Moderator: Our next speaker is Kelly Tobin,
and Kelly is a corn an soybean grower
from New Market, Iowa,
and I told Kelly when he came here this morning that,
he said, "We ran into some fog,"
and I says, well, you know in the summer time,
we often see clouds going above our heads
from west to east and we just know
they're loading up for Iowa.
Male: Yep, thank you.
Moderator: And Lee, you came from 15 inch country.
Kelly's probably coming from 35 inch country,
but the reason I like Iowegians on the program
is because western Iowa is much like eastern Nebraska
except for that rainfall difference.
There's a lot of issues with erosion in western Iowa
and they have a good lust cap as well as what we have
in eastern Nebraska and of course, if you drive I80,
you know, you see nothing different, it's corn and soybeans.
And I think it's really good to capture some of the success
and failures that are being experienced in that world
as well and we can probably apply some of that to here
in eastern Nebraska as well, so Kelly, welcome
and with that, I'll turn it over to you.
Kelly: Okay, well, thank you all for coming today
and I'm really impressed with this building
and with all this crowd here, it's just amazing
to see that much for cover crops.
But anyway, we've been doing it for 10 years and
we've been no tilling for 37 years and...
We've got started and it's really made a difference.
The longer you're in it, the more you can count
on yields, the more you can count on more water
infiltration and less nitrogen use.
So that's one of my goals is to get the nitrogen use
down there and make it more profitable
and so that's why we keep trying and keep pushing for this,
and so we've got one of the goals here is to have
those soybeans up there to your chest and clean.
We really believe in weed suppression
and so that makes a lot of difference
and the more years you're in it,
the less trouble you have with weeds
and all this takes good management.
You just cannot do a halfway job.
It's real important to pay attention to what you're doing
and to really talk to other people and to get things
like you want 'em and improve every year, so we've been
on our farm for 50 years, we're still building it up.
We're still learning, we're still trying to find new ways
to make that more profitable.
And so...
You know, the old adage that you can't teach an old dog
new tricks, well, this, it's wrong.
This old dog had been learning a lot of new things
about cover crops over the last 10 years.
When I first considered introducing cover crops
into my corn, soybean rotation, there was little
or no information about how cover crops
help slow down soil erosion, increase soil organic matter,
reduce impact of compaction
and contribute to weed suppression
and improve soil health and soil function.
And after 10 years of planting cover crops, I can tell you
they do all of these things, as well as reduce
our input cost and consequently increase our profitability.
That's our goal, that's what we're after is to do this,
to improve the soil, and to make it profitable.
Cover crops aren't new, we planted them back in the 1940s
and 50s, back then our cash crop included corn, oats and hay
and I remember planting sweet clover in the fall
which grew up to six foot tall and then plowing it under
in the spring for fertilizer.
Wasn't called a cover crop then, but it is now of today.
So we've been no tilling since 1979, I learned that
cover crops and no till are first cousins
and they should be used together
and that's one thing I don't want you to forget.
No till and cover crops belong together,
so in 2008, the Iowa Learning Farms, which is a part
of Iowa State University Extension and Outreach
and practical farmers of Iowa asked us to be part
of a five year research and demonstration project.
I immediately said yes.
This would enable us to learn how to make cover crops work
on our land so we could show that to other farmers.
Our plot is 1320 feet long, which is a quarter of a mile
and each one is 45 foot wide and there's eight of those
plots, four with cover crops and four without cover crops
so we've been doing that now, this'll be the ninth year,
they thought it was so successful after five years,
they asked us to continue for another five
so we could have 10 year results and...
This would enable us to learn how to make cover crops
work on our land so we could show it to other farmers
and this is drilled right after the combine leaves
the field, why, we're in there with a drill to do these.
And if you want to see these plots, they're located
next to a blacktop road on J35 in Taylor County highway
and we're one mile north and three and a half miles east
of Newmarket Highway, which is east of Clarinda
and Shenandoah, that five year project has expanded
to 10 years, so we can document the longterm effect
of cover crops on our fields.
It was only after two years of experimenting with
cover crops, crimson clover and some radishes,
that we decided to use cover crops on all of the farm's
400 acres, the first year corn yields followed drill dry
were reduced by seven or eight bushels per acre
but we fixed that the second year by...
Planting two weeks after termination of the cover crop
and we recommend our, and we increased our corn yields.
We found out that that was part of the reason
and so there's still research going on on that.
Consequently the soybean yields have shown an increase
of three to 11 bushels each year when we have terminated
one to three days after planting.
I'm not just enthusiastic about cover crops because
of yields, they are also improving my soil's infiltration.
20 years ago, we pattern tiled 10 acres because it was
heavy bottom soils, after a heavy rain, we would still have
standing water and no water was coming through
the tile lines.
After three years of cover crops, the water drains
through the tiles and there's no water standing
on the top of the soil, so that tells you that the roots
go three to four foot deep and that water follows
those roots down there after you terminate it,
so those are real important, and the yields have also
increased over 10 bushel per acre on that area each year.
Over the 10 years we have continued to experiment
with cover crops to figure out what will work best
on the land, for instance, we wanted the cover crops
to be drilled in earlier, so we started using earlier
hybrids of corn and soybeans.
The switch from 115 day to 100 day corn and soybeans...
Also from threes to twos, group twos,
so they increased our cover crop stands
and has made an impact on the yields.
To plant the cover crops, we're using a 45 foot wide
air seeder and are able to get the 400 acres done
in two days.
We also do some aerial seeding of cover crops
into corn and have had good stands.
Last year, we had excellent stands because we,
as mentioned before, we had the four inch rain
after we put it on and this year we haven't had hardly
less than an inch of rain, so we haven't had as good...
Time with it this time.
I'm so enthusiastic about cover crops that we are also
incorporating them into row crops on all the farms
that we manage.
The tenants on these farms were not certain
that cover crops were worth $30 an acre, so I convinced
the owner of the farms to pay half the cost and that was
enough to get the tenants to do it.
Understanding and seeing the benefits of cover crop
will keep them using them and I guess I have a question.
Who gets the most benefit from cover crops?
The tenant or the landlord?
My answer is in the first years, the tenant does
because you get that increase in yield and after
four, or five years, why, the landlord then,
because infiltration of soil and the yields go higher
and the organic matter is built up and as you build it up
that really helps the farm so that part is working,
although there's quite a few other farm managers don't
like it because I did that.
But anyway, I think that's the way to help out
and to make things work for you.
So if you keep experimenting and keep doing something
different every year, why, it'll make a difference
after 10 years and you'll really appreciate it.
So I discovered there was a lot more going on underneath
the soil of my farm than above it.
That helped me realize how I could cater to those
different activities and continue to improve crop production
and preservation of our soil resources even today.
The soil conservation has long been a passion for me.
When I first purchased our own farm near New Market highway
in 1968, it had a lot of soils classified as highly erodible
Fields ranged from 2% slope on our marginal bottom land
to five to 12% slope on the hillsides.
I put the most fragile soils in CRP and I've planted
20,000 trees and a lot of walnuts and a lot of hickory
and we have a thousand Chinese chestnuts which we sold over
800 pounds of nuts off of that this year.
We average about 34 inches of rain each year,
so runoff is an issue.
I terraced a lot of land, including where we planted trees
and everything was contoured.
Terraces and contours were a major undertaking
at a time when you had to rent a dozer back then
for $40 an hour, but much of the land needed it
so we kept doing it each year.
Now it costs $145 to $150 an hour.
On our bottom lands,
our farm was one of the first in the area
to use bench terraces with tile and we continued
to adopt new terrace and tile strategies
throughout the years.
On our bottom lands, we built burns with tile risers
to prevent water from running the length of the field
into the ditch and so every, that'd be 660 feet,
if for half of it, and then...
We built that up two foot and sloped it, and then we put
every 50 foot, we put a six inch riser and I've learned
that originally we had four inch risers.
Now six inch risers, we have a lot more heavier rains,
four, five, to six inch rains, so.
I guess I would put an eight inch in there if we keep
having the big rains, but that's a good way
to get the soil control so that you can...
Stop it at the end where you have your end rows.
Or we have a burn there also and then before
I was always having trouble with the dirt washing down
into the end rows and hold the water back
and now that doesn't happen, so it works out really well.
As equipment as it changed, so have our strategies
for how to best treat our land
so it will still be productive
for our grandkids and great grandkids.
No till was a big step forward in our soil conservation
journey, one of the best deals I've ever done
is started no tilling and now the next best one
is the cover crops, and so they need to be used together.
That's the one thing you want to remember, no till
and cover crops.
We had wanted to try no till for several years.
Our oldest son became the extension director
in the nearby county of Adair and wanted to give
instructions on no till, so he joined in
with a John Deere dealer to put on several field days,
which we did at our place.
We wanted to buy a six row no till planter
and it happened, our uncle passed away
and left us an inheritance of $11,000,
and that's what the planter cost, so we lucked out there.
We used that money to buy the six row John Deere
conservation planner in March of '79.
Soon I was saving soil, toil and oil and I never looked back
When we first tried no till, hardly anyone else
in the area was doing it, we sponsored no till field days
with the Taylor County soil district of which
I am a commissioner.
We contracted with the local John Deere dealer
to get some no till planter farmers could rent.
This was before Roundup, so we had a lot of trouble
with weeds the first few years.
But thank goodness for Roundup, at the time
made a lot of difference, especially on no till.
There wasn't any information from the universities
so we had to seek out and create these meetings
and talk to the other farmers.
I made a lot of phone calls and trips to other farms
to see how it worked.
I had always been a soil nut and wanted to know
what we could do to keep our soils in place.
We stuck with no till and I have watched erosion
become less of an issue and our soil organic matter
gradually build.
We didn't lose yields the first few years
and then yields even started increasing.
After no till, the next big jump in our soil conservation
journey was using cover crops.
Unlike with no till, by the time we were using
cover crops, there was some research being done
so we weren't quite as much in the dark
on how to manage them.
There still weren't a lot of people using cover crops
in our area when we started in 2008,
but it wasn't quite the blank slate we faced with no till.
Cereal rye was our first crop.
We tried annual rye grass but couldn't successfully
get it through the winter.
Eventually we shifted to a mix of cereal rye,
clover and radishes.
This mix worked and I've now used cover crops
on all my acres every year for the last five years.
I've used an interseeder to plant cover crops
in 15 inch rows, spreading the...
Crop with fertilizer.
Last year we used an airplane broadcasting one bushel
of cereal rye, two pounds of clover and two pounds
of radishes, there was a lot of rain last fall
so the airplane seeding worked exceptionally well.
We've always tried to get the cover crop planted
as soon as the combine was out of the field.
To accommodate this strategy, we switched to using
100 day corn instead of our standard 150 day corn
and group two soybeans as opposed to group three soybeans.
This let us combine almost two weeks earlier
and help get the cover crops more established
before the first freeze.
I like to get that drill in there by the first of October
after soybeans harvest and it's working most of the time
right now.
In recent years, we've had very little trouble with weeds
thanks to our cover crop residue.
It's now typical to spray just once per year,
when we burn down the cover crop.
Using cover crops has really built up our organic matter
which means we're holding onto more water
and losing less nitrogen.
Starting out, soil organic matter ranged from 1.9 to 2.1.
Now in the areas where we use rye cover crops,
for the last 10 years, organic matter levels
are measuring three and four.
Where soil organic matter is higher, yields are higher
and we can use less nitrogen,
which improves our profitability in a time
where commodity prices are so low.
We experiment with every management change we make.
When it comes to nitrogen, we run side by side comparisons
to determine how much nitrogen is truly needed
to achieve the best yields.
We found yields aren't any greater with 180 pounds
of nitrogen than 150 pounds and we think we could drop down
to just 130 pounds eventually, so it tells you that...
The nitrogen in the soils are working, doing a lot of that
for us so we don't need to put on as much
and you have to keep testing and keep knowing how your
rates are so that you can cut it down
and we experiment, we'll cut down here and mold over here,
see which one works the best on our soils.
We experiment with every management change we make.
We are also using micronutrients.
I think having clover in our cover crop helps a lot
with the end, but the earthworms and other soil organisms
are also working faster to process our residue
and return nutrients to our crops.
And on our CRP, we've had a lot of it in since '86,
every five years I go in and interseed alfalfa and clover.
And red clover, and that has really helped our
organic matter, raises them up,
and so we've had some, you put your coarse fields
in first, we had 80 acres north of our house
that we had in for 30 years and we took it out
and the first year we had 53 soybeans.
The next year we had 200 bushel corn, but we also,
when we used anhydrous, we pulled a fertilizer rig
behind and we put 50 pounds of phosphate
and 60 pounds of potash.
I think that makes a difference, getting it down
below, but...
It's amazing how much that changed, but I give a lot
of credit to every five years of that alfalfa and clover
and so what it does is gets those roots down there
and helps put the nitrogen down there too, so.
Iowa state is doing some interesting tests to look at
soil activity on our farm on these research plots.
Instead of some very technical lab test, they simply
bury teabags in the, and have come before.
They check them every so often and observe
how degraded the teabags have become.
We don't have final results yet, but where we've had
cover crops, the teabags have clearly been worked over.
The teabags are far more intact in areas
where there haven't been cover crops.
I found a few weeds in our picture there.
Anyway, Iowa state university is also looking
at our earthworm population.
I figured they'd bring knives or spades, dig in the earth
to count the worms, but to my surprise,
they take a different tack.
They gently scrape the residue from a two by four area
and then count how many little earthworm holes there are.
It just goes to show you that you can still learn
something new every day.
Besides dropping our nitrogen rate, we've also adjusted
to timing of our nitrogen applications and fertilizer
applications, we used to put on anhydrous,
we used to put on anhydrous in the fall
and that was it, now we recognize there's a lot of
opportunity to (audio cuts out)
with a fall application so we've switched to spring
anhydrous application.
We split the fertilizer application rows when we plant
so the corn roots can reach out to the P and K
on either side.
We stuck with no till and have watched erosion
become less of an issue and our soil organic matter
gradually builds.
The deep placement results in a stronger and deeper
root system and a healthier crop.
When the roots hit those bands, they really start
to get color, with no till there was always some doubts
when we spread P and K that it was really
getting down to the root system.
Now we know P and K is positioned strategically
for the roots to access.
We've done comparisons and where we didn't knife in
the P and K, there was a 10 to 15 bushel yield difference.
We just continue to experiment every year to determine
what works best.
Moving farming is an evolving practice.
In my early years of farming, we were raising soybeans
for hay, people don't believe me when I tell them that.
Eventually yields increased and we were harvesting
10 to 15 bushels of soybeans, then 25 bushel,
then we got up to 50 and I never thought I'd see
100 bushel soybeans in small areas on our farm
or 250 bushel corn, but here we are.
I've managed many acres over the years, some on my own
and others as an independent manager for Hertz farm
management out of Nevada, Iowa.
I'm always trying to make those acres better.
I've worked with renters and owners to implement
no till, cover crops, terraces, tiling, buffer strips
and most recently putting acres into the CRP pollinator
program, most of you have heard of that, I think.
The pollinator program is a win win because it's...
'Cause we're able to take acres like hillsides
that aren't producing well
and plant them to a diverse plant mix
that resembles a natural prairie.
The diverse mix is good for the bees and the soils.
The farmer benefits because with cost share and bonuses,
it equals out to about as much rent on those same acres
as corn and beans.
With my managed farms, we have about 300 acres
in this pollinator program.
When I was growing up, we used to have plowing contests.
We competed to see who could produce the very
cleanest fields, plowing up every inch of dirt possible.
Now I want the opposite, I want residue.
I've had to change my perception of what is best
for the farm and keep learning to continue making
good decisions.
Today my soils are in far better condition
than when I found them and I hope my children
and grandchildren will continue to make our farm better.
I think we have a little handout here that it tells about
the last year we had 370 acres of row crop
in corn and beans, and we've been farming since 1949
and I've been a Taylor County commissioner
on the state soil conservation committee
and a member of the Iowa Learning Farms
and Practical Farmers of America and...
Four to 500 acres of cover crops, some on managed land,
started cover crops in 2008 and other conservation
practices started no till in '79, we have 150 acres
of CRP, 40 acres of trees, and 10 acres, 12 acres
of buffers along waterways.
And cover crops are planted, are plants that cover the soil
during the six months out of the year that it would
otherwise be bare.
A lot of people other than farmers don't realize that
that soil is bare six months out of the year
and so when that rain downfalls at 20 miles an hour,
it'll kick that bare soil up almost six inches
and that soil that it kicks up is a lot looser
than the soil that it came from, so that's where you get
a lot of the washing and it really makes a difference
when you think through this thing and see how you
can manage it and make sure that you do a lot of things
right and if you can't find the answers, there's books
that you can get it out of, so...
And I want to go over the benefits again, it covers
the bare ground, preventing erosion,
loss of soil and nutrients from wind and water.
We don't have the wind like you have in Nebraska,
but we still have to, some places have black snow.
So it fixes in, making it available for succeeding
cash crops, people don't realize that.
Keeping...
Phosphate and nitrogen in your system protects
the streams, lakes, rivers and structural conservation
practices, right now in Iowa we have a lot of our lakes
that are condemned and we've just got to keep pushing
and pushing, there's only 3% of the acres in Iowa
that are cover crops, so we've got to really, really
improve that and we've got to make people realize
that this needs to be done or we're not gonna have
clean water to drink, and I think it's so important
to emphasize that and we all need to talk about this.
We don't need to take these home and put 'em in our
cabinet and forget 'em, we need to make them...
Make them realize that, so...
And then...
The benefits, again, are improved soil health,
enhancing the nutrient system of P and K, plant and residue,
conserves soil moisture, reduces compaction
and encourages infiltration.
That's the one thing that a lot of people don't realize.
The higher you get that organic matter,
the more it infiltrates and that is really important,
and the more it uses less nitrogen.
It increases organic matter, increases biological activity
and it improves the yields.
It provides opportunity for producers of livestock
to graze and to hay.
Provides winter food and cover for birds
and other wildlife and the opportunities for business.
One of our goals is to build up organic matter
to four or 5% and we need higher infiltration rate
of water, I will not stop trying to raise that.
And it keeps using less nitrogen,
that's one of our goals.
Trying for a third crop.
I think wheat oats are using...
Cover crops after oats harvest are my low.
We had too much corn and soybeans.
It's, we can't sell it at our regular price
to be profitable, but we need to have a third crop
to go in with either rotation.
So I think your soils will be built a lot faster
if you can use that third crop and a lot of people argue
that continuous corn really builds organic the fastest
because it's so much biomass, but I think,
that's what we used to do back when I was growing up.
We had the three crops and we never bought fertilizer
like we do now, but I still think we can keep
building that up and make it work if we keep trying.
So remember in your area to check everything that works best
and start out slow to begin cover crops.
Go to a lot of meetings like this and I want you to get
the third edition of Managing Cover Crops Profitably.
Its editor is Andy Clark from College Park Maryland.
I can give you this number if you want to call for a book.
301-405-8020.
That's 301-405-8020.
The cost is $19, but it's the third edition
so they've improved it three times and shipping,
I think, is 5.95, so it'll be worth $25 and you'll have
that to read too.
Find out what to do different or what other people are doing
and also remember to check the variety of cereal rye.
We use that Elbon, the university furnishes for that,
but I think all of us need, we used to get rye,
never knew where it came from or its origin,
but that's one of the things I think we need to improve on
is the varieties of rye.
And I got a little bit on this teabag index
that we got, found out yesterday and...
They are...
There's 12 teabags they put in this plot.
Six of 'em are green tea, six of 'em are rooibos.
And they bury that three and a half inches deep
between May and June and they retrieve those teabags
or check those teabags on day four, day seven,
day 14, day 30, and 68,
and then they pick 'em up at 130 days, so.
One of my other goals is to research cover crop growth
prior to soybeans, provides benefits.
In other words, let that soybean,
the cereal rye that you're gonna put into soybeans,
I want to try this, let it grow three weeks later
and then terminate it.
The day before soybean planting cereal rye,
grow an extra three weeks prior to produce about three
to 400% more biomass with a 100% increase
in nitrogen retention when compared with
early terminated cover crops,
so that's one thing I want to try.
The extra three weeks of cover crop growth
is like getting three to four years of cover crop
production in the system and organic matter
into your soil.
This is clearly a way to speed up the process
of receiving the benefits of biomass production,
and you know soybeans don't produce much biomass,
but rye really does and it goes deep in the ground.
And the study shows that cover crops left in the field
for an additional three weeks before soybean planting
increase the nitrogen in the cover crops from 40 pounds
to 80 pounds per acre.
It really shows how you can get a lot of...
Bang for your buck in those extra three weeks
and we saw the same in soybean yields, go ahead and finish.
There's a great benefit for water challenges, longterm,
adding that biomass and keeping that nitrogen
in the system.
It will build soil health and so...
I can conclude mine by thanking you again for coming
and I want to introduce my wife, Irene, stand please?
She's my helper and my...
(audience applauds)
You want to go ahead and finish this?
Okay.
Moderator: Thank you, Kelly, any questions for Kelly?
I think a lot of guys missed your comment about
what variety of rye you used.
Kelly: Well, the next speaker will tell me, Elbon?
Moderator: Okay, very good, thank you again, Kelly.
Give him a nice round of applause, appreciate it,
sharing your story.
(audience applauds)
Okay, we're gonna switch gears here now and go back west
towards Bladen, Nebraska and back by popular demand
and I'm sincere when I say popular demand.
People said last year, geeze, you gotta bring him back,
you really got a great message, Keith Burns
and he's gonna visit with us about his...
Experiences and his operation and success failures
and changes that he's made over the course of time
with cover crops, so please welcome Keith Burns,
Bladen, Nebraska.
(audience applauds)
Keith: Yep, looks like we're good.
All right, very good, it's good to be back.
Always enjoy coming and visiting with the folks here
and Keith always puts on a great program.
I'm just gonna talk this year about some corn and soybean
cover cropping tips that we've learned over the years.
Just a little bit of background.
We farm in Bladen, Nebraska, down here in Webshire county,
about 30 miles South of Hastings is where we farm.
We've been no tilling for over 25 years now.
We've been using cover crops for the last eight years.
About 2/3 dryland, a third irrigated is what we do
down there in Webshire County.
Corn, bean, cereal is kind of the typical dryland rotation
although there's far too little cereals anymore.
We'll talk about that later, but over the years,
we've added rye, triticale, oats, barley, vetch,
sunflowers, buckwheat, we've added things like that
to our rotation to get more diversity, but on our
irrigated ground, we're still primarily corn, beans.
We've started integrating cereals,
but the predominant rotation in my area
on the irrigated ground is still just gonna be
corn and beans.
We were very fortunate last year.
The Soil Health Institute is putting together
a soil health documentary which is gonna be really cool
when it comes out.
We were very fortunate they called us up
and they wanted to come out to our farm and get us in
part of this video, and so one of the things that
they wanted to do is they wanted to, because we,
just like Kelly, we try to get the air seeder in the field
right after the combine, so they wanted to get this
great video of getting the air seeder out
and having it running with the combine there
and everything, so it was really quite an honor
to be part of this, but I just wanted to show you this
little video here, so you can go ahead and play that.
Oop.
Yeah, just hit the play button there, Keith.
Basically they came out last October.
It was a beautiful day, and they sent this drone out
and you know, I had the hired man hook up the drill
and I got in and was taking off to the field.
You know, it's a beautiful fall day and I'm thinking man,
this is pretty cool, it's gonna be part of this
video series, you know, I'm gonna be a movie star.
This is gonna be great and so I take off down the road
and I start bringing it up to speed just thinking,
man, how cool is this, what a great day this is,
and then just about the time...
(audience laughs)
(man laughs)
Just about the time you think everything's going really well
something like that happens.
Now... (laughs)
I would guess that everybody in here has done something
like this, but I bet nobody else has it captured
on high definition drone footage like that.
(audience laughs)
I was assured that this will not be part
of the actual documentary, but it may be in the blooper
reel, anyway, so, oh, no, we don't need to do it again.
(audience laughs)
Now I think we're good, okay.
I want to put this slide in there because even though
I farm in Nebraska, my farm is not gonna be the same
as yours, and that's been well documented
with other speakers.
I love this quote by Emerson, it says to as methods,
there may be a million and then some.
That's the way we do things on our farms.
But the principles are few, that's the reasons
that we do 'em, and so the man or the farmer
who can grasp the principles and successfully select
their own methods, they're gonna be the ones
that are gonna make it work, but if you try my methods
or his methods or anybody else's methods
and just try to stuff them into your farm,
you're gonna have trouble, so learn the principles
and then figure out the method, and I think that's why
we're all here and I think all the speakers
have done a really good job talking about that.
Just a couple of basic understandings before I kind of
get into cover crops within a corn soybean rotation.
Cover crops are unlikely to work for you or work well
anyway if you try to squeeze them into an already existing
system or rotation without making other changes
to the system.
You can't just cram 'em into what you're already doing
and not make nay other changes or allowances for them,
so keep that in mind.
You can't just stuff 'em in there without making
other changes, it's really a systems approach
and it takes a high level of management
and I've heard at least two or three of the other speakers,
they are all taking, this requires management.
You know, Steve Groff, my friend, says cover crops
will make a good farmer better and a bad farmer worse
and I think that's really true because a bad farmer
will just stick 'em in there and do nothing else
and it will be a train wreck and a disaster
so if you want to go down this path to cover crops
and soil health and I think we all need to.
I think we all want to, you wouldn't be here if you didn't.
Management, management, management and that's what
we're gonna talk about, some ideas here today.
So cover crops are easy.
You can just hit the easy button with cover crops if
you're putting them in July and August, after
a cereal crop, it's the easiest thing in the world
to make cover crops work them because there's a list
of species, there's 80 different things you could choose
from that would work in that time of year.
There's lots of time for it to grow.
You get a lot of biomass, both above and below
the ground, there's all kinds of benefits that will accrue
from that cover crop, it's gonna grow in that window,
so that's the easy button.
We're not even gonna talk about that because it's so easy.
The challenge is within the corn soybean rotation
does not always lend itself to cover crops nearly as well
simply because of the restrictions with the planting
and the growing windows in both the fall and the spring
so what do you do?
How do we meet this challenge?
Well, I've got good news for you.
We've got a new cover crop coming out that we're working
with, you can plant this as late as you want.
It overwinters great, but it's really not
a challenge to control in the spring.
It fixes N, P and K and whatever else that you need.
It's gonna grow tons of biomass but it's not gonna be hard
to plant into, it fixes compaction, pH issues
and salinity issues, and it's very inexpensive.
We're pretty excited about this, okay?
(laughs) Here's what it is, it's a bean.
It's Jack's magic beans that will grow up into
a beanstalk, there is no such cover crop
that's gonna do all those things, but yet
that's what we want, but it doesn't exist.
We're not gonna be able to do that, so.
We have to work within the confines of what we have
and so I like to refer to this as opening the window
as much as possible because within a corn soybean rotation
we have short growing windows so our goal or our job
or our challenge is to open that window as much
as possible and make this work a little bit better.
Kelly talked about it, we're gonna talk about
some of these things.
He talked about, they went from 115 day corn down to 100
day corn, well, that's one of the easiest things
that you can do, plant shorter season varieties,
especially soybeans, we've switched from group threes
to group twos just like that.
We've seen no dropoff in yield whatsoever with soybeans.
With corn, if you get the right varieties,
there's little dropoff, but that's one of the first things
that you can do to open this window a little bit wider
to make it easier to make cover crops work within
the confines of corn and soybeans.
Plant shorter season ones and plant those fields first.
If you've got a field where you know you really want
to try cover crops, then get the shorter season variety
and plant that one first because that's gonna give you
the most time after harvest to make that work.
You can also relay seed with an airplane prior to harvest.
It's hit and miss especially as you go west.
The dryer you are, the more risky this is.
Sometimes it works great, sometimes it's just
a disaster, timing is very critical.
You need some good rainfall to make it work.
If you go too early and I've seen guys do this.
They'll fly this on too early.
They'll get a stand, they'll get some emergence,
but then it dies off from lack of sunlight.
If you go too late, the growth is gonna be really limited
so it's possible and there's some good,
I'll show you some pictures here later of things
other than just an airplane that can work with this,
but that's an idea, you can do the aerial seeding type
thing prior to that crop being harvested.
But you do want to use the most cold tolerant species
possible for your area.
And, you know, I talk to people all the time.
They say, well, by the time I get done harvesting corn,
you know, the middle of October, it's too late
to plant anything, and I say that's bull.
They'll say, well, sometimes it stretches into November.
I say that's still no problem.
Well, sometimes we're at Thanksgiving time.
It's never too late to plant rye, that's our theory.
I would rather plant rye in the middle of December
than to plant oats in March.
You'll get better stand.
For one thing, if you can get the drill
and I should say, if you can get the drill in the ground
and we've done it before because you don't have to get it
in very deep, but if you can scratch rye in even in
December and this is a...
You know, usually you're not that late,
but even Thanksgiving time, if you can get the drill
in the ground, it's never too late to plant cereal rye.
Cereal rye will germinate in 33 degree soils.
Nothing else does that, but cereal rye will
and so you can plant rye very very late
and still count on having a good stand in the spring.
Annual rye grass, I'll show you some pictures of that
here later, annual rye grass really needs to be seeded
by, for us what we figure is about the 25th of September.
If we want to have a good chance of it overwintering.
It doesn't always overwinter, but it will a lot of times
if we can get it established soon enough.
But it cannot be planted late like cereal rye.
Oats, we figure we don't get oats in by the middle
of September, it's probably not wroth doing in our area.
Radishes, about the 25th, rapeseed, canola,
partly because it's inexpensive, we'll take that out
a little bit longer, so use the most cold tolerant
species possible for your area and that just extends
that growing window, not necessarily the planning window,
but extends the growing window out as much as possible.
Hairy vetch, we like to see that in no later, you know,
ideally around the first of October, but we've seeded
hairy vetch towards the end of October.
The later it's planted in the fall,
the slower it's gonna be in the spring, and again, I've got
pictures of all these here later.
Winter peas right now are hit and miss.
If you want them to overwinter, you really need
to plant them deep in about the time you need to plant
wheat for best overwintering.
Now we are looking at some additional winter pea
varieties, I know Jeff's working with one,
the university of Wyoming has...
Released, we're looking at some genetics out of Serbia.
I think there's gonna be some new things coming,
not just for peas but for vetch and other things as well.
There's gonna be new varieties coming because breeders
are finally starting to see cover crops aren't a fad.
Cover crops are gonna be here to say.
Cover crops are a big and a powerful and an emerging
market, so we're gonna start seeing breeders start
breeding things not for grain production,
but for what's gonna be the best for cover crops
and that's exciting.
It's gonna be a few years before we see the fruits
of that labor, but it's coming, winter lentils.
We can work, we've actually seen them be
a little more consistent than winter peas
but hardly anybody grows these things
so we need to get more guys growing winter lentils.
Crimson clover works further South.
It's not as winter hardy up in our area.
I'll show you some pictures where it did overwinter.
Doesn't happen very often.
Balansa clover is a more cold tolerant annual clover
that does show more promise for some of these
northern areas, so just a few pictures.
Now I will admit, you know, when you're up here showing,
you want to show the best pictures that you can.
You know, you showed your worst pictures, I admire that,
that's gutsy, I'm showing my best stuff, okay,
'cause the winter of '15 into '16 was very mild, okay?
So this isn't going to happen every year, but I want to show
you what can happen, and I think we can, as we get our...
Rotation into a more soil health friendly,
when the soil gets healthier and healthier
I think we'll see this type of thing happen more often
than when we have beat up and bare soil.
So this is Balansa clover.
This is planted October 1st, 2015.
We put in a whole big plot and then we watched
and saw it overwintered, so this picture was taken
April 1st, we had pretty good overwintering
on that Balansa clover, but look what it did about
five weeks later.
Balansa clover is one of those things that looks like it
did survive but it's not really doing much.
Then it kind of hits another gear and it really takes off
and you get a lot of growth that last part of April
and the first part of May, so that one is one
that we're continuing to look at.
Austrian winter peas, again, they don't always overwinter
like this, but this particular winter, it was relatively
mild and we had good success here.
I'd say Jeff has been growing some winter peas up there
at Crofton and you know, it's hit and miss sometimes
but if you plant them by themselves and you get them
deep enough, where's Paul Yasa?
How deep do you plant winter peas, Paul?
Paul's answer is how deep can your drill go?
Yeah, Paul plants his winter peas four inches deep
because the growing, you gotta keep the growing point
under the ground, so it can work but it definitely works
better in a mild year.
Here's two different types of crimson clover,
this is the type that most people that are familiar
with, the actual crimson clover.
This is called white cloud crimson clover.
It's not really crimson at all but it's the only
white blooming crimson clover in the world.
A company that we deal with had developed that.
And again, this is May 11th, fully headed out here.
If we could get crimson clover to overwinter like this
every year, it would be great because crimson clover
is cheap, it's the cheapest clover that there is.
It just doesn't consistently do this.
You get further South, you get South of I70,
it'll do this quite a bit and if you get good snow cover
and that was one of the things with this particular winter,
the only real cold period of time that we had,
we had a little bit of snow cover on the ground,
makes a huge huge difference on the winter survival
of these things.
Hairy vetch, this is hairy vetch, planted in October
and again, this is May 11th, hairy vetch is the most
reliable overwintering legume and if you want to produce
a lot of nitrogen, hairy vetch is the one that you go to.
I want to just show you these pictures.
This guy is not gonna be able to do this every year,
I don't think, but if he can, this is gonna be a complete
home run, this is an organic producer from Hebron.
So he's a little bit east of me, but he planted hairy vetch
and he didn't get the hairy vetch in until October 25th
of 2016 because he put 'em in after soybeans, organic
soybeans, he no tilled his hairy vetch right into
the soybean ground and this is late.
He's planting corn, he's rolling it down with the roller
right here, he's got his corn planter, he's not
a big farmer, organic guy, but he has a six row
corn planter and he's doing this June 7th.
It's later than what he would want, but he had to wait
for the vetch to get to the right stage to where this
roller would kill it.
Now this is impressive hairy vetch growth.
That's probably 150 pounds of nitrogen.
But here's what is really impressive to me.
This is organic, there's no chemicals there whatsoever.
Nothing other than that roller pass, look at the kill
that he got on that.
Now again, can he do this every year?
I hope so, he's trying it again, but if we could do that,
whether we're organic or not, that is a home run,
both for fertility and weed control.
Little later in the season, you know, still,
incredibly clean hairy vetch, covering up, no weeds coming
in that at all and even late into the season.
Look at the color of that corn.
There was no manure, no additional organic fertilizers
applied, just simply from that vetch, so can we make it work
yes, are we willing to wait til June 7th
to plant our corn, probably not.
And he isn't either, so this year what he did,
instead of having a corn soybean rotation,
he's looking to going corn, yellow field pea rotation.
He took his yellow field peas out.
He planted buckwheat as a weed control crop
for about 45 days, he took that out.
Now he got his vetch planted about the 10th of September.
Now he's gonna see, he's hopefully gonna be doing
this same thing this coming year but doing it about
the 20th of May instead of June 7th, but I show you
these pictures not because I expect you to go out
and do it but to expand your mind to think what is possible
because if he can do this and he's not the only guy
that's done this, we've seen other pictures of people
doing it, but this is pretty exciting stuff.
Hairy vetch is one that can really...
Be a very good legume force in our system.
The USDA is working with the Noble Foundation
and some others and they're actually working on breeding
some new types of hairy vetch.
The guys at the Noble Foundation told me
that they have identified the complete genome
of hairy vetch because the knock against hairy vetch
is hard dormant seed, you plant vetch,
you'll have vetch for the life of your farm.
They've identified the entire genome of hairy vetch.
They know which genes code for hard seed in vetch.
Now they know how to turn 'em off, so you're gonna start
seeing hairy vetch varieties in a few years come out
with zero hard dormant seed because now they know
how to flip the switch and turn that hard seed off.
Exciting stuff, it's not GMO, it's through regular
plant breeding processes, so that's gonna be pretty exciting
to see some of that coming down.
Winter lentils, you know, Morton's an old variety.
You know, lentils are never gonna be the big powerful
crop out there, but it does show some promise, again,
planted in October and we got some decent overwintering
there, Bob winter oats, there are some other newer
winter oats coming out.
Winter oats normally will not overwinter for us
in Nebraska, some years they will, but as you go South,
they will, but you can plant a winter oats
in the middle of September and it's gonna grow far longer
and still winter kill than what a spring oats will,
so if you want more growth than what spring oats'll
give you, but yet you still don't want have to manage
a cover crop the next spring, winter oats is a possibility.
Annual rye grass, it's very fine stemmed, extremely
deep rooted, you know, you get rye grass that's a foot tall.
It's probably got roots down four feet deep
and it's a powerful, powerful rooting plant.
It's good weed control but it's much more difficult
to get establishment and consistent overwintering.
Winter barley is one that we're looking at really hard
because as people have talked about, it's more difficult
to plant corn and to cover crop cereal rye than soybeans.
So we're looking at winter barley as an alternative
for planting corn into because it has less allelopathy.
There's less risk of nutrient tie up, partially because
it only gets about half as tall as cereal rye.
There's less risk of it getting away.
Now it is not as good as weed control.
It's not as winter hardy, but there are new varieties
coming, I know University of Nebraska is hopefully gonna
be releasing a couple new varieties of winter barley
here in the next couple years that show some promise.
We're working with one that we got out of Montana,
hoping that it will be winter hardy enough to be
a consistent option for us planted as late
as the end of October, so it's not as good as cereal rye
from an agronomics standpoint, it's better than cereal rye
for wanting to plant corn into it.
So that's one that we're looking at as something that
we can work into this corn soybean rotation as well.
Here's just some side by side pictures.
This is triticale over here, significantly taller.
This is the 919 winter barley that the university
developed as well, significantly shorter
but still, it's far better than doing nothing.
And you know, so winter barley, I think, holds some promise.
Again, to get it to overwinter, the best we'd like
to see it planted, you know, more by the first of October.
I would be nervous about planting winter barley
November 1st, you probably would not get good
winter survival on that like you would with rye,
but if you can get it planted around the first of October,
kind of like what you do with winter wheat.
I think there's a pretty good chance it's gonna work.
Okay, cereal rye's been talked about extensively.
Kelly was talking about they only use Elbon rye,
and we're the same way.
This is the only rye that we use as long as we can find it.
For a couple of reasons, number one, it's bred
in Oklahoma, the genetics are from the Noble Foundation,
so it's bred in Oklahoma, it has a short dormancy period
because think of the winters in Oklahoma versus the winters
in North Dakota or in Canada 'cause most other ryes
have their genetic origins either in the Dakotas
or Canada, they have to breed that for a fairly long winter.
Oklahoma rye has been bred, they're both winter cereal
ryes, don't ever let somebody tell you Elbon isn't
cereal rye because it is, but it has a short
dormancy period, so it will grow longer in the fall,
it breaks dormancy faster in the spring and it was bred
specifically with one purpose in mind and that's forage
'cause everything the Noble Foundation does is all about
grazing cattle on it, so it's a more aggressive growing
plant, we've never seen it winter killed where we're at
in the Southern part of the state.
We've sent it north and it's done well.
The thing is, is it doesn't have to produce grain.
We just need it to over winter and grow fast
but because it breaks dormancy so fast, we can get it
to a more mature stage earlier so that when we do
spray it out, I've got more lignin, I've got more
soil cover, I've got more residue than I would have
if we're just using a BNS or a northern type.
Still very winter hardy and another bonus on it,
it's typically very small seeded, 22 to 24,000 seed
per pound on Elbon, where a lot of your northern ryes
are gonna be 17 to 18,000 seeds per pound.
Compare that to wheat or triticale, a lot of those'll run
12 to 14,000 seeds per pound, so you plant a pound of Elbon,
you get a lot more seeds per pound.
So it's in the end, usually it costs a little bit more
than VNS type ryes, but when you start looking at it
from a seed count, it really doesn't.
Here's a picture of Elbon rye, it's a little hard to tell
from these pictures, but by May 11th, this Elbon was
pretty well headed out, or the head was coming out of
the boot, where the northern rye, the head was still down
in the boot at the same period of time.
And you can kind of tell that this is probably six
to eight inches taller than the northern rye.
Now this will eventually catch up and in the end
they look very similar.
This just gets there faster than this one does
because of that short, short dormancy period.
It really gets out and gets after it.
Here's Elbon rye over here versus triticale.
The Elbon rye is completely headed out.
All these pictures were taken the same day.
So you can see all the heads emerged and extended here
on the Elbon, where this triticale hasn't even
started heading out, so if you're looking for something
that's mature that you can spray out or roll down
and plant beans into, this is way better.
You're looking something to graze cattle on,
this is way better, so they both have a fit
but we like the Elbon rye because it's so fast
out of the gate in the spring, and nothing can beat it
out of the gate, and that's why it's such good weed control
and I've got pictures of the weed control part here too.
So another thing for opening that window up further
is you can consider letting your covers grow later
into the spring or as long as possible.
I know some people they get nervous when they see
anything out there growing in the spring.
They're wanting to go out there and spray their
cover crops out when they're two or three inches tall.
It's much easier to let your cover crops grow longer
in the spring when you're gonna be planting beans into it
than when you're doing corn,
it's scary to do when you're planting corn.
I'll show you some pictures, but we're scared to do it
but it worked, but it's riskier and it's also very risky
on dry land, the drier you are, the more you have to manage
when you spray those cover crops out
from a moisture standpoint.
Now you can also manage it simply by a population
standpoint, and that's why you guys are planting rye
really thin because you don't have a lot of moisture
that you can waste, not waste, but use up
and so yes, we will always plant a thinner population,
lighter populations, the drier that it is.
We'll plant heavier on irrigated, we'll plant heavier
if we're gonna graze cattle on it, but a lot of times
if I'm planting Elbon rye around the first of October,
30 to 40 pounds is what we'd recommend.
As you get later into the season it's not gonna tiller
as much, we want to see that rate go up,
but you don't have to be seeding two bushels.
And I get people from universities and NRCS places
and whatever, they call me up and they're gonna do this
study and they're gonna put rye on, and they're gonna
seed two bushels. (laughs)
Just thinking, man, I hope that works out
'cause I'll sell a lot of seed if you guys can show
that that works.
But you don't need that much, you really don't need
that much because you saw the pictures of how powerful
that is as a weed suppression tool.
Nitrogen management becomes much more important with corn.
I'll show you pictures of that, but you almost have to be
a little bit more of an organic mindset and what I mean
by that is organic guys, they don't worry
if they don't have their corn in the ground
by April 20th, you know, a lot of nonorganic guys,
they're just a nervous wreck if their corn's not
in the ground by the 20th of April.
You know, organic guys, they're fishing then yet
because (laughs) they know they're not,
they're waiting for the soil to warm up.
They're waiting for those cover crops to get up.
And that's probably what we should be doing too.
We can let those covers grow a little bit longer
into the spring, but again, you have to manage it.
If you don't want to really do much management, yeah,
go ahead and spray it out when it's very small,
but you're only getting small benefits.
There's benefits, it's worth doing, but the bigger it gets,
the more benefits you're going to accrue.
So here's just some pictures of this is where we had
all those plots and this is just some pictures
of what we sprayed this out, this was a mix of
winter rye, winter triticale, winter barley
and we sprayed this out on April 1st.
We sprayed this out on April 30th.
I planted the corn on the fourth, May 4th here,
basically this was the day I planted the corn,
so you can see the difference here
this was sprayed out a week ago.
This was sprayed out five weeks ago.
In a couple of weeks, there's gonna be nothing left here,
you know, I got some benefits from the roots
but I have very little benefit from any residue
that's gonna stick around.
Here's a picture of where the corn planter went through,
kind of a closeup, this is where it was sprayed out
the 1st of April, eh, yeah, there's some there,
but a lot of that's bean stubble.
But look at the amount of bare ground.
You know, that's just not acceptable for us
so we don't spray things out that early.
This was, I allowed that to grow basically an extra
four weeks and...
This was sprayed the end of April, not the 1st of April.
But basically I had significant more residue
by allowing that cover crop to grow a little bit more.
Now here's something that we did on a trial basis.
This was under a pivot so we knew we could get away with
using moisture, this was 2012, everybody knows
how dry it was in 2012.
And so this would have been a disaster on dry land,
but what we decided we wanted to do, we had cover crop rye,
we left a 90 foot strip here, the width of one
sprayer boom where we did not spray the rye out
April 10th, this was a very, very early spring
in 2012 because it was so warm, so everything,
timelines and everything got moved up.
So this got sprayed out, basically about 10 days
before we planted corn, this got sprayed out
about two weeks after we planted corn, okay?
So you can see the corn coming up here, these pictures,
this was taken May 11th, so you can see the corn
coming up here and I've got some closeups on
what this looks like, so this is where we sprayed it out
early and still had really good residue, there's no doubt
that we had a lot of residue, the corn's coming up
just fine there, we planted thousands of acres of corn
into fairly tall rye, you can do it, you have to know how
to manage it, I'll talk a little bit about that here
in a little bit but look at the additional residue
I got by letting my rye grow longer and I'm not saying
that you should do this because we're not doing this
on all of our acres.
We'll do it on some, but like I said, it's scary as heck
doing it, but we learned some things by doing it
and we definitely do it with our soybeans.
But what we're trying to figure out is what's the value
of this residue versus the risks that we take
with the corn, so here's another picture.
This was the picture here is June 1st.
You can start to see, the early sprayed out stuff,
it's starting to kind of melt down a little bit.
This looks like I planted into wheat stubble
'cause this rye was headed out basically when it got
sprayed, now we did have to run this pivot a couple
extra times because there's no doubt that it took moisture
to do this, and so I say, it would have been a disaster
on the dry land, just another picture here.
It's interesting because that strip, that 90 foot strip
where we planted into that tall rye, all the way through
about, oh, the second to third week of July,
that 90 feet was shorter than the rest of the field.
About the third week in July it caught up and got about
even, and then all the way from there on out,
that stuff kept growing and that was a foot taller
than the rest of the field.
Now we didn't see a significant yield increase in that
but there was something going on there because that corn
grew taller in that strip.
Look at the amount of residue there yet, from that late
sprayed out stuff, if we could figure out how to
make that work and not scare ourselves to death
every time we did it, that'd be pretty good.
This is the early sprayed out stuff in August
and here's the later sprayed stuff in August.
Still incredible amounts of residue there.
Okay, control of resistant weeds in my opinion
is going to push people over into here in the use
of cover crops, I think that we're still somewhere
over here where mostly we've got early adopters.
Kelly, I think you said 3% of Iowa is covered, you know,
and I don't know what Nebraska is, but I doubt
if it's much better than that.
Resistant weeds are gonna push the early majority,
it's gonna push more people into doing cover crops
far more than soil health and it's exactly what
you're saying, you know, people are gonna do this
because they are pragmatists which means
they're gonna do it because they're getting something
out of it, something that they can tangibly see.
Resistant weed control is something you can tangibly
see and I think that's gonna push more people to adopt
cover crops in Nebraska than anything else.
And here's why, because cereal rye, even when it's not
planted exceptionally thick, is incredible weed control.
And one of the things that we fought with and this isn't
a weed that you mentioned, but mare's tail,
Roundup resistant mare's tail was just eating our lunch,
kicking our butts, until we started using cereal rye.
We don't even talk about mare's tail anymore.
You'll get almost 100% control of mare's tail
and it's the same way because mare's tail
is a winter annual lycocia like some of these other things.
Any winter annual is gonna be easily be controlled
by cereal rye because cereal rye whoops it
out of the ground.
These things have no other competition
early on in the season
and so they just grow and they flourish
and they get too big and then they're extremely hard
to kill, but when you have a cereal rye
or even other, triticale, wheat even does some,
cereal rye is by far the best.
It's exceptional weed control because of how
competitive it is, but there's other things going on as well
Cereal rye contains a substance called benzoxazinone.
I think that's how you pronounce it,
but it's a chemical in there that does inhibit
the germination of other seeds.
Now that's where you have to be careful with planting
corn into it because there can be some allelopathic type
things, there has been some documented issues
where it has led to...
Lack of germination in corn and a true allelopathy
means it's not gonna let it germinate.
Now when you see other issues, like, when you have
yellow corn or stunted corn, that's probably not
allelopathy as much as it is nutrient tie up,
is probably the number one reason that people have
poor corn behind cereal rye because cereal rye
is incredibly efficient, it just loves taking up nitrogen.
Loves it, loves it, loves it.
It's very efficient at taking it up and it's very slow
to release it, which makes it a perfect cover crop
ahead of soybeans because you don't want any nitrogen
out there for the soybeans, let that cereal rye
release it later in the season when you can get
a little yield tick from that nitrogen coming out
of that, for corn that's a bad thing.
So if you're doing cereal rye and corn, do not put
your nitrogen on pre-plant, you just, you can't
or this guy is gonna just suck it all up
and it's gonna hold it and it's not gonna let go of it
until later and you will have yellow corn, you'll have
short corn, you'll have stunted corn, and people will say,
well, see, I told you that was a bad idea.
It's allelopathic.
No, it's not allelopathy because your corn germinated
and it grew, it's just starved for nitrogen because the rye
took it all up, so when we do this, when we let rye
grow very big and we plant corn into it, we do not put
any nitrogen on ahead of time, have a good starter
fertilizer package when you're planting your corn
and then you have to post supply your nitrogen.
If you have a pivot, that's perfect.
Put the majority of your nitrogen on through that pivot.
That's the perfect way to do it in a cover crop.
That's the number one biggest thing that you have to do
is you have to manage the nitrogen if you're gonna plant
corn into cereal rye that you let get very big.
Now if you're spraying it out when it's six, eight,
even 10 inches tall, that's not that big a deal
because that's gonna break down, that's gonna release
that nitrogen pretty quickly because the seed in ratio
of small rye is pretty low and it's gonna cycle
back through pretty quickly.
Here's some more weed control benefits.
You can see right here, this field had cover crop rye
over here, no cover crop here, same chemical treatments
across the whole field, look at the amount of weeds
that they weren't able to control over here.
Very few weeds over here.
Same thing here, this isn't rye, this is oats,
but showing you that oats can have very good weed control
as well, this is a fallow replacement mix.
So they had a cover crop of oats and some other things
here, no cover crop here, look at the kosha,
just going crazy over here, very little kosha
growing over here.
This is on our field.
There by Bladen.
We planted rye September 20th of 2015.
We grazed this through the early spring and then we drilled
soybeans into here on May 20th.
So we did that on part of it.
That's kind of what it looks like there
where we grazed it, had a good mat on the ground
and then the other part of the field we had more rye
than we had cattle so we never got cattle over here
so basically the rye got up to where it was fully
headed out, we ran the air seeder through here,
we drilled these soybeans in, made plenty,
this is where the tire tracks of the tractor went,
smashed it down, drilled the soybeans in there.
We came in after, we planted the soybeans
and we rolled down the rye and it's...
If you have, like Jerry had, the organic guy
where your cover crop roller matches your planter,
you know, you can roll ahead of time.
Ours didn't match so we ended up just drilling it first
and then we came back and rolled it later.
And we did end up spraying it too, just to make sure
we got the rye killed, but that was the only time
we sprayed that field was early on.
Incredible amounts of residue on the ground.
Even all the way into August, this is picture from August,
I went in and I kind of pulled the soybean plants apart
and took a picture of what the ground looked like.
That's what it looked like.
If you can't see the soil, you're gonna have very,
very little weed pressure because weed seeds need
several things to germinate, they need sunlight
and they need free nitrogen, you know, nitrates
in the soil and that's why rye is so powerful
because it prevents sunlight getting into them
but it's also sucking up all the nitrogen
and basically it's starving those weed seeds
and those weed seeds aren't gonna germinate
if there's no nitrogen out there for them to grow in
so that's why rye kind of affects it in several
different ways, a very, very clean bean field
with no post application.
But this is that same field on the end rows
where we have end row compaction so we didn't get
nearly as good a stand of rye, so we didn't have
the thick residue cover, plus we have all of the weeds
blowing in from the neighbor's fields over here,
so I just want to show you that there's no shortage
of weed bank in this place.
There were plenty of weeds, we were just able
to get out ahead of it and suppress it.
Again, you've seen these pictures but I want to show 'em
again, not just because it not only produces
a tremendous amount of nitrogen for 'em,
but the weed control that he got is just phenomenal
and so they're worth another look at how
we can control weeds simply by outcompeting them.
Now some kind of cool equipment things coming up.
You know, you may not want a big roller, but Dawn
is coming out with these individual row unit rollers,
these mount right on the front of your planter.
The way this is designed, it's got this thing out front.
So this thing kind of parts your residue, think about
running through tall cereal rye, this is the first thing
that hits the rye right here.
It kind of bends it apart.
You can run these down in the ground and actually
move a little soil, I don't think I would do that
if I had these, but what it does is it gets the rye
leaning this way and then this thing comes along
and it stomps it down and so now when it's rolled
you've got a place right in the middle where your
double disc openers are gonna run where the rye is pushed
either direction, so it makes it very easy, then,
to plant right into where that has been rolled.
This is just pictures off of Dawn's website.
You can see they're moving way too much soil here.
I would not do that.
Those are adjustable, you can pull those up so that you
don't have to do that soil disturbance, but, you know,
they're not cheap, they're expensive to put on.
We're trying to figure out if we can justify
putting those on our planter because it looks like
that would make a really nice one pass operation
on our irrigated ground.
I would be nervous to do that on our dry land ground
because I would have to let my cover crop grow
until I planted and we're just, I'm not sure
if we can do that consistently on our dry land,
although you guys are doing it, so I just need to stop
being so chicken and jump in there, right?
Spring planted covers may be an option
if fall planted did not happen.
Again, what can you do in a corn soybean rotation?
Well, you didn't get anything in in the fall,
is it too late, is there nothing I can do?
Not true, you have spring options, oats, peas, lentils,
chickling vetch, rapeseed, there's lots of things
that you can plant, plant these as soon as
your soil temperatures hit 40, although I didn't know
you could plant corn when it was 35.
I need to go to North Dakota and learn all this stuff.
You guys are probably planting this when it's 12 out.
(laughs) So there's a number of things that you can get
into the ground as soon as it kind of starts warming up.
We have had guys that'll plant a mix like this,
they'll come in, this is where they're gonna plant corn.
You can come in and spray this mix with Select.
Take out your oats because that's what would be
the most competitive with your corn, plant the corn,
allow the legumes to keep growing.
When the corn starts to emerge, then you can spray
those legumes out with the post spray
because the legumes tend to not be nearly as competitive
as the grasses, interseeding, there's lots of benefits,
lots of hurdles with this.
And interseeding, I'm talking about putting things in
like at V4 to V6 in the corn.
I'm gonna just talk about this a little bit.
We've done some experimentation with it.
I know other people have done a fair amount as well.
Here's the things that you have to overcome
if you want to plant cover crops into your corn
from V4 to V6, number one is RMA.
Is this going to disqualify me for crop insurance?
The way the crop insurance reads, is you can do this,
you can plant a cover crop as long as it doesn't affect
the growth of that crop that you're planting into.
Now what makes me very nervous is who makes
the decision of did that affect it or not?
It's pretty loosey goosey open ended language in there.
Makes me a little nervous when they write things like that
because I'm pretty sure my opinion's not gonna hold
nearly as much sway.
Now there is some legislation that I believe one of the
senators from...
He's from, I'm not sure where he's from.
There has been a bill introduced in Congress
to kind of revise the crop insurance act
so basically what he's saying is,
if you, basically any recommendation that NRCS makes
for you to do, will not disqualify you for crop insurance
and the other thing is if it's a best practice
recommended by an expert like an extension agent
or something like that, it cannot disqualify you
from crop insurance, so kind of keep your ears open
for that, that's just been introduced.
They're trying to get that as part of the new farm bill.
I think it would be really good if they kind of overhaul
some of the issues there, so that's one issue.
Weed control issues are a huge deal because if you're
using a lot of big, heavy, residual type herbicides,
it's gonna really affect what you can put into your corn
at V4, it's difficult to get legumes to nodulate
if you're putting 200 pounds of nitrogen out there
for that corn crop.
The legumes'll just say thank you very much
and they'll take that up and they'll be lazy
and then, you know, probably the biggest thing
is it's just dark down there.
You get under a corn or soybean canopy, it's dark.
Especially if you've got a good stand
and it's hard to get things to grow in the dark.
So what've people been doing?
Well, or why are they doing it?
It's a relatively easy way to seed cover crops
because it's not necessarily a busy time of the year.
You can get the plants to germinate.
You can get the cover crops to germinate,
and they can grow four to six inches
and then they kind of go dormant when the canopy closes
or at least that's the goal, that's what you want
to happen, then as the corn dries down and the canopy
opens back up, the plants begin to grow again
with cooler weather and sunlight.
It's definitely, if you can get a stand of cover crops
there, it's good trafficability for fall harvest
if you have a wet harvest and you've got cover crops
growing out there, it really helps hold your equipment up
and it can help with residue issues of corn on corn.
Again, the challenges, you know, the weed control
is a pretty big deal, so if you're gonna try this,
what people have been doing, they do a glyphosate
burn down, they post with only broadleaf herbicides
if they're gonna do a grass type cover crop.
There's some guys further north using Verdict
and they are doing that as a pre-plant or a pre-emerge
and then they're getting some of these cover crops
even, like, batching clovers to work at V4 to V6
and, you know, it's just, there's a lot of things
going on here that make it difficult to do
and it probably is a better fit up north.
You said you guys are flying a lot of rye on at V6.
What I have seen of this, the further north you go,
the better it works because you have shorter summers.
The days are longer but the summer is shorter
and that helps these things survive
and it's usually not as hot or as long.
So you know, you've got equipment like this.
You can get a highboy type seeder that's got drops
putting the seed down below the rows.
That's much better than just simply over the top
broadcast like this.
This is another piece of equipment from Dawn.
It's basically a row unit.
You can drill two rows of cover crops in between
a 30 inch row, again, a very cool toy, very expensive.
Penn State has done probably more research with this
than anybody and they're actually coming out.
I don't know if they're doing it or if they're partnering
with someone that's actually building some seeder units
to do that as well.
Here's some of Penn State's research.
Basically, I've never seen a study that has shown
interseeding cover crops at V4 or later.
I've never seen a study that said it's hurt the yield
of the corn, I've seen plenty where the cover crop
just sucked because of one reason or another.
Weed control, lack of sunlight, herbicide injury,
there's a lot of things that can make it go wrong.
I've never seen a study where it said, man,
that really hurt my corn, 'cause you get corn out to V4,
corn's gonna take care of itself, that you cannot plant
the cover crop at the same time you plant the corn
or you will hurt that corn deal.
Corn is very sensitive to that heavy competition early on.
So here's just some pictures.
They got some rye grass coming up here late in the season.
Here's some pictures from Dean Krohl did.
Dean is with the university and with...
Platte NRD, so he did this up by Grand Island,
so we mixed up about 14% rye grass, 57% rye,
11% crimson clover and then I wanted to see
what mung beans would do, so we threw some mung beans
in this mix as well and I think this was...
I don't know if this was 2015 or '16, so here's some
pictures later in the season that Dean took.
Pretty decent stand of rye grass, you can see
there's a little bit of a mung bean there.
Actually, those mung beans did a lot better than
I thought they would because they are a warm season plant
so they don't have the ability to go semi-dormant
like the cool season things like the rye grass, the vetch
and the clovers, but they actually did pretty well.
I was fairly impressed and again, these are the better
pictures, the whole field wasn't like this
and he did it other years and didn't get as good as success
but he's got some crimson clover actually blooming here.
You know, just showing, you know, especially right
in the middle of the row where you can see
a little bit of sunlight, that's where the cover crops
are gonna grow the best.
If you have this on the irrigated, you'll have
great cover crops in your pivot tracks.
Anywhere where you skipped with your planter,
you're gonna have fantastic cover crops.
Other places, it's not gonna be as good.
So, you know, this particular year it caught
and it worked pretty well.
Other years, it doesn't do as well so we're still trying
to figure out how to make that a more consistent system.
You really, really have to be cognizant of what
herbicides you're using because that's really gonna
drive the bus on what you can do.
There is, they did a far more extensive study this
past year where they drilled the cover crops into
the ground, that was all broadcast that year.
They got it drilled into the ground.
I think they're gonna have a field day coming up here
in the spring, we'll try to make sure we get that
information to Keith and he can blast it out on his email.
So the real problem and I know I don't have much time
left but I just want to address this.
The real problem is not the fact that we have short
growing windows in the fall because of this.
The real problem is that we just lack diversity.
And you know, natural systems have huge diversity.
Most of our cropping systems do not.
You look at any natural system, it's gonna have
dozens and dozens if not hundreds of species.
You look across our farming landscape
and we have two.
And you know, Dwayne Beck, many of you have heard him
talk, Dwayne says, weeds and diseases are nature's way
of adding diversity into a system which lacks diversity.
These are all his slides and he goes on to say
that we can counteract that, we can battle the weeds
and diseases by adding our own beneficial diversity
to the system.
You can do it by adding more crops to your cash crop
rotation, which is good if you can do that,
or you can do cover crops.
And we just don't get enough diversity in our
crop rotation and that's why I was really glad
Nathan talked about wheat and adding wheat
to your rotation 'cause of what that can do for the overall
system, this is what our rotation looks like now.
We've diversified it a lot more than just corn
and soybeans, we've added all these other things in
and have a lot of different options, but I always want
to stress this to people, that cover crops
are the perfect opportunity to have great plant diversity,
both above and below the ground and that's important
because we want below ground diversity with different
root types as well as above ground, but look,
when you start adding additional cash crops to your system,
most times you're gonna need specialized equipment,
specialized knowledge and specialized markets.
Okay, so if you're gonna start adding four, five,
six, seven, eight different cash crops to your system,
that's great, there's good opportunities out there
to do it, but you better have these three things
because if you don't, it's gonna be a disaster.
But you don't need any of those things to have
great diversity in a cover crop because just a good
no till drill, I can go out and plant a diverse mix
with 25 things in it, I don't have to have specialized
equipment, I don't have to have specialized knowledge
because I'm not growing it out to grain.
And I don't have to have a specialized market
because the market is the biology of the soil
and so this is where the opportunity comes
to add diversity to our systems.
The later you get into the season, the less likely
you can have that diversity so that's why we want
to try to get, do whatever we can to plant earlier
because the earlier we go, the more diverse we can be
and we have a saying at our farm, more is better
than less, but something is better than nothing.
So there's no shame in planting rye on November 15th
if that's when you got the corn picked.
It's still better to plant rye than to do nothing.
Okay, double crop sunflowers, just, real quickly.
You know, Nathan talked about wheat.
Wheat is just part of the system.
I just want to show you one way we've been adding diversity.
So we'll do irrigated wheat.
We feel if we're doing an irrigated cereal,
we have to do something else to make it cash flow right.
So on the irrigated, we will come in right after we harvest
the wheat or triticale in our case.
We'll plant a mix with hybrid sunflowers
and then about 10 or 12 other different types
of cover crops, we mix that all together.
We drill it out there.
It starts to come up, it looks like this.
We got a lot of sunflowers coming,
but you can see that way before the sunflowers ever bloom,
look it, I've got all this buckwheat starting to bloom
already, and I've got six or seven or eight other things
growing down underneath those sunflowers
and it's crop diversity drives biological diversity
and the biological diversity drives this whole system.
So any time that we've done this, we've never had to spray
for sunflower head moth because...
You know, we rarely fertilize because we've got
the legumes that are nodulating and providing nitrogen
to the system, we've got all the other things flowering,
bringing in beneficial insects.
You can see all of the bees, just all kinds of critters.
There's just incredible amount of insect diversity
in this system and when you get enough insects,
then you'll have far more better ones than bad ones
and so it controls it and it's a beautiful things.
You'll get people coming from miles away
that want to take their senior pictures out here.
They'll call you up, people you never even heard of,
hey can we take our engagement pictures out
in your sunflower field?
That's probably a common sight in North Dakota.
In Webster County, Nebraska, you have a sunflower field,
you stand out, but it's been a great way to add diversity
to that system, this is what it looks like late
in the season, then, those sunflowers are getting ready
to harvest, those sunflowers because they've been dead
and are drying down.
I've got all this other stuff still alive, though,
because it's frost tolerant cover crop species
and then you go through, you can just take a regular old
grain head, rigid grain head, you put sunflower pans on it
and you can harvest those things any direction
that you want to.
I want to just finish with what I call a tale
of two fields because this happened two years ago
between us and a neighbor.
I know my neighbor's not here, so I can talk about him.
And I want you, as I'm working through this scenario,
I want you to be thinking about this from not just
a soil health perspective, but really think of it
from a residue perspective because the residue
that we can keep on the surface really drives the system.
So my neighbor grew irrigated corn.
He probably had 200 plus bushel irrigated corn.
Look at all the residue here, looks pretty good.
We had soybeans, irrigated soybeans,
you know, they made 70 bushels and you know,
that's pretty good but you know how fast soybean residue
disappears.
So after harvest, he was in there, he raked,
he baled, and he hauled it off, okay?
I watched him do it because I was over here
and I was drilling a cover crop
the same day that he was baling.
This is what his field looked like
and this is the next spring, so I think...
I think he had already planted soybeans
because he planted, and remember,
this was corn stalk residue, see it?
No, you can't see it 'cause it's at the feed lot.
But this is what he had left after all that corn residue.
This is what I had after soybean residue, 'cause
I came in, this is a mix of winter barley,
you can see barley heading out here.
There's hairy vetch blooming, crimson clover,
and it's amazing, this crimson clover overwinters
much much better when it's protected by the rest
of this cover crop than it does when you plant it
by itself, there's a ladybug right here.
This field was alive, how much life do you see here?
You know, there's nothing.
Over here, I have life.
Life, okay, here's his field,
there's his soybeans coming up, kind of struggling,
look at that.
Now they didn't rake all that up.
Guess where the rest of that went.
After he removed the majority of the residue,
the rest of it blew away.
He's got nothing left, that's no till, though,
there was no tillage done.
But there's absolutely no residue because he did not
value the residue.
This is my corn coming up into that cover crop
that we had terminated.
You know, I've still got residue from multiple years
and you know, I guess the question is which one
would you rather be?
You know, this guy over here that started with a lot
of residue and ended up with nothing, or me over here
which didn't start with a lot of residue but ended up
with quite a bit because of the choices that we made
and the management that we applied to the system.
So no till doesn't really mean anything
if you're not applying the right management
and doing the right other things with it.
Last thing, my contact information is up there
but it's covered up.
If you got any questions, you can email me,
keith@greencoverseed.com.
You can also, if you'd like, I've got copies,
well, we just printed 15,000 of these soil health
education and reference guides.
It's a 56 page guide, there's articles in here,
Dwayne Beck, Jay Fuhrer, Alan Williams,
Wendy Tarry, Jonathan Lundgren, they've all got
articles in here, Lance Gunderson from Ward Labs.
There's a couple boxes in the back.
I think Gary set the boxes out there.
56 pages of soil health information, so I would encourage
you to pick up a copy if you're interested.
Lots of good information in there about all things
soil health.
Keith, do we have any time for questions?
Certainly.
Moderator: Certainly.
Keith: Do you have any questions, yes?
(man speaks indistinctly)
Okay, so the question is how do we put the nitrogen
on the corn after we burn that rye down?
With the pivot, we're putting either with the planter
or side dressing right after planting.
We're probably putting on about 40% of the nitrogen needs.
We'll put the rest on through the pivot,
on the dry land, we'll put some on with the planter
and then we'll just side dress with the colter
the rest of it, you know, when the corn is probably
that V4 to V6 stage.
Spraying it on with a sprayer, if you can catch a rain
and get that washed in, that'd be great.
If you don't, you're gonna risk losing some of that
to volatilization, so streaming it would be better
than spraying it, injecting it is better than
streaming it.
If you band it after the planter, you'll probably
be all right, I mean, that's better than a lot
of other ways you could do it.
Yes?
Best combination of cover crops if you want to graze cattle?
It really depends on what time of the year you're planting
and when you want the grazing.
If you're fall planting and spring grazing,
I like to do several things.
I will tell guys do Elbon rye for what you want to graze
in February and March 'cause it'll be early,
it'll be the best grazing then, but it plays out,
because once rye heads out, cattle won't look at it twice.
They'll walk right past it.
For their later grazing, if they want later grazing,
you go to triticale because it's far better forage,
it's just not as early as what rye is
and if they really want to extend that grazing season out
into May and even into June, you can go with like
a forage wheat, we have a product called Willow Creek
forage wheat, that stuff headed two weeks after
triticale did, just super long season wheat from Montana
and so you plant the things based on when you want
to graze them, so you kind of figure out when you want
the grazing and then you work backwards to figure out
what to plant.
Now you could add hairy vetch to any of those.
You could add some clovers and different things like that
but the majority of your tonnage is gonna come from
those cereals.
If you fly it onto bean ground, yeah, flying on,
you want to wait until you have about 15 to 20%
of the leaves starting to turn yellow before you fly
that on, but you know, for a lot of guys it's gonna be
Labor Day ish, you know, give or take, depending on how
long a season, and again, this is where you're gonna
want to plant your shortest season bean,
where you want the best grazing.
Plant your shortest season bean, plant it first,
because now you might be able to fly that on, you know,
the end of August versus the middle of September.
Makes a huge difference.
Every day in August is worth two days in September.
Every day in September is worth two days in October
when it comes to the amount of growth.
Yep, with a pivot, if you're willing to water it
after the crop no longer needs water.
A lot of guys aren't willing to put that water on
late in the season, but you got to make the commitment.
Again, that's part of, don't try to do cover crops
if you're not willing to change some other things
that you're doing, so yes, under a pivot you have
a far, far better chance of making a broadcast
seeding application work.
Yes?
My thoughts on hybrid rye?
I've never tried hybrid rye.
My understanding with the hybrid rye, it's very very
high seed yielding.
As of right now, I don't even know, do you know,
does that seed even grow the next year?
It's illegal to replant it, for one thing.
We've never done it because I can't harvest it
and replant it, if you're growing rye for the, say,
the baking market or the distilling market or something
like that, it's probably a great product.
For a cover crop, I don't know that it would have
any advantage, it's gonna cost you far more,
and you know, the cover crop, you really don't,
you could care less about grain yield, really,
as a cover crop, so I think there's better rye products
for cover cropping.
If you're growing rye for grain, it's probably a great
product to do, but you can't harvest it and resell it
to be planted because that seed is patented by,
I think it's the Germans that have most of that.