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Conservation Ag Update is brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment. Hey, welcome to Conservation Ag Update. Great to have you with us. As always. 18% of corn is planted nationwide and 11% in Iowa, which is where we find our good friend Kelly Garrett, the area Iowa no-tiller is once again primarily focused on balancing a soil this year. Here's why.

And I talk about balancing the soil and I talk about balancing the plant. And my first priority is balancing the soil. If you don't balance the soil, your input dollars, your input budget is at least partially wasted. And a lot of farmers, a lot of growers, myself, up until just a few years ago, I didn't understand base saturation, and it needs to be the number one priority.

You can see in the red areas there, base saturation on the potassium is below two. Base saturation to me is the balance of the soil. Perfectly balanced soil, in my opinion, is 65% calcium, 13% magnesium, 4% potassium. There's other things that go into it, but those in my opinion, are the three most important ones. Hydrogen would be right there. Nobody's probably ever brought up hydrogen to you, but hydrogen would be right there. Your highest yielding soils, I can almost assure you have the appropriate amount of hydrogen. The potassium here, we want to look at the red areas where it's down below... Perfectly balanced soil, as I said, is four. The red areas are below two. You're going to go put potash out in there. You're wasting your money.

And Garrett says there's no reason to apply it there without amending the soil. You can catch more of his No-Till Conference presentation on notillfarmer.com. Moving on. Bogard, Missouri, no-tiller, Kyle Hawkins cracked the high yielding code for soybeans when he took home first place in the Golden Harvest Go For the Gold Challenge with a 103 bushel yield. And Hawkins says his yields really started taking off when he changed his planting date.

We started in 2020 doing early planting soybeans. 1st of April, we go out there and we started planting. I will say that it was a battle to get my dad on board with this. And some things you just, if you're getting the planter ready, you just have to pull it out of the shed and throw some seed in it. Go plant it, and it's already planted, dad. That's what we did in 2020, and we had really good yield results out of that. We had 37 acres that averaged 101, a little over 0.62 bushel on 37 acres. And it was a shock and awe thing because at home we've never had that kind of especially fuel average. It wasn't a lot of acres, but it was enough to give you an idea that said, "Hey, we can potentially have something good going here." And as the years went along, we've hit nineties, eighties, depends on the weather early, but planting plant soybeans early has been... And we do some other microbial stuff with another company that I think gives us a pop.

Hawkins' no-tills about 5,000 acres of soybeans. Let's send it over to McCain Vogel now for today's Cover Crop Connection. McCain, take it away.

Thanks, Noah. Well, earlier this week I had a chance to catch up with Lisa Kubik. She's an Iowa grower who grazes cattle and grows corn, soybeans and cover crops, but she also works with growers through Agoro Carbon Alliance. She told me about a cover crop case study at another Iowa farmer she recently worked with who saw great cover crop success by, get this, accidentally planting green. Here's Lisa with the full story.

As with what happens on a lot of our farms, we have a plan going in and sometimes it doesn't work out quite like we planned. With this specific grower, his original plan was not to plant green, but he ended up planting green. And luckily for him, it turned out as a great experience. There were some places where he had a little bit of effect on germination where he saw a few less plants that germinated just because of the cereal rye that was still there. But in most cases, the crop came up beautifully as long as his row cleaners were working well, which happened on most of the fields. Last spring, which is when he first tried this cover crop, we did have a ton of rain, just heavy rains all at once, and he could see a pretty dramatic difference from where he didn't have cover crops or neighbors didn't have cover crops to where he did.

He said, "Visually, big difference," as far as erosion control and where he was able to see that rain actually truly saturating the soil. In this area where we haven't had a lot of rain in the last couple of years, being able to soak in some of those big rains when we don't get the little rains will make a big, big difference. Overall, he did see a benefit in the cover crops. Didn't see any issues as far as compaction. The field that we specifically talk to him about has been chopped for silage the last two years. Typically, we see a lot of compaction from that practice. There's not a lot of residue left, and we're running pretty big machinery over that ground. He's seeing no compaction, which I would attribute a lot of that to that cover crop continuing to grow as well as our cash crop, of course.

Well, a great cover crop story there that just goes to show that sometimes the most valuable lessons on the farm are learned by accident. Well, you can hear the full discussion with Lisa on the Cover Crop Strategies Podcast. Just head to covercropstrategies.com. That's all for this week's Cover Crop Connection. Until next time, I'm McCain Vogel. Back to you, Noah.

Thanks a lot, McCain. Great stuff as always. Special treat now. I caught up with soil health legend Jerry Hatfield to talk about his upcoming presentation at the Strip Toe conference and also the keys to expanding our knowledge about soil health. Here's part of our conversation.

We want our soil to supply water. We want it to supply nutrients. We want it to provide support. We want it to have an aspect in terms of oxygen exchange. And if you look at all that relative to strip-till, we're only cultivating a really narrow band of this system out there and then you've got all the residue on there, so we've got that protection of the microclimate. We've got that water dynamic. We've got a stable home for the microbes to do their thing. All of those different pieces contribute to soil health. You just take and look and saying, "What are the avenues to soil health?" And then you flip it back and say, "What strip-till do in terms of these avenues?" And they're headed right down that path. And I think people need to understand that these dynamics are really critical to help us bring all this together. And I think that becomes a critical piece of how we begin this understanding.

Now, for someone who's never seen one of your presentations before or what can we expect from a Jerry Hatfield presentation?

That's an interesting question, Noah, in terms of this, but it's really about how do you communicate to producers? I have 45 years of science, but really my dad taught me, he says, "Take all that science and make it understandable to a producer. And that's really what you get out of this is it's something that everyone that's in the audience should have something to take away and say, "How do I do this?" And if not, ask questions about it. I'm freely available all the time in terms of before and after conferences. People know how to get ahold of me. And it's really about how do we work together in this understanding? Because there are things that I'll admit that I don't quite understand either yet because we deal in a pretty complex system, I pick up a lot of my crazy ideas of what needs to get done from producers that ask questions. And it's really about a dialogue, and that's what I hope that whole presentation does is create a dialogue.

I've seen your presentation before and you'll share some data and charts and some things that are normally pretty complex. You do a really good job of taking that complex data and information and transforming it into a story that's understandable for farmers.

And that's what I hope. That's my whole goal is to make it understandable. When I retired from USDA, people asked me what I was going to do and I said, "I'm going to help agriculture." And to help agriculture is you have to really work with agriculture. You can't just stay above it and say, "Well, it's there." You have to get your hands dirty, so to speak. But you also have got to pay attention to what is going on and really explain that and not be afraid to say, "I don't know. I don't know how some of these things work, but together we're going to figure them out."

Really looking forward to seeing Jerry at the National Strip Tillage Conference, July 31st through August 1st in Iowa City. For more information, head to striptillconference.com. Precision Planning, PTI Farm's new high speed planning study is out and PTI Farm manager Jason Webster says the data shows that not only were yields maintained at higher speeds, but they actually increased in some spots.

Traditionally, there's some growers that really felt that the only way they could do a good job of planting is if they planted slower. And yes, that was the case years ago, decades ago, but now we've got technology, high-speed planting technology where we can plant faster without sacrificing performance. To prove this, we've looked at yield data. We put trials in. We put protocols in at the PTI Farm from 2018 to 2024, we planted it four, six, eight and 10 mile an hour planting corn. And there's just been very little yield difference from those planting speeds. Matter of fact, there's only been a two point one bushel difference from the slowest speed to the highest speed. What does this mean? Well, it means with speed tube, high speed planting technology, you can plant faster and you don't have to worry about yield falling off. It's been very, very consistent.

Now of course, Webster notes these results are based on using high speed planting technology. The results aren't the same with non-high speed tech.

We've tried to do high-speed planting with seed tube, and it simulates you as a grower. You got seed tubes on your planter and you're trying to get done planting a field, and all of a sudden the black clouds come rolling in and it's going to rain. And you say, "Well, let's hurry up and get this field done. Let's throttle up. Let's plant faster to get this field done." Well, we've done that with seed tube and we've run into some real problems. Matter of fact, this past year in 2024 where we did that, we took five mile an hour planting speeds, ramped it up to 10 mile an hour with traditional seed tubes. We lost 11 and a half bushel of corn times the price of corn. That was nearly a $50 loss on a per acre basis. However, we use that same five mile an hour, ramp it up to 10 mile an hour using speed tube. There was only a difference of point seven bushel to the acre, and a $3 difference on a per acre basis. It shows the differences planting fast with and without high speed planting technology.

Good stuff there from Jason. We're going outside the box now with our video of the week. No-till legend, Ray McCormick, is always cooking up something on his Vincennes, Indiana farm. This year, he built a natural pond to boost biological activity and attract beneficial insects and animals. Check it out.

We just completed our natural pond with a spring coming out of the hill and a set of waterfalls. And how this works is we use this stream and these waterfalls to aerate the water, and then we use the circulation of the water in and out from the bottom. And recirculating out is that's how you keep it stirred up and keep it from becoming cold and hot water. And then on each side we'll be planting wetlands in the water that will be swimming in it. And those wetland plants are so aggressive that they take the nutrients out of the water. The algae you see there cannot compete. It can't get the nutrients to survive. This natural pond will have frogs in it and it'll have fish in it and it'll have grandkids in it. And this is our new natural pond.

Those solar panels you saw there actually run the pumps that circulate the water, and that'll wrap things up. Something unique going on in your neck of the wood, shoot me an email at nnewman@lestermedia.com. Thanks so much for tuning into Conservation Ag Update. We'll see you next time. Have a great day.