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Hi, everyone. Mackane Vogel here at Walnut Creek Seeds Farm in Carroll, Ohio. Welcome to Conservation Ag Update.

Conservation Ag Update is brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment.

Hey, welcome to Conservation Ag Update. Great to have you with us. Cover crops, new equipment, cutting edge no-till practices and much more were on full display at the CTIC's Conservation and Action Tour in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. No-till farmers John Duberstein and Mike Lesser had a front row seat to all the action, which included on-farm visits to a couple of local no-till and strip-till operations, as well as stops at POET headquarters and the U.S. Geological Survey's Earth Resources Observation and Science Center. Also, two Conservation Ag giants were inducted into the CTIC Hall of Fame, longtime Dakota Lakes research farm manager Duane Beck, and the late no-till legend David Brandt, whose son Jay and daughter Amy accepted on his behalf. So we caught up with the Brandts and Beck afterwards to discuss how they're still blazing the trail for Conservation Ag.

What brought the greatest pleasure to David, my dad, was that my son Christopher is able to take over the farm operation using the same practices that he was promoting and bringing in his own flavor into that, his own experience in building on that. So we're trying to continue with our farm as an example farm in conservation agriculture, using no-till practices, crop rotation, cover crops that we can entertain folks to come and see it in practice and develop confidence to take away how it would work in their system.

So one of the things that we do now, just as a demo for people, if you come in the summer when we have the irrigators fired up, the one thing we always do with the crowd is we'll have an irrigator put on two inches of water. It goes on in nine minutes. We'll set a bucket there and they can see it and then we walk them behind the irrigator and they don't get their feet muddy. Well, if you think about it, you could do the same thing in the lawn in your front of your house or in a pasture or any place in the woods. The only place you get your feet muddy is in tilled fields.

And you can head to no-tillfarmer.com for much more from the Conservation in Action tour, including video coverage of that CTIC Hall of Fame induction ceremony. All right. So Jay just talked about his son Christopher bringing his own flavor to the family farm. Well, Makane Vogel shows us how in today's Cover Crop Connection. Mackane.

Thanks, Noah. Mackane Vogel here with this week's Cover Crop Connection, and we are in Carroll, Ohio at Walnut Creek Seeds Farm, home of the legendary Dave Brandt. And we're going to toss it off to our Cover Crop segment here with Dave Brandt's grandson, Chris.

So this is a cover crop of cereal rye, winter pea, hairy vetch, flax and Balansa clover. That was planted early September and it got terminated about three or so days after we planted into it, and that would've been around May 8th or so. But this is probably the lowest dense in biomass part of the field. There's poor emergence here, and then everywhere where you actually see biomass, there's corn coming there. So I guess that's what counts. What my grandfather David was primarily focused on was proving it can be done, no tilling in the early '70s, working with Monsanto and glyphosate to prove that no-till was something you could do in the '90s, and then into their early mid-2000s proving that cover crop single species can work 2010s, cover crop mixes work, and they're really good. That was his focus. My focus is on how can the average farmer start using these practices without changing their operation in a large way? What I want to do is I want to figure out how the average farmer can adopt these practices.

Wow, very cool to see Chris following in his grandfather's footsteps. Thanks for that report, Mackane. Well, since we're in Ohio, we have to pay a visit to the longest continuing no-till plots. Quick history lesson for you. Glover Triplett and Dave Van Doren arrived at Ohio State University in the late 1950s. And not too long after that, the duo seeded this no-till research plot in 1962. And hey, it's still going strong today. Manbir Rakkar and Warren Dick from The Ohio State University checking in with some key takeaways from the historic field.

Last year in the summer, fall, it was extreme drought and we took pictures of those. And you can visibly see 10 feet apart no-till versus the tillage plots, huge difference in just visual differences how the crops were doing; same hybrids, same all the fertility program and everything. How much difference it really makes to investing in these kind of soil health practices is huge.

You start reading it more and more the reduced tillage, no-tillage, it's much more resilient to climate change. Everybody talks about climate change, and I don't think conservation ag is going to be the answer to mitigate, to help climate change from happening, but it is a good system to adapt to what's happening. So if it gets, like you said, drier or wetter or hotter or whatever, the no-till will do... they just adapt much better to that climate change. And I think that's another story that needs to get out more, instead of chasing carbon, carbon, carbon. And I agree with Manbir, carbon has so many benefits, so we need the carbon in the field, it's absolutely important. But if we do all the right things, the carbon's going to come naturally.

In Ohio State, no-till innovator Randall Reeder says the plots need to go on for another 60 years because there's still so much to discover. Well, let's head out to Moundridge, Kansas. Now our 2025 strip till innovator Ray Flickner shows us how his corn's holding up in pretty dry conditions.

We have a living root growing throughout the year, get three crops out of two years. So basically, everything's got a crop growing with the exception between the soybeans and the corn planting. And the challenge I've had is I've experimented and I haven't found the answer to that one as to what kind of a cover crop arrangement should I be using before I plant the corn. We dig here in the strips, it's really mellow. We've got good moisture, and we're behind our moisture level by about 10, 12 inches for the year. But we did have an inch of rain about 10 days ago and that strip held the moisture and got a really good stand in the strip there.

Challenge is, trying to make sure the planter stays on the strips. This particular field that was planted here was a 24-row John Deere planter, pull type and he did a really good job with that one. I've got another field here where I had one of my neighbors plant who had a 16-row 3-point mount, and you can tell he had a real hard time keeping the thing on guidance with the strips. And I had that experience with my 8-row planter with the 4640 tractor. Unless you've got a lot of weight on the front end and a lot of tires, it'll pull you around pretty good and you end up fighting the strips there. So that is something one has to worry about when you go to strip tillage is how do you maintain the planter on top of the strip?

Really looking forward to learning more about Ray's system at the 2025 National Strip-Tillage Conference, which you could sign up for at striptillconference.com. That'll do it for this week. Shoot me an email at nnewman@lessermedia.com if you want to catch up. Thanks so much for tuning in as always. But before we go, let's send it out to Daniel Smith at the Lancaster Ag Research Station at the University of Wisconsin. Daniel, take it away.

Hi, I'm Daniel Smith, outreach program manager for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension's Nutrient Pest Management program. Today I'm at the Lancaster Agriculture Research Station chatting to you about research that I'm going to be presenting at the 2025 National Strip-Till Conference in Iowa City, Iowa. Very excited about this project because we're comparing conventional till to no-till to various termination timings of cereal rye. We're very interested in using the cereal rye cover crop for weed suppression and at the Lancaster Farm, we're lucky enough to have a decent population of waterhemp.

During the talk, you're going to learn all about the various yields of this study, comparing, again, no-till, conventional till and those termination treatments of cereal rye, which include two weeks before planting, at planting, two weeks after planting, and finally, a rye-rich harvest for our livestock farmers. We're also going to dive into weed control aspects. So in this study we're also combining pre-emergent herbicides compared to no pre-emergent herbicides, so we've got a lot of weed data to dive into as well. Finally, we're going to talk about how to incorporate some of these systems into your strip till system. So how can we use winter rye in a strip till system for weed control? And then thinking about pre-emergent herbicides, that might be options as well within that system. Very excited to share this work with you. Look forward to meeting everyone at the conference.