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No-Till Innovator and 2-time NNTC Presenter of the Year Rick Clark saves an estimated $2 million on inputs per year on his Williamsport, Ind., farm through adoption of regenerative farming practices. 

Clark’s 7,000-acre operation is 100% no-till, 100% organic and 100% free of synthetic nutrients, herbicides, pesticides, insecticides, fungicides, GMO crops, crop insurance and government subsidies. In this No-Till Farmer Podcast, brought to you by NewFields Ag, get a first-hand account of how Clark makes regenerative practices work and makes them profitable. 

         
           

         
           

The No-Till Farmer podcast is brought to you by NewFields Ag.

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Full Transcript

Welcome to the latest edition of the No-Till Farmer Podcast. I'm John Dobberstein, senior editor of No-Till Farmer.

In the latest edition, brought to you by NewFields Ag, No-Till Innovator and two-time NNTC Presenter of the Year, Rick Clark, will share how he's using regenerative farming practices to reduce input costs on his 7,000-acre farm by an estimated $2 million a year.

His farm is now 100% no-till, 100% organic, and 100% free of synthetic nutrients, herbicides, pesticides, insecticides, fungicides, GMO crops, crop insurance, and government subsidies. Let's listen in on his discussion.

I'll give you a little history of our farm. We have been no-tilling soybeans for 21 years. We have been no-tilling corn for 16, cover crops for 16. And if anybody wants to ask a question at any time, please yell, do whatever, because I want to address it at that point in time. And if there's people that can help in questions, let's go for it.

Farming green for 14 years and farming green for me, is raising your cash crop into a living, growing green cover crop. Now, this is hard to do when you're organic like we are, and this is not going to be an organic presentation. This is going to be a presentation on how we save input costs, okay? Epigenetics, I think this is huge.

I have a definition for epigenetics in a little bit. We'll talk about it if we get there. But it's basically allowing your seed, your cattle, your sheep, your goats, whatever the case may be, to adapt to your system. That's epigenetics in a nutshell. So you are pulling seed from your seed bank, and that's your seed for next year's crops.

But you got to do this legally, we'll talk about it. Biostimulants, for three years, we've been using Johnson-Su Bioreactors. I like Johnson-Su Bioreactors because that material is being sourced from your farm, your inputs. A lot of the reactors we build are made out of 100% oak tree leaves that are on my father's farm.

It all comes from the farm somewhere. There's the bioreactors. Nine-crop system. Most of our neighbors farm corn and soybeans, if not all of them. We are now up to nine crops that we plant, and I want to get more all the time. And I understand that markets sometimes play a factor into this, but I will tell you, we have shipped milo to Texas from Indiana.

So you need to rethink your logistics and look outside of your 30-mile comfort zone that you've been selling your crops into all these years, so we have to look for crops. Corn, soybeans, wheat, alfalfa, peas, milo, buckwheat, cover crops, sheep and cattle are what we're raising now.

I'm very, very big on diversity. Whatever that is, diversity in your life, diversity in your row crops, diversity in your cover crops, we need diversity to make this system work. 5,600 acres of certified organic, the remainder is still in transition. No starter fertilizers for 11 years, no fungicides, no seed treatments.

Now, in my opinion, those two there are huge to take out of your system. Take them out, especially anything with a neonicotinoid on it. I don't understand why this is even still allowed to be used. There is no evidence of any kind of a yield increase. There's no evidence that it does anything, except kill the beneficial species.

So we have to figure out a way to take these out and we're going to talk about it in a little bit. No insecticide, another one we have to eliminate. If you are going to go out in a system and you're going to attack one species, like an aphid. I don't know how many times I heard this from the retail plant, "Oh Rick, it's just $2 an acre more, let's just throw in some pyrethroid."

And we have just smoked 2,000 beneficials. No P or K in 11 years, no ag lime in 11 years. And folks, I know there's more to pH than just ag lime, but we've not added lime in 11 years and our pH is at 6.9, 7.0 and been there for years. Once you take the salts and the acids away, you no longer need to use things like ag lime.

Now, I know there's other factors involved too, keeping your P and K in balance, there's all kinds of things involved. No nitrogen applied in six years. We're going to talk about all this, and we're doing this with no-tillage. Now, I want to stay here for a moment. I know we are at the National No-Till Conference, but I am starting to battle perennial weeds.

When you take the amount of years we've been going no-tillage and the amount of years we've been dealing with no chemistry, we now have perennial Canada thistle, chicory, goldenrod, wild thistle, aster, bluegrass, all of these things. Trees, we've got trees growing, so you see, it's proving that succession is real.

When you think about succession, think about a field that you put into CRP. What happens? The first years, it's all grass. Then you get the broadleaves, then you get the trees and the shrubs. That's exactly what's happening to our farm. So we have gone from a bacterial-based farm to now a fungal-based farm.

I've actually probably swung a little too far. We have to understand what the system wants to do inherently. What does your soil want to do inherently? It wants to get to a carbon-nitrogen ratio of about 14:1. So whatever we try to do to screw that up, that's what the system wants to always come back to.

And I can prove that because we have relied on cereal rye too much on our farm. But when you live in Indiana and it's October 25th, you don't have very many choices of what you can plant for a cover crop. But then when you bring that high of a carbon-to-nitrogen ratio species into your system, you have thrown the microbial biome out of balance.

And then it takes days, weeks, months to come back into balance, and that's when we see yield reduction. That's when we see weeds starting to creep in. Foxtail right now is my number one nemesis, foxtail. You want to raise foxtail, you just go out and do any disturbance at all and you've got foxtail.

And really, you don't even have to do that. I'm finding out that when we have the biggest foxtail breakouts is when we're trying to raise a monocrop, which is what all of us in this room are trying to do. Why? When we put species together, like cereal grains and soybeans, cereal grains and peas, and do not terminate the cereal grain, let it grow together, we don't have foxtail.

But when we try to no-till soybeans into a cover crop, and then we terminate that cover crop with a roller crimper, by August 15th, we're going to be flooded with foxtail. And we've done nothing, other than drop a blade in the ground and plant our cash crop. So we have to constantly be changing the way we look at the dynamic. And folks, this soil is a living, breathing dynamic organism.

It's changing by the second, so we have to change. So this is what I'm going to try to do. We are going to try and incorporate some flax and some buckwheat into our cash system, to hopefully not set that trigger off for the foxtail to want to grow. So in other words, we're going to plant flax, buckwheat at the same time we plant soybeans and let them all grow together.

Now, the beauty would be if we'd get all three of those to grow, and what we'll do is we'll just separate them out with the cleaner. This is the future, folks. We need to figure out how to raise multiple species' crops together. Then the next advantage is to find a buyer that will buy those crops as a mix.

A dairy, a feed lot, anybody. We, right now, when we raise our wheat or our cereal rye, we're mixing it with a pea or a soybean. And if it's a pea, it's going to a dairy as that mixture. How easy is that? As a soybean, we clean it, run it through our cleaner, separate the beans out, separate the cereals out, and sell them in two different directions.

We need to start figuring out how to do that with all of the crops that we're raising. Now, I'm not a biologist and I'm not a chemist. I wish I was a biologist, because that's what we are now, we're biologists. And I wish I understood what that is more than I do, but here's what I do know. It's all about pumping the maximum amount of oxygen and sugar into the profile. That's what it's all about.

And you're going to only achieve that maximum ability by maximizing your solar panel or your cover crop, your green crop that's growing. So I don't know about you guys or gals in the room, but I cannot sleep much past 2:30. I don't know why, but I wake up at 2:30, and I got a pad of paper and I got a pencil, and I just start taking notes of whatever's coming into the old brain box.

And I got this crazy notion that we've been doing these cover crops for a while and I want to see what's in these cover crops. I don't know why I came up with this, but I just did. I want to see what's in here. So we went out, and let me set the field up. So this was a field that was planted, the corn in the previous year, corn was harvested.

We went in and at this particular point in time, we had time to do a cereal rye, a 100 pounds of Elbon cereal rye, and we did two pounds of tillage radish. And I think I did three or four pounds of sorghum-sudan, because that's really all the time for the weather we had and I didn't want to spend a lot of money. So two of those species, winter killed.

The cereal rye survived, came out in the spring, came out of dormancy and started to grow. And at 12 inches, this is what we did. Okay, so here's what you do. We do this test so much that we built a two-foot by two-foot square out of PVC pipe, like 3/4-inch PVC. You walk out in the field and you set this square down on the ground, and you get down and you clip everything off inside the square.

Put it in a bag, send it to Lance Gunderson, Regen Ag Lab in Nebraska, and ask him for a feed analysis and this is what you get back. I ran into that like three times, and this is what you get back. Now, this is only a few of the items from that report. I just pulled some out. You know how they tell us that you can't no-till corn into cereal rye? Do we understand why we can't do that?

Some people want to say there's an allopathic effect. I may believe that about this much, but what's really happening is this power that the rye has of sequestering the nutrients that that crop needs. Look at what happens in four days. In four days, 18-inch rye now has 120 pounds of nitrogen. Folks, that nitrogen is tied up. You're not getting to that.

But the beauty of this nitrogen is it's soon to be organic nitrogen, and it's not going anywhere unless the soil leaves the farm. So we have to understand what's happening and this field is going to be planted to soybeans. What do soybeans like? Look at this. Now we understand what the first few slides I put up here showed, where I have not added P or K in whatever many, 11, 12 years.

This is why. But you see, folks, and again, I don't want to step on toes or offend anybody. But when you plant a cover crop in the fall and you come out the first day in the spring, and you burn it to the ground with the chemistry, look how much is being left on the table of potential.

All right. These numbers are great, but luckily I had my brain hooked on, and I decided to come back two months after termination and now look what's in that cover crop. This is power and you only have power when you do testing. I am a data junkie. You have to have data to make decisions. We can now make decisions. And please, I'm not reckless here.

We're testing these fields every year to see if there's a reduction in the P and the K or whatever, sulfur, magnesium, boron, and nothing to date has shown up. So we continue to farm in the way we're farming, but we are going to make some changes. Any questions here to this point? Okay. Now, I took the three biggies off that sheet or off that slide, and I put a value to them.

So the 12-inch rye had 82 pounds of N, that's worth $91 of N, so on and so on, and you get over here to $228. The 14-inch or the 18-inch rye had $350 almost of value. The 28-inch rye had $435 worth of N, P and K value. This is insane, and this is the numbers I use to get there. I don't know what they are today. I don't really care. I don't care what the price of N, P, or K is.

I did this on August of '22. It's probably outdated. I don't know what these numbers are. I imagine they're similar, but this is what I get. This is what really intrigues me, look at the investment I made for the potential return that we made. This is why if we figure out a way to eliminate or greatly reduce inputs, it's going to put money in your pocket.

Now, now is not the time to be a hero because, "I heard Rick talk at National No-Till and we're going to go home and the price of corn sucks and the price of beans sucks, and we're going to just." No, that's not what I'm saying to do here. This is not the time to be a hero.

This is the time though, to start thinking about how do we set our farm up to where we can now start reducing inputs? And I'll tell you how I started to do it in just a little bit.

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That's a great question. His question is, "By the time that that cover crop was dead, does that mean that the crop we had planted has time to get to that? Is that right?" Yes, not all of it.

But in the course of the time from when we maxed out here to when we terminated, at least half of this is going to be available for that soybean crop, and that's all the amount of potash I need.

Now, let me go a little further though. This right here, this 84 pounds of nitrogen that's still left, that is going to be hanging around for the next crop that gets planted, and I hope it's a cover crop.

It's going to stay?

And it's going to stay, it's organic. But we also have to understand here, everything has unintended consequences in life, everything. If we get too high up on our organic nitrogen, how's anything going to get to utilize that? Because it's got to get converted again then back into a form that the plant can take. So we've got to be careful that we don't swing this thing too far, okay?

Again, this goes back to my earlier comment about cereal rye being used probably too much in our system as a parachute, because we're at the end of the growing season and it's too cold. Okay? But you got to do something. I've never had anybody ask me that question before. Question is if we would've used chemistry to terminate, would those numbers have changed?

I don't know, but I'm going to guess they're going to be very similar, but I don't know. I don't know if the chemistry affects the breakdown of the micro. I don't know that, but that's a great question. I'll try to find an answer to that. Thank you. But my guess is they'll be a little bit different. Yeah. "I am in Midwest Indiana and I plant corn on May 28th to June 5th."

That's part of the problem, is the environment that you've put that corn seed into, it doesn't like. First of all, it doesn't like the cold. Now you've brought in the rye to the equation and it didn't like that. It's not going to like rye. When we used to do this with chemistry, we would plant our corn into rye about this tall. And then we would burn it down with herbicide when it was this tall.

We didn't use a roller crimper then, we just sprayed it, just let it, but I'm talking middle of May. So I think that has a lot to do with we used to plant 116-day corn. We now plant 100 to 105. Used to plant Group 4 beans, we now plant Group 2.5 to 3.2 for that reason right there. So I don't mean to be hard on you, but I think that's the answer, the cold weather.

And I'll just go ahead and stay there for a minute. I usually do not start planting a crop until the ground temp is at 55 and it's on an upswing. The last thing you want to see is a 55 and then a 48. That's not good. You want to see this thing moving, and then what's your future weather showing? I know it's hard to sit at home. You've got all your neighbors, everybody's been to Florida all winter.

They're just chomping at the bit to get in the field and we got to go, go, go. I get it. Believe me, when I get to the field, my neighbor's corn is this tall. So it gets demoralizing and depressing to drive to work every day, and see that beautiful field of GMO corn growing and when you don't even have a kernel in the ground yet.

But you have to overcome that. You've got to stay the course on what you truly believe. And for me, folks, this is not about yield. This is about soil health and human health. When you stop and look at your family's history, and I did this, I don't know, I was combining corn or I don't know what I was doing.

And I start to think about this uncle that died of cancer, the sister-in-law that died of cancer. The 24-year-old nephew that has had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, the diabetes in the family. I have diabetes, my mother had diabetes. Why? I don't give a crap about yield. Remember that first slide I had on the screen? I give a crap about that.

I do not want that family around that. I do not want my grandchildren around that. So I know that today's all about how in the world are we going to raise 300 bushel corn, and we better do it now? I do not agree with that, that's me. I don't pay your bills, you don't pay my bills. You've got to come up to this realization of your own. All right.

What about beans? What's your planning date on beans? Were you just talking about corn or do you wait that long on beans?

No. I like the way this system works now, because by waiting till after Mother's Day to plant corn, which is the second Sunday in May, I can then give us a chance to get our bean crop planted. So we'll start planting beans when the rye is at boot stage, and for me, boot stage is about April 28th. So we've got from April 28th to May 20th to get the soybeans planted.

Then now the legumes are ready to go for the corn, so I like the beans being first and the corn being second. His question is, "Do we roll or crimp our soybeans and rye together? And if so, how tall are those beans?" V2.5 is max, and this is critical. Because if you get to V3, you are going to shred leaves and break branches and you're going to be one mad, you know what.

Because that guy, that crazy guy from Indiana told me to roll our beans down with the rye and here we are breaking them all off, so do not get past V2.5. That's one way. Again, you've got to be flexible with Mother Nature. She is always going to humble you at any opportunity. So when you think you've got this figured out, here comes the big curveball.

'19, I think it was, we had so much rain in the spring, we couldn't get in the field until June 2nd was the first day we planted. At June 2nd, our rye was at anthesis, so I decided we're going to roll the rye first and then plant behind the roller. So you can do it either way, either way. It just depends on how long you want to wait for the right situation.

Now, one thing I will say. Go out here, go to any trade show, go to anywhere, and they've got the equipment out there and I'm telling you, folks, the equipment today is unbelievable. And I'm talking about a row unit on a planter, it's unbelievable the technology. And you look out there and there are closing systems that I think can close anything back together.

But we got to remember here, we can only be in these fields when the conditions are fit to be in. I don't care what your neighbor's doing, because compaction is real. You can pull into a field that is too wet to be on, and take a closing system out there and slam those two sidewalls together. And I'm telling you that cash crop will not come out of that.

Is that a good thing? No. I've got enough years of planting corn, I don't need any more practice to be replanting. So we do not get into our fields until they are fit to be in. And my rule of definition of being fit to be in, is it has to crumble all the way from your seed depth to the surface. It has to crumble in your hand.

And do you need a Mother Nature event to get this crop out of the ground, hence, a rain event? That's my two rules to know when it's fit. Have I lost yield to maintain that soil health every single day? I do, every single day. How much nitrogen is in the air that we're breathing right now? What?

78%.

78%, good man. 78% is what we're breathing right now. If we go out into the landscape, do you know how much free nitrogen is sitting above every acre of ground? 20,000 tons, not pounds, 20,000 tons. How many pounds do we need to raise a corn crop? 100. Actually, when I quit using N, I only needed 60 pounds of N to raise 200-plus bushel of corn. So we got 20,000 tons and we only need, I'll let you have 100.

Let's figure out how to get that 100 and stop using synthetic fertilizer, okay? Same thing, two-foot square, this is a field of wheat last summer. Because in Midwest USA, you're not going to have time to get a legume crop in the ground after soybean harvest, and do you any good and survive the winter and be able to get these kinds of numbers.

So you have to now raise the wheat and not double crop. I know this is hard, especially for the Southern folks, not double crop soybeans and plant a massive cocktail. Now I'm changing my building process. I used to think that what we need to do is get as many species as we can. I'm still with that notion, but I'm going to add more to it.

Bless you. We need to start thinking about families and maximizing the number of families we're using. We have now created a cocktail that has six families represented, six. Now you've got the power of quorum sensing with you. So this was, I don't know, it was hairy vetch, some hairy vetch, Balansa FIXatioN Clover. It was volunteer some cereal rye, because I got cereal rye everywhere on the farm.

It's volunteer. It was sorghum-sudan, it was sunflower, Sunn hemp, safflower. It was all of these things that everything winter killed, except for a little bit of vetch and this FIXatioN Clover. And I used Balansa FIXatioN Clover because it has a stem the size of your pinky, and it's hollow, and the roller crimper can break it and terminate it. Okay?

May 20th, now again, I'm West Central Indiana. Everybody knows where Champaign, Illinois is. I don't care where I go, everybody knows where that town is. Come straight east into Indiana and go north about 12 miles. That's me, okay? I'm in line with the Iowa-Missouri border. I'm right in line. May 20th, 75 pounds of N.

June 4th, this is why I do not plant corn until after this date of May 20th. Now, I want you to look at the next line right here that's going to come in. June, it's four days. Look at this, look right here, isn't that bonkers? In four days, it fixed another up to 262 pounds of nitrogen. Now the thing I wish I would've done here, and this is the day we planted the corn.

So that's the day I thought to take the test. I wish I would've taken the test on the 9th, the 10th, the 11th, and just to have seen where this thing would've ran out of gas. But the point is, if we can manage this and look at the biomass, that's dry matter biomass. Look at the K2O, it's nuts, the calcium, these numbers are nuts.

Now, the only other thing that I wish I would've done also and I really wasn't familiar with was sap analysis. I wish we would've done some sap analysis, and I should have also done a Haney test. Because everybody, whenever I go anywhere and I talk about how foxtail's my nemesis, this right here is what everybody wants to claim right here is the problem, calcium.

Well, is it a problem? It's there, but is it in the plant? I don't know. I didn't do a sap. I wish I would've. So that's what we have to do, we have to take all of these tests and we have to then start looking at what are the similarities here? And remember, every test that you take is a snapshot in time. Just like my blood sugar.

I could take my blood sugar right now and it'd have a number and I could take it again when I walk out the door, and it's going to be a different number. Same thing when you take a soil test or a sap test or any other test. It's a snapshot in time at that particular moment. That's why I look at the trend. We plot all this stuff out on Excel spreadsheets, and what is the trend of organic carbon?

What's the trend of inorganic nitrogen? Again, we don't need a lot of fancy-schmancy tests to tell us that what we're doing is right. If you're getting started in this journey of reducing inputs, you've got to baseline your farm. You've got to, so you can see in two years what we're doing, is it correct or not? So when I look at this Haney test, it is a tremendous test, folks.

Anybody familiar with the Haney test? A few. You've got to start researching this test. It's a soil health test. It gives you at least 30 areas of information. One of those areas is the relationship between inorganic nitrogen and organic nitrogen. So if you're in a full-tillage system with full inputs, your inorganic nitrogen is going to be off the chart and your organic nitrogen is going to be nowhere to be found, right?

Once you start making that shift, this is what happens. So all you have to do, you don't need a test that we don't even have. There is no test that can show this except for a few, Haney's one of them. So when you start to see this happen, you know that what you're doing is correct. That's how we do things and that's how I dissect through this.

Same thing, I luckily had my brain hooked on. Look at the release in six weeks, but this would be expected because of your microbial biome is in overdrive, and it is absolutely consuming this material. In six weeks it'll be gone. That's good and bad, because now I have no cover. We're on 20-inch row corn spacing, because I want that to canopy as fast as it can.

Because we are depending on that biomass right there to get us to canopy for weed suppression. The planting day is not as important as termination, so here's what I would suggest. If you are still in an environment where you're using chemistry, this is what we did. We would plant right in here. Wait six days before the corn came out of the ground because we were planting non-GMO corn.

And then go in and terminate closer to this date to pick this up. But being in the organic world, I wanted to push this as far as I could, so I waited till right here. But just look at the biomass doubled, and folks, this is huge. Because when we rolled this down, you're not walking across this field like I am up here. You are going through high cotton, you are stepping high. It's this deep.

So it takes a lot of patience, because your corn just looks like crap. It's yellow, it's spindly, it's way behind your neighbors, but you've got to give it time. Or if you don't want to go organic, which I don't recommend, it's extremely difficult. Then still use a little bit of chemistry and just wipe this stuff out and then watch.

Your corn, it is so green, it'll turn black when it has that as fuel. Cattle, we do not bring outside genetics into the herd. We will pull the sires from the existing calf crop. Same thing with our sheep herd, we've not introduced outside genetics in five years. We don't vaccinate, we don't do anything. There's no shots, there's no nothing.

There's no ivermectin, there's nothing. So in a world where we are today, there's major change coming, major. We need to know where our food is coming from. We need to know how it's being grown, and we need to make sure it's safe to eat. And that's what we all are trying to do. Maslin, this is a very strange story.

I know I'm running out of time, but you got to realize how powerful that thing on your hip or your pocket or your phone, you got to realize how much power this thing has. We were doing this maslin right here, this notion for three years. And I was sitting at the dinner table one night with my wife and I was starting to tell her about this. I didn't, it's not a maslin.

This idea that I had because I told you, I don't know how many times I've told you now, it's all about diversity. So when you get to October 25th, planting cereal rye is not good enough. So I want to plant cereal rye, wheat, and barley. I know that's a stretch. They're all in the same fam, I know that, but they're still putting out different exudates.

So I'm talking to my wife about how we did this three years ago. I don't know why this came up, but it did. And next day, wouldn't you know it, in my Facebook feed, I get an article on maslin, a 3,000-year-old tradition in the Middle East. So that's how we come up with this. Now what they did was they raised these three and sometimes they added another crop to it, like maybe a Kerns or something, some ancient grain. And then they would go ahead and mill this and make the bread out of the combination. That's what I think we need to try to think about today.

So this is how I'm trying to get, and I know it's a stretch, some diversity late in the fall. And again, you see what Mother Nature is doing with this. When we started the maslin, it was 60% rye, 20% wheat, and 20% barley. The rye is less than 40% of the mix now. So you see, who am I to decide what the system needs when Mother Nature's telling me it must not like rye?

It's trying to kick it out. So we have to be, this is how you move to that next level. Input reductions from 11 to 23. We've reduced diesel fuel by 46%. We've reduced horsepower by 64%. So the major drawdown of this first line is here, but it's also with all of the lost passes we're no longer doing. It's three passes.

It's a pass in the fall for a cover crop, it's a pass in the spring to plant and it's a pass to terminate. Now, we are starting to use a little bit of biology, just a little, that's a whole nother day of conversation. So that's a fourth pass. But the point is we've reduced the tractors on the farm and we've reduced the fuel.

Obviously, the N, the P, and all this has gone to zero, and then what's this mean? So the savings, this is just the savings, is $62,000 in fuel, $605,000 in synthetic N, this, this and so on. Now, the one that really, and these are all averages over that time, because some years we were heavy corn and light beans and vice versa.

So this is all averages, but the one that really gets me is this last one. We spent almost $500,000 in chemistry to have weeds that are resistant to the chemistry we're spraying. How insane is that? What's the saying? You keep doing something the same way expecting a different result.

Insanity.

Insanity, thank you. That's insanity. I want to tell you another little, quick story because I just think these things drive it home. In '08, I think, it was '08, Purdue reached out. Purdue University reached out, and they knew that we were farming some ground in Illinois. And they wanted to know if we would give them samples of water hemp, because if you want to see water hemp just come to Illinois.

Okay? So we sent them a sample in '08, and they were testing for glyphosate resistance. This is '08. Do we understand when the first GMO soybean was available? Do we know what year that was? '97. This is '08, that's 11 years. And the university's asking if we've got resistant weeds. Eight was clear, nine was clear. Guess what happened in 10? Resistant weed.

In 10, 13 years is all it took, Mother Nature to say, "Screw you." That's scary. Now, if you come to our fields in Illinois and you look at our fields that have a cover crop on them, there is no water hemp, none. But yet, to my neighbors, we can't do anything right. I don't understand that. Just I don't understand why you're not willing to learn from somebody else.

And look at the seed savings here. So this is cover crop, this is cash crop. This is everything wrapped up in a big, old bag. That's how much money we're saving on our farm. Now you understand why I stand up here and say I don't drive this system by yield. I'm driving this system by human health, soil health, and input reductions.

Now, I am not asking anyone in this room to farm the way we farm. That's not what I'm asking. I am asking though, would you please reduce inputs, take advantage of the cover crops and start to show a difference in building soil health and human health?

What about pollinators and solar electric?

Oh, yeah. Pollinators, we purposely plant pollinator strips. We have birds, bees, we have it all. We have everything going on the farm. I need to get somebody there, Ray, and do a bird count. I've not done that. I need to have somebody come and identify how many bird species we have. And that's another thing we got to think about.

Yes, I think livestock are very important to take it to another level. Okay. Are livestock necessary to get movement on your farm? No. But if you want to move to the greatest level, yes, livestock are necessary. But think about how many deer and other wildlife are on our farm that are accomplishing the same thing. So that's what this is all about.

It's building that system and they will come. And you're right, Ray, it's alive, the whole thing's alive. I think one of our people that really has been driving this for a long time, Gabe Brown, you all know who he is. I think one of the one-liners he's got is, "I got tired of going out and deciding what I was going to kill today."

We got to go out and decide what we're going to save today. How are we going to make this live better? Thank you, Ray, for that. And there was a question over here.

Yeah, your maslin with rye, barley, and wheat.

Yeah.

What, do you harvest that?

Yeah.

Use it as a feedstock?

Yes. Well, he wants to know what we do with that, the maslin. Yes, great question. That maslin is our core staple now of the cereal part of our mixes, and it will go to an organic dairy and they'll usually be peas in with it. They can hammer mill it and take that hard pea and make it a viable food source.

And I'll tell you the other thing, the people that are probably calling the most about this are the chicken people. The people who are raising layers, they're trying to get away from corn and soybeans in their ration and they want to do wheat and peas.

We get a lot of calls from all over the United States on this mixture. Yeah, hope that answered your question.

That's it for this episode of the No-Till Farmer Podcast. We'd like to thank No-Tiller Rick Clark for his revealing discussion on how to save big time on input costs, and improve profitability with regenerative farming practices. We also want to thank our sponsor, NewFields Ag, for helping to make this podcast possible.

A transcript of this episode in our archive of previous podcast episodes are both available at notillfarmer.com/podcasts. For Rick Clark and our entire staff here at No-Till Farmer, I'm John Dobberstein. Thanks for listening, keep on no-tilling, and have a great day.