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“I talk a lot about this complementarity, where sorghum and corn go into the same markets to a large extent. We do a lot of work where we grow sorghum and corn in the same rotation, because sorghum breaks corn rootworm, corn borer, gray leafspot … all those things you worry about with corn, it breaks those cycles.”
Dwayne Beck
This week’s edition of the No-Till Farmer: Influencers & Innovators podcast is a continuation of the previous Influencers & Innovators podcast featuring NNTC presenter Dwayne Beck.
Beck discusses the particulars of the discussion he started with the last episode: the particulars of crop rotation and using rotations to fight pests. Beck recently retired as the director of the Dakota Lakes Research Station in South Dakota.
This presentation was delivered in 2016 at the National No-Till Convention and deals with crop rotations. You’ll occasionally hear the audience clapping and laughing in the background, and may hear MC Darrell Bruggink at the end.
At the time, Beck was advocating for diversity including vegetables.
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'Connor:
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 Andersons sponsors this program in which features stories about the past, present and future of no-till farming. I encourage you to subscribe to this series, which is available in iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and Tune In Radio. Subscribing will allow you to receive an alert about upcoming episodes as soon as they are released.
Brian O'Connor:
I'd like to take a moment to thank the Andersons for supporting our No-till Farmer Influencers And Innovators 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
Brian O'Connor:
For this week's episode of the No-till Farmer Influencers And Innovators podcast is a continuation of last week's podcast. In it Dwayne Beck talks about establishing crop rotations. If you haven't listened to it, I recommend you go back and go through it. Beck recently retired from his position as the director of the Dakota Lakes Research Station in Pierre, South Dakota. This presentation was delivered in 2016 at the National No-till Convention and deals with crop rotations. You'll occasionally hear the audience clapping and laughing in the background. You'll also hear them asking questions at the end of the presentation, and maybe master of ceremonies, Darrell Bruggink, as he closes that out. At the time of this presentation, Beck was advocating for vegetables as part of crop rotations. Without further ado, here's Dwayne Beck.
Dwayen Beck:
So let's look at some different kinds of rotations. The ones most you think about are simple rotation. This is more like a college part of the course now, which is boring as hell in a big room. Here's a simple rotation. Winter wheat, corn, canola, spring wheat, winter wheat, corn, sunflower, winter wheat, corn P, corn soybean. These are all simple, because they go in the same order every time. So when you send the hired man out he knows that he can spray all the wheat stubble with whatever, and if you got this rotation you can spray everything that's going to go to corn you spray the wheat stubble. You don't have to get confused, right?
Dwayen Beck:
So a limited number of crops to manage and market. Only three crops, two crops. All corn, but it's limited. And all corns behind wheat or all winter wheat is into spring wheat or whatever. The conditions for that corn is the same on every acre corn that you have. And the weather's variable, so wouldn't it be better to spread your risk? Oh, you got crop insurance? Oh, wow. Hell, forget all this. You got crop insurance. They'll take care of it if you have a problem. I got to ask you a philosophical question. Crop insurance has subsidized it about a couple years ago $14 billion a year. If it's a good thing to subsidize crop insurance, isn't it a good thing to subsidize health insurance? Or is it the other way around? Just a philosophical question. It isn't a presidential debate, but it's a question you should ask your Congressman, right? Why are you for this and not for this?
Dwayen Beck:
Rotations with perennial sequences, corn, soybean, corn, soybean, corn, soybean, and then you throw in the reset button, four years of alfalfa or four years of grass seed. So you say, okay, I'm going to do that on purpose. I'm going to do this stupid rotation and throw in a perennial sequence. That's what my dad and grandpa used to do. Okay. Still a limited number of annual crops to manage a market, excellent place to spread manure on your perennial crop. Whether that's grass seed... We use grass seed for part of this, would grow tall grass prairie, switch grass seed, or big blue stem seed. We can probably produce more soil structure than annual crops, especially if you have a grass or grass mixture in there.
Dwayen Beck:
If we're going to do biomass crops, which I think is a stupid idea, but if we're going to do biomass crops for ethanol or whatever, let's do it with perennials. Because there we can take that biomass off at the right period of time and take very few nutrients out, and we're leaving the root in place. Biomass crops probably have some potential there. We're going to use it for grazing and seed production. It's difficult to manage a sufficient percentage of your land and perennial crops without doing grazing because you can't physically harvest 40% of your farmer's forage. If you do alfalfa and sell the alfalfa, it's one of the most degrading things you can do to your land, because all the nutrients lead. If you do alfalfa and feed your cattle and put the manure back, it's better.
Dwayen Beck:
Compound rotations. Here, we just take two simple rotations put them end to end. Spring wheat, winter wheat, corn, soybean, corn, soybean. Or you can just have one wheat and then corn, soybean, corn, soybean. I call this my mother-in-law rotation or banker rotation. My wife is an agronomist. She got a master's degree in agronomy. It took her about 20 years to figure out why she always was taking [inaudible 00:05:40] at me calling, then finally she realized what the joke was and she was all right with it.
Dwayen Beck:
The reason you do this is if you get a wet year... Let's say your mother-in-law, your banker is coming to visit you in June. You show her this corn, the one that's behind the soybeans because it's going to be big and growthy and look great. And it's June and it's wonderful. But in South Dakota, we often don't rain in the summer. So she comes to visit in September, you show her the corn that's into wheat stubble, which in June probably looked a little puny and was struggling some. Spreads the risk. Spreads the risk of it. Still have a limited number of crops to manage. Creates more than one sequence for some of the crop types. Limited ability to spread workload. You still only have three crops there.
Dwayen Beck:
So this thing about sequence and interval. In the Western corn belt, we have a corn rootworm beetle that has got extended diapause, right? You all familiar with that? Natural habit for a corn rootworm is a beetle eats on the silks, lays its eggs at the base of the corn plant, the egg goes through a diapause, becomes a larvae and it eats the roots the next spring. If you're doing corn, soybean, corn, soybean, that baby has nothing to eat if it's a normal habit. By doing all corn, soybeans, we've selected for a species that has a two year rest phase. The egg gets laid, it goes into diapause for a year and a half, and hatches during the corn year. Mother nature has been playing this trick longer than you have.I mean, when she sees what Monsanto's doing with all their genetic technology and whatever she goes, oh, you damn amateurs. Try this. I've been doing this longer than you have. Boom.
Dwayen Beck:
In the Eastern corn belt you have some corn root and beet rootworm beetles where the pregnant or gravid females fly from the corn fields of the soybean fields to lay their eggs. Soybean variant. I call them the blonde, corn rootworm beetles, because everybody goes, look at that dumb blonde. Well, dumb blondes aren't usually dumb, right? Flying over there, doing their thing. If we plan all of our corn into wheat stubble, you get the same thing happening. You'll have them learn to fly into wheat stubble. You can't be consistent in either sequence or interval.
Dwayen Beck:
Rotations where crop within the same crop type vary. Barley, winter wheat, corn, sunflower, millet, or P. Sorghum is the other one. I talk a lot about this complementary, where sorghum and corn go into the same markets to a large extent. We do a lot of work where we grow sorghum and corn in the same rotation because sorghum breaks, corn rootworm is corn bore, corn rootworm, all those things. Gray leaf spot, goss's wilt. All those things you worry about with corn, it breaks those cycles. Still gives you a product that is going into the same market and actually goes in at a premium right now because the Chinese will buy sorghum at a premium to corn, because it's not GMO.
Dwayen Beck:
We can create a wide array of crop type by sequence combinations. It's got this complementary I talk about, sorghum and corn. I've got papers on this. It requires substantial crop management and marketing skills. That's why you're a farmer. You're the manager and you got to have those skills, crop management skills. Used to be you could be a farmer if you could drive straight. Well, we all got auto steer. We don't need you to do that anymore. You got to up your abilities.
Dwayen Beck:
And then stacked rotations, which are the ones all the college kids that come to visit. They always like me when I talk about stacked rotations, for some reason, where crops are crops within the same crop type are grown twice in succession. It looks stupid to do wheat, wheat, corn, corn, soybean, soybean. This is an example. We actually do this one on irrigation. Why would you do that? Well, it's not consistent in either sequence or interval. It gives us these long breaks. And the real reason for doing rotation is these long breaks. And these are breaks in biological time, not in chronological time. So when you throw a cover crop in there, it's biological time. If you don't have a cover crop, there just have a stale seed bed. You're not getting any biology, so the time stops. But if you throw in a crop, you get things happening.
Dwayen Beck:
Keep the pest population diverse or confused. Diversity in sequences and intervals. Mix of long and short residual herbicides. If I do a stacked rotation with corn, corn, or Milo corn, I can use a high rate of atrazine and not worry about carryover. You may not want to use a high rate of atrazine here for water quality issues. You may not be allowed to, but we are allowed to because this dry country, our biggest problem of using high rate of atrazine is carryover. We can use a high rate of atrazine in that first year, go to another crop that is tolerant the next year.
Dwayen Beck:
What that does is that makes a long and short residual herbicide program, reduces the cost, and then it minimizes the chance of resistance. I'm not going to get Roundup resistance if I'm doing atrazine in the Milo, I'm doing Roundup in the corn, I'm coming into maybe the first year of soybeans with a long residual ALS herbicide, and not using the Roundup trick in that soybean. And then the two years of wheat, I'm not using Roundup in at all. You're only using Roundup two times out of six years in crop.
Dwayen Beck:
Two year break between corn and wheat. The reason for that is this head scabber fusarium thing, the thing that breaks down the fungus that breaks down cornstalks. It's the one that causes head scab in wheat. We probably can reduce the risk of developed biotype resistance, and we can reduce the cost of herbicide program if we know that. It says not well tested. We've been doing this for about 20 years, so we're starting to get really comfortable with it. Some crop sequences may not be ideal. There's some crops, like canola and canola, I wouldn't do just because the white mold will eat your lunch. You got to understand what you're doing with it. But the goal is to be in inconsistent.
Dwayen Beck:
Here's some other ones. Wheat, wheat, wheat, wheat, wheat, sorghum, sorghum, sorghum, sorghum, sunflower, sunflower, sunflower. Right? I was in Kansas and an extension guy said, "I got a farmer who goes, wheat, wheat, wheat, wheat until he gets joint goat grass. Then he starts growing sorghum until he gets shatter cane. And then he goes to sunflower until he gets white mold. And then he goes back to wheat." And then they all laughed. And I said, "Well, that's smarter than somebody doing corn, soybean, corn, soybean, corn, soybean and calling up Monsanto and saying, I need new herbicide. I mean, at least he's responding.
Dwayen Beck:
Ones we use to [inaudible 00:13:25], we got this wheat, wheat, sorghum first usually, corn and then [inaudible 00:13:31]. We got this rotations five years. Four of those years are high residue crops. This is our best rotation on dry land, because we're a prairie just like you guys are. Or you're a forest, which is even more carbon. You can't put low carbon stuff in there. We've got to push high carbon to these things. We've got some real heavy soils, true Vertisols, where we do two wheats, both winter wheats. Then we do a catch as catch can broad leaf. What that means is, whenever the ground gets dry in the spring we plant a broad leaf in there, whatever is appropriate for that time. Because it rains you won't get it planted in that real heavy residue of two years of wheat. Then we do Milo or sorghum, corn and then P canola or flax, which are cool season broad leafs. After that last corn you're going back to the winter wheat. Winter wheat, corn P, winter wheat, soybean, corn, Milo P.
Dwayen Beck:
This one is half broad leafs. It's like a corn soybean, but better from a weed control standpoint. That one's being changed because it's degraded to the soil support. But after 25 years, I'm not going to do it anymore. So we're going to put a perennial grass into there. Irrigated rotations, continuous corn. Corn, soybean. We have only one field of corn, soybean left. And then we've got these other more diverse rotations.
Dwayen Beck:
There's no set recipe, no best rotation. I didn't pick your wife. I told a young guy that one time. He was trying to get me to tell him what rotation to use. And I said, "You see, you just got married." Still had his ring on. Most farmers get rid of it that first time they get caught on something, they put them in the drawer. He said, "Yeah, last week." And I said, "Who picked your wife?" And he said, "I did." I said, "Well, then you got to pick your own rotation."
Dwayen Beck:
Individual field may be differing treatment depending on the soil, the landlord or proximity or history or ownership or whatever. Just understanding these principles. I've got a paper that covers all these rotations. If you email me, I'll just send it to you. So here's our irrigated stuff, which is closer to what you guys talk about. Corn, soybean rotation. If I put in a cover crop that gives me 7.3 bushel of acre average versus no cover crop, we use cover crop on everything now. In 2013, soybeans with cover crop, 62.9 bushel acre. It had have been 55 without the cover crop. If we do a corn, corn, soybean, wheat, soybean rotation with a big cover crop after this wheat going to this soybean cover crop there before this soybean, whatever, 73.6 bushel, 81.2 these two different years versus that 65.
Dwayen Beck:
So cover crop increased soybean yield 7.3 bushels historically, but the crop diversity increased soybean yield by 15. 62.9 versus 78.8 average between those two years of soybeans in that diverse rotation. Corn, similar. Continuous corn. Long term type thing. 203, bushel acre. Continuous corn, 217. Corn, soybean, 235. First year corn is 250 or 60. Second year corn is more like the 217. Average is 235. In that rotation where we have continuous corn, if I had 5,000 acres, I'd have. 1,015,000 bushels of corn, and I need five combines and 22 semi trucks just to haul the damn stuff. Big dryers and all kinds of fun things.
Dwayen Beck:
Corn, soybeans. If I did that and the same things, I've got more than half as much corn, and I've got 157,000 bushels of beans. The interesting thing is where I do this corn, corn, soybean, wheat, soybean, less corn, but actually I have more beans here than I have here. 40% of my land grows more beans than 50% does. And I get 120,000 bushels of wheat. So would you trade 72,500 bushels of corn for 120,000 bushels of wheat plus 350 bushels of soybean plus less herbicides, less seed cost because the first year corn here's a non GMO savings? But just sheer bushels, you still win by being more diverse.
Dwayen Beck:
It's all about building organic matter, managing the ecosystem. Organic matter makes a difference. With on technical crafts is organic matter increase from one to 3%, available water capacity doubles. One of the reasons your land water logs and floods and whatever is that it doesn't hold as much water as it did when grandfather got here. You took a soil that used to hold 12 inches and now it holds six. So when you get a big rain it tends to water log. And when you don't get a rain it tends to get droughty on you. When soil water storage capacity is low much of the rain that falls during extended periods of precipitation is lost and contrast high water storage capacity combined with effective captured rain over the winter and spring can support a crop through dry periods.
Dwayen Beck:
Concentrate on having your soils wet during the tri part of the year, not just having them dry during the wet part of the year. Concentrate on having them cool for good root growth during the hot part of the year. Not just warm during the spring when you want something to grow fast. All tillage tools destroy soil structure. All tillage tools decrease water infiltration. All tillage tools reduce organic matter. All tillage tools increase weeds. If you run a vertical tillage machine across your ground, lots of data is out there. They'll give it to you if you want it. It'll cut your infiltration rate in half in long term no-till field. It's like putting your finger over the top of a soda straw.
Dwayen Beck:
Tillage is to agriculture what fracking is to petroleum. They both increase the speed and extent of nutrient removal from the resource, leaving the resource degraded. Our parents and ancestors came here. My first ancestors came to Illinois and then they left Illinois and went to the Dakotas. They degraded the soil in Illinois and then they left and went to the Dakotas. Some experts say they proposed using tillage as a means of addressing weed resistance. If tillage was so good at getting rid of weeds, they should all be gone, right? We've done enough damn tillage. They should be out of here. It doesn't work.
Dwayen Beck:
Continuous low disturbance no-till in combination with the diverse rotation and cover crop is a biological answer to a biological problem. It's looking forward. Sarah Singler from France, looking forward instead of looking backwards. When her grandfather used to plow in France, he was looking backwards. When he no-tills, he looks forward.
Brian O'Connor:
Welcome back to Dwayne Beck's presentation in a moment. Before we do so I'd like to thank our sponsor, the Andersons, 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 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. Before we get back to the conversation, here's Frank Lessiter with little known no-till farmer fact.
Frank Lessiter:
I've fielded questions from a few readers in recent months about the stratification of phosphorus and potassium in no-till soils. And we got some long-term data from plots at the Calmer Research Center in Alpha, Illinois that shows that service applied phosphorus and potassium leads to significant stratification. In plots that have received no phosphorus and potassium for a dozen years at a soil depth of more than three inches, the amount of available potassium and phosphorus went down dramatically. Incorporating P and K into the soil versus surface applying definitely improves the likelihood of profitability.
Brian O'Connor:
And now we'll get back to the conversation.
Speaker 4:
We discussed here carbon in the soil. I've got some guys who are proposing to put carbon down with a machine and add it to the ground. Is it practical? Can you add enough? Is it going to solve a problem? Is it going to make a difference?
Dwayen Beck:
Mean with exhaust going in the ground?
Speaker 4:
No. We're talking about using carbon that would be a process from... They're typically using carbon that's coming from wood chips.
Dwayen Beck:
It's okay, but it's not much. Did everybody hear that question?
Speaker 5:
No.
Dwayen Beck:
Okay. He wanted to know if it made sense to use carbon coming from processed wood chips and whatever as a way of adding carbon to the soil. It makes sense within reason. I mean, that's what you're doing with manure and whatever. You got to add the other things, nitrogen or whatever, to balance what you put on with carbon. But there's 2 million pounds roughly in the top six inches of soil. And if you want to add 1% to that, that's 20,000 pounds, which is a lot of stuff, right? You really start talking a lot of volume, 10 tons. And then a lot of that'll in the process of turned into organic better will be lost in the transformation process. So it's okay if it's cheap enough, but...
Speaker 6:
From Southern Missouri, we've been doing cover crops, partly for our diverse livestock pasturing system for our dairy and our beef cattle. We do grow Milo and barley and things like that that we bring all the way to harvest. But I heard you were saying that you're using multiple years of atrazine and putting on heavy rates. I've had a wreck with that on my cover crops because I've had some cover crops that just won't function with too much atrazine.
Dwayen Beck:
Yeah. That's the devil in the detail of using that trick of long residual. You tie your hand on the cover crop thing. Where we will have the most success with this or use the high rates of atrazine is actually on dry land where between Milo and corn there's not A, time or B, moisture to do anything other than have snow. Southern Missouri doesn't understand this. But by the time we harvest some Milo the ground is pretty well frozen. So there's not a cover crop period between then and when corn's planted. So the high rate of atrazine, for instance, is a good tool. But you could use higher rates of atrazine than you can if you're not... You're not stuck with only using Roundup in your corn, put it that way. You got different tools.
Speaker 6:
Dwayne.
Dwayen Beck:
Yes.
Speaker 6:
You mentioned that you saw that legumes led supplied nitrogen into a crop in a no-till system, and that people don't see it in a tillage system. What is explanation of that?
Dwayen Beck:
Mycorrhizal. Vascular arbuscular Mycorrhizal fungi. If you can say that, see, then nobody asked you a question. They go, he might ask me something I don't know. But it's these webs of Mycorrhizae that... There's some really neat stuff out on YouTube now that looks at the forest where these webs of Mycorrhizae take nutrients from here and bring it over here. The corn is giving the Mycorrhizae carbon in return, and it's getting nitrogen and other nutrients.
Dwayen Beck:
We see this in one of the big... Ray Wards here from Ward Labs in the second row. He and I puzzle over some things. We have some fields because we're next to the Missouri River that we've drawn to less than five parts per million Olsen in terms of phosphorus on purpose. So we don't have high P soils sitting next to the river. And we don't want stuff getting in the river. We don't get a response to phosphorus yet at that level because we have so many Mycorrhizae. But if I would go out there and work that ground once I'd have huge differences in phosphorus response.
Dwayen Beck:
The phosphorus soil test have been calibrated for killed systems. We may need to recalibrate them. Is that fair, Ray, to say that we may need to recalibrate them for no-till?
Ray Ward:
I have not recalibrated.
Dwayen Beck:
No, but that's supposed to be a university thing.
Ray Ward:
Right.
Dwayen Beck:
But we don't have those anymore. So whatever. We don't have the same emphasis. Because what's happening is Mycorrhizae's doing a good enough job of getting this, quote unquote, unavailable phosphorus that you've been scared about all these years. All it is is unavailable, or it's not available to run into the lake or the river. It's not available to your crop unless it has Mycorrhizae. But other than that, it's there. But if the Mycorrhizae can help you get that and they won't help push it into the river, that's a good thing. See, that's the way the old ecosystem used to work.
Speaker 8:
Dwayne.
Dwayen Beck:
Yes.
Speaker 8:
Over to your left. You had a slide up there with the earthworms showing how it provides water infiltration, nutrient movement. I'm in a situation where we struggle sometimes with lower PHs so we're having to put calcium lime or something like that on. Is there any chance that earthworms will move calcium through the soil? Or does that fix to the to two-
Dwayen Beck:
A couple things there. Number one, the lime that you put on, if you get a small rainfall before you get a big rainfall, won't necessarily move into the night crawler hole. Some people say, well, you put your fertilizer on, you get a rain and it goes down the night crawler holes. If you're putting your fertilizer on in a band that's in the soil, that won't move in the holes. So that's why we're sidemanning. If you're broadcast, like with lime, it'll stay on top, but the night crawlers will eventually take that down.
Dwayen Beck:
One of the things with my alfalfa and corn growing together. What the perennial would do, if you have low pH soil, you put in three or four years of perennial and don't take off the residue, graze it, or do whatever. That lime from deep comes right back to the surface. That's really what the function of that perennial was. In Kofi Boa, his perennial sequence is rainforest. So they'll put in about seven years of rainforest. And then the traditional farmers would slash and burn, but he slashes and mulches and does cover crops and whatever so he doesn't burn and lose all that nutrient they accumulated. But that deep root system of the tree goes down and takes all those nutrients that are leeching deep and bringing them back to the surface. Your trees did the same thing and they fell in the way of leaves on the surface. Or the grasses did that, and the animals grazed them, and it all got back to the surface that way.
Dwayen Beck:
Well, Ray was at my house and we dug... He left me. Oh, there you are. We dug that soil pit at that time Joe was there. Was that, about the second or third week of June. We had roots at four feet. We had soybean roots at four feet, and they had nodules all the way down going in the earthworm channels. So I got my witness here.
Speaker 9:
Dwayne, you said that you needed to introduce livestock onto your farm. What makes you say that, and what are your plans to do so?
Dwayen Beck:
Well, I can't continue to sell my nutrients. I think one of the things that livestock bring that we can't get with fertilizer is biology. You're starting to see a lot of biological amendments and stuff like that. There's somebody that sells them and called a bag of bugs or whatever. Dan Towery was telling me about it, it's called bag of bugs or something like that. Dan's in the audience. I got a picture for you, Dan. I got a picture of my cows. They're bags of bugs, is what they are. If you think of what cows do.
Dwayen Beck:
Now, the other way of thinking about that in cold climates, the biology and the soil stops and cold climate stops when it gets cold, pretty much. The biology in the room, and is almost identical what goes on in the soil, or a good share of it in terms of cellulose digestion and all this stuff. And it goes on all winter. So my cows, which are grazing today... And they'll be grazing this weekend and whatever. We swath graze them, stock graze them. That biology, what they're doing with my residue, is going on during the wintertime when I don't have any other biological activity going on. So that's an interesting way of thinking about that.
Dwayen Beck:
How do we plan to do it? There's a part of our Buffett series of projects, but we're going to try to design a self-propelled grazing cell. So we actually manage the cattle much as we could in confinement in terms of having that way to monitor them and whatever. But be able to move them around in the field, to be able to call them up on my smartphone and look at the cows. If one of them is moving too much or not moving enough, the computer would figure it out and call me and say there's something wrong.
Speaker 10:
You farm on a river, which probably floods. Do you have any insight on rotations or cover crops in a flood plain?
Dwayen Beck:
I farm on a river that doesn't flood anymore because they put a dam in. It's going to start flooding again in about 50 years once the dam is silted in. Well. Hey, duh. I don't know. I do have some insight. There's guys that have issues with closed depressions that flood. The thing there is to get something growing as fast as you can. Fallow Syndrome is what happened. Your Mycorrhizae's dead when it floods. And so Fallow Syndrome is where you could have high P testing soils, but your corn doesn't grow well. And that's because you don't have the Mycorrhizae there. So placement of fertilizer, probably some pop up there, is important. But first, let's get some... Flax is very highly Mycorrhizal. Oats Is very highly Mycorrhizal. I think people grow too many brassicas. They don't have very much fiber. We do some brassica, but we don't do lots of them. They're not that great at cow feed, either.
Speaker 11:
Yeah. Dwayne. Pros and cons about hauling fertilizer out of the field, not put it on my field.
Dwayen Beck:
If you're putting concentrated fertilizer on a frozen field it's probably not the best way to do it, because if you do get a big rainfall, it can go away. In Denmark, they have to put their fertilizer on top of the ground, not in the ground, which is interesting. They have to no-till have a cover crop and apply the pig poo underneath the cover crop. But that's where some of these cover crops really come in as a place to put manure on when it's not freezing, and you got a cover crop that can take it up right away and lock it up in that catch and release thing.
Speaker 14:
Yeah. Dwayne. 60 years ago hardly anybody was planting soybean. Now they're pretty ubiquitous across the country. What future crops do you think farmers should be planning for the future instead of being stuck in this corn, soybean rut that we've got?
Dwayen Beck:
God, if knew that I wouldn't be stupid enough to work for what I work here for, Daryl. Well, I mean human edible crops. We're going to need to produce more crops that are actually food. So we grow things like lentils and field peas and chickpeas and some of those kind of crops. I think soybeans are okay, we just can't grow them every other year. I mean, it's a case where we've built an industry that... Because we need the protein, but there's a lot of different ways to get protein. We need the oil, and there's lots of different ways to get the oil. We've grown this industry around growing crop giving us both of those. We do flax and canola and those kind of things for oil seed crops. A lot of sunflowers growing in our area. And then in terms of protein, those are pretty good protein sources too if you press them. And then with peas and lentils and some of those [inaudible 00:36:00] human edible stuff.
Dwayen Beck:
And peas, if you feed peas to beef... We've done these studies. If you feed peas versus distillers grain or soybeans or whatever, the steaks are more tender and more juicy if they've had peas for a protein source versus those other ones. It's really interesting stuff. And taste panel stuff. They did the sheer test with the sheer measurement. And then they also did a taste panel, and taste panel consistent, 90% of the people were picking a pea fed beef out as being better. And 90% of a taste panel never picks anything. We had to redo it two or three times because they didn't believe that number could be that good. Yeah.
Speaker 15:
I just want to thank you for opening my mind years ago to all the possibilities. Since then, we've been able to do things like instead of intensive cropping we graze crop for several years, then go to corn, soybeans.
Dwayen Beck:
Does your wife agree?
Speaker 15:
My wife has agreed. My sons both came back. They wanted to integrate cattle into the operation. If you wouldn't have had the key to unlock it, I wouldn't have been able to do that. I really appreciate that.
Dwayen Beck:
Well, I appreciate the thoughts. I'm thinking you're probably smart enough. It wasn't just me.
Speaker 15:
Is that right?
Dwayen Beck:
Yes.
Speaker 16:
Hi, Dwayne. Several years ago, I heard you speak. And when you were speaking to cover crops you had said that you wanted at least two species, preferably a sink and a source. And now we've got multi-species are being touted. How far down that road are you as far as more diversity or more species in a cover crop blend? Or are you into cover crop blends?
Dwayen Beck:
Yeah, I think blends are important. I've got a top 10 list on cover crops. Well, first thing is, decide what you want to do before you do it. We do a lot of stuff that's maybe two or three or maybe four species. I don't know that there's magic. Some people claim you got to have seven or you don't get anything happening or whatever, but I'm not sure I've seen that. I had a graduate student and we did some work on it. But mixers are definitely great.
Dwayen Beck:
And what do you want to to? I want them to grow at different times, for one thing. The thing we're grazing right now is we're swath grazing oats and German millet or hay millet, that was planted after weed harvest. And then we swath it right before everything froze. And it's been laying there ever since. It's under about this much snow, but the cow just go in and put their head down. They know exactly where it's at. Just away they go. They just have a great time in there. I wanted the hay millet to take off and grow when it was warm, and the oats just sat there. And as soon as it gets about 38 degrees, the hay millet decides it shouldn't be there and it dies. And then the oats grows, and it grows way late into the fall. Now, this field's going to go to soybean so I didn't throw any broad leaves in there because I didn't want to bring any kind of root disease stuff across.
Dwayen Beck:
I do have volunteer cereal grown in there. The volunteer winter wheat and the volunteer spring wheat, depending on whether it's spring wheat or winter wheat that we had there, that's growing or grew. It's in the swath, and the winter wheat's actually still green underneath there. So that would be the minimum of what we do. And then a lot of times we'll have four or five where we're going to go to corn. The next thing you're going to swath graze is where we had wheat and we're going to go to corn. And that had peas, lentils, dwarf essex rapeseed, oats, and flax. And it was swath. So that's what we have for dinner.
Cedric:
Dwayne, in the spirit of diversity, I figured we better have a question from Canada for you.
Dwayen Beck:
Yes, Cedric. Can I tell him about Brandon?
Cedric:
Well maybe later it would be a better time. So as you know, our soils I was used to dealing with pod soils. I've got acidic parent materials. We're always dealing with the lime question. You mentioned about the earthworms bringing the calcium up, which I assume is cat carry sub soils. Trying to get guys to look at no-till in our acidic soils, and we got to keep adding that lime. Is there any way to follow up with his question that we can get that profile at the pH six five we want, and then come in with regular additions on the top and expect that lime to move through the profile over time, as long as we keep introducing at the surface?
Dwayen Beck:
Yeah. I think that's probably legitimate.
Cedric:
Is that a realistic strategy for managing that pH long term, if we take those pod soils to a strict no-till system?
Dwayen Beck:
How deep are they?
Cedric:
It's eight inches, 10 inches.
Dwayen Beck:
And then where does the stuff goes when it leeches? Do you lose it?
Cedric:
No.
Dwayen Beck:
I mean, your pH goes down, so why does it go down?
Cedric:
Well, because their soil's inherently acidic and we're losing the calcium and magnesium out of the system with cropping and it's taking it back to-
Dwayen Beck:
So you should only have to replace crop removal, which isn't a lot.
Cedric:
ell, you should, but it's being hydrolyzed with that. And that chemical reaction's being held up with the hydrogen. You've taken me right back to grad school [inaudible 00:41:43]. We're dealing with that chemical issue. It's always fighting-
Dwayen Beck:
If it's only eight inches or 10 inches, that's realistic. That should change a pH there. If you're trying to change a pH to four feet, that gets to be a lot of the lime.
Cedric:
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks.
Brian O'Connor:
That was Dwayne Beck presenting to the National No Tillage Conference in 2016. Before We wrap up today's episode, here's Frank Lessiter one more time.
Frank Lessiter:
A number of readers have voiced serious concerns over various types of erosion that are happening, not only in the US but around the world. Soil, wind and water erosion will continue unless more reduced to it such as no-till is adopted at a much faster rate around the world. Within a depleted top soil layers in many areas of the world, especially in Africa, no-till is the best way to overcome losses of our extremely valuable soils.
Brian O'Connor:
That concludes this episode of the No-till Farmer Influencers and Innovators podcast. Thanks to our sponsor, the Andersons, 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 boconnor@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 listenermail@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 wherever you listen to podcasts. For Frank and our entire staff here at No Till Farmer, I'm Brian O'Connor. Thanks for listening.
