Brought to you by:

     
   

   

     
   

The Conservation Ag Update Podcast is brought to you by Sound Agriculture.

More from this series

Sound Agriculture delivers bioinspired solutions that enrich soil and improve crops. Our synergistic products empower growers to achieve success while minimizing environmental impact.

SOURCE® activates the soil microbiome, unlocking nutrients for crops through advanced chemistry. BLUEPRINT™ offers the highest-quality arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), extending root systems to improve nutrient and water access.

Beyond our products, Sound leads the way with programs that support growers in adopting sustainable practices to reduce reliance on synthetic fertilizers while maintaining productivity and profitability.

   Full Transcript

Conservation Ag Update is brought to you by Sound Agriculture. Hey, welcome to Conservation Ag Update. Noah Newman here. Great to have you with us as always. Let's fire up no-till chopper, because we are going all over the U.S. for the first segment as Leopold Conservation Award recipients talk about some of the unique things they're doing on their farms. First stop, Harvel, Illinois, where Richard Lyons has been using cover crops since 2012.

There was an opportunity for some clean air money through EQIP and NRCS, and I began, at that time, to use cover crops. With these practices, what I've learned is one of the things you have to do, you have to change your management. It's got to be changed to fit the practice of what you're doing. Today, that's progressed to a five-way mix front of corn, and front of the soybeans is all cereal rye.

The tools that we use in regenerative agriculture, predominantly our planters, they're all no-till. We've actually built a fertilizer bar where we're injecting our phosphorus six to eight inches deep. It's safe, it's going to stay down there, we're not going to see that wash off into the rivers and streams, and it costs us about $5 an acre. The benefit we see from that is actually bigger, and the conservation from that is 10 times what it would be if we were still farming the same way.

Rotational grazing or cell grazing, we have done that now for quite a few years, and it's really made a difference on the quality of the pastures. Of course, we've had some rain too, but... Yeah. In fact, when I check cattle, I usually try to count. Well, you can't because can't see them, because the grass is doing so well. We have some solar panel wells now that I'm so impressed with, and I know that our calves are doing much better when they get well-watered than they don't have to drink surface water.

I learned about Kernza, that it was a perennial grain, that it could be used for food lieu of annual wheat flour, so you plant it once, you can harvest a grain for a few different years, and you can graze it. Kernza's breeding program is monumental in terms of what it can do for the soil. I envision Kernza to be a third crop in a conventional crop rotation. Just think about the benefits, what that would do for everyone.

Wow, great stuff there. For more information on all the Leopold Conservation Award recipients and their systems, head to sandcountyfoundation.org. All right, I made the trip to Nokomis, Illinois this week for the Ag Technology Solutions Group clinic at CEO Skip Klinefelter's farm. Precision Planting's Josh Stoller did a presentation about planters and sprayers, and afterwards, I asked him about some of the technology that's giving him a winning edge on his no-till and strip-till farm.

For us, on our own farm, no-till and strip-till, one of the big things is our closing system. We ended up just a couple years ago, we put on what we call FurrowForce. We noticed we had some tougher to close situations on the planter in harder ground, wetter ground, especially 2024 was wet for us through the entire season, and so we put FurrowForce, which ended up as a two-stage closing system that we closed with the first stage, and then the second stage is kind of managing soil density. We lighten that up, try to just tiptoe over the top of the wet ground, and make sure everything did get fully closed up. That's been a big thing for us.

This year, we're going to start looking more into the technology on the sprayer. We're going to make some changes on the, what we call, SymphonyNozzle, is our PWM control on the sprayer, make sure we do knock out all the weeds, that we don't have escapes and things like that, and looking at some of the camera technology SymphonyVision Rate. We're going to be adding this year as well some of the crop scouting things, crop health, stand counts, stuff like that, or emergence consistency, and just rate control using a full range of a label. If we don't have many weeds, we're going to cut back on the Rate. If we do have taller or more small weeds, we will increase the Rate and use the full range of the label and just try to get more efficient as we go through.

Switching gears now, some lively conversation going on in the No-Till Farmer Email Discussion Group this week. We asked, "What have you done to reduce glyphosate dependence on your farm, and how would you keep no-tilling if glyphosate was banned?" Let's see what you said.

Jason Harold says, "Simply switch to clethodim for rye termination and have a more diverse crop rotation." He's already scaled back his glyphosate use.

Jake Caderly has been in the herbicide business for 35 years as a CCA. He says, "We can farm without glyphosate. It just will cost more, and the timing of applications will be in a smaller window, and there will be more weed escapes. We've had the easy button for a long time now with Roundup Ready crops, I would like to go back to the '90s. With the herbicide-resistant weeds we have today, we need to protect all the chemical choices we have and keep rotating herbicide families to prevent weed resistance."

Alejandro Ladaga checks in from Argentina. He says glyphosate use has actually already gone down dramatically in his neck of the woods because of weed resistance.

Finally, Martin Conce with some great insight as always, here from England. "We have fields that haven't seen fungicides or pesticides for 12 years, no soil applied fertilizers for six years, and no glyphosate for seven years. Yes, we have weeds, but they grow alongside our crops, not against them. Our yields are lower but our test weights are higher. Our inputs have dropped up to 80% in some fields. Many of the so-called weeds we use to battle don't even appear anymore. The removal of synthetic fertilizers could be a major reason for this."

Oh, let us know what you think. Join the discussion at no-tillfarmer.com. Let's send it over to Mackane Vogel now for today's Cover Crop Connection.

Thanks, Noah. Mackane Vogel here with this week's Cover Crop Connection. Well, last week, I told you all about our upcoming National Cover Crop Summit and promised to showcase lots more great topics and speakers, so without further ado, here's Gary Zimmer, another one of our speakers, to preview his presentation about fitting the cover crop to the farm and how to make money doing it.

Yes, we farm in southern Wisconsin. We're organic and we have developed, what I call, an extreme cover crop farming system, where one year, rye cover crops, and the next year, corn. Corners are really big markets. I think that what I'd take away from this is what extreme cover crop farming can actually do to your soil and to your crops, and I think that's kind of the message I'm trying to give out here. Farmers can't understand how we can only actually have an income or a decent income every other year, but our farming system is very profitable, and very low input, and our soils are radically changing. Our soil fertility numbers keep getting higher. I think the piece of the puzzle comes into play is the fact that we actually have a really good organic corn market 10 miles away, and so we make the money on corn.

How do you make money doing it is by the fact that, even if I was conventional, I say we grow excessive amount of nitrogen and that's a big limiting factor for organic farmers, we have our soil structures getting really good. Our weed control is getting better and better every year. We've been doing this for eight years, so there's four rotations on some of this stuff, and so our input costs are low. We don't seem to have very many troubles and soil resilience is built up, and so we're extremely well-satisfied with what we get for results in our farming systems. I look right now at conventional farms, if soybeans get to be $8 next fall and you're going to grow 40 bushel, you might as well take the year off and have a soil building here and then put your insecticides, fungicides, [inaudible 00:07:45], pectin, and nitrogen down and use all the biotechnology if you're conventional.

Great stuff as always from the father of biological farming, Gary Zimmer. There's still plenty of time to register for our fully online and free 2025 National Cover Crop Summit taking place March 18th to 20th, and get access to six great presentations to view at your convenience from the comfort of your own home. Well, that'll do it for this week's Cover Crop Connection. Until next time, I'm Mackane Vogel. Back to you, Noah.

Great stuff. Thanks, Mackane. Can't wait to watch Gary Zimmer's presentation. All right, wrapping up now as always with our video of the week, the No-Till Conference presented Monte Bottens with the Most Outstanding Speaker Award for his 2024 presentation Making Grazing So Easy a Corn Grower Can Do It. Great title, great presentation, and during his acceptance talk, Bottens highlighted some of the on-farm trials he's got going on in Cambridge, Illinois this year. Take a listen.

Every acre on our farm is a test plot, replicated test plot for nutrients, cropping practices. We just started a long-term tillage, tillage cover crop, no-till, no-till cover crop, in partnership with Illinois Soybean to get real intensive data on that. We also have a tile water monitoring project that we're working on. We have a theory. Dad invested a lot in pattern tiling many, many years ago before it was cool, and we're concerned about what nutrients we're sending off, but we think if you manage nutrients right judiciously, we're not having a problem, so we're going to compare a pattern tile system compared to old clay tile system under our nitrogen management versus tapping into the neighbor's tile that would be on a fall-applied higher nitrogen management regime just to have those datasets so that we can be prepared when the regulators want to drop the hammer on us. We can say, "Hey, it's not the tile, it's the nutrient management on top of the tile."

Very interesting stuff. They're looking forward to seeing how Monte's trials shake out. Story idea? Shoot me an email at innewman@lessermedia.com. Thanks so much for tuning into Conservation Ag Update. We'll see you next time.