.020]the more food comes into that system, okay?
[00:19:37.430]So we started looking at that,
[00:19:38.557]and then the other big advantage of that small grain crop
[00:19:42.090]was they were usually what, all fibrous root, right?
[00:19:47.350]So a fibrous root builds it back.
[00:19:49.800]Well, so we took a look at that whole scenario,
[00:19:52.260]and we said to ourselves, we can bring in covers.
[00:19:56.370]That's another way to offset and augment.
[00:19:58.660]We can bring in additional cash crops.
[00:20:01.700]I feel real fortunate in North Dakota
[00:20:03.460]because we still grow a fair bit of sunflower,
[00:20:06.600]canola, flax, small grains, soybean, corn.
[00:20:11.450]I feel pretty good because we have a fair bit of diversity.
[00:20:14.300]And we still have some livestock base.
[00:20:16.830]These are things that augment
[00:20:19.440]or offset our production systems.
[00:20:23.210]Because in agriculture, what do we do?
[00:20:26.700]We're gonna harvest something in agriculture.
[00:20:29.200]And we're gonna put wheels under it, most likely.
[00:20:31.920]And it's gonna go to an ethanol plant,
[00:20:34.030]or it's gonna go for people food,
[00:20:35.910]or it's gonna go for livestock food,
[00:20:38.130]but it's gonna go somewheres.
[00:20:39.780]And many times in production agriculture,
[00:20:42.240]what are we willing to do to offset?
[00:20:45.970]What are we willing to do?
[00:20:48.030]And I think for the people that are accustomed
[00:20:52.310]to putting a spade in the ground and looking,
[00:20:54.740]they're much more in-tuned to this.
[00:20:57.500]And so I'm at a meeting in North Dakota,
[00:21:00.320]and there was a meeting of my peers.
[00:21:02.400]So it was a internal agency meeting.
[00:21:05.380]And we got talking about some of these type things
[00:21:08.180]in the open discussion.
[00:21:10.230]And I said, look at your fingernails.
[00:21:13.740]There was a time when we would have these meetings,
[00:21:16.620]and we all had soil under our nails.
[00:21:20.690]I said, look at your fingernails.
[00:21:22.490]Then I went to a farmer meeting, and I said the same thing.
[00:21:26.660]Look at your fingernails.
[00:21:29.050]Your hands tell us a story, right?
[00:21:32.920]And so we've kinda lost some of that touch,
[00:21:35.300]and I think the whole scenario on soil health
[00:21:37.820]is coming back to those foundation principles
[00:21:41.190]with modern agriculture and modern technology
[00:21:45.090]and building back a system.
[00:21:47.640]So with that, let's just put this under the magnifier.
[00:21:51.940]And I just have a white sheet of paper here.
[00:21:55.960]And the magnifier is pretty simple.
[00:21:57.410]It just plugs into the laptop,
[00:21:59.590]and it's got a little adjustment on it.
[00:22:01.930]And let's go ahead because we should be able
[00:22:04.800]to see soil aggregates, right?
[00:22:08.210]So we should be able to see that.
[00:22:09.650]And who builds them?
[00:22:12.520]Yeah, the soil food web, the microbes.
[00:22:14.580]They build these aggregates.
[00:22:16.350]And then the plant and the microbes together
[00:22:18.580]make the glues that hold them together,
[00:22:21.360]'cause you notice, they don't come off, do they?
[00:22:23.160]They don't shake off.
[00:22:24.490]You'd have to rub them off, right?
[00:22:27.320]Okay?
[00:22:28.153]So let's go ahead.
[00:22:30.760]I put them down just on a white sheet of paper
[00:22:32.880]because I find that a little easier to,
[00:22:36.672]gives me something to put the magnifier down on.
[00:22:42.520]Okay, let's try that.
[00:22:45.980]And then we'll adjust it in a little bit.
[00:22:54.160]Tell me what you see.
[00:22:58.940]Tell me what you see.
[00:22:59.773]That's a little, that's a little root here.
[00:23:03.500]Yeah, see how small all of those soil aggregates are?
[00:23:08.420]And you see how they're all different sizes?
[00:23:12.150]So they have different pore spaces then in between them.
[00:23:15.700]So you've got places that bacteria can hide
[00:23:18.240]or places that fungi, protozoa, nematodes,
[00:23:21.803]Actinomyces, whatever they are.
[00:23:24.150]They're all different sizes.
[00:23:26.430]And so all this life takes place in that little micro,
[00:23:29.530]that little micropore space, okay?
[00:23:32.930]So it's that little air pocket.
[00:23:34.990]It's kinda like we all came into this air pocket
[00:23:37.440]through that door, so when infiltration occurs,
[00:23:41.020]water has to find a pore space.
[00:23:44.870]Now we're building pore spaces.
[00:23:47.460]And so we take a look at that,
[00:23:49.590]and what I like about this is kinda gives us a little bit
[00:23:54.480]of a better look, there we go,
[00:23:57.160]little bit of a better look.
[00:23:59.170]That's just one little hair on the root system
[00:24:03.410]covered with soil aggregates.
[00:24:05.440]So when you're putting in a cover crop,
[00:24:07.480]you start to understand you're building these back.
[00:24:10.320]And you're harvesting CO2.
[00:24:12.170]You're harvesting carbon during a period of time
[00:24:14.540]that you normally don't, right?
[00:24:17.430]So we started to understand this.
[00:24:19.990]Then we started to understand,
[00:24:21.310]if we took livestock in there, and I top it,
[00:24:25.160]and just graze the top half, that I can go ahead,
[00:24:28.640]and I can even increase this a bit.
[00:24:31.440]And due to plant physiology, it needs to regrow, right?
[00:24:35.180]So if I top it, and I leave a good leaf space for harvest,
[00:24:38.730]for its continuation of harvest of sunlight and CO2,
[00:24:42.550]then I can accelerate or even intensify this harvest.
[00:24:47.540]And so we end up bringing in more carbon, okay?
[00:24:51.100]So that was one of the advantages
[00:24:53.060]of the whole livestock aspect, okay, using them as a tool.
[00:24:58.570]And then we started to understand that if we,
[00:25:02.330]I'll do a little more right here,
[00:25:06.780]now, if you had to take your best guess
[00:25:08.830]at how many soil aggregates are there,
[00:25:17.640]let me focus that down a little better,
[00:25:19.840]I can give you the answer to that.
[00:25:21.427]And my answer usually is not enough, right?
[00:25:27.260]Not enough.
[00:25:28.940]Okay.
[00:25:33.783]All right.
[00:25:34.990]So we have that whole scenario.
[00:25:37.040]That's soil aggregates.
[00:25:38.800]That's one of the end products of the exudate
[00:25:43.480]that David explained coming into the soil from that plant.
[00:25:46.103]They're gonna build those soil aggregates.
[00:25:48.650]But in order to do that, they gotta have the food source.
[00:25:51.330]The food source is carbon, okay?
[00:25:56.130]All right, any questions so far?
[00:26:02.750]What I also learned to do is if we're going to graze it,
[00:26:06.730]I'll nip off a plant.
[00:26:08.940]I'll cut it off right above the ground,
[00:26:10.790]and I'll lay it on my hand, and I'll balance it
[00:26:13.223]'til it balances, okay?
[00:26:15.370]You have to step out of the wind in North Dakota,
[00:26:17.300]but you balance it, okay?
[00:26:19.510]So why do I do that before I turn the cattle in?
[00:26:24.940]To see how much they graze off.
[00:26:26.700]Exactly, 'cause I'm gonna harvest the top half by weight,
[00:26:30.117]and then I have my eye.
[00:26:32.150]So now I know when I turn them in,
[00:26:34.460]what that level's gonna be, okay?
[00:26:36.810]And I also know now I've left enough plant height
[00:26:39.690]with leaves on it to harvest CO2 and sunlight
[00:26:43.330]and to keep the production system going.
[00:26:45.570]'Cause remember, one of the principles
[00:26:46.840]is continual live plant.
[00:26:49.320]So when we have a continual live plant,
[00:26:51.590]we wanna go ahead and see that this happens, okay?
[00:26:54.900]All right.
[00:26:56.000]We're gonna move to a couple of soil demos here.
[00:27:00.610]And I wanna explain them in a way that you can go home
[00:27:03.620]and do them yourself, okay?
[00:27:06.300]And this first one is called slake.
[00:27:10.720]And what it really means
[00:27:12.190]is you saw the soil aggregates, right?
[00:27:15.810]Okay.
[00:27:16.890]So you saw the soil aggregates.
[00:27:21.760]That's got a bunch of them, right?
[00:27:23.900]Those are all soil aggregates in one clump.
[00:27:27.430]When water comes into them, it's gonna push
[00:27:30.040]and create a pressure, okay?
[00:27:32.410]If the pressure is greater than the glues,
[00:27:36.460]it'll start to microscopically slake off
[00:27:39.210]those little individual particles, okay?
[00:27:43.230]So you saw how they were made,
[00:27:44.870]and we saw a good look at them.
[00:27:46.380]They're tiny, and they're all oddly shaped.
[00:27:48.610]But when you get them all in here together,
[00:27:50.800]we call it a ped or a clod, right?
[00:27:53.560]So now we got a clod of soil.
[00:27:55.330]A bunch of soil aggregates, they gather, okay?
[00:27:58.360]So when we put it in water,
[00:28:00.410]we'll create that internal pressure.
[00:28:03.110]And if we have more pressure than glues,
[00:28:05.670]we're not aggregate, it's not stable.
[00:28:07.710]We don't have aggregate stability, okay?
[00:28:10.420]On the other hand, if we put it in the water,
[00:28:12.740]and it slakes very little, it's not so uncommon
[00:28:15.300]for some particles to fall off,
[00:28:17.260]but it slakes very little, and the water stays clear.
[00:28:19.870]That would be aggregate stability, okay?
[00:28:22.890]So when you go home, you take some of these,
[00:28:25.660]like next spring when the weather clears off,
[00:28:29.070]and it warms up, you take some of these off a field,
[00:28:32.520]and you set them on the pickup dash or windowsill
[00:28:35.240]so they can dry.
[00:28:36.610]They have to dry.
[00:28:37.890]They can be whatever size you want, okay?
[00:28:41.090]That's plenty big.
[00:28:42.080]I got some smaller, some bigger,
[00:28:43.670]but that's kind of an average.
[00:28:45.210]And if you still have a fence line,
[00:28:47.980]does anyone have a fence line?
[00:28:49.760]Okay.
[00:28:50.672]If you still have a fence line,
[00:28:52.040]take something in a fence line.
[00:28:54.390]Okay, I got some clients who don't have a fence line.
[00:28:57.590]My neighbor at the Menoken Farm, my nextdoor neighbor,
[00:29:01.540]has 40,000 acres.
[00:29:03.980]That's my neighbor.
[00:29:05.100]He's a lot of people's neighbors.
[00:29:07.640]Yeah.
[00:29:08.473]So it kinda gives you an idea where we're at on this thing.
[00:29:12.390]So if you have a fence line, take one out of the fence line.
[00:29:15.050]You don't need to compare yourself to anybody.
[00:29:17.120]You just compare it to your farm,
[00:29:18.760]your ecosystem that you've created, okay?
[00:29:21.920]Take one out of the fence line.
[00:29:22.960]Take one out of the garden.
[00:29:23.930]Take one out of the cropland.
[00:29:25.500]Take one out of the cropland
[00:29:27.260]that has had a history of cover crops.
[00:29:29.670]Take one out of the croplands that had no history of covers,
[00:29:32.320]or maybe a history of tillage or no tillage,
[00:29:34.910]whatever you have, and dry them.
[00:29:38.040]And then go through this process.
[00:29:40.850]You'll want a taller container
[00:29:42.380]because you wanna be able to see that slaking action.
[00:29:45.430]If you don't have a taller container,
[00:29:46.940]it's more difficult to see it.
[00:29:49.440]The older you get, the bigger the container you like,
[00:29:52.880]okay, I'm here to tell you.
[00:29:54.740]I got this card in the mail the other day,
[00:29:57.990]and Dan, you don't know anything about this,
[00:29:59.530]but I got this card in the mail the other day.
[00:30:01.840]It's an exclusive club that you belong to.
[00:30:05.840]I think it's called Medicare.
[00:30:08.180]And I'm like, what the heck?
[00:30:09.970]I always thought that was for old men.
[00:30:11.570]And my wife explained to me, it is, honey.
[00:30:13.885](audience laughing)
[00:30:14.850]So now I belong to this exclusive club.
[00:30:17.410]And haven't had a chance to use it yet, but maybe someday.
[00:30:21.450]And then I like a little bit of netting,
[00:30:23.220]and so the netting, I like to cut some out in the bottom,
[00:30:26.490]cut a little of the netting out
[00:30:27.700]so you get some stress on it, right?
[00:30:29.780]Don't coddle it.
[00:30:30.720]So I cut out some of the netting.
[00:30:33.660]And I like to do an example like this
[00:30:36.300]because, first of all, it doesn't cost anything, right?
[00:30:39.723]And you can repeat it as many times,
[00:30:41.670]and it tells you a wealth of information.
[00:30:44.340]And then here I just have high disturbance
[00:30:46.300]and low disturbance.
[00:30:47.280]So this particular one I took out here is high disturbance.
[00:30:51.240]I'm gonna show you what I use here.
[00:30:53.970]I'll show it on the camera.
[00:30:56.000]This is what I put in that one.
[00:30:57.760]Can you read that?
[00:30:59.973]That's the bad guys, okay?
[00:31:01.700]I like things simple.
[00:31:03.300]So I know this field has had a tough life, okay?
[00:31:07.150]There's no soil health principles on this field, all right?
[00:31:11.010]So I'm just gonna lay him down there with the netting.
[00:31:15.642]And he was kinda from the bad guys.
[00:31:18.440]Well, guess what that one says?
[00:31:23.880]So you gotta have some good guys, right?
[00:31:26.380]So I got some extremes here.
[00:31:28.810]First of all, it's darker.
[00:31:31.200]If it's darker, it probably has more what in it?
[00:31:33.360]Carbon. Probably got more carbon,
[00:31:35.420]'cause what's the color of carbon?
[00:31:37.672]Black. It's black, right?
[00:31:39.060]Coal, oil, think in those terms.
[00:31:42.000]Here we are.
[00:31:43.110]It's also rougher, bumpy.
[00:31:45.470]It's got some holes in it.
[00:31:47.120]So we got a whole different scenario.
[00:31:49.630]And then some of them, I have in here,
[00:31:51.160]some have something odd sticking out of them.
[00:31:53.360]Can you see that and explain,
[00:31:55.660]what do we got going there?
[00:31:56.630]Roots. Yeah, we got roots
[00:31:57.463]sticking out of this one.
[00:31:58.770]What the heck?
[00:31:59.603]All right?
[00:32:00.436]Green plant, all right.
[00:32:02.840]So we have that, and we're gonna put these
[00:32:05.720]in the two containers.
[00:32:10.500]Now, I usually tap them a little bit
[00:32:12.870]'cause if there's a part that's ready to just fall off,
[00:32:15.810]I'd just as soon it fell off right away.
[00:32:18.130]And I put them in the net.
[00:32:21.720]And then this is the one that's got the principles applied.
[00:32:25.645]Okay, and we got some bubbles coming to the surface.
[00:32:28.500]Typical soil is 25% air,
[00:32:31.670]right, 25% air, 25% water,
[00:32:35.120]45% sand, silt, and clay,
[00:32:38.170]5% soil organic matter.
[00:32:40.670]Of the sand, silt, and clay,
[00:32:41.960]which one holds your nutrient?
[00:32:45.160]The clay, okay?
[00:32:46.870]So that's always a good one to understand.
[00:32:50.790]So we got that one in the water.
[00:32:52.400]So water's coming in.
[00:32:53.680]It's creating a pressure now, okay?
[00:32:56.290]This is my one that has the principles applied.
[00:33:00.540]This one, not so much.
[00:33:04.370]So we're gonna put the, these are both loam soils,
[00:33:07.490]kinda like David showed, the two on the screen
[00:33:10.080]that were kind of extremes.
[00:33:11.210]These are both loams, okay?
[00:33:13.350]I always try to do loams to loams,
[00:33:14.940]clay to clay, sand to sand, that type of thing.
[00:33:18.110]Now, this one's gonna have water coming into it.
[00:33:21.110]And can you see the slaking occurring?
[00:33:23.700]Okay?
[00:33:24.590]So when we had water, when it would rain in the '80s,
[00:33:28.710]this is what would occur on our landscape
[00:33:31.540]with water erosion, because when they
[00:33:34.400]are no longer aggregate stability,
[00:33:36.600]they move really easy, really easy.
[00:33:40.630]And sometimes we'd be standing out there
[00:33:42.300]surveying a waterway that we were gonna construct,
[00:33:45.210]and we were going, it is so unbelievably flat.
[00:33:47.710]How could've that possibly eroded?
[00:33:49.640]I can't believe that it even eroded.
[00:33:52.080]It didn't matter after a while
[00:33:53.480]because when it gets to that point,
[00:33:55.720]any rain just takes it.
[00:33:57.980]It's gonna leave, okay?
[00:34:00.080]So that was our issue on that.
[00:34:01.897]And this was just one thing that we could do
[00:34:04.770]to take a look at it, get a little taller container
[00:34:07.700]and go to Jo-Ann Fabric, and you can get yarn jars.
[00:34:11.610]They look just like that.
[00:34:13.100]You can go to Walmart, get the cheese ball jars.
[00:34:15.950]That's what I do.
[00:34:17.244](audience laughing)
[00:34:19.800]And you never use them twice, okay?
[00:34:22.980]So you have to go back and get cheese ball jars,
[00:34:25.630]and I've taken the hit on that.
[00:34:27.940]So you look at that, and you'll start
[00:34:29.910]to understand water quality aspects as well.
[00:34:32.950]And so if you hear water quality concerns,
[00:34:36.850]yeah, this is probably a real issue
[00:34:39.280]because it's transporting everything.
[00:34:42.140]And then, could I ask you to step over here a second?
[00:34:46.630]Just take a look at the surface.
[00:34:48.760]What's on the surface?
[00:34:52.784]With this one, there's nothing on the surface.
[00:34:54.430]This one, there's quite a bit of air bubbles and film
[00:34:56.760]and even different probably light organic matter
[00:35:00.410]or particles floating.
[00:35:01.570]Yeah.
[00:35:02.403]Yeah, exactly.
[00:35:03.236]Rather clear, a little of everything.
[00:35:06.330]The technical soils term is scum.
[00:35:09.200]So if you get a chance, truly,
[00:35:12.090]so if you take a look, you have to sit down.
[00:35:15.069](audience laughing)
[00:35:16.930]Thank you.
[00:35:17.790]So if you take a look at this during break or whenever,
[00:35:20.230]come up and take a look at it.
[00:35:21.300]This one's gonna have a lot of that material on.
[00:35:23.350]So I grew up on my dad's farm.
[00:35:25.620]It was homesteaded land.
[00:35:29.100]I think we had to homestead the whole state
[00:35:30.810]and basically give it away so people would settle there.
[00:35:33.750]I don't know why.
[00:35:35.020]But anyway, when I grew up on it,
[00:35:37.480]my job was to spend the summers
[00:35:40.910]summer fallowing a third of the farm.
[00:35:43.730]So you would cultivate every field
[00:35:46.070]with usually a chisel plow.
[00:35:48.340]And when you got done with all the fields, guess what?
[00:35:52.780]You started over.
[00:35:53.930]That was five times.
[00:35:55.590]So typically, if your dad was German heritage,
[00:35:57.860]and mine had a little bit of German in him, like all,
[00:36:02.120]and so, also, you would look around,
[00:36:05.700]and if everybody did it five times,
[00:36:08.140]maybe you should do it six.
[00:36:10.110]And so you know how it'd work.
[00:36:11.960]If one weed grew in one place,
[00:36:13.820]you went and worked that entire field.
[00:36:15.760]And we did that for a number of years.
[00:36:17.730]And this scum always reminds me of,
[00:36:21.280]my dad picked me up at the end of the field one day,
[00:36:24.520]and it had just rained.
[00:36:25.760]That's why he picked me up.
[00:36:26.840]Otherwise, you keep working.
[00:36:29.220]So he picked me up, and we're driving down the road.
[00:36:32.380]And all this water ran off that field.
[00:36:34.580]My dad and I are talking about this.
[00:36:37.070]Man, we did a good job summer fallowing.
[00:36:39.170]That profile must be just so full of water,
[00:36:40.850]it can't hold any more.
[00:36:44.330]But that wasn't the case.
[00:36:46.260]What we had done is just sealed that surface off.
[00:36:49.070]And the water ran off and ran to the road ditch.
[00:36:52.020]Huge amounts of water coming off these fields
[00:36:54.470]'cause very little got in on a summer thunderstorm.
[00:36:59.500]And so it would hit the road ditch,
[00:37:00.910]and then it would swirl at the culvert.
[00:37:03.720]And on top of the swirl was a huge pile of foam,
[00:37:08.740]foamy scum.
[00:37:10.520]And so it wasn't just water coming off the field, was it?
[00:37:13.990]No, it was all the life coming right off the field as well.
[00:37:17.570]Okay?
[00:37:18.403]So this one is slake, but it, do it on your farm,
[00:37:22.440]and just take a number of different ones,
[00:37:24.860]you know the size of the ped, dry them.
[00:37:27.010]They gotta be dried.
[00:37:28.460]Get them in the sun for, a windowsill or something,
[00:37:31.030]for a week or so.
[00:37:31.863]Dry them good, turn them now and then.
[00:37:33.540]If you don't dry them, they offset the water
[00:37:37.280]trying to come in, and they just sit there and look at you.
[00:37:40.970]Okay?
[00:37:41.990]So you wanna get them dry so they actually have to perform.
[00:37:45.800]Okay?
[00:37:47.360]Any questions on slake?
[00:37:49.290]Everybody knows how to go home and do it?
[00:37:52.600]Then your job is to do it.
[00:37:55.230]This one is called tabletop runoff.
[00:37:58.590]And I've got one here, again, both loam soils,
[00:38:02.760]but I have one of them, I'm growing a cover crop on them.
[00:38:07.162]Okay?
[00:38:07.995]So this one's out of a no-till field.
[00:38:10.840]I harvested that out last fall,
[00:38:13.300]kept it in the shop this winter,
[00:38:15.220]gave it a little water now and then,
[00:38:16.750]maybe not quite enough always,
[00:38:18.480]but if I was around, I put a little water on it.
[00:38:21.220]This one over here is from the same field
[00:38:24.646]as this one right here, all right?
[00:38:27.200]So these two are from the same field, all right?
[00:38:30.100]Now, we had a practice standard.
[00:38:34.670]Remember the old ridge roughening days?
[00:38:37.850]Maybe you didn't have that in Nebraska,
[00:38:39.550]but in North Dakota, we had what we called ridge roughening.
[00:38:42.840]So if you had erosion, wintertime or not,
[00:38:47.190]you could go out, and you could roughen the ridges, right?
[00:38:51.010]And so I'm gonna give this one
[00:38:52.680]a little bit of ridge roughening,
[00:38:54.500]and I'm also going to deep till it,
[00:38:56.960]and I'm going to use vertical till as well.
[00:38:59.550]So I'll end it with a little bit of shallower scenario.
[00:39:04.290]And however many different ways you want me
[00:39:06.250]to do the passes, I don't care, we can do that.
[00:39:09.840]And the other reason I do that
[00:39:11.500]is because I did this workshop with David Brandt
[00:39:14.090]in Iowa one time, and the first day,
[00:39:17.160]these things ran like textbook, perfectly.
[00:39:21.320]The second day, David didn't bother to tell me
[00:39:24.430]he didn't take it out of his pickup, and this is wintertime.
[00:39:27.500]He didn't take it out of his pickup that night
[00:39:29.510]into the motel room, and it was frozen,
[00:39:32.010]but I didn't know that.
[00:39:33.236](audience laughing)
[00:39:35.250]And so I have the good guy just running water off
[00:39:38.810]like you've never seen.
[00:39:40.160]There's no way you could get water in it.
[00:39:42.540]And David is sitting there, and he's a big guy,
[00:39:44.560]and he's just, his whole body is just going up and down.
[00:39:47.590]He's thinking that's hilarious at my expense,
[00:39:49.910]and now, five years later, I think it's kinda funny.
[00:39:53.370]But at the time, it wasn't all that funny.
[00:39:56.730]And there's holes in these top pans.
[00:40:01.160]I usually seal some of those up,
[00:40:03.150]otherwise the water goes through there so unbelievably fast,
[00:40:06.770]and so just to slow the water down a little bit
[00:40:09.050]so it doesn't have a tsunami.
[00:40:12.370]And then you want the water in the bucket underneath.
[00:40:15.990]That's the infiltration bucket.
[00:40:18.050]And so you want the water to go through
[00:40:20.860]and into the infiltration bucket.
[00:40:23.710]We don't want the water in the runoff bucket, all right?
[00:40:27.430]So that's the runoff.
[00:40:30.150]And finishing that summer fallow story,
[00:40:34.590]years later, my dad said to me one day,
[00:40:36.890]he said, we're no longer gonna summer fallow.
[00:40:40.210]And I'm like, how can that be?
[00:40:42.340]That's what paid the bills, right?
[00:40:45.700]You harvest out the carbon, you pay the bills, right?
[00:40:47.820]That's how that was working.
[00:40:49.360]And he said, no, he said, we didn't know what it was doing.
[00:40:52.790]He didn't go into detail.
[00:40:53.850]He just said, we didn't know what it was doing at the time.
[00:40:57.460]And he said, but we're not gonna fallow anymore.
[00:41:00.160]And that was a big change.
[00:41:02.440]And eventually, that went across the Dakotas.
[00:41:05.330]But it still probably was a system
[00:41:08.590]that was used for a good 30 years,
[00:41:12.040]maybe longer, okay?
[00:41:14.370]Okay, so you got a predetermined amount of water,
[00:41:17.170]right about there, and we're gonna run that water in.
[00:41:20.650]And we'd like it to go into the infiltration buckets,
[00:41:25.120]not so much into the runoff bucket.
[00:41:30.820]So we'll let them run a bit.
[00:41:35.870]Sometimes you gotta put your hand across the holes
[00:41:39.880]because they'll airlock, okay,
[00:41:42.620]just to see that they're all going through.
[00:41:48.090]So you see, when I put my knife in there
[00:41:50.020]and how easy my knife went in there,
[00:41:51.500]it didn't matter, did it,
[00:41:53.210]because I don't have what in there?
[00:41:56.330]I don't have pore spaces.
[00:41:58.540]I've got collapsed structure, okay?
[00:42:01.700]So when you have collapsed structure,
[00:42:03.780]what happened here microscopically
[00:42:06.530]happens on the soil or the surface right here,
[00:42:08.630]and it seals it.
[00:42:11.010]And it seals those few pore spaces that are in there.
[00:42:13.790]And when it seals those few pore spaces that are in there,
[00:42:17.240]it's just game over.
[00:42:19.700]It's done, all right?
[00:42:21.660]Remember back in the tillage days,
[00:42:24.110]in the spring seeding, you would get a hard rain,
[00:42:28.840]and what would happen on the surface of the soil?
[00:42:31.540]Crust. A crust, yeah.
[00:42:34.020]Then one day you moved into no-till systems,
[00:42:36.150]and nobody knows what a crust is anymore, right?
[00:42:39.260]So if you have residue on the surface,
[00:42:41.310]take out the energy of the water,
[00:42:44.230]that's a big, big item, okay?
[00:42:46.510]That's a huge item because rainfall compaction
[00:42:49.320]onto bare soil is gonna seal a lot of your pore spaces shut
[00:42:53.790]if you don't have dead litter or green plant, okay?
[00:42:58.290]So I've got one here with a cover on, one without cover.
[00:43:03.380]I microscopically sealed.
[00:43:05.510]I've got water coming in here.
[00:43:07.240]I'm probably not gonna have much water erosion here.
[00:43:10.380]I'm gonna have a lot of water erosion here, okay?
[00:43:13.950]And then you're gonna talk to somebody like me
[00:43:16.100]who's gonna say, well, we probably should put a structure in
[00:43:18.380]and et cetera.
[00:43:19.213]That's what I would've told you
[00:43:20.190]in the first half of my career.
[00:43:22.740]Second half of my career, I would ask you
[00:43:24.720]to come to a meeting like this,
[00:43:27.360]and let's talk about getting the rain into the profile.
[00:43:30.880]Okay?
[00:43:31.713]Questions on, this one's just called tabletop runoff.
[00:43:35.200]Comes in a, I've got a black toolbox here.
[00:43:38.500]They just fit right in there.
[00:43:40.180]I like it 'cause I can take it into a board meeting.
[00:43:43.160]I can take it into a meeting like this.
[00:43:45.870]And Mark set up the camera on it.
[00:43:47.710]And everybody can get a good view of it.
[00:43:50.210]So you've got the option to work with it in that manner.
[00:43:53.600]And again, doesn't really cost anything.
[00:43:55.590]What I really like about these is when you go to the field,
[00:43:59.280]you take a block of wood, and you put it over top,
[00:44:01.300]take a big hammer, drive it down flush,
[00:44:04.440]pop it out with your spade, level it off,
[00:44:06.520]put that little grate underneath it.
[00:44:10.120]These are just sitting on there.
[00:44:12.000]This little wire grate it sits on,
[00:44:13.810]you put that on underneath so the soil can't fall out.
[00:44:17.300]And you've got the integrity of the field
[00:44:19.410]right there in front of you.
[00:44:21.010]So I like that a lot from the viewpoint
[00:44:23.750]of getting a good integrity of your sample, okay?
[00:44:27.490]So do that one when you get a chance.
[00:44:30.380]Questions on any of, soil aggregates that we looked at
[00:44:34.920]on the magnifier or the slake or the tabletop runoff?
[00:44:38.800]Any questions?
[00:44:40.990]Yes, sir.
[00:44:42.480]Is your soil dry on your sample on the left
[00:44:45.027]on the bottom?
[00:44:49.800]Let's,
[00:44:53.470]how far down do you think it went?
[00:44:57.500]Why don't you come on up here,
[00:44:58.500]and let's just put the, let's just look, okay?
[00:45:06.370]So we went quite a way, oh, there we go.
[00:45:08.900]So what would you say we went, about an inch?
[00:45:11.570]Yeah, inch, inch and a half.
[00:45:12.843]Inch and a half. It's dry.
[00:45:13.840]About an inch and a half, we had dry ground.
[00:45:16.140]Yeah, yeah.
[00:45:17.480]Good question.
[00:45:18.730]Putting a cover crop in, I've never found easy,
[00:45:23.000]but I am to the point where I understand its importance,
[00:45:26.240]and I understand what happens without it.
[00:45:29.270]And so then I go look for my windows.
[00:45:32.180]And more recently in North Dakota,
[00:45:34.470]and I think this is probably gonna be a bit more common
[00:45:37.430]in the future, we have soybean acres going up.
[00:45:41.510]We got weed acres, thank you, weed acres coming down.
[00:45:45.516]Okay, not so uncommon around the world, in fact,
[00:45:49.280]but certainly within the US.
[00:45:51.180]So if we're gonna grow soybean more frequently,
[00:45:54.980]how do we grow it with more carbon?
[00:45:58.820]How do we grow it with more carbon?
[00:46:00.420]How do we put it in an environment that it likes?
[00:46:04.080]And how do we make it work in that scenario?
[00:46:07.060]And also, in the Dakotas or in the Northern Plains
[00:46:10.110]and into Canada, how do we grow canola that way, too?
[00:46:15.310]'Cause there's a super low carbon plant as well.
[00:46:19.580]So how do we bring in those type plants?
[00:46:21.860]How do we bring that in and have a little better setting
[00:46:25.970]in terms of carbon, okay?
[00:46:28.120]So that's one of the goals, okay?
[00:46:30.630]So let's see if we can do that.
[00:46:34.410]This was the field that finally got,
[00:46:36.440]just took me over the top.
[00:46:38.440]And that was a few springs ago.
[00:46:41.910]It's a long-term no-till field.
[00:46:44.500]And we had one of these balmy breezes
[00:46:48.470]for three days in the spring.
[00:46:50.123]We were just about getting ready to seed.
[00:46:52.530]You ever had that?
[00:46:53.410]We had 40 to 50 mile an hour and gusts to 70-plus,
[00:46:57.660]three days, okay?
[00:46:59.470]So when you get up over 70, I don't know how much over 70,
[00:47:03.490]it isn't real pretty.
[00:47:05.510]And so here we had a classical scenario
[00:47:09.510]of a previous soybean field.
[00:47:11.990]Didn't have enough cover, okay?
[00:47:14.500]I had other ones where we had water erosion on them.
[00:47:18.400]They weren't quite as dramatic as this one,
[00:47:20.690]but we had the same scenario
[00:47:21.940]because we had less soil aggregation.
[00:47:24.370]Again, it's not an evil crop,
[00:47:26.840]but we have to address some things.
[00:47:28.510]So in the Dakotas, erosion, wind and water,
[00:47:31.590]water quality, salinity, salinity is eating the lunch
[00:47:35.270]of Eastern North Dakota and Eastern South Dakota.
[00:47:37.940]It's just eating their lunch.
[00:47:39.840]And so as you manage your water on bare soils,
[00:47:43.760]that's evaporation, right?
[00:47:46.240]But if you run it through the plant,
[00:47:48.100]what do we call that?
[00:47:50.070]Transpiration, right?
[00:47:51.840]Transpiration always buys you something.
[00:47:55.780]Evaporation, always gonna cost you something.
[00:47:59.600]So you start looking at those a little bit differently.
[00:48:02.470]Wildlife habitat, and then improved trafficability,
[00:48:05.500]that's not even a word, but everybody knows
[00:48:07.490]what it means in farming.
[00:48:08.690]It means you can drive places where you can't otherwise
[00:48:12.350]because you're driving on a green plant, right?
[00:48:15.010]Way more holding capacity.
[00:48:16.960]It's another way to increase my crop diversity.
[00:48:20.360]I like it too because I had less hairpinning.
[00:48:23.500]So there was a good scenario for us.
[00:48:25.220]We liked that, a little better seed soil contact.
[00:48:27.770]Gives me a place for livestock integration
[00:48:29.970]'cause I can come in and top that plant.
[00:48:32.940]I can come in and top it.
[00:48:34.100]I'm not gonna come in and remove it with livestock.
[00:48:36.550]I'm gonna come in and top it, okay?
[00:48:38.720]Soil health benefits, it's gonna build an aggregate.
[00:48:41.930]All right?
[00:48:42.770]So for the people that were moving heavily into soybean,
[00:48:46.070]and they had moved out of wheat already,
[00:48:47.900]wheat wasn't even in their scenario anymore,
[00:48:51.660]then a cereal rye in the fall
[00:48:53.490]makes good sense for a soybean field,
[00:48:56.410]okay, good sense for a soybean field.
[00:48:59.460]So we started putting in cereal rye.
[00:49:01.770]If we're early enough in the fall,
[00:49:03.360]I'll add diversity to the rye.
[00:49:06.060]If I'm not early enough in the fall,
[00:49:08.580]I'm gonna put in 100% rye.
[00:49:10.930]So at the Menoken Farm where I do a little demo work,
[00:49:14.150]September, October, and November,
[00:49:15.710]I planted rye in all three months,
[00:49:18.620]okay, in different windows, different seeding rates,
[00:49:21.910]but different windows.
[00:49:23.650]And we got people that are doing the interseeding.
[00:49:25.870]That's Jeremy Wilson on the left,
[00:49:28.075]if you're ever looking for an excellent speaker.
[00:49:30.350]That's our Leopold Award winner
[00:49:33.080]for this year in North Dakota.
[00:49:36.000]And this is a young family.
[00:49:37.950]We need youth.
[00:49:39.240]We need young people in farming.
[00:49:41.240]But he's really good at putting a cover crop
[00:49:44.530]into a row crop or any other scenario.
[00:49:47.650]So that's his operation on the left.
[00:49:49.620]That's his interseeder that he uses
[00:49:51.770]as he puts it directly into a standing corn crop.
[00:49:55.180]Eastern part of the state, we've been somewhat successful
[00:49:57.880]flying it on, but mostly we're drilling after harvest.
[00:50:01.650]That's the most common one.
[00:50:03.430]And in the center of North Dakota,
[00:50:05.690]like where I work a lot, typically,
[00:50:08.200]it's gonna go into the soil through a drill,
[00:50:10.400]typically, okay?
[00:50:12.710]So that's the Menoken Farm, April 13th, 2018.
[00:50:16.907]And I'm thinking to myself,
[00:50:18.240]maybe if I hang around 'til noon,
[00:50:19.760]maybe we can start seeding at noon.
[00:50:22.144](audience laughing)
[00:50:23.770]No.
[00:50:25.110]That seeding part didn't happen
[00:50:26.440]for quite a while after that, all right?
[00:50:28.860]You like the geese?
[00:50:31.420]Close to the Missouri River, big flyaway,
[00:50:33.340]lots of wetlands, lots of birds.
[00:50:36.470]But frozen ground, so I wanna get a cover crop
[00:50:39.690]into these environments, right,
[00:50:41.210]'cause you're taking away my good window,
[00:50:43.850]'cause I could put the cover crops in
[00:50:45.580]after a week pretty easily.
[00:50:48.090]And we could make that work.
[00:50:49.470]And we did make that work.
[00:50:51.300]But all of a sudden, one day,
[00:50:52.380]there's less of that window available,
[00:50:55.110]okay, I still like that window,
[00:50:56.610]and I use it whenever I can,
[00:50:58.220]but I was also now gonna put it into a different window
[00:51:01.940]that didn't exist previously, okay?
[00:51:05.180]So we got this little precision plant unit.
[00:51:08.810]And I thought, well, let's combine that
[00:51:10.560]with some newer technology.
[00:51:11.940]So I like the precision plant unit
[00:51:13.890]because it allows us to do some things,
[00:51:16.350]kinda build your own planter, right?
[00:51:18.930]That's just a Case IH BAR.
[00:51:20.910]That's just a Case IH BAR with precision plant units on it,
[00:51:24.180]the Delta Down Force and all of that,
[00:51:27.444]and the smart seed firmer,
[00:51:30.040]so we got a few of those on there,
[00:51:31.450]and that's gonna tell me my moisture.
[00:51:32.900]It's gonna tell me my uniformity of the furrow.
[00:51:36.800]So if I've got a lot of,
[00:51:41.004]if I am not getting seed soil contact,
[00:51:43.010]I'm gonna know that because I'm gonna be able to tell that
[00:51:45.630]on the monitor, and also temperature.
[00:51:48.090]And then it's gonna teach me about carbon
[00:51:50.030]with the soil organic matter.
[00:51:52.000]So the first time you run this, you create your map.
[00:51:55.640]All fine and good.
[00:51:56.670]Now after a few years, you'll have that map
[00:51:59.700]in multiple years, won't you?
[00:52:02.180]And then one day you're gonna look at it.
[00:52:03.670]You're gonna sit at that desk with a cup of coffee,
[00:52:05.640]and you're gonna look at it.
[00:52:06.540]And you're gonna go, hmm,
[00:52:08.220]carbon on this field went up a little bit,
[00:52:10.770]or carbon on this field went down a little bit,
[00:52:13.810]or carbon stayed the same.
[00:52:15.750]It's gonna be something that occurred.
[00:52:17.890]So it's going to self-teach us
[00:52:19.620]'cause then you can overlay your cropping scheme.
[00:52:22.480]Oh, it went up.
[00:52:23.313]I used a cover crop.
[00:52:25.020]I told that NRCS guy I'd never do that again.
[00:52:27.580]It costs me money.
[00:52:28.460]But I'm not gonna tell him my carbon went up.
[00:52:32.410]Am I too far off on that?
[00:52:34.257](audience laughing)
[00:52:36.720]Okay.
[00:52:38.020]'Cause you know how NRCS is, right?
[00:52:40.840]Okay.
[00:52:41.673]We got a little video clip there.
[00:52:43.100]I'm gonna see if that'll--
[00:52:44.310](engine whirring)
[00:52:51.740]So when we're seeding canola, that's pretty early,
[00:52:54.570]and so I didn't have a whole lot of growth yet.
[00:52:57.550]So the rye is pretty young, right?
[00:53:00.420]What is that rye cover starting to do?
[00:53:03.350]It's harvesting sunlight and CO2.
[00:53:08.250]It's putting in exudates into the soil.
[00:53:10.300]Now you've got the continuous live plant thing going, right?
[00:53:14.880]And I'm gonna hand that off like a relay
[00:53:18.040]to my low carbon plants, like soybean,
[00:53:21.620]or like canola, or even higher,
[00:53:24.680]but for sure those 'cause now I'm creating an environment
[00:53:28.130]where they don't have to generate all the carbon alone.
[00:53:31.960]And for a starter kit, soybean likes this environment.
[00:53:35.290]Soybean's kinda my starter kit,
[00:53:37.090]but I thought, let's throw canola in too
[00:53:38.940]because it's a broadleaf into a grass,
[00:53:42.238]broadleaf into that, okay?
[00:53:44.340]Paul Jaza knows more about planting into that environment
[00:53:47.500]on corn than I'll ever know, okay,
[00:53:49.950]'cause he's got a big background on that.
[00:53:52.420]But here in the Northern Plains,
[00:53:54.260]this is like, what, what are you doing?
[00:53:57.420]So here we go, trying to create that environment.
[00:54:00.810]Also, with canola, clubroot, blackleg,
[00:54:03.750]these are issues if you have Brassicas in.
[00:54:06.260]So it agronomics.
[00:54:07.563]It's the same agronomics we always learn.
[00:54:10.200]And so it's always a little safer
[00:54:11.770]when you start broadleaf into a grass.
[00:54:15.090]It's good agronomics, okay?
[00:54:18.600]So here we are planting the canola.
[00:54:21.250]This was May.
[00:54:22.800]Rye is not very big yet.
[00:54:24.150]Made a really nice, made a very nice seed bed.
[00:54:27.550]I enjoyed that.
[00:54:28.870]And see how stable it is?
[00:54:31.426]Do you see any wind erosion, any water erosion?
[00:54:34.830]No.
[00:54:35.663]See any salinity?
[00:54:37.340]'Cause now we're transpiring water
[00:54:39.670]'cause rye has pretty good salinity tolerance.
[00:54:42.290]So it's transpiring water, putting in exudates,
[00:54:45.400]accumulating carbon, feeding the biology,
[00:54:49.040]during a period of time that we normally never would've.
[00:54:51.370]'Cause you know how long it's gonna take
[00:54:53.240]for that canola plant to finally do that?
[00:54:56.250]That's gonna take a while, okay?
[00:54:59.110]Also, the Brassicas don't like to give up much
[00:55:01.430]for mycorrhizal, any association, so another consideration.
[00:55:06.540]So there we went ahead and took it down with a herbicide,
[00:55:09.720]but I got a stable canola field with a canola plant
[00:55:13.360]that's got really low carbon in it.
[00:55:16.050]Okay, so now I've handed off the baton.
[00:55:19.640]What's the soil health principle?
[00:55:21.480]Continual live plant, right?
[00:55:23.463](man speaking faintly)
[00:55:26.350]In the fall?
[00:55:27.510]Yeah. In the fall?
[00:55:28.830]If I'm early enough, I add diversity to the rye.
[00:55:32.290]So the September ones had diversity in with the rye.
[00:55:36.180]The October and November ones were 100% rye
[00:55:39.377]'cause I can't make anything,
[00:55:41.090]the only thing that's gonna overwinter in our environment
[00:55:43.510]is cereal rye, triticale, or hairy vetch,
[00:55:47.320]and more recently, winter camelina has some promise.
[00:55:51.460]Yeah.
[00:55:52.497]Is this the same field
[00:55:53.622]as the last picture? Yes, this is the same field.
[00:55:55.770]So this was seeded in September.
[00:55:57.500]No.
[00:55:58.333]Oh, the rye was. Yeah.
[00:55:59.300]Yeah, I'm sorry.
[00:56:00.190]The rye, correct.
[00:56:01.290]I just wonder how much growth you have there.
[00:56:02.160]Yeah, I seeded,
[00:56:03.430]some of the fields went in in September.
[00:56:05.120]Some went in in October.
[00:56:06.270]Some went in in November.
[00:56:07.740]And that's how they came up.
[00:56:10.040]September came up earliest, got rolling,
[00:56:12.180]then October's fields, then November's fields.
[00:56:14.780]They all came up, but the earlier seeded came up earlier.
[00:56:18.510]Okay?
[00:56:19.343]So same field, then we started to notice something,
[00:56:22.020]flea beetle damage where I didn't have a cover crop.
[00:56:26.470]Whoa.
[00:56:27.470]So I got ahold of Jonathan Lundgren,
[00:56:30.430]the entomologist in South Dakota,
[00:56:32.130]and I said, what's going on?
[00:56:33.680]Well, he said, what happens, he said,
[00:56:35.360]where the compound eye can pick out the rows on bare ground,
[00:56:40.360]but the compound eye's got a lot of trouble
[00:56:42.380]telling the canola plant from a cover crop plant.
[00:56:45.760]And so, they'll find some, they'll find some,
[00:56:49.070]but they won't eliminate you like a bare row would.
[00:56:52.620]So that was just kind of a little bonus.
[00:56:55.700]So I had the flea beetle damage on the bare ground.
[00:56:58.400]I really had very little flea beetle damage on the right.
[00:57:01.988]So just a little benefit for us in canola productions.
[00:57:05.590]The Canadians grow a lot of canola,
[00:57:07.127]and their favorite thing to tell me
[00:57:09.920]is they have a three-year rotation.
[00:57:12.590]And it's called canola, snow, canola.
[00:57:15.466](audience laughing)
[00:57:16.790]And I said, that's really funny,
[00:57:18.100]the first time I heard that guy is 20 years ago.
[00:57:20.830]That was really funny, but you gotta quit saying that.
[00:57:23.830]Okay.
[00:57:25.000]So canola's not an evil plant.
[00:57:27.380]It's not an evil crop.
[00:57:29.000]Just doesn't have much carbon.
[00:57:30.480]So I'm giving it some additional carbon, okay?
[00:57:33.400]This is what it looked like the end of June.
[00:57:36.720]I halved, I halved the seeding rate.
[00:57:40.540]Okay, normal seeding rate is 4 1/2, five pounds.
[00:57:44.460]I set that precision plant unit at half of that.
[00:57:47.700]So that was a 40-some dollar an acre savings in seed.
[00:57:51.810]That precision plant cannot singulate canola.
[00:57:55.170]It's too fine.
[00:57:56.750]It can't singulate it, but it's the closest thing to it.
[00:57:59.750]So I had an average of every four to five inches,
[00:58:02.670]I had a plant on 15-inch rows.
[00:58:04.960]Okay, so that was a nice perk.
[00:58:07.910]There we are in July.
[00:58:10.990]Then soybean.
[00:58:12.020]Now you notice the rye's color
[00:58:14.180]'cause it's a little bit later, okay.
[00:58:16.690]Canola went in first, then we went to the soybean.
[00:58:20.710]So in that cab on the left, there's a lady sitting there.
[00:58:25.520]That lady is the state conservationist
[00:58:27.930]for North Dakota for NRCS.
[00:58:30.600]And she's in that tractor Planting Green that day
[00:58:34.440]so that she understands the concept
[00:58:37.430]because she's gonna sit in a meeting sometime
[00:58:39.920]with other partners, whether it's NDSU or whoever else,
[00:58:44.240]and we're gonna all be sitting
[00:58:45.360]in a room in North Dakota somewheres,
[00:58:47.240]talking about something like this,
[00:58:49.440]maybe talking RMA NRCS cover crop termination guidelines,
[00:58:54.370]these type things.
[00:58:55.990]So there she is.
[00:58:58.020]That's a learning curve for her,
[00:59:00.000]but what better way to learn it
[00:59:01.530]than to see it firsthand, okay?
[00:59:04.360]So also, I now have a soybean field.
[00:59:08.960]Do you think this soybean field would blow away on me,
[00:59:11.780]like that very first one I showed you?
[00:59:14.170]No.
[00:59:15.270]Now I have a stable landscape.
[00:59:17.520]Yes.
[00:59:18.470]How long, so when did you terminate the rye
[00:59:21.060]compared to soybean?
[00:59:22.470]This particular field here that we planted green,
[00:59:25.530]the soybean actually came up, and then it was terminated.
[00:59:29.440]We let it come up first.
[00:59:31.000]Yep.
[00:59:32.500]The other interesting thing on this
[00:59:34.100]is we had two soybean fields at the Menoken Farm.
[00:59:38.500]One we planted brown, so it was just
[00:59:40.750]the previous year's dead litter.
[00:59:42.490]Okay, they were both planted no-till.
[00:59:44.670]The one planted green had no late flush of kochia,
[00:59:48.690]had no late flush of anything.
[00:59:51.630]And the one we planted brown had the late flush.
[00:59:55.080]So does it eliminate weeds?
[00:59:56.920]No.
[00:59:57.753]Does it suppress and change that environment?
[00:59:59.770]Absolutely.
[01:00:01.330]Absolutely.
[01:00:02.670]You have weed resistance, and you're trying
[01:00:05.600]to take out that weed without a cover crop,
[01:00:08.900]that's almost somewhat futile
[01:00:12.070]'cause when you bring in this environment,
[01:00:13.770]that's a game changer.
[01:00:15.010]Now you're not trying to do it alone.
[01:00:17.270]You're not trying to have a herbicide do it alone.
[01:00:19.960]Yes. What's the grow space
[01:00:21.588]on your rye?
[01:00:23.040]The rye was 7 1/2.
[01:00:24.703]7 1/2? Yeah, we drilled it in
[01:00:26.430]with a no-till drill, 7 1/2, John Deere no-till drill, yep.
[01:00:30.460]But the beans are on 15s.
[01:00:33.860]Yep.
[01:00:35.850]Okay, that's what they looked like July 5th.
[01:00:39.180]And we also took a look at corn.
[01:00:40.760]That was corn.
[01:00:42.020]I have a corn/bean field.
[01:00:45.630]How's that?
[01:00:47.010]I have a corn/bean field, so that's kinda odd for me.
[01:00:49.900]But I keep one.
[01:00:51.240]So it's strictly corn/bean, okay?
[01:00:54.570]That's the best I can do.
[01:00:55.970]That's a no-till system.
[01:00:57.170]That's a no-till bean, corn/bean field.
[01:00:59.290]What do you think I got for ground cover?
[01:01:03.030]Not nearly enough.
[01:01:04.840]That's really bare.
[01:01:07.517]Do you think those soils slaked after that rain?
[01:01:11.730]I guarantee you they did.
[01:01:14.010]Now I've lowered my infiltration rate
[01:01:17.400]'cause when I get rainfall on bare soils like that,
[01:01:20.170]I get runoff.
[01:01:22.450]And my profile's not full.
[01:01:24.320]And on those soils, I can hold eight to nine inches of water
[01:01:27.160]in a four foot profile, but I gotta get it in the profile.
[01:01:31.010]And that starts right at the surface.
[01:01:32.610]That's no different than the tabletop runoff.
[01:01:36.500]I sealed that surface.
[01:01:38.140]Too much energy in the rainfall
[01:01:40.370]seals those microscopic pores shut.
[01:01:42.870]I don't have enough litter from the previous year.
[01:01:45.270]That was a 55 bushel bean crop.
[01:01:47.270]It's not that it was an awful bean crop,
[01:01:50.450]but there's no cover.
[01:01:51.630]And then we get that balmy breeze,
[01:01:54.410]blows that residue right out of the field,
[01:01:56.470]the fines right out of the field.
[01:01:58.070]I got no way to anchor them, okay.
[01:02:00.450]I don't like that.
[01:02:03.110]Say again.
[01:02:03.943]Wasn't there wheat sprouting there, too?
[01:02:05.800]There should be.
[01:02:06.760]Yeah, you can see them.
[01:02:08.290]Yeah.
[01:02:09.630]Yeah, you can see them.
[01:02:11.581]All the classical symptoms, weeds sprouting,
[01:02:14.270]sealed soils.
[01:02:15.610]But it's a no-till system.
[01:02:16.790]It should be all right.
[01:02:20.012]That's not enough, right?
[01:02:21.120]When you look at the whole foundation principles,
[01:02:23.053]it's just not enough, okay?
[01:02:25.660]When we moved into the no-till systems
[01:02:27.770]from our tillage systems, that was a huge change
[01:02:30.970]of improvement, don't get me wrong.
[01:02:32.900]That was.
[01:02:34.070]But then after you're in it enough years,
[01:02:35.860]you start to run into these things
[01:02:37.380]because one thing, you got enough biology now
[01:02:39.830]where it consumes so much of your residue,
[01:02:42.740]especially the soybean residue,
[01:02:44.600]which is so close to the C:N ratio of the soil itself.
[01:02:48.090]What's the C:N ratio of the soil?
[01:02:51.740]It's right around 10 to one, 11 to one, okay?
[01:02:54.930]So for the soybean plant, that's a short ride
[01:02:58.920]to decomposition, all right?
[01:03:03.840]This one, I planted into a fall cover,
[01:03:08.290]so from the previous year.
[01:03:09.740]So I got a little cover here 'cause I had built some,
[01:03:13.150]okay, with a green plant that was not a rye field.
[01:03:17.480]And so that was just a conventional hybrid corn.
[01:03:21.610]Now, when I look at the maps, color is an old concept
[01:03:25.280]in soils, so color has been used in soil mapping
[01:03:29.790]for forever.
[01:03:31.430]And so the fact that this chip is using color,
[01:03:33.930]I think fits well.
[01:03:36.360]Also, the company is still ground-truthing.
[01:03:38.910]So now I can look at my soil organic matter map,
[01:03:41.930]and I can get a feel for what I have or what I don't have.
[01:03:45.890]One map doesn't mean much.
[01:03:47.250]It's kinda like when you're monitoring soils,
[01:03:49.190]and you got one year's data.
[01:03:51.140]Doesn't really mean much, but it's the start.
[01:03:53.517]And then as you add to it,
[01:03:55.760]you start to gather up more information.
[01:03:58.690]So then I looked at the down force.
[01:04:00.770]So the down force, there wasn't much down pressure
[01:04:03.410]being used in seeding.
[01:04:05.490]I like that.
[01:04:06.380]That tells me a story.
[01:04:08.270]If that thing was going off the roof, out the top,
[01:04:12.157]and it had to have that much down pressure,
[01:04:13.910]that's telling me something, right?
[01:04:15.770]So I didn't use much down pressure.
[01:04:19.770]Here's my clean furrow.
[01:04:21.160]So the furrow was relatively clean.
[01:04:23.080]There was a fair bit of material there.
[01:04:25.220]So I was satisfied with the seed soil contact
[01:04:28.410]in that environment.
[01:04:30.815]And then soil temperature.
[01:04:32.550]Can you tell which side of the field
[01:04:34.060]was started on in the morning?
[01:04:38.220]Yeah, right side of the field is cooler.
[01:04:40.320]That's where it was started on in the morning
[01:04:41.910]and then moved over to the left side, right?
[01:04:45.000]Yep, okay.
[01:04:47.900]So kinda gives you an idea, Planting Green,
[01:04:52.790]covering your stuff and Planting Green,
[01:04:55.880]but we wanna understand the concept or the why.
[01:04:58.680]And so it's the handoff if you're running a relay.
[01:05:02.580]Previously, the soybean was running the relay alone, right?
[01:05:07.220]They're running the entire year alone.
[01:05:09.220]Whatever they accumulated for carbon,
[01:05:11.260]whatever they accumulated for yield,
[01:05:13.290]whatever they accumulated for residue on the surface,
[01:05:17.100]now they are supplemented or offset or augmented.
[01:05:20.820]And so you bring in another partner, if you will.
[01:05:24.320]And soybean does not appear to put up much resistance
[01:05:27.980]on that environment.
[01:05:28.940]It appears to actually like that environment.
[01:05:31.520]And so I liked our start on that.
[01:05:34.450]I monitor four different farmers in North Dakota,
[01:05:37.410]and they're in year five.
[01:05:39.320]They're starting year five on Planting Green.
[01:05:41.930]And so we've been monitoring these fields
[01:05:43.900]and tagging along a bit.
[01:05:45.500]And I do a little bit of soils work on them.
[01:05:48.180]And just an observation, but each year,
[01:05:50.700]when they first started, there was early termination.
[01:05:53.660]First year was kind of early termination because why?
[01:05:56.310]Well, it's gonna take all my water, all my nutrient.
[01:05:59.490]This is, everything's gonna die,
[01:06:02.010]even though it's a small field.
[01:06:03.840]And so we'd go ahead, and it's their call when to terminate,
[01:06:08.800]totally their call.
[01:06:10.310]And my observation has been, each year, it's gotten later.
[01:06:16.590]And that fosters more life.
[01:06:19.820]So you're harvesting carbon, okay?
[01:06:22.320]All right, any questions on cover your stuff part?
[01:06:25.270]Yes, sir.
[01:06:26.170](man speaking faintly)
[01:06:31.620]Pinto beans is another crop
[01:06:33.230]that we're working on a fair bit,
[01:06:34.660]and it always had a pre-emergence.
[01:06:36.870]It's really the only crop out of here
[01:06:38.670]that had the pre-emergence.
[01:06:40.510]And when they went into Planting Green,
[01:06:42.910]they took the pre-emergence out.
[01:06:45.370]And they're just terminating the cover then.
[01:06:48.210](man speaking faintly)
[01:06:49.470]No, no.
[01:06:50.630]But before Planting Green, they were.
[01:06:53.240]Yep.
[01:06:54.180]And pinto beans, if you're familiar with pinto beans,
[01:06:57.280]we grow a fair bit of pintos as well.
[01:06:59.860]And they've got even less salt tolerance than soybeans.
[01:07:04.850]They're a little touchier,
[01:07:06.677]but they like the Planting Green concept.
[01:07:09.110]So yeah, yes.
[01:07:15.931]Oh.
[01:07:17.780]You're not planting corn into green, then,
[01:07:20.070]you're terminating in the fall, or yeah?
[01:07:22.560]The corn, we planted into,
[01:07:25.710]I did a combination of winter camelina with rye.
[01:07:29.790]So I did 50/50.
[01:07:31.450]I put in about half of each.
[01:07:33.420]So I had one field that I did camelina/rye combination
[01:07:37.360]that we planted corn into.
[01:07:39.471]Yep.
[01:07:41.357]Yeah, oh, yeah, the field was fine.
[01:07:44.210]I put the camelina, I've never planted camelina before,
[01:07:47.280]so I got it from the University of Minnesota, the seed,
[01:07:51.700]'cause I think the seed's kinda hard to get yet.
[01:07:54.020]And I had to agree to stop emailing them
[01:07:57.080]and stop calling them, and then they said,
[01:07:58.960]we'll send you the seed. (audience laughing)
[01:07:59.827]And I said, I'm good with that.
[01:08:02.240]And so they sent the seed, and I stopped emailing them.
[01:08:05.160]So then I put it in the worst scenario.
[01:08:07.370]I put it in in November.
[01:08:08.720]I put it in in the first week in November
[01:08:10.357]'cause I want it in a, this is the Menoken Farm,
[01:08:13.270]it's a place I can go to fail.
[01:08:15.410]So I put it in in November, right,
[01:08:17.880]'cause I know that's gonna be tough.
[01:08:20.060]It came up, it did come up,
[01:08:22.930]and it came up late, which I kinda expected.
[01:08:25.990]Went in in November, it's gonna come up late.
[01:08:28.300]And it came up about the same time
[01:08:29.970]the rye went in in November in that field also.
[01:08:32.820]And they were both about two inches in height,
[01:08:37.050]maybe two, maybe three at the most,
[01:08:39.560]the day we planted the corn.
[01:08:41.870]So they came up slow.
[01:08:43.630]So if they were in your environment,
[01:08:46.140]they would've got a lot bigger.
[01:08:48.530]But in my environment, they went off slow.
[01:08:50.650]How soon did you terminate that?
[01:08:53.030]I think we terminated it after the corn was up.
[01:08:57.320]Yep.
[01:08:58.360]Yes.
[01:08:59.193]You talked about the, couldn't have Brassicas
[01:09:02.470]because the blackleg--
[01:09:03.480]Yeah, on canola.
[01:09:04.440]On canola production, that's a, the question was,
[01:09:07.250]the blackleg, the disease issues on canola.
[01:09:10.370]So I didn't use the Brassicas
[01:09:11.820]because they're all in the same family.
[01:09:13.920]You know, just agronomics, it's basic agronomics.
[01:09:17.240]So because of canola, I'm gonna go with grass covers.
[01:09:21.310]And then when I put canola in, it's no issue.
[01:09:23.900]I'm gonna be a little picky about, you know,
[01:09:26.150]I'm not gonna have any turnip or radish in it.
[01:09:28.200]I'm not gonna have any canola in it,
[01:09:30.180]'cause sometimes I've used that before, too.
[01:09:32.440]So I take those out of that equation
[01:09:34.260]when I cook that cover crop.
[01:09:36.900]And then I go in with more of a grass base
[01:09:39.070]because of the broadleaf canola going into the grass.
[01:09:42.260]Loves that.
[01:09:43.980]Yeah.
[01:09:46.360]So the difference in seeding
[01:09:47.650]between the October, September, and November,
[01:09:50.800]is there a point where you say, okay,
[01:09:52.270]we only have an inch of growth
[01:09:53.920]or two inches of growth when we plant?
[01:09:56.050]This isn't worth it.
[01:09:57.070]Yeah.
[01:09:57.903]The question is, where's the point where you say,
[01:10:00.390]well, it's maybe not worth it.
[01:10:01.790]It got in too late.
[01:10:03.080]In our environment, and I'm not here
[01:10:05.130]to tell you how to farm in Nebraska,
[01:10:06.940]I got enough trouble in North Dakota,
[01:10:09.120]but in our environment, I can put that cover in
[01:10:12.280]in September or October, and I can have a nice stand
[01:10:15.550]in the spring, in our environment.
[01:10:17.840]When I put it in in November, it's late.
[01:10:20.910]It's gonna be really small in the spring.
[01:10:23.430]So November's not my favorite in my environment.
[01:10:27.480]In Nebraska?
[01:10:30.070]Is that worth it then, doing it in November?
[01:10:32.830]Well, for me, for me, is that your question?
[01:10:36.670]For me or for you?
[01:10:38.040]Either one.
[01:10:38.873]For you, for you, definitely do it.
[01:10:41.045](audience laughing)
[01:10:45.450]Keep in mind, if I got three inches,
[01:10:47.460]I'm harvesting sunlight and CO2.
[01:10:49.670]The key on that is to dig up the plant
[01:10:53.000]and look at the root mass.
[01:10:54.630]That's always the key.
[01:10:56.300]And then the other key on the whole thing,
[01:10:58.070]he has a little bit of monitoring, you know?
[01:11:00.830]Are you building soil aggregates?
[01:11:04.006]Do a couple soil demos.
[01:11:05.240]Do a little monitoring, and it'll answer your question.
[01:11:08.460]If I got a buck to spend at the Menoken Farm,
[01:11:10.940]and we work off a budget, and it's a collaboration,
[01:11:14.700]but if there's a buck to spend, I spend it on a green plant.
[01:11:21.243]Do you mow your rye or your cover before you plant,
[01:11:24.456]or do you just keep it?
[01:11:26.740]The question is, considering mowing, okay,
[01:11:31.970]to keep it there longer, right?
[01:11:34.480]And so here's what we're gonna do this spring.
[01:11:36.500]I wasn't gonna talk about this, but you asked the question,
[01:11:38.960]so let's talk about it.
[01:11:40.820]So I wanna roll my rye in North Dakota.
[01:11:45.950]Can't do that, right?
[01:11:47.960]With soybean in it.
[01:11:50.510]You saw how big the soybean was when we planted,
[01:11:53.610]how big the rye was when the soybean got planted into it.
[01:11:56.960]It was maybe, what, 18 inches roughly?
[01:12:00.710]I wanna roll that with soybean.
[01:12:04.410]I've seen that done in Nebraska.
[01:12:05.950]Yeah, I'm gonna let the soybean grow up,
[01:12:08.580]and I'm gonna come in with the bar roller.
[01:12:10.970]So we've dedicated a field to that this coming spring
[01:12:14.470]'cause I'd like to roll that rye.
[01:12:16.420]So that means I'm gonna let both of them grow
[01:12:18.750]for a while together, and then I'll roll it.
[01:12:24.310]I want you to tell me that won't work
[01:12:26.240]because most of the time when we hear that,
[01:12:28.690]that's the green light that it's gonna work out just fine.
[01:12:32.350]But that's where I wanna go with it in North Dakota.
[01:12:34.560]So Menoken Farm is intended to push that envelope a bit.
[01:12:38.120]Let's look at that.
[01:12:39.440]So we've got a field set up for that.
[01:12:41.290]So we've rolled beans for years with smooth rollers
[01:12:45.640]in the Dakotas when the beans are up.
[01:12:48.530]That's the smooth roller for rock.
[01:12:51.790]You maybe don't have that.
[01:12:53.070]We're glaciated.
[01:12:54.230]We were glaciated 10 to 20 times over geological time,
[01:12:58.720]okay, so we have some of that.
[01:13:00.850]But a bar roller, crimper, that's different
[01:13:05.710]'cause it's got the bar on it, right?
[01:13:07.710]So we are dedicating a field to that.
[01:13:10.210]Tell you more, tell you more next spring.
[01:13:13.560]If you're just gonna roll it--
[01:13:14.850]We're gonna roll the rye.
[01:13:16.778]But what if you mowed it down to four inches
[01:13:20.240]so you could just let it lay in the dirt and grow longer
[01:13:22.950]without it causing a shading issue--
[01:13:25.410]Yeah, mowing it might be another option.
[01:13:28.020]I haven't done it.
[01:13:29.190]Okay.
[01:13:30.023]But when you do it, let me know
[01:13:31.427]'cause I wanna know.
[01:13:33.250]I think there's more ways to do this.
[01:13:35.050]We're just not always thinking of.
[01:13:38.670]Okay, got it.
[01:13:40.270]Yep.
[01:13:41.103]No, I think it's worth looking at.
[01:13:43.120]Jay, what's your seeding rate
[01:13:44.790]on your rye in the fall?
[01:13:46.520]Seeding rate in the Dakotas,
[01:13:47.950]this is what we used, I'm not saying it's for you,
[01:13:50.140]this is what we used, we used 45 pounds in September.
[01:13:53.710]We used 60 pounds in October.
[01:13:55.560]I used 90 in November.
[01:13:56.850]And that's drilled.
[01:13:58.240]Yes, that was drilled.
[01:13:59.940]Yep.
[01:14:01.190]I'm not saying they're your rates.
[01:14:02.790]I'm just saying this is, and if I'm gonna graze,
[01:14:05.240]I always like a little higher rate.
[01:14:07.590]If I'm not gonna graze, I'm not as picky on the rate.
[01:14:13.010]Nope.
[01:14:13.866]Jay?
[01:14:15.250]You started with structures, that you built structures.
[01:14:18.455]Yes.
[01:14:19.288]If you thought you could get to that 10 years
[01:14:21.600]where your soil aggregation was better,
[01:14:23.810]could you remove your structures,
[01:14:25.030]or are they still needed as well,
[01:14:26.380]or could you start that and not put structures on?
[01:14:29.190]I look at it as a systems approach now,
[01:14:31.560]so I haven't taken any out.
[01:14:33.530]I've left them in as a systems approach.
[01:14:35.480]I've augmented them with better infiltration.
[01:14:38.950]Yeah.
[01:14:39.783]But when we were in the full tillage mode,
[01:14:42.940]and we were building all of these structures,
[01:14:45.320]if we would've switched over
[01:14:46.660]into looking at the carbon at that time
[01:14:50.820]and putting in a green plant at that time,
[01:14:53.770]I think we could've accelerated this tremendously.
[01:14:58.280]Yeah.
[01:14:59.260]I couldn't see the forest, you know?
[01:15:00.800]I was too close to the forest.
[01:15:01.980]I just saw trees.
[01:15:03.650]And I wasn't technically strong enough to understand it.
[01:15:07.750]And I remember the day my biology teacher
[01:15:10.770]talked about carbon something something something
[01:15:13.680]in high school, and I wasn't excited.
[01:15:16.480](audience laughing)
[01:15:18.290]But later in life, later in life, it got real exciting.
[01:15:22.420]Yeah.
[01:15:23.253]Any other questions?
[01:15:25.210]Okay.
[01:15:28.210]We got a PowerPoint here somewheres, I think.
[01:15:31.430]Though we probably gotta switch this thing back,
[01:15:33.390]if Mark's around.
[01:15:37.080]We're gonna go ahead, and I'm just gonna
[01:15:40.210]show you a little example on mineralization.
[01:15:43.580]And so what I have is the cornfield, interesting cornfield,
[01:15:49.090]but it's just gonna be an example
[01:15:50.610]where I took soil tests in the middle.
[01:15:53.380]So I monitored their nitrogen because the previous year,
[01:15:56.210]it was grazed with a full season cover.
[01:15:59.780]And so then the cornfield, what impact did that have
[01:16:02.350]on the cornfield?
[01:16:03.700]So this cornfield, this is the year before.
[01:16:07.110]So I had a cool season multi-specie in there,
[01:16:10.640]and I brought these yearlings in, and I topped it.
[01:16:14.320]Okay?
[01:16:15.200]Then they went off and grazed another field.
[01:16:17.467]And I came back later, topped it, okay?
[01:16:22.120]So I was putting weight on these yearlings, all right?
[01:16:25.370]And so that was that particular field.
[01:16:27.500]I usually have one of those fields
[01:16:29.140]at the Menoken Farm every year.
[01:16:30.670]It's a full season cover crop combination,
[01:16:33.360]forage combination, whatever you wanna call it,
[01:16:36.160]but the intent is to graze it, okay?
[01:16:39.070]And so it's gonna also have a late flush underneath it
[01:16:43.000]of species that are gonna also evolve
[01:16:45.380]in the fall a bit more.
[01:16:46.500]And so that gives me multiple grazings on it,
[01:16:49.130]so harvesting carbon, right?
[01:16:51.200]So I have one of these fields to take a look at.
[01:16:54.220]Then in the spring, we planted it to corn.
[01:16:55.900]You saw this picture previously, okay?
[01:16:58.770]So this was the cornfield.
[01:17:00.650]It's just a conventional hybrid.
[01:17:02.750]It's nothing fancy.
[01:17:04.260]Used Callisto on it for weed control,
[01:17:08.410]79-day corn, 112 bushels,
[01:17:13.400]good corn yield in Burleigh County.
[01:17:15.650]There's people that some years get up close to 150, 160.
[01:17:19.500]There's some years they're down around 110.
[01:17:21.850]I mean, but 112 is in the ballpark, okay?
[01:17:27.170]So before, nutrient management,
[01:17:31.740]in the spring, there was total nitrogen,
[01:17:34.390]I'm talking total nitrogen, inorganic
[01:17:36.790]and ready-to-mineralize organic, was 44 units.
[01:17:41.120]39 units of phosphorus.
[01:17:42.730]C:N ratio was just about 10.
[01:17:45.400]So obviously, things were gonna happen.
[01:17:48.380]When your C:N ratio is sitting right about at 10,
[01:17:51.470]there's nothing really restricting your mineral flow.
[01:17:53.940]Things are gonna happen.
[01:17:55.490]The PLFA was 4100 nanograms.
[01:17:59.310]That's not a bad PLFA, for us, okay?
[01:18:02.540]I have no idea what yours are, but for us,
[01:18:04.780]that's a pretty good biology amount for us.
[01:18:07.310]Soil organic matter was at 3.9.
[01:18:10.380]Okay, then in July, actually, the end of June,
[01:18:14.720]beginning of July, there was 100 units of urea
[01:18:17.860]was broadcast on there in June.
[01:18:20.850]Now, I did the soil test again,
[01:18:22.390]now we got 122 units of N, but keep in mind,
[01:18:26.250]a mineralizing from the previous year.
[01:18:29.680]Okay?
[01:18:30.730]So that mineralization of that full season cover,
[01:18:34.060]which was roughly probably a third to 40% legumes in it.
[01:18:38.720]Kinda gives you an idea of what this looked like.
[01:18:41.000]So now I got enough units, I got 122 units.
[01:18:44.680]Well, that's enough for me to grow, what, 122 units of corn,
[01:18:50.494]150, 160, 170?
[01:18:54.860]When we started in the no-till systems,
[01:18:56.910]we were at 1.2 pounds per bushel.
[01:18:59.740]Now we got a lot of the guys that are at 0.8 or 0.7,
[01:19:04.980]or they are not gonna tell you.
[01:19:07.429]It's somewheres right in there.
[01:19:08.810]It's lowered tremendously.
[01:19:10.020]So that's enough for a fair bit of corn,
[01:19:12.690]but we only put on 100 units of urea.
[01:19:16.300]So that was only 46 units, right?
[01:19:18.550]So it's mineralized.
[01:19:20.606]Do you see the difference from the previous to the second?
[01:19:24.330]Okay?
[01:19:25.163]46 of that came with actual application of nitrogen,
[01:19:28.640]but it's mineralizing from the previous year.
[01:19:31.180]Now the C:N ratio is just a tad higher,
[01:19:33.290]but not all that much.
[01:19:34.680]PLFA dropped a little bit.
[01:19:36.370]Not so uncommon.
[01:19:37.390]It's a live biology, goes up, goes down,
[01:19:39.880]goes up and down with food, typically.
[01:19:43.070]Okay, and the cover crop is producing X amount of units.
[01:19:46.540]Well, now you get into November,
[01:19:49.200]so we had the 112 bushels of corn, okay,
[01:19:53.210]based on a rather dry year, but for us,
[01:19:56.140]in our environment, that was reasonable, okay?
[01:19:59.860]And it's dryland.
[01:20:02.120]And now it's November, and I still got 46 units of N.
[01:20:06.140]So you can see how this thing was churning.
[01:20:09.140]Okay, and it was churning from the previous year.
[01:20:11.820]All right?
[01:20:12.653]And so we hear about those things,
[01:20:14.157]but it's so interesting, if you have no life, like me,
[01:20:17.670]that's really fascinating stuff, okay?
[01:20:20.370]So you start looking at that, now look at my phosphorus.
[01:20:23.670]Now it's 42 pounds, okay?
[01:20:26.040]What happened there?
[01:20:28.870]So you start looking at that whole thing
[01:20:30.770]because when we bring in all that diversity,
[01:20:33.420]we start to make phosphorus
[01:20:34.700]sometimes a little more readily available
[01:20:36.560]based on what was already fixed there for many years.
[01:20:39.540]C:N ratio went up a bit at harvest time
[01:20:42.070]because now we got this dry, high-carbon material
[01:20:45.040]called the cornstalk, right?
[01:20:46.990]So now the C:N ratio went up a little bit.
[01:20:48.890]That would be common, okay?
[01:20:50.970]The biology now is really doing quite well.
[01:20:53.930]Now it's at 5800, okay?
[01:20:56.300]So I got a strong biology there building soil aggregates.
[01:21:00.110]Okay?
[01:21:00.943]Soil organic matter stayed constant,
[01:21:03.150]which is a little unusual 'cause that also
[01:21:05.980]is always kinda going up and down a bit, okay?
[01:21:10.530]So that's what the cornfield looked like.
[01:21:12.860]Now, keep in mind, that's all that's been applied
[01:21:15.190]is 46 units of N.
[01:21:16.660]That's all that's on that field totally.
[01:21:19.400]I knew what my water was, okay,
[01:21:21.730]'cause I can take a look and go to NDAWN,
[01:21:24.310]North Dakota Ag Weather Network,
[01:21:25.880]and you got options to all of that, I'm sure, yourselves.
[01:21:29.260]So I can look at see what the water needs are of that plant.
[01:21:33.870]And then we had 5000 pounds of residue
[01:21:37.810]on this field after harvest.
[01:21:40.360]So what am I gonna do with that?
[01:21:43.860]I'm gonna bring livestock in there,
[01:21:45.360]and I'm gonna harvest some of that, okay?
[01:21:47.840]I'm not gonna take it all, by any means,
[01:21:49.590]but I'm gonna put them on a pretty high plan of nutrition.
[01:21:52.460]I'm gonna take some of that material off.
[01:21:55.170]I had a vetch understory 'cause I had vetch
[01:21:57.740]in that cover crop the previous year,
[01:22:00.290]so it comes on again later in the year in that corn crop.
[01:22:04.760]And in our environment with our rainfall,
[01:22:07.290]it's pretty well-behaved, okay?
[01:22:09.550]It just stays laying flat on the surface.
[01:22:12.280]So it's part of my nutrient management as well
[01:22:16.000]in this cornfield.
[01:22:17.600]And so we get a lot of people talk about Planting Green now.
[01:22:20.760]So I was texting with somebody, and I said,
[01:22:22.340]yeah, we're combining green.
[01:22:25.280]Get it?
[01:22:27.400]Okay, maybe I was a little too quick for you.
[01:22:31.560]And then I'll see if we got this one.
[01:22:42.880]Okay, so now I'm armored up.
[01:22:45.310]So when it rains or blows,
[01:22:46.870]I'm in a pretty good situation either way.
[01:22:49.710]I took 25 grazing days per acre off of that.
[01:22:52.860]I always use about 3% of their body weight.
[01:22:56.495]They need 2.7, but they'll eat three.
[01:22:59.030]They're like me.
[01:23:00.200]I'm gonna eat more this noon than I need, right?
[01:23:02.410]So you figure a little bit more.
[01:23:05.250]And then, so I took off about 1100 pounds of that armor.
[01:23:10.120]So I took off the higher.
[01:23:11.790]Could've I had them on there a lot longer?
[01:23:15.620]Yes.
[01:23:17.920]Would've they been on a lower plan of nutrition?
[01:23:20.900]Yes.
[01:23:22.330]Would've I had less armor left?
[01:23:24.910]Yes.
[01:23:25.900]So there's a point in there, okay?
[01:23:27.960]So we just took that.
[01:23:30.150]Then I looked at the economics of the whole thing, okay?
[01:23:34.330]What's in print is the NDSU's data
[01:23:38.010]for that particular region of the state
[01:23:39.650]and that particular crop outlook
[01:23:41.840]and projected yield at price, et cetera.
[01:23:44.500]We're, of course, it had projected
[01:23:48.180]to come in at a $41 negative, okay?
[01:23:51.980]That was that projection,
[01:23:53.600]for a negative $41 an acre in corn,
[01:23:56.230]not 100 like was discussed earlier.
[01:24:00.380]But I actually came in with a positive.
[01:24:03.140]And so my return to labor and management,
[01:24:05.340]when I look at that whole scenario,
[01:24:06.800]you can see the differences on there pretty easily.
[01:24:09.680]When I come in with that whole scenario,
[01:24:11.740]that was actually a positive 59.
[01:24:14.400]So I've got a budget to work with.
[01:24:16.550]That's the only way we can make the Menoken Farm work.
[01:24:18.750]I gotta generate some income on there, okay?
[01:24:21.520]And so this was one way of doing that.
[01:24:24.030]And so if you look at my return to labor,
[01:24:27.460]my grazing income, so that was about $80 profit
[01:24:31.740]from my corn year, so I can live with that,
[01:24:33.970]okay, I can live with that.
[01:24:36.610]So what do we got for time?
[01:24:38.240]Are we, we got a couple minutes left?
[01:24:41.175]About 12 minutes.
[01:24:42.008]12 minutes, okay.
[01:24:44.110]This is part of nutrient management as well.
[01:24:46.420]My philosophy at the Menoken Farm
[01:24:48.200]is everything through a stomach, okay?
[01:24:50.960]So we try to get everything through a stomach.
[01:24:53.500]So I have the multi-specie plants and animals.
[01:24:56.350]So we have the sheep/yearling combinations.
[01:24:59.180]NDSU owns the sheep.
[01:25:01.670]Local soil district buys the yearlings.
[01:25:04.070]We mother them up.
[01:25:05.560]They spend about three, four days together,
[01:25:07.410]getting to know each other
[01:25:08.380]before they go into the grazing system.
[01:25:10.207]And then they go in as a unit.
[01:25:12.450]Then they're together, okay?
[01:25:14.980]And then we move them.
[01:25:16.470]So there's a wire there to the right.
[01:25:19.420]And I move them because when I get to that point,
[01:25:22.050]it's time for them to go because now they're getting
[01:25:24.120]into the second half of the plant by weight, okay?
[01:25:28.110]So we take a look at that 'cause I want armor.
[01:25:31.370]And I want it for a number of reasons,
[01:25:34.080]but when I look at the entire carbon scenario,
[01:25:36.190]the grazed covers, I always get a little more carbon
[01:25:39.100]on the grazed covers because of plant physiology
[01:25:41.640]when the plant regrows, it harvests more carbon.
[01:25:45.100]Okay?
[01:25:47.240]Also, I have these guys for small landowners.
[01:25:50.180]So small landowners, they're a challenge,
[01:25:53.970]but that's the largest meat protein, I think, in the world.
[01:25:57.010]So let's figure them out.
[01:25:59.030]And that's a market, right?
[01:26:01.920]Even in Bismarck, that's a big market.
[01:26:03.940]We got 100,000 people.
[01:26:05.730]That's a big market.
[01:26:07.350]So learning those guys, and then I follow them
[01:26:10.410]with the chickens.
[01:26:11.243]I can't put them directly together
[01:26:12.550]'cause the goats go stand on top of the chicken mobile,
[01:26:15.260]and that really cranks me up.
[01:26:17.079](audience laughing)
[01:26:18.460]And I gave those goats the talk, and they listened.
[01:26:22.690]After I got them on the other side of the electric fence,
[01:26:25.090]they listened, okay?
[01:26:27.190]So that little horizontal piece, that prevents predators.
[01:26:31.040]So nothing wants to burrow under there that far,
[01:26:33.745]evidently, because we had no predator issue.
[01:26:35.890]That was 1/10 of it.
[01:26:38.090]So those ladies were fine.
[01:26:40.660]And then we make static compost.
[01:26:43.810]And so those tubes that are in there,
[01:26:46.960]that's a working stomach, so you see it puffing there.
[01:26:49.860]That's a working stomach.
[01:26:51.720]And so that takes off the heat.
[01:26:53.790]And so I don't turn the compost
[01:26:55.470]'cause that's like working summer fallow back in the '60s.
[01:26:59.160]That's like working fallow.
[01:27:00.320]So I put the tube in.
[01:27:01.530]They eat the entire tube.
[01:27:03.290]The only thing they don't eat is what sticks out of there.
[01:27:05.297]But that takes the heat out of there,
[01:27:07.230]okay, 'cause we don't turn it.
[01:27:09.340]That's static compost, okay?
[01:27:12.290]And then I have these microbiome digesters.
[01:27:14.930]That's more stomachs.
[01:27:16.280]But this one here, that entire compost pile
[01:27:19.610]has to be eaten and pooped out.
[01:27:22.860]That's a big job.
[01:27:24.050]The soil food web consumes that entire thing, right?
[01:27:27.340]That's why it turns into soil at the end, all right?
[01:27:30.390]It's not magic.
[01:27:31.870]Somebody's gotta eat it, okay?
[01:27:34.520]So then on the digesters, I just put in bedding material.
[01:27:40.310]I wanna do a soil inoculant, so I'm putting bedding material
[01:27:44.100]and worms inside these inoculants.
[01:27:47.150]And I keep the valve open on the bottom.
[01:27:50.090]You can see on the right,
[01:27:51.100]those are some of the foods I feed them.
[01:27:53.120]And on the left is just the bedding material
[01:27:55.680]'cause I'm doing this for, guess what, no cost.
[01:27:58.600]I'm not gonna spend money on it.
[01:28:00.500]I'm gonna take what we normally waste
[01:28:02.230]and what normally goes to the landfill,
[01:28:04.700]put it through these worms, okay,
[01:28:07.040]'cause of the enzymes, blah, blah, blah.
[01:28:10.140]Coffee grounds, it should be Starbucks,
[01:28:12.510]but they will consume other ones.
[01:28:14.220]But they really like Starbucks.
[01:28:17.610]I got the shuttles for free because I asked for them.
[01:28:20.250]I had to agree to quit whining to them,
[01:28:22.457]but then they eventually just coughed them up,
[01:28:24.620]gave them to me.
[01:28:25.910]And I got paper out of the federal building, okay?
[01:28:29.460]That all goes to the landfill, all right?
[01:28:32.520]Why not run it through these guys.
[01:28:34.671](engine whirring)
[01:28:37.070]Out there in terms of the leaves
[01:28:38.650]and the shredded wood, the shredded paper.
[01:28:41.160]That ended up, here's a farmer named Andrew Mans
[01:28:44.220]at Coaldale, Alberta.
[01:28:45.880]His quote is, "We end up wasting the waste."
[01:28:49.016]And the waste can be really valuable.
[01:28:51.940]So that all got mixed together.
[01:28:54.280]We loaded them.
[01:28:56.680]Then it went into the inside for the winter
[01:28:59.370]'cause the worms, I don't think, would like it outside
[01:29:01.640]in North Dakota in those little shuttles.
[01:29:04.290]That's how it looked when they went in.
[01:29:06.730]They come in the mail.
[01:29:08.950]They go in the shuttle.
[01:29:11.920]If it gets too hot in there, if I get too quick,
[01:29:15.020]gets too hot, then I have to take something out,
[01:29:16.840]cool it down a little bit
[01:29:17.930]because it's processing, right?
[01:29:20.090]It's processing, so you gotta monitor the heat.
[01:29:23.865]Then it's gonna go in those tanks on the planter,
[01:29:26.410]and I wanna inoculate a seed trench, okay?
[01:29:29.500]So that's gonna be an inoculant on naked seed
[01:29:32.240]in the seed trench, okay?
[01:29:34.600]It'll be a liquid.
[01:29:36.530]So everything that comes out the bottom,
[01:29:39.480]so you gotta keep it moist.
[01:29:42.190]Okay, so you keep it moist.
[01:29:43.990]Those are cabbage heads that didn't reach maturity
[01:29:47.100]from a truck farm garden.
[01:29:49.480]And so I had a shuttle or two of just cabbage heads.
[01:29:51.940]And you take a sledgehammer,
[01:29:53.760]and you convince them to give it up.
[01:29:55.493](audience laughing)
[01:29:57.170]Cardboard, corrugated cardboard has the glues on it.
[01:30:01.100]That's what you want.
[01:30:02.010]You want the glues.
[01:30:03.290]So then the alfalfa, looking for growth hormones,
[01:30:07.670]so I'm giving them alfalfa as well.
[01:30:11.100]And then that's just a feeding,
[01:30:12.520]kinda gives you an idea of what it looks like.
[01:30:15.360]And then this one, oh, yeah, there we go.
[01:30:17.830]So if you see all the fungal community on top.
[01:30:21.880]And then when you kinda move it aside,
[01:30:24.520]they're there doing their thing.
[01:30:25.630]So it's solids on the top of the shuttle,
[01:30:28.190]liquids out the bottom, okay?
[01:30:31.340]First harvest, we just had the first harvest,
[01:30:33.570]80 to 90 gallons out of those 30 shuttles.
[01:30:36.090]And then we put a shroud on it
[01:30:37.940]'cause I wanna keep it dormant.
[01:30:40.420]I don't want them waking up and coming around, okay?
[01:30:45.230]And okay, we just gave the worms two cups of coffee grounds.
[01:30:48.920]And you can see the fungal component.
[01:30:52.200]The fungi is really starting to go to work.
[01:30:54.480]We added this additional bedding,
[01:30:56.090]about one foot of additional bedding about a week ago.
[01:31:00.550]And now we're gonna give them some water.
[01:31:03.520]And I give them about maybe close to a gallon,
[01:31:06.910]and that takes me about 18 seconds to give them a gallon.
[01:31:11.950]I use the burlap because it takes away the force
[01:31:14.940]of the water.
[01:31:16.120]Burlap is the same as the cover,
[01:31:18.046]cover crop, right, on the soil.
[01:31:20.816]Keep giving them a gallon of water.
[01:31:22.150]Moisture, and so I think that really helps.
[01:31:27.600]So that's your reading assignment.
[01:31:30.093](audience chuckling)
[01:31:31.130]When you're done with that, you email me,
[01:31:32.810]and I will send you another list of books.
[01:31:35.690]And that does happen.
[01:31:37.300]So go ahead.
[01:31:38.710]They're really good.
[01:31:39.900]And again, appreciate the opportunity to come here.
[01:31:44.350]I see this as we're kinda all in this together.
[01:31:47.200]And Keith, I don't know if we're at the end,
[01:31:48.810]or if we got time for a question or two.
[01:31:50.830]I'll take two questions,
[01:31:52.270]and Jay will be on a panel this afternoon.
[01:31:55.610]Yeah, and I'm here all day.
[01:31:56.443]I have no life.
[01:31:58.000](man speaking faintly)
[01:32:01.850]We're looking at, the machine is capable of five,
[01:32:04.720]so probably gonna try something close to that.
[01:32:08.760]We have analysis in to, checks us for the biology,
[01:32:12.970]and we have it for micro and macronutrient into Ward Labs,
[01:32:16.520]and we have it into Midwest for humic acid,
[01:32:20.820]and trying to put some science to it.
[01:32:24.100]You can read a lot about it,
[01:32:25.940]but there's very little science on it,
[01:32:27.560]so we wanna put science to it.
[01:32:29.080]But my goal, or I think our team's goal,
[01:32:31.530]is we wanna build aggregates also,
[01:32:34.770]so it's a biological inoculant for the seed trench.
[01:32:38.930]It'll go directly into the seed trench.
[01:32:43.660]One more question.
[01:32:44.831]One more question.
[01:32:47.050]Okay.
[01:32:47.900]So the last part of the two-phase question,
[01:32:50.780]you snuck two in there, but there's,
[01:32:53.564]is it a compost tea?
[01:32:54.560]I think it's gonna be a little different.
[01:32:57.366]Just a quick shout-out for a company in Lincoln
[01:32:59.720]called Big Red Worms.
[01:33:01.340]They do an industrial vermicompost.
[01:33:03.260]There you go, yeah.
[01:33:05.998]Yeah, yeah.
[01:33:07.400]I'm just looking at a soil inoculant.
[01:33:09.410]Yep, that's what they do. That's what I'm looking at.
[01:33:11.810]And I'm looking at it for the usual thing
[01:33:13.870]that us and North Dakota pay for something.
[01:33:18.070]Thank you.
[01:33:18.903]Appreciate the opportunity to visit with you.
[01:33:20.180]Thank you, Jay.
[01:33:21.514](audience applauding)

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Nebraska Cover Crop & Soil Health Conference - Jay Fuhrer

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