You can count on one hand the number of people who have attended each and every single one of our now 34 National No-Tillage Conferences. Cole Camp, Mo., no-tiller Bryan Von Holten is one of them and I had a chance to catch up with him in between sessions last week in St. Louis. We talked a lot about what he’s learned each year and why he keeps coming back, but here’s a quick snippet of our conversation. 

“Well, I was kind of fortunate. There was a fella about 50 miles from me to the east who had been no-tilling for 14 years already. And he's a teacher. He was very generous with his knowledge and he sat down with me and helped me put together a plan that ... And so really right out of the gate, I had pretty good success the first year. And so right away I was pretty comfortable with it. It's just, you got some learning curves, but by and large, thanks to his help and then coming to this ... I started no-till in 92, came to this conference in 93. And of course that was a big part of it too. People like Dwayne Beck and different ones that really helped a lot of good speakers and learned a lot from all this too. And so…

“I've experimented with a number of different things. Two years ago, I had a lot of cover crop behind wheat, about 500 acres of real diverse 19 species mix. My struggle with that is how do you grow a wheat crop as a standalone crop without double crop beans and then spend 50, $55 on a cover crop. But it did tremendous things for the soil, but how to make the economics. And that's where I think the livestock integration has got to come. I personally don't have any livestock, but I'm trying to figure out how to make that happen because I think we have to have a livestock system in place to utilize the cover crops and then kind of help pay for the cost of them. And I think the whole system together worked great, but now we're talking a whole different management team and a lot more work for somebody.

 Always fun chatting with the no-till and cover crop experts like Bryan. And if you want to hear from more cover crop experts, go to CoverCropStrategies.com and sign up for our upcoming FREE and full digital event that will feature lots of great topics and experts in the world of cover crops. I’ll have lots more on the full speaker lineup for the Summit in the coming weeks.

Watch the full version of this episode of Conservation Ag Update.