Organic No-Till Is Possible—Here's How Rick Clark and Dan DeSutter Do It

0:00 Noah go ahead and fire us off here.

0:08 Hello everyone that is joining. We are just gonna give it here a couple seconds. I've got everything recording and going live on Facebook. So I'm going to give people about 15, 20 seconds here to get logged in.

0:37 Okay, perfect. Well I'm gonna go ahead and kick things off here. Thank you guys so much for tuning in this evening. This is our second to last webinar. Can't believe we've done six of these already, but we definitely have a treat for you here tonight. We're gonna be talking about is organic no-till possible. I've heard Keith say numerous times that it's kind of the holy grail of soil health. So we've got some experts with us tonight that are going to be talking about what they're doing.

1:07 And there's not a silver bullet for things that does seem to be what everybody's looking for is just one thing that can solve everything. And I think what we're going to find tonight is that's not necessarily the case, but it is a little bit more attainable than what we've come to think about. You know, it's definitely possible and it just takes a little bit of practice and talking about it so that's exactly what we're going to do tonight.

1:29 Keith, do you want to go ahead and we'll actually, here before you go ahead and kick things off, I will just let you guys know that everyone is muted, but if you have questions during the presentation at all, we're going to allow you to type those in in the Q&A portion or in the chat and we'll go to about 6:15 and then open it up to your guys's questions. We are going to do things a little bit differently this evening instead of having Dan and Rick give a presentation. This is something that we've got a lot of questions about and I know that you guys have questions as well. So what we're going to do is have Keith kind of lead a discussion with Dan and Rick about what they're doing and allow them to expand on some of the things that maybe are a little puzzling to us that are just getting into it. So with that, Keith, do you want to go ahead and introduce our speakers and kick off the presentation?

2:18 Yeah, I will, thank you Noah. You're right, I have often referred to organic no-till or the closest we can get to organic no-till as being kind of that holy grail of soil health. The holy grail being, you know, something that's often searched for but almost never found. But we've got a couple guys here that I think are pretty close. They're in fact I think they have found it. They're still working on some things and they'll talk about that. They'll talk about some of the struggles and things, but let me introduce them and then we'll kind of jump in here.

2:52 We have Dan DeSutter. Dan, wave your hand there. Dan. Well, both these guys are from Indiana and actually they don't farm very far apart, which is really great because they can kind of learn from each other. They're not doing exactly the same thing which I think is really cool because what that tells us is that there are multiple ways to put these principles into practices and that's what we're really going to be talking about.

3:18 Don't take anything that these guys say as a recipe that you can go home and immediately start putting into action on your fields. Some of the things, yes, you will be able to do that, but the whole system, no, nobody can duplicate a whole system in its entirety. So as we're talking here this evening, be listening for how they're putting these soil health principles into practice without using either chemicals or using tillage and that's what organic no-till really is. You know, most organic guys are still using some tillage, most non-organic regenerative farmers are still using some herbicide, some pesticides. The goal is to reduce those as much as possible, but true organic no-till is not using either one of those and it's really, really hard and they'll talk about the struggles that they've had, some of the successes as well, some of the failures.

4:14 So Dan DeSutter. And I'll let each of these guys give a little bit more of their background, but we've been working with Dan, gosh Dan, what, four or five years probably, we've been sending cover crop mixes out to you there in Indiana, just not too far from Lafayette, but more like seven or eight anyway. Okay, well time flies when you're having fun I guess. So we've known Dan for many years. I'd say he's been real innovative and real aggressive at integrating livestock into this process and they'll talk about how important that is.

4:51 So we've known Dan for quite a while. I have read and heard about Rick Clark for a while and this summer Dale Strickler and I took an almost called a pilgrimage out to visit these guys in central Indiana there. And we went to Dan's farm and because Rick farmed so close, he was good enough to come over and toured around and I jumped in the pickup with him and got to know him pretty well. So I haven't actually been to Rick's place, but got to know a little bit of his background and since then we've talked on the phone, emailed back and forth quite often. So I feel like I know his operation, not as much as Dan's, but

5:28 I know a little bit about what he's doing just in listening to him and going back and forth since then. So Dan, I'm gonna just start off with you. Why don't you give us just a little bit of the background, the first question I want to ask you guys and for you to share with our audience because there's a lot of people interested in this. What made you decide to do this? And for the record, I entitled this 'Organic No-Till: Is It Possible or Are These Guys Just Crazy?' And so that might be part of the question that you answer here, and it's probably a little bit of both. You got to be a little crazy to kind of go down this path, but Dan, you start us off and then we'll go to Rick. Tell us a little bit about what drove you down this path, what made you decide that organic no-till is where you wanted to go.

6:21 Well, if you ask anybody that really knows me, they will confirm that I am crazy, so we don't need to debate that or discuss that anymore. What we've been in no-till, my dad started 1983, we've been no-till since 1990, and started using cover crops around 2000, and really aggressively for the last 10 years. And it was a CSI project I'm involved that really made me look at organic. I thought about it through the years but just didn't want to do the tillage. And we started to learn about roller crimpers and see how we could do beans. And saw how our wheat pressure was really declining as we added diversity. It just, the light came on that we may be closer to being able to do this. And we think, but probably the deciding factor is that we did some extensive testing on a farm that's been no-tilled and cover crop for 20-plus years, no-till 30 years, cover crop 20 years, no synthetic fertilizer besides 28 nitrogen, all manure. And in that testing, what we saw is that we weren't changing the biology as much as we thought. We'd done physical things, we had added a lot of organic matter, increased aggregate stability and all those things, but biologically we really hadn't changed the soils the way we'd hoped.

7:48 Can you guys still hear me? Yeah, you're good, Dad. Okay, so when we started to think about the whys of that, and I went through the principles and we're trying to manage by these five soil health principles. I don't know if I'll go over them. I'm gonna say so we're all on the same page because this is our guide, this is our roadmap. And when you're thinking about how we're making decisions, there's a minimum disturbance. We want armor, living root all the time. We want as much diversity as we can get, and we want room and impact whenever we can get it. And so knowing that will help make sense of what Rick and I are going to talk about because that's really our guide to post. But as I thought through reasons why we weren't seeing our biology improve the way I thought it should, it really became clear that some of the things we were doing were causing disturbances. We'd always thought of disturbances as physical, but when you start talking about things like glyphosate, fungicide, insecticides, that's a disturbance. And I just more and more came to the view that that was what was holding us back. And if we wanted to take the next quantum leap in terms of regenerating soil, improving our soil health, we need to get rid of that stuff. And if you're going to start to do that, then you might as well think about how you get more for my crop. And there's never just one reason, but that was really the big 'aha' moment. And as I look forward to the next generation and trying to create a scenario where my kids could all come back to farm—I have three sons that all want to farm—without having to try to farm 10 or 15 or 20 or however many thousand acres that would take in another 15 or 20 years to sustain that, I really wanted to focus on getting more per acre. And so there's a lot of things that went into it, but on the soil health side, it was trying to get rid of the things that I felt like were holding us or biology back.

9:48 Yeah, thanks Dan. I appreciate that, and I love that point that you made about disturbance because a lot of times when people think of the soil health principles and they think of minimizing disturbance, all they think about is 'I gotta eliminate tillage.' And they don't understand or they don't realize, or we haven't spent enough time thinking about the chemical disturbances that all those other products that we're adding—even fertilizers—you know, can cause those disturbances. So I'm glad you really brought that out in what drove you there. So Rick, tell us a little bit about your background and your story and how you ended up on this path.

10:22 Sure. Well, I'm honored to be here today. Thank you, Keith, for inviting me to talk. Yeah, you know, way early in our journey, Mother Nature has guided me to where she's wanted me to go, and I can't thank her enough for that. It was with weather events or whatever the answer was.

10:48 But early in our cover crop journey we were planting green and that means planting our cash crop of corn and soybeans into a living growing green cover crop and not terminating until well after we planted. And on those early days of the journey we were doing this chemically. And I'm glad I live close to Dan because Dan has been on this journey longer than I have, and that's where I started kicking my ideas around. And the two of us just started to feed off each other. And then we were blessed to meet a wonderful person in Wisconsin, Dr. Aaron Silva. And Dr. Aaron Silva showed us how we could plant soybeans into standing cereal rye at boot stage and roll the whole thing down 45 days later, beans and all. And when that moment happened and I saw it happen for myself, I'm like, okay, we are so close. We've taken away the burn down pass. We are now down to just getting enough biomass, and that's what this is all about. Today's talk, Keith, is about biomass. We've got to have eight, nine, ten thousand pounds to be able to suppress these weeds.

12:07 And we have no easy button to go back to. We can't go back and come in and bring a spray and try to save a field. We can't do those things. So you know, I always say the success of next year's cash crop starts with the success of this year's cover crop. And you really got to think about that, and you've got to figure out the region that you're living in. How do you get those cover crops planted in a timely fashion? So all those things make a difference.

12:37 But I guess to answer why I did this, it was that building up of farming green and letting these cover crops go way into maturity. And then when you do that, the amount of sequestration that these cover crops do for you is why you become regenerative. Then because we are recycling these nutrients, so it's just it all fits together and it all starts to make sense.

13:07 Yeah, it certainly does. And that's a great point. I love how you came at it from similar reasons or for similar reasons. But I want everybody to take notice that neither one of these guys said, 'You know what? Boy, I was going after that big organic premium,' because if that's your driving factor, you're probably really going to fall down and hurt yourself pretty bad in this process. So that's a byproduct of it. It cannot be the driving factor. And the reason that you're going there, would you guys agree with that?

13:44 Most definitely. Yeah. And I want to add something to that, Keith. I want to add something. We have to be very cautious here. If your farm is in any kind of a financial strain, this is not the step you take. You have to be more on a financial good foundation before you make this move because this is tough. I mean, this is something that Dan and I will never step away from, but the mental drain is unbelievable on this thing. And you better have some financial backing behind you to really get rolling.

14:33 It's when I started looking at organic, I asked everybody I knew that knew about our game, 'Who are the best organic farmers?' And then I went and asked their advice, and they all had different advice except for one thing. They also had to start small. And of course, I didn't listen to that. And it's been really hard getting through transition. You know, the last two years we've had 1,500, 1,600 acres that we really didn't take the income off of. We just used part of our transition time as a region here, and that's really hard on your working capital. And not to mention the lessons as we've tried things that we wanted to see if it would work, knowing that they might not. And a lot of them haven't.

15:15 And you know, it does, Rick's right. It is a good thing we've got each other because you know, we understand what the other guy is going through, and we can help pick each other up when we get a little down. So have a good support group would be another piece of advice I would say. Is have someone that's thinking along a parallel path that can boost you and pull you along when you stumble.

15:42 Yeah, that's a great point. It's hard to underestimate how important that is. And you guys are very fortunate. You know, geographically you're quite close. But a lot of people don't necessarily have that. But that doesn't mean you can't find a support group. You know, with all of the online technology that there is now, you know, you can come up with your own online support group. And they don't have to be. Now, it helps if they're somewhat geographically similar or at least in rainfall conditions, but even if not, you know, still just having some people to bounce ideas off of. So I want to talk about a couple of other things. Dan, you mentioned everybody told you to start small, but you didn't really listen to them, and you jumped in pretty big time. One point I want to make about these guys, and some in the audience probably realize this and some don't.

16:33 These guys aren't doing this on 40 acres, 50 acres, 80 acres, even 5, 6, 7, 800 acres. They're doing this on thousands of acres. So again, when I think about the people that are doing organic no-till, I know a number of people that are doing this in their garden or they're doing this on 20 acres where they can really put a lot of labor into it. These guys are doing it on very large scales. And you guys don't have to tell us exactly the number of acres, but it's multiple thousands of acres now. It didn't all get transitioned to organic no-till or to organic all at once, I don't think. But Dan, you like to say you didn't just start with 20 acres to see how it worked. You started with a pretty big chunk.

17:21 Well, I remember back my dad was doing Ridge-till when I came back to the farm. We went to a meeting at Jim Cummello's, and we were both really impressed with what we saw. On the way home, we were talking about, okay, this is what we want to do. And my dad wanted to do a few hundred acres at a time. And I convinced him by the time we got home that we need to commit to this, and that means getting rid of the Ridge-till stuff, getting the tools that we need to be successful in this new thing, not trying to do it half-assed. And I've always been a believer in that, that when you're ready to commit, commit and immerse yourself in that. And I think that helps you stay with the program and commit your full energy to it when you burn the bridges behind you.

18:13 How about you, Wreck? Did you go all in or did you kind of go in stages? Well, we started the first year small, 500 acres, and then it went quick. After year two it's into the multiple thousands. So the trajectory that we're on, we're going to be fully certified by 2022. So again, a total agreement with Dan. Once you commit to something, there's no looking back. You have no excuses. You can't make excuses. You're all in. Let's go. And you know, things like I've always said, if you want to get rid of tilling, if you want to get rid of the need to do tillage, sell all your equipment because then when you don't have it, you can't go out your back door and hook on and go save a field.

19:09 So that's how you get committed, but it's way deeper than that though too, Keith, because now that starts to answer some of the questions: well, I can't afford to do that. I can't pay for those cover crops. I can't do this. Well, once you sell your equipment off, you've now gained that capital back to help offset some of those steps to get to where you currently are. When you pull into our farm, and you will be on our farm one day, Keith, you will be—there's no equipment in the back lot anymore. It's gone. There is no equipment there. There's nothing there. Some semi-trailers, that's it.

19:43 Yeah, it's kind of like some of the old Spanish explorers when they came over to the new country here, you know, they literally burned the ships so that there was no return. And that's kind of what you're talking about doing. You're talking about landing almost in a new country and then burning the ships because we're fully committed to making a go here. Right, right. And you know, I don't know where all you want this conversation to go, but I mean, I am to the point where I am so committed. I no longer take crop insurance. I no longer take subsidy payments from the government. Haven't taken any CFAP or whatever they're called. Haven't done any of that stuff. That's how dedicated I am to making this system—not only making it work, but how much faith I have in it. And how it's going to be well worth the journey.

20:41 That's the ultimate freedom to farm right there, isn't it? Because there's absolutely nobody telling you to do anything. You have 100 percent control over everything. So yeah, that's impressive. That's impressive. Dan, why don't I want to move in kind of from the theory, you know, of how you got started. I want to share with people a little bit about what you're doing to make this work. And again, folks, don't be writing down recipes here, but use it to generate ideas. I was at Dan's farm, and I know Rick had similar things this year. They've had better years than this year. This year, just weather conditions didn't make things allow things to work quite as well as other years. So guys, I want you to share some pictures. I know you've each got a few slides that you can share because I want to give people kind of a background of some of the things that you're doing to put this principle into practice, into the ground. So Noah, we're having some connectivity troubles from Dan's computer, so Noah's going to share Dan's slides. Why don't you just go ahead and talk.

21:58 About your slides a little bit Dan, and then we can have Rick share his.

22:13 All right, I don't know if I have Dan's, then that might just be Rick's that I've got. Okay, I will look but why don't you go ahead and keep looking. Yep Rick, go ahead and share your slide deck.

22:29 Let me share the screen here. What we're trying to do here is I want to show you where we've kind of been and where we're coming from.

22:52 Change is good. Change, can you see the screen? Is that right? Everything yep, okay we're good. Okay good. Change is so it's good and it's so hard to put your brain around. I mean you've got to first decide that we're going to do something different than the way it's been done on the farm and I'm not here to put down the way anybody's farming. That's not what this is about. This is about change is good and we need to make change necessary in our thought process, and change is the answer.

23:29 Now this is probably one of the most powerful slides that I have in my deck and what this is is showing stability and standard deviation is yield. So before, let's look at that left side of that screen. That's corn before we really got the soil working for us and it's always talked about you got to be in this system three, four, five years and you really start to see these changes take place. That's what's happening here. While we were building up to this, our standard deviation or our differences in yield in a given field was almost 29 bushels. Today it's less than five. So we've taken all of the noise out. Same thing on soybeans. I'm going to move quickly through this stuff because Dan wants to get to his stuff and we got a lot to talk about.

24:21 Let me keep going here. All right, I've mentioned earlier that biomass is critical and I'm going to just quickly go up to the almost the end here. So this is cereal rye and we took it at 12 inch, 18 inch, and 28 inch and this was going, this is a field of rye that was planted in the fall and was going to be soybeans planted into it. And this is what kind of sequestration we are getting with cereal rye. Now move way over to the right and look at this biomass side. 6,800 pounds of biomass. That is what is critical now for the system that Dan and I are trying to continue to work on.

25:08 Now when we then came back two months after termination because I wanted to see how much of these nutrients had released from this cereal rye plant back to the cash crop soybeans. So look at that. We know soybeans love potash. We went from 281 pounds down to 65 is all that was left so that had been a release and the plants were now taking those in. And now look at our biomass. It's down to 3,500 pounds. My rule of thumb on cover crop weed suppression is 70-30. We need to get 70 percent weed suppression from the cover crop and we've got to get 30 percent from the cash crop canopy. So by this point in time we have to have our beans starting to canopy because we're losing the biomass. Our microbial biome is in overdrive and it is absolutely eating through all of this material.

26:16 All right, the power of nitrogen fixation clover. This is the main staple that we try to get to for planting corn. Now I'm going to stop right here for a moment and I want you to look at these numbers. A lot of people go out on the first warm day of spring and they burn these cover crops to the ground. I'm asking you to please give these legumes more time. Look at from May 20th to June 4th we went from 75 pounds of N to 114. Then look, in four days we went to 262 pounds of N and 444 pounds of K2O. Unreal biomass. Look where we are on the biomass: 12,700 pounds. Now luckily I thought to do the same thing on this that I did on the cereal rye. We came back on July 24th. Look at the end: 262 pounds now down to 52 pounds. It has released over 200 pounds of N in a little over 40 days and the biomass is down to 5,400. Now that is what you would expect that because on the day that sample was taken the carbon to nitrogen ratio was 20 to 1. Look at that organic carbon: 5,200 pounds per acre. This is what I talk about all the time. We've got to let these cover crops go further into their maturity. I also call this the power of patience because we didn't plant until that June the 8th. The day we took this sample was the day we planted June the 8th.

28:01 Okay, this is where it all begins for our system. You've got to get the cover crop established in the fall in a timely fashion. Again, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful cover crop. Okay, I just want to put in just a little bit of a teaser here on the way we're planting corn. We are no-tilling corn. This is alfalfa now so that previous slide was a cocktail like I used called Gunslinger. It's got the nitrogen fixation clover.

28:34 And you can get that from grassland Oregon, but this is alfalfa that's been established and we really like planting into this because you've got all the fuel you need to raise a corn crop. This is difficult though, folks. Do not think you can go out tomorrow and start doing this. This takes a lot of preparation to get to this point.

28:56 Then we come back behind the planter with a roller crimper. It's an INJ roller crimper. It's got the chevron pattern from the Rodel Institute, and this is not going to terminate the alfalfa, but this will lay it down and it will give the corn we hope a fighting chance to get above this corn and take off. And then when this happens, we can get to the corn. Now this is what I was describing with Dr. Silva, and I'm just about done, Dan, and I'll hand it over to you.

29:29 We are no-tilling beans now. This is a little past boot stage because this is May. We had another wet spring. Typically in our region this is going to be at the last week of April, first week of May. You're going to plant beans at boot stage, and then we're going to walk away for about 40 days, and then we're going to come and you see the planter goes through it just fine. It's everyone worries about, you can't plant through cereal rye. Yes, you can. It goes right through it.

30:02 Okay, then we're going to come back in June, and again, this is way beyond anthesis, but it's okay because what's critical here is we cannot exceed the V2 to V2 and a half growth stage of the soybeans. So here's the rye standing. It's the same. I kept the same field coming through here. There's the soybeans. They're at V2, V2 and a half, so they're maybe six, seven inches tall. And there's the roller. You can see it's very aggressive. It's very aggressive, and there are the soybeans that you're going to see.

30:41 And I can't thank Dr. Silva enough. Aaron Silva at the University of Wisconsin for showing me how to do this. This is what got me started headed down the organic road. There's the soybeans. They're just fine. They're just fine. There's the same field on July 16th, absolutely amazing. There's no inputs of any kind. I mean, Keith, what we've done here, we've taken everything away. I use nothing. I am no longer using manure ahead of corn. We are trying to grow all of our nutrients for the corn crop. We're trying to grow with cover crops.

31:18 I think we are hurting ourselves with big flushes of nitrogen, and we're trying to take that away, and I prefer the slower release of these cover crops degrading on their own and releasing all this out. But I mean, that right there, folks, is as clean as a field that has been sprayed, so this can be done. Does every field look like this? No, but I think we have answers why. The reason why this field looks like it does is because these cover crops were planted before September the 10th. We had come out of either a cereal grain that we did not double crop beans into. We prepped it during this, after the harvest of that cereal grain, got to this point, then we can get this kind of weed suppression.

32:11 I can also show you fields that were absolutely the weediest field in the county, and the yields were very poor, and it was attributed to planting dates after October 20th. So we're really learning how to make this system better. We know what some of the cause and effects are. I think that's my last slide. I will stop sharing.

32:40 Great. Hey, Rick, just a couple questions there before we move on. I really like what you said earlier. You said that the success of the cash crop starts with the previous cover crop, but really what you're saying now is the success of that cover crop starts with what happens before it. So you need to design your rotation to give the cover crop time to do its job. You can't plant cereal rye October 15 and then blame no stand on the cereal rye.

33:13 Tell us a little bit about the seeding rate that you're using at that time of the year, and have you seen—I know you've experimented a lot with seeding rates—have you seen differences in varying that feeding rate, especially planted that early? Yeah. When you can get, you know what I'm trying to shoot for is at least 30 days before that hard frost, and if we can get to 45. So now I don't care where you are sitting at in the world. If you know what that time period is, back it up. And now we're talking. Okay, so let's back up that 45 days. We could go with that picture right there. We got away with 100 pounds of Elbon cereal rye, and we are only planting variety-specific rye because we want it all to mature at the same time so that we can lay it down with the roller crimper.

34:06 Okay, now as time marches forward and moves on, we have to start moving the rates up. So now what we've even done, and you know what, events like this are awesome because you never know. This networking, there's so much information that comes out of this. I'm speaking to a crowd in Ohio last—

34:24 Year and Jay Brant is in the crowd, and I ask a question and Jay says, 'Why don't you broadcast some of your cereal rye?' Boom, that's exactly what we're doing now because my question was we're on a 10 inch row spacing on our drill. I think we need to get better canopy in between those 10 inch rows. Jay raises his hand and says, 'Whatever your goal is on your total target amount, why don't you put a portion of that out of the broadcast?' That's what we're doing now. So after October 1st, we're laying down 50 pounds of L-Bond broadcast and we're drilling 100 pounds with a 10 inch John Deere air cedar, so 150 pounds is where our journey has taken us.

35:09 Because like I said, we have no easy button to push. We have to get our suppression with that cover crop. And really with the cereal rye, you've got two modes of weed suppression. A lighter amount of rye will probably suppress the winter annuals, but it will not leave enough biomass to give you that weed suppression deeper into the season like what you guys are needing.

35:37 Right, and let me throw something out there. I've got a notion that one of the things that's always said is if you've got a broad leaf problem, plant cereal rye, you won't have that broadleaf problem anymore, unless you got gaps or holes in your cover crop. I think what's happening—you go back to my slide I put up there—I think cereal rye is sequestering the nutrient load that those early maturing weeds need, and we've buckled them at their knees, and now that cereal rye is at an advantage and it can hold those broad leaves down. Then as it goes later on in the season and it's releasing that nitrogen back, now that's the fuel for the foxtail, and that's what we're seeing now. Those late season weeds coming into play. I think all this ties into each other, so now we have to start thinking about different trigger times and different trigger points and start changing the way these weeds are adapting to the environment that they're in.

36:39 Yeah, that's a great point. You're literally starving those weeds of the nutrients that they need, but you're also fundamentally change the biology of your system. And you know, I would guess that you have a lot more fungally dominated soils. And you know, when you were farming conventionally, most weeds do not grow well on that type of soil.

37:02 That's correct. Our Haney tests—we do them all the time, we do them twice a year—our farm has moved from a bacterial based farm to a fungal based farm very quickly by using these techniques.

37:14 Yes. Yeah, great. Noah, did you find Dan's slides?

37:22 No, we're still having trouble getting those lights up. We do have the option if he needs to just share it on his iPad we can. Otherwise, yeah, we don't know if Dan if you want to just kind of talk about what you've got for slides on there.

37:44 Hey, Dan, can you hear me?

37:49 I'm not sure Dan can hear us now. Yeah, I think his connection is kind of flitting in and out there.

37:55 I'm back, I'm back.

37:59 There you go.

38:12 Yeah, yeah, I'm going to hide my videos so yours can be a little bigger.

38:21 Rick, why don't you go ahead and hide your video while Dan shares his slides here?

38:25 Okay.

38:29 Okay, yep, you're good to go, Dan.

38:36 How do I make my mind bigger? I'd like to get it full screen, I guess.

38:44 That'll have to do.

38:45 Okay, so this first one is just—you know, I've always thought when I can walk out my fields and see fungi growing, I'm probably down the road of creating the kind of environment we're looking for for mycorrhizal fungi, which are really a foundation of the system we're trying to create. So I just included that picture just because that makes me smile when I see that.

39:12 I'm just going to talk about beans real quick here because we've all been around no-till organic beans, and again all echo, Rick—kudos to Aaron Silva because she has really helped us get the confidence to go down this road that I don't know if we ever would have had without her. Thank you, Aaron. So this year we had kind of a different—we've been rolling and doing, and so we're waiting and waiting and waiting, and more time when we composed. This year we had more like—you see how it's gooseneck crook where the roller hit it? It really affected, I think, the vigor of our plants. So I still don't understand what was different about this year that made that work that way, but it really hampered our bean growth early, and something we hope we don't see again.

40:35 So on to corn. This is a picture of my son, Damon, standing out in a field. This is our diverse perennial organic strip till experiment, and we've got over—I think right at 10 species of plants, perennial plants out here. We've got a couple different clovers.

47:20 Really be able to do the job and we found we could sever horse weeds and different things with this. Once we got the weight on it so it'll do a pretty good job on a lot of things but not very effective on annual grasses, that's our nemesis.

47:35 And then the last technology we're working on trying to develop that's a little unique is a romo and it's not as robust as we'd like it but we've got it to where it works pretty good. And it just gives us another way to go out there to avoid a cultivator at certain times.

47:57 So that's all my slides guys.

48:06 All right thank you Dan. Yeah and you know I got to see some of that this summer, saw that perennial mix that you planted that corn into and the romo and the inner row crimper in action. And you know just really impressive, not only the management systems that you guys are putting in place but the creativity that you're coming up with to develop some of these tools because, you know, even five six years ago a lot of these tools weren't even available that are helping you do some of these. Because as you lose tillage as a tool, as you lose herbicides as a tool we still have to have tools so we have to replace that, you know, with both tools and management.

48:51 Guys we could go on forever here with you guys sharing slides and information. Such good stuff I know there's a ton of questions so Noah why don't you go ahead and start. I'm gonna hide my video I'll let you come on. Why don't you go ahead and start curating some of the questions out to Dan and Rick there. We'll see how many of these we can get through.

49:13 Yeah absolutely. We'll start off here with Ruth asks: Is your perception of risk because you had more to lose versus a beginning younger farmer? And sorry guys you do have a bit of gray showing. Go ahead, I'm not sure I understand the question.

49:36 Well I think what she was asking about when it was in reference to not starting off, you know, jumping right into it and maybe Dan you're the wrong person to ask when it comes to that but was there more risk because you were largely into that at that point or is it more to lose as a beginning younger farmer?

49:59 Well I think what Rick referenced in terms of having a strong financial position is that just the transition alone is taxing because you're probably going to see you'll drop. I mean remember these soils we've done everything for them for fifty years and now we're asking them to do everything for themselves. And the tools and the microbes and the mycorrhizal fungal systems those networks we've killed them off and now it takes time to bring them back. So there is a lag, a drag I think initially in this system and part of it's us learning how to manage it and part of it is the soil trying to come out of its detox and start to respond to providing for these plants so that we don't have to. And so between those two you know you see a pretty good drop in cash flow. And you know to the extent that older farmers, I guess I'm being called an older farmer now, may have built a little more cushion, it does make it a little easier to weather that storm. But I'd say anybody can do it but just it's like in I'm a former commodity broker, when you trade they always talk about trading within your means. And I would say the same thing applies here: transition within your means. And if you've got enough pushing and I want to be more aggressive great. But if you're a young farmer and you really want to get started on this, just start at a level that you can afford to have a disaster to and not wipe you out, that's the important thing.

51:42 Okay, what did you guys use to determine the soil biology and what were you comparing it to? Rick do you want to start with this one?

51:52 I have to thank Rick Haney for this one. He's got a tremendous test that shows the biological life of your soil, the health of it. And we've been doing testing, I don't know maybe six years, we've been doing his testing. We do it twice a year and we take it in at the locations are geospatially marked so we're going back to the same location every time. And we're going to three locations in a field: the highest product producing part of the field, the worst producing part of the field, and the average producing part. And we're pulling three samples from each field and we do that twice a year and then we track what we're getting back from their tests. And I will say one thing: I think the lab that you send it to could give you different results so you got to be careful on who you're using and where you're sending that to. But the Haney test has been very important to see the soil health.

52:56 Okay Dan do you have any anything else to add to that? Ditto kudos to Rick Haney to try to look at soil fertility like a plant.

53:05 I think that's really important. And the other thing I would add you asked what made us realize, well, you know when you look at things like fungal bacterial ratios which comes from the PFLA test, I think that's another test we used to look at fungal populations. When you look at the ability to, what do they call it, the Soviet test, the burst, all these things are good indicators of biological activity. And in our case I mentioned the CCSI project. We had a field that had been no-till 30 years like I said earlier, 20 years of cover crops and mostly manure for fertility. And we sampled we had areas within that field that were blocked out with no cover crops for part of this test. So we had within our field we had cover crop, no cover crop, and then we had a neighbor's field, same soil type but managed conventionally, that we also sampled. And that's where we really saw that biologically we weren't that much different from the conventional tilled field. And that was really discouraging for me and really caused me to take a long look at what we're doing and try to figure out why it was that we hadn't made the strides that I've seen other people make.

54:28 Okay, Doyle asks, have you ever had a field flat out fail and why? I'll start with that because the answer is definitely yes. I mentioned our perennial field. The first year we had a really wet spring. We weren't able to plant until about the 10th of June. And then from the 15th of June until the 23rd of August we basically didn't have any rain. And so you had this young corn plant competing with these established perennials. And you know some of the plants actually died. They looked like a pineapple field. And by the time August rolled around it was apparent there wasn't going to be grain to harvest. But we did have a lot of biomass that started back in once it did start raining. We went ahead and took a cutting of hay off of it. And so that was zero yield. We had another field that year, same kind perennial experiment that we grazed. So that's one of the advantages of having livestock in the system is it does give us the ability to utilize things. Even a disaster has some.

55:37 Those are probably our two worst disasters so far. Yeah, I would agree there. I don't like to use the word failure. I like to use things like that was an outcome we didn't quite expect. We can learn from failures, but I understand what the question is all about. And yeah, my answer is back to the cover crop. When was it established? We didn't get that, you know, for whatever reason. I mean this spring, 2020 has been hard in many, many ways. Dan had army worms. We had black cutworm. We had a frost way late in the spring. It affected the way the cereal rye tillered. I mean, all of these things are out of our control. We can only do what we can do. And sometimes you know, Mother Nature throws a curveball and you gotta be able to roll with it. So again, it goes back to that financial foothold where you've got to be able to have X amount of percent of your acres could be a zero, maybe not a zero, but less than desirable so that you can carry the load on the rest of the farm.

56:50 Scott asks, do you have problems with herbicide drift from neighbors and if so, how do you deal with that? We on all of our organic fields we leave a 30-foot buffer around all our edges and we use that for pollinator habitat as we're trying to establish a diverse community of insects, a balanced community. And so, so far we really haven't had any issues. We've had, you know, close calls, but that's so far served us well. We have a lot of fields where we're our neighbors, so that helps a lot too. Yeah, same thing. We, you know, with the organic certification, you have to have buffer areas between your neighbors' corn fields for the cross-pollination. Same thing we've been doing. Pollinator strips around them with a mix of annuals because these strips are moving around the farm every single year. Yep, it's good to have those pollinator strips. They bring in a lot of beneficials.

58:05 So speaking of the pollinators, Ken asks, how are you terminating that balance of clover? The balance of clover, the reason why we picked Baloney's fixation clover, well, many reasons. As you can see on my slide, it fixes a lot of nitrogen and it's sequestering a lot of nutrients. But it has a hollow stem about the size of your pinky. And when it is rolled at the correct growth stage, we can terminate it with that roller crimper with the chevron. It just, it's like taking a straw, put it in between your two fingers and pull it down. It's kind of the same concept. You know, at the outset, Keith talked about the holy grail. If there is a holy grail.

58:54 To organic no-till corn it may well be balanza fixation clover because of its ability to produce the nitrogen and biomass for weed control and because of our ability to terminate it without chemicals or tillage.

59:09 The challenge with it is getting it to survive an Indiana winter. We often go through a big part of winter without snow cover and so we get these arctic blasts, we get these two inch rains in January on frozen ground, we get ponding a little bit here and there, and then things freeze. So if you can figure out how to get balanza clover planted at the right time and get it to survive winter, then no-till organic corn is very doable.

59:41 Yeah and I want to jump in there and dovetail you there. A lot of the things that we talk about are what he just said. What are we going to do to get first of all what are we thinking? September 1st is probably the premium date to plant balanza fixation clover. How do we accomplish that? We have acres that go to regen, that means there's no cash crop. We are strictly building the biology in that field and setting it up for that timing event to be successful with the fixation clover.

1:00:17 What we found on our farm, and again Dan's right, those clippers come down from Canada and can ruin all your plans, but if we can get to third trifoliate in the fall we can probably have success with that clover next spring. How do you do that? Cereals and do not double crop. All these things make differences on the success for next year. So totally agree with Dan, it is a tremendous legume and we just gotta make sure we got it next spring.

1:00:56 Okay it is 6:30 but I want to get to just a couple of last questions here. I'm going to try to lump them up as far as categories. You mentioned the roller crimping. Tyler asked can I use a mower on my cover crop earlier to start or do I need to use a crimper? He's still conventional and then kind of a follow-up to that, do you think Jeremy Brown asks do you think that rolling covers will work in a dry climate from an organic cotton farmer in West Texas?

1:01:27 So my take on that would be the difference. We have a flail chopper that we use in certain situations. I think it can be a great tool. It's going to, one of the things that's going to change is how quickly your amount of residue is going to break down. If you flail chop you're going to get a faster breakdown and a quicker nutrient release probably than if you crimp roll.

1:01:53 If your goal is feeding that plant early it's probably better. If your goal is biomass and weed control later into the season then it's probably going to hurt you. So I don't think there's a one size fits all there. Both are tools that we want in our arsenal and have a place.

1:02:10 As far as working in drier climates, you know one of the benefits of crimping and rolling down all this biomass is that we cut off the evaporative loss quite a bit. I don't know that it's zero but it's certainly a heck of a lot less than a tilled field and we maintain our moisture. And I've seen times we've been two or three weeks without rainfall in the summer and 80 90 degree temperatures and it's bone dry and cracking until ground, and you can go out under these crimped cover crops and there's still moisture there. So I think it would really be an asset in that way.

1:02:55 Okay this will be the last question here. Let me just get to who said that. Dave Gifford said our fields are very full of grass seed and weeds from their organic transition. I'm hoping to have some suggestions for getting fields clean enough to go no-till.

1:03:14 My opinion on that is I'm not worried about the weeds to be honest with you. If we eliminate tillage we're not re-germinating those weed seeds. They're staying on the surface, they're degradating, they're being eaten by microbes, they're being eaten by rodents. I think it's just the normal progression to move through that and have grass. But now grass is on our farm everywhere. Now foxtail is our nemesis and I'm not quite sure on that one yet, but I think if we can stop tillage altogether a lot of these weed problems go away.

1:04:07 Yeah to echo what Rick's saying, I think there was research done in Iowa State and they showed that if you leave weed seeds on the surface 99 of them are gone within three years. So a lot of the weed issues that we've experienced both conventionally and organically probably have more to do with tillage than anything else. And the whole notion that we're going to control weeds by controlling the wheat seed bank, well it's one of those, how's that working for you? And I don't care whether you're organic or otherwise.

1:04:44 We see that not being very effective. So our strategy is to try to leave those on the surface or the insects, the birds, the worms, the rodents, everything can eat them and hopefully do some sanitation that way.

1:05:02 The other thing I would recommend that is very helpful: alfalfa is a tremendous crop if you've got a really weedy mess. A couple years of alfalfa where you're out there mowing every 21 to 25 days and not having to do any tillage is a great way to clean up a field and reduce your pressure.

1:05:27 Okay, well with that, we are going to wrap up. Thank you guys so much for your time. There was obviously a ton of questions that we did not get to. So what I'm going to do is if you guys have questions that you really want to get answered, you can email those to me. My email is noah@greencoverseed.com, and then I can compile those questions and get them sent to Dan and Rick that way they can hopefully get those answered for you.

1:05:53 Thank you guys so much for your time. I do want to give Rick here a little shout out. He's got a website if you guys want to go learn more about what he's doing, especially on the consulting side. That is www.farmgreen.land, and you can follow him as well at farmgreen13.

1:06:12 And Dan, I apologize if there's a place you'd like me to plug as well. We can get that on the recording of this. This was recorded and we'll have that up later this week. So if you think that there are people that would find value in this conversation, please share that with them.

1:06:29 Next week we will have the grand finale with Dale Strickler. He's going to be talking about restoring the skin of the earth, kind of looking at the drought resilient farmer aspect of that. So with that, Dan and Rick, thank you guys so much for your time. Do you guys have any closing thoughts?

1:06:48 Well, without getting too in depth, I think the foundation of what we're trying to do here all revolves around soil biology, getting mycorrhizal fungal networks reestablished, getting the azobacter bacteria and all those natural systems that used to allow the soil to provide for itself back in place. It's kind of a build it and they will come type thing. And Rick mentioned that there are certain behaviors that probably are counterproductive, you know, like heavy doses of manure, but we're trying to do everything we can to rebuild those soil infrastructures that can do the work for us.

1:07:34 Yeah, I'd like to end with: change is good. And I know that's hard and we're stuck in our ways, but we have to step out of the comfort zone a little bit. And if you don't, I mean folks, my kids were just in diapers yesterday and now I have grandchildren. So time goes fast. We have to step out and start change now.

1:08:04 And I also want to say one more thing: Keith Burns at Green Cover Seed, they have everything under the sun. If you want to go on a quest to try to stump him with something, I don't think he can because they've got every species there is available. You can come up with forage packages, you can come up with cocktails for corn crops, you can come up with cocktails for soybeans. You can get whatever you need to. Keith may not be able to talk to you personally, but there's somebody there that's going to be able to help, and I'm telling you they've got a very good website, including Valencia clover if we're going to shout out a nice plant.

1:08:46 There, yeah, I appreciate that. You know, if we can't find it or we don't have it, we'll go looking for it. If it's out there, we'll try to find it.

1:08:56 Yeah, I want to echo that a little bit. The thing that drew me to Green Cover, you know, why did I go to Nebraska for cover crop seed? Well, initially it was the Smart Mix calculator, and that is one of the best tools to really learn and begin to visualize and think about how putting together mixes to accomplish a variety of goals can work. And that's been fundamental to our ability to do better and better at reaching our goals. So a great tool if you guys haven't done it, I really highly recommend that. It's free.

1:09:34 Said it better. If we paid you to say that, thank you guys. We appreciate that.

1:09:39 I know my only closing thoughts is folks, I appreciate you jumping in on this. My guess is we're not done with these guys yet. I think we're going to be bringing them back for some encore performances. Don't know exactly what that looks like or when, but there's too much knowledge here that obviously we're not going to cover it in one session. So we'll be looking at how to best roll out additional information from both Dan and Rick down the road. So guys, thank you so much. Have a merry, very merry Christmas, and we will be talking to you soon.

1:10:12 Thank you. Bye-bye to you guys. You all have a wonderful evening. We'll see you next week at 5:30 for Dale Strickler. Take care.