Nathan: So our first speaker is Abbey Wick.
She's a professor from North Dakota State University.
Her area is Soil Health Extension Specialists.
I was was really jealous,
I was a professor at the time in South Dakota,
when some of these positions were being created
in North Dakota, specifically on soil health.
And we were all very jealous that NDSU created positions
just on soil health.
So we appreciate you coming down,
and we look forward to what you have to share with us today.
Abbey: Awesome, thank you.
Will this thing kick in and work?
Is it on? Nathan: Yup.
Abbey: Can everybody hear me with the placement of this?
I wanna make sure.
You're good?
Thank you.
I always like when people react in the back
and tell you that they can hear you or not
instead of just dead silence.
So thanks for the invitation to be here.
I'm really excited to be in Nebraska.
Like Nathan said, North Dakota about seven or so years ago,
came of the soil health initiative
and they hired six different positions at NDSU
to work on soil health.
So by no means am I doing all this alone up there.
So we have an incredible support network at NDSU,
as of a really great farmer partners.
And that's what I focus on, is partnering with farmers
to figure out how to make these practices work,
and how to make them work effectively.
So a lot of what I'm gonna talk about is
for a very short growing season.
North Dakota does have a very short growing season
compared to what you guys have here.
And as you move from the Southern part of our State
to the Northern part of the State, it gets even shorter.
So when I talk about corn and things like that,
we're looking at mid-80s to high 90s for our varieties.
Our average yields are probably between 185 and 220.
So keep those things in mind
as I talk about corn and soybean.
And I'd say our soybean yields probably 40 to 70.
70 on a really good year.
So just keep that in mind
as I talk about some of these practices we're using.
And hopefully you'll get some ideas from this,
maybe not specific recommendations,
because I wouldn't want to come here
and make specific recommendations,
but some ideas on how you can maybe tweak
or apply some of these things we're doing
onto your systems here.
So I wanted to give some basics,
because I understand there's a whole diversity
of people in here that Some of them are just starting,
or thinking about it,
some that have been using cover crops for a while,
and I think Lauren is gonna go quite into depth things
for people using cover crops for a while.
So I wanna talk about some of the basics
of using cover crops.
And one of the first things that,
when a farmer comes to me
and asks me about using cover crops,
is I ask him, what is your goal?
What do you wanna do with cover crops?
And sometimes it could be,
well, I really wanna manage water,
I want better trafficability in the spring.
Some will say I wanna build soil health.
For me, the building soil health
is actually really challenging,
because we don't know how to measure it very well.
So some of the specific operational goal
is really gonna help you figure out what you wanna do
and how you're gonna do it.
So developing a goal is usually the first step,
and then there's usually another set of questions
after that on, what are you growing this year?
What are you growing next year?
What are you comfortable controlling?
What are your weed pressures?
And then fitting that system together to make it work.
And it could be for,
it's gonna be different for every farmer,
it's gonna be different for every field
that you farm in a lot of cases.
So keep that in mind as we kind of move forward.
But here's one example of a primary goal in my region,
is to reduce erosion.
We have terrible wind erosion when we had gusts,
yesterday is was like up to 50-some miles an hour.
I flew down here in a blizzard, so that was kind of fun.
But our primary concern is reducing erosion.
And so we try to keep our fields covered.
Turning off the chopping head on the combine
and leaving the corn stalks standing.
Getting some cover crops growing in there underneath
to use moisture the next spring.
We are also very waterlogged,
we have a ton of water right now
that we're gonna have to really manage going into next year.
And I understand your guy's soil profile
is also pretty full right now too.
So water management may be one of your goals.
Building aggregation, biological activity.
A lot of where our water management comes from
is from building aggregation,
because that creates large pores, it creates small pores,
it allows water to move through the system,
it allows the soil to maintain the water as well.
So having that kind of diversity
of aggregation in the soil can be really important.
So here's an example of,
this is a really nicely aggregated soil.
You can see the earth worm activity in there.
This is under a cover crop after wheat.
We grow a lot of wheat in our region too.
It could also be to manage compaction.
And when we think of compaction,
we think of the tillage radish, right?
I mean, that's probably the primary one
that we start thinking of for alleviating some compaction.
But we also like to use oats for compaction.
We like to use the fibrous roots on oats
to build some of that aggregation,
help get through some of the compaction.
So in our season,
where we've left a ton of ruts in the field
during harvest this fall,
we're gonna have a lot of preventive plants
and hopefully on those fields that we're starting,
we're gonna plant oats to start fixing
some of that compaction, and maybe throw in some radish.
Managing water in the spring,
this is usually how our fields look in the spring.
This is a tiled piece that's conventional tillage.
This is a untilled piece with no till.
And so this farmer is using several approaches
to manager water.
He's got the transpiration by the plants,
he's got the infiltration by the plant roots
and the structure he's built.
He's got some evaporation as well too.
And then this field is managing it
with probably just evaporation
and the tiling here is trying to move water out.
However, I dug in this field and it's very compacted,
and I doubt that surface water
is getting even to the tile line.
So that's another consideration.
But this is what we're starting to look at from management.
And on this field, I could walk all the way
across this field, on this one,
I can't even take a step in it,
'cause I might sink and I about lose my boots.
So that's kind of how
we're looking to manage moisture in the spring.
Increasing trafficability at planting.
I know you guys are doing a lot of reduce till in this area.
Where I work, we're still a lot of full tillage.
And we're concerned about soils warming up,
we're very concerned about them drying out.
So this is what we do to prepare for that in the spring.
But there's an alternative.
Here's a way to use cereal rye,
and planting soybeans right into that rye.
And it's got great trafficability.
He was planting in the rain, managing moisture,
getting his equipment across the field,
and doing a good job with planting.
And then improving trafficability at harvest.
This is one of my favorite picture.
This is when a farmer called me at 9:00 pm,
and he said, "I know what I'm doing is working,
"I need you to come down here tomorrow."
And so I went, because I was intrigued,
I had to see what he was doing.
And this is a field that he was using
no till with the diversartation with cover crops.
They harvested in two wheel drive, their soybean crop.
And they made it across the field, no issues.
Same day, this is a field that's conventional tillage.
Basically corn and soybean rotation.
This guy was harvesting with tracks, same day.
And so you can see that huge difference
and the benefits they're getting
from using these practices at both planting,
and then again at harvest.
And this is a high clay soil,
which you guys don't really have that here, correct?
Most of you are farming loam, loam textures.
We've got 60% clays, which is really a challenge.
But here you can see, this is where using those systems
and integrating it on a wet-harvest year
is really paying out for this farmer.
He could load on the field,
this guy was loading on the road.
You can see how he slipped around.
This guy didn't have to buy tracks, this one did.
So you can see how those thing might pay out.
But where do we start with all of this?
I mean, I think it's,
I get asked quite often
to make a blanket recommendation
for the state of North Dakota on, how do we do cover crops?
And to tell you the truth,
this is absolutely possible to do that.
So each field, each farmer,
sometimes we're even splitting our fields to divide them up
because they have different issues
to really get the best management.
So anything that I say here
is not gonna be a blanket recommendation,
it's gonna be an idea that's in your head
that you're gonna take and turn into something on your farm.
It sounds like you have a great support network here too,
from what Nathan was saying.
You've got a lot of support, which is really good.
So I'm gonna reference to,
this is one of the largest projects
that I have called the SHARE Farm.
And it's the soil health
and agriculture research extension farm.
It too me an entire day to come up with that acronym,
so please don't think it's stupid,
because it was a lot of work.
But this is a project that
is funded by our commodity groups.
And we have two of these sites now.
One in the Southeastern corner of North Dakota,
and one up in the Northeastern corner.
Two very different cropping systems,
very different approaches being used.
And I'll talk quite a bit about
what we're doing here with the tillage practices,
and then this is all no-till cover crop.
Then we have tiled ground and untiled ground,
which I'm not really gonna talk too much about the tiling
versus non tiling.
But this is where we get our information,
this is where we collect the data.
This is where we get the farmers to tell us
what they want us to do,
and this is how we build our programs.
So you know that to believe some of these practices,
sometimes you need to see the numbers, right?
You've gotta see the yields,
you have to see how it's working,
and so this is our project
where we get a lot of those numbers.
But I'll talk a little bit too about
where we can fit in cover crops.
And for us, it's after wheat.
I know you don't grow a ton of wheat down here,
so I'm not gonna focus a lot on that.
But we've been flying in cover crops into soybean
and also inter-seeding into corn.
And those are two really great practices
that we're using.
More success, for certain, with inter-seeding corn
than with flying on into soybean.
And then for us, after wheat is a no brainer.
If we get in by August 15th, we're good,
we can get a decent cover crop.
It sounds like you guys have until October 1st
to get in.
So there's all kinds of ways to inter-seed.
And we explore all these different ways,
and there's still more ways that farmers are developing.
I was told, when I started, that I should figure out a way
for farmers, I should figure out the equipment farmers
are gonna need to do this.
And I realized at first,
farmers don't want me to tell them what equipment to do,
they're gonna build their equipment.
They're gonna create what's gonna work on their farm.
What we need to do is figure out how effectively
these methods work so that a farmer can make a decision
on, do I wanna broadcast, do I wanna seed,
how am I gonna do this to get a good stand?
And so again, keep in mind,
on all this we're doing is on 30 inch row spacing,
and mid-80s to high 90s for maturity.
So we try to get upright structure on our corn
when we're doing this, so we can get sunlight down
to the cereal rye that we seed.
So just keep that in mind in your systems.
If light can't get down to it,
it's gonna be a challenge to get it going.
But here we've got a system where we seed it, actually,
in the soil with this rig.
Here's one where a farmer broadcasts it
with his, at side dress time.
Here's another one where we drop it in with a high boy.
And then there's, of course, the airplane.
So here's what we did at the SHARE Farm that I talked about.
We had a company design this,
where they could come in
when the corn is up to 18 inches tall,
and they can actually get the seed to soil contact
of the cover crops in there.
And we're seeding cereal rye and radish.
We keep it really, really, simple,
those are two cover crops that the farmers I work with
are comfortable controlling and managing.
And this works pretty well for us.
Here's what it looks like going through the soil.
This was actually, we started, when we transitioned
to reduce till in our systems,
we start with inter-seeding corn, and then we transition
by planting green with soybean, and going on from there,
because wheat residue is really scary for me.
So we start here, and this is how we often get started
with our cover crops.
And there's a close up of the inter-seeder that we use.
And what we are seeing,
here's the cover crops established mid-season,
well, towards the end of the season
they're getting a decent amount of light to get going.
We don't want them to grow a lot,
we just want them to grow a little bit and get established,
because after the corn comes off,
we really don't have a lot of time
for the cover crops to grow.
And so for example,
a lot of our farmers are still combining corn right now,
because we had such a late season,
and it's really kind of a bummer.
So here's it established,
this is what it looks like non chopping head,
the cover crops growing.
Post harvest using moisture, managing moisture.
There's the cereal rye and then also the radish in here.
And then going into the winter again,
there's where we sit with
that the cover crop establishment
under the residue on the snow.
So corn yields in 2016, these,
we had actually a really good year for corn.
And here it's significantly higher in the no-till cover crop
than it is the conventional till.
And that was a good thing for us to see.
I would be fine if those numbers were the same.
And actually what I think is more interesting
is the variability.
So this is our low, this is our high.
Look how much tighter that is
for the no-till cover crop system
than it is.
It's so variable for the conventional tillage
in our system without cover crops.
And so often times with cover crops,
we're trying to decrease that variability.
We're trying to make it a little bit more consistent
across the field.
And that's what we're able to do
in this system.
And then here's an example of broadcasting.
So we've got, this has a twin tank,
so you can broadcast the fertilizer,
and then also the cover crop seed.
So he's going in at this time,
he can cover a lot of acres, go really fast.
And he's fine with broadcasting in his system.
And this is what it looks like,
here he did 30 pounds of cereal rye.
Here is did 60 pounds.
And in this field it actually got hailed on twice.
And so this farmer, though, he was really
upset about the hail, he was actually really happy,
he had the cover crop growing under there,
because it competed with weeds,
it did a whole nother level of management for him
in that field.
And helped him get through that year.
So you can see a difference in seeding rate
depending on the coverage you want.
So he saw that, and the thought well, heck,
I got variable rate,
I've got sandy hilltops,
I've got high clay lower parts of the field,
I'm in a just variable rate,
and I'm gonna sit in the broadcaster,
and I'm gonna bump it up to 60 pounds
in my low parts of the field,
I'm gonna drop it down to 10 on the high parts
on the hilltops.
And so that's what he did.
This is a hilltop where he has less,
and then here's the low part where he's got more cover crop.
So you can kind of customize things.
As you get comfortable with it, you can take it
to a whole nother level and say,
"I don't want as much moisture usage on the hilltop,
"because I know it's gonna dry out faster,
"so I'm gonna reduce my rate, and I'm gonna bump it up
"on the low parts of the field."
Or you could even go through the field
and just seed your cover crop in the low parts of the field,
where you're gonna have trafficability issues,
and get it established there,
but just don't do anything on the hilltops.
So there's a lot of different variations on this
that you could do to help it fit your system.
Dropping between rows.
This is a Heggie unit that we had run around
to do a few fields for us.
So this is how it looked mid-season after harvest.
So you can see the cover crops, they get established nicely.
Again, it's a broadcasting method,
so it's gonna rely a little bit on moisture,
or predominately on moisture to get it going.
But when you have this residue in here,
I think that helps quite a bit
to get the cover crops established and growing.
And then flying it on with an airplane.
I think this is the easiest, right?
Because it's one less person you gotta manage.
It's a phone call.
It's making sure the seed gets to the airport,
and then it's done.
And I have a lot of farmers that do this
because it's just the simplest way to get it done.
So they'll go on about tasseling, and bump up their rates,
nearly double them, if they're broadcasting versus seeding.
And they will get this kind of establishment
after one month.
And you might look at that and be like,
"Oh what a failure, why did I even bother spending the money
"on doing this?"
But then the next April, that's how it looks.
And it grows the cereal rye over winters,
and it grows in the spring.
You guys might have more flexibility with your annuals here.
In North Dakota, that's what we have is cereal rye.
That's our primary tool.
And then rainfall, like I said, is important.
This one was seeded a day before one inch rain.
This is literally taking a step from here
over to here and taking a picture.
And this was flown on a day after a one inch rain.
So rain is really, really critical
if you're gonna broadcast.
So if you have the flexibility with a pilot
to get him in there right before a rainfall event,
or something like that,
often times that's not the case,
but if you do, that could really help with establishment.
We've done some comparisons, kind of side by side
with either seeding the cover crop
and then broadcasting it in,
so I wanted to show a little bit of that.
There wasn't really much for yield to collect
or biomass on the cover crops, so we didn't focus on that,
but the visuals are pretty striking.
So we ran our inter-seeder.
This is the same thing we ran at SHARE Farm.
And actually had the seed to soil contact between rows.
And then these farmers rigged up
this box on the front of their Heggie,
this hydrous unit, and it drops a seed down the front,
and then this colter kind of works it in
as a side dressing, so somewhat of a broadcast method,
but they're getting a little bit of soil thrown
over the top.
And here's a comparison.
There's our twin row that's actually seeded in the soil,
and here it is where they broadcast.
Same exact mix, same timing on seeding.
So it makes a difference whether you seed it in the ground
or broadcast it.
This year we got nailed with crickets.
And anything we broadcast,
the crickets ate germ out of it,
and it didn't establish.
But anything we seeded established really nicely.
So that seed to soil contact can be pretty important.
This is from Rob Myers with SARE.
He just had some other pictures of way that farmers
are getting cover crop seeds out there in corn,
so while harvesting, broadcasting.
And then also running some vertical tillage,
it looks like, and broadcasting cover crop seed
at the same time.
So there's lots of ways to do it,
you just have to think about what you have,
and the equipment you could pull,
the things you could pull, the tree rows to modify
and how you can get your equipment to work for you.
And doing this.
And if you could do two things at once,
it's even better, right?
If you could side dress and do the cover crop,
then you're doing one pass for two things.
Planting green with soybean.
This is another thing that's been
really, really good tool for us.
If we're inter-seeding our corn,
that rye will establish in the spring,
and then we're planting our soybean right into the rye.
And it's worked really well for us,
because typically our springs are very wet.
And so having that there to use moisture
is really important.
So this is actually, I wouldn't recommend this rate
for starting out.
This is about 90 pounds of rye
that was seeded in the fall.
So it's a pretty dense stand.
But I think if you can find the right rates,
and the right amount that you're gonna
be comfortable seeding into,
but this is an excellent tool for us.
We like it because in a no-till system,
if we're looking at the moisture content we are more,
I just run around with this moisture probe
and I stick it in the soils of different fields and
we're saturated under our no-till.
And we can't afford that,
because we can't be any growth stages behind where I live.
We've gotta be right up there in getting everything
to finish out and be able to harvest.
So by adding in a cover crop,
we've cut that moisture in half.
And that's a great tool for us.
There's the cereal rye that we seeded,
it's reducing the moisture between where we have the strips,
where it's just no-till.
And then here's where the cover crop is growing,
and then anything that was not covered
had zero moisture in it this one spring.
There was nothing left.
The seed was being exposed on the surface,
the soil was blown away, it was very, very dry.
I guarantee this didn't germinate very well or timely,
and it was probably an entire growth stage behind.
So for us, it's a great moisture management tool.
And so if you're going into this winter
with some saturated soils,
maybe you have some rye out there,
and you're gonna think about it next spring
as to how you're gonna manage it,
just think about when you're gonna terminate it,
what you're gonna plant into and make it work for you.
I feel like I've been blocking that side enough,
so I'm gonna move over here.
Yeah, question?
(audience member speaks faintly)
That probe is probably 12 inches long,
so not very deep.
I'm mainly concerned, like when I poke around,
I'm looking at the seed bed.
And so I wanna make sure that, like for example,
if we're using cereal rye,
I wanna be out there terminating it before
it uses too much moisture and dries out that seed bed.
So I have farmers that will terminate it at 14,
a dozen days in advance to make sure
that they don't dry it out.
Because they've been hurt by that before
on their bean yields.
So I think it's, whenever the field looks like
it's gonna be suitable to plant,
that's when we recommend that you just spray it out.
And then you'll still get some of the benefits,
because you'll have the roots in the soil
and things like that that you're gonna drive on
to help with trafficability.
But watching these field, I tell a lot of growers
that cover crops are not gonna fix all your compaction,
and they're not gonna make things perfect in your field,
and it's not gonna be rainbows and puppies,
because it requires a lot of management.
It still requires management in that field
to make sure you're terminating at the right time,
that you're using the right rates,
that you're adjusting based on conditions,
that you're adjusting your equipment to get it in
and do a good job seeding in the residue.
Yeah, question?
(audience member speaks faintly)
So the question was, with the dryer soil
that would warm up a little bit faster
and are we still using seed treatments?
I would say majority of the farmers are.
They're still using the seed treatments.
Which works for their systems.
Any other question?
Yeah, I'm glad we're asking questions.
(audience member speaks faintly)
So the question was,
do you see any allelopathic effects
on the soybeans by planting into the growing rye?
And where we see these allelopathic effects
is on the corn, a grass into a grass,
but broadly for the soybeans into a grass is not,
not an issue for us.
The main issue is soybeans into rye
is gonna be making sure it doesn't dry out.
I have farmers that we don't advise it,
but they do plant their corn into rye
and they can run issues with the allelopathic effects,
nitrogen tie up, moisture tie up, competition,
disease transfer, pest transfer.
And so when I see six things that are potential warnings
that you gotta watch out for it,
to me it's not a great idea for our systems.
But from what I understand with going
like something like corn into rye,
even you're gonna,
the nitrogen tie up could kill you on that.
So you have to be really careful and side dress
and things like that.
But the broadleaf end of the rye works really well for us.
As long as we make sure it does not dry the soil out.
That it can't get going.
Any other questions?
This is more how I like, yeah.
I got this at Forestry Suppliers,
it's like 400 bucks or something for the probe.
The other thing, the other tool that I really liked,
so I have a moisture probe and we've got soil tissue.
So I've got a salinity probe and,
by far my best tool is a pickup,
is the pickup and the shovel.
So driving around looking at stuff,
get the shovel out, digging around.
For 55 bucks, I've got the spearhead spade that I love.
It works really well.
It's easy to get out and dig up soils,
so that's going to be, you can tell a lot by moisture.
You can tell a lot by the conditions in the soil too.
But, yeah.
(audience member speaks faintly)
So the question was
are we trying other things like triticale
in addition to the rye
and then what's our spread pattern on it?
(audience member speaks faintly)
Probably 70.
Yeah.
It doesn't go out as far as you think.
But when I'm spreading,
so when I'm broadcasting a cover crop,
my expectations are just gonna be different, right?
You know that you're not, you might get some streaks
because you're not gonna get the pull width.
It's not gonna look like it is.
If it's seeded, you're gonna have some establishment
in areas where it may be wetter and areas where it's dry
or you're not gonna get establishment.
So for example a farmer called,
he had broadcast some cereal rye in the farm
and he called me in the spring,
he goes, "Abbey, this looks terrible."
He's like, "I've got these patches here
"and I've got this not growing there and I've,"
he goes, "It's really inconsistent."
And he was like, "But wait a minute."
He's like, "I see that that rye
"is establishing in those low parts
"at the field where I needed to use moisture."
He said, "It looks really good there.
"It's established, or it's competing with these weeds
"that I had."
And then he goes,
"Maybe I'm not so concerned that it doesn't establish
"on the higher parts of the field
"where I don't necessarily need it."
So setting your expectations too, when you broadcast,
it's going to be patchy the next spring.
And it's not gonna look as uniform and consistent
as something you may have seeded.
But yeah, we run into a lot of that.
Even with the airplane passes,
if you fly on oats versus cereal rye,
the spreading pattern is different.
So the pilot needs to be aware of that
to make sure they get good coverage.
Any other questions on the corn and inter-seeding?
Yeah.
(audience member speaks faintly)
So the question is when are we terminating that rye
that we're planting green into?
And for us I let the farmers use their judgment on that.
If the field is really wet
and they feel like they need that growing there
to help reduce,
we have iron deficiency chlorosis in our area.
So if it helps, having the moisture managed
by the rye with the soybean actually is beneficial.
So if they have parts of the field
where they have that issue that I tell him to
let it go for a little bit, but typically they're coming in
and terminating within a day or two
and some of them then roll it down as well,
so they roll it and get better weed coverage
throughout the year.
And so that's been really beneficial.
And one of the things that we're kind of playing with
while we're talking about this with rye up where we are,
is variety of rye.
So I mean, when you buy rye it's usually be on us, right?
And our Carrington Research Extension Center,
Steve Zwinger is there
and he's developing different varieties of rye
that are protected varieties,
but he's developing them to grow faster in the spring
to compete with weeds better.
We have a lot of resistant kochia,
so competing with weeds at that time,
and then you roll it down and it'll be a shorter,
shorter stature plant
you can roll it and get
some decent weed control throughout the year.
But we focus a lot on that as how are we gonna,
what's the best tool we're going to have
to achieve these goals.
And for a lot of us, it's the resistant weeds,
and getting it growing early and then laying it down
to manage weeds.
Any other questions?
(audience member speaks faintly)
Yeah, that's a good question Lauren.
He asked me to clarify
between the annual ryegrass, cereal rye,
perennial rye, what we're using,
we are using winter rye, cereal rye,
so it's called winter rye, it's called cereal rye.
That's what we're using.
It's a winter annual.
I don't recommend using annual ryegrass where I am.
Because number one, it doesn't achieve the goals
we want it to achieve.
We want something over winter and our North Dakota climate,
so cereal rye or winter rye is the only one
that's going over winter for us,
but in other places they're using annual ryegrass.
I also have a weed specialist that will,
that will literally disowned me
if I ever recommend annual ryegrass in our area
because of the potential to become a weed.
So we don't use it for the goal of reasons,
but then also the potential to be a weed.
And then perennial, we're not using much perennial rye
in our area.
I think because of the cost.
So if you're talking Italian ryegrass and annual ryegrass,
those are similar things.
One's a forage and one's a crop,
but, well we stay away from the Italian ryegrass
and the annual ryegrass
and focus on cereal rye and winter rye.
Any other questions on that?
This is great, I love questions.
So, yeah.
Audience Member: So you develop (speaks faintly),
I think that's something I will walk down there.
Abbey: I'm not sure, so we've developed the dillon rye
and now we have the gardener rye coming out.
And they worked really well in our climate.
You pay more for it, right?
'Cause it's protected variety.
And I'm not sure if it would work better down here or not,
but that could be something,
sure we could send you some seed and throw it in some plots
and see what it does.
But I like the idea, Oh, it's gonna go on your farm.
(chuckles)
I like the idea of using protective varieties too
in a lot of ways because then you know what you're getting.
So as far as even contamination for weed seeds
or winter hardiness for us,
winter hardiness is really important.
And if we're getting a cereal rye
or winter rye grown down in the Southeast,
it's not gonna survive in North Dakota.
I mean, it won't survive.
We need something that's like grown there,
that's gonna be regional.
And also too, I like the idea of having something grown
in our region that if,
I mean there shouldn't be any weed seed in it,
but if there ever is, then you know what the weeds are.
You've already been managing them.
And so if you're getting something from the Southeast
or wherever else you can get some issues
with weeds coming in, especially like millets
are really bad for weed contamination.
(mumbles) questions as we go through this.
I really appreciate those.
These are just some,
we did some measurements when we planted
our soybean green under rye.
Just as far as the plant heights and the populations.
And so we were getting taller plants in the rye.
And maybe that's the competition making it stretch out.
One of the farmers really liked that
because then he felt like the pods are gonna be higher up
and you can get a better cleaner harvest.
I don't know if that's consistent,
but that's what we're seeing on a couple of replicates
in one field.
And then here's the weed biomass.
I love cereal rye for weed control
and it's just one more mode of action that's not a chemical,
it's timing is different.
It's just a really, really good tool.
So here we had strips where we measured weed count
plus biomass and we were 10 times lower in weed biomass
where we had cereal rye.
So it's holding it back
and in some cases like you've got fields
that you just need a little more time to get to.
If you put rye on those fields
to help you control weeds in the spring
and give you, just buy you a little bit more time
to get there and to terminate the weeds.
That's gonna be a really beneficial approach too.
And I have a lot of farmers that do that.
They just say this is gonna be my last field
I'm gonna get to.
So I'm gonna make sure that there's rye on it
so that I know by the time I get there
I can control the weeds 'cause there'll be smaller
and I'll get a better kill.
And then these are the strips side by side in the field,
almost looks like two pictures next to each other.
But those are replicated strips.
And so here you can see yields did not,
was not hit by using rye.
And so there again, those are the kinds of yields
that were average yields for us.
Now this can change if the rye does dry out the soil
too much in the spring and it drys out that seed bed,
you could be, I mean for us we get a growth stage behind
on our soybean, which means we put on less pods,
which means we take a yield hit.
So, yeah, a question.
(audience member speaks faintly)
What's our annual rainfall?
In the Eastern part of the State,
we're probably 18 to 22 inches.
And then in the Western part of the State we're arid.
So semi-arid.
Yeah.
(audience member speaks faintly)
Yeah, the question is what are we,
so we're looking at yields and things like that,
but what are we measuring for soil health
and what metrics are we using there?
We have at that SHARE farm, we collected,
I think it was 80 some points across that field,
but the tillage and no till.
And we did, I don't know,
probably $50,000 worth of testing on it.
We did all the soil health tests you could possibly do.
And then we added in some of our own
like nitrogen mineralization, residue bags, things like that
to figure out what the best possible approach was for us
on that soil health testing.
And the researcher that did all that,
she came to me later and she goes, "You know what?"
She goes, "Abbey, if you just calibrated farmers
"on a shovel, you'd probably get better results."
We were just having a really hard time calibrating
those tests to our region
because they're so based on organic matter of percentages
that we already have really high organic matter percentages
in North Dakota.
So it was offsetting everything
and saying all our soils were really healthy.
So we're not kind of,
we don't do a lot of that examination anymore.
We are working with the soil testing lab in our area
and we're developing the tests that could be appropriate
in this package.
So for us, like aggregation
would be the one of the most important ones
because it's the quickest to change.
So especially if you've got any clay in your soil,
it's gonna aggregate.
Basically the sand soil and clay particles
are gonna be packed into like a larger particle
with roots and fungal hyphae and bacterial glues
and things like that.
And and so we measure that
along with organic matter percentage
'cause that's kind of what everybody wants to see.
But you have to be careful on
how you sample for that as well,
Yeah, it's really, it's hard to measure,
but on these fields like
sometimes I don't need the measurement.
I just need the phone call from the farmer saying,
"Hey, I'm still planting, it's working, it's raining,
"I'm getting everything in the ground."
Sometimes that's, I feel like the best, the best response.
Yeah a question.
(audience member speaks faintly)
Okay, so the rye is that rolled
or chemical burn down.
(audience member speaks faintly)
Oh, that was a chemical burn down.
So just full rates of herbicide on that
to make sure you've got a good kill
and they don't roll because they don't have any rocks.
So they just leave it like that.
So yeah, it's important.
It's important to get a good kill on the rye.
That's the other thing I noticed
is that if you're planting green and you skimp on
the herbicide rage or whatever it is,
and you don't get a good kill,
then you're gonna have a bad experience.
So it's important to make sure
that you're doing a good job spraying it out too.
Okay, so then this is,
we did the same thing at that SHARE farm project.
We planted green.
This is our stuff that was interceded in corn.
That's how the rye look the next spring.
And then we flew on oats into our soybean.
And I chose oats because
I wasn't sure if I was gonna go to wheat the next year,
or if I was gonna go to corn.
And so if I have oats,
I know I can kill the any volunteer oats
with a wild low herbicide and wheat.
And I know that it's gonna winter kill before corn.
So I wanted nothing there except for something growing
underneath the canopy to help
with the combining of it.
As you can see we used a really good residue cover.
We've got the corn stocks, we have some,
if you can kind of see a green hue on it,
but it was enough that when he was combining it didn't push
and he felt really good about how clean it was
and how well it worked.
So it doesn't look like a great stand,
but it kind of held all that residue in place
over winter and kept it from blowing around.
But I like choosing something like cereal rye
if you have an area where you need high moisture
and you need something over winter,
but then oats are also a great option.
If you want it to grow the winter kill
and say you got to wheat or you go to corn
and you don't want to terminate it before you go to corn.
That's how you kind of tweak those cover crops.
You can also do a mix of rye and oats.
So you only want 10 pounds of rye
and then you pay 140 pounds of oats.
Well it's something in the winter kill,
but you want a little bit of a safety net there
to plant into.
So lots of variations you can do.
And I think that's the fun part of it
is that you can really figure how to customize
some of these things.
Flying on cover crops into soybean.
We're doing that pretty successfully.
And I think a lot of that's because of our high clay soils,
to be honest with you.
Because the whole moisture,
and we have the moisture there at the time
we were flying it on right before a leaf drop.
So if you don't have that moisture there,
just set your expectations that,
if you're flying it on before leaf drop,
there's no moisture or nothing's gonna grow.
So you just have to keep that in mind.
But we're getting some pretty decent luck.
How would that in our area,
this is how the field looks at harvest.
This was actually cereal rye.
This farmer tells me he sprays it out
before he plants corn into it.
I don't know if he just tells me that to keep me happy
or if it's that he actually does that,
but he gets the rye out there.
This is a high clay soil.
Again, loves combining over this
'cause it's just easy to do.
Everything stays low to the ground.
And does a nice job for them.
They've also stripped tilled into it before sunflowers.
Or you could do this before corn,
but getting those strips in with your fertility,
but having the rye in there
between is really beneficial too.
So that's kind of a nice system.
And then there's, I work with farmers who,
everybody's got bad parts in their field, right?
There's parts that don't grow anything
or that are waterlogged or that are just a pain in the butt.
This one, he plants his soybean
where he knows he can get the good yields
and then he comes in with his broadcasts
and just throws out some cereal rye or it could be barley
or it could be oats or whatever is, this is a saline area.
But going back into those areas
where nothing establishes,
focusing your efforts on planting your cash crop,
where it's gonna grow and it's gonna do really well.
And then taking some of those more problematic areas
and coming in and just getting coverage
so you don't get the weed pressures.
It could be a really great tool as well.
So I wanted to put some of the watch outs on here.
Things that we've made mistakes on.
And as a university we like to make the mistakes
so that you guys learn from it
and you don't have to make the mistakes on a large scale.
So here we broadcast cover crops way too early.
You can see that that's gonna be a problem for harvesting.
Fortunately, this guy has livestock
so it wasn't a huge deal.
But we thought we came in at the right time,
but for some reason everything grew
by the time we were there to harvest
it was quite a bit of growth.
Corn into cereal rye.
This is what we don't like to see.
And then our region
where we have such a tight growing season,
corn into rye can be really detrimental.
And cause yield reductions.
But maybe you put in strips, you do strip till
and you get that rye away from the corn.
So you give it a chance to grow.
If you have strip till you can do that
or if you don't, you can seed it
on roast basting and they come in between with your corn.
So you need to have that rye there.
You're too nervous
to do this on a field without it or whatever.
You can either create the strips
or you can leave gaps to plant your corn
or plant your crops.
So even if you're going to soybean into this,
some farmers do love leaving that gap because they want,
that's what they're more familiar with is planting into that
and they'd rather have their rye growing in between.
You're still getting great erosion control,
you're still getting great moisture usage just using strips.
This is another thing that we do in North Dakota is,
and on our wheat ground we do bio strips.
So we focus all our cover crops on our 30 inch row spacing
where we're gonna plant our cash crop.
So it helps us reduce seed costs.
It also helps us just move,
get some residue managers out there if we want them
so that we don't have to worry too much
about planting into something.
So this is setting up for corn
and it works works pretty well for us.
So we got decent growth on this.
We had flax in there.
We had faba bean and radish.
And this is how the strips look.
In the fall when the faba bean frost kill
they turn black and it's a really nice dark residue.
So you could use peas in this case
which you'd probably want the peas off of the corn rows
because they'll tangle up around your equipment,
but faba beans, you want them in the row
and you could end up producing a nice dark residue.
Kind of an expensive seed,
but that's why we cut it back and just did it in the strips.
Relying on catch and release,
I think, and your system may be different here,
but for us in North Dakota,
we're trying to figure out when that nitrogen
and the nutrients tied up by the cover crops
is actually released for the next year's crop.
And we ever take a credit,
how do we do this so that we don't get hurt on yield
because we're relying on something that cover crop
may or may not give.
So we have these plots in two different areas.
One of the plots is on a 40 year no till site
with 20 years use of cover crops.
And then the other site is on a recently transitioned
to no-till site with no history of cover crops.
And so we've got kind of both ends of the spectrum
and where there's a replicated froze closet,
Dave Franzen is working on.
And so he comes out here and,
basically sprays out where the cover crop is.
We're doing this after weed going to corn
but we also have interceded corn going to soybean
and soybean with oats in it, going back to wheat.
And so he comes in and sprays it out
and then we just do business as usual.
And then he comes in with different fertilizer rates
to see how the corn responds to the fertilizer applications.
And one of the things that he's finding
where we have, this line here is the yield with cover crop.
And here's the yield without the cover crop.
So it's not all rainbows and puppies, right,
where we're seeing a yield reduction
as a result of having the cover crops,
but it's really there's 100 pound nitrogen lag.
So we just need to make sure
that we're still applying decent amount of nitrogen here
to get a yield when we're using a cover crop.
So his recommendation is if you're gonna go in
and you wanna see whether you get
that nitrogen release from a cover crop for your corn crop,
just fertilize whatever percentage of the total
that you want to on the field.
But do a check strip where you do the full amount
and then watch it.
And if it's something that you feel like,
"Okay, boy I really am not getting any release
"from that cover crop.
"I should add additional nitrogen,"
go back in and side dress.
But it's this catch and release idea.
It's not simple.
We're not seeing that net nitrogen released in year one.
We're not seeing it in year two.
We're not seeing it in year three.
So when does that nitrogen come back
to our cash crop?
It's not very simple and that's for us,
and maybe it's different here,
I don't know if the work has been done here in Nebraska,
but we're seeing that Wisconsin's kind of a similar thing
where it's not just catch and release.
North Dakota is certainly that way.
But just something to be aware of that,
that when you're fertilizing and you have cover crops
in the system, don't necessarily just take your credit
because you're using a cover crop.
Make sure that you're still managing responsibly
with your with your fertilizers.
Yup.
(audience member speaks faintly)
Well this is actually, sorry, this is the same field.
This is a plot where zero nitrogen was added
on this side and then this is where 80 pounds was added.
And these are both cover crop plots.
(audience member speaks faintly)
Nope, this is from actually the recently converted
and we see the same exact thing on the 40 year no-till,
which you think that guy has got six
or seven percentage organic matter.
He's got great structure.
He's got cycling nutrients,
but he's been really hurt in the past
by not applying enough nitrogen
because he was relying on his is biological component
of his soil to work in a good year.
And if you don't get the right moisture at the right time
for that mineralization of the organic matter
for the nitrogen release, nothing can help you.
So at the end of the day,
the microbes still rely on moisture to function
and if you have a dry year and you don't get it,
then you're still not gonna get the nitrogen
release or availability.
(audience member speaks faintly)
You keep it in the loop.
And so he's asking about the scavenging of nitrogen
by those cover crops.
And so they definitely, there's a lot of biomass of it
'cause we had rye, we had radish, we had turnips,
we had flax, we had all kinds of things in the mix
and they're capturing that nitrogen and holding it.
You could certainly see that in the soil test results.
But it's just, yeah, it's in the system.
We just don't know when it's gonna be released.
So it's beneficial, right?
I mean, you're holding onto your nitrogen
and you're keeping it there.
It's just don't bank on it the next year
because it may not be released, at least in our system.
And here it may be totally different depending
on moisture conditions, temperature,
all those kinds of things.
But just something to be aware of
and make sure you don't hurt yourself in yield.
Yup.
(audience member speaks faintly)
Yeah, that's a great question.
And I wish David Franzen, and we're here to answer it
'cause he's our soil specialist,
but when Dave does his curves,
so he applies 40, 80, 120, 160, 200 pounds of nitrogen
on these plots.
And so Dave is always looking for this point
where you're not gonna get any more yield
for what you apply.
And so there's some of that in here
and not maybe as specific
as you're wanting, but his fertilizer rates are dependent
on where this kind of peters out
and you don't get any benefit towards the yield.
So it'd be the same for both lines as to where,
so maybe this one is a little bit
closer, I had to say.
And I wonder if he's put that.
I'll post it on, a lot of the stuff
we have on our NDSU Soil Health webpage too.
So anything that I'm showing that you wanna follow up on
or have questions about, a lot of it's on our webpage
and I'll make sure that I put this article that David,
for the crop and soils magazine on there when I get back.
(clearing throat)
But I think the main thing is that learning happens faster
with the network and with partners.
There is no way that we can know all these things
and for our system, if we didn't have great farmer partners,
if we weren't, didn't work with trusted advisors
and we didn't work with researchers
and other extension specialists,
there's Franzen applying his fertilizers.
But we learned so much
by working on all this stuff together.
So one of the great things about being here today
is that you're all,
a lot of, you have been here multiple times,
so you're forming this network, right?
People that you see that you talk about social health with
or maybe that you've got their numbers in your phones
to call them when you've got questions.
But this network is really, really important
and this is kind of what we were building in North Dakota.
So like here's an example from one of our programs,
this cafe talk program.
These are all the different locations in the royal blue.
And then if you look at here, the green are NDSU people,
the blue are farmers, the red are consultants,
the yellow are industry, I think the white are NRCS
and other government organizations.
So when you look at this,
we've got all these people talking, right?
All these lines mean that these people are associating
and they're coming in contact with each other.
And if you're on the inside of this,
it means that you're showing up to a lot of events, right?
So your dot is getting bigger, you're more of an influencer.
You're maybe somebody that talks more often.
These are all farmers that are in here interacting
with extension and with research and with consultants
on a regular basis.
And then there's this whole group of people
that are just getting interested in this.
And then our goal is to bring them to the inside
and they can keep growing out.
And so don't ever underestimate the power of a network
or connecting with other people.
And it may seem weird to ask another person
for their phone number or something like that,
but to have that number on your phone to use it,
if you're planting green and you're like,
"Ah, this is not going very well.
"I'm not sure if I'm getting the right seed depth"
or whatever, to have somebody that's done it before,
in your phone and call them and say,
"Listen, this is what's going on."
And they can say, "Well, did you try this?
"Did you try that?
"Adjust this maybe."
Have that number in your phone
because that's really critical
and this network is really critical
to making these practices work
and to make them, help you advance faster
in all these things.
It's one thing to go to a meeting,
it's another thing to be talking to somebody
when you're in the field and get some ideas.
And Twitter is also a great resource for that.
So this is a Twitter network that's built after
one of our meetings where people are talking.
You can see the interactions that are occurring
well beyond the walls of the facility.
Yeah.
(audience member speaks faintly)
Yeah.
The question is about, does NDSC ever work with them?
No, confirm it if you're in, like Burleigh County.
And we actually, we meet a couple times per year.
So we bring in all the researchers
and extension people working on soil health from NDSU
and then the same with the NRCS.
And the same with Burleigh County
and Menoken and actually Dakota Lakes.
Dwayne Beck usually comes up
and we get together and we try to create,
we try to make sure we're giving a consistent message armor.
I mean, if you're hearing one thing from the university
and you're hearing another thing from NRCS,
then you hear another thing from this and then that,
and we bring farmers into that group too,
people that are talking about these things.
And we try to make it so it's cohesive.
That we all know where everybody's trying.
Everybody's working to make sure we get good coverage.
So yeah, we're pretty fortunate in that way that we do.
We do collaborate quite a bit.
So here's all kinds of information.
You guys have postcards for the soil center podcast.
There are 16 episodes on there from farmers,
extension researchers, consultants.
If you wanna listen to them, they're only 30 minutes long.
But they're a great way to kind of get an idea
of what farmers are trying in our area and what we're doing.
Pretty active on Twitter.
I like that network and platform.
Here's our webpage ndsu.edu/soilhealth.
And then this is a large regional workshop
that we're doing now that we just had the first year
this past December and we have it again in December
of this year.
But yeah, all my contact information,
if you leave here with some kind of thoughts or ideas,
or things you wanna kick around a little bit more,
I have a lot of windshield time typically.
So it gives me a great time,
great opportunity to talk with people
on ideas they have and I'm always learning
and enjoying that process too of learning.
So any more questions
on kind of what we're doing
or how this could be applied here?
Nathan: Yeah, I'll run the mic around there
if you've any questions.
We have time for questions so you might as well ask.
Audience Member: You've talked a lot
about using cereal rye going into soybeans.
So what do you use in soybeans going into corn?
Abbey: In soybeans going into corn, we are using oats.
So for us, we can fly that on before leaf drop
and soybean get a little bit of growth
and now that we don't have to terminate it
the next year before we plant corn.
'Cause for us that's a big deal.
I mean we pretty much go from snow cover to like,
let's get rolling and plant.
And so there's often not times
to go out and spray something and to terminate it.
So some farmers that I work with are using cereal rye
and they're flying it into their soybean.
They're either putting in strip,
they're doing strip till later
or they go in after harvest and they actually seed it
with spacing for their corn in between.
If they're on a really high clay waterlogged soil,
that's what they're doing.
(audience member speaks faintly)
So the question was,
are we seeing an increase in organic matter using the rye?
So organic matter is a tricky test.
And here's why we use it but,
we don't rely on it for evaluating change.
So anytime you change your system, say it's,
you're going to reduce tillage
or you're incorporating cover crops or something like that.
If you're out there and you're not kicking away
whatever residue is on the surface
before you collect a sample,
you're gonna artificially inflate
your organic matter numbers.
And I think that's a lot of, sometimes what happens with,
but some of these numbers where you see
these rapid increases
in organic matter percentages
as a result of a change in practice,
then it may be some residue that's caught in there,
that some reflected in the test.
And that seems to be our biggest issue with some of those.
So unless, and I've even seen a samples I've collected
where I been down on the ground pushing
the residue aside to make sure
that I just get that soil sample
or I work with a colleague that actually removes
all the roots from the sample before he runs it
for organic matter as he's looking out root tweezers.
But he removes the roots
because he hasn't kind of consider
that part of the organic matter.
It's still too new and it's still too active.
So if you're adding more roots to your system,
you're adding more residue.
Those numbers can be really tricky to track.
But from what I know about organic matter,
it's 20 years for you to see major changes
in organic matter.
So we're looking at things like the active fraction,
so organic matter has pools.
It's got active and slow and passive,
and so you can separate those out
with chemical tests in the lab.
And so we're kind of looking at that as maybe
a better measure.
Audience Member: Abbey, what's the native organic matter
levels that you work with?
Abbey: Really, really high.
I mean we've got a lot of our Valley soils.
Probably we're around 7%, 8% organic matter.
Yeah, we've got a lot of organic matter,
which is why the soil health test don't work for us
'cause everything's weighted on organic matter
for those tests.
So we have a lot of organic matter.
Our soils are very, very dark.
We have successfully reduced that organic matter percentage
to half a percent or one by beating our soils up
and reducing our rotations.
So we have depleted that by quite a bit
actually in a lot of our soils are.
Our average range for a sample sent in to the testing lab
could be 0.5 up to five.
Audience Member: Are you using any residual herbicides
when you're interceding?
Abbey: What I recommend with herbicides
is that you pick your herbicide program first
and then you fit the cover crops
into that herbicide program.
I mean, the last thing you wanna do is leave gaps
in your system that are gonna lead to weed pressures.
And if you have weeds and then you see cover crops
under weeds, you'll still have weeds in your cover crops.
So I think what we recommend is that you pick
your herbicide program first
and then you fit the cover crops in there.
And the good thing about oats and cereal rye for us
are that they're pretty tough.
So you can get them to kind of grow
through some of those residuals as well.
But I've walked into fields
where they've done the reverse
and they've tried to fit their herbicides
into their cover crop program and it's just a mess
to be honest.
Audience Member: Does this interfere with
the crop insurance?
Abbey: So does this interfere with crop insurance?
It gets a little sticky and that's where I want to make sure
that all the farmers are talking
with their insurance provider.
They're not worried for us.
They're not worried about interceding corn.
That's not a huge deal.
They're more worried about the soybean going into the rye.
But there's also,
I don't know we have these weird guidelines in North Dakota
where like just because North Dakota
is bordering with Minnesota,
Minnesota has different requirements
than we have in North Dakota,
but our systems are very similar.
So for the most part I'm not seeing
like a huge pushback on that.
But I think it is something you want to have a conversation
just to make sure you're protected.
Audience Member: So I've got a two part question.
First one refers to,
you talked about the nutrient recycling
and it takes two to three years in your area
for the breakdown to get back in the soil.
As you move further South,
We have lower organic matters.
Is it feasible to say that it breaks down
maybe two times faster the actual figure,
as you go further South?
Abbey: I don't even know, I might rely on Nathan
to answer that one or Keith.
Nathan: Ask your second question.
Audience Member: Okay, the second question is,
(laughs)
you were referring to pick the cover crop
that fits your chemical program,
but a lot of these chemical programs
have residuals that don't work well
with a lot of cover crops.
Is there a chart that kind of bases
what cover crops could be planted
in a certain amount of time after a chemical program?
Abbey: Yeah, that's a good question.
So we have some stuff from our webpage.
So I think Lee Bruce was here a couple of years.
Nathan: Last year.
Abbey: And he (speaks faintly).
That came for, lets say you're managing
and then also some of the cover crops
so you could kind of cross check it
with like a weed guide.
So we have, in North Dakota wheat guide that we use
and so you can kind of cross check it with,
okay, well if it's gonna control this
and it's also gonna hurt this cover crop.
So you could do that.
But then NDSU has started putting in,
they've started doing some work at one of our RECs,
research extension centers on herbicide residual
on cover crops.
And so we have a little chart in there.
It's not much, but it's something that says, okay,
it could be moderately impacted or heavily impacted.
And maybe that's of some use
from the North Dakota lead guide.
But there could be something very similar for Nebraska.
Nathan: So to answer
the nitrogen question real quick,
I'm going further South.
I did my PhD in Kansas.
We looked at heavy stands of winter annual weeds,
which were 1000, 2000 pounds of winter annual weeds
as a kind of, I think as a proxy for cover crops.
They took up 20 to 30 pounds of nitrogen
when we followed that through the corn growing season.
It was released towards the end of the season,
but by tasseling time it still wasn't there.
So we still saw a yield drag with that system.
And that was no till conditions
in Northeast, Southeast and central Kansas.
So there is a temperature moisture interaction
and so it gets complicated to say it right
'cause it's gonna depend each year, almost.
Audience Member: I sewed rye last fall after beans
and it was late in the season
so I didn't get much growth.
But then comes spring.
How soon do I kill that rye before I plant corn?
Abbey: Well, I'm gonna again defer to your local experts
'cause that's a pretty specific question.
Keith: My answer would be 10 days to two weeks
if you want to be safe.
I've seen it done planting green corn
and didn't seem to be a problem.
Was there adequate nitrogen?
Is there allelopathic effects?
I think weather plays a big role.
Soil moisture.
Paul Hey or Paul Yasha,
what's your comment on that?
Let me get you the mic here.
Paul: When it comes to allelopathic effect
the best way I describe it, non technical terms,
the decaying green ooze from the dying rye
is the stuff that does yearn.
And so the worst time to spray out cereal rye fields,
this is five days before planting.
The decaying green ooze is right there.
If I'm planting shallow or on an open seed V,
you really screw up the germination on corn.
Soybeans, no.
And again, it's the grass on the grass.
If I'm planting deeper, that minimizes that.
If I kill, Keith said 10 days to two weeks.
I prefer two to three weeks.
So I make sure that decaying green ooze has gone,
but I'll also doing it cause I'm a dry lander
and I want to conserve soil moisture.
The other side of the coin is
if you're plating green
and this corn seed germinates
before the decaying green ooze comes in
because you sprayed
the stuff out, say five days after planting,
then you won't have any little allelopathic effect either,
but you'll have much more of a nitrogen tie up effect,
especially if you surface applied your nitrogen
because that microbes to break down that residue needs
nitrogen as food.
It's catch and release or release it later,
but if you're starving your corn when it's down here,
to five, six inches tall, you're hurting your yield.
That's where we increase our starter band and nitrogen.
Can you see some demonstration parts out here
where they put it about two to four inches
to the side of the row?
You don't see any nitrogen effect
as far as tie up
because that's right there next to the plant.
Nathan: Thanks for the presentation Paul.
(laughing) No I'm just kidding.
You did a good job as well as.
Keith and I think we got,
Keith: We are to stay on schedule on.
We give Abbey a round of applause.
Abbey: Thank you.