Okay, we're gonna move on to our afternoon panel.
I'm really excited about this.
All the producers are gonna be up here
I've worked with personally,
so they can vouch for good or bad recommendations from me.
But one thing I've always loved about working with producers
is what I get to learn from them
and the information they share back with me.
So that's really what this is about.
So this is also your time.
I've asked our panelist to kind of give five,
seven minute update each and then we'll open it up
for questions.
And Keith Lewin and I started this back in 2015, I think,
here, called the Eastern Nebraska Cover Crop Conference.
And one thing we've always had is producer panels.
We had one this morning and they've always gone really well.
And so once we get through those kind of presentations,
we'll open up for questions,
and we've always filled the time
so don't be scared, it goes fast.
So I'll ask my panelists to come up.
If you wanna grab a seat up here,
we have a mic that we'll pass around.
I have a brief introduction for the whole panel
and then I'll have them start on introductions.
I think I have Garrett up first.
No, it's okay.
So we'll go through this.
So the title of today's afternoon panel
is the Nebraska Farmer's Perspective
on Diverse Crop Rotation and Intensification.
If you didn't catch my name earlier,
it's Nathan Mueller.
I'm a water and integrated cropping systems
extension educator, Saline, Jefferson, Gage.
Some of you may have remembered when I was up in Dodge
in Washington County.
A little bit about the USD crop reporting districts
and data.
How many of you are familiar with CropScape?
Anybody?
CropScape.
So it's actually a USDA satellite,
called the Modus satellite, that USDA,
and Rick Mueller runs it, no relation.
They essentially use the satellite imagery
to verify what crop you're growing on every field.
So you certify acres if your producer's, right?
They've then figured out with satellite reflectance
a signature to figure out, okay, that's, corn is corn
based on the imagery.
So they can tell us how many acres are planted
of which crop, even though they still asked you
to fill out a paper survey.
I just filled out my ag census.
Anybody get that done last week like we were supposed to?
So that's another piece of information.
So I just ran down, outta curiosity, from 2021
what the satellite imagery,
they always delay the data,
probably to not influence the market.
So it's always behind probably on purpose.
But we had 1.85 million acres of corn in Northeast,
1.34 for soybeans,
193,000 acres of alfalfa, and 3,800 acres of wheat
in Northeast.
And then you go down corn 2.1,
soybeans 1.5, alfalfa 92,000, and wheat 11,000
in east central Nebraska.
And then down in the southeast we had corn at 1.5,
soybeans at 1.3, alfalfa at almost 50,000,
and wheat at almost 30.
So you can look back in time
if you wanna track acre changes.
Over the past couple years, winter wheat has has increased.
We probably reached a bottom in about 2019, 2020,
and then things actually have been coming back up.
There's crops I left out, right?
I should have probably put oats.
If you look at oat acres in the far northeast,
there's quite a bit.
There would've been grain stored,
the list goes on, right?
And so a lot of these, if you haven't been to that website,
Google CropScape and you can learn more about
what everybody's doing in eastern Nebraska.
Before I forget, a plug, 'cause a lot of the producers
are gonna talk about small grains in the rotation
as well as alfalfa.
We do have some events coming up.
The UNL Winter Wheat Variety Trial Tour
and Field Day's gonna be June 8th near Fairbury
in Jefferson County.
And then we'll have the Southeast Nebraska
Alfalfa and Wheat Expo August 24th in Crete.
So save the dates.
And Haldon's at round two.
He's already been a panelist for me
at the Alfalfa and Wheat Expo in Crete.
So I'm really excited, we'll go north to South.
Garret Ruskamp, if you wanna raise your hand,
is up in Cunning County.
Angela Knuth, Saunders County.
And then two gentlemen down in Southeast
in both kind of Jefferson and Gage,
Kyle Riesen and Haldon Fugate.
With that, I'm gonna turn this over to Garret.
I do have some of the pictures you sent to me,
and so just a brief introduction of your operation
and what you're doing, and then we'll go through
all four of you and then we'll open it up for questions.
So I'll turn it over to Garret.
Yeah, can everybody hear me?
All right, so I'm from up by Cunning County,
kind of southwest of West Point.
And we've got a diverse rotation between corn,
soybeans, wheat and alfalfa.
And then we've got a cow calf operation as well.
So we try to utilize the cover crops with the livestock
as much as we can.
I guess some of the things that we're doing
as probably for the past five, six years,
we constantly plant rye in the fall,
usually following corn silage or something like that,
and then we graze it in the spring with the cows.
And then we plant soybeans into that,
and I guess we've been having wheat in our rotation
for probably about, like I said, five, six years
and we've been doing really well with it.
And we usually plant a cover crop following the wheat
and that's always been really good,
and depends on moisture obviously,
but we can usually get some pretty good growth in the fall.
Like Mary was talking,
we usually do sorghum sedan of some sorts.
And then this last year we had a pretty diverse mix
that we planted and we didn't have a lot of moisture
but it still turned out pretty decent.
And we grazed that.
And along with the grazing we do try to do strip grazing
as much as we can.
And I guess the one new thing that we did try this year
is that picture up there is actually the relay cropping
with rye and soybeans.
And so basically we planted the rye in the fall
and then the soybeans in the spring,
just used a drill on seven and a half inch spacings,
and then we basically didn't touch it.
Herbicide passes, nothing, and a little bit of nitrogen
to the rye and then I harvested the rye
over top of the soybeans and then came back in the fall
and harvested the rye.
And for the little moisture that we had,
it didn't turn out too bad, I suppose.
That's kind of an overview of what we do.
Yeah, so the pictures there,
they might be kinda hard to see,
but on the left is our rotational grazing or strip grazing.
It's what I call a tumble wheel fence
that we use with poly wire that we can easily move.
It saves on time, but we can still strip graze our rye
or any cover crop that we're using it in.
In the middle there would be the diverse cover crop
from this last fall that we planted after wheat.
We had like an eight way species mix in there.
And one of those would be on the right,
the purple top turnip, and we had really good growth
on some of those.
Mostly down in the bottoms
where there was still some moisture,
but turned out really good.
We grazed it most of the fall
and then we're still grazing it,
'cause we kind of stockpiled some of that.
And we still got fall pears running out there now grazing.
My name's Kyle Riesen.
Farm Gage, Jefferson County, live on the county line.
So walk across the road from my house,
I'm in Jefferson County, I guess.
I grew up on a dairy farm.
We farmed, or we milked about 150 cows until 2012.
And that's when I went off to college also.
When I came back I was fortunate enough
to get employed by my neighbors
who farm a few thousand acres.
We started using cover crops on our family farm
back in, I think 2007.
Started with oats, diversified into turnips and radishes,
and oats as well as a way to graze, fall graze
after corn silage to meet feed needs
for replacement heifers,
bred heifers, and dry cows.
When I moved back and jumped on with my neighbors,
we didn't do much cover crops then,
but my dad and I still did with our small beef herd
that we still currently have, 50 cows.
So I kind of talked to guys I work for
into starting with rye and that kind of took off.
We put about a thousand to 1500 acres of rye in every year,
or some variation of that.
Some of it's strictly for erosion
because we did some sort of tillage
and some of it's just with the intention of soil health
and no-till situations.
So I have a few pictures up there as well.
Some of 'em are kind of hard to see.
I was scrolling through about five years worth of pictures
on my phone, which I didn't realize I had that many.
But here, so on the left,
it's hard to see probably on this screen up here,
but situations like here,
these are a lot of earthworm holes that came up
in our rye field that was out there.
It was really easy to find and pick out.
Okay, thanks.
And then the picture on the right is a turnip I believe,
no, radish I believe.
And I was driving through the field in the spring,
and that was the decayed skeleton,
and so you can see the hole that was around it.
Pretty easy place for water to get into and infiltrate.
These two pictures, the one on the left was after
our winter wheat crop, which we first started growing
in 2021, was our first crop.
I was anhydrasing that year in the spring,
which is not good for the earthworms,
but it was neat to see the root structure
associated with this, the cover crops we did.
I tried to make an attempt at a test trial
and on-farm research.
It failed miserably 'cause it didn't rain
from July 15th to October one.
But I did oats and turnips and radishes on one part
and I tried to do a legume mix,
and then I wanted to try and supplement in some blocks
at different varying nitrogen rates
to see what the nitrogen credit would come from legumes.
When it doesn't rain and it's a hundred degrees,
nothing grew except the river bottom.
So that's what we got out of that, nice strip of roots,
the picture on the right's the same,
and think there's a earthworm in there.
It's really hard to see on the picture on the right,
but it's the same principle.
Another earthworm picture right there.
There's the big guy and he crawls up through there.
I don't know why I'm interested in earthworms,
but I think that's a feel good thing
when you're doing cover crops.
And more earthworm castings and holes here
in various years.
That's just a picture of how mellow the soil
was when I was anhydrasing,
that was probably an eye-opening experience.
Most of the time it's pretty hard.
It feels like, especially for as dry as that fall was,
I blasted right through there and got it
as deep as I wanted.
And you can see the growth.
That was a little bit better 'cause it was
in the creek bottom but it was just super mellow,
really was an eye-opening thing to see there.
So this is one of my favorite pictures.
The two comparisons, our farm that I live on and grew up on
has been in our family for a while.
Really hilly.
Haldon's been across it to try and hay,
and he knows how rough it is.
Tough deal.
And so I put in some drain tiles
where I was having some really bad ditches.
And so the picture on the left is just
what the cover crop looked like,
just kind of a fancy picture, made me feel good.
But the picture on the right here was from this spring,
as in our area we didn't get any rain
or any moisture from maybe February or March
until April 30th.
And that's when we got three inches of rain very quickly,
stopped planting for about 10 days.
And then the following, that was on April 30th,
May 3rd, we had another half inch of rain.
And this is coming out of the water
coming outta my tile line where I had cover crops.
Crystal clear water.
I thought that was a pretty neat picture to see.
There was wasn't hardly an ounce of runoff
coming off that field after three and a half inches of rain.
This is a picture fertilizing our wheat,
our first year doing wheat.
That was just a picture to kind of illustrate
we didn't have any moisture, or after we planted
that winter wheat, we had about a 60 mile an hour windstorm
on October 10th or 12th or something.
And so it blew wheat seeds and soybean residue
all over the place,
and we were very, very close to terminating our wheat.
But Nathan kind of talked us out of it and we decided,
well, we're not gonna learn anything
if we don't see what happens.
So we fertilized it and that was just to illustrate
how spotty some of the stand was from,
you can see kind of a line right in through there
and up in some of those corners, very, very patchy.
It looked worse than what the picture shows.
And then the picture on the right is is just
a view of maybe, probably middle of June
in that same wheat field.
They really come around and, thanks to Nathan's help a lot
and Mark Noble who we bought our seed from,
tremendous resources for successful wheat crop.
Like I said, we have a small cow herd,
so this is a feel good picture, a couple of 'em.
But we also integrate livestock to an extent.
We graze our rye in the fall.
And because we have the livestock, we do it twofold.
So we plant rye to graze in the fall as much as we can
and then come spring we swath it, chop it for hay,
makes tremendous feed, in our opinion, for our mama cows
and the few other custom feeding customers
that we have for that.
Just a couple pictures of anhydrous,
some feel good pictures,
but that's what the oats and turnips
and radishes looked in the bottom on the left
and they looked in the creek bottom,
but up on the hillsides there was next to nothing.
And the other part for the guys that I work with,
we do a lot of rye and plant soybeans right into it
and spray the cover crop the day of planting.
So obviously both of those pictures
are probably our post-spray.
We also have hogs.
So we have a high amount of hog manure.
We got caught in a pickle where we didn't quite know
what to do.
The picture on the right shows me trying to spray
a residual herbicide with all the crop residue.
So I wasn't quite sure that that was a smart idea,
because I didn't know how the residual product
was gonna get to the soil.
But we did it anyway.
And we didn't have any weeds,
and you can just see how thick of a mat that rye was.
And that was there all the way until we harvested.
So I don't know if that's a good thing
or if that's bad because the microbes didn't eat at all,
but it just shows how much residue we can have.
And those were, luckily we had rain,
so those were successful soybean crops for dry land,
we are really pleased with the yields.
I'm Haldon Fugate and farm around Beatrice
and Gage County.
Mainly alfalfa, irrigated and dry land.
Get to do some crazy things coming in with Kyle
behind crops to get,
'cause I'm on some pretty high value ground
that they're trying to rotate out.
So virtually we planted some half stand wheat,
you'd call it.
I mean Nathan called it,
it would be a failure wheat crop in the fall,
'cause we had to do some tillage for some ridges
to get took out, and that ended up being a really good deal
'cause that same windstorm that he had trouble
with his wheat, I didn't lose all my ground.
And then we come in the spring
and planted alfalfa into that,
which is kind of unheard of, plant alfalfa into something
green matte that's shin high, was kind of crazy.
Everybody tells you that that ain't gonna work.
And Nathan said, well I don't know how this is gonna work.
And I said, well we're done now
so we're gonna see if it'll work.
And ended up being a very successful deal.
And it seems to be good.
There's things I would do a little differently.
There was 180 of that that was beans that got,
wheat got planted in September sometime,
and it got way too big.
The stuff that was planted into the corn ground
and later, that ended up being really good
and had a good, successful stand.
And alfalfa appears to have done very well with that.
I also run cows, cow calf, and dabbling in some stalkers,
run some custom cows on some cover crop stuff
with Kyle and those guys.
So dabbling in that area.
Hello, I'm Angela Knuth,
and we farmed just a couple miles up the road from here.
Our soil health journey probably started in 2005
when we moved from full tillage to strip till in our corn
and no-till in our beans.
We did that until 2019,
but we'll get to that.
And then in 2013 we moved to putting in small grains
with wheat.
The university had a milling wheat program,
so we jumped into that.
And that opened up a real big window,
a big opportunity to adventure out with cover crops
because, you know, you harvested in July,
so you've got that big window.
We started out with sorghum Sudan grass,
and we grew that, and cut it, and bailed it off.
So that whole system was a good income system.
And then we moved, as we moved on in in the years
with the wheat, we've went from the sorghum sudan grass
to doing some more studies with the university
with like a three-way mix.
And in 2020 we actually put in a 17 way mix, it was crazy.
And then last year we put in buckwheat after that.
For green cover seed we grew buckwheat seed for it.
And that was a very good rotation for us.
In 2015 we worked with Mary Janowski
and we did a grazing study, and that was very helpful
for us to work with the university
because we had never put in cereal rye before, nervous.
So it was great working with the university
as far as, they set up the trials, they brought in the cows,
took care of the cows.
We basically just had to plant and just observe
how that affected our ground.
And it turned out well.
I actually thought Mary was gonna graze in the fall,
and she said in the spring and I'm like,
my husband's gonna kill me.
'Cause we had to put corn in right after that,
but we did not see a yield drag at all.
And then, so that's our journey.
And then 2019, after the floods,
we went from strip till to all no-till
because we were all planting late that year
and we haven't looked back on that.
So the video I'm gonna show you is just,
so we've transitioned some acres to organic.
That started in 2018.
And we went with alfalfa because we wanted to do
minimum to no-till organic.
Yeah, that's fun.
So the transition years were just alfalfa and then we,
I had heard Rick Clark speak, and he was planting corn,
no-till just planting corn green into living alfalfa.
And he said, I mean it works.
So he said to try it on a few acres, and we put it on 140,
and actually the first two years we got away with it,
but we didn't know how to get out of it
and we had some problems.
So this is, first of all, just a little video.
This is our farm here, just up the road.
And this is our first organic field.
And this is us planting green into the alfalfa.
We didn't really have any openers on that.
We just had the shark tooth,
I think that's what they call the blades there.
And then this is our second organic field.
And this was a planting of beans, cereal rye and sunflowers.
The cereal rye was supposed to help with weed suppression
and the sunflowers were supposed to bring in
beneficial insects to help with insect pressure.
And that was done under the instruction of,
we went out and found consultants.
We didn't do this by ourselves,
'cause we would never have done that by ourselves.
This is my husband and our two sons,
and that just put that in there.
That's the whole operation right there.
Just a little bit, whoops, my bad.
Got it, got it.
This is just a little bit more,
we're gonna show an overview of what the actual row
looks like in planting.
Actually, we were scared of planting into it,
but that turned out to be the easiest part
of the whole process.
That's just what the soil looked like at planting
and that seed to soil contact was pretty good,
and I accidentally put black on the end of the video there,
but we had really good seed soil contact.
And this is the inside of the row, what it looks like
and just kinda showing you that.
And then when the corn got to the V stage, or V1,
we came in, Mednas up the road have a big hanging business
and this is a Crone.
Took 60 foot swaths and cut the alfalfa down.
And they got it done in an hour or so.
We thought about doing it with our own shredder,
but we would've been out there all day, two days.
And there's kind of the stand,
'cause I know you're wondering what kind of stand we got.
And then we would come in and just spread it out
with the header there.
So that's just what it looks like after,
that's the same day that it was shredded.
And that's kind of just an example of the stand
that was out there.
Of course you've got areas in the field that are bad,
and of course I'm not gonna take pictures of those.
So this is, now the race was on,
now it's just a matter of the corn outgrowing the alfalfa.
And just these are different stages of it.
So we were pretty nervous at this point,
'cause it's like the alfalfa was kind of winning.
That's the past pad part.
Yeah, if you wouldn't mind,
this is just a shot of the corn right before,
there it goes, right before pollination.
And the alfalfa is still very much alive and doing its job
weed suppressing.
And then once we got into to the pollination,
the alfalfa just kind of died down
and it was a little easier to actually walk through finally.
And okay, so that was the first two years we did it.
This is 2022.
We had no exit plan with the alfalfa.
And we had to go to beans or something else,
and I wanted to try some other things.
My husband wanted to try some soybeans and he won.
So we tilled, tilled up the alfalfa.
And then this is a shot of what it looked like in spring.
That is a carpet of mare's tail.
Just a carpet.
And the other mistake that we did was we put
20 tons of manure on there.
So I'm sure that didn't help at all.
So we were dealing with that.
This is a few days after emergence there,
and you can see that that's not looking very good at all,
and it wasn't very good.
We ended up, we planted the first time middle of June,
we rototilled twice and then we replanted
in the latter part of June.
And so that is button weeds.
And that was what greeted us
in the latter part of the season.
Basically we had to have the field walked,
but there was 30 acres that we wouldn't have, I don't know,
I can't get that to go.
Sorry.
There's 30 acres that we just lost.
I mean that's sad.
So we had, again, the Mednas come in with their mowers
just to try to keep the seed amount down
and just mow off the tops,
and that was not fun at all.
And of course you don't farm in a vacuum,
so everybody's like, what are you doing?
So, and that's just another view of it.
So that was 2022 for that one.
Now this is the other field that we planted, the cereal rye,
the sunflower and the beans together.
And the first, that was in 2021 and it worked out great
for the most part.
We did have this walked and we did have Carrie's dad,
call in him every week to tell us to till it up
and start again.
But we held on, we actually even had the adjuster come out
and take a look at it.
But it pulled through and we found out that the sunflowers
don't only attract insects, but people too.
And then this was 2022, again we were gonna go to corn.
We had planted a five-way mix.
We had too much cereal rye in it.
I'm not sure what happened, but again,
our consultant's going, "do not plant corn in there."
And so we drilled soy beans into that
and this is kind of a overview of what it looked like.
So that's the five-way mix.
So we drilled into it standing up,
'cause we were worried about this,
with the seven and a half inch spacing
we were worried about it lodging.
And then we came in and roller crimped it, excuse me.
And we thought we did pretty good.
The problem we had this year, and we're thinking it was,
maybe it was the VNS, I think cereal rye
is supposed to finish pollinating like five to eight days.
It took over two weeks.
And I think it was, we're thinking it was
because of the VNS, that there was so much,
I mean it wasn't pollinating all at the same time,
so we couldn't roller crimp it so it got really late.
But anyway, this is what the beans looked like.
They were at their first trifoliate.
And we thought we did a good job,
but this is further into the season.
There are beans in there and it just,
the foxtail just took over and we lost on that.
We had people asking us what we were growing out there.
So you gotta have exit plans and you gotta have a plan.
And those were two good examples of not having a plan
and not having an exit plan.
We're not afraid of the alfalfa,
but now we're talking with the university about the clovers,
because alfalfa you can't,
I would not recommend it in dryland,
and you can't plant a lot of other species in it.
So beans don't work in it.
But we're hoping that maybe with the clovers
we could do a perennial implant in that.
We'll go ahead and open, keep that mic up here,
we'll pass that around to you four.
How we've formatted this before,
we'll wait for the microphone.
We'll run a microphone around,
wait for that microphone, and then state if the question
is for one of the person on the panel
or if you want all the panelists to answer the question.
Is that, everybody understand that right?
So if you have a targeted question,
make sure you say if it's a panelist
or if it's for the whole panel, state that.
So with that we'll open it up for questions.
This is your time with the panelists.
And if no one has a question, I'll lead us off, too.
I have a question in my pocket if we don't get one
right away.
For those of you doing the relay crop rye,
what was your seating rate on the rye
and then also on the soybeans?
For the rye, we try not to seed too heavy.
I want to say it was around 40 pounds,
give or take a little bit, being as it's an old drill.
But you know, for the soybeans I think we stuck
with our standard, about 140, 150,000 plants.
And that particular experiment, it was on a small acreage,
but we planted the rye with a drill at an angle,
and then we planted the soybeans with the drill,
or excuse me, planted the soybeans on 15 inch row spacings
with our planter that has rolling cutters on the front,
and we planted at a separate angle, and we just left to go.
On the beans you were just talking about,
when you interceded into the rye,
what planning date roughly did you go into that standing rye
and decide to get your beans in?
So we planted the beans really early.
It was the first field, I mean end of April.
And we tried to shoot for a longer maturity bean.
So like up in our area,
anywhere from two five to a three one is pretty common.
And this was a three three.
Our thought there was, if we can get that maturity
a little bit longer so that way we can get that rye off
and a little more sunlight when it needs it,
a little later maturity bean.
And that was the one thing that we did notice
that we struggled with was the sunlight.
And beings that the rye was basically shading out
the soybeans, those soybeans had a lot of length
in between the nodes because they were trying to grow
to the sunlight.
And so that's, we definitely learned on that this year.
And so I'm gonna try it next year.
I'm gonna change how I planted the rye.
I planted it and basically in twin rows,
seven and a half inch spacings on 30 inch centers
and then I'll try to plant the soybeans in between that
so that way they're not competing for the sunlight as much.
All right, yes.
For Mrs. Knuth,
what are some advice or tips you would suggest
for those thinking about using a roller crimper
in the future?
Well we actually just bought the roller crimper
last winter, so I'm not sure if I'm qualified to say,
but I would say our problem with the roller crimper
was the fact that, I mean I really think that it was
the VNS and it not maturing fast enough,
and then you've got a husband
that wants to get in the field.
So we didn't wait long enough.
So we put covers on 700 acres and tried rolling those,
and we just went in there too soon and it came back up.
And so we ended up having to spray anyway.
We were trying to get away from the pre-emerge,
and we just shot ourselves in the foot.
So if you're gonna roller crimp,
just from one year experience, I would say don't skimp
on the expense of the cover.
If you're doing rye, make sure it's not a VNS.
That's just our experience.
I'm sure there's plenty of guys that would debate that.
What about on a maintenance standpoint?
Very minimal maintenance?
Yeah.
Thank you.
I was wondering, those sunflowers
that were in with the soybeans,
how did that work at Harvest?
What was the outcome of the sunflower?
Do they go to seed and intermingle with the soybeans or?
They did, and I won't say
the name of the variety right.
It's perdaca, or if somebody can help me with that.
They're actually supposed to shoot out the back,
but I think there's different varieties,
and we might have ordered the wrong one.
So they were in there with us.
It was organic so they had to clean 'em anyway,
so we did get a dock on that,
but it was well worth it.
So yeah, you have to be careful about the variety
that you do that with.
This is for anybody who planted wheat
last year, but as dry as it was,
I'm just kinda curious for anybody
who planted wheat last fall,
what kind of stands you got and when you planted it?
And if it was too dry and didn't germinate,
if it germinates this spring,
is there time to vernalize and produce grain yet or not?
So you're saying this past fall,
this fall of 2022.
Okay.
We have irrigation so we cheat.
And actually, yeah, the dry land was not that great
but the irrigated, I guess we have irrigation so it works.
We have a mix of dryland
and irrigated dryland farms.
Well, two years ago, this year it won't be a problem,
I don't think.
It's germinated enough.
I don't know how tall it got.
2, 3, 4 inches.
Feels like it'll be enough.
And the only way I'm making that assumption
is from two years ago when we had our ferocious windstorm
right after planting, our fall growth was seriously
next to nothing 'cause it just took it all with it
when the abrasiveness of the soil,
and came back and had 80 plus bushel wheat.
So I don't know anything about wheat,
that's Nathan's department, but it worked that first time
and so I think it'll be fine again this time
for at least us.
So in terms of vernalization,
that wheat just needs to exort water.
That seed just needs to exort water
to start that vernalization process.
You don't even have to see a coleoptile shoot or anything.
So usually you're okay.
As long as that seed's still semi firm
or you have a little bit of a shoot or coleoptile,
that's a good sign.
If it's starting to get soft and mushy,
then that's what it's a little bit of a concern.
So there's some fields I've walked where we'll see,
I've dealt with wheat enough in eastern Nebraska,
I don't make any judgements yet, just hold off
and you have time yet, most of the time,
to make that decision later.
And I do have a really nice one 10000ths of an acre grid
and interpretation.
So you can just plop that down,
you don't wanna do a tape measure with wheat
for stand counts.
And if your wheat hasn't come up with,
I've had a lot of wheat that doesn't even emerge
'til spring.
My own field, that was the first year and we had 86 bushel.
As long as you're a little bit more aggressive
with your nitrogen early on
to promote some spring tillering,
you can make up for that.
And the main thing is that you had a good fall seeding rate,
and that's why we always do seeds per acre.
You never do pounds.
Because if you had 28,000 for a corn plant
population you wanted, and you seeded 20,
or you got 20 and you got 40 for actual stand,
you wouldn't be happy, right?
And so that's why we gotta get the seed size german purity
and I have a calculator, you can plug that all in.
So usually I start guys at 1.2 million seeds per acre
at early October, and as we delay planting
we increase that by about 300,000 seeds per acre
all the way up to 1.8.
And that compensates for the lack of of tillering
that you're not getting in the fall,
so you have more main stem heads.
So you make up some of the yield
but you have extra seed costs.
And the audible, for most guys in eastern Nebraska,
they're far enough away from seed that the option is,
you bought the seed,
you thought you were gonna get in right after soybeans.
It ends up being second half of October.
Either go get more seed or plant less acres,
just don't go with your planned seeding rate.
So I've made judgements on wheat before,
and over the past, I started in Kansas
and I just keep dragging my feet until the very end
when you have to make the decision,
'cause it's surprised me quite a bit.
Are you finding that your soybean yields
are staying the same or going up or down
where you're using cover crops?
I guess for us,
typically in the past we plant rye in the fall
and we plant soybeans into it.
In the past we've been grazing that and so,
we're not planting our soybeans until the end of May
because we're grazing as long as we can.
And we're further north and so it takes us a little bit,
it's usually the end of April before we can really
get out there and graze that rye.
And so we are giving up a little bit of soybean yield.
I won't say they're gonna beat our traditional soybeans,
but for what we're gaining in grazing value,
I'd say it's pretty similar.
I mean I think on our traditional year
where we get normal rainfall, whatever normal is,
we can usually be within less than five bushels.
Our experience with that,
kind of twofold.
On the one side we graze our rye early in this fall,
like I said, and then we chop it about,
what in mid-May, late May, maybe more Memorial Day weekend
and we still plant beans into that.
I think I would say for sure two,
maybe three of the four years we've done it
we haven't hardly seen a yield drag at all if any.
But we just, we plant obviously different maturity,
later season in our area,
we're still going 3, 7, 9, 40s occasionally.
And so we haven't seen it a lot.
Now this year was different in 2020,
we planted some regular seasoned beans,
well we planted everything,
basically everything that had cover crop
had a five bushel yield drag.
But I think some of that was associated
with two week later planting delay because of some rain
compared to some earlier season shorter maturity.
I think that was a culmination of things.
So we just hit the wrong rain window
from July 15th to October one with no rain,
just at the prime time for needing it,
just in the wrong spot.
But otherwise in the other experience we haven't hardly,
we haven't seen any yield drag at all,
even after chopping or planting green.
Nathan, this one's for you.
When does that wheat and rye have to imbibe water?
What we planted in October laid in the dust
until it snowed in mid-January
'til it got any moisture on it.
Yeah, usually it's just any point.
You usually need probably 30, 40 days for vernalization.
It depends on the variety.
But it could be absorbing it now.
I've seen it where it's bone dry,
it's dry and then it freezes.
And there's been one year up in South Dakota
where I saw pockets of a field, maybe the size of this room,
in a few pockets where it didn't vernalize
and it stays vegetative, and you'll know pretty fast
'cause you're not gonna have those shoots
or it won't produce heads if it doesn't vernalize.
And actually had that question yesterday,
someone that wanted to do winter rye
planted this April.
So I guess I'm not too concerned about it yet.
So if I'm wrong you can call me back later this year.
So have any of you
used conservation programs, whether it be NRD, NRCS
to kind of help offset some of your risks?
And if you're not, is there something
that's keeping you from doing that?
We're in the process
of figuring that out.
We have applied for CSP stuff,
we haven't done any cost shares.
We're in the process of figuring that out,
'cause we like what we're doing in our experiments
and seeing just to be reimbursed
and help maybe fund some more expensive cover crop mixes
to justify some more extravagant ideas, I guess.
You know, I guess whenever we've
looked into it in the past,
most of our acres have seen a cover crop at some point,
and so, I guess I could be wrong on the qualifications,
but you gotta be pretty new to it.
It's kind of like the carbon markets
with the additionality clause,
and so we haven't really looked into it much.
And it's also for the fact I kind of like doing my own thing
and don't necessarily like following guidelines.
I'm the same as him
as I'm gonna beat my own drum and do what I wanna do
and nobody else needs to tell me how I should do it.
And there's really no insurance policy for alfalfa
to begin with, so it's just easier to do your own thing
and take your own risk at your own will.
We've got sharing seed with NRCS and also PFI,
so that that takes some of the risk out.
And then if you partner with the university and do a study
they help you out too.
On my farm where I have wheat,
I am currently I think fourth year,
fourth year of CSP.
And the dollars helps a lot
when your brother's an ag economist,
so that was the main motivation.
So yeah, it's been fine.
I think one of the barriers is just some of the seed mixes
where we're at, Dodge, Washington,
between corn and soybeans, other than the small grains,
some of the other ones we either dormant seeded
or in the fall haven't really contributed much
to biomass and that's why we really went to wheat,
so we could do more of a forage crop, cover crop.
And then of course I made the mistake
of not putting the goal after wheat,
so I couldn't graze my cover crop after wheat,
because my goal was to minimize compaction in the CSP.
So setting your goals in CSP up front's important.
I guess that's been my experience.
I guess you mentioned the PFI,
was that the Practical Farmers of Iowa?
I did look into that.
I mean there's a couple things out there
that you can apply for, and I might do that
as long as it fits my parameters.
I'm not gonna change what I'm doing to go after $20 an acre,
let's just put it that way.
Yeah Garrett, while you're talking anyway,
when you combined your cereal rye
as opposed to grazing it off and then planting soybeans,
what was your end goal for the rye?
Your own seed or?
Yeah, so that was, there was only 14 acres there
and we got about 30 bushel an acre off of that,
which I was pleased with.
And we basically just kept that fur and we cleaned it
and we used it for our own cover crop seed.
And that was, it happened to work out
that that's all that we needed for the following.
We planted it all out this fall.
Have you changed any of your other
input expenses as you've used more cover crops,
be it chemical or fertilizer?
I mean this year we did pull some handy samples.
And so we might be cutting back on the fertilizer
a little bit, but we haven't changed a lot.
The particular experiment with the relay cropping,
that that did not get a single herbicide pass.
The fertilizer was pretty similar
to our standard soybeans program.
But the thing there is the additional costs that we'd cut
was we did not take the crop insurance,
like multi peril crop insurance.
The last year premiums were pretty high on multi perils
so we did save a little bit there.
I do know the RMA has released a little bit more information
on applying for crop insurance using relay cropping,
but it's kind of like the wheat,
you need previous year's history of doing it well.
Not many of us have that so it's not really worth
going through it.
For the pre-emerge we just went with glyphosate
and didn't have like five or four different products in it.
So in that respect we did save a little bit
on the herbicide.
Probably shouldn't have answered so quickly.
We did do a few times where we tried to reduce
herbicide passes.
So I say we tried.
And we ended up going back.
The farms where we do a lot of cover crops
also happen to get hog manure applied to 'em out of lagoons.
So by the nature of it, weeds that come around
the edge of the lagoon somehow get mixed into the lagoon
and end up on those fields.
Some years we've, one year we tried,
so from the guys I worked for,
I chopped half of an irrigated farm off
and we tried to roller crimp the other side,
poor timing, just kind of did it blindly,
and we needed to come back with glyphosate.
And since we figured we were making the pass already on,
probably would've been June 15th ish,
June 10th, we figured we ought to just hit it
with Zidua quick, too, 'cause we're making the pass.
We didn't wanna necessarily risk it having Palmer come
at that point anyway so we just made the pass anyway.
So we have tried.
Some of our management hasn't quite worked into that
but we have tried to make those steps,
mostly in the pre-emergence.
I don't want to say we're gonna increase
some of the fertilizer load,
you know 'cause it's kind of opposite of what I just said.
But I do know, when it comes to the rye,
this year we may try putting a little bit
extra fertilizer out there and sometimes,
I would like to try the roller crimping,
and I think if you had a more even stand of rye,
maybe a little extra shot of nitrogen on that rye
in the spring might help it be a little more even,
and maybe actually help you get a better kill,
was just a thought that I had.
I just had kind of a funny one for Angela,
did you enter a photo of your field into any photo contest?
Because it was the most beautiful field in the county.
Oh, thanks.
No I have not, but they're for sale if anybody wants them.
And that's why I work with this farmer group,
folks, right there.
Good comment.
When you seed rye in the fall,
anybody in the panel,
all of you comment on what you're seeding rate would be
if it's a cover crop versus if you're using it for grazing,
what your seeding rate would be for winter rye?
We're doing the winter rye for grazing,
I'm crowding the two bushel mark pretty hard.
We're not grazing right now
but I think we were at 70, sorry, I really don't remember,
70 pounds per acre.
I think typically when we were grazing
we were shooting for upwards to 70 to 80,
or even close to 90.
You know, I think we do have a couple fields,
if we're gonna say we want to plant a plant corn into rye,
which we don't typically do very often,
I'll try to stick that around 30 to 40 pounds an acre.
So I definitely, it kind of varies,
and it might depend on how much rye you have left
what rate ends up being, so.
We try and stick around 75 pounds
if we're grazing it in the fall and silage for forage.
On our cover crop only,
it's kind of whatever the guy sets the drill for,
but it's mostly 50 to 60 pounds,
maybe a little lighter, just because
we're trying to save a few costs
and we're not really trying to suppress
a whole lot of weeds, we're just doing it
for the soil health on that standalone cover crop.
Had a question for Mrs. Knuth,
on that organic corn no-till into alfalfa
year one and year two,
I was curious what the yields were in the end.
And I know some of that yield can be offset
with double or triple the price with organic corn
compared to conventional corn.
I'll defer the actual yield
but the first year, the return on investment,
the yield was lower by the return,
'cause basically we planted it,
we had to pay for the mowing, and then we went in
with two different applications of fish,
four gallons of fish and that was it.
So the return on investment, I mean,
and everybody's about yield, but it's really,
at the end of the day it's how much you make on the field.
So you have to look at that.
I have a question for the panel,
just because I wanna make sure everybody's up to speed
on where we're at for yields on wheat.
I'd love to hear what kind of your range of wheat yields
and maybe what you expected before you started doing wheat.
I guess we've been doing wheat
for probably six years now, and I think our lowest yield
was probably about 70.
And I mean 2021, it was exceptional for everything
in our area and we had, I think our average
was over a hundred bushel wheat.
And so I think we've routinely got over 90, it's pretty,
and that's, I don't say I expect that,
I planned for about 80.
But yeah, I'd like to get 90 every year if I could.
I was talking with Garrett earlier
and I told him I don't like to tell yield data
because I don't know if people are telling
the highest number they saw in the yield monitor
or what when they share it.
But when we started wheat in 2021,
the patchy stand, we thought we were
maybe gonna get 50 bushels, but we hadn't grown wheat
for the guys I worked with for 10 years.
And so we ended up getting, as I recall we had like a 93,
a 91, and an 87 or something on the three farms we did.
So that blew our socks off.
And then one of those farms was the cover crop failure.
The other one was a manure play for hog barns,
and the third one, and some of those were straw bailed off,
and the last one was straw was spread
and we did double crop beans.
And we got an additional 20 bushels of beans
off of that, which was a blessing,
and got a rain at the right time to make that work.
So we kind lucked out there
and that was a super profitable year for that,
'cause that was when beans were coming up.
So we hit that right by luck.
And then this last year we did an irrigated farm,
and I think corner to corner it made close to,
I wanna say 92, 90 maybe, something like that.
But dry land was next to nothing on the double crop beans
that preceded that.
Our double crop beans on the irrigated farm made 20
and we had to irrigate it all summer to get to 20.
And then our dry land farm we had was at 75.
And we attempted some double crop milo, plot twist in there,
and that was a failure but we're getting some grazing value
out of it so we'll see how that works out.
One thing I want to comment,
you know you talked about return on investment
or the revenue that's produced.
This last year we had two varieties of wheat,
and if you wanna look on the pounds
from the grain cart scale, they both did over 90,
but you gotta be careful with wheat
'cause there's some varieties out there
that don't like to thresh very nice
and the grain elevators don't like that.
And so I think I figured,
when we took the actual revenue on the dock
that we took from all that,
I mean it was over a hundred dollars an acre difference
in revenue that we lost because we took the dock
at the elevator.
So there's things you gotta be careful with that as well.
As far as raising wheat goes,
do any of the buyers that you guys sell to
offer a premium for like a "chemical company's",
quote unquote, acre?
Like they won't dock you if you use X products,
things like that,
have you guys had any experience with that?
No, not that I'm aware of.
I mean Nathan would probably know more than we do,
but around here, Scouler Grain in Fremont's
basically where everything goes,
they got a really good basis bid.
And I guess if I'm not aware of anything that they offer.
I haven't heard of any like management practices
that come with the premium other than
they're obviously looking for test weight and protein.
Most people don't know,
but the basis at Scouler in Fremont,
this isn't a plug for Scouler, it's just a reality,
is often 40 cents over Kansas City price.
So the only reason I knew that, I grew up in Fremont
and never knew that until I worked in South Dakota
with wheat, and guys said they were hauling it down.
So that's something I always share,
but even given the basis is often zero,
so it does pay to see what basis is in eastern Nebraska,
and oftentimes it's a lot better
than actually where most wheat's actually grown.
So yeah, that's something that can make
a big marketing difference.
Scouler does provide a protein premium most years,
not every year, because they play that game
like everybody else on protein,
depending on what's happening down south.
If they low yield and high protein
then they don't give as much, or vice versa.
But if you have poor quality wheat,
I always tell people not to go to Schooler,
'cause they dock pretty aggressive,
because it's food grade use
and they go to somebody in the southeast US
on their hundred car trains.
Yeah, for us it's,
well he said South Dakota, and it's well worth our drive.
We're two hours, right at two hours from Fremont.
Our basis is almost 60 under for our local co-op.
So it's a dollar extra just to bring it up here
and we can get two loads a day.
So it pays wage, pays truck,
maybe a little extra gravy on top.
And then if there's any sort of protein,
this is probably not a good plug,
but Kansas State has a interesting basis map on ag manager
for corn, soybeans, wheat and milo.
And so it's kind of interesting,
it's hard to see Fremont in there,
'cause they're so positive on their basis.
But it's kind of interesting to see
the layout of the basis map for wheat,
or all commodities really of those major four.
You can type in Google search,
"Kansas State basis maps" and it'll pop right up.
It's kind of a neat map to look at
when you're looking for some of those expanded markets
that are within trucking range.
Well thanks for your time
this afternoon on the panel.
Thank the panelist again for their time this afternoon.