Healthy Soils and Endless Opportunities: What Regenerative Agriculture Can Do for Your Farm

0:09 Thanks Davis. Like Davis kind of mentioned, turns out I can do more than introduce people. I actually do have a farming operation that we do practice regenerative agriculture on.

0:21 One of the cool things that I'm going to do about this—I'm by no means a large producer. I don't have 2,000 acres to show you guys, but everything I show and do can be replicated and duplicated onto about any scale possible. It's not about the scale, and that's something I think people need to understand. It doesn't matter if you have five acres or 500,000 acres—everybody could do this. It's just as long as you get the principles right, you get the practices right, and you put it into operation and plan for that management. Like Sean, Tiffany, and Kevin Wilsey and Jimmy Emmons have all talked about, it's all about the management. It's not about the scale.

0:59 So every picture I show you today, except for a few, are going to come straight from my operation. I'm not going to sugarcoat anything. I'm not going to hide anything. The pictures that are not from my operation, I will share with you where they came from, who they are, and why I decided to put them in there. So like the PowerPoint says, this is all about healthy soils and endless opportunities.

1:22 So our operation—like I said, I don't farm a lot of ground. I'm not going to throw out numbers. I'm not going to throw out budgets to you. You guys can figure your own operations because everybody has different soils. One thing I do have and have been blessed with—well, it could be a blessing and a curse, depending on how you look at it—I live 15 miles east of here in Moran. We get varying rains from 2 to 30 inches. We generally get varying rains per year of 20 to 100 inches.

1:53 So we could really have some challenging times, and I hope that this relates to a lot of you—that not only we can be dry. I mean, don't get me wrong, everybody has a drought. Everybody has different levels of a drought. Just because we get 20 inches of rain a year doesn't mean we're not in a drought. We have clay soils. We can be seven days without rain in the summer time. We could be in a drought, depending on how you manage your farm.

2:19 But basically, starting at zero, I went to Pittsburg State University, graduated there with my degree in business management and marketing. I have ag background—grew up on a small family farm, grew up conventional tillage. That's just how we did things. That's how everybody started out. That's how everybody did things. I only know one person who's going to talk this afternoon that has never tilled ground. That's kind of neat to me, but we'll talk about that later. But like I said, starting at zero—small farmer, young guy, straight out of college, no idea of soil health—what in the world am I getting myself into?

2:53 I met Darren Williams, who Jimmy said is sitting in the back. He just purchased a facility. He wanted to turn it into a cover crop, non-GMO facility. We're going to talk about cover crop soil health. He wanted to show me what to do, and he was looking for somebody to run it. He lived an hour away from that facility. I lived in that small town, so what better resource than a mutual friend to put us in touch? And sure enough, I started to work for Darren, running that facility.

3:20 I knew zero about a cover crop mix, what is soil health? Oh, let's go get some fertilizer and spread it out on our tilled field, work it in, plant our crop—hey, we've got healthy soil. Nope.

3:33 So he started dragging me around all these soil health conferences. I think he hired me like January 6th. The No-Till on the Plains that year was like January 26th, and I was there. That was the first soil health conference I went to—No-Till on the Plains—and was it an eye-opener? I mean, young kid straight out of college, I had the ag background to understand what was going on, but I also had a business background to back up what I was seeing, and it did not take long for me to see and understand and learn all of that.

4:01 So I came back to work for Darren. I also have worked for our family farm nonstop since I was about 14 years old. The year I came back, we bought our first no-till planter. Sounds good, doesn't it? Well, little did we know there was a lot to learn about no-till and cover crops.

4:20 But since then, we've transitioned our operation almost into 100% no-till. Last year we had 100% cover crops going into the spring, except for 14 acres that we just ran out of time. But I'm going to talk about all those possibilities. But the biggest thing I want to point out is—starting at zero, I started at zero. There may be people in this room that are starting at zero. We all started at zero. It's going to be scary. It's going to be concerning, but with help and education and investigation, we can grow and learn from this.

4:53 I mentioned non-GMO. We do grow non-GMO crops. I don't hate GMOs. That's not the point. Sean, I gotta tip my hat to him. The statement that he made yesterday—that he said that in his lifetime, he can potentially see a time where we don't have the technology to use to control weeds in our GMO beans that have that technology.

5:18 He's a little older than I am. So this is a funny statistic for you. I don't know how funny it is. You look at me, I'm a little bit young. I do remember that before 2000 you could not spray Roundup on soybeans. That wasn't that long ago—what, 21, 22 years? A little older than that, the average age of the farmer in the United States is 57 and a half years. Guess what? I'm half a year shy of half of that age. I don't have much experience. The experience I have is very practical and very rewarding.

5:56 But like I said, non-GMO crops—I'm not saying that there's going to be a time that we lose the technology, but I want to be able to capture and utilize any resource I can to know what I need to do to grow crops at a base level. That's what we should look at. What can we do to grow this at a base level? Not organic. We're looking at a base level crop diversification. That's one thing that has put our operation leaps and bounds ahead of most other no-till operations—is the taking the chance to go out on a limb and do something different. Attention to detail. I'm going to show a few attention to detail slides showing up and then doing the right thing. That is very powerful to me. Like Davis said, I've got two young children, a wife. I want to do the right thing for them. I'll do the right thing for their grandkids.

6:45 So here's zero. I have a friend that is very proud of this picture. I mean, he can be proud all he wants. I don't argue with him. We're friends. You can get along with somebody and have different ideologies. We see this a lot. We see this too much—fall tillage. Do we know what that actually does to our soils? Well, look at this. This is from an Iowa State Purdue University study. Fall tillage is often expensive entertainment. We had this conversation the other day. Luckily I did not know my wife when we were still tilling, because I could have spent a lot of time and it would have cost me a lot of money to take her on dates. Luckily we just went to Taco Bell or something like that.

7:30 Rivers of the gutters down which flow the ruins of the continents—Luna Leopold. Luna is the son of Aldo Leopold, who was the great conservationist and ecologist who many of you know. I actually got this quote. Heard it for the first time on a wildlife podcast that talks about conservation. This is a staggering quote because everything we talked about—all the runoff, all the chemicals that we lose, what's actually happening—let's look at it from a big picture standpoint. We are ruining the continents. We are causing the problem. How do we fix that? Where do we go from that? What can we do?

8:13 Look at this picture. So that picture is very powerful to me. We didn't have six inches in this picture. That is a normally dry drainage that just sits all year until we get rain, and the field on the other side was chiseled in the fall. This picture was taken about March 5th on our property, on our road. Took that picture right through there. The astounding part of this—we had about two and a half inches that day, March 5th. We're going to plant corn April 1st, right? That's when we do it around here, as soon as we can get in the field, soil temperature maybe 45 degrees. If it's April 1st for planting corn, it's just how it happens. Well, that chiseled ground just soaked in all that two and a half inch rain, didn't it? No, it's running out there. See those bubbles? That's phosphorous. That's nutrients. You reckon they lost more than a dime of soil that day? Very possibly.

9:06 The best part about this—this fall, or last fall when they were chiseling—that I was literally across the road planting a cover crop. I thought to myself, man, this is astounding. We have two completely different farming practices separated by a road. I wonder what that could lead to. I failed you guys on this though. I took that picture capturing his mistake, but what I didn't capture was our field. We had cereal rye in the field, and it's going to be soybeans, trying to build some carbon whatnot. I looked over there, and I was like, oh, I'm going to go take a picture of water running out of the terrace channel. It's clear, you know, it's going to be great. Whatever. I look out there, and there wasn't even any water in the terrace channels. So guess what? I didn't take a picture. Well, now I don't have proof of that, but I can tell you there was not water in our terrace channels, and he was running sediment out of a drainage ditch that sits dry.

10:01 Why is our residue important? I talked about non-GMOs and weed control. If anybody knows, there might be a few resistant weeds that we're fighting with our herbicide programs currently, and cover crops and residue is a huge part of that to capture that. Temperature control. Jimmy talked about it—the guy that he had come out to his operation. They dug into the soil. That dead soil was frozen 10 inches, 12.

10:26 Inches in the ground, what have it. What we're seeing is people that are transitioning from tillage to no-till, they're getting a packed layer. People say, 'Oh, it's got a three to four year barrier that we're not going to get any yield benefit from this, we're going to struggle more than we're going to gain.' Well, if you're doing tillage and you go straight from tillage to no-till with no covers, you're going to have that problem.

10:50 Basically what happens with the temperature is it compacts that top couple inches of soil, does not allow air to get through the soil. You know, we think sunlight is what warms the soil—it's not necessarily true. It does warm it some, but it's the air flow into the soil that helps to warm that. So if we skip the step of tillage to no-till without covers and go from tillage to covers, we're instantly implementing natural tillage through the cover crop roots. That's what we want. That's what's going to warm our soil, dry our soil quicker. Or not only dry, because like I said we're getting a lot of rain, hold moisture.

11:28 It's not about the amount of moisture in that soil. It matters. What matters is what you can do with the amount of moisture that's in that soil. It may be a little damp still, but guess what? If you don't have sidewall smearing when you're running through your planter through the field, is it too wet to plant? Not necessarily. When it's 100 degrees outside and the wind's blowing and everything else, and you have a lower residue on the surface, and you go dig in the soil and you've got moisture within a half inch and it's 85 degrees, that's pretty powerful. These are just some of the things that the residue can do to us.

12:07 CO2 emissions. This is really, really interesting to me. So soybeans specifically have a terrible CO2 capturing mechanism. Just so happens that UV light is a steroid to residue, so soybeans are probably the easiest plant or easiest cash crop to cover crop for. It's pretty straightforward. Don't really have to worry about nutrient management or anything like that. But basically what happens, you plant your soybeans and then the UV light shining on them sterilizes the residue so it cannot decompose. As soon as the beans canopy, approximately 45 days, shape, now your residue is in shade. Well, at that point soybeans actually need the most CO2 that they do during their entire life cycle. And guess what is released when the residue starts to decay? CO2. Guess what can now be easily captured by a soybean that is planted into a heavy residue cover crop to help promote it?

13:11 And how many people have walked out in a soybean field? It's 100 degrees, middle of July, they're canopied, hasn't had rain for a week, you walk through your bean plant, come out your pants are completely soaked from your knee down. Not do that? That's that CO2 emission from the cover crop that is now being uptaken in your soybeans. And finally, what is causing that? That's the biology. This is very, very, very important. There's been studies that have shown that anywhere we have cover crops during the breaks of our cash crops, we have one thousand to two thousand times more microbes living in that soil. Well, when you figure that there are around fifty billion microbes per tablespoon of soil, that's pretty impressive when you think one thousand to two thousand times, not one thousand to two thousand, one thousand to two thousand times as many microbes working for you in that soil. And all it takes to feed them is a little bit of residue, you know, not very much money.

14:13 Let's talk about this. We're in Eastern Kansas, we had some crazy winds last night. I get it. Thank goodness that everybody was safe. We didn't have any terrible problems with that, but you know, we still have wind erosion. It's very possible. The worst part about this picture is the combine ran through it and I'm running the drill through it and we still have wind erosion. It's not a perfect system, you know. There are ways to mediate and bridge that gap, but this still happens. It's not uncommon. And like I said, we live in Eastern Kansas. You can see hedge trees right there. Those are all around all our fields, great barriers, and we still have wind erosion. So the point here is you need to chase the combine through the field.

14:57 The longer you wait to do some of that stuff, the worse off your soil is going to be for that. And I know it's a lot of work, takes a lot of time. I work a full-time job for Green Cover. I work a full-time job on the farm and I have a full-time family. What do you think we do? We don't sit around. I can promise you that.

15:15 Nutrient management. This is a pretty hot topic for the cropping systems. And like I said, the grazing guys did a fantastic job yesterday. I'm going to leave the grazing to them. We do have cow-calf operation, but they did a fantastic job. I'm talking about row crop situations, practical applications, and how to get your operation in that position. This looks like Dale after Thanksgiving, doesn't it?

15:39 No, I'm just kidding Dale. Don't call, don't quit cold turkey. That's not the point. That's not what we're trying to tell you. Do not tomorrow go out and quit putting fertilizer on your transitioning ground because that's not gonna gain you a penny. That will hurt you more than it will help you because your soil is not prepared for that. It's like taking an addict and shutting them off. We all know what happens to them. They struggle and a lot of times they relapse. And guess what, we can be the same way. If we shut our soils off, we can relapse. We're the relapse. We're the addict. If we say, oh this isn't working, we're going to have problems.

16:18 This is just a little information. Corn can run 20 days without having any nitrogen. 20 days. There's worth a worth of nitrogen in that little corn plant. You can see that. You know, it says 12 and a half to 25 percent of nitrogen uptake. 10. That's pretty small percent. So what I'm going to tell you here may shock you a little bit. You may not like it, but I think you're just going to have to understand. A no-till cover crop corn will not look like your neighbor's tillage corn. It's not going to look like it the first year. It's not going to look like it probably the fifth year. It might be a little depressing. But what I'm trying to show you is the first 20 days of that plant's life, it does not matter what it looks like, as long as you have the stand, the soil, and the potential for fertility that it needs.

17:09 It doesn't matter that your neighbor's tillage corn that's releasing all that nitrate and breaking all that down and releasing it into the ground water looks great. Looks dark green when it's a half inch tall, inch tall. Yours isn't going to look like that when you get started, and it's okay. It's okay to think, oh, this isn't going to work, man. This looks ugly. I'm sure the neighbors are talking about me. I'll talk about the neighbors talking about you in a little bit because that can lead to some exciting stuff. But this is very important. The most question topic probably with no-till cover crops and the cropping systems rotation is cover crops for corn. We want to grow nitrogen. The way to do that is to plant a cover crop, get it established, and then grow biomass. Your biomass is coming, or your nitrogen is coming from your biomass. If you plant a legume cover crop at Thanksgiving and plant your corn April 1st, we're not going to have much biomass. We're not going to have much nitrogen. It's pretty straightforward. It's pretty simple. It's nice to understand that because you need to make those management changes to your operation the year before you do it. It's not like going to the elevator and buying nitrogen. That's just not how it works. So we need to consider that when we're planting corn. And a lot of data is starting to show that our 110-day hybrids can match up fine with the 95-day hybrid because of our varying rainfall. So we're taking 15 days off of corn hybrid. Maybe I can plant my corn May 1st instead of April 1st. Well, let me tell you what 30 days at 50 degree soil temperatures can do to a legume plant. It can quadruple, if not more, in size and biomass, which is building that nitrogen.

18:47 More importantly, if we're not using our cover crops for nitrogen and we're using synthetic fertilizers, the biggest thing to remember is nitrogen is volatile. It is very sensitive to temperature and water. If you spread dry nitrogen on a cover crop field that's going to corn or sorghum, whatever it may be, and you get rain or the temperature is above 80 degrees, you're losing some of that every second of every day that it's not in the soil. So, you know, this again takes management. We're going to change things a little bit. We're going to put our nitrogen in the ground. 28 or liquid nitrogen is a lot safer than anhydrous, not only for us but for the microbes in the soil. What do you think? If the anhydrous can choke us and kill us, what do you think it's doing to the microbes? Not saying it's the worst case scenario because it isn't. It's still a very viable option. Again, it's all about the management.

19:40 Phosphorus and potassium. Dale had a great talk about phosphorus and potassium. I'm not a soil scientist. I will not claim to be a soil scientist. I'm not going to give a soil scientist talk. I'm going to give actual information that you need to supply your operation to be successful. One thing I will say about phosphorus is that most phosphorus that we spread on our soil is rock phosphate. Dale talked about that yesterday, treated with an acid. The reason they treat it with an acid is because plants cannot actively take up rock phosphate, and that's supposed to make it water soluble and get it into an organic form quicker. What actually does it the quickest is the microbes. Again, the microbes in the soil will eat the rocks, turn it into organic phosphate, and then our plants can uptake it. It's a pretty simple.

20:32 System but it takes the cover crop being in the soil to do that to feed the microbes to get to that point.

20:40 One other thing about phosphate that a lot of people don't realize is that 50 to 70 percent of it is in organic form and is attached to clay and organic matter particles. Clay and organic matter particles are the two first types of particles that erode when we get a lot of water or a lot of wind. Those particles are on the very top. Eighty-five percent of the phosphorus, give or take, is in the top two inches of the soil.

21:07 So every time we get rain or water and you see runoff and you see foam on that water, that's not just little bubbles, that's phosphorus. That's phosphorus that's getting lost through tillage or runoff or stuff like that. So again, the cover crops are holding it in place. The cover crops are creating organic type of phosphorus.

21:29 Keep going, equipment. What does it take? Who owns a planter? Come on, you guys have to plant your crop somehow. Who owns a planter? Guess what, your planter can be a no-till and it doesn't take very much to do it. If you bought it after 2010, more than likely it's already no-till, whether or not the equipment dealer said it is or not.

21:48 There's not much difference between a conventional tillage planter and a no-till planter besides a little bit of weight and down pressure. More than likely those are pretty easy to change.

22:00 Where does it come from? No one equipment manufacturer is better than another. It doesn't matter if it's red, yellow, blue, green. They all make good equipment. They all make no-till capable equipment. And it doesn't matter. Don't get hung up on what color it is.

22:16 Modifications. This is going to be a nightmare. What do I have to do to this thing to actually make it work? Well, actually the modifications are kind of fun. I like to play on my phone, look at stuff, check stuff out. I like to learn what I can do to make my equipment better, to get the seat exactly where I want it and be right where it needs to be in these cover crop situations that's not a perfect tillage situations.

22:39 And I don't have that. I don't have a no-till drill. I don't have a no-till planter. I don't have a sprayer. What are you talking about? Why do I need all that? Well, let's just talk about it. Like I said, I'm not a big farmer. This is an eight-row planter. Believe it or not, these still exist. It's an 8-15 split row planter.

22:56 This picture was taken probably right before the picture of the drainage that was full. This is our cover crop field right here. That's where the water was going. You see why there was no water standing.

23:08 Anyways, back to my equipment. We rebuilt this planter this year between corn planting and soybean planting. It might have been a little bit stressful. Might have been a little bit concerned because that's the first row going back on. We literally rebuilt it from nothing.

23:22 This is what the units came looking like. We do not have a bulk fill planter and those are bulk fill units. So you can see we've got air bags on there. We've got some gauge wheels. We've got some cable drives. We're going to put all that on. We're taking an old standard spring-powered box planter ground drive planter and I'm putting those units on. Air bags, cable drives. Getting rid of the old chains because corn stalks kept messing us up, knocking our chain off and causing the planter monitor to go nuts.

23:52 We did that all in about 30 days and my brother had a graduation party in between there.

23:57 This is what it looked like. This is the first field I pulled into. Planter looks a little different. It's got a tank on it. What am I using that tank? I don't see any fertilizer there. That's my weight.

24:08 How simple is that? Mount a little tank on there on the front of that tongue of that planter, fill it up with water, and guess what? I have weight. Who has priced implement weights recently? Those things are not cheap. Guess who has water tanks or chemical tanks around every tree row or old equipment pile possible? Almost every single farmer because we never throw anything away.

24:33 That's important and none of us can deny it.

24:36 So this is the first field I went to. Looks pretty good and believe it or not, it worked. The air bags held pressure. I had my gauge going. My cable drives all held together. We didn't know what we were going to get ourselves into, but by gosh we got her done.

24:50 And then my liquid applicator. Everybody's going to get a chuckle out of this. This is a 12-row liquid applicator, three point with lift assist. I bought this from a guy in Nebraska for 700 bucks. It had a tank on it, a pump, 12 units, and a lift assist, and it was 700 and it worked.

25:08 Believe it or not, it put my nitrogen in the ground two inches deep before my corn. What did I say we needed to do? Put our nitrogen in the ground where does it need to be.

25:19 In the ground, it's not necessarily where it's at as long as it's in the ground and protected from sun, temperature and water. Once it's in the ground it can bond to the soil, mark soil particles and all the microbes and it's there. It'll still leach, some don't get me wrong, but it doesn't take a five hundred thousand dollar piece of equipment to put nitrogen fertilizer out.

25:43 Again, this is something that everybody can make. Everybody has this type of stuff laying around. You've got to get creative. You know, if you want to spend the money on something, go for it. I'm not saying don't do that either because it's fun to buy stuff. I like to buy stuff. But just be creative, think outside the box a little bit. This whole system is about that.

26:00 Then we got a little drill. You know, it's not a huge drill, it's 15 foot no-till drill. It doesn't take much of a drill to get a cover crop into the ground. I've used a no-till drill, I've used a conventional drill, I've used a conservation drill. It doesn't matter if you cover the seed up. Most cover crop seeds are going to be fine. I mean, I would say a high percentage of the seed we sell is going to be broadcast anyways. So if we can scratch a little dirt and cover it up, that's way better, way more controlled application than broadcast. So it doesn't take much. The drill is the smallest step.

26:36 The last thing I don't have a picture of that I'm going to say is probably one of the most important parts of the no-till and cover crop situation is a sprayer. The reason being, not so much for post spray applications, but to manage your cover crop in the spring when it comes planting time. Sean yesterday talked about his cover crop getting too big on him, too tall on him before he gets corn planted. It happens. But guess what, if it was raining, they worked six days in four weeks. Guess who else is working six days in four weeks? The co-op that's spraying every acre around you.

27:16 So now not only are you at the mercy of mother nature, you're at the mercy of the co-op to get that ground sprayed. So in my personal opinion, upgrades and all that are fine and dandy, but the most valuable piece of equipment that you can have on your operation is that sprayer so you can control your cover crop because you need to be able to do that and not rely on somebody else.

27:38 So where I started, man, there's our there's our cover crop, our no-till planter, first pass. The stuff on the left was the first year no-till soybeans and a residue that was my residue. You know, I was excited, got a good stand. It actually worked, believe it or not. You can no-till soybeans. Cool. So next year we got some cereal rye out there. Looks scary. We didn't do it on every acre that year. We got it in, got it planted, worked great. We kept going.

28:08 Now we got our cereal rye. I got a little thicker, a little taller. So now we got the planter again. My weight systems on there, planting into this is probably around 70 pounds of cereal rye again, soybeans because I've got all my boxes on, box fill planter bulk. It doesn't take much to get stuff where to go. And the big part about this planting system is every bit of residue you have that is something you have to modify your gauge wheel and your planter depth for.

28:41 So if I have 25 pounds cereal rye, just something out there, I'm probably not going to need to modify my depth setting very much because there's not much there. If I have a hundred and fifty pounds of cereal rye out there, guess what, my gauge wheel is held up probably close to an inch. So if I do not adjust my planter field to field and check my conditions, I go from planting soybeans an inch and a half deep to planting them half inch deep. In June, the beginning of June, that can be the difference between hitting moisture and getting an established stand and waiting for a rain. And guess what, that rain can be pretty fierce.

29:19 Speaking of fierce rains, this is a property that I got that's I'm starting at zero. This is the kind of ground that I pick up, people stuff, people don't want. You know, the stepchild of ground like, three fields that equal 25 acres, great, trees all around it. This one specifically is an absentee landowner owns a property to shoot a lot of deer. And guess what, there are a lot more deer than he can kill on this property.

29:48 So what happened here? No-till, cover crops had no cover except a little bit of stuff at the edge of the field. Lucky enough to get a two inch rain, three hours after I planted it, and it came in 30 minutes. It was not a great situation. This was no-till though, so I should be fine, right? No. This is a week after. I should have plants here, right? No. Look at this. This was less than three steps away. This is nature's cover crop. This is wild, some type of winter annual grass I did not plant this. The landowner before me.

30:24 Did not plant this, this is what nature put there to cover that ground and protect it. Five steps away and I have what I would call a manageable stand. Zero manageable. What did that cost this ground here, what did that cost me to not have a cover crop on that? Well, first of all I had to go dig the planter back out of the shed, then I had to track down some more seed, then I had to drive 15 miles to the field, then I had to spend four hours planting it, then I had to pay for my fuel, my time, my cup, my soybean seed that I had to replant. And I lost out on that. Like I said, I have two small children, one of them is less than a year old and the other one I'm sure you saw running around here last night, three and a half. I would just assume spend time with them then plant a crop twice. I'm not talking about planting a crop in a cover crop, I'm talking about planting a crop twice. There's no need for this. Nature proved it to us. That was her doing, that was not me. Her, she saved that crop.

31:32 Even better, here's a picture of a cover crop field planted the same day, morning versus afternoon. Like I said, small fields. Look at the stand there and you're like, oh yeah it doesn't look like much. Well, that's part of having a cover crop. It's not a perfect situation. You can't go out and stand count from the road. You have to walk out in your field, manage it. The point is, look at the residue. What do you think happened? Well, I'll tell you what happened. Two inches of rain in 30 minutes. What do you think that does the soil? How many pounds? You know, Jimmy said 27,000 gallons per acre, one inch rainfall. 27,000 gallons times eight pounds a gallon. That's what, hundred, 180, 190,000 pounds per acre of force per inch of rain on your soil and if it comes in 30 minutes you get all that in 30 minutes. Well it beat that ground down right? Well this rye was my sponge. It was my barrier. That rye protected my ground. It kept it from crust crusting. Not only did it protect it from the rain, the next day it was 100 degrees for three days. So then what did it do? That was my protection from the sunlight. That helped the ground stay soft and mellow and let that ground, those soybeans come out of the ground. Soybeans are a sensitive plant. I mean they are. It takes specific soil types and textures and hope and luck and a combination of many other things to get them out of the ground and they're sensitive and they did it here.

33:05 So here's a video of planting those soybeans into that rye. This is this equipment's from 1995, might add. Nothing fancy about it. It did not cost us 150,000. It is what it is. Look at the box bounce there. There's a little bit, not bad, not bad. I'm probably running five, five and a half miles an hour, going through about 95 pounds of cereal rye. Look what it's doing behind it. All that residue, not all of it. Eighty-five, ninety percent of the residue is going straight to the ground. That's what saved me. That's what saves us from these events that mother nature are throwing at us. These wild events that we cannot control. But we can control that. We can do that for our operation. We can protect it. Did it work? Ask her. She will tell you and she'll tell you again and she'll tell you again and over and over again. She is my, she's my plant checker, you know? Her mother thanks me when I do that too.

34:07 She is full of air. She's full of excitement, she's full of joy and I love to take her and explain stuff to her. Sure, she doesn't soak it in yet, she's only three and a half, but one of these days she's going to be my advocate. She's going to go in and tell her friends in school and say, hey, did you know this about a plant? Hey, do you know this about a root? Huh, that's cool. And guess what, hopefully they go home and tell their parents and guess what, their parents may not farm, but they may want healthy choices for their children. They may want to know where stuff comes from. You know, I bet in her class there's probably not three people in a three kids in a hundred kid class that still lives or works or has anything to do with a family farm in this part of the country and that is, that is not far off. We're doing it for her right? I want to make money but I'm doing it for her.

35:02 So here's my favorite thing ever. I started doing this, this year. These are oats, these are awesome. These are winter oats. Plenty of these, no-till, 15-inch planter. Look at that, better residue. If that doesn't get you excited I don't know what does. But 15-inch planter, like I said, you can see the gauge wheel. This was going right down the row. It covered almost all of it. There's a little bit of space right there that didn't, but it didn't take long. Like I said, crop management. I'm going to speed through this a little bit to get to some more points I want to make. Not all systems are created equal.

40:30 Plant which it looks spindly and it will because it's coming through residue. It's got to get through that residue to get to sunlight, so they're going to look a little spindly. It started so they're a little taller than they probably would be if you had conventional till, but they're healthy. Look at that root system. Look at that little oat right there still attached intertwined in the soil with the soybean.

40:52 Remember the mycorrhizae fungi that Dale was talking about and how the plant systems are all connected below the soil? Starting to look pretty promising right. Look at this. If you can't see it in the back, this is 12 inches right here. This is my tap root, it's 12 inches. Look at these roots here. Everybody say, oh, that's compaction. Your roots aren't puncturing through the soil. No, what that is doing is that is the rows and the roots closing the gaps between each other to help feed each other. There's no reason that your structure should just go straight down because if it does that, you've got 15 inch between your rows. You're missing all the easy, the low hanging fruit of that water and nutrients in the top little bit of your soil. You want your roots to connect side to side too, but you also want them to go down.

41:40 The point here is this is a three-year-old system and we're getting 12 inch root penetration from a plant that's usually pretty about penetrating 12 inches in three years soil.

41:58 This is one of the pictures. It's not from my operation. That did not come out of my field. That's a conventional tilled soybean field after a seven inch rainfall. That's a lot of rain at one time, but look at it running out there and it looks clean. I get it. There's a waterway that's running down. That's filtering all the sediment out of it. Guess what it's collecting and pooling there? They're now going to have a raised field edge to continue their tillage process so the water can't get out of the field. Takes even more water to drain the field. So I went out in my field, pulled a couple soybean plants. I didn't even get mud on my boots. You saw that residue. It's like walking on a carpet. Look at this. One, two, I think there's, oh there it is, three. Those are earthworms. That's biology. That's the type of stuff that should get everybody excited.

42:48 It did not take me 10 years to get to this point. Is it perfect? No. Is my soil getting healthy? Yes. Am I doing better for the ecosystem? Yes. This was the first time I'd pulled, actually pulled plants, and earthworms were intertwined into the roots. I didn't dig these with a shovel. These came with the roots, and guess what, I didn't break anything off. That's something else I should have mentioned about this picture I pulled. I didn't dig it. I didn't stick my shovel in the ground. Why do you think that root didn't break off when I pulled it? Because the soil is getting healthy. It's getting loose. It's letting oxygen come into it.

43:30 Look at those beans. You know, like I said, I'm not going to talk about yield because there's only one yield you should ever compare and that's to your operation and your soils. I'm not going to tell you that I made 63 bushel beans here for you to tell me you made 75. Where did that come from? What are you doing differently? How are you doing that? What are your input costs? The this field right here that I'm showing you and giving you demonstrations of, this all in less rent. You know that can be variable depending on where you're at. All in less rent, 86 an acre, minus combine costs too because I didn't figure that 26 dollars an acre in. I figure planting cost because my times were something. I figure herbicide applications. I figure every bit of that. I had 86 dollars an acre in this. I can live with that for plants that look like that. I mean it doesn't matter how many pods you have. It doesn't matter what your yield is. Doesn't matter what your neighbor's yield is. You have to learn and grow from your soils. You have to start where you're at and just kind of stay in your lane. That's why all these pictures I'm showing you are from my operation. I'm not trying to borrow something to talk about somebody else's. I'm talking about mine.

44:49 Let me explain what should get you excited. After we combine those beans, you see the bean stubble on top. So after that I scraped it off. There's my oat residue from this year. Cool. That's exciting. That's my soil, and I'm just out after the combine's been through the field. I'm just like, hey, let's just see what it looks like. I want to see how much I really wanted to see how much oat residue was left after the crop. So I was like, okay, let's keep going. Let's dig it.

45:16 I stuck my knife in it and flipped that over. I'm like, huh, looks like a worm. It is. Guess who was more excited about that than he was his yield in his field? And it wasn't because it was a bad yield.

45:31 If you don't know and understand your biology and your soil, and it doesn't make you more excited or excited enough to stop the combine and get out and look for this, you need to take a step back. You need to relapse and remember what we're doing, what we're trying to do, and where we're going, because this is the stuff that gets you excited.

45:51 I have never one time talked to a neighboring farmer—again, this goes back to farmers, farmers should be for farmers. We shouldn't be against each other. It's not a competition. We're farming our ground, you're farming your ground. We should be friends. But I've never felt better after asking another farmer's yield than I do looking at this.

46:08 Normally, after you ask somebody else or your neighbor or somebody in the coffee shop, you're like, oh, yours did that well? I can lie too.

46:20 Here's the soil probe from that same field. Look at that black muck. This is clay we have clay around here. Look at this. Do you see that? What is happening there? That's the oxygen getting into the soil. That's the oxygen and magnesium being able to break down and being utilizable, and the phosphate being utilizable by my crops. That's probably around a six-inch increment there. But as soon as you get to that, you see Dale showed that picture yesterday where the oxygen can't get through. Look at how it changes. Oh, it's black, that's good? No, it's not good. That's cannot get oxygen to that soil. This is what we're going for.

47:01 Like I said, three years doesn't take much. Three years of a profitable operation built that. So guess what I can do in three more? That put me at six. You know, I'm half the age. I'm 28, I'm half the age of the average life of a farmer, I hope. That I have 30 harvests left. You know, if we think about it like that, that's only 30 chances. That gets me two years over the average age of a farmer right now. That's 30 chances I have to make my soil better. It's not 300. It's not 3,000. You know, most businesses get multiple chances a year. We get one. One year, 12 months, one harvest.

47:41 Everything you do, every step you take, matters to your operation. It's important that you consider that, and it's very, very valuable every step you take. That you make it forward, you're going to get knocked back. You're going to get held up. But you just have to keep leaning forward and going.

48:00 Here's what happened when I stuck the shovel in the ground. This, like I said, I'm not going to get carried away, hold myself together. I get a little squirrely every now and then, so we're going to keep on track. Look at this residue layer. Soybean residue isn't going to last and you know I see a little hint bit right there. Not worried about that. We'll take care of that later. Once the cover crop—see the cover crop growing right there, there. Once that cover crop gets going, that henbit will be done. It won't be able to compete. The cover crop will take it over and help it out.

48:32 By the way, henbit is probably one of the most detrimental factors to no-till, no-cover soybean operations because of the amount of soybean cyst nematodes that they host. We rotate our crops because corn or warm-season grasses don't host soybean cyst nematodes. We're causing the problem or we're living the problem through weeds. They host more soybean cyst nematodes than any legume that we sell at Green Cover Seed, and they're almost in every single field every spring. And even if you till them before you plant, those nematodes are still in that soil. Just consider that.

49:11 So here we go, a few more pictures here. You can see the root systems of the cover crop. You can see them holding each other together. See little wormy still over there. You know, if you don't have worms, you don't have biology. That's step one. That's like walking out and saying, oh, I have this pasture. It has a cow in it and it has a calf in it. Oh, great, I have two animals. I have a cow and a calf. Well, if I walk over this patch, you don't have any cattle in it. I can't have a calf in it. If there's nothing to raise that calf, we're talking baby calf, not stalker. There's nothing to raise that calf. It's not just going to show up. We've got to have something to raise the worms. The residue is going to raise the worms, and the worms are going to bring more microbes, and it's going to prove the point that this is better.

49:56 This picture isn't as exciting as I wish it could be. I think if all the lights were off, I'll send this picture to you if you want. First day Carbonomics with Keith, he had

50:04 A really cool picture of a root going through a little tiny hole with Jimmy Evans' little microscope camera on it. That's exactly what this is—that is a living root going down an earthworm trench exploring. You know, that's probably three inches. That root is tiny, three inches deep, tiny already there.

50:28 Guess what else is going to go down that hole? Oxygen. Guess what's going to get deeper in my soil each year? Oxygen. That's what our goal is—to help the oxygen layer spread, to health, organic layer spread. Like I said, I'll tell you, if I don't have a picture from my operation, this picture didn't come from my operation. This was a picture that I asked to get permission for. I asked you out there, 'Hey, I thought I saw something out in your field. I want to take a picture for my PowerPoint.' It's all right, yeah, sure. You know, we're friends—they'll let us walk out there.

51:00 Look at that—that's topsoil. Soil. Not really sure. That might be the classification of dirt, like when you bring it in on your shoes in your house. That's not what we're going for. We're not trying to build that. I don't know, it takes a long time to recuperate from that. But guess what, the stuff I had looked like that three years ago. Three years. Granted, like I said, 30 harvests—that's 10. So if you can increase that every year, you're going in the right direction.

51:34 How to diversify? They—like I said, grazing livestock. Got to get the cattle on the crop ground, the ground that I've been talking about. Rented ground doesn't have fence or water. It's just not possible. Some things it's not possible to do. But this is way to make more money: experimentation. So I like to try new things. So this year, I think we're going to plant some flax. Flax in southeast Kansas—most recent scholarly article I found about it was from Kansas State University in 1927, but guess what? It specifically listed Allen County as being the flax-producing capital of Kansas. Why not? Kind of interesting, isn't it? So, you know, I'm not going to try a big field—I don't have big fields—but we're going to try some flax. We're going to do something different. We're going to experiment.

52:22 Are non-GMO soybeans? You can grow non-GMO soybeans and not have weeds. Don't worry about pigweeds—pigweeds are the least of my worry with cover crops. The problems that I have with my non-GMO soybeans with high residue cover crops are late sprouted cucumbers, late sprouted cucumbers after the canopy starts to fall. That's the problems that I have. Pigweeds can't fight the residue once you get the system going and the residue levels, layers built. They become, they diminish into basically no problem.

52:53 These are our winter oats, Costa Coats. You can see a few mare's tail out there. This is the first year I grew them. We only had enough seed to plant like 65 pounds an acre. I plant more than that now for seed production. This was a trial. This was the furthest they've ever grown north—ever. They grew them in Tennessee and around like Wichita Falls area, Texas. They asked me, 'Hey, you want to grow these oats? I don't know if they're going to live or not. You want to try it?' Sure, why not? Well, guess what? There was no scholarly research on that. We did it anyways. Guess what? Not that I'm scholarly, but I have some research on it. I can tell the next guy how to grow it. And we're pushing the bounds to everything a little bit more and a little bit more every year.

53:38 Just keep your options open is what I'm trying to say. If you have livestock, if you have neighbors, you can harvest almost every cereal that Green Cover sells. You can harvest and use as livestock feed in a grain form, not a forage form. I mean, you forage for them too obviously, but you can use it in a grain form in a ration. Diversify your cropping system. I promise you that it costs less to raise a bushel of barley than it does a bushel of corn, especially this year. So just consider that.

54:06 You know your cover crop goals? I'm not going to talk about this. We have great people around here that can help with that. We'll talk about that later. Seating date, plant maturities—kind of touched on the corn. Some cool pictures there. This is a lot of carbon. Graze it, hay it once, let it grow back and leave it. That's where you get your benefit. It's got to be left out there to some extent. Through manure is great. If you hay it and then once it freezes, you hay it one more time to get that last little bit, you're losing all that. All right, not sure if you can read this or see what it is. This came from the No-Till Farmer magazine, old no-till Ned.

54:46 And Tillage Steve or whatever his name is, it's fighting some mud. How do we change who? Ever boiled crabs or been to a crab boil? You know what that looks like? You put all your live crabs in this boiling pot of water. Well, guess what? They can get out. They have legs. They can pull themselves out of it. The other crabs just pull them back into the pot to their certain death. Well, a little harsh, I know, but what I'm trying to explain is that's what happens with farmers. If I walk into the coffee shop or say I'm in the coffee shop, talk to my neighbor into trying to cover crop for the first time. Yes, sold him a little seed. We're having some soil health benefits. He says cover crop failed. I'm not going to do it again. Well, guess what? There's four guys sitting around that never had a cover crop before. Now, not only is he going to do the cover crop again, the four guys around him aren't. I just took out five people that could potentially see soil health benefits because they were crabs in a boiling pot of water and dragging each other down. We have to get over that. We're here to help people. Neighbors should help neighbors. Everybody love everybody. We've all heard it.

55:53 Use your fields as your data. The only relevant data you have is what you do. You can be right across the road to your neighbor and they can yield a lot of yield and they can spend a thousand dollars an acre on inputs and do whatever they want to do. It does not matter. It's what you do. It's how you do it. It's what your results actually are that's what is important. Don't base your research off of somebody else's experimentation.

56:22 Finally, networking. We're here today to network. We're here today to make new friends, talk to sponsors that can help better our operations, talk to friends that are in our area that we didn't even know. There's people within 40 miles of here that I've never met before and I've lived here my whole life. So network, use all of the aspects of that. Social media has huge platforms. There's millions of people that you can talk to and you never have to see them. Who doesn't like to be a recluse and not see people? But just use these opportunities.

56:56 About three weeks ago, my wife and I were sitting around our supper table. She says, 'Hey, we need a quote for the year, something that we can put on a Christmas ornament.' And Kevin, I was jealous. We're looking for a name for our operation, and when you had 'Plan B Ranch' up here, I thought, 'Man, that's right. That is right.' But she said, 'Well, hey, I found this. What about this? I've not failed. I've just found ten thousand ways that won't work.' It didn't have the quotation at the time, but I looked it up. As Thomas Edison had over 2,500 failed attempts at a light bulb. 2,500. And now we have one in every room, building, vehicle that we own. We have light bulbs. We had over 2,500. Somebody asked me, 'Well, ten thousand ways, how many are you at?' Ten thousand and one.

57:45 We fail. Everybody here said it. We've all failed. It's not something that's not going to happen. It's going to happen. No doubt about it. In my mind, you're going to fail under your operation at some point in time. You just got to get back up and keep going forward. You know, you have to have optimism. You have to be positive about it. You have to continue to take the right steps forward, put yourself around people that are going to help you and do positive things, and every now and then you get lucky.

58:10 This is probably my favorite picture. Only thing I wish is my little girl was riding with me, but that is a rainbow. It doesn't really show up very good in this picture. That's a rainbow looks like it comes right down into my field that I'm planting cover in my cover crops. That's pretty cool. Rainbows are few and far between, but for this perfect situation to line up like that, I can honestly say I took that picture. And every now and then you get lucky.

58:38 Finally, this is who I am. This is my wife, Danielle. She works with her mother-in-law, and friend are actually the caterers. I'm going to give them a plug real quick. 'Simply Delicious' is an absolutely fantastic job. I think we should all give up, stand up, and give them a round of applause because it's hard to beat it. I mean, it really is. They're in the room. Trust me. But thank you.

59:04 Like I said, this is my wife and our family. We'll be around this afternoon. I'm sure my little girl will be here running up and down the lanes trying to play with something. She's a little wild. But if you have any questions, you can get me through All Green Cover media outlets or media channels. There's my email and that's my cell phone number. Feel free to ask me. I can't answer every question. I'm not a professional. I've only been doing this for a few years, but I like to learn, and if anything, maybe I can learn from you.