Nebraska Cover Crop & Soil Health Conference - Scott Heinemann

University of Nebraska Eastern Nebraska Research and Extension Center Author

02/25/2019 Added

48 Plays

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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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[00:00:29.388](papers rustling)
[00:00:32.450]Next up, we have Scott Heinemann.
[00:00:34.060]He came to us from Winside and
[00:00:35.890]he's going to talk about grazing cover crops
[00:00:37.720]without owning livestock.
[00:00:39.190]So thanks, Scott.
[00:00:48.875]Okay, everybody hear me?
[00:00:51.850]Okay.
[00:00:52.683]Well, thanks to Keith and everybody that planned this.
[00:01:01.053]There?
[00:01:01.923][Distant Male Voice] Yeah.
[00:01:02.756]Okay. Thanks again to Keith
[00:01:04.170]and everybody that had a part in planning this.
[00:01:07.490]It's an honor, like Jeff said, to be here and speak,
[00:01:10.000]and it's not something I'm really comfortable with,
[00:01:13.277]but I just think it's important, as a farmer,
[00:01:16.478]if I can show my mistakes and what I've learned from it,
[00:01:21.330]it's-
[00:01:22.690]And I was telling someone earlier,
[00:01:23.940]I've probably learned way more from
[00:01:26.700]visiting with people here and the seeing the presenters,
[00:01:30.950]than anything people will learn from me.
[00:01:32.860]But we're all in this together,
[00:01:34.360]so I think these events are really good.
[00:01:41.170]I guess, going back.
[00:01:42.190]The history of our farm families.
[00:01:44.630]My grandpa moved into Wayne County in 1948.
[00:01:47.730]It's where he settled.
[00:01:49.950]And he was a cattle feeder,
[00:01:51.280]my dad was a cattle feeder,
[00:01:52.890]and I was a cattle feeder.
[00:01:54.980]Not huge, we had four to five hundred head,
[00:01:57.920]year round in the feed lot.
[00:02:00.150]So we hauled a lot of manure,
[00:02:01.450]but we did a lot of tillage, too.
[00:02:05.905]And my wife and I got married a little later,
[00:02:07.980]and we don't have any kids.
[00:02:11.213]So as my dad got close to retirement,
[00:02:13.990]the labor situation started becoming more of an issue.
[00:02:18.720]And we debated whether we were going to
[00:02:20.760]expand in the cattle or in farm ground.
[00:02:24.210]And either way, we just though,
[00:02:25.770]it's just a lot of expense, a lot of investment
[00:02:31.710]to try to make that extra income.
[00:02:35.283]To generate income to pay that full time hired help.
[00:02:39.700]We don't have kids,
[00:02:40.570]so what's the point of us working harder
[00:02:42.650]to pay somebody the extra that we are going to make anyways.
[00:02:47.430]So we just sat down one night, several nights,
[00:02:50.260]and had a heart to heart.
[00:02:51.170]And decided to discontinue the cattle feeding.
[00:02:54.500]And it was a tough decision.
[00:02:57.630]But looking back, it's one of the best things we ever did.
[00:03:02.090]My parents told me a few years ago,
[00:03:03.667]"boy you're a lot easier to be around
[00:03:05.550]now that you're not feeding cattle."
[00:03:06.824](audience laughter)
[00:03:07.657]And I said, "geeze, I didn't think
[00:03:08.490]I was that hard to get along with."
[00:03:14.014]But in the process of that,
[00:03:15.200]we had oats, we had alfalfa, and corn.
[00:03:17.690]And I had started to add soy beans in '95,
[00:03:20.950]so we were more diversified when we had cattle,
[00:03:24.950]and then we got back to just corn and soy beans.
[00:03:28.490]And I did make the switch to No Till and cover crops.
[00:03:32.940]I had started cover crops with the rye.
[00:03:37.430]When we still had cattle where we cut sileads,
[00:03:39.930]We were seeding rye.
[00:03:43.180]Really sudden benefits of reduced soil erosion.
[00:03:49.780]But after a few years of just corn and soy beans,
[00:03:53.280]I just knew that we gotta be more diversified.
[00:03:56.480]Like Jeff was talking, having small greens in the rotation
[00:04:01.410]allows you to plant that diverse summer seeded crop.
[00:04:09.650]In my area, there's a lot of young guys
[00:04:11.630]that want to come back into the family farm.
[00:04:14.350]And it's tough.
[00:04:16.140]Fortunately, they like the livestock,
[00:04:17.433]so it's worked out for us
[00:04:23.755]to be able to rent some acres to those guys
[00:04:26.130]and kind of help them out.
[00:04:27.577]And it benefits both of us.
[00:04:30.630]This is the first year I started.
[00:04:32.723]That we got back into oats,
[00:04:34.610]I seeded a couple pounds of sweet clover,
[00:04:38.600]and the oats were tall, but that sweet clover
[00:04:41.340]really furried that year.
[00:04:46.740]I never knew oats could yield like that.
[00:04:48.870]And I didn't tell anybody what they yielded
[00:04:50.680]because I thought they would accuse me of lying.
[00:04:52.460]But I told Stan, my seed dealer, the next Spring
[00:04:54.970]when I bought seed, and he said,
[00:04:57.057]"Oh yeah, we had a couple of guys that were."
[00:04:58.960]And then I felt kind of bad.
[00:05:00.784]But it was, they were outstanding oats,
[00:05:04.130]the sweet clover was just incredible.
[00:05:07.603]And then I came back, after we took the oats off,
[00:05:12.020]and seeded sorted grass, sunhemp, and radishes.
[00:05:18.870]And like a dummy, I thought, "well there's no way
[00:05:20.870]I'm going to be able to plant into that next spring."
[00:05:25.463]And there was no fences,
[00:05:27.032]I couldn't find someone to graze it that year,
[00:05:29.040]so I mowed it.
[00:05:37.940]But anyway, that next year,
[00:05:40.870]we did a soil pit this early fall here,
[00:05:44.440]and I wish I had pictures of it.
[00:05:48.310]It was such an eye opener to dig a pit six feet deep,
[00:05:52.710]and see how deep those roots go.
[00:05:54.464]And to see the moisture in the soil profile
[00:05:57.020]when you have all that stuff growing.
[00:06:00.230]And so I thought, "well, I'm going to, get crazy.
[00:06:04.290]And I'm going to cut my nitrogen back next year."
[00:06:06.330]We went to corn, and I got crazier yet,
[00:06:08.700]and I planted 93-day corn - which everybody knows
[00:06:11.220]won't yield in Northeast Nebraska.
[00:06:16.990]I think the field averaged 193 and it was 15.4 moisture,
[00:06:22.740]and we took it out on September 29.
[00:06:25.640]And there was about two or three acres
[00:06:27.180]in the bottom of the field
[00:06:28.190]where I ran out of sweet clover seed.
[00:06:32.050]And that made 168.
[00:06:34.816]The only difference was the sweet clover,
[00:06:38.047]and it made 25 bushels difference.
[00:06:42.080]So that really got me to thinking that
[00:06:43.730]we don't need to be applying so much nitrogen,
[00:06:46.730]we can do some other things.
[00:06:49.870]So this is the next year, after rye harvest.
[00:06:56.850]We got a little more diversified yet and we found,
[00:07:00.830]somebody to graze it that fall.
[00:07:02.370]This is the same field, I think that's maybe six weeks
[00:07:07.430]or so after we planted it.
[00:07:08.700]This is off on the edge of an alfalfa field that's
[00:07:15.440]it drains quite a few acres.
[00:07:16.940]I think I figured the two fields together drain about
[00:07:20.496]the main water way, where it ends up,
[00:07:22.536]where it fills up into the creek is about
[00:07:24.560]between 60 and 70 acres.
[00:07:27.670]And there's fairly good slopes on it.
[00:07:31.720]I like alfalfa, but I've found that,
[00:07:35.500]especially after it's just been cut
[00:07:38.100]and you don't have that cover there,
[00:07:41.420]if you get a hard rain you get more run off.
[00:07:44.970]But I was amazed at how the runoff got 15-20 feet
[00:07:51.100]into the cover crop, and it just filtered out
[00:07:55.820]and that was it.
[00:07:57.360]And there's another picture of that.
[00:08:03.040]And you start digging, and you find out
[00:08:05.150]one of the reasons why is because not just
[00:08:08.500]the ground mass is slowing down,
[00:08:10.570]but the rain that falls is so much better infiltration.
[00:08:17.220]There's a lot of talk about how fast this happens.
[00:08:20.210]And it is a slow process, and a gradual process.
[00:08:22.870]But for me, the one thing, I was
[00:08:26.390]amazed at how quickly it happened was the earthworms.
[00:08:29.790]I always had earthworms, but the number of them,
[00:08:32.710]I was just astounded how quickly they multiplied.
[00:08:38.870]This is the bottom end of the same field,
[00:08:41.560]that's a couple weeks after we seeded it.
[00:08:44.480]Where everything kind of converges.
[00:08:48.040]There were at least two years in the past,
[00:08:50.770]I've farmed this farm since 1991, I think.
[00:08:57.410]And I know there were at least two years when we were doing
[00:09:00.220]full on tilings, that when it got to this point,
[00:09:02.658]we couldn't cross it with a combine, it was that deep.
[00:09:08.710]And after I took the rye out, I spent two and a half hours
[00:09:11.530]with hydrolic blade and I sapped and fixed it.
[00:09:15.430]And when I was done I thought,
[00:09:16.669]"you know if it was fall, after corn or soy beans,
[00:09:18.840]I wouldn't take two and a half hours
[00:09:20.205]to shape that up that good and got it seeded."
[00:09:25.370]And to this day, that was 2015,
[00:09:30.530]we've not touched it with anything.
[00:09:34.610]I mean, we've had some water run on top,
[00:09:38.350]but we've lost no soil.
[00:09:43.130]That's the same field, six weeks after I planted it.
[00:09:45.800]And I got a big grin because I remembered
[00:09:49.160]back when I was a kid and dad planted oats,
[00:09:51.210]and it was foul, I was out there pulling
[00:09:53.530]button weeds and cocalberries the whole month of August.
[00:09:59.840]And there's some weeds here and there,
[00:10:01.416]the big one I notice is water hemp,
[00:10:03.742]the cows love the water hemp.
[00:10:06.280]If there's some in there, they'll eat it.
[00:10:12.716]That's the same field.
[00:10:13.890]I think the cows went on there late September
[00:10:19.440]and it was shortly after, and maybe it was early-
[00:10:25.900]Whatever it was, it was 28 days, 38 head
[00:10:28.810]and it's 40 acres.
[00:10:30.110]And it was all just one field,
[00:10:32.060]we didn't have it divided or anything.
[00:10:36.430]And I thought we left a lot there.
[00:10:38.090]This is January 31, we had a lot of snow cover,
[00:10:40.992]and then it warmed up that January, the last week.
[00:10:45.340]And I went out there and I thought,
[00:10:46.697]"Where did all that cover go?
[00:10:49.830]It's like it just disappeared under the snow."
[00:10:55.410]And that's planting it the next Spring.
[00:10:57.080]And I bailed the straw, and you can see the green stripes
[00:11:01.460]where the strawworm row was.
[00:11:05.190]But that also taught me that after I bailed that straw
[00:11:12.090]the summer before it's the first week of August,
[00:11:14.360]it's 90 degrees and that volunteer rye
[00:11:17.260]was growing in a week.
[00:11:20.280]And I thought that if it would grow out there in August
[00:11:22.300]when it's warm, what if I take a fertilizer spreader
[00:11:25.730]right after I combine corn and do the seeding.
[00:11:29.470]Broadcast it on my corn stocks.
[00:11:33.050]So that's what I've been doing.
[00:11:34.980]And this is a field that we did that, we had cows in there.
[00:11:38.800]The guy did not get the cows off when he was supposed to,
[00:11:41.510]this isn't even one of the worst spots by far.
[00:11:44.780]But the rye was greened up pretty good.
[00:11:48.360]And I thought that those spots
[00:11:49.980]were going to be bare in the Spring,
[00:11:52.944]but I don't know if you can see it very good on that, but
[00:11:57.565]it greened up.
[00:11:58.398]It wasn't quite as thick as the rest of the field
[00:11:59.990]in those spots where they really congregated, but
[00:12:03.355]it greened up.
[00:12:09.390]This is the following year.
[00:12:11.850]Another cover crop.
[00:12:12.940]And I think this one is even a little more diverse,
[00:12:14.970]we just keep taking away one species
[00:12:19.550]and adding something else.
[00:12:20.730]Mainly if I have something a couple years in a row
[00:12:24.020]that doesn't seem like it grows that good.
[00:12:27.250]Maybe it's not adapted to our area.
[00:12:28.940]So I take it out.
[00:12:31.480]That's one of the fun parts, but it's just playing around
[00:12:33.770]with your mixes and coming up with something new.
[00:12:37.910]And seeing what works.
[00:12:41.970]And I still didn't learn that if you don't get
[00:12:44.790]grazed you don't have to mow it.
[00:12:48.420]So I'm out there mowing.
[00:12:50.813]The same day my neighbor that has a pasture
[00:12:53.390]over the hill in the background.
[00:12:56.270]This is early October.
[00:13:00.590]He's going back and forth hauling alfalfa bails
[00:13:03.280]to his cows in the pasture, and I'm thinking,
[00:13:06.567]"Well what a dummy."
[00:13:07.640]And then I thought,
[00:13:08.473]"Well what about you? You're mowing this cover crop
[00:13:10.850]you could work something out with him, and-"
[00:13:13.900]And so that was the day two fools met, I guess.
[00:13:16.910]One was on the road and one was in the field.
[00:13:22.837]And this is just a picture of what it looks like
[00:13:28.230]and it's, I just love rye.
[00:13:30.406]I tell people it's my my favorite herbacide.
[00:13:32.063]Because if you get a good stand,
[00:13:35.420]and not just if you let it go to maturity for seed.
[00:13:37.820]But if you get a stand established in the fall,
[00:13:41.210]that was one of the other things
[00:13:42.580]that was kind of unexpected for me,
[00:13:44.460]was the broad leaf wheat suppression.
[00:13:50.740]And it doesn't really show up,
[00:13:51.857]but this is five to six feet tall here.
[00:13:56.210]And I had an oats field that was two miles south
[00:13:59.710]and it had some crown rust in it.
[00:14:02.879]I don't know, it had some other issues.
[00:14:04.360]It wasn't the best stand.
[00:14:07.280]It was this tall.
[00:14:10.080]And Dan was out there
[00:14:10.913]and a couple other guys in our pure group
[00:14:12.680]after we combined and I seeded it.
[00:14:16.710]There was way more moisture in the soil profile
[00:14:19.210]than where those wimpy oats were.
[00:14:22.960]And it was tall until it matured.
[00:14:26.840]So how did it have more moisture
[00:14:31.350]when it was supposedly using all that valuable moisture?
[00:14:38.320]This is the grazing mix, there.
[00:14:40.060]We did the same mix on that oats field.
[00:14:43.420]And I don't think it ever got taller than this.
[00:14:45.370]We were just short on moisture.
[00:14:48.117]And I don't know, I'm not a ergonomist
[00:14:50.210]or expert by any means, but it seemed like the rust,
[00:14:54.840]or whatever issues the oats had
[00:14:56.940]affected the cover crop, too a little bit.
[00:15:06.590]We only had cows out there for 18 days,
[00:15:09.220]and that's when I started thinking
[00:15:16.580]I don't know, it just gets you thinking.
[00:15:18.170]How can we be more efficient,
[00:15:20.880]maybe put fewer cows and start doing some paddocks.
[00:15:28.080]This is just kind of a mix.
[00:15:31.060]We went out, our pure group had a field day,
[00:15:34.050]and Dan and I went and dug up some plants.
[00:15:37.300]Just tried to get a good representation
[00:15:41.590]of what was out there.
[00:15:42.548]And it's kind of neat because some of the radishes
[00:15:46.200]were pulled up and the cows
[00:15:48.060]just pulled them up out of the ground and would eat them.
[00:15:53.080]I just think that's a pretty neat picture.
[00:15:58.090]That's January 9th.
[00:15:59.220]And again, that's grazed off more than I would like.
[00:16:05.930]This is this past summer.
[00:16:07.020]This is after combining rye and after I drilled it,
[00:16:10.990]I took that picture and
[00:16:11.823]man that's pretty with those stripes.
[00:16:14.620]And I thought that it'd be a lot prettier
[00:16:16.350]if there was something green growing in it.
[00:16:19.370]SO I want to go back to putting some clovers
[00:16:21.670]and something in the rye to have so I'd
[00:16:24.550]have something green growing all the time.
[00:16:26.690]But not that sweet clover that gets as tall
[00:16:28.570]as what I'm combining.
[00:16:33.982]And this is my current cowboy.
[00:16:37.180]Not him, that's the cowboy's son.
[00:16:39.160]But I call him my cow boy.
[00:16:43.990]I've found that it's very important
[00:16:46.500]to have the right person.
[00:16:48.830]If somebody has livestock, I mean, anybody that has it
[00:16:52.250]knows that you have to be dedicated.
[00:16:54.840]The sad thing is, I've run into people
[00:16:58.010]that weren't dedicated and weren't around
[00:16:59.880]when they're cabin.
[00:17:01.320]And this and that and-
[00:17:04.350]So it was a little bit of a, the first two or three years
[00:17:06.770]trying to find the right person to rent to
[00:17:13.008]But this guy's 29, I think.
[00:17:14.910]And his brother is a couple years younger.
[00:17:16.770]So he bought 12 cows this year and ran them
[00:17:20.600]on some of my dad's ground.
[00:17:22.270]SO that's working out good.
[00:17:25.900]This is a field day we did, excuse me, in September.
[00:17:32.430]Jimmy Emens from Oklahoma came up and talked.
[00:17:35.050]And we did paddocks.
[00:17:37.820]We didn't measure to see what size,
[00:17:39.970]or do any measuring of plant growth,
[00:17:42.900]we just kind of.
[00:17:44.100]This was our first stab at it,
[00:17:45.570]and it was, pretty amateur-ish, I guess.
[00:17:51.190]And I knew we over grazed it.
[00:17:52.730]I knew when I took Jimmy out there that morning
[00:17:55.530]he was going to say, "you grazed this a little too hard."
[00:17:58.760]And I said, "yeah, I knew it."
[00:18:02.529]But the bottom picture is 10 days after the sordum sundan
[00:18:06.940]you can see how it's leafing out.
[00:18:09.930]And I think Jay has talked about
[00:18:12.820]the amount percent of the plant that you graze off.
[00:18:17.860]When you get to 50 per cent or lower,
[00:18:19.780]your roots stop growing pretty fast.
[00:18:26.770]I keep saying this,
[00:18:27.750]people think I'm a broken record probably,
[00:18:29.580]but the more you know, the more you learn,
[00:18:31.890]the more about what you're doing,
[00:18:34.050]this is your business,
[00:18:34.883]the more you know about how the biology of
[00:18:36.735]everything works.
[00:18:39.590]The more you know why this works or this doesn't.
[00:18:42.810]I've got a long ways to go.
[00:18:45.570]But so many people tell me, why do you take the cows off
[00:18:48.245]there's still feed out there, you're wasting feed.
[00:18:51.230]And they just don't understand the biology.
[00:18:56.680]So this is the
[00:18:59.750]couple other paddocks.
[00:19:00.627]And we did not leave the cows out as long on those.
[00:19:06.734]So I wish Jimmy was there to see it,
[00:19:08.310]I think he would have been proud.
[00:19:14.400]This is after we had a couple of nights in the 20's.
[00:19:18.480]Most of the grass species die.
[00:19:20.510]The grass because
[00:19:23.000]I think it's gotta be in the teens for a few nights
[00:19:25.540]before they die, but the cows
[00:19:28.100]just really go after it after that.
[00:19:31.660]Some of them.
[00:19:35.560]That's some of the turnips and collards, radishes
[00:19:39.270]after a hard frost.
[00:19:42.280]We had a garden, on the north end of a field at home.
[00:19:46.424]A chaos garden that I had, I think,
[00:19:48.420]28 different vegetables, pumpkins,
[00:19:52.370]I don't know what all was in it.
[00:19:55.250]Well the pumpkins did incredible.
[00:19:59.210]I think we had over 150 pumpkins on a 10th of an arce.
[00:20:04.351]And I think I did a pretty good job
[00:20:05.810]of finding them out there in that mess.
[00:20:09.820]But we turned the cows out after we were done,
[00:20:14.040]and there was 50-60 that I had missed,
[00:20:18.780]and they were pretty green, but the cows cleaned them up.
[00:20:25.040]This is next to the garden.
[00:20:26.540]I did a legume plot experiment.
[00:20:31.930]I put some safflower and buck weed in there
[00:20:34.280]just for the fun of it.
[00:20:35.660]Safflower, I knew they weren't going to touch
[00:20:39.481]because of the prickly leaves, but I'm a big visual guy.
[00:20:44.590]So it's just kind of neat to have something in comparison
[00:20:47.440]of when they really went after something
[00:20:49.920]and then something they didn't touch at all.
[00:20:53.210]Then I'm going to go in there with corn this Spring
[00:20:56.970]with no nitrogen, and see how our yields are affected.
[00:21:03.930]How it compares this Fall based on the different clovers.
[00:21:08.880]That's the Crimson clover.
[00:21:10.620]And it was a small area, and we put the cows in
[00:21:12.840]for probably two days.
[00:21:16.580]And they didn't spend all their time there.
[00:21:18.150]They were meandering all over.
[00:21:21.630]But I thought that it's pretty good,
[00:21:23.330]but it's pretty compacted because we had, I think,
[00:21:25.764]an inch and a tenth of rain
[00:21:28.980]a couple of nights before we put them in there,
[00:21:30.580]and it was still pretty wet.
[00:21:35.040]THat's the hairy vetch.
[00:21:36.490]When I went to step on the spade, I almost fell over
[00:21:39.780]because it went in so easy.
[00:21:43.560]I turn that soil over, and it was just
[00:21:46.500]a beautiful structure.
[00:21:51.200]The clovers didn't really have a lot of Nitrogen fixation.
[00:21:55.490]I was kind of surprised by that.
[00:21:56.717]But the batch was just loaded.
[00:22:01.610]Lots of earth worms.
[00:22:04.500]This is my latest thing,
[00:22:08.700]I'm on 20 inch rows of corn and bean,
[00:22:10.970]so interseeding in the 20 inch corn is challenging.
[00:22:15.560]I've done the aerial seeding pre-harvest
[00:22:20.810]and never was happy with the results.
[00:22:22.710]And waiting until after harvest,
[00:22:24.130]you know, so I've just tried a few strips here and there.
[00:22:29.340]Last year I did a field down on the bottom,
[00:22:32.300]south of my place.
[00:22:33.220]Nobody can see it from the road.
[00:22:35.650]SO I thought, I'm just going to do,
[00:22:38.333]this is my crazy, whackey experiment field.
[00:22:43.820]And this isn't even the craziest part.
[00:22:47.480]But I did cowpeas, buckwheat, crimson, and red clovers.
[00:22:50.170]The cowpeas did really good.
[00:22:51.770]The buckwheat was so-so.
[00:22:54.580]A lot of it came, and what didn't come
[00:22:57.840]bloomed pretty good.
[00:22:58.780]The crimson and red clover pretty much was a failure.
[00:23:04.770]There's the cowpeas.
[00:23:09.620]That's looking out the combine window.
[00:23:13.910]They climbed right up to the tassel.
[00:23:21.476]It didn't look as impressive after you harvested it,
[00:23:23.507]but there was a lot of green out there.
[00:23:25.354]And I thought, boy if we could get the cows moved over,
[00:23:29.540]because they were right beside it, in the cover crops.
[00:23:36.030]I think two nights later, before we moved them,
[00:23:39.390]it froze and cowpeas are just -
[00:23:42.470]It gets to 32 and it's almost like they just disappear.
[00:23:47.700]This part, I wish I could have gone ahead of Jeff,
[00:23:50.120]because I'm not there yet.
[00:23:53.330]But I'm going in the right direction.
[00:23:56.790]I looked at the UNL crop budget,
[00:24:00.641]and my wife is the book-keeper.
[00:24:02.070]And she said she wanted to do it like this,
[00:24:03.820]so I said, "yes, dear."
[00:24:10.750]There's not a penny that's not accounted for.
[00:24:13.006]If it's not here, it's somewhere.
[00:24:19.610]And that's where we're at.
[00:24:21.290]On the corn,
[00:24:24.880]the chemical part on the corn
[00:24:26.550]I'm not whatsoever happy with where I'm at now.
[00:24:31.390]I think a big part of this is
[00:24:32.780]I've been chicken to plant green.
[00:24:37.020]And Dan's going to hold me to that this year.
[00:24:43.523]As I know the saving in herbacide on the soybean side of it,
[00:24:47.193]were I let the rye grow and plant green.
[00:24:50.130]The fertilizer is the big thing that
[00:24:54.294]I'm noticing on the corn.
[00:24:55.220]I think 2018 we were somewhere between
[00:24:58.483]one half a pound and six tenths of a pound
[00:25:04.120]for every bushel.
[00:25:06.810]There's the soybeans.
[00:25:07.960]One of the biggest ones is seed,
[00:25:11.370]and I've cut my seeding earnings way back.
[00:25:15.760]And plus, I haven't treated seed in three years now.
[00:25:22.090]So our trend is headed the right way, I think.
[00:25:24.800]I'm still a long ways from what I want to be.
[00:25:29.070]This is going back to that crazy field.
[00:25:32.120]That's the previous October.
[00:25:37.034]That was I got all my cover crops seeded,
[00:25:38.590]I had a little seed left over
[00:25:39.980]from plots and wildlife plantings.
[00:25:42.480]So I threw it all in the drill and seeded it.
[00:25:45.160]And I seeded it thick to get it out.
[00:25:49.810]And I think every seed grew.
[00:25:53.590]You couldn't walk through it, really.
[00:25:56.750]And people were complaining there's no pheasants
[00:25:58.840]in Wayne county, I said that's cause they're
[00:26:00.500]all on that seven acre field.
[00:26:10.452]We didn't get it grazed.
[00:26:14.364]So I thought, "I'm not going to mow it,
[00:26:15.500]I'm just going to plant right into it next Spring,
[00:26:17.270]nobody can see it from the road."
[00:26:20.220]THat's what it looked like next spring.
[00:26:21.850]I mean, there was some stuff like this.
[00:26:23.450]But it was dry and I picked an afternoon
[00:26:26.360]that was good and dry and everything was brittle,
[00:26:30.600]and it just planted beautifully.
[00:26:35.500]That was a month later.
[00:26:39.640]And I think we didn't weigh it,
[00:26:44.950]I think it was in the 220's per yield.
[00:26:48.620]Just going off the yield monitor.
[00:26:50.030]And it's a goofy field and wet on one end.
[00:26:52.070]SO I don't know exactly, but I know it was-
[00:26:57.170]for supposedly it can't be done,
[00:26:59.450]it turned out pretty good, so that's what I have.
[00:27:02.353]So, that's what I have.
[00:27:04.456]Thanks.
[00:27:05.289](applause)
[00:27:12.450]Maybe a few questions for Scott
[00:27:14.310]then we'll save them for the panel.
[00:27:15.990]Ray, if you want to work your way up.
[00:27:18.200]Questions for Scott, yes?
[00:27:22.190]Scott, I've got one question.
[00:27:25.886]Are these people that are grazing for you,
[00:27:31.550]are they going to their own cool season type pastures
[00:27:37.680]early and then come to you when you get growth
[00:27:44.100]later in the Fall, is what you're looking at there?
[00:27:47.357]Yeah.
[00:27:48.190]Okay.
[00:27:49.420]Like I say, the two that I'm working with now,
[00:27:51.480]that's working really well, are two brothers.
[00:27:53.680]And they're young, and they're hard workers.
[00:27:56.400]They both work full time, because they farm a little
[00:27:59.720]with their dad, but not a lot.
[00:28:02.630]And they want to grow their cow heard.
[00:28:04.560]They rent quite a bit of cool season grass pasture,
[00:28:10.738]but even in a year when you have good moisture,
[00:28:13.110]it's just not-
[00:28:15.480]You get into August it's a cool season grass pastures
[00:28:18.390]it's just not the quality and by the time you get that.
[00:28:21.600]Most guys want to keep them out there
[00:28:22.457]until you get corn out, and put them on corn stocks,
[00:28:26.831]and that's what that one neighbor was hauling hay everyday.
[00:28:29.590]Okay.
[00:28:30.423]And they don't live in the immediate neighborhood.
[00:28:34.510]They're 11 miles away, but I thought,
[00:28:36.467]"you know, these guys might jump on that."
[00:28:39.900]And they did, and it's worked out well.
[00:28:43.103]And it fits a window for them.
[00:28:46.118]And then they'll graze on through it.
[00:28:49.400]And actually that neighbor that was hauling hay,
[00:28:52.080]this a funny story too, I hope he's not here.
[00:28:54.907](laughter)
[00:28:57.450]I rented to him
[00:28:58.370]and he was the first person I ever rented to.
[00:29:01.030]The next year I did offer him some, and he said,
[00:29:02.727]"No, I'm not going to pay any rent,
[00:29:04.280]I can wait until I get some corn out."
[00:29:06.940]Well he's paying more in alfalfa hay, I think.
[00:29:11.430]And the young guys, one of them told me last fall,
[00:29:15.727]"I feel a little guilty that you don't charge me more."
[00:29:17.827]And I said, "Don't talk that way at all."
[00:29:20.420]I said I'm more than happy with what you're paying.
[00:29:24.910]It helps me and it helps you, so that's life should work.
[00:29:31.800]Okay. Thanks, Scott.
[00:29:33.097](applause)

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Nebraska Cover Crop & Soil Health Conference - Scott Heinemann

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