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On this episode of Conservation Ag Update, brought to you by Sound Agriculture, we head inside Commodity Classic 2025. USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins promises a standing-room-only crowd rapid action and support from her agency to help get the industry on its feet this year.
Longtime South Dakota no-tiller Rick Bieber shares the eye-opening results from a 5-year trial comparing no-till fields with no inputs to no-till fields with “best management” inputs.
In the Cover Crop Connection, Rob Myers, University of Missouri agronomist, shares tips for seeding cover crops this spring. Plus, Indiana landowner Mary Huber shares a story about going the extra mile to get one of her farmers started with cover crops.
In the Video of the Week, Marlette, Mich., farmer Ryan Shaw shows how he’s implementing cereal rye on 100% of his strip-till acres.
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Full Transcript
Noah Newman:
Conservation Ag Update is brought to you by Sound Agriculture.
Hey, welcome to the show. Great to have you with us as always. Let's kick things off in Denver, the home of John Elway, for Commodity Classic 2025. We had boots on the ground. Senior Editor John Dobberstein was there for all the action, which included educational sessions from familiar no-till and strip-till names like Dave Hula, Kelly Garrett, Randy Dowdy, Fred Bielo, just a cavalcade of stars. USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins, meanwhile, took the main stage and promised the standing-room-only crowd rapid action and support from her agency to help get the industry on its feet This year.
Brooke Rollins:
Today, I am proud to announce that the Economic Assistance Program will be called the Emergency Commodity Assistance Program, ECAP. You know we love the acronyms in Ag, don't we? And at USDA. ECAP is the new program to help us distribute that $30 billion in fines that the Congress passed in December. They gave us 90 days to start distributing that first 10 billion in economic assistance, and we are on track to beat that and get that money starting to move immediately in the next few weeks.
Noah Newman:
Now, Rollins also promised a streamlined application process. Head to no-tillfarmer.com for more information and coverage from Commodity Classic 2025. Turning our attention now to an interesting multi-year study. So South Dakota no-tiller Rick Bieber split one of his fields in half. One field got no fertility, and the other side got his best management practices. Well, yield went down 10 to 15% on the first three years on the side without inputs, but by year four, yields were pretty much equal and even better by year five. So Rick, how in the world did this happen?
Rick Bieber:
We see that it's balanced itself. Our testing that we're doing on it all will show that our nutrient content on the fields with zero fertility have actually been going up significantly. And that's all because of a practice or a process that's called rhizophazycycline, where plants actually can manufacture and will manufacture their own nutrients if the balances are all in the soil. And the balance I'm talking about are biological balances where all your bacteria and fungus and protozoans and all those little critters that many of them I don't understand, when they all come back into a balance, and they only do that when all the chemical side of things, the carbon, the oxygen, the phosphorus, the magnesium, the molybdenum, all those levels become accessible and uniformly distributed within our soil so the plants can get them.
Noah Newman:
Yeah, Bieber never stops experimenting. Here he is seeding a mix of non-GMO corn, turnips, radishes, oats, barley, and more on a freezing cold 19 degree day at the fields of Sinsinawa in southern Wisconsin last week. So frost seeding legumes and spring cereals can work very well, according to University of Missouri agronomist Rob Myers, and as Rob tells us here in the Cover Crop Connection, if you want to wait a little bit longer and plant your covers in April, well, that's perfectly fine too.
Rob Myers:
So frost seeding, when the snow's on the ground or we've got some moisture, even if there is no snow, can be something to think about. The other option for spring seeding is I've had good success coming in with a grain drill as soon as the conditions allow. So where I'm at in Missouri, that's often the last week of March or first week of April. Of course, if you're farther south, you could be potentially going earlier in March. If you're further north, you might be a little more into April. But I've had really good success with spring seeding of crimson clover, Austrian winter peas, hairy vetch can do okay with spring seeding. Again, oats. There's really a variety of things that can be spring seeded and still give us some benefits for both wheat control, nitrogen fixation, and just providing some soil protection, since spring is often our most erosive period in terms of soil erosion.
Noah Newman:
Check out the latest episode of the Cover Crop Strategies Podcast for more spring management tips from Rob Myers. Okay, so last episode, we took you inside the first ever conversations about conservation workshop, teaching landowners about the true value of no-till and cover crops. And during one of those sessions, Indiana landowner Mary Huber shared a story about helping one of her farmers get started with cover crops. Take a listen.
Mary Huber:
I did the research, read up on cover crops, the benefit, as well as how to do them. I talked to the soil and water conservation people to see what they had to say. Plus, I read about it and did research, and then I talked to my farmer about it and proposed to him that for the first couple years I would take care of making all the arrangements and paying for it. And after several years, he converted, and now he also does cover crops on other lands that he farms.
Noah Newman:
And it wasn't just paying for the change that made the difference, she says it was also putting in the work, really digging into something that that particular farmer had never done before. Let's check in with Ryan Shaw now for our video of the week. The Marlette, Michigan, farmer explains how he's using cereal rye on all of his strip-till acres.
Ryan Shaw:
This would be like one of our tram lines, our 120, and the other one would be over there. So then there'd be the 12 rows here, and we're making the berms in between where our cereal rye was planted last fall after the soybeans came off. And we tried to, well, that we'll just let continue to grow for a while. But we were just making our seedbed between all that, and the idea was to not have a whole bunch of that rye in our berm to start with that you were going to be mixing in there, just because sometimes the roots gave us trouble trying to bring it up if we got into heavy clay and stuff. It will almost look like a knife through butter. You could open it and you'd see the wavy colter, but then it was just root masses down in there. So leaving it in them two rows allows us to make a better seed-bed and more comfortable with covering 100% of the acres with a cover crop, knowing that we're not going to have that issue.
Noah Newman:
Good stuff there from Ryan. That'll do it for this week. Got something you'd like to feature on the program? You know where to find me. Shoot me an email at nnewman@lestermedia.com. Thanks so much for tuning into Conservation Ag update. We'll see you in a couple of weeks. Have a great day.
