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

Hey, happy 4th of July. Thanks for spending part of it here with us on Conservation Ag Update. I'm Noah Newman. All right. So, harvest season, yeah, it's kind of far away, but it'll be here before you know it. So, let's catch up with No-Till Legend Marion Calmer, who shares some insights on how he deals with heavy residue on his Alpha, Illinois farm.

We planted into corn and we're in a corn-soybean rotation. And so, this cornstalk residue here was actually harvested about 18 months ago. And you can see how well it's decomposed, and you can see the pieces that were cut with a BT Chopper about an inch long or so. But what's interesting is that the earthworms were able to come in here and grab all of that small confetti and pile it up around the hole here.

And so, we'll open it up here, and you can see that there's the earthworm hole. But he was able to take all that residue and pile it up and make a nice little home for himself. So, I still believe the faster I can get cornstalk residue to decompose, I get it back into the soil and I just don't have to deal with it. And I don't have to worry about it washing away either with all the heavy rains that we had this year.

Yeah. Marion says it's the same principle, but soybeans get the straw to decompose as quickly as possible. So, when he's harvesting soybeans, he keeps the teeth engaged on the straw chopper.

Field to Market, meanwhile, recently held its annual meeting in Kansas City and attendees got a sneak peek at Fieldprint Platform 5.0, which helps farmers measure the environmental impacts of their crop production and increased profitability. We caught up with Field to Market President Carrie Vollmer-Sanders for a look at how it works.

Sometimes it's helpful to look back at the data and say, "Did that really work the way we thought it would? Or what were all the variables?" So, with the Fieldprint Platform, there's an opportunity to put in data that goes beyond carbon. So, other metrics that they're evaluating, energy use, biodiversity, water use, water quality. Essentially, there's three different things that look at soil and give you this overarching impact of the farm. And one of the things that we've been talking about is, in this new platform, could we also add insights for the grower?

So, for example, you've inputted all the data. You might ask the platform, "How could I decrease my energy use?" So, we've been testing this out. It hasn't launched yet. It's going through some iterations still. But what in preliminary results have shared is it gave the farmer three different areas where it could change energy use. And then, within those three areas, it gave three or four different examples of what the farmer could look at to decrease the energy use on the farm.

And Version 5.0 is expected to launch August 1st. Fieldtomarket.org for more information on the platform.

All right. Time now to check in with Baltimore Orioles fanatic and Associate Editor Mackane Vogel for today's Cover Crop Connection.

Thanks, Noah. Mackane Vogel here with this week's Cover Crop Connection. For this episode, we're going to Nelson, Missouri to visit with Alan Weber, as he discusses his use of cereal rye and other cover crops on his farm. Weber runs a diversified crop and livestock operation, as he's found cereal rye especially useful in reducing pigweed and waterhemp pressure.

One of the reasons that I was initially attracted to the use of cover crops was actually for weed resistance, or for being able to decrease our dependence in terms of herbicides. It's been more than 10 years ago actually when I first started using cover crops, and at that point in time, we were using red clover and cereal rye. And cereal rye, we were trying to take advantage of the allelopathic effects in terms of the following crop.

So, I actually got a small grant from the State of Missouri, from the Department of Agriculture, to look at a control versus the use of cereal rye. And we took weed stand counts in terms of that control and we definitely found that anywhere that we've used cereal rye, that the weed populations, specifically the summer annuals, like pigweed and waterhemp, were significantly reduced.

So, that was actually my original reason for wanting to use cover crops. But now, after several years of use, I've pivoted to the point where we're looking at ways to be able to increase soil organic matter and thus, water-holding capacity. So, we're in a position here geographically where many times, we're short of water in July and August. And being able to have a little bit more water-holding capacity can benefit us significantly in terms of the economics.

Weber also says that cover crops as a whole are saving him between 35 and $50 an acre on hay needed for grazing.

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.

Moving on, The Fertilizer Institute is launching NuGIS 2.0. It's the Nutrient Use Geographic Information System, which integrates multiple datasets to create county-level estimates of nutrients applied and removed. Kathy Mathers with The Fertilizer Institute shares how it's helping farmers across the US.

The Nutrient Use GIS information system, originally started or originally built by IPNI, by the International Plant Nutrition Institute, it is now ready for what we're calling NuGIS 2.0. And what NuGIS does is it allows us to tell our advocacy story by looking at data on nutrient use, nutrient uptake, and other related, for example, other inputs such as manure use on a watershed-by-watershed basis. And that is really allowing us to better tell or better counter those who say that we're using too much fertilizer, we're just dumping it on indiscriminately. And again, really attempting to find evidence ways to step up for the growers.

NuGIS is free to use, but you have to register. We included a link in the article for this episode on no-tillfarmer.com. That's no-tillfarmer.com.

Well, back in 1962, Glover Triplett and Dave Van Doren seeded the first no-till plots in Wooster, Ohio. They're still going strong 60-plus years later. And in our Video of the Week, Warren Dick, who managed the plots for nearly 40 years at Ohio State, reflects on the early days of the groundbreaking project.

And my dad used to always say, I grew up on a farm, "If you grow a crop, you have to plow." It's just everybody knows that. And of course, you look at the history, back in the pyramids, what do you see? Oxen pulling a plow in Egypt. So, tillage is synonymous with agriculture for thousands of years. So, to change that, it took a whole new mindset.

So, when Glover and Dave and Jim Henry was USBA, they kind of... their main things that they wanted to answer was, can you grow a crop with no tillage? Is it even possible? If you do, what is the effect of rotation in that? And then, how does that affect your soil properties over time? Those were the main things right at the beginning.

Glover Triplett, he's passed. I love... He's a great guy. He said the dean came to visit Worcester and they took him to the plots here. And Glover was here. It was in the spring, and his wife, I think, was with him, or maybe she told him at home. She goes, "Glover, the dean's going to fire you." It's because it was so un-green.

And that was filmed by Mackane Vogel and Christine Book during their visit to the plots over the spring.

All right, that'll do it. Story idea, or just want to chat? Send me an email at nnewman@lessitermedia.com. Thanks so much for watching. Hope you have a great 4th of July weekend, and we'll see you soon.