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“The key is controlling weeds and minimizing disturbance of the soil while taking real good care of that crop residue.”
— Bob Klein, Nebraska Cropping Systems Specialist
For this episode of the No-Till Farmer Influencers & Innovators Podcast, brought to you by SOURCE® from Sound Agriculture, editor Frank Lessiter chats with Nebraska cropping systems specialist Bob Klein. The conversation covers no-till history as well as the concept of Eco-Fallow —the process of controlling weeds after wheat harvest with herbicides, while minimizing soil disturbance as much as possible and conserving soil moisture.
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No-Till Farmer‘s No-Till Influencers & Innovators Podcast podcast is brought to you by SOURCE®️ by Sound Agriculture.
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Full Transcript
Mackane Vogel:
Welcome to the No-Till Farmer Influencers and Innovators podcast, brought to you by Source from Sound Agriculture. I'm Mackane Vogel, associate editor of No-Till Farmer. In today's episode, editor Frank Leseter chats with Nebraska cropping system specialist Bob Klein. The conversation covers no-till history, as well as the concept of ecofallow, the process of controlling weeds after weed harvest with herbicides, while minimizing soil disturbance as much as possible, and conserving soil moisture.
Frank Leseter:
Let's talk a little about your history. You grow up on a farm or whatever?
Bob Klein:
Yeah, I grew up on a farm in actually Eastern Nebraska.
Frank Leseter:
Then what'd you do? You went off to school, where'd you go?
Bob Klein:
University of Nebraska in Lincoln.
Frank Leseter:
Okay. And then what happened after you graduated?
Bob Klein:
Well, first couple years I went as a county agent in Douglas County of Omaha. And then went back another year and got my masters, and then went out West, and I was county agent for about 20 years in Redwood County or McCook, the county seat there.
Frank Leseter:
So where's that located from North Platte?
Bob Klein:
Okay. It's straight south, about 70 miles from North Platte. Yeah, the last 40 years I've been at North Platte as a cropping system specialist.
Frank Leseter:
Well, we want to talk about ecofallow today in my history series, and I think first off, we ought to get you to define what ecofallow was, or is.
Bob Klein:
Okay. Here it is, ecofallow, controlling weeds during the fallow period, mostly after winter weed harvest by using herbicides and/or tillage with minimum disturbance of crop residues and soil. So that's really the key is controlling the weeds and then the minimum disturbance of the soil and crop residues, taking real good care of that crop residue because that's really important.
Frank Leseter:
So the key to this was instead of having a fallow season, you could somehow get away from that, and growers before this been getting two crops in four years. And with this, they could get two crops in three years, right?
Bob Klein:
That's right. Yeah. The common thing before we started this was wheat, the summer fallow, and then wheat the next year, or one crop in two years. And it was basically all wheat. And then what we did was introduce corn, or grain sorghum, or sunflowers, or grow some melon. The first two were actually corn and grain.
Frank Leseter:
So it would eliminate the fallow season all altogether? Well, it didn't eliminate the fallow season, right?
Bob Klein:
Yeah, we'd start off with wheat, and then of course after winter wheat harvest we would basically turn to spraying to maintain the crop residue and control the weeds, instead of going out there with tillage. And then if we kept good residue out there, we also trap some snow in the wintertime. So in general, we ended up with at least three inches of additional water to fall saved by using herbicides instead of tillage to control the weeds. And then we would gain some more over the winter usually, catching some snow.
And then the next spring when we planted corn or grain sorghum in there, we really reduced evaporation. When we talk about evapotranspiration, a good share of it, especially early in the season, is evaporation and not transpiration. And so we can really reduce that evaporation and get some pretty decent corn or grain sorghum yields, or other crop yields. And I would have to say before we introduced this program, of course I was county agent down in Cook then, and we could not grow corn or grain sorghum profitably by using conventional tillage. We just couldn't get good enough yields to make it profitable.
Frank Leseter:
So Gail Wicks pioneered this system and you worked with him. What gave you folks the idea for ecofallow?
Bob Klein:
Well, there was some research going on. Kansas was doing some research of using some atrazine after winter weed harvest to control the weeds, and that really made a difference. Now, we would use paraquat to burn down the weeds out there, and then use the atrazine for residual. And we saw that we could control the weeds by using the atrazine, and this was really a breakthrough when we had a pre-emergence like atrazine to use in that fallow period. And then of course, lots of times we use some additional atrazine, or some other herbicides to control the weeds in crop instead of using tillage cultivation. And so it really made quite a difference.
Frank Leseter:
Yeah. And you mentioned this earlier, but how much moisture retention do you think a grower could get on the average with this system?
Bob Klein:
Yeah. Well, we'd end up with a good three inches after harvest, and then if you go to [inaudible 00:06:41] tillage to control weeds, or cultivation each time you go out and do that operation, you can lose from a third to an inch depending on the depth of soil water through those. So it can make quite a difference in that. Now we've seen as much as 100 bushel difference in using the ecofallow system as conventional tillage, and you say, "Well, we don't save that much water." Well, what happens in some of those years is that if you end up, and say you got another five inches of water out there, that crop can hang on quite a while, and then you eventually catch some rain. And if your crop already took the trip drying out with conventional tillage, so we would end every seven or 10 years, we'd see situations like that where we got some good rains in August there. And if your crop was still in good shape with the excess soil water, you had quite a difference in the system.
Frank Leseter:
So where this was popular in Western Nebraska, what kind of rainfall or moisture during the year did you get? How many inches?
Bob Klein:
Yeah. Well, like in the McCook area, in North Platte, you're talking probably about 19 inches on the average.
Frank Leseter:
So when you were in McCook County, was Paul Shafford in your county?
Bob Klein:
Yeah, just in Indianola. And he was one of our early adapters in the eco farming system. And let me tell you about a story about Paul. Him and his brother-in-law were flying, his brother-in-law had a pilot's license, flying over their cornfields. And this is in the early days of ecofallow, and they flew over this one, and half of it was greener the other half. And they made several passes over the field, it just didn't make any sense because they planted the same hybrid all the way through the field. They used the same herbicides all the way over the field, and they fertilized it the same all the way over the field, the same. It just doesn't make any sense why half the field was greener than the other half, so they landed and drove over to the field and got looking around.
"Oh yeah, they look different." And it was greener on part. And where it was greener, there was more straw, wheat straw because he planted in wheat straw. And then they went over to what wasn't as green, and there wasn't much wheat straw there. "Oh yeah, on half the field we took the straw spreader off and bailed the windrow of straw." And Paul called me and he told me about it. He says, "Bob, are you interested in checking yields?" And I said, "You bet." Because that was the early days of it and we didn't have all the documentation on it yet.
And so we went out there and checked the yield on corn on where they took the straw spreader off and bailed it. And it was a good year in Southwest Nebraska for the corn, it made 97 bushels. And then we went over where they left the straw spreader to check the yield there, and it made 117. Because I didn't come close to getting the value in that straw of 20 bushels of corn. And so it's put interesting showing the value of that. And one of the things that we really like about the ecofallow program, in our wheat, fallow wheat, to maintain soil organic matter, which is a major component in soil health. And of course soil health is the big thing right now, but it takes about 4,000 pounds of residue, or two tons of residue, per year to maintain soil organic matter.
Or in the wheat fallow wheat rotation, you would have to actually have 80 bushel of wheat in that every other year cropping system, or 8,000 pounds of residue. And if you look back at our yields about that time, we were averaging probably about 23 bushels in Southwest Nebraska, only about a third of what we needed to maintain soil organic matter. So you can see what we did to soil health in that wheat fallow wheat rotation, and you could see quite a difference. I got a real good slide where a farmer always started wheat harvest on the edge of this field, and then it didn't spread the residue very good, but I would say right behind the combine he had about three times as much residue. And so that area got plenty of residue and it really is good wheat, and in between it's not too good, and it shows you the advantage of that soil organic matter.
Frank Leseter:
So one thing we ought to do here is put a timetable to this. So ecofallow came out in the '60s or '70s, right?
Bob Klein:
Yeah, the first year that we really saw it adapting the system to any extent was 1974, or 50 years ago now. And we estimated that there were about 5,000 acres treated after wheat harvest that summer in 1974, 50 years ago.
Frank Leseter:
Any cons to the system, problems?
Bob Klein:
When we first started, we had lots and lots of problems. One was the application of the herbicides, the sprayers at that time were not set up too good. Some people thought they were pretty good at spraying, but when you go out and spray a wheat stubble field, you can see every weed you miss out there. If you're spraying green weeds in a corn field, or a soybean field, if you miss a few, it's not too bad. But when you're spraying a wheat stubble field, man, you can see every one you miss. And then with the system, if we had a weed that we didn't control, and of course it produces seed, which makes it hard to control because there's no crop competition out there. So the weeds really do good, produce a lot of seed, and in general in those areas in dry Western Nebraska, we wouldn't have a crop wherever we had weeds.
So that was a major problem. We worked a lot with sprayers and dealers. We had some real innovative dealers like Owen Elmer down at McCook, he advised [inaudible 00:14:40] good commercially. Marking systems were a major problem that Owen actually developed a thing that would make a ridge out to drive by, so that was important. Do a canoe down a tricot at Oxford the first time through the field, they would actually just move over half the width of the boom, and then double spray, and then use those tracks, just every other set of tracks, for spraying later on. And he said at that time, he really sprayed the field twice, but he would bill the farmers just for one and a half and he would absorb the other half of the cost. And it really worked good because of the fact that with the rates he were using, he really got good coverage with the paraquat. And that's one reason he did so good.
So that was another problem. Another one was crop residue distribution, and we could really see the effects of that, we even have that today. Back on Paul Schaffert's in 2013, Paul caught my attention to one of his fields, and they had a John Deere 40 foot draper head on the combine, and it spread the residue 20 feet, and so 10 feet outer on either end was not getting residue. Well, we went out in the field and got ears and there was good ears on the 20 feet that had the residue, there was nubbins on the outer 10 feet on each one of those. It made a world of difference. And so all these things, and so crop residue distribution, really important.
The planters and drills at that time were not very good at planting in crop residue. And we had a real problem, especially behind the combine if it didn't spread the residue very good, and of trying to plant in that and get a good stand. Now we've got good planters here with the disc that can do a pretty good job planting and some pretty heavy residue, but all these things were big problems. And I know we had some people that were probably ready to give up, or did give up. I know Dwight Balzenberger, he tried several things out there at Kimball County, and he gave up a couple of times trying to implement the system, and eventually he got it to work out, or got the drills and everything else to do the job. So lots of challenges.
Frank Leseter:
Yeah. The dealer that was double applying, my gosh, that was controlled traffic before we knew what to call it, right?
Bob Klein:
That's right, yeah. And it was interesting. We talk about some of those application things, and this was actually on Keith Olson for one of the people over by Grant. And of course he headed the farm bureau in Nebraska here, good cooperator with us. And he had wheat fields, it's a pretty dry year. And so wheat yields were only about 22 bushel or something like that. And when they sprayed, the sprayer wasn't set up very good. It had 60 inch nozzle spacing, and flood nozzles, and all these things that were wrong until we learned how to really do it. And what was interesting though is there'd be rows of weeds out there, and he combined it in the opposite direction it was sprayed, and they didn't spread the residue very good. Later on, he got a straw storm, which really did a good job, but at this time you didn't and spread the residue probably only about a third of the distance.
Well, with that 25 or 22 bushel wheat, there was probably the equivalent of about 60 bushel residue right directly behind the combine, and that really suppressed the weeds. You had rows of weeds, but there would be a break there right where the combine ran, and then there'd be weeds again just because. And showed you, we talk about cover crops and weed management, suppressing the weeds, you could really see it. And this was way back in the '70s, and so there's not many new ideas out there. And we learned some of those things, the value of those good crop residues. And we really advocate stripper headers, we really like stripper headers for the ecofallow system. So then the only thing we have to do is spread some chaff, and that makes the system a lot easier.
Mackane Vogel:
We'll come back to the episode in a moment, but first I'd like to take a moment to thank our sponsor Source from Sound Agriculture for supporting today's podcast. Do you want to make your fertilizer plan more efficient? Source it Source from Sound Agriculture optimizes the amount of crop nutrition supplied by the microbes in your soil, providing 25 pounds of nitrogen and phosphorus per acre. It's a cost-effective alternative to live biologicals that you can throw in the tank and spray in season. If you want to unlock your crop's potential and increase ROI, there's only one answer, source it. Learn more at sound.ag. And now let's get back to the conversation with Frank Leseter and Bob Klein.
Frank Leseter:
So I went back and pulled a story that we had done in No-Till Farmer in October of 1977. And I was out there, and a farmer we featured were Bob Gene and Lawrence Heabner. Remember them?
Bob Klein:
Yeah. You bet.
Frank Leseter:
Is ecofallow still going today?
Bob Klein:
Oh, yeah. In fact, I would say that that's what most of the farming has done now. And of course we always did encourage opportunity farming in that system. In other words, let's say when you start it with winter wheat, and you really want a good wheat crop, that's number one thing. We want to do everything you can to get that good of winter wheat crop, and then do a good job of taking care of that crop residue, and spray timely, and all these good things. We don't let any weeds go to seed and all this. Then you plant the corn, or the grain sorghum, or other crops in there, and then you come the next spring, and if it's a dry year, you fallow and then plant wheat in the fall and start the program over again. But I recommend in that spring at about corn planting time, or grain sorghum planting time, or whatever else crop your planting, to go out and check your soil moisture.
And if you've got good weed control, and you have good crop residue, and you have moisture probe out there, and you've got good soil water, hey, go out and plant another crop of corn, or grain sorghum, or other crop out there and take advantage of that good soil water. And we've had people, I know I worked with a farmer in Kansas, and it happened to be a good years, or several good years of rainfall, and he called me and he did it about six years in a row of planting grain sorghum. He says, "Bob, I never made money like this before, getting a good crop every year." And you want to take advantage of it when you have those good years, and it's very important to do. And you can show the value of that residue.
Another one real interesting story was in Frontier County. A farmer had a field, and he planted two different corn hybrids out there. One was a long season one, and he was sure it wouldn't mature before frost. And so on that half of the field, he went and harvested the corn for silage, left the other half for grain. Then he planted the whole field to corn, the same hybrid the next year. Where he harvested the silage the year before, he had zero corn yield that didn't even set any years. He had a good corn yield where he harvested for grain the year before.
And I tell farmers the biggest mistake you can make if you have a dry year, never in a dry land in Western Nebraska, take all that residue off. You need to do it. If there's not any corn to harvest out there, just don't do anything. But you want that corn out there to protect what residue is left and catch any snow, to prevent wind erosion. Boy, don't even consider going out there. And of course Eastern Nebraska, they can take it off and plant something else in the fall, but when we have a dry year, I hate to see them. And I don't want farmers in Western Nebraska to pick up the idea that they can go out there and salvage some residue out there in dry land Western Nebraska.
Frank Leseter:
Yeah. Well, that's a good example because with corn silage, you've got practically zero residue.
Bob Klein:
That's right. And the field will look completely bare after, and all the wheat residue you have will blow out of that by that second winter if you don't protect it with the corn stalks.
Frank Leseter:
So people that are using ecofallow today, what are they doing for herbicides? Have they gone to glyphosate instead of paraquat, or what are they using?
Bob Klein:
Yeah, we use a lot of glyphosate. Of course, it's really great on the control and the volunteer wheat, which is a big pest out there. But the glyphosate now we have a problem with glyphosate resistant wheat. And our biggest one now that's a problem is Palmer amaranth, that's a real challenge. And I tell you about a farmer down the [inaudible 00:26:28], he said to me, "Bob, I thought kosher was a problem until I got Palmer amaranth." And I would agree with him. But Palmer amaranth comes up all season long. Now, good stands of either corn or grain sorghum are really important in controlling the weeds because if you've got any skips out there, but we use herbicides like Acuron and they do a good job.
But you got to put a good weed program together. It worked really easy when glyphosate did everything, but I tell people now you're going to need in the spring, usually many times you need to put a spring burn down out there, and then you need a good pre-emergence, and then you'll look at one and maybe in some cases two applications, post applications, to control the weeds. But put a good program together. And if you have any problems, contact people like myself and we'll try to help you out and put a good program together. But weed management is really a key.
Frank Leseter:
What are farmers using to control Palmer amaranth?
Bob Klein:
Well, Acuron would be one. And of course we also use the dicamba, that's a big one too. And we'll also look at what other weeds you got out there you need the control, the Acuron, those ones have been really good. And in lots of times we're using split applications. One of the things is, I like to get my spring application on early so I pick up some rainfall to get it activated. And we got to always be concerned that herbicide is not going to do a good job of pre-emergence herbicide until it gets activated by soil water, preferably a half inch of soil rainfall to really get it activated.
So you want to plan really a good weed management program, that's really key. And stripper heads help, you get a lot of good residue out there. I know some people have said that they can get by with one less herbicide application with a stripper header because you maintain. Any residue that goes through the combine doesn't last as long, and we want to keep that residue as long as we can, and that helps with a stripper head. It doesn't though through the combine.
Frank Leseter:
We've been doing No-till-Farmer now for 53 years. You go back to the early days when we got it started, and the main herbicides were Paraquat, Princep, Atrazine, Banville, which is like what Dicamba is today in 2-4-D, and gosh, most of them are still being used.
Bob Klein:
Yeah, that's exactly right. Atrazine is a good old standby, it just makes about most of the other herbicides work a little bit better. And of course, we use Dicamba and 2-4-D, and we'll use Paraquat. We use a lot more Paraquat now with resistant weeds after winter weed harvest lots of times. And we've got to really do a good job with our applicator, setting up at the right gallonage, the right nozzles, all these things to get the good coverage, it's really important. And of course, the pulse width modulation is another key factor in there of doing a good job. But setting up. And of course, we've done a lot of work over the years in application that's really been helpful.
Frank Leseter:
Right. The new players on the market these days are John Deere See and Spray, and there's a couple other that are using cameras to spot weeds. Is this going to work in ecofallow or no-till situations?
Bob Klein:
Yeah, I think it can work quite well because there'll come out and there are lots of times when we come back with a later application, we just got some spots in fields. And so yeah, we can help reduce the cost if we have that. So yeah, there's a lot of possibilities. And we've been working over the years, and of course technology has really increased the ability to do this now. And so I think that we'll see it. It's pretty expensive right now, but we'll get to see it adapted as one of the ways we can reduce cost. And we don't want to use any more pesticides than we have to either, we can reduce the pesticide use. So it has several benefits. You bet.
Frank Leseter:
The big thing that's got to work is camera's got to know the difference between brown residue and green weeds.
Bob Klein:
That's right. Yeah. It's a challenge, but with the day's technology we'll be able to pull some of those things off. And like I say, reduce cost and make it economical, but there'll be challenges in getting the system to work, which there is in probably most systems like that.
Frank Leseter:
Yeah. I was going to bring up something you mentioned earlier about the distribution out of the combine with residue management. We're getting to where we've got 50 and 60 foot headers now.
Bob Klein:
That's a big problem.
Frank Leseter:
Yeah. What do we do about that?
Bob Klein:
Yeah. Well, it makes it a lot easier with a stripper head because we don't take in all that residue. And so it's a real challenge, as I mentioned, the draper head down on [inaudible 00:33:29], which had 40 foot, and I don't know if they brought it out. I know John Dale was talking about a 60 foot draper, but I don't know if they brought it out. I haven't followed it closely.
Frank Leseter:
Yeah, I think somebody's got one today. I'm not sure who it is though.
Bob Klein:
Okay. So yeah, that can be a real problem. And that residue is so valuable not only for the next crop, but for helping suppress weeds too. So it's a mistake I think, I don't want any combine that I can't spread the residue or whatever it is, even the fines.
Frank Leseter:
Right, the full width.
Bob Klein:
Those fines that come out of there. If you have that volunteer week at a high level, it makes it harder to control. And then if you spread it all out, if you spread it over the entire 40 feet, you don't have a lot of volunteer per area. And so it's a lot easier to control with higher plant populations. And I always think back when we first started working with Anthracene, and I was just like everybody else, we really don't knew a lot about it, but we'd have a farmer come in the office and say, "Can I plant soybeans?" Well, I used Anthracene last year." And well, we'd tell him how to get a soil sample and then bring it into the office, and then we would split it up half of it, and we'd treat half of it with activated charcoal and not treat the other half. And then we'd plant some oats in there, and then tell him to come in about three weeks and we'll cover it with you.
And so he'd come in and shoot, the oats looked fine where they had the anthracene, so you'd go out and plant his soybeans, and guess what? They came up and died. And then we finally put a graduate student on it, we found out what the problem was is we put too many old seeds in that flower pot with the untreated soil, and that's why there wasn't a problem. So later on we said, "Hey, for this area, you only put in eight old seeds." And then we could identify the problem with the bioassay. And so we learned a lot of things.
Frank Leseter:
Yeah, that's great. Have I missed anything about ecofallow we should be talking about?
Bob Klein:
Well, the big thing is we really want to stress, you want to grow that good winter wheat crop, get that residue, spread that residue, or better yet, use a stripper header. Make sure you do a good job of spreading the fines and then get those applications on timely for weed management, don't let anything go to seed. And just making sure that you do all those things that can really make a difference. And I don't think that when we first started the program we put enough emphasis on growing that good winter wheat crop. In fact, I'll tell a farmer today, if you don't grow that good winter wheat crop, you need to fallow and start over again, and try to grow that good winter wheat crop before you really try to introduce the corn, or the grain sorghum, or sunflowers, or proso millet, or whatever it happens to be in there. Because you just won't be successful unless you have that good winter wheat crop. And it also makes weed control a lot tougher if you don't have the good residue out there.
Frank Leseter:
So nationwide, the wheat acreage still seems to be going down. What's happening in western Nebraska?
Bob Klein:
Yeah. And I mentioned earlier there that one of those reasons are is we got more people that are doing continuous cropping, taking advantage of that soil moisture. They're trying to eliminate the fallow period, and I caution these people, I says, "You want to make sure you have good crop residue out there, and you want to make sure you have enough soil water at planting time. If you don't, you better fallow and not try to plant some crop out there and then fail with that." So then you've got a failed crop there and then let's say you try to plant spring wheat out there, which we have some people try to do. And then you get about a 20 bushel spring wheat yield, and then you try to plant corn in there. You don't have much residue, you won't get a good corn crop, or grain sorghum crop. You dug yourself into a corner.
So you really want to manage the system. And like I say, if you got enough soil moisture, now we have some people that put some peas out there and some of those things. But one of the things is in general, we like to see if possible crops that produce quite a little residue because that's our thing we can really benefit from in dry Western Nebraska. And I know with some work Paul Yoss has done, and he shows that, and of course we experience the same thing. You have good residue out there, and you have controlled traffic, and you get a rainstorm moving through with three, four, five, inches in an hour, you're going to soak it all up. You have bare ground out there, and not even controlled traffic, or even with controlled traffic, you may only get a quarter to a half inch of moisture versus four or five inches.
Frank Leseter:
It's like Paul preaches, a no-till program starts with the combines.
Bob Klein:
That's right.
Frank Leseter:
Right.
Bob Klein:
Yeah. You got to do a good job with that combine, and spread that residue, and you want to take care of that residue is really friendly. And then control traffic is really important, I don't think we probably stress that enough.
Frank Leseter:
Well, it's easy to do today with GPS. It wasn't easy to do 30 years ago.
Bob Klein:
That's right. And we talk about marking systems, it's so easy now with GPS RTK. And I remember all of the problems we had with trying to do marking systems.
Frank Leseter:
Right.
Mackane Vogel:
That's it for this episode of the No-Till Farmer Influencers and Innovators Podcast. Thanks to Bob Klein for that great discussion. And thanks also to our sponsor Source from Sound Agriculture for helping to make this podcast possible. A transcript of this episode and our archive of previous podcast episodes are both available at NoTillFarmer.com/podcasts. For our entire staff here at No-Till Farmer, I'm McCain Vogel. Thanks for listening. Keep on No-Tilling.
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