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Conservation Ag Update is brought to you by Sound Agriculture.

Happy March Madness everybody. Great to have you with us here on Conservation Ag Update. I'm Noah Newman. Hard to believe some of you might be planting already by the time our next episode airs in early April. So, we figured now is a great time for some last-minute planter maintenance tips from our good friend, Clay Scott. He's a field support specialist for Precision Planting.

Clay's five action items right here. Make sure your boxes are cleaned out. Your meters, openers, seed tube guards and drive chains are good to go. And he's a big believer in replacing drive chains every year. Also, make sure your seed firmers have the right tension on them. And when it comes time to plant, Clay says don't go too crazy on the first day, just in case there are some gremlins lurking around.

Do not go out the first day of 2025 and think, "Man, I am going to set the world on fire. I'm going to go plant 200 acres today," or whatever your number is as a good day. Do not go out there thinking that. I want you guys to plant 10 acres your first day of 2025 because I want more time out of the cab than I want in the cab. That first day, maybe we have done our planter maintenance. We've gone through, we've took every nut and bolt loose, we've painted, we've done everything. Maybe we missed some stuff. Maybe things didn't get tight. Maybe we didn't get something shimmed right. Maybe we need to tighten some things up. So, that first day of 2025, I want to make sure, let's slow down. Let's pump the brakes. Let's get out of the cab and check things.

And for more on Clay's five action items, we included a link to his No-till Conference session in the episode article on No-TillFarmer.com.

Time now to visit with a true conservation innovator, Walnut, Illinois farmer Alan Madison, who started promoting no-till and strip-till decades ago during his 30-year run with NRCS. Today, he strip-tills 100% of his corn and soybeans and he follows eight steps to achieve high yields and strip-till success, which includes broadcasting cereal rye on all 2,000 of his acres immediately after harvest with this pendulum spreader.

Cover crop, seeding that cover crop in there does help that compaction, so that can work for you. We're using starter. We've used starter for 40 years on the planter, looking at at least somehow getting maybe 20 units or 30 units of nitrogen out there and some zinc is a key component. And then there's a lot of other things you can put with that to maybe help improve it somewhat. And then make sure your planter is set up with the right row cleaners and disc openers and closing wheels and those kind of things. And there's a lot of information out there on how to set up Precision Planting planters. And then, of course, we spoon-feed nitrogen, so we're putting some on with the planter. We put some on with our herbicides and then side dressing. And if we have to, we actually do some Y-drops later in the season.

And the final thing on Alan's checklist is you harvest early, usually around the last week of September so that heavy residue can start breaking down into the soil before he makes his strips in early November.

Now, let's check in with Baltimore Orioles fanatic Mackane Vogel for today's Cover Crop Connection.

Thanks, Noah. Well, this week, we kicked off the sixth annual National Cover Crop Summit, which featured more than half a dozen presentations from a variety of great speakers covering several different cover crop related topics. But if you missed out on the sessions, we've got you covered. You can still sign up to gain access to all of this year's sessions as well as more than 40 sessions from past years, and you'll have an entire year to view them at your convenience.

Here's just one clip of a session from this year. Check out father-son farming duo, Roger and Nick Wenning, as they explain how they started planting cover crops before they even knew what a cover crop was.

I actually started back, I guess, in the mid '80s. I didn't know it was cover crops because we didn't know what a cover crop was. But I have a lot of rolling ground and I got tired of watching my soil wash down into the creek. So, I started contouring, planting weed around on them and up and down all the little gullies. I used them for erosion control. Worked beautiful.

Well, then I started noticing we tried some no-tilling in it then too. There was a few guys in the county no-tilling. Cover crops, nobody had heard of, so we were on our own there. But I had a couple of guys to talk to, and we worked on some no-tilling. And even early on, I noticed that ground was a little more mellow. We could get a stand because otherwise, those hills over the years had eroded and we worked it. You just had clods, about two-inch clods. You'd drop your corn in and wait for rain and hope maybe some of it had come up. But we just noticed the ground was more mellow.

A fascinating cover crop origin story there from the Wennings, and that's just one snippet of one presentation. So, be sure to go to CoverCropSummit.com to sign up for the summit and hear the rest of their story, as well as several other fascinating lessons, anecdotes, research summaries, and more in the world of cover crops.

Well, that's all for this week's Cover Crop Connection. Until next time, I'm Mackane Vogel. Back to you, Noah.

Thanks, Mackane. Switching gears, diversity is not just important for cover crops and rotations, but also for herbicides says Bryan Young, Professor of Weed Science at Purdue University. Young says no-tillers should diversify their weed management toolbox because, as he tells us here, some of our current herbicides might not even work in a few years.

Well, I think by the end of this decade, there's a good chance there'll be some fields where the auxin herbicides and glufosinate, Liberty, don't work anymore on important species like Palmer amaranth and waterhemp. I think that's pretty easily said because in some fields, we already have one or maybe two of those herbicides that have stopped working. So now, we're just relying on the other one, the third one, to take us home the rest of the way. And I don't think it's going to last for six years. We don't have that much time, even if we practice good crop rotation and only apply it three more times, but there's a lot of herbicides we apply in our corn that we're also applying to our soybeans today.

And that's the other thing that we've done is if a herbicide worked in corn, we decided, well, why don't we use that in soybeans as another tool? So, that's where we really aren't rotating away from some herbicides like we used to be able to when we had, let's just say, non-GMO crops pre-1996. After herbicide resistant crops, that's when we enabled a lot of herbicides be used in corn and beans because they're good and effective, and why not use them? Well, it contributed a little bit towards herbicide resistance evolution is a good reason why we should not have.

Interesting stuff there. Young says a good place to start is by focusing on rotating post-emergent herbicides from year to year.

And moving on now to our video of the week, our John Dobberstein got the scoop on a brand-new innovation from ETS at Commodity Classic 2025. It's a cover crop seeder that can be used while making strips and applying fertilizer. Let's check it out.

With all of the movement that we've got to increase cover crop acres across the US, we've had a lot of customers that are asking about doing the cover crops while they're making their strip-till pass in the fall. So, this is a chance to be able to apply your cover crops while you're still applying your fertilizer and creating those strips with your SoilWarrior.

So, the cover crop kit, you have the applicator and tank system that's mounted on the front of the SoilWarrior and then it's delivered through air to the rear of the machine. We have the blockage sensors back here to make sure that we do have consistent flow out of each of the tubes. And then we do have multiple locations where we can apply this product or apply the cover crops.

Here, we're showing it to be applied between the rows, but we do have the ability to apply the cover crop directly into the strip to make sure that we could get to those cover crops to establish and hold the soil after the strips have been created. So, we got the flexibility to set this up for whatever the customer wants it to be doing.

Pretty cool. The tank can hold up to 40 bushels of cover crops. If you saw something that caught your eye at one of the shows this winter, let me know about it at nnewman@lessitermedia.com.

And before we go, we honor the life and legacy of Lessiter Media co-founder Pam Lessiter, who passed away March 8th after an unwavering seven-year battle with lung disease. In March of 1981, Pam and her husband, Frank Lessiter, bought No-Till Farmer, Farm Building News and the National Farm Building Show and founded our company, Lessiter Media.

We wouldn't be here without Pam. She was instrumental in keeping the business afloat through the ag recession of the 1980s and was credited as ahead of her time among chief financial officers in the niche media world. Pam was a model of how business and an enormous heart for people can go hand in hand, and her impact is felt every day around these offices. Rest in peace, Pam Lessiter.