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Conservation Ag Update is brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment. Happy planting season. Welcome to the show. So we're always asking you guys for suggestions at the end of every episode because this is of course your show. I've gotten a few requests for more planter talk, so let's go with a little viewer's choice to kick things off here. Here's Wisconsin no-tiller Ross Bishop sharing some keys of success with his Case IH planter.

These are the areas where I put the nitrogen, I put the ammonium style sulfate because we need sulfur. So that's dribbling right alongside each side of the row. This is where I'm putting a 9189 starter with the zinc and the molasses, and that's falling right down into the seed trench. I'm planting corn. I learned this with the guys that plant sweet corn. I'm planting corn at two inches or better. We're getting better emergence rather than having one come out of the ground today and another one comes out tomorrow. They're all coming out within 12 hours because of that two to two and a half inches. It's much more even emergence, which then you don't have that weed, that corn that comes later on, it's becomes a weed. So you're not wasting that seed. And I've slowed way down and I used to plant at five and a half. Now I'm more at 4.8 to 5. The question is maybe I should slow down even more because the more accurate we are, the better the emergence of the corn.

And that was filmed at one of these Cedar Creek farmers field days. Another highlight from that event was a planter one-on-one session with Chuck Kroonberger of Deere dealer, Reister and Schnell, during which Chuck compared an empty field without covers to rebellious teenager. What? I got to hear this.

An empty corn field, an empty grain field is like a teenager. We all have teenagers or had them, right? If you leave that teenager on its own with nothing to do, what happens to your teenager? It'll run away on you. It'll go bad. It'll grow weeds. Go into marijuana, go into pot, drinking, causing trouble. That's a teenager. If you keep your soil with something in it all the time, busy, something to do, you keep your teenager with something to do all the time, they don't cause any trouble or less anyhow, at least manageable trouble. Same as no-tilling and cover crops. You put the seeds in the ground, you plant it, it grows up manageable, something you can manage. If you get your teenager wild, you can't manage it anymore.

Great analogy. Now to someone who's always staying out of trouble, Mackane Vogel, keeping busy with intramural hockey, award-winning articles and today's Cover Crop Connection.

Thanks, Noah. Well, more than 650 farm advisors from across the US participated in a survey on cover crops, shining light on how they advise growers on cover crops. A report on the survey was released this week by the Conservation Technology Information Center, USDA SARE program, and the American Seed Trade Association. This is the eighth national cover crop survey conducted by those groups since 2012, and the first to focus on advisors. Here's a short clip shedding light on some of the results.

Those that actually have experience working with cover crops have become very convinced of the benefits, and that's something we hear from farmers widely, that once they've had a few years of experience with cover crops, they really tend to stick with them. They have become a believer in the benefits for soil health and other aspects of their farming and ultimately in their economic bottom line. So next slide.

So one of the questions was what percentage of your farmer clients use cover crops? Of course, this varied from advisor to advisor, but overall, 54% of those said that it was a quarter or less of their farmers. And this isn't surprising. Keep in mind a lot of these farm advisors are advising dozens of clients that have a variety of farming approaches. The barriers that you hear about from farmers not adopting cover crops. Keep in mind that these are perceptions that are from farmers who haven't gotten into cover cropping, but it's important to acknowledge that these perceptions are driving farmers' decision making.

So the two big ones there are the economic return. There's a question from those who have not yet used them. Is this really going to pay off for me? Understandably, any farmer making a decision on spending money on inputs, whether it's cover crop seed, new equipment, a fungicide, they've got to evaluate the economics. So there's a perception among those that haven't yet used them that there might not be that economic return, especially in the first year. We could look at our past cover crop surveys of farmers to see quite a bit of economic data that actually does show that cover crops pay off, especially after the first two to three years. But again, this is a perception that holds some farmers back.

Some really interesting figures and notes from that data, and we'll have plenty more coverage to follow that will dive even deeper into those results. So be sure to stay tuned for more content coming soon on covercropstrategies.com. Well, that's all for this week's Cover Crop Connection. Until next time, I'm Mackane Vogel. Back to you, Noah.

Great stuff as always. Thank you very much, Mackane. Now to one of the top stories on notillfarmer.com, a federal grant program that helped drive cover crop and no-till adoption and other climate-focused practices has been canceled by the Trump administration over concerns about what they call sky-high administration fees. So Brownsburg, Indiana, no-tiller Mike Starkey tells us he's kind of nervous about some of these recent cuts he's been seeing, but it won't stop him from doing what he is doing.

We're somewhat nervous about it. We already actually had a cut in our local soil water conservation district office as of yesterday. It's someone that we really depended on. We're concerned about the grants, the CSP, the CRP, the EQIP, so on and so forth. Is that something that's going to set us back for all what we've done and provided to improve our soils? It's kind of nerve-racking, but we take it day by day and we're going to somehow overcome if there's any issues with that regardless, because I'm going to continue what I'm doing.

And let's head south to Fort Myers, Florida now for the Farm Equipment Manufacturers Association Convention. Mach CEO, Colin Hurd served as technology chair for the event. One of his goals here is to help manufacturers build more technology into their equipment because that's where he sees the industry headed in the next five years.

Well, I think we saw a glimpse into the future this morning, right? We saw a robot, but really what it was is a farm implement. So historically you don't think of farm equipment manufacturers. If you ask a farmer today, tell me about farm equipment manufacturers. They're not going to use the word robot, right? I think in the next 5, 10 years, the word robotics and farm implements are going to be a lot more synergistic, meaning that there's just going to be a lot more automation. So one of the things that some of the speakers in the tech track this week talk through is how do you make decisions on an implement? How do you augment an operator's job and implement more intelligence to do a job better, more efficiently, and really scale that across an operation? And that's really cool. I think we're going to see a lot more of that. Fundamentally, that's robotics.

All right, hashtag Plant 25 is underway with 4% of corn planted nationwide according to the first USDA crop progress report. The Free brothers crew in Phelps County, Nebraska started no-tilling corn last Sunday, and here's what it looked like from inside their cab in our video of the week.

Good afternoon. Thought I'd let you know what we're doing today. Here we are in 2025 and we're planting corn. Here in the last year's bean stubble. And if you look, you can notice that there's a lot of corn residue from two years ago. So there's over there where we've been. We just got started, going pretty good. Well looking a little something like that. Same old thing. Just move a little trash out of your way and lay them in there and we'll see how it goes. This is the earliest I've ever planted corn. We are dry and forecast looks good for temperature. So have a nice day.

And they're getting off to an early start is they're only among the 1% who's planted corn in Nebraska so far. Story ideas, video suggestions, email me nnewman@lestermedia.com. That'll wrap things up for this week's Conservation Ag Update. Thanks so much for tuning in. We'll see you for our next episode, May 2nd. Have a great day.