Cover crops, new equipment, cutting-edge no-till practices and more were on full display at the CTIC’s Conservation in Action Tour in Sioux Falls, S.D.
No-Till Farmer’s John Dobberstein and Mike Lessiter had a front row seat to all the action, which included on-farm visits to 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.
Two conservation ag giants were inducted into the CTIC Hall of Fame — longtime Dakota Lakes Research Farm manager Dwayne Beck and the late no-till legend David Brandt, whose son Jay and daughter Amy accepted on his behalf. We caught up with the Brandts and Beck afterwards to discuss how they’re still blazing the trail for conservation ag.
Jay and Amy Brandt, David Brandt’s Son & Daughter, Carroll, Ohio: “What brought the greatest pleasure to David, my dad, is that my son, Christopher, was able to take over the farm operation using the same practices that he was promoting and bringing in his own flavor into that. We’re trying to continue with our farm as an example farm in conservation agriculture, using no-till practices, crop rotations, cover crops. We can entertain people to see it in practice and develop confidence to take away how it would work in their system.”
Dwayne Beck, Dakota Lakes Research Farm Manager, Pierre, S.D.: “One of the things that we do now (at Dakota Lakes Research Farm) just as a demo for people — if you come in the summer, when we have the irrigators fired up, we’ll have an irrigator put on 2 inches of water, it goes on in 9 minutes, we’ll set a bucket there and they can see it. Then we walk them behind the irrigator, and they don’t get their feet muddy. If you think about it, you can do the same think in the lawn or a pasture or anywhere in the woods. The only place you get your feet muddy is in tilled fields.”
Head to No-TillFarmer.com for more on the Conservation in Action Tour, including video coverage of that CTIC Hall of Fame ceremony. Jay just talked about his son Christopher bringing his own flavor to the family farm, Mackane Vogel shows us how in today’s Cover Crop Connection.
Watch the full version of this episode of Conservation Ag Update.
