-: Thanks for the opportunity to be here.
This is a fast break, but they gave me time
to pop three popcorn bags, instead of two.
Or maybe to eat one ready-to-eat bag, Oscar,
I don't know how long it takes to eat a bag like that.
But I'm fortunate to be here, and it is good to be back.
My job is to cover, or talk about, no pun intended,
some cover crop projects that I'm part of,
I've been blessed to be part of.
And it's like coming full circle for me,
because I came off a diversified farm in Illiinois,
with livestock and alfalfa and clover and oats
and corn and soybeans and sheep
and cattle and chickens and you name it.
And then I spent a couple years in Southeast Asia
working in diverse cropping systems there
as part of Peace Corp.
Came back and I did my Ph.D. in intercropping work,
and then my first job was out at Clay Center,
where this photo was taken at.
So, Richard and Teresa, and Anne, and I
spent 22 years there,
just south of where this picture was taken
was where we lived.
But the landscape there has changed dramatically
in the last 10 years,
and you can see it here in this photograph,
just taken straight west of Clay Center.
Where a hybrid seed field,
when the mail roads were destroyed,
turnips were seeded and cattle were ready to graze there.
But, this talk isn't about me.
It's about the people that are working beside me
and with me, and these are a few of the people.
Daren Refearn is a crop and forage residue
management specialist, that's been a close colleague
in almost everything I've done.
Chris Proctor was here earlier this morning,
is now Extension Weed Educator.
Roberto Blanco is here in our crowd,
and is one of the cool PI's on this big project.
Ed Barnes, I couldn't get a picture of Ed overnight.
So, there's Ed, he's our research technologist
out at Clay Center that helps us immensely.
Katja Koehler-Cole is the post-doc
on the cover crop project I'll be talking about briefly.
Angela Bastidas is a Ph.D. candidiate,
or a Ph.D. student doing work on cover crops.
And Justin McMachan is an intern
that served with me this last summer.
You'll see some of the benefits of that work.
He's not only a Ph.D. candidate in entomology,
but is also a doctor of plant health candidate.
So, a good team of people around us.
And this is just a few of the people
that I'm working with.
Part of the thing, this full circle part,
is just in Sunday's paper, in the Journal Star,
was a quote from our Light Corp colleagues
that apparently one of their mission statements or ideas
is understanding nature's chaos.
So, when I say I'm coming from full circles,
because there for a while, I served just working in corn,
and working in soybeans,
and that's relatively simple compared to the systems
that we're trying to work with.
So, I'm trying to,
we are trying to understand nature's chaos.
So, what's a cover crop?
There's a definition of it.
It covers the ground.
The thing that this definition leaves out
is this little bit here about forage production.
You can argue whether cover crops are forage crops or not,
but that's beyond my time limit here.
And this is beyond my time limit, too,
because reportedly, cover crops do a great deal.
You need to read Humberto's article that just came out,
didn't it, Humberto, just a few weeks ago
in Agronomy Journal,
where he goes through with the rest of us
and faithfully documents where's the research
behind a lot of these claims.
So, read that for your enjoyment.
This is a figure that you added in there,
Humberto, that talks about some of the ethics
of why I am doing what I'm doing,
and maybe what the rest of you are doing, too,
because if you look at
soil organic concentration over here on this axis.
This is just a concept piece, isn't it, Humberto?
It's not technically based on solid data,
but it's just a concept of the way soil organic carbon
has changed over time,
and various ways we can mitigate those losses
and one of those is cover crops.
And that's why it's fun to be part of
this new adventure for me.
But I say it's a new adventure,
and then you look at this kind of chart
that Daren put together.
We'll be talking about this at the crop production clinics
this year, so this is in draft form now.
But Daren put this together.
The names in blue there are Agronomy members.
But, when you get here you say,
"Well, gosh, there are people who have gone before us."
Lyon and Hergerts paper was just published.
David Nielsen from Akron, Ohio,
or Colorado, was part of that study, just published.
They've done a lot of work on cover crops
in very dry environments, out in the panhandle.
Dan Walters was part of the project here,
was following soybeans back in the early '90s
is when that work was done.
Power and Koerner was with USDA,
has done a lot of work on that.
But here, in addition to these Agronomy members,
Mary Drewnoski in animal science is working hard
on cover crops alongside the rest of us.
I'll scan this list, Chris Proctor is there.
Paul Jasa, I can't forget.
Paul's doing a lot of work just out at the Rogers farm
just east of town.
Suat Irmak is doing work around the state,
some of it in seed production fields.
Bill Krantz up at Northeast is doing work on cover crops.
I'll highlight one of our studies that we're working
with him on soon.
Keith Glewen, Laura Thompson,
with the On-Farm Research Network
are doing work on cover crops.
So, there's a lot of work that has happened
and is going on.
I'm gonna highlight this project right now,
that's funded by the Soybean and Corn Board, briefly.
You can see the PI's on that,
including a lot of people in this room.
Richard's here and Tom, or Charles Shapiro,
and several others are here, some are not.
Working with lots of people from across the state.
Four locations for this study,
sponsored by the Corn and Soybean Board
two dryland in the east,
and then the two irrigated ones in south central,
and the last one there near Colorado, is at Brule.
So, Tim Shaver's helping coordinate that.
The idea of the study is this is one schematic of it
we're working in corn-soybean systems,
and continuous corn systems.
So, three cropping systems.
The idea is that we're seeding cover crops
about dense stage on corn.
So, we're overseeding, trying to simulate
aerial seeding there.
But we're also coming in,
so that would be a period like this.
We're also coming in after harvest and drilling
five different species of cover crops,
or I guess a mixture's there, included.
So, we're working in those four locations
with these kinds of systems.
In addition to corn-soybean systems,
and soybean-corn systems,
we're working in continuous corn systems, too.
Here's some photographs
of what it looked like just a few weeks ago,
broadcast into standing corn and standing soybeans.
Those are our five different experimental treatments there,
with a cocktail on your right, this seven species mix
that the green cover folks fixed up for us,
and then a combination of the other species there, as well.
I think I'll pass on the graph that talks about data,
other than to show that we've got a lot of interactions.
This is spring, dry matter on the part
of the cover crops here.
A lot of interactions.
You can see at Brule, basically we had no growth at all.
So, that's part of,
I think Corby talked about bookending our studies.
We've got the best of both,
absolutely nothing to pretty good growth and responses.
Angela's working on a study where she's looking
at five different planting dates for cover crops.
And they're in the right part of the table here.
From planting at the same time
that corn and soybeans are planted.
Actually, we're only in corn here.
Also, V8 to V9 on corn,
R5 right before harvest and right after harvest.
So, she just started that at two locations.
Havelock, which is just east of town here.
On Havelock, and then out at Clay Center.
Also, it's got several species involved there,
and you can see that.
Here's, I'll flash you a couple pictures here.
This is what happens when you plant,
that top one is rye with corn.
At the same time that corn is planted, a lot of stress.
She just is pulling harvest right now,
but I don't think you need statistics
for some of these comparisons, like this one.
Yields will be reduced versus the control.
Same with the corn in the mixture.
Gets a little better when you add,
well not radish,
but it gets a little better when you add vetch.
And the soybean really was not competitive
with the corn at all.
It's a little bit better when she broadcast at dense stage,
as you can see in these next photographs here.
So, a lot of changes, a lot of interactions.
I'll close out by talking about one,
another study that Chris Proctor helped think about.
This is one that we're working with Bill Krantz on.
Bill Krantz is up at Northeast,
where we've got seven different hybrids of corn
from 80 to 115 day hybrids.
A couple planting dates, different populations,
but the idea here, what's the trade-off
between corn yield with these early and late season hybrids
and the ability to get cover crops planted sooner.
So, that's what we've done here.
This has not been processed at all,
other than Excel,
so they're just fresh data.
But I just wanted to show you,
I think this conceptualizes what we're thinking.
When you plant the early seeds in the 80-day hybrid,
about 150, 160 bushel yields up to about 258, 260
with 115-day hybrids.
So, those are corn yields.
This is just Clay Center data here.
But when you add in, the idea of the 80-day hybrid
is that when it gets down to 18% moisture content,
and we modeled that,
then you should be able to harvest that
and plant cover crops.
So, that's what I'm simulating here,
planting cover crops when that 80-day hybrid
was planted.
But then I'm looking at heat units based at 32.77 systems,
so it's a 0.25 degree Celsius heat unit comparison
that's used for cool season grasses.
You can see that we get a lot more heat unit accumulation.
It just makes sense.
You're planting maybe a month earlier,
if you can harvest then.
So, there's a trade-off between getting the cover crop
planted early and getting dry matter establishment,
and reducing corn yields.
So, what I also did is took those heat units
actually through Tuesday of this week,
the third of November,
and calculated how many leaves would those cover crops have
based on about 112 heat units
per leaf of production there.
So, you can see, we might have,
if we could've seeded right then,
an eight-leaf rye plant,
which would mean probably a rye plant with two to three
tillers on it, six-leaf.
So, there's a dramatic difference here
between the two-leaf rye plant now,
and an eight-leaf plant.
So, that's the direction we're hoping to go.
That's kind of conceptual,
but that's the idea.
So, with that, as you're thinking about your questions,
I can get this.
So, do you have questions?
I might have a minute.
Here's a time-lapse that Justin put together.
Radish, you can see where the crops are.
Basically a 28-day cycle of where you can see
that the radish and the vetch and the rye
and the mixture is growing.
But you know, I picture this as a scientist.
The full circle is that scientists are stewards.
And how can we be good stewards
of the resources that we have.
And that's why I'm excited to be a part of
what we are doing.
Thank you.
(applause)