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“As you might expect, we found that they do help with water infiltration into of the soil, they do help improve aggregate stability of the soil by their burrowing and casting activity. You do see roots in earthworm channels, a number of no-till field days in the 80s and 90s, there would be the requisite soil pit, and you would look there and you'd see nightcrawler channels going down into the sub soil and you'd see corn roots growing in those nightcrawler channels that had cast material lining those channels. So you knew that they were significant in helping improve root growth and getting nutrients into the crop because of the roots growing right next to that nutrient rich material.
”Eileen Kladivko.
For this edition of the No-Till Farmer: Influencers and Innovators, we’re heading underground. We’re going deep under the soil surface to concentrate on one of the major benefits of no-tilling when it comes to improving soil health.
Today’s agenda is worms: Earthworms, red worms, nightcrawlers, and other kinds of worms and the impact the have on no-tilled soils.
Forgive me for saying so, but Eileen Kladivko, an agronomy professor at Purdue, has worms on the brain. She’s addressed the topic as a National No Tillage Conference speaker, where attendees have come to think of her as the “godmother of earthworms.”
Eileen’s other areas of expertise involve on soil physics, soil biology, and soil management. Her specific research topics include tile drainage and water quality, the interactions between earthworms, soil management and soil physical
This podcast is Frank’s fascinating — and wormy — conversation with Eileen.
No-Till Influencers & Innovators podcast series is brought to you by The Andersons.
A nutrient management program is essential to maximize crop productivity and yields. Providing the right nutrients at the right time throughout the growing season is key. The Andersons High Yield Programs make it easy to plan a season-long approach for many row and specialty crops. Visit AndersonsPlantNutrient.com/HighYield to download the High Yield Programs and get instant product recommendations for corn, soybeans, wheat, potatoes, and more.
Full Transcript
Brian O'Conner:
Welcome to the latest episode of the No-Till Farmer Influencers and Innovators podcast. I'm Brian O'Connor, lead content editor for No-Till Farmer. The Anderson's sponsors this program, which features stories about the past, present, and future of no-till farming. I encourage you to subscribe to the series which is available on iTunes, Google podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and Tunein Radio. Subscribing will allow you to receive an alert about upcoming episodes as soon as they are released.
Brian O'Conner:
I'd like to take a moment to thank The Anderson's for supporting our No-Till Farmer Influencers and Innovators podcast series. A nutrient management program is essential to maximize crop productivity and yields. Providing the right nutrients at the right time throughout the growing season is key. The Anderson's high yield programs make it easy to plan a season long approach for many row and specialty crops. Visit andersonsplantnutrient.com/highyield to download the high yield programs and get instant product recommendations for corn, soybeans, wheat, potatoes, and more.
Brian O'Conner:
For this edition of the No-Till Farmer Influencers and Innovators podcast, we're heading underground. We're going deep under the soil surface to concentrate on one of the major benefits of no-tilling when it comes to improving soil health. Today's agenda is worms. Earth worms, red worms, night crawlers, and other kinds of worms and the impact they have on no-tilled soils. Forgive me for saying so, but Eileen Kladivko, an agronomy professor at Purdue, has worms on the brain. She's addressed the topic as a National No-Tillage Conference speaker where attendees have come to think of her as the "godmother of worms." Eileen's other areas of expertise involve soil physics, soil biology, and soil management. Her specific research topics include tile drainage and water quality, the interactions between earthworms, soil management and soil physical properties. Here's Frank's fascinating, and wormy conversation with Eileen.
Eileen Kladivko:
I grew up in New Jersey in suburbia and I'm not from a farm, but our family was an outdoor family and got interested in the environment. And right before my senior year in high school, my dad got transferred to Ohio, so I actually graduated from high school in Ohio. And the environmental movement was really starting when I was in high school. So I got interested in the environment and Purdue had a program in environmental science, brand new program. And so that's actually, I came to Purdue for my bachelor's degree in environmental science.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, that was going to be my next question, how'd you end up being a boiler maker? But I see you have two degrees from Purdue and then you got your PhD at Wisconsin up here in our country, right?
Eileen Kladivko:
That is correct. Yep, yeah. So I did, my bachelor's was in environmental science at Purdue, and then I needed to take some ag electives and the first ag elective I took was a soils class and I just really fell in love with it. And so that's how I got more and more into soils.
Frank Lessiter:
We're going to have some fun today. We're going to talk about earthworms and I know you did some early research on it and you haven't done so much lately, but it seems to me, I've been around no-till forever, it seems like earthworms were more important and in a limelight 30, 40 years ago than they are today. Do we just tend to take them for granted today?
Eileen Kladivko:
Well yeah, I think there's a little bit of that. And there's a little bit of we've realized, I think earthworms helped awaken people to soil biology. So I would say there's a lot more interest in soil biology involved than there was. So back in the eighties, when I was doing some of that earthworm work, eighties and nineties, it was brand new. And so that was something that I felt was really, really good and important was that it alerted people to the fact that, "Oh, we've got all these organisms in the soil." And of course, earthworms are one of the easiest to see and everybody knows earthworms are beneficial. So, I think people got really excited about earthworms then, but part of it now is I think there is a broader understanding of soil biology beyond earthworms. And some of it is, yeah, people get bored with the same stuff and it's like, "Oh, earthworms, yeah."
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah. So all of a sudden earthworms got us to where we found out there's 500 other flora species underneath the ground, huh?
Eileen Kladivko:
Exactly, yep.
Frank Lessiter:
So, how did you get started? You went back to Purdue in the early eighties, what led to your interest in earthworms?
Eileen Kladivko:
So I got onto the faculty at Purdue in January of 1982, actually as an assistant professor of applied soil physics. And so what I started working on at that time was drainage was one item, and no-till was really a big item for me. So I joined forces with a couple of really experienced tillage researchers that we had here, Jerry Mannering and Don Griffith. And they had long term tillage plots, meaning no-till, chisel, plow, ridge till, and I became another team member with them and what I was contributing to what they were already doing was a lot of measurements of soil physical properties that they really didn't have time to do. So that was my contribution, but as I was doing that, physical properties like aggregate stability, like water flow, like porosity, things at that.
Eileen Kladivko:
As I was doing that and reading the literature, I noticed that some of the papers from Europe and Australia, and New Zealand were talking about earthworms as being a really important part of all of those things that I was trying to measure and there weren't really any people in the U.S. at the time, with one or two exceptions that had been looking at earthworms and tillage systems.
Eileen Kladivko:
So I thought, "Well, that's something that a new assistant professor, that I could add to the work that's being done." And that relates to what I was interested in with water flow. So that's really how I got started on doing earthworms was to look a little deeper at the potential impact they would have on, or that they might have on water flow in the soil and some of those other things that we were really interested in. And so basically I started reading. I happened to have, there was a postdoc with another professor that was here, who was from New Zealand, and he had done a little bit of earthworm work on his PhD in New Zealand and so he knew some of the methods. So he and I kind of teamed up and we started doing earthworm work on the long term tillage, no-tillage plots.
Eileen Kladivko:
And I met some of the earthworm specialists, went to a conference in Europe where there's a whole earthworm conference and learned a lot more about earthworms from that conference as well. So, but basically it was, yes, other countries have discovered that earthworms are really important. We haven't really looked at it here in no-till situations. And so I wonder whether they're important here was kind of the Genesis of it.
Frank Lessiter:
And what did you find out?
Eileen Kladivko:
Yes. They're important here. Yeah, basically the work really had two different thrusts, I guess you might call it. One was first of all, are the earthworm populations different as resulting from different tillage systems? So, would we find more earthworms under no-till than under chisel or plow, for example, as they had found in Europe and Australia, and New Zealand. So yes, the first thing we found was, yes, you generally do have greater earthworm populations with less tillage. No-till being kind of the one end of the extreme, if you're just looking at tillage differences. And then the other thrust was what impact do those earthworms have on soil properties like infiltration and aggregate stability or resistance to crusting and erosion.
Eileen Kladivko:
And we found, as you might expect, we found that they do help with water infiltration into the soil. They do help improve aggregate stability of the soil by their burrowing and casting activity. You do see roots in earthworm channels, a number of a number of no-till field days in the eighties and nineties, there would be the requisite soil pit, and you would look there and you'd see night crawler channels going down into the sub-soil and you'd see corn roots growing in those night crawler channels that had cast material lining those channels. So, you knew that they were significant in helping improve root growth and getting nutrients into the crop because of the roots growing right next to that nutrient rich material.
Frank Lessiter:
And a ballpark figure, how many more earthworms can you expect in no-till than you can in other tillage systems?
Eileen Kladivko:
Well, that of course depends where you're starting out from.
Frank Lessiter:
Sure, sure.
Eileen Kladivko:
But I usually think if we're not in a pasture or something like that, if we're in a corn, soybean or corn, soybean, wheat rotation, with no-till you might have a hundred to 200 red worms, not the night crawlers per square meter, whereas with a tiled system, it may be down more like 50. So, you could double or more depending on how low the tilled system is. Night crawlers are not very prevalent at all in tilled systems, unless they're very heavily matured. And then the night crawlers themselves, if you've got 20 per square meter, which is like two per square foot, I usually consider that to be a pretty good number. I've seen them higher, but that's already a pretty good number. If you're counting middens out in the field and you find two or three per square foot, that's really good for the night crawlers.
Frank Lessiter:
Right. So earthworms prefer no-tillage. What about the impact of chemicals, fertilizer, herbicide?
Eileen Kladivko:
Yeah, that's what I was most concerned of about when I first started, but I became much less concerned about it. Certainly if an anhydrous band goes right next to an earth worm, it's likely going to die just because it's so highly concentrated. It essentially just burns the worm. But when you're injecting anhydrous on 30 in centers, you're not affecting really very much of the soil. I did have one grad student one year who went out and tried to count the earthworms the day before and the day after anhydrous and he did find about 6% or so of the worms that he was able to see had been killed, but on a field scale basis, that's not very much. And of course they're continuing to reproduce. So, fertilizers in general for normal crop rotations, I don't think are a problem.
Eileen Kladivko:
Herbicides in general are also not a problem, right? Because they're meant to kill plants, not animals. It's the insecticides that are sometimes problematic. And especially some of the corn rootworm insecticides that were used back in the eighties and nineties. Some of them are really detrimental and some not. It's really hard to keep up with non-target effects of chemicals, given how many chemicals come out all the time. They do have to test that in order to get approved. But one of the things I talk to people about with respect to insecticides is where if they are able to put it in a narrow band like in the seed slot or something like that, you're affecting much less of the soil than if you're broadcasting it over the whole field. So, that is one suggestion of how somebody might minimize the impact of insecticides. If we're not sure whether that insecticide is toxic or not is just reduce the area over which it's being applied.
Frank Lessiter:
I had at least one farmer tell me once that he thought the worms could hear the anhydrous ammonia tractor coming and they'd get down deeper in the soil just because they're scared of the noise. Who knows?
Eileen Kladivko:
Actually, I think it's the vibration actually. No, I think it is.
Frank Lessiter:
Right, okay.
Eileen Kladivko:
Thank you. I think there is something to that. It's just a matter of whether the burrow is still open, because if the burrow's open and the anhydrous, if the gas goes down the burrow, then they can try to hide, but they can't.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah. Right, right. How can no-tillers count the number worms in their field? Or they need to do it or not worry about it?
Eileen Kladivko:
Well counting, if you really want good counts, it is a lot of work and whether it's worth it or not is questionable depending on how curious you are, what you want to know. But I can tell there's the fast estimate and then there's a more detailed count. So the first thing people need do need to remember is that there's the night crawlers versus the shallow dwelling worms, right? So the night crawlers, Lumbricus terrestris, we do only have one species of those in the glaciated portion of North America. And that's what we commonly call night crawler. It has a more or less permanent burrow, that vertical burrow that goes three feet, four feet, five feet, depending on the soil, they pull those residues into the mouth of their burrow at the top, they have casts and so on.
Eileen Kladivko:
So once a farmer knows what a midden looks like and knows how to look for it, the way to estimate your night crawler populations is simply to count the number of middens. And sometimes that's easy, you can stand up and do it. But other times, if you have a lot of residue, it is a get down on your hands and knees and put down a square meter or square yard or something and count the number of middens. Because as they all know, if you're trying to count night crawlers, since they have a burrow, as soon as you start digging, they also will go down to the bottom of their burrow. And so you're not going to actually catch them. So that's for the night crawlers. And I would say anybody, I would encourage anybody to kind of learn what the middens look like and then they'll somewhat jump out at you once you know what you're looking for. And just count them on the surface.
Eileen Kladivko:
The shallow dwelling worms, which there are many different species of those. And I call them red worms or gray worms or fish worms, but there are several different species of those. If you want to count them, you're basically trying to count a known area. So I would actually take a flat bottom spade and cut a square foot and go down eight or 10 inches and take all that soil out, put it on a tarp or in a bucket or whatever, and then sort through it by hand and pick out the worms and count them. That's quite a bit of work. If you just want to know in general, do you have more worms, take a shovel and if you've got a couple of worms in every shovel full, and then you go to a conventional field and you hardly ever see a worm, that may be enough evidence for you to know that you've got a better earthworm population.
Eileen Kladivko:
So it really depends how badly people want to know how much they have and how much work they're willing to put into it. I mean, you can do the calibrated shovel, right? I mean, you could basically say, "Okay, I'm going to take a big, heaping shovel full and I'm going to do that in several places and see if I get two or three or four worms in a shovel and I go someplace else and I don't get any." That probably tells you what you want to know.
Frank Lessiter:
Let's say we got a no-tiller out there who has got a lot of earth worms. He's been no-tilling for 10, 15 years. Is there any benefit to him of finding a way to get even more earthworms? For instance, I suppose if he put on manure, that might increase the number of worms or not?
Eileen Kladivko:
Yeah, basically the earthworm populations, I think are limited in our Northern climates by two things. One is the cover and the other is food. So the no-till is providing first and foremost, it's providing essentially a mulch cover. So it keeps the soil from drying out as fast in the spring and it keeps the soil from freezing as fast in the late fall or winter. And that gives them a chance to first of all, to reproduce longer, but also to acclimate to the cold weather, right? So they can move down a little deeper as it gets cold, but if the soil is bare and we get one of those quick freezes in November, a lot of worms will just die because they didn't have a chance to get down.
Eileen Kladivko:
So, that's the first thing, but then to increase the populations further, food is really important. So that might mean applying manure. It might mean growing cover crops. I mean, growing cover crops is another way where we're basically providing more food for them. And I do know a number of farmers who talk to me about, "Yeah, my worms are so hungry, I got to plant cover crops so that I can still have more residue on my soil surface because they're eating up all my crop residue and I need to give them more food." So yeah, I don't think there's a, I mean, I think adding more food to get more worms will also get more of those other soil organisms that I mentioned at the beginning, right? So anytime that we can either add organic matter like manure or grow organic matter like growing cover crops, I think is going to help the overall soil biology, not just the worms.
Brian O'Conner:
We'll come back to Frank and Eileen in a moment. Before we do so, I'd like to thank our sponsor The Anderson's for supporting today's podcast. A nutrient management program is essential to maximize crop productivity and yields. Providing the right nutrients at the right time throughout the growing season is key. The Anderson's high yield programs make it easy to plan a season long approach for many row and specialty crops. Visit andersonsplantnutrient.com/highyield to download the high yield programs and get instant product recommendations for corn, soybeans, wheat, potatoes, and more. Before we get back to the conversation, here's Frank Lessiter with the reporter's notebook fact about this interview
Frank Lessiter:
In my conversation with Eileen, I failed to ask one question that I jotted down in my notebook. It was about a recent award she had received called the Purdue Agricultural Spirit of the Land Grant Mission Award. This award's purpose is to recognize faculty members at Purdue for their excellence in integrating and promoting the core mission of discovery, engagement, and learning. The award highlights Eileen's research and teaching work over the years that has benefited agriculture both nationally and internationally. This is an award that should be one of the highlights of her long term career at Purdue. A very much deserved award and an honor she can be very proud of having earned.
Brian O'Conner:
And now we'll get back to the conversation.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, when you talk cover crops, our no-tillers are far ahead of everybody else. I mean, across the nation with all farmers, we're probably around 10% or so. And then our survey of our no-till farmers will show that they're 80% of them are using cover crops.
Eileen Kladivko:
Yeah-
Frank Lessiter:
They've caught on.
Eileen Kladivko:
I think cover crops, that's one of my other hats of course is-
Frank Lessiter:
Sure, no I know that.
Eileen Kladivko:
Cover Crops Council and so yeah, I definitely think cover crops are great for improving soil health and soil biological activity.
Frank Lessiter:
Let's go back to some of your early research and I'm going to lead you into something else here. How did ridge till earthworm numbers compare to no-till?
Eileen Kladivko:
Ridge till was pretty good, but was not quite as good as no-till. You've got, I mean, the ridge till had a lot of cover, but it did also have two tillage passes a year. Not very aggressive tillage, but so they were a little bit lower than the no-till, but they were still much better than a plow or a chisel system.
Frank Lessiter:
Right. Well, I'm going to lead you into my next question because we got strip till today and you look back at what we were doing with ridge till, and we're doing some of these same things in strip till. So how will earthworm numbers be in strip till?
Eileen Kladivko:
I would think they would be fairly similar to the ridge till in the sense of they're going to be less than no-till, but they're certainly going to be much greater than in a chisel or or a plow system for sure.
Frank Lessiter:
Would the building berms in the fall affect the earthworm populations or not?
Eileen Kladivko:
Well again, they have residue. There are still parts of the field that are residue covered. So we actually found in the ridge system, my grad student who did a more detailed study of that found as you expect as soon as you say it, right? That they're actually concentrated under the residue parts of the field and less under the-
Frank Lessiter:
Rather than berms, right.
Eileen Kladivko:
Yeah, right. So I think that would be the same thing is that they would tend to move there.
Frank Lessiter:
Different earthworm species from north to south is the same, or they don't matter, or what?
Eileen Kladivko:
North to south, within the glaciated parts of North America or across all the U.S.?
Frank Lessiter:
I'm going to let you tell me which.
Eileen Kladivko:
Yeah, okay. Well, I have very little- Well, I have no experience in the South.
Frank Lessiter:
Sure.
Eileen Kladivko:
So within the- So the main difference, first of all, is the glaciated part of North America versus the never part, okay so. I don't really have a strong... Well, I have no experience and I have a little bit of knowledge as far as below the glacial line. Within the glacial line in agricultural fields, the species are pretty similar because most of them actually arrived with the European settlers in root stock and so on. So we have species that mostly are associated with Europe in our agricultural areas north of the glacial line.
Eileen Kladivko:
I don't worry too much about the different species other than I want to know, is it a deep burrower or the night crawler, or is it a shallow dwelling worm, but within the shallow dwelling worms, there's like in Indiana, we've got three or four or maybe five species. They all are, at least at the level that I'm interested in from a practical, agricultural standpoint, they're all pretty similar in what they actually do. So I just want to know, is it a deep burrower or a shallow dweller? The ones that are south of the glacial line, there are many other species, but I can't speak real knowledgeably about any details about them.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, I remember at one of the no-till conferences, Dwayne Beck talking about some 18 inch worms from South Africa that nobody had seen before. He had some pictures of them in-
Eileen Kladivko:
In the U.S.?
Frank Lessiter:
No, no, he-
Eileen Kladivko:
He had them in the U.S.?
Frank Lessiter:
No, no. He had them- The question came up, should you bring him into the U.S. or not.
Eileen Kladivko:
Oh. Oh no, I wouldn't do that.
Frank Lessiter:
No, no. I don't think anybody did.
Eileen Kladivko:
Yeah, no, there's actually I did part of a sabbatical in Australia back 20 years ago and Australia has some... It actually gave me a nightmare one night I [inaudible 00:25:33] like three or four foot long worms that are almost an inch in diameter. So they're really more the size of a snake, but it's an earthworm species that they have there. And when I went on sabbatical, I asked one of the guys, "Can you tell me where I can go see one of those?" And he said, "No, I can't because they're not-" Basically, they're not very common. They're very difficult to find, because obviously they're not in agricultural areas, any amount of tillage would destroy their habitat. And he said he had a student one time that was trying to do her thesis on it and ended up not being able to find enough of them to be able to do that, so.
Frank Lessiter:
Right. Let's say you're, you're doing chisel plowing or field cultivator and you got a compaction problem. If you go to the no-till, can the worms help you with that compaction problem or not?
Eileen Kladivko:
The worms could help with a compaction problem up to a point, right?
Frank Lessiter:
Okay.
Eileen Kladivko:
So if it's really, really severe, they're not going to be able to go through it either. So it still may require an implement to break up some of that compaction and then the worms could potentially help with not reforming that compaction. But there's a limit to how much they can dig through as well.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah. I remember years ago people were talking about maybe we ought to buy worms and seed our fields. And I've had people tell me, they'd be riding with Jim Kinsella down at Lexington, Illinois, and he'd stop and pick up worms off the road after a rain and toss them out in the field. But I don't think-
Eileen Kladivko:
Yeah.
Frank Lessiter:
I don't think seeding worms ever caught on
Eileen Kladivko:
No, no. I had people asking me about that as well. And we actually did a small experiment where we tried to do that. Where we put night crawlers in no-till fields where we had not seen any evidence of them yet. And most of the fields they survived, but they didn't really thrive. We had a couple fields where within a few years we had night crawlers all over the place. But whether that was due to us seeding them or whether they were on the edges of the field and just hadn't quite made it in yet, I don't know. Yeah, it never really took off because I don't think there was any compelling evidence that it would work. But I know Jim did that and that was, if you could go down the county road near an alfalfa field and pick up a whole bunch of night crawlers and put them in your corn and soybean no-till field, it could potentially jumpstart the population.
Frank Lessiter:
Going back to the food source and cover crops, are there any cover crop species that worms really like, or they just want to eat anything?
Eileen Kladivko:
Well, they'll kind of eat anything, but in general, legumes are probably preferred, because they're just a richer food source. So legumes as opposed to just a grass. So just cereal rye is probably not going to increase the populations as much as if you had a crimson clover or something like that. But there's the quality and there's the quantity, right? So, if you're... Depends on a lot of times, certainly in a corn, soybean system, we can't get cover crop legumes to give us very much biomass and fit within that timing. If you've got wheat in your rotation, then you got more time for a clover to really get well established. So then it may have more of an impact. But yeah, food preference wise, they would definitely prefer a legume to just a grass or cereal.
Frank Lessiter:
That's interesting because we've got a lot of people planting these multi-species and legumes don't show up that much when you got somebody planting 10 or 12 different things. I hadn't thought about that.
Eileen Kladivko:
Yeah. They're kind of slow growing compared to some of those other things, so they might be there, but they're just not very competitive with a... Especially if you got a warm season grass in the mix. That just takes off.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah, you go back to when you started or even before that and one of the real guys doing earthworm research was Bill Edwards at Coshocton and-
Eileen Kladivko:
Oh yes.
Frank Lessiter:
That whole thing has shut down, isn't even there anymore. Any research going on in the U.S. now with the earthworms that you know about?
Eileen Kladivko:
Actually I think there's a fair amount that's that's going on. It's not with the tillage folks so much as some of the soil biology. I haven't kept up with the details of it, but I think the Georgia group, the soil ecology group down there is still doing some. And I think are some scattered studies around, but not stuff that you'd see so much in the no-till research circles.
Frank Lessiter:
Right. For years we've said that no-till has kept sediment on the ground. We've reduced erosion, but now there's some work going or some talk that earthworm holes could lead to more chemicals running off the fields. What do you think?
Eileen Kladivko:
Well, if an earthworm channel is open at the soil surface and you spray a chemical on the soil surface, and then you get a big rain, then yes there's a chance that the earthworm channel will carry whatever material that is down to the bottom of the earthworm channel. So yeah, on the worst case scenario, the earthworm channel will get it into the soil and deeper than what we would want it. There's a bit of a... It's always more complicated, of course. One is, I'd still rather have it go into the soil, then run off the soil. Because at least if it goes into the soil, it has a chance to maybe be absorbed or caught by some of the soil particles. The other thing is that the earthworm channels are usually lined with cast material, at least part of the channel and so that does tend to absorb some of the chemicals.
Eileen Kladivko:
But yeah, I mean, on balance, I think it's still a net positive, but certainly an earthworm channel can connect down to the water table or in some cases to a tile, and then if you put something on the surface and you get a big rain, then it can go right into the tile. Yeah, that can happen. I don't think that's a compelling enough story to say that earthworms are bad and we should obliterate earthworms. What it means though, is that we may need to manage the way that we apply chemicals a little differently so that they don't tend to go into the earthworm channels in the first place, right? So for example, injecting manure versus putting it on the surface is one thing. Chemicals that you spray on the soil surface, well, most of the time you have to spray them on the soil surface, but don't do it right before you know it's going to rain, right?
Frank Lessiter:
Right.
Eileen Kladivko:
I mean, there's a few things like that where we can do a little better job, but yeah, there's no absolute prevention of that possibility.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah. Another thing's come up is we've had some serious floods in recent years. What happens to earthworm numbers in floods?
Eileen Kladivko:
Depends a little bit on what time of year and what the soil temperatures are. When it's flooding in the winter and it's cold and they're not very active anyway, there would be less of an impact because they're not respiring very much so they don't need as much oxygen and cold water holds oxygen. And so there may or may not be a big effect if it's flooding when the temperatures are cold. If it's flooding when the temperatures are warm and the soil stays saturated for more than a couple days, then we could kill off quite a few worms in that case.
Frank Lessiter:
I'm going to wind this up on earthworms, is there anything we missed that- I want to talk to you about a couple other things, but anything we missed on earthworms you'd like to talk about?
Eileen Kladivko:
No, I think we covered it pretty well.
Frank Lessiter:
Okay. All right. Let's talk about the Midwest Cover Crop Council. Give us a few ideas of what's going on there and who belongs, how you joined, et cetera.
Eileen Kladivko:
So the Midwest Cover Crops Council is basically, includes all 12 states in the USDA north central region. So it's going from Ohio down to Missouri, and through the Dakotas, and Kansas, and Nebraska. So there's 12 states plus the province of Ontario. Plus we just admitted Manitoba. So that kind of rounds out, or maybe squares out the Midwest region. Anybody can be a member. We don't have, I mean, yeah, anybody can be a member. We don't have a membership fee. We don't have membership dues. It's not really membership per se, but if you're interested in receiving occasional emails, we encourage people to join the LISTSERV. The LISTSERV is not one that tends to crush you with dozens of emails every day. Usually there's not too much activity there, but we announce when we have events coming up and then occasionally somebody will ask a question and there'll be a flurry of activity and so on, and then it dies back down again.
Eileen Kladivko:
But what we do, we have a lot of, our mission really is to facilitate widespread adoption of cover crops across the Midwest. We began because we knew that much of the cover crop work that had been done in the U.S. earlier was done in the Mid-Atlantic or South. And while we could learn a lot from that, it wasn't specific for the Midwest. So we started it because we thought we needed a regional emphasis on cover crops in the Midwest. We started it actually a few years before the big interest in cover crops started peaking, so-
Frank Lessiter:
Sure, no I know that.
Eileen Kladivko:
Three or four of us that got together in 2006 and said, "We need to know more about what everybody's doing and it really could be really useful for water quality and taking up nitrates and so on." And then three or four years later, things really started exploding with cover crops. So we had an organization that was kind of ready. It's the land-grant universities are involved. So we have a representative from each of the land-grant universities. We have industry involved, NRCS, non-NGOs, farmers of course, are a key part of what we have. And extension, we're really more of a extension outreach.
Eileen Kladivko:
We try to do some collaborative research and people get to know each other and then come up with projects that they can do across state lines and so on. But we're really much more into the education and outreach. So for example, we have our third edition of our Cover Crop Pocket Guide that just came out in December. We're very proud of that and we encourage people to purchase it at a bargain price of six dollars. And it's got a lot more content in it than our second edition even. And all the major cover crops that are used in the Midwest. We have website with links to lots of different resources. We have a cover crop decision tool, which helps people. If they don't really know what kind of cover crop, maybe they want to use, it leads them through a very simple process of where are you?
Eileen Kladivko:
It takes the weather data from their county and asks about what cash crop they're growing and what goals they have. Like, do they want a nitrogen scavenger or do they want erosion control, things like that. And then it basically ranks the cover crops for the goals that the person has put in there. We also have what we call cover crop recipes, which are essentially, our suggestion about how to get started with cover crops for people who haven't grown cover crops before, and are a little unsure about how to get started, because there's so much information out there.
Eileen Kladivko:
It's our basically attempt to say, "Okay, here's a relatively low risk way to get started." And we have those for every state, primarily for a corn, soybean rotation, but some of the states also have for after weed or after silage. So we always got questions at various conferences from farmers saying, "There's so much information. I'm sold on the idea that I want to try it, but I don't know where to start. Just tell me what to do." And we finally decided, "All right, well, for those who want to just be told what to do the first year, we'll do it."
Frank Lessiter:
But talk about the Midwest. But you got, I mean, the rainfall in Indiana versus North Dakota is totally different. So I think it's neat how you get the weather data from the county and look at it and give a guy some ideas. And I always remember at our first no-till conference in '93, Dwayne Beck from South Dakota got up and said, "You guys here in Indiana and Ohio no-till to get rid of the water, and we no-till in South Dakota to keep every drop to that we can."
Eileen Kladivko:
Right, right. That's right.
Frank Lessiter:
The other thing I remember is, I'm a lot older than you are. I like to tell people I'm as old as dirt, but when I was growing up on the farm north of Detroit 40 miles, my dad was... We used cover crops. I can remember him seeding clover in the fall as a cover crop in the late forties. And then it seemed to get away from us when we got commercial fertilizers and herbicides coming. And then it came back in the last few years, but-
Eileen Kladivko:
Yeah, I think that is part of what happened is that commercial fertilizer came in and a lot of folks got away from the small mixed farm, so they didn't have livestock, and then they didn't have a reason to grow anything that was like a forage. So, that I think was unfortunate in what it did to soil health.
Frank Lessiter:
Right. It's been great. But I'll let you go. Have a great Easter and we'll put it this up in a week or two, and I'll alert you when they put it up. However you want to take it and put it at any place else is fine.
Eileen Kladivko:
Okay, super. Thanks. It was very nice talking with you, Frank.
Brian O'Conner:
That was Eileen Kladivko and Frank Lessiter. Before we wrap up today's episode, here's Frank Lessiter one more time.
Frank Lessiter:
Since today's No-Till Influencers and Innovators podcast deals with earthworms, I want to tell you about a book that we originally published in 1995. It is still the number one non-scientific reference on earthworms today. The title of our 112 page book is the Farmer's Earthworm Handbook with the subhead of Managing Your Underground Moneymakers. Featuring an extensive background on worms and practical ideas used by no tillers in managing their underground on livestock, this highly popular handbook has gone through numerous reprints over the past 27 years. 19 chapters delve into all aspects of on farm earthworm management. From increasing worm populations, earthworm friendly fertilization and pesticide application tips, manure management, seeding fields with night crawlers, the worm's impact on various tillage systems, cover crops, crop rotations, and the major benefits of increasing worm numbers in your fields.
Frank Lessiter:
To order your copy of our earthworm book, go to the No-Till Farmer website at notillfarmer.com, then click store on the dropdown menu and then scroll down to books and you'll find this book and many others dealing with no-till management strategies. Here's one of my favorite quotations from the book, "Earthworms are nature's tillers, they're cheap and do an excellent job." It sums up what you can learn from reading the 112 pages in this bestselling book.
Brian O'Conner:
That concludes this episode of the No-Till Farmer Influencers and Innovators podcast. Thanks to our sponsor, The Anderson's for helping to make the series possible. You can find more podcasts about no-till topics and strategies at notillfarmer.com/podcasts. If you have any feedback on today's episode, please feel free to email me at V-O-C-O-N-N-O-R at lessitermedia.com or call me at (262)777-2413. And don't forget, Frank would love to answer your questions about no-till and the people and innovations that have made an impact on today's practices. So please email your questions to us at listener mail at notillfarmer.com. Once again, if you haven't done so already, you can subscribe to this podcast to get an alert as soon as future episodes are released. Find us we're wherever you listen to podcasts. From Frank and our entire staff here at no-till farmer, I'm Brian O'Connor. Thanks for listening.
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