2023 Eastern Nebraska Soil Health Conference - Farmer Panel 2

Deloris Pittman & Mike Kamm Author

03/20/2023 Added

11 Plays

Description

Nebraska farmer’s perspective on diverse crop rotations and intensification - Farmer panel with Angela Knuth (Saunders County), Garret Ruskamp (Cuming County), Kyle Riesen (Jefferson County), and Haldon Fugate (Gage County) moderated by Nathan Mueller, Nebraska Extension Educator

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[00:00:05.397]All right. Good morning everyone.
[00:00:06.900]I'm Jenny Rees, Nebraska Extension Educator.
[00:00:09.900]It's great to be back here
[00:00:11.310]and see so many people at this conference.
[00:00:14.190]And it's great also to see all the networking
[00:00:16.770]because I actually met Jay at this conference.
[00:00:20.760]Oh no, it's 2017 or 2018,
[00:00:23.580]but it's a great way to network and meet other people.
[00:00:26.910]So with me on this panel today are Jay Goertzen,
[00:00:30.690]a farmer from York County.
[00:00:32.220]He's been interseeding cover crops for four years.
[00:00:35.580]And Chad Dane,
[00:00:36.630]a farmer in Clay County who's been interseeding cover crops
[00:00:39.986]for three years.
[00:00:41.910]And I'm just so blessed to get to work with so many farmers
[00:00:46.170]who let me walk alongside of them,
[00:00:48.390]learn with them about the questions that they have
[00:00:51.510]in their own fields.
[00:00:53.550]So when we're talking about interseeding, why do,
[00:00:57.720]why are people interested in interseeding?
[00:01:00.390]Well, primarily interseeding of cover crops
[00:01:02.940]what we're talking about is interseeding
[00:01:05.070]in early season corn and soybeans.
[00:01:07.830]So V3 to V4 corn.
[00:01:10.440]For soybeans, we tested at emergence on soybeans and at V2.
[00:01:17.130]So ultimately we would recommend in soybean, at planting,
[00:01:21.150]at emergence or a dormant seeding when it comes to soybeans.
[00:01:26.610]But why are we doing this?
[00:01:28.620]Because we know that that window after corn and soybean
[00:01:31.410]harvest is so short.
[00:01:33.180]So for those who are looking to get more diversity
[00:01:35.640]in the system, it's harder to have anything
[00:01:37.950]beyond cereal rye.
[00:01:39.810]And so I'm so grateful that we had a great group of growers
[00:01:43.260]that looked at this.
[00:01:44.365]Their goals can differ depending
[00:01:46.830]on their specific operations.
[00:01:49.080]It may be to increase nitrogen,
[00:01:51.143]allow for weed control,
[00:01:53.280]reduce their nutrient inputs in their system,
[00:01:56.215]increase diversity,
[00:01:58.230]allow for more cover crop growth for forages.
[00:02:02.220]So, and then I'm gonna put at the bottom, this was my dream.
[00:02:05.970]I can't say this is everybody's dream, but it was my dream.
[00:02:09.570]My dream was to have something always growing
[00:02:12.270]in between the corner of the soybean rows.
[00:02:15.420]And it looks very different.
[00:02:17.220]It's a very different way of thinking to go down this road,
[00:02:21.270]but as I talk with farmers
[00:02:24.557]and as we look at the challenges we're facing,
[00:02:28.350]possible greater regulations,
[00:02:30.600]the difficulty finding chemicals,
[00:02:32.430]I think more farmers are interested in finding ways
[00:02:35.010]to reduce inputs in their system.
[00:02:37.140]So this is a way we were trying to do that.
[00:02:41.070]You heard Jay speak, I think 2019 or 2020 at this conference
[00:02:47.970]about his work with interseeding that first year.
[00:02:52.124]I am thankful to Kacha and the committee for inviting us
[00:02:56.940]back to share what happened three to years later.
[00:03:00.270]But this ended up being a partnership 2020 through 2022,
[00:03:04.770]between The Nature Conservancy,
[00:03:08.250]the Upper Big Blue ND, Extension, Kellogg's,
[00:03:12.360]and then all of our Farmer Cooperators.
[00:03:14.280]We had 11 farmer cooperators throughout
[00:03:17.220]the duration of the three years.
[00:03:19.350]Six of them chose to do this via on-farm research where they
[00:03:23.490]maintained the same strips of cover crops and check in their
[00:03:27.600]fields throughout the duration of the three years.
[00:03:30.750]And I have lots of pictures of people because we did a lot
[00:03:34.260]of data collection.
[00:03:35.760]I'm so grateful to all my colleagues at the university,
[00:03:39.360]both current and former colleagues who helped,
[00:03:42.450]to Dr. Mary Drewnowski, Dr. Darren Redfern
[00:03:45.510]for the use of their grad students who helped
[00:03:47.820]us so much, and then all of our partners who helped.
[00:03:51.720]So with that,
[00:03:52.553]I'm going to turn it over to our panelists
[00:03:55.410]to share their experiences.
[00:03:57.210]So we're gonna start with Jay Goertzen.
[00:03:59.860]Okay, so good morning.
[00:04:01.980]Yeah, Jay Goertzen.
[00:04:05.807]I'll just start out a little bit with telling you guys
[00:04:07.380]where I'm at.
[00:04:08.340]I'm in Henderson, Nebraska.
[00:04:10.710]We are fully irrigated 2/3 corn, 1/3 soybeans
[00:04:15.450]kind of a rotation.
[00:04:16.996]I'm wide row, ridge-till silt loam soils.
[00:04:21.870]And there's kind of average yields for the area,
[00:04:27.106]like field wide on a decent year.
[00:04:31.770]So I think Jenny touched on some of these goals.
[00:04:35.610]The biggest goal that I had was learning about soil health.
[00:04:40.050]Everything I read, everything I listened to,
[00:04:43.020]everybody kept coming back,
[00:04:44.370]coming back to this idea of diversity.
[00:04:46.454]And as you can see,
[00:04:48.270]I'm drawing a fair amount of acres that are corn on corn
[00:04:50.910]with that 2/3, 1/3.
[00:04:52.200]So the acres I'm putting these interseeded crops on,
[00:04:57.810]some of them are 20 to 30 plus years of corn.
[00:05:01.858]And it's that way because I rent, I don't have,
[00:05:06.630]there's some logistics stuff that goes on in there,
[00:05:08.760]but I was just trying to figure out how can I get something
[00:05:11.670]else in here with the corn so that I can keep growing corn,
[00:05:15.930]keep doing what we've been doing, keep everybody happy,
[00:05:18.780]but also maybe start making an influence
[00:05:22.350]on the microbial biomass as well.
[00:05:27.540]So this is, I started up there at the,
[00:05:31.470]on the top left was my first trial.
[00:05:35.070]The first year I did it,
[00:05:35.940]I went and stole row units off of a drill that I owned with
[00:05:38.850]my cousin and then a neighbor had a gandy box sitting around
[00:05:43.080]and I had a cultivator bar.
[00:05:44.790]So I spent a couple days slopping that together and it
[00:05:49.510]worked and it worked really good and I was super excited.
[00:05:53.430]I actually had like a two bushel yield increase,
[00:05:56.010]which according to UNL doesn't matter,
[00:05:58.290]but it mattered to me.
[00:05:59.123]I thought that was pretty cool.
[00:06:00.472]It didn't go down.
[00:06:02.010]So, and no offense.
[00:06:05.580]Statistically, so anyway,
[00:06:07.014]I don't understand all the statistics part,
[00:06:08.910]but I thought that was cool.
[00:06:10.110]So the next winter I spent all winter building
[00:06:13.770]the picture there that the little bigger picture of a 12 row
[00:06:17.250]to match my equipment, my size, everything.
[00:06:21.240]And because I was believed it would work.
[00:06:25.441]And then the bottom picture there is a old stock chopper
[00:06:28.710]where I moved the row units over to actually go
[00:06:30.600]in between the row,
[00:06:31.650]and I think that's where the future of this is for me,
[00:06:33.840]is using this interseeder to even plant rye
[00:06:36.810]or something ahead of soybeans so that I can go in there
[00:06:39.570]and rather than using herbicide,
[00:06:41.730]I can go out there and terminate my rye by rolling it
[00:06:46.710]and then reduce my herbicide even further.
[00:06:49.080]I've done it once semi successfully and it was,
[00:06:52.290]the results were pretty exciting.
[00:06:55.950]So one of the main things that I looked at too was I was
[00:06:58.950]coming at the point where I thought this might be something
[00:07:02.280]that would increase value for the grazer.
[00:07:04.440]I don't personally have cattle,
[00:07:05.970]but I thought well maybe I can entice people to pay me a
[00:07:09.330]little extra for my corn stalks
[00:07:10.710]if I can raise something for them.
[00:07:12.900]And I have another neighbor who does have cattle
[00:07:15.150]and he does a population study every year
[00:07:18.450]and he wanted me to interseed it.
[00:07:19.650]So we interseeded it.
[00:07:20.483]And just to kind of show you the difference
[00:07:22.380]of what sunlight does,
[00:07:24.930]the left one there is 10,000 population and you can see he
[00:07:28.560]has milo in the mix and it looks like Milo.
[00:07:30.990]And you go down to 15,000
[00:07:32.370]and it's kind of hard to see in the picture,
[00:07:33.900]but it looked kind of like a funny looking grass.
[00:07:36.750]And then you get down to 20,000,
[00:07:38.100]you can't really even tell that it's Milo anymore.
[00:07:41.250]Just that if you want to get biomass,
[00:07:43.500]you're gonna give up corn population.
[00:07:47.010]This is on my own acres,
[00:07:48.930]just comparing a dry land corner where I reduce rates 24,000
[00:07:52.440]versus under the pivot where it's 30,000.
[00:07:56.700]And just to see the difference in how much growth there is
[00:07:59.892]and how that is a direct relation to your population.
[00:08:07.102]This is what happens, this is what happened
[00:08:09.480]on the second year after I got all excited,
[00:08:11.130]after that first year,
[00:08:12.660]I went out and seeded 300 acres and one of the quarters
[00:08:17.400]happened to have a number that had really good ear flex
[00:08:20.520]and really good yield potential.
[00:08:24.720]So I had dropped the population down,
[00:08:26.250]was pretty excited about planting into that.
[00:08:27.960]But it also did not have a very good green snap rating.
[00:08:31.350]We had a windstorm and I had about 40% green snap.
[00:08:34.569]That field turned into a jungle, that opened up the canopy.
[00:08:39.900]The cover crops took off.
[00:08:41.130]You could not walk through the field.
[00:08:42.900]I mean it was literally, it was, it was a mess.
[00:08:47.280]Still yielded 165 but it wasn't much fun.
[00:08:52.470]On the right side there is that same year
[00:08:56.100]on a field where it didn't green snap,
[00:08:57.660]the stuff stood up pretty well.
[00:08:59.130]But just to show you how much growth we had,
[00:09:00.900]we had cowpeas going all the way to the top.
[00:09:04.110]They were in some fields,
[00:09:05.370]they were trellising across the 36 inch rows and you're
[00:09:07.890]walking like through head high soybeans, you know,
[00:09:10.020]it was just hard to walk through the field,
[00:09:13.830]but it didn't hurt yield that bad where I didn't have
[00:09:19.890]the green snap issue.
[00:09:24.210]This was just kind of showing what it looks like in the fall
[00:09:26.700]and the spring.
[00:09:28.170]There was not as much that survived as I was hoping.
[00:09:32.280]I was hoping I could use this as a way to take place of my
[00:09:36.450]planting cereal rye after corn or after soybeans, you know,
[00:09:39.840]late in the season, that I could get a really good
[00:09:42.120]established crop early.
[00:09:43.200]But it seemed like by harvest time most
[00:09:44.910]of that stuff had died off.
[00:09:46.500]And then when you ran shredding corn head
[00:09:49.110]over the top of it,
[00:09:49.943]you took care of a lot of the rest of it.
[00:09:51.417]And there was a little bit of green
[00:09:53.684]you can see out there in October.
[00:09:55.099]The most exciting one was in the springtime.
[00:09:57.960]One of my mixes had some cereal clover, or I'm sorry,
[00:10:01.420]I had six pounds of cereal rye
[00:10:03.360]and one pound of sweet clover.
[00:10:04.980]And most of what you see out there
[00:10:06.420]is actually the sweet clover.
[00:10:07.500]It's not the cereal rye and there's a closeup picture of
[00:10:10.410]what those roots are doing.
[00:10:11.970]There's a lot of nodulation going on
[00:10:14.418]and that was just one pound.
[00:10:15.251]So that was exciting to see.
[00:10:17.220]I do know that some of the other people in the group had a
[00:10:20.430]hard time killing that stuff.
[00:10:23.280]Sweet clover is pretty hard to kill.
[00:10:25.290]I did not have an issue.
[00:10:26.430]It was going into a bean field and I used dicamba and it,
[00:10:29.910]it did die for me,
[00:10:31.665]but I know some guys hit it two or three times and still
[00:10:33.360]couldn't get it to die.
[00:10:37.650]One of the other years I played with herbicide options,
[00:10:40.650]I'm set up to band on my planter being a ridge-till guy.
[00:10:45.780]So I did some playing with banding of Generic Lexar.
[00:10:50.850]I also did, so if I would band,
[00:10:57.270]I would band with the planter and then I would spray Roundup
[00:11:00.180]or Liberty one to two days before I planted my interseeding
[00:11:04.440]and that's all I had to clean it up.
[00:11:05.910]And then, so the middle of the row really never got
[00:11:08.430]a pre-emerged that whole season.
[00:11:11.100]And then in, let's see,
[00:11:15.480]the second year I did two quarts of generic Lexar at
[00:11:18.900]planting and I broadcast it and then about four weeks later
[00:11:22.260]is when I came in and interseeded, that worked as well too.
[00:11:24.630]You could however see that it reduced the population of my,
[00:11:28.080]what came up in that interseeded in those strips because of
[00:11:31.500]that probably 'cause of the Callisto and the metalochlor
[00:11:34.680]that's in there.
[00:11:36.300]And then this last year I did a broadcast of verdict,
[00:11:41.010]which is a mixture of Outlook and Sharpen.
[00:11:43.350]I did that right before the corn was coming up and then
[00:11:47.190]I interseeded about three weeks later and there was no other
[00:11:49.650]spray on that field.
[00:11:50.670]So that was actually a really cheap herbicide plan
[00:11:56.190]for that last year.
[00:11:57.240]In fact, when I was going back through
[00:11:59.416]and splitting up expenses with my landlords,
[00:12:01.380]I couldn't figure out where my second spray had gone on that
[00:12:03.420]field and I remembered what had happened.
[00:12:05.640]So it actually, it worked pretty good and it,
[00:12:07.470]it is working at actually reducing herbicide costs
[00:12:10.290]if you plan accordingly.
[00:12:14.340]Oh this is a picture that goes back
[00:12:15.660]with the herbicide stuff.
[00:12:17.370]So all the way on the left, that's where I had used,
[00:12:21.300]I think it was the two quarts of Lexar.
[00:12:24.180]So you can see that there's not as much diversity in there
[00:12:26.760]as if you look way over on the right
[00:12:28.200]where there was nothing.
[00:12:29.460]On the right there you can see some radish and stuff like
[00:12:32.580]that up front, small seated that stuff was knocked
[00:12:35.700]out by the herbicide.
[00:12:36.900]And on the left here you're basically seeing some grass,
[00:12:39.180]some cowpeas and there's some flax in there.
[00:12:41.880]So just to kind of show as you move that way there was less
[00:12:45.690]herbicide in the mix.
[00:12:49.110]So it did,
[00:12:49.943]but what was interesting though was that even with that
[00:12:52.140]pretty high rate of herbicide stuff did come up and it came
[00:12:55.260]up through it and I think that just running that drill unit
[00:12:57.870]through there was enough disturbance to break that,
[00:13:02.183]that the barrier or whatever that that herb pre-emerge is
[00:13:05.370]putting down that it still allows stuff to come through.
[00:13:07.920]So we were excited about that.
[00:13:09.530]It does not mean you have to give up herbicides
[00:13:11.790]in order to try this.
[00:13:12.690]You just have to be a little more creative.
[00:13:17.520]So my mix currently,
[00:13:19.350]the one I used last year and we'll probably use something
[00:13:21.790]like it this year,
[00:13:23.580]this is what it is if you guys wanna see it.
[00:13:25.620]Last year it was about 15 and a half dollars.
[00:13:28.888]But that's what I'm using. I'm using five plants.
[00:13:32.700]I may add annual right grass into there too.
[00:13:35.700]At this point I'm not really sure.
[00:13:37.217]But so that's kind of what I'm, what I'm doing.
[00:13:40.680]I'm doing low rates.
[00:13:42.630]I know if a guy were to go be grazing or if you wanted to
[00:13:45.330]get more to make it over the wintertime you would have to
[00:13:48.630]bump your rates.
[00:13:49.463]But logistically 'cause of the cedar I'm using,
[00:13:51.810]because of the timing this is going in
[00:13:53.700]and because of the fact that this is
[00:13:55.200]kind of could potentially compete with my cash crop,
[00:14:00.480]I wanna keep my rates low in case we have a windstorm
[00:14:02.880]or something like that.
[00:14:03.990]There's just not quite as much competition out there.
[00:14:09.310]Okay, so kinda to sum it up,
[00:14:11.136]I did pros and cons basically, positive and challenges.
[00:14:16.740]This adds a lot of diversity and that was one of my main
[00:14:20.670]goals was getting stuff out there,
[00:14:22.260]getting other roots out there.
[00:14:23.700]And the first year I did this I just,
[00:14:26.010]I didn't know what would grow in the shade of a corn row.
[00:14:28.740]I was really, really surprised.
[00:14:30.090]I think I tried probably 15 different species that first
[00:14:32.970]year and then had a really hard time figuring out what they
[00:14:35.760]were when they came up.
[00:14:36.870]But they almost all came up and that was the cool thing,
[00:14:40.050]how much diversity there really was.
[00:14:42.930]The interseeder tool opens a lot of options for me.
[00:14:45.690]It opened the option for relay cropping if some of you guys
[00:14:48.000]have heard about that.
[00:14:49.861]Putting rye then soybeans and then harvesting the rye over
[00:14:53.100]the top of the soybeans and letting the soybeans come up.
[00:14:55.320]It's just a kind of a spin on the double crop idea,
[00:14:57.870]but it allows you to get better crop of your soybeans.
[00:15:01.020]There's just things you can do because of your,
[00:15:02.970]'cause you're planting, where you're placing your seeds,
[00:15:06.249]it kind of opens some different ideas up there.
[00:15:10.500]Perennial cover crops,
[00:15:11.460]I think that's the next route that I will be exploring,
[00:15:15.810]seeing if we can get some clovers or something like that to
[00:15:17.880]grow all year round so I don't have to go out there and try
[00:15:20.610]to terminate something in the spring if it over winters.
[00:15:26.640]The diversity, I'm hoping it can eliminate my need
[00:15:29.610]for insecticide and fungicide.
[00:15:31.200]I, as a practice,
[00:15:32.730]I don't use either one of them but I will if I need to.
[00:15:35.940]But what we saw this these last four years was how much more
[00:15:40.170]insect activity there was in these fields.
[00:15:42.660]And we saw spots where when the root worm beetles come in,
[00:15:48.030]start clipping your silks to the row
[00:15:51.510]where there was cover crops,
[00:15:52.560]they were eating the cover crop instead
[00:15:53.880]of clipping corn silks.
[00:15:55.500]Now I can't say that they would do this, you know,
[00:15:58.136]overall, but, but that's what we saw.
[00:16:01.410]And Jenny was in, you know,
[00:16:02.850]six different cooperators fields.
[00:16:04.620]She saw the same thing everywhere that the bugs would,
[00:16:08.100]they were eating or the grasshopper we saw,
[00:16:10.221]with the grasshoppers too.
[00:16:11.054]There'd be cover crop species that were stripped all the way
[00:16:13.140]clean and then you go over into the corn where there was no
[00:16:16.063]cover crop and then they were chewing on the corn.
[00:16:18.870]So it adds something else out there,
[00:16:21.180]a different food source for them.
[00:16:22.675]It also brought in beneficial stuff like that.
[00:16:26.130]Some of that stuff was hard to measure
[00:16:27.630]and actually put data to,
[00:16:28.800]but it was stuff that we observed and we saw it in person.
[00:16:35.400]I think it's a positive for grazing.
[00:16:37.050]I don't think there's a huge, a huge benefit to it
[00:16:41.160]but the neighbor of mine who has cattle said just even just
[00:16:44.790]a little bit of green out there with that cornstalks really
[00:16:47.730]makes them use the cornstalks a lot more efficiently.
[00:16:50.250]And so he thought that even with that small amount of growth
[00:16:52.800]we got that it was still a very positive thing
[00:16:54.930]to have out there.
[00:16:56.176]So it's something that, it was exciting that way too.
[00:17:00.150]I had watermark sensors for three years in my interseeded
[00:17:05.820]strip versus a no treatment strip and every year it
[00:17:09.510]showed that the stuff that had covered crop in it
[00:17:12.120]used less water, three years in a row.
[00:17:15.270]This is, I mean it's under a pivot,
[00:17:16.680]but I was monitoring that and it data showed it and the last
[00:17:20.880]thing was an increased organic matter and that's,
[00:17:23.190]I'll put with a little caveat,
[00:17:24.595]there were a few other practices I was doing and the organic
[00:17:28.515]matter increased across all treatments
[00:17:30.454]including the check strip.
[00:17:33.000]So it's a little bit,
[00:17:35.004]not quite sure why that happened but it was almost a whole
[00:17:37.860]point in three years and I went out and double checked it
[00:17:41.914]'cause I didn't believe it.
[00:17:42.747]And the second test I did also showed it as well.
[00:17:45.300]So there's potential for something to happen.
[00:17:51.300]The challenges, controlling weeds can be a challenge
[00:17:53.640]because you do have to think through your herbicides
[00:17:56.490]when you're using a diverse mix like I was,
[00:17:58.140]that pretty much takes every single herbicide off the table
[00:18:01.103]unless you can place that herbicide far enough in advance,
[00:18:04.170]you know that or you just have to be creative.
[00:18:06.840]You gotta really think it through and realize that you,
[00:18:10.199]it's a balancing act.
[00:18:11.724]The weeds that we did have, when we had a good establishment
[00:18:15.570]of cover crops, they didn't compete.
[00:18:18.300]They were there but they didn't get big and you go on the
[00:18:21.330]check strip, you know they got, you know, the water hemp,
[00:18:24.307]whatever, you know we get this big,
[00:18:25.140]you go on the interseeded stuff,
[00:18:26.280]it stayed as big as the interseeded stuff,
[00:18:28.170]it just never got big.
[00:18:29.490]So yeah, the herbicide choices and timing is complicated.
[00:18:35.460]Those spring pictures you guys could see,
[00:18:37.260]it looks like a mess.
[00:18:38.636]It's not real pretty to look at sometimes to me,
[00:18:42.720]I like it but you know, some people if you're,
[00:18:45.630]if you're renting ground like me,
[00:18:46.890]you may have to talk to your landlords a little bit and try
[00:18:48.900]to explain what you're doing, why you're doing it.
[00:18:52.920]Wind and hail can get pretty interesting.
[00:18:54.690]So make sure that you know what you're planting and that
[00:18:57.450]it's a good standing variety so that you're not putting
[00:18:59.880]something with potential green snap in with something that
[00:19:03.060]could take off and be become a weed.
[00:19:06.420]Does take a little bit
[00:19:07.253]of creativity to pencil it out financially at this point it,
[00:19:11.940]it's pretty hard to make that all make sense if you're just
[00:19:15.900]looking at a book standpoint.
[00:19:17.580]But when you start factoring in the insect stuff,
[00:19:20.040]the possible beneficials,
[00:19:21.960]the possible soil health metrics that maybe we can't measure
[00:19:25.800]or we don't know how to make that thing tell us that we can
[00:19:30.480]use less fertilizer.
[00:19:31.920]You know some of those things are kind of hard to figure out
[00:19:34.380]exactly that way.
[00:19:38.190]There was not as much biomass that was presented that over
[00:19:42.090]wintered as what I had hoped for and there was not probably
[00:19:46.320]as much grazing value as I had anticipated.
[00:19:50.880]I think that's the end of mine. I'll let Chad take over.
[00:19:54.750]Good morning.
[00:19:56.730]I realize I hadn't been up here for 28 years.
[00:20:00.270]I started doing the math.
[00:20:01.230]I worked a summer up here across the road for UNL
[00:20:04.380]as a senior in, that was 1995.
[00:20:08.070]So that tells you how old I am already.
[00:20:09.720]But my name's Chad Dane, have a farm in Clay County.
[00:20:14.850]We farmed just shy of 4,000 acres.
[00:20:18.270]Corn, soybeans.
[00:20:19.170]We have about a thousand acres of seed corn takes
[00:20:21.870]a lot of our time.
[00:20:22.703]My wife and I have seven children,
[00:20:25.500]so if we're not in the field, we are in a gymnasium,
[00:20:29.730]which is where I'm headed after this.
[00:20:31.800]So I don't speak a lot.
[00:20:34.380]Jay's gonna be a lot longer than I was or will be.
[00:20:39.060]Let's see, where to start.
[00:20:41.560]So I guess we've been growing cover crops for 12 years.
[00:20:44.550]Kind of started when we were doing seed corn and cover crops
[00:20:47.790]and seed corn's pretty easy,
[00:20:48.960]lots of sunlight and we've had a green snap or hail event
[00:20:54.030]11 years in a row now on our seed corn, amazingly enough.
[00:20:57.600]So we have lots of sunlight.
[00:20:59.596]That's the easy part.
[00:21:01.206]We tried growing cover crops in field corn numerous times.
[00:21:05.340]It's not that you can't get established,
[00:21:07.080]you can fly seed on it will establish the problem is
[00:21:11.520]sunlight and these, the cover crops get tall and spindly.
[00:21:16.350]They fall over in the first event of hot weather,
[00:21:20.310]say in September when you're done irrigating, they die off.
[00:21:23.550]So you've spent a lot of money to no avail.
[00:21:26.610]We've even done it with a 40% green snap in field corn flown
[00:21:30.478]turnips and radishes on.
[00:21:32.490]They did not develop correctly.
[00:21:34.740]So when Jenny called and said, "Hey,
[00:21:36.300]would you be interested in this?"
[00:21:37.650]Well sure.
[00:21:39.090]Anytime we could establish something early so that
[00:21:42.030]plant develops correctly,
[00:21:43.350]let it go dormant and then see if it comes on the fall.
[00:21:46.950]Like you bet, that that sounds great.
[00:21:48.900]So I've only done it for three years and my,
[00:21:52.260]I guess my goal was to, I don't have cattle.
[00:21:54.612]Cash rent's in my area pretty high. It's pretty intense.
[00:22:01.530]So it's all about economics.
[00:22:03.360]I guess my goal was to reduce nitrogen cost if we could,
[00:22:08.310]hopefully to see an organic matter increase
[00:22:11.220]and of course soil erosion.
[00:22:15.240]I will say before I go into this mix,
[00:22:17.670]one thing we have found in our area,
[00:22:19.470]Clay County is named that for a reason.
[00:22:22.950]We do have some heavy,
[00:22:23.970]heavy clay and even drilling rye after corn harvest.
[00:22:30.240]If you can let that get eight to 10 inches tall the next
[00:22:33.270]spring and kill it off,
[00:22:35.280]which and may maybe not even plant green.
[00:22:37.354]We have found with all of our water sensors that we are
[00:22:41.010]getting a deeper penetration with all our irrigation
[00:22:43.980]and rain, just, just that little bit.
[00:22:47.580]We've had some farms that were gravity irrigated for far too
[00:22:50.520]long that we took over and water was only soaking 18 inches
[00:22:55.986]deep first two years and after some rye,
[00:22:59.556]we now our water goes down four feet when we irrigate
[00:23:03.540]and our roots go down four feet.
[00:23:06.570]We were seeing on our sensors,
[00:23:07.980]the root mass wasn't even there past 24 inches.
[00:23:11.550]So certain benefits,
[00:23:14.010]but I'm getting off subject there Jenny.
[00:23:16.571]So mine, I'm gonna,
[00:23:18.960]I'm gonna tell you I don't even know what my mix was.
[00:23:20.550]I said Jenny, I want a nitrogen building mix.
[00:23:23.157]And so she, she helped me with all the work.
[00:23:25.800]So you can see everything there.
[00:23:29.190]There's our 21 mix and our 22 and yeah, the 21 mix.
[00:23:34.680]You look at the cost at $46 an acre.
[00:23:36.737]That's that's really,
[00:23:39.369]yeah, after the first year I said, listen, we can't,
[00:23:43.620]not too many farmers are gonna pay that kind of money.
[00:23:46.110]That's a big outlay to, you know, especially,
[00:23:49.620]oh let's say if we could make 50 pounds of nitrogen even at
[00:23:54.067]a dollar a pound, which, you know, you're,
[00:23:56.610]you're at break even there.
[00:23:57.780]So 2022 that got reduced to $22 an acre.
[00:24:03.750]And so that's more reasonable for our goals.
[00:24:09.750]Herbicide.
[00:24:10.583]So yeah, this is a timing thing.
[00:24:13.140]So to get cover crops seeded in corn,
[00:24:16.230]we use the NRDS drill.
[00:24:17.970]I didn't build one like Jay.
[00:24:21.330]What, two leaf.
[00:24:23.520]You can start going to probably planting it. Two leaf corn.
[00:24:26.400]Five leaf corn, you're almost too late.
[00:24:29.100]By six leaf corn if you're interseeding we've seen that,
[00:24:33.420]that the corn's too big already.
[00:24:35.430]You will not get established.
[00:24:36.450]So you've got about an eight to 10 day window in there to
[00:24:39.450]get this done, which is doable if you get the weather.
[00:24:44.160]Our pre emerges were some atrazine and metalochlor, Roundup.
[00:24:48.870]Our post was Roundup and Liberty I think all three years
[00:24:54.570]we just posted it either the day they planted or a couple
[00:24:58.440]days after before the cover crop came up or the day before.
[00:25:03.570]We did 1.75 quartz of Lexar and 1.8 quartz of Lexar.
[00:25:08.820]So yeah, even with the Callisto in there you can,
[00:25:12.303]you can get a good establishment of cover crop which was,
[00:25:14.340]which was nice to see.
[00:25:16.770]And honestly our weed control was fine
[00:25:19.590]in both the seated and unseated.
[00:25:22.200]And so these strips,
[00:25:23.670]we did 'em three years in a row and the very same strips.
[00:25:26.580]And so our goal was to,
[00:25:29.190]and I'm gonna let Jenny talk about what we saw on the soil
[00:25:32.100]tests after three years, but early season and mid-season.
[00:25:38.220]Yeah, I don't, we got good establishment.
[00:25:43.800]Mid-season, you can see that we had great covers.
[00:25:48.612]Some of the cowpeas and the,
[00:25:51.090]they call forge beans is that the other bean and the
[00:25:55.110]buckwheat had gotten up pretty tall and I thought,
[00:25:57.750]boy this is gonna be bad on a corn head, you know,
[00:26:00.750]we're not gonna get through this.
[00:26:02.070]But by harvest time you didn't even notice it.
[00:26:05.550]They were there,
[00:26:06.383]they had dried up just like the corn plant,
[00:26:08.610]corn head went through no problem.
[00:26:15.210]Yeah, excellent weed control, good cover.
[00:26:18.570]Here's the fall and really the guys with a cow herd
[00:26:23.280]I think could take advantage of something like this.
[00:26:28.200]You know, there is, there's some growth there.
[00:26:30.150]This is October, I don't know when that picture was taken,
[00:26:32.490]but that's mid-October
[00:26:34.620]and you can see we've got some good cover there and it grew
[00:26:39.330]for another two weeks before it froze.
[00:26:41.670]And so we were really happy with the results.
[00:26:45.000]Now in year three this year we had, let's see, Pioneer 1563.
[00:26:52.290]That's a very tall bushy plant.
[00:26:55.050]And the early season looked just like that.
[00:26:59.280]By late season, by what? When did we go there?
[00:27:03.330]Mid-August, late August, September, first September.
[00:27:08.040]There was hardly anything in my plot.
[00:27:10.050]I hadn't been in there for two weeks. I couldn't believe it.
[00:27:13.050]A lot of it died off. It was, that's just too big a plant.
[00:27:16.500]Okay, so there is a little bit to picking
[00:27:19.650]the right corn hybrid too, I believe.
[00:27:23.829]We did do one year a soybean mix and did some winter wheat
[00:27:29.880]and clover and the soybeans were planted into green
[00:27:36.303]cereal rye that spring.
[00:27:39.270]And then we killed that with Roundup, Valor and Zidua
[00:27:42.240]and then we did no herbicide on the plot.
[00:27:44.970]And so there's after we drilled the wheat and clover.
[00:27:52.830]Came up nicely and as you would you expect irrigated
[00:27:56.190]soybeans, they get chest high.
[00:28:00.270]Zero sunlight gets in there, the wheat died off.
[00:28:05.880]But the, I don't know if we have a picture
[00:28:08.550]of the clover stayed living and it was nodulating
[00:28:14.910]and we only did that one year.
[00:28:18.030]So there is potential there.
[00:28:21.628]I'm trying to think what else.
[00:28:23.550]I guess for me, three years, were we successful?
[00:28:28.440]Did we learn anything?
[00:28:30.900]Yes, we're increasing the bugs in our soil
[00:28:36.482]without a doubt.
[00:28:39.403]The, you're increasing or helping soil erosion in a picture
[00:28:44.880]like that on the right.
[00:28:46.290]If you've got any kind of rolling fields,
[00:28:50.730]you get a pouring rain without a doubt
[00:28:53.944]you're decreasing soil loss, so that's a benefit.
[00:28:57.840]It's, it's a challenge.
[00:28:58.830]It's a timing challenge.
[00:29:00.366]After three years we need to keep going.
[00:29:06.060]We're probably going to plant soybeans
[00:29:08.730]in this field this year and not do anything different.
[00:29:13.410]See if, we'll go ahead and measure those strips again
[00:29:15.840]and just see if after three years there was a benefit.
[00:29:18.990]And then I think what I'd like to do, as Jay mentioned,
[00:29:22.710]it's such a timing issue.
[00:29:25.290]You know to cover a couple thousand acres of this
[00:29:28.080]would be very difficult.
[00:29:29.940]I think we need to get to more of a solid seated clover,
[00:29:33.840]run a strip till machine through it,
[00:29:36.360]maybe band herbicide and try to plant in that same spot for
[00:29:40.380]five or six years and maintain that clover in between
[00:29:44.760]the rows and cut our herbicide costs.
[00:29:47.880]See if we can actually cut our nitrogen down
[00:29:50.310]by 80 pounds or something.
[00:29:52.020]Then we're talking some real benefits.
[00:29:53.880]So yeah, that's about it for me.
[00:29:58.560]So I'm gonna finish up with a summary
[00:30:01.740]of what we learned in our six on farm research fields.
[00:30:05.970]So we had six on farm research fields but we had
[00:30:10.701]July 9th, 2020 and 2021 we had the windstorms
[00:30:16.140]that impacted yields.
[00:30:17.970]June 14th, 2022 was a massive hailstorm
[00:30:21.270]in our area of the state.
[00:30:22.410]So we only had two fields that made it to harvest last year.
[00:30:26.160]We also had two soybean studies
[00:30:29.010]where they were interseeded in 2021.
[00:30:31.500]So instead of showing you a bunch of graphs,
[00:30:33.930]'cause I could spend a lot of time on graphs,
[00:30:35.940]I just wanna give you the overall summary and then share
[00:30:39.600]where we're gonna go,
[00:30:40.530]what we learned and where we're gonna go from here.
[00:30:42.930]So we had a total of 12 corn site-years
[00:30:45.540]and two soybean site-years.
[00:30:47.670]We took cover crop biomass every year in September.
[00:30:52.140]10 of the 12 site-years,
[00:30:53.160]the interseeded cover crop had more biomass than the check.
[00:30:56.790]There were two times where the check treatment that was in
[00:30:59.790]2020, where the canopy had 40 to 45% green snap
[00:31:04.620]opened it up.
[00:31:05.670]We had more weeds in those check strips than we actually had
[00:31:09.000]even cover crop in the interseeded area.
[00:31:11.580]And that's just because we had no residual herbicide.
[00:31:14.370]We used the same herbicide program across the entire area
[00:31:18.600]of this plot.
[00:31:20.850]When it came to yield, half of the site,
[00:31:23.940]so six of the 12 years we had higher yield in the check
[00:31:27.990]treatment than the interseeded.
[00:31:30.364]In half the years we had no difference.
[00:31:33.210]So those yields ranged from two bushels an acre to 10 bushel
[00:31:37.620]an acre under that check.
[00:31:40.950]When it came to the soybeans,
[00:31:42.060]we had no difference in the yield where we interseeded.
[00:31:45.510]So those two locations, no difference in yield.
[00:31:48.780]Net return, 10 of the 12 site-years for corn.
[00:31:52.320]We had a higher net return for the check.
[00:31:55.020]And going back to Jay's point in that we're only looking,
[00:31:59.010]we're basically looking at the cost of the cover crop
[00:32:01.350]and the cost to intercede.
[00:32:03.240]We're not taking into account any other benefits.
[00:32:05.760]So half the guys grazed their fields.
[00:32:09.690]We didn't take any account for any changes in soil health
[00:32:13.740]benefits for less insecticides or fungicides.
[00:32:18.450]So those are things that we need to think about as a soil,
[00:32:21.060]like a community around soil health.
[00:32:23.520]How do we attribute economics to these factors?
[00:32:28.950]We hope to do that more in the future with our group.
[00:32:33.180]Soil health values.
[00:32:34.230]We took PLFA, so phospholipid fatty acid analysis,
[00:32:39.360]that's your soil microbes.
[00:32:42.269]So that looks at total microbial biomass as well as how much
[00:32:45.540]is bacteria versus fungal.
[00:32:48.030]And then we also did the Haney test.
[00:32:49.799]So we did this in 2020 and then we did it again in 2022,
[00:32:55.230]both the same time of the year, the same way of sampling.
[00:32:59.160]And what we found was a significant increase from 2020
[00:33:04.140]to 2022 of our, all the soil health indicators in the check
[00:33:12.688]as well as it happened in the interseeded.
[00:33:14.649]So when we look at overall when we compare
[00:33:17.940]the check to the interseeded,
[00:33:20.190]we can't say that the difference in that increase in the
[00:33:23.160]microbial growth in the soil health indicators was due to
[00:33:27.570]the interseeding itself.
[00:33:29.610]So then I'm getting these results back,
[00:33:32.160]scratching my head and I start asking them
[00:33:33.960]all more questions.
[00:33:36.390]These guys are already doing a lot of practices,
[00:33:38.970]soil health practices that many of you in the room are
[00:33:41.280]probably already doing.
[00:33:43.290]So they were maintaining everything correctly
[00:33:45.480]on their strips.
[00:33:47.160]But like Chad,
[00:33:48.343]he drills rye across his whole field every fall
[00:33:52.500]and was grazing.
[00:33:54.480]And Jay was doing that on several times
[00:33:57.180]and he also was using compost extract in his field.
[00:34:01.830]We had another guy applying a biological across this field
[00:34:04.710]that I found out after the study.
[00:34:06.690]So they're all doing additional things
[00:34:08.400]to increase soil health.
[00:34:09.510]So the good news for all these guys,
[00:34:11.700]they all significantly improved their soil health
[00:34:14.460]in three years.
[00:34:16.260]It's just we can't attribute all of that
[00:34:18.600]to the interseeding itself.
[00:34:21.510]And then we also took the soil nutrient values and there
[00:34:24.630]were individual changes but across the board
[00:34:27.840]we didn't see any differences.
[00:34:31.410]This is just a picture Jay,
[00:34:32.610]this is actually from your field to show red ripper cowpeas.
[00:34:37.230]When you open up that canopy,
[00:34:38.730]what it does and Steve Melvin is my colleague with UNL
[00:34:42.840]that's been working with me on these studies as well.
[00:34:45.600]You can see how great of nitrogen fixers
[00:34:48.240]those cowpeas are as well.
[00:34:52.470]What I was excited about was,
[00:34:55.530]what I feel that our group achieved is we were able to prove
[00:34:58.740]that we can intercede cover crops into early season corn
[00:35:02.730]and seed soybeans successfully.
[00:35:05.700]So we were able to get establishment,
[00:35:07.590]we were able to get growth,
[00:35:09.180]they survived the growing season.
[00:35:10.560]We had something at harvest and then we also had something
[00:35:13.230]that survived the winter and how much survived the winter
[00:35:16.620]depended on what the rate was and what the species were
[00:35:20.487]and how the winter was.
[00:35:21.720]If it was a dry, open winter,
[00:35:24.630]you didn't have as much survival.
[00:35:26.430]If you had snow cover, we had a lot more survival.
[00:35:29.640]And so these are just examples.
[00:35:31.200]We've got red clover, hairy vetch, yellow sweet clover.
[00:35:35.940]This was really cool until it gets really scary.
[00:35:39.120]Like you know when you start realizing, oh my goodness,
[00:35:44.460]like we're throwing so much herbicide at this thing
[00:35:47.250]and it's not dying.
[00:35:48.870]I learned, I have a whole presentation just on herbicides.
[00:35:52.632]So all this information will be in crop watch.
[00:35:54.390]We'll have like four articles in crop watch,
[00:35:56.550]'cause that's how much we've learned.
[00:35:58.830]But the clover though is what really encouraged us,
[00:36:03.480]how this survived really encouraged us
[00:36:05.790]for where we're going.
[00:36:08.580]I've got two slides on what we learned.
[00:36:10.890]I'm not gonna go through all of this.
[00:36:12.960]If you wanna take pictures you can do that,
[00:36:14.850]but I put it on here so that you could just see the summary.
[00:36:18.450]A lot of this was covered between the three of us already.
[00:36:22.043]One thing that wasn't covered is we do need to think about
[00:36:26.220]water early on in that season.
[00:36:28.530]So if we've got a dry spring,
[00:36:30.690]gotta think about maybe an inch of either rainfall or
[00:36:33.623]irrigation and the irrigation we were splitting
[00:36:37.230]it into half inch passes,
[00:36:39.450]'cause you've really gotta have something to get
[00:36:41.430]those seeds that are just at the surface or just below the
[00:36:44.532]surface getting going early on in that season.
[00:36:49.980]And then everything else,
[00:36:51.420]so we also saw that with the Japanese beetles
[00:36:53.940]regarding the insects.
[00:36:55.290]So Jay mentioned the insects part of it.
[00:36:58.500]This next slide, what we learned, buckwheat and flax,
[00:37:02.250]it just became pollinator sanctuaries out there.
[00:37:05.100]Just butterfly sanctuaries, lacewings dragonflies.
[00:37:08.670]It was beautiful.
[00:37:09.780]It's really, it looks different but it's just beautiful.
[00:37:14.550]If I'm to recommend what you want in your interseeded mix,
[00:37:18.210]I'm always gonna say, especially in corn, on corn,
[00:37:21.203]buckwheat, cowpeas,
[00:37:23.250]flax and then collards, like a forage collard
[00:37:27.390]and then annual or Italian rye grass or both of them.
[00:37:31.050]The reason buckwheat and cowpea,
[00:37:32.910]they're gonna be your first things up.
[00:37:34.980]They come up quick, three to five days,
[00:37:37.260]they get a broad leaf and I really think
[00:37:40.260]that helps us with weed control.
[00:37:42.660]It shades the ground quick.
[00:37:44.310]Forage collards provide your understory
[00:37:46.710]or you can use other grass too.
[00:37:48.990]We just started switching to forage collards and they also,
[00:37:54.120]I felt helped with weed control.
[00:37:57.060]I already talked about the yellow sweet clover
[00:38:00.150]and this key I mentioned at the beginning,
[00:38:02.550]but if you're gonna do this in soybeans,
[00:38:04.835]the earlier the better.
[00:38:06.540]So interseed at planting, at emergence
[00:38:10.020]or do a dormant seeding.
[00:38:12.660]Hybrid is important.
[00:38:14.190]So both of these guys actually use Pioneer 1563
[00:38:19.020]and they both learned and it's a great hybrid
[00:38:21.210]and it's a great flex hybrid too.
[00:38:23.280]But when you're using these really tall,
[00:38:25.530]really broadleaf hybrids,
[00:38:27.480]we gotta think about what else we're trying to achieve
[00:38:29.520]within those rows.
[00:38:30.840]So be thinking about your hybrids
[00:38:32.820]when you're doing this as well.
[00:38:35.160]And then I took a ton of soil samples and I wasn't smart
[00:38:40.320]enough early on, but that's how we learn.
[00:38:42.720]I couldn't ever figure out where all the nitrogen was,
[00:38:44.880]where are all the nutrients?
[00:38:46.500]Took all these soil samples and there was always less
[00:38:48.480]nutrients where we interseeded versus
[00:38:50.970]what the check treatments were.
[00:38:53.310]Well the nutrients are all in the plants.
[00:38:55.650]So if you're gonna be doing nutrient analysis in these cover
[00:38:59.183]crop studies, take the nutrient analysis,
[00:39:03.450]take biomass samples,
[00:39:05.580]send them to places like Wards and have them do the nutrient
[00:39:09.180]analysis for you.
[00:39:10.620]So we started doing that the last two years because our guys
[00:39:13.830]wanted to know how much nitrogen is this cover crop provided
[00:39:18.450]me for the next season.
[00:39:20.190]So that was an additional thing that we started using.
[00:39:23.782]I wish I would've known that sooner.
[00:39:25.882]So where are we going?
[00:39:28.260]This, we got excited about clover and it's because
[00:39:32.070]after interseeding into soybeans, which I was okay,
[00:39:35.520]I was excited but I was kind of scared and we had to plan A
[00:39:39.090]through E on what to do for herbicide options.
[00:39:42.810]And the last one E, was we were gonna abandon
[00:39:45.060]the whole thing.
[00:39:46.230]But I'm so grateful that these growers are just willing
[00:39:50.370]to just take that risk,
[00:39:52.090]jump in and and take those risks with me.
[00:39:55.650]But after we saw how the red clover got established in
[00:39:58.770]soybeans, it was just really cool because we're like,
[00:40:02.610]we already have that crop then established for the corn
[00:40:05.310]that's going in there the next year.
[00:40:07.500]So we're switching now our mindset a little bit
[00:40:10.800]to perennial covers.
[00:40:12.450]Last year we started with six fields
[00:40:14.490]that were dormant seeded.
[00:40:16.620]So when I'm saying dormant seeding,
[00:40:18.030]this is in March using the interseeder.
[00:40:22.260]So we dormant seeded in March, we did red clover,
[00:40:25.440]some guys did Dutch white clover.
[00:40:27.330]So think about the white clover in your lawns,
[00:40:30.690]that's low growing, hard to kill, that's Dutch white clover.
[00:40:34.170]That's what we're gonna start putting in fields.
[00:40:37.248]Actually we're gonna go to AberLasting this year,
[00:40:40.830]which which is a mix of Dutch white times Kura clover.
[00:40:44.670]And the reason for that is it has a little bit more drought
[00:40:46.920]tolerance, really good grazing.
[00:40:49.820]So this is one of the fields that survived.
[00:40:53.400]This is in corn.
[00:40:54.540]We love the way that this looked,
[00:40:56.100]this is Mammoth Red Clover.
[00:40:57.840]Got two feet tall,
[00:40:59.640]two feet tall and then just laid down.
[00:41:02.280]An amazing weed control.
[00:41:04.710]We compared the economics of this compared to a full
[00:41:08.703]herbicide treatment in his check strips.
[00:41:12.660]And basically this all's it has is Lepidium to kill the rye.
[00:41:18.240]Two rounds of Zidua.
[00:41:20.100]So when you're thinking about working with cover crops,
[00:41:22.350]you really have to start thinking outside
[00:41:24.210]the box with herbicides.
[00:41:26.130]And we're just using a lot of group fifteens after the herb,
[00:41:29.970]after the covers are emerged.
[00:41:31.740]So we're excited about this.
[00:41:33.446]This is what it looked like after running a strip till rig
[00:41:36.480]in it this fall.
[00:41:38.610]And so we're excited to see what it looks
[00:41:40.770]like next year with soybeans.
[00:41:43.140]This was soybeans.
[00:41:44.430]It looks like a mess, again,
[00:41:45.750]it's a different way of thinking.
[00:41:47.280]It looks very different.
[00:41:49.209]This looks kind of scary when you get clover that's that
[00:41:54.240]tall growing with your soybeans.
[00:41:56.880]This is what it looked like at harvest and after harvest.
[00:42:00.360]And then that's what it looks like today.
[00:42:02.430]So we're just excited to look at the economics of the system
[00:42:05.565]and see, okay, now we've got the clover established,
[00:42:08.490]how well does it come back?
[00:42:10.380]And over time what are the economics of okay,
[00:42:14.040]if we're not receding, we've got that cost gone.
[00:42:17.550]Can we reduce our herbicide?
[00:42:18.990]Can we reduce our nitrogen in the system?
[00:42:21.750]And I think that's of interest to us.
[00:42:23.970]That's where we're,
[00:42:25.800]I'm not saying that we're not gonna interseed annuals too,
[00:42:28.710]but this is what several of the guys are excited about.
[00:42:32.670]Gonna give a plug for our on-farm research meetings.
[00:42:35.610]If you wanna hear more about these and other studies,
[00:42:38.695]these are the different locations and we're asking that you
[00:42:41.920]would RSVP and with that I'm gonna just turn it over,
[00:42:46.710]open it up for questions that you have for us.
[00:42:50.610]Okay, the question is,
[00:42:51.660]what's the current status with crop insurance with
[00:42:55.050]interseeding cover crops?
[00:42:57.540]So when I, when I look at the RCIS policies,
[00:43:02.700]technically it is legal to do this,
[00:43:05.460]but then you read further and it talks about,
[00:43:08.040]it's based on what your local NRCS region dictates,
[00:43:12.870]especially when it comes to planting green and termination,
[00:43:16.500]things like that.
[00:43:17.735]So according to RCIS when you read it, the big policy,
[00:43:23.135]it's you can do it but, but then you got also,
[00:43:27.958]I mean there's the NRCS part of it and at the end
[00:43:30.990]of the day I'll let these guys talk about what they,
[00:43:34.740]what they see on it.
[00:43:35.970]I will say we did a lot of interseeding in other situations,
[00:43:39.330]including after a hailstorm
[00:43:41.580]when a guy was down to 10,000 plants.
[00:43:44.255]And what we did is we interseeded a cover crop mix in a
[00:43:49.380]portion of his field and then he left a check strip
[00:43:52.650]because his cover,
[00:43:53.760]his crop insurance guy wasn't sure about the whole thing.
[00:43:57.930]To the row where we had interseeded the cover crops,
[00:44:01.770]palmer didn't come in,
[00:44:03.284]Palmer came in crazy where the hail damage was without so
[00:44:07.460]and so, I mean that is something to also consider
[00:44:12.600]in these situations.
[00:44:16.710]Yeah I did, I did talk to my insurance guys
[00:44:18.660]before I did it.
[00:44:19.493]I thought about not talking to him but then,
[00:44:24.020]then I wondered what would happen.
[00:44:25.677]But yeah, like she said,
[00:44:27.090]I mean according to the big main policy,
[00:44:29.400]I don't remember the wording but I did look it up
[00:44:31.680]specifically and I think there were some conversations with
[00:44:35.520]here, but look at the policy,
[00:44:36.660]this is what it says and it's worded that it is inclusive.
[00:44:40.020]The way I understood it.
[00:44:42.900]Yeah, I asked my guy and he just said,
[00:44:45.210]go ahead, it's legal.
[00:44:46.260]I think that's changed recently and seed courted companies
[00:44:49.710]are now paying us extra to plant cover crops as part of
[00:44:53.190]their contract so I think in the future these things
[00:44:55.860]will be more normal.
[00:44:57.810]I have a couple questions.
[00:44:59.540]Have you done any research with broad soybeans and also are
[00:45:04.560]you using any digital chemicals to, for weed control?
[00:45:09.431]I guess I didn't catch what,
[00:45:10.770]I didn't do any soybean stuff myself.
[00:45:12.540]But as far as the residuals,
[00:45:14.640]I mean we definitely did use residuals, we used them.
[00:45:17.407]What I did was finding that, you know,
[00:45:20.790]if you could wait three weeks or something after that
[00:45:23.190]residual, you had the better stand.
[00:45:25.410]But we also, this last year,
[00:45:27.900]some of the guys who got the perennials going were using
[00:45:30.810]residual like, like metalochlor or Zidua
[00:45:34.472]on top of the emerged clover.
[00:45:36.750]So to give you that residual.
[00:45:38.130]But after that cover crop has already come up.
[00:45:40.890]But to keep the other stuff from coming.
[00:45:43.260]And I didn't catch the first part
[00:45:44.880]of your question.
[00:45:45.713]What kind of soybeans?
[00:45:47.700]Oh, drilled soybeans.
[00:45:48.690]Okay, so, so on the soybean study Chad had 30 inch rows.
[00:45:53.850]No I'm talking like 15 to seven and a half.
[00:45:57.600]Right, right.
[00:45:58.500]So Chad had 30 inch rows but the other guy who did the
[00:46:01.260]soybeans was in 15 inch rows and so on that one
[00:46:07.020]he farms tough ground.
[00:46:08.850]That field is some tough ground and I was concerned about,
[00:46:12.660]he had a beautiful stand of 15 inch soybeans and we were
[00:46:15.410]gonna interseed through there and I knew we were gonna kill
[00:46:18.930]soybeans along the way.
[00:46:20.580]So we actually added a half rate of soybeans into our wheat
[00:46:25.590]and our clover mix just to make sure
[00:46:28.440]that we could have enough cover.
[00:46:30.900]'Cause it's, I mean that was,
[00:46:32.857]had a lot of train on that ground it turned out amazing.
[00:46:36.840]Kudos to you Jenny and Chad and Jay
[00:46:39.210]for sharing and it's truly innovative work
[00:46:41.940]that you're doing with interseeding and sharing
[00:46:44.460]the replicated results.
[00:46:46.830]Kudos to you guys today.
[00:46:49.020]Has there in central Nebraska been any new farmer
[00:46:51.720]to farmer learning communities?
[00:46:53.220]Because it, it takes,
[00:46:54.930]you gotta up your game management wise and your herbicide
[00:46:58.020]talk and their experiences.
[00:46:59.729]They're willing to share farmer to farmer here as is there
[00:47:04.050]any new groups that have started in your area that are
[00:47:06.450]willing to share results with cover crops?
[00:47:09.630]Because really in Nebraska we only have maybe what four
[00:47:13.260]or 5% cover crops, totally, you know,
[00:47:15.690]across the state and that might be generous at that.
[00:47:19.080]But I see this as a new opportunity for farmers to learn
[00:47:22.290]amongst themselves, those that are leaders in their area.
[00:47:26.820]There is a kind of a small group of people
[00:47:29.760]that have, we've been meeting
[00:47:31.170]and not like taking data necessarily,
[00:47:33.270]but just sharing experiences and I think that started
[00:47:36.510]because there were probably 10 or 12 of us that were all
[00:47:39.450]bugging Jenny about,
[00:47:40.470]well who are the other people that are trying this stuff?
[00:47:42.810]And so she kind of connected some dots
[00:47:44.610]and put some names together.
[00:47:47.634]And so there's a few of you in this room and and a few
[00:47:49.664]others that you know within probably a 50 mile radius
[00:47:55.620]of York or so that that are meeting.
[00:47:58.890]And that's, I would encourage anybody, you know,
[00:48:01.320]wherever part of the state that you are,
[00:48:02.610]if you find a few other people who are trying some different
[00:48:04.950]things or whatever just to talk to other people because then
[00:48:09.690]you're not alone doing it and also helps you when you make
[00:48:11.991]mistakes or you can learn from somebody else's mistakes or
[00:48:15.822]share your own or whatever.
[00:48:17.160]And it's not the same,
[00:48:18.840]you don't get the same judgment that you would
[00:48:20.940]at the coffee shop.
[00:48:24.810]I guess I'll just add to that,
[00:48:26.310]that I guess the biggest challenge for me is herbicides
[00:48:29.730]and trusting that you can back off.
[00:48:32.310]I've got a father who sees one sunflower in the ditch
[00:48:35.100]and he's making a phone call to me, you know,
[00:48:37.110]get your corn knife out and my grandfather was even worse.
[00:48:40.590]So this is a whole different, you know,
[00:48:42.450]you gotta have a landlord willing to see these things
[00:48:45.240]and hey this is something different.
[00:48:47.310]So for me,
[00:48:48.510]backing off herbicides is what I wanna learn and trusting
[00:48:52.110]that in the future.
[00:48:54.150]So what was the big concern in the,
[00:48:56.915]in the greens snap corn?
[00:48:58.050]Because you, in my mind you're either gonna
[00:49:00.480]have a cover crop kind of explode and take over
[00:49:04.140]that's gonna freeze out and not really
[00:49:05.880]be a, in my thought, maybe not a major problem.
[00:49:08.820]But if you don't, at least in my area and it was mentioned,
[00:49:12.210]Palmer will go fricking nuts and it'll be a problem at
[00:49:15.870]harvest time even after they're dead where the other ones
[00:49:18.960]are probably gonna melt for the most part.
[00:49:22.676]And that's a good point and that I hadn't,
[00:49:26.280]that year that that happened.
[00:49:27.570]I mean that was the first time I'd had that bad of hail in
[00:49:30.780]quite a or wind I guess in quite a while.
[00:49:34.859]And the other experiences had been like, you know,
[00:49:36.570]replanting hail so the, you know,
[00:49:38.250]there you don't have that comparison but that is a good
[00:49:41.460]point on the Palmer thing that the fact that that stuff took
[00:49:46.230]off, it did, it did keep the weeds at bay.
[00:49:48.450]It's just that those became weeds and I,
[00:49:50.113]I did question that year how much of my yield loss was
[00:49:53.760]because of hail and how much or the,
[00:49:56.760]I'm sorry I keep saying hail,
[00:49:58.140]wind, 'cause that's what I had this year.
[00:49:59.790]Yeah it was hail was the wind was,
[00:50:02.486]how much of it was due to the covers actually stealing
[00:50:05.730]nitrogen because I think at that point when they started
[00:50:07.980]getting that big, they were competing with the corn,
[00:50:10.260]they were competing and where I had check strips,
[00:50:14.070]the yield difference was definitely bigger that year between
[00:50:17.310]my check strips and my cover crop because of that.
[00:50:21.060]I think that just that competition that was there,
[00:50:23.160]but it did keep the weeds out.
[00:50:25.410]You were correct.
[00:50:26.696]How much opportunity is there
[00:50:29.940]to increase your grazing fees
[00:50:33.030]and they offset some of the costs?
[00:50:36.450]I come from a, I do not have cattle,
[00:50:38.580]didn't grow up with cattle and the guys that I deal with
[00:50:41.416]that have cattle either have their own ground or they don't
[00:50:46.920]want to pay any extra.
[00:50:48.510]So I think it's hard to,
[00:50:50.310]it's hard to convey that benefit,
[00:50:53.985]especially because I'm not doing it myself saying yeah I've
[00:50:55.920]done the, the one neighbor that I did some interseeding for,
[00:50:58.590]he did some strip trials and he found that,
[00:51:01.500]whether it was from the interseeding
[00:51:02.880]or just the fact that he was strip grazing,
[00:51:04.950]he tripled his, his time cow per acre, however you,
[00:51:11.340]whatever the terminology is there,
[00:51:12.870]I mean he tripled it pretty easily.
[00:51:15.780]But that was also mo you know,
[00:51:17.640]cutting him back and reducing,
[00:51:19.260]moving fence and doing all that kind of work.
[00:51:21.150]And most of the guys that I know who run cattle,
[00:51:23.580]they want to fence off a quarter
[00:51:25.320]and they don't want to touch it.
[00:51:26.400]And even one of the guys that I've talked to,
[00:51:28.920]I said well I'll move the fence for you.
[00:51:30.360]And he was pretty nervous even about that,
[00:51:32.010]like 'cause I wanted to see what it would do,
[00:51:34.230]but he didn't even wanna let me do the work just because he
[00:51:36.917]was worried about the cows.
[00:51:40.650]I can't say I have a lot of experience
[00:51:42.150]with that in field corn,
[00:51:42.983]but in, in seed corn, yeah guys will, excuse me,
[00:51:47.310]bring 400 cows and drop 'em off
[00:51:49.018]and come back in a month, you know,
[00:51:52.260]and yeah we've gotten paid up to $30 an acre for some of
[00:51:56.190]that and their, their pairs, the calves do gain pretty good.
[00:51:59.250]They've been happy I think,
[00:52:00.990]but one year then I didn't get paid, you know,
[00:52:03.210]so it's kinda like the hay business and so I think you gotta
[00:52:06.810]trust who you're working with and there are some
[00:52:10.020]opportunities but as far as the, these covers, you know,
[00:52:13.710]these were small 15 acre plots,
[00:52:15.900]they weren't big enough to justify that yet.
[00:52:20.280]Thank you so much. I think we are out of time.
[00:52:23.130]We have another speaker coming up.
[00:52:25.110]Thank you to the panel for bringing all of this together,
[00:52:27.270]talking about soil health
[00:52:28.290]and all these beneficials, this is very cool.

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2023 Eastern Nebraska Soil Health Conference - Farmer Panel 2

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