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Full Transcript

Mackane Vogel:

Welcome to the No-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment. I'm Mackane Vogel, Associate Editor at No-Till Farmer. We're back this week with another conversation with no-till living Legend and 2024 Conservation Ag Operator fellow, Ray McCormick. This time from the cab of his truck, as he's out scouting after a heavy rainstorm in Vincennes, Indiana. Today's episode was recorded in mid-May, just one day after the Vincennes area received five inches of rain in less than 24 hours. Let's listen in as Ray scouts fields with No-Till Farmer contributing writer, Michaela Popper.

Ray McCormick:

So my friend Brock was in there and I was like, "You ain't going to believe this." I told him how much rain they got. He goes, "Oh, I believe it." He says, "In my house, we got that much rain." He says, "Marchenos' field over there. It's got a six-foot cut, but there's never been a ditch."

Michaela Popper:

Oh, my gosh.

Ray McCormick:

He works for the huge produce people and he runs the corn and soybean part of the farm. But he's around this big, I mean, big produce farm and they have 200 Latino workers, H-2A workers, and they're not the only ones. They have 200 there every day. And they'll be out there working today, six inches of rain or none.

Michaela Popper:

What would they be doing today?

Ray McCormick:

Probably repairing damage, walking out there with shovels and stuff or trying to get water off the fields or where the plastic's messed up because they're putting them all in plastic. They might even be planting because they got all these melons got to go out and, rain or shine, they got to get the work done.

And they do it, that they can walk across the field, you don't have to have a tractor to do some of this stuff, is they can go out there and repair damage to that plastic stuff. But when they're harvesting, they drag loaded school buses full of watermelons with four-wheel drive tractors across the field because it's got to be picked that day. It has to be delivered to Kroger's or whatever. So many 50 semi loads a day or whatever. So I mean, I've seen them out in the field and it's just lightning everywhere and they just keep right on going. They get paid well. H-2A workers are here on a work visa, so they don't live here. So they go back at the end of the contract, but they get paid handsomely. They put in a lot of hours.

Michaela Popper:

Are they treated well?

Ray McCormick:

They're treated well by their employers. They're treated well by the people around them. The people in our community, I doubt it. I was helping the Obama administration and they asked me to work with migrant workers in this area. I said, "Okay." So we're in a table at the university where the leaders of the migrant, these are migrant workers, not H-2A workers. And I'll never forget, he said, because we were trying to address child care. So when they're up here with families and the mother and the father are out picking watermelons or doing this stuff, what do you do with the kids? What do you do about healthcare? What do you do about schooling and all? So they had all these and the guy says, "All these are a problem, but the biggest problem is the disrespect we get in this community for all the work we do."

That really hit me. That's when I started on this. Going to another Festival Latino, in Ohio, Columbus, I believe, to see what it was like because how do you turn around disrespect? I'm like, by having a festival, and I think I'd been to one in Indianapolis, too, earlier. So that's what started me. And then once we formed Wabash Valley Progressives, because the Democrat Party didn't want us, they don't need young people. So one of the first things I brought up was having a Festival Latino and I got push back on that, but we ended up-

Michaela Popper:

From your progressive group?

Ray McCormick:

Yeah.

Michaela Popper:

Why?

Ray McCormick:

They just didn't understand that we could do it and it would be successful and that people would come. And the first thing we did was we had a march for science. Oh, you're recording all that stuff. A march for science. And a bunch of people showed up. So we're beating drums and carrying banners and going down the main streets of Vincennes with a police escort, and we're all going, holy cow. Look at the people we have. And people are coming out of their buildings and going, what the heck? And we're beating drums and marching. So that kind of encouraged us to do more stuff. But the first Festival Latino was very successful. Everybody was shocked. I think we're having our eighth, now, or ninth.

Michaela Popper:

Do you think it just helped mitigate the disrespect?

Ray McCormick:

It has to when it's on the front page of the paper and it's really popular with children, so people bring their children to take part in all the activities they have for kids. So for younger people and for children, it's very popular. So this just got planted. Now, I don't see a lot of standing water, but buddy, that is a flat field, so that's why. But I just planted and it looks okay so far.

Michaela Popper:

That's good.

Ray McCormick:

Well, you can't see it. Maybe it's standing water there, but that was an ocean. I've run over it now. We'll see some that hadn't been run over, but that was where all the clover was and everything and all the swallows were flying around me. So this is my wife's ground, this is. See the soybeans coming up?

Michaela Popper:

Mmm.

Ray McCormick:

See them out here? And so this cover crop wasn't as thick and lush because it was just annual ryegrass and turnips, so it didn't get all that nitrogen from the clover, but it was thick, it was pretty, but it's been killed for a while now. So they're just coming up. But it was really, really wet out here when I was drilling it, so they're going to be plenty of them. But it was a tough road, but no standing water right here, anyway.

Now see here, here's the corn rows and it doesn't look like it now because it's been burned off around it for a while, but it thrives in between the rows. So there's all this heavy residue and it's spraying it out between the rows. This is snapping roller bringing the stalks down, and so you get most of the stay-in between the rows, but the root systems are so vigorous that you'll find roots across the whole part of it. Well, this looks okay. This is Armiesburg. So you asked me what's the primary soil type in the river bottoms-

Michaela Popper:

Armiesburg?

Ray McCormick:

Armiesburg and that's what this soil is on this field. So it's a light soil where the water can infiltrate easier than a heavy soil. So we're going to go look at one of my sluice and see if it's full of water. There's a big sluice out here in the middle of this other field. It's an old oxbow lake.

Michaela Popper:

What is this purple stuff?

Ray McCormick:

Crown vetch. A lot of farmers use hairy vetch. Crown vetch, farmers don't like it so much because it would get in their wheat fields, so they didn't like it.

But it's used along highways. But what we did is, I got tired of saying it's grass and it's got this in it and it's got that in it. We went in last fall and killed it all with Roundup and then sowed it with wheat. And I was going to plant it all into prairie flowers and stuff for wildlife and butterflies. But it's so nice right now, I don't have the heart to kill it. It's pretty.

Michaela Popper:

It is pretty.

Ray McCormick:

But normally levees are just mowed grass, but I want mine to be wildlife friendly, so I'll bet there'll be a lot of quail and stuff nesting and all that. So I won't mow. I don't like to mow anything until later in the summer when nesting season's over.

Michaela Popper:

Do you have to mow it?

Ray McCormick:

Well, to keep weeds from growing on it or trees from growing on it. You can't just let it keep going and going or it'll have bad stuff growing on the levee that will compromise the integrity of the levee. But this ground was all flooded here a few weeks ago. It was all water, solid water. Those beans there aren't doing as well.

Michaela Popper:

Yeah. What's the chance that that area would recover the beans?

Ray McCormick:

Needs to be off there in a couple OF days. Beans at that stage is a little ... That it's completely underwater has an impact that it'll kill it more easily if it can't get any air, but it's cloudy. When we have floods when it's really hot and it's really sunny, it just boils the plants and they die. Just hours in there, it'll kill corn. And I've seen it other times, it'd get in it and not hurt it much. So there's a lot of ... But three days, you're done for. Look out there in the middle of the field where the water is.

Michaela Popper:

Oh, my gosh.

Ray McCormick:

I just planted that.

Michaela Popper:

Oh. So is that going to make it?

Ray McCormick:

No, it's three foot deep out there. It's going to be on there a long time. I just planted it, what, nine o'clock. Nine o'clock, Sunday night, I planted all this field. I almost got it done in one day. And these people are all no-till now. And they farm six, seven thousand acres and they put cereal rye on every acre. They were planting that at the same time I was planting mine. We're just getting into the bottom. You can see it's big acres.

Michaela Popper:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

But their field is Armiesburg, so see, there isn't a lot of water out there. So soil type has some impact on it. Now, there's standing water, lots of it. So my friend that was helping us with the irrigation there, Monday, was it Monday night I was playing? Here's the neighbors going, "Oh, crap." They're the ones doing all the thousands of acres of cereal rye, now. Used to work all the ground. Now their son that's my son's age or a little younger, he's now the president of the local Soil and Water Conservation District.

Come out in a very flat field. We just had five inches of rain. You would think it'd be standing water everywhere. But because we've changed these soils, the kind of soils people go, "No-till won't work on our soils." This is a heavy wet clay soil. Zip is what they call it. And look at what we've done with the field. We've planted cover crops in here for years, no water on top of the surface.

And we've got all this cover crop biomass. So we're actually changing the field from something that had been worked up and worked up and stood water and there'd be sheet water everywhere to where that problem is going away because of all the cover crops we use. This is a mixture of balansa clover, crimson clover and annual ryegrass. And, of course, we love annual ryegrass because it thrives in wet fields. If this was cereal rye, you probably would've struggled to have got a stand in such wet soils. But annual ryegrass loves it. And what they also love to do is go down about four foot plus into the soil making channels for the corn roots, making channels for where the water can get out of the soil and bringing up nutrients.

And we did some biomass removal recently and, incredibly, there was 650 pounds of potash of K per acre in our biomass removal. So we're bringing a lot of nutrients up from way down there and making fields like this that everybody says they got great soils and say, "It won't work on my soils." These are the soils you would think it would be the hardest to do. And they, cover crops, really help you. So not disturbing the soil, building the soil up, making it so water can infiltrate.

You got lots of earthworms that help the water get into the soil and you hear meadowlarks in the background using this prairie of cover crops. Really makes you feel good about farming. Not very expensive. Probably cost me less than what would be a trip with a chisel plow across the field. So I'm putting on 13 pounds an acre, so maybe $11 acre, $12 an acre. It just depends on what the clover's costing you. Straight annual ryegrass is 90 cents a pound. And if you put on 10 pounds or 13 pounds, you're around $10 an acre, $11 an acre. You can't do anything for that cost on your fields. But yet I'm able to spread it with the combine at those cost.

Michaela Popper:

Yeah. Hard to say that cover crops aren't worth the money.

Ray McCormick:

People don't want it to work. They're not comfortable farming like this. Going to no-till conferences, hearing speakers, can boost that confidence. Maybe this helps too, but that's a confidence problem. When they make up reasons. "It won't work on my soils," is probably the easiest excuse of all. And it is one of the most lame ones of all. If you say, "Well, I don't have any experience in it," or, "I don't have a planter." Okay, I get that, but that it won't work, it'd be like saying in the 50s, "Oh, nitrogen fertilizer won't work on my corn." Really? When people talk about loss of prime farmland from development and everything, and I'm like, you're one hell of a person to speak about loss of prime farmland when it's going down the river.

Michaela Popper:

Yeah. That's also a loss of prime farmland.

Ray McCormick:

The big loss. So this is where all the water in that field has to come through this pipe. Well, it's coming through there and the creek's not that big.

Michaela Popper:

Do all of your fields have tile?

Ray McCormick:

Very few of them do.

Michaela Popper:

Oh, really?

Ray McCormick:

Well, I don't know if that's fair. Acres-wise, very few of them do. But when you get up in the hills, usually, it's not a tile system, it's a tile rain up through a wet spot in the low part of the hill or something. It's not like in ... I went places where they pattern tile everything. And again, those Drury brothers, or not Drury, whatever their names is on ... Heckney?

Anyway, they're like, "Tile, tile, tile, tile, tile. Don't do anything until you get it all tiled." And I'm like ... Look how high the water's been here, man. It was a flash flood. It must have really ... Look at it. It's been way up on these ditch banks. Yeah, it's a roaring down through there, but it's getting away. And they're "Work the ground, work the ground, work the ground." They're on national radio every day. Now, the water's been right up to right here or been across the road. So Nathan, who we were just talking to, this is ... See, they do almost all cereal rye, but look at what a beautiful job he's planted into that and the beans are up and look at the cereal rye.

Michaela Popper:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

Isn't that cool?

Michaela Popper:

It's going to get pretty tall.

Ray McCormick:

And this is cereal rye I think they're going to harvest for seed.

Michaela Popper:

Okay.

Ray McCormick:

It's been over the top of the road here.

Michaela Popper:

How much rye does it take to produce an off seed to make-

Ray McCormick:

Well, let's say it makes 50 bushel on an acre, and I don't know what a bushel of rye weighs, but you might be planting rye at the rate of 40 or 50 pounds an acre, so almost probably around a bushel an acre. So, for them, it's going to take 7,000 bushel of rye. They plant it light, so they plant it maybe at 30 pounds. So maybe they harvest 5,000 bushel of cereal rye. I don't believe in doing that.

Let people raise the seed on land. I get asked this question quite a bit. Don't try to grow your own cover crop seed. Our climate is not well adapted to growing high quality seed like it is in the Upper Plains or in Oregon for clover and so forth. We grow great corn around here. Don't take your ground out of corn to grow your cover crop seed. Buy it. High quality seed from a reputable dealer. I'm not a guy who's ... But the reason they can do it is they're doing all cereal rye and just cereal rye, so they can raise their own. This is the farm where my wife's father farmed. When he sold all the dairy cattle, then he plowed it all. Massive erosion. And when he was falling ill and going to die, he could hardly bear the thought of letting me farm it no-till he just had a real time accepting that I was going to no-till it.

Michaela Popper:

Why was it so hard to accept?

Ray McCormick:

Because he'd always been like all other farmers in the mindset you have to work the ground, you need to work it up to get a good seed-bed and control the weeds. And be able to farm it, you got to work it up and I'm not working it up. And he just couldn't get over that you could farm that way. I mean, he told me you would have way more erosion farming my way than if you plowed it. He told me that. "People for a hundred years have been tilling the land and now you're not going to till it and that that was wrong and I think the way I'm farming is right." That's such a mindset change. That's such a change in the culture of farming that people can't get over that and accept that.

How you change that, as I've said before, if I knew that, I wouldn't be out here for 40 to 50 years trying to change people. It's a very tough question and no obvious answers. Let's go this way and look, see if we can go into the river bottoms because that floods all the time. And look at the cover crop and talk about scour erosion, scouring the soil off the surface of flood plains.

When I remember to talk about spreading your fertilizer in the crop, nobody does that. So that's a mindset that would be hard for people to accept. You need to spread it in the fall. You need to spread it in the spring. You need to work it into the ground. See, here's my neighbors that have never no-tilled before. Look at that. No-tilled into cover crop. They're, I don't know, 55 years old or something, but they've come to the conclusion that they need to farm a different way.

Michaela Popper:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

It's incredible to see these young men that are great farmers, great people, but they worked the ground and worked the ground and worked the ground. And now, they've decided ... And I think some of it was one of their big landlords was like ask, that I farm next to, was asking me about it. So if your landlords start asking you about, "Why don't you no-till it and put cover crop on them," like maybe ... Look at that. It's a creek. God. Like Ray. See, Nathan was talking about he's got crops under water. That's down there.

So I think maybe some pressure was put on by the landlord to cover up his fields and protect them and that their dad had passed away, who would've never put up with it, has given them a window opportunity to farm a different way. And see everybody around here, Michaela, no-till's double crop beans into their wheat straw. So as soon as they ... The day they harvest that wheat, they're back in there, drilling beans because you can raise big yielding double crop beans in this area. So they've all no-tilled into wheat straw, which is about as hard of planting as you could have. I mean, it's wet straw, thick as hair on dog's back and they all successfully do that. So it isn't like they've never done any. They've done double crop beans for 30 plus years. So it's not impossible for them to think that you can plant into it.

Michaela Popper:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

This is the field where he told them if they didn't do no-till then he was going to charge them more rent.

Michaela Popper:

I think that's such a good strategy.

Ray McCormick:

So this is Anson Farms. They farm 23,000 acres or something, all no-till cover crops.

Michaela Popper:

When you're putting the nitrogen on during the season, what form of nitrogen is it?

Ray McCormick:

Different forms. So when we're dragging the hoses through, I couldn't remember what they call that. It's a special name they got for that brand, but it's in a box, but I saw it at another farmer's farm. That system will stream on top of the ground nitrogen at the base of the rows and they're like metal tubes that hang down with a rubber hose on the end of it.

So that would be liquid nitrogen, 32%. When you're spreading it out in the field, it's in a granular form, it's urea. And so that would be in a mix in their hopper and they would be mixing them together. But the one that you're going to do variable rate is independent. So it'll be in one hopper, the other mix will be in the hopper that's not doing variable. So that won't burn the corn, hopefully. You get liquid nitrogen on the corn, it burns the leaves.

Michaela Popper:

Oh. So you're doing the two different, you said different times?

Ray McCormick:

Relatively at the same time. The nitrogen that we're putting on in that post application, it's encapsulated, so it's expensive. They call it Super U, I think.

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, Yetter Farm Equipment. The No-Till Farmer podcast is brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment. Yetter Farm Equipment been providing farmers with solutions since 1930. Today, Yetter is your answer for finding the tools and equipment you need to face today's production agriculture demands. The Yetter lineup includes a wide range of planter attachments for different planting conditions. Several equipment options are fertilizer placement and products that meet harvest time challenges. Yetter delivers a return on investment and equipment that meets your needs and maximizes inputs. Visit them at yetterco.com. And now, let's get back to the podcast with Ray McCormick.

Michaela Popper:

How are you determining what gets the liquid and what gets the urea?

Ray McCormick:

So the liquid is put on the ground or in the ground with a coulter when we're side dressing because you can't get it on the plants. So when the corn's out of the ground and growing, you need to either put it in the ground or put it on the ground, the liquid, without getting it on the corn.

The urea is a granular and it will not severely burn the corn, so you can do that, but a lot of people put on urea. I mean, it'll get away from you, it involve the lights and so forth. So a lot of people incorporate urea in their fields early. Some spread urea on the ground, have the fertilizer people spread it on the ground to have nitrogen for the corn. I prefer not nitrating all of the field, but nitrating the part of the field that's next to the rows of corn as you're planting. Much more efficient. And the corn does not need hardly any nitrogen when it's little. It needs it when it's making an ear.

Michaela Popper:

So how many times are you putting nitrogen on?

Ray McCormick:

Good question. So we're putting it on with a planter and then we would side dress, however, and that means going through either dragging hoses or spreading it granular. So that's two times. If we have irrigation, like the big field we looked at, then we would put it through the irrigation system with the water two more times because you can put it on great big, tall corn, see. And so it would go on two more times. So that would be four under irrigated fields, two under non-irrigated, which is most of my ground. Only 200 irrigated at least over here.

I've got more irrigated in Illinois, now because, and what I tried to do last year is they call it wide drop. So these tall sprayers can drag hoses with a wire out the ground, put nitrogen on when the corn's great big. So I went into the river bottoms, put it on with the planter, put it on with a coulter, with a side dress rig, and then I was going to have them come through a third time and put the last dose of nitrogen on. And when I called them up to do it on all this beautiful corn, they said, "You're out of our territory, we won't do it."

Michaela Popper:

Oh, my gosh.

Ray McCormick:

So instead of getting like 220 pounds of nitrogen, it got 180 and it was by far the biggest yields I've ever imagined growing. So I didn't even get the last dose on it.

So we will try again and have a contract with them this year that we'll put it on with the planter, we'll side dress it, and they will come back through when the corn's great big and wide drop it.

Michaela Popper:

So how much do you think that will increase your yields?

Ray McCormick:

I'm not sure it'll increase it much. It depends on what the potential yield is of the corn. So water, a lot of times, is the limiting factor and you can't overcome that. But what it does do is it holds back your investment in nitrogen for several weeks more so, believe it or not, if the river comes and kills it all, which it does, kills every acre, which it does, you haven't gotten an additional investment of more nitrogen on. So it's delaying the nitrogen to not lose the money if we lose the crop. So that's going to be hard for people to wrap their brain around, but we lose the crop, now, so frequently it's scary. Didn't used to lose them, but now it happens all the time. When you get huge rains in a degraded watershed and you are at the bottom of that watershed, you're in trouble. So that equation has changed.

Michaela Popper:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

Intense rainfall events, degraded watersheds and farmers are part of that degraded watershed because if the water is running off your concrete, your tilled soil, and it's running into your cleaned-out ditch, as we talked about last night with the landowner, then they're accelerating the water into a stream and then they're accelerating the water in the stream into the river. And when you have that all over the watershed, that intense rainfall event is a disaster because it just blows it into the river. And it don't matter if the river's only up two days, it can kill everything. Sometimes it kills 60%, sometimes it kills 30% and sometimes it just kills every acre. It gets up so high, it's all dying. Sometimes you got to go back in and put the pieces together and plant soybeans in all these areas that the river killed and they're large and small, so it's like going back into a jigsaw puzzle and trying to put the pieces back with a different crop.

And so it is a strange way to farm, but that watershed, that is the east fork of the White River and the west fork of the White River and the Eel River going into the White River and the White River going into the Wabash and the Wabash going into Ohio and the Ohio going into the Mississippi. So everybody's dumping their water as fast as they can and it's all going on everybody downstream.

So it's a cumulative effect of run ... And you should never do that. And the answer is infiltrate the water into your sponge at the top of the watershed. It's not levees, it's not dredging, it's not tiling. It's infiltrating the water into your soil, into that sponge at the top of the watershed, not trying to deal with it where the result is, it's dealing with the problem. And, of course, every farmer wants that water in the summertime to grow a better crop. So you shouldn't lose your water. So here's Dr. Thompson. I haven't got his planted yet. It's small, little fields, so he's got to wait.

Michaela Popper:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

So that'll be, because it's corn stalks, it'll be going to beans.

Michaela Popper:

Do you ever just abandon planting any crop?

Ray McCormick:

Cover crop or regular crop?

Michaela Popper:

Regular crop.

Ray McCormick:

Used to. We didn't go back. It's too late. Now, with climate change, we never give up.

Michaela Popper:

Oh, really?

Ray McCormick:

Yeah, the falls are so warm and summer-like that you can plant in August and grow a crop of soybeans. It's staggering. It's unbelievable. And we all do it. We all do it down here. So when you're talking about a flood that you can only get back in in August, think of that. It used to flood in May. Now, you can lose your crops in July, a hot, dry part of the year. And so we all rush back in here as fast as we can and plant the high spots, then the lower spots and then ... So it's been a long time since I ever gave up and didn't plant back. It was a few years ago I gave up and planted the cover crops. Figured the cover crops were better than planting soybeans.

And you want to talk about cover crops, go back into a field that's been nitrated for a 200 bush of corn crop and put cover crops in there. They're sequestering up your nitrogen and, my God, what cover crops. I mean, the turnip leaves were like elephant ears out there and stuff. And turnips are great about sequestering up carbon. My friend that I talk about, Matt Crowe, in Greene County, they had a hose come off on the side dress rig and his dad didn't realize it was under the belly. So he did a whole bunch of putting way, way too much nitrogen in that broken hose string.

So this year they're having trouble because that streak in their cover crops is like gigantic, but it's a testament to not losing your nitrogen and part of not losing your nitrogen is that your soybeans produce a lot of nitrogen. So you have this big, high, maybe a hundred pounds an acre of nitrogen when you harvest your soybeans.

Well, that immediately starts declining. You've ground up the stalks and so forth. And so we get a cover crop in there because any nitrogen we can grab and hold is being turned into vegetative cover, instead of going out, because it's water-soluble, going out with the rain or going out with the tile. So you sequester up that excess nitrogen that is free out of the legume soybeans. On the other side of that stage is corn, so that if you've put enough nitrogen on to grow 250 bush of corn and it made 90 because of a massive drought, there's all that nitrogen out there and that's part of the reason I grew cover crop in that field. You've got all that nitrogen on that field. Until now, it would just slowly get away into the river. You'd lose it.

Now, you have the opportunity to grab it and hold it for the next year's crop in some vegetative form. So it might not be nitrogen, but you're gaining all this cover crop that sucked up the nitrogen and didn't let it get away. So cover crops play a great role in sequestering up excess nitrogen that can come in different ways. It can come from legume soybeans or it can come from excess nitrogen in your ...

So you see it. You go places where you were side dressing and the rows were coming together or something and you see that cover crop has just soaked up all that nitrogen and it's just lush green right there where the excess nitrogen came together. Michaela, this is part of the degrading of our watersheds. So my grandfather farmed that field. My dad did. I did. And I told him about the CREP program and planting it in trees and what it would pay and they took it because they're flooding so much, they're giving up. And that's happening a lot in these watersheds. Fabulous farm ground, but floods so often that they said the payment every year for planting in trees was so good that that's better than renting it to me.

And I told them, so I don't get anything, but I said, "If I'm going to do this on my ground, I should tell my landlord this opportunity's there." And they took it on this field here and I've taken it to the limit. Trees are much more better paying than crops in these floodplains because you get a payment every year, but there's a limit to that.

Michaela Popper:

And they're a lot less work, I would imagine.

Ray McCormick:

Yeah. And, believe it or not, trees this far from the river, because the river runs underground, the river runs underground through the gravel, it pulls nitrogen out of the river.

Mackane Vogel:

At this point, the neighbor who farms those 7,000 acres near Ray's field comes down the road in his pickup truck. Nathan and Ray start talking through the windows of their trucks.

Ray McCormick:

What the heck?

Nathan:

Didn't need that.

Ray McCormick:

I had no idea.

Nathan:

I had four inches in my gauge.

Ray McCormick:

Danny Robinson dumped out five. I don't know that it rained ... I never knew we got this kind of rain. So as I'm coming to Wheatland, I'm looking at pond ditch going, "Holy cow!" And I'm like, man, they must got two or three inches. I didn't know ...

Nathan:

Down there, below the house, good part of that's covered.

Ray McCormick:

I saw that.

Nathan:

Yeah, yeah. And now I figured I'd venture out and see what the damage is everywhere else.

Ray McCormick:

Your soils are not headed to the Gulf of Mexico. And a rain like that could take a hundred years' worth of soil off your field.

Nathan:

I noticed, I mean, where we'd burn off for corn and filled in ditches, it's just blowing them right back out. It's got to be-

Ray McCormick:

But it's not raking the whole field. I mean, these fields that Hank [inaudible 00:41:25] are farming. He's worked it three or four times now. I don't know what they'll do. I guess just leave it like it is.

Nathan:

Now, it's just one of those years. We knew it was coming.

Ray McCormick:

I told her the stress has been unbelievable because I tell her, Nate, "You can't spray that. You can't spray that. If we get a week of rain like they're talking about ..." "Well, it wasn't a week of rain." And I'm like, "Well, we got to have three days window. If you lay it all down and we don't get it planted ..." So there's this jockeying back and forth. "We'll go spray these fields and we'll drill them in beans." "Well what about the corn?" It was just back and forth and you know, you're running a sprayer, and it was like just drama every day of what we're going to do, where we're going to go, where we're going to move to.

Nathan:

And on beans, I've just pretty well written it off that I'll prioritize getting the corn chemical down and beans if they come up, we'll just burn off the crop later on.

Ray McCormick:

Yeah. And you can do that with beans.

Nathan:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

But-

Nathan:

Non-GMO corn just kind of puts you in a pressure cooker situation.

Ray McCormick:

Well, that's why I say to Nate, I said, "Look, we don't get it killed and it comes up in our non-GMO corn, we got a hell of a problem-

Nathan:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

... a hell of a problem." So it's that you got to get it killed, but you can't lay down hundreds of acres that we ain't going to get planted. And so just, the other rear bombs, he just sprayed it all and now we're not going to get in there for a good while. But it was standing pretty straight up. There was a lot out in there that was laid down and that's not good.

Nathan:

Which our cereal rye that we've still got standing was not so thick enough to really lay down bad.

Ray McCormick:

That's the trick.

Nathan:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

I learned a long time ago, don't plant it too damn thick, so your planter can go through it easily without crunching down and it'll stand. It's much better to have it thin than it is way too thick.

Nathan:

I got to check off ... We were up there on Ewing's, planting some of that up around their house, drilling beans and the rye was five foot tall and the Marchenos were, they were planting beans in the no-till on the other side of the road. And I noticed one of their [inaudible 00:44:06]. Mike said he turned around and he was out there digging in our beans after we ... He said, "At least have the common decency to let us leave the field before you two."

Ray McCormick:

No, you need to encourage them. You need to invite them over. They wouldn't be the first ones that went over and said, "Oh, my God." My dad did that the first time in 1986, I think it was. I drilled beans into wheat and borrowed a drill and everything. And man of God, he went out in there and he said, "If you ever get a stand, I don't see how." He was letting me do it, but he was like, "This will never work." And then he said, "You'll never control the weeds." Back then, all we had was Gramoxone and Surflan, that's all we did. And the weed just suppressed all the weeds. And he said, "You just got lucky." That's what he said to me.

Nathan:

I think, I don't know, I'm debating on trying some barley.

Ray McCormick:

Yeah? Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan:

Incorporating some more barley, just so it don't get ... I want the cover, but I don't think it's got as good a root as what the rye does. But if we could thin down the rye some-

Ray McCormick:

But in this field, when I bought it and we planted corn out there for the first couple of years, corn would fall over this tall. It'd just fall over, and we had Doc Trice come out and look at it and he said, "It's your soils have been moldboard plowed. They're ruined." And we're like ... And he said, "Plant cereal rye and no-till it."

Well, that was way beyond my ability to think that we could do that. Now, look at it. But when we first started farming, you get two inches of rain, it killed big areas of the field. It just laid on top. That's been cured. I'm not saying five inches, but two or three inches losing big areas of the field, that's completely gone, now.

Nathan:

Yeah, the water infiltration.

Ray McCormick:

It was a big deal. Big deal.

Nathan:

And being able to keep the water. I mean, you're sending it down instead-

Ray McCormick:

Into the sponge, though.

Nathan:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

Yeah. Well, I'm glad I didn't say anything to you the other day, but you being a leader in the community is such a good thing because in our community it's okay to use cover crop in no-till. It's acceptable. A lot of people are doing it. It's almost a contest to who can have the nicest cover crops and stuff. And the few people that work it up to bug dust, they're like, everybody's like,

Nathan:

Yeah. As far as working stuff up and, number one, I mean, the manpower and the fuel-

Ray McCormick:

I'm watching you. You could have had five turbo tills out there and not kept up with your sprayer.

Nathan:

No.

Ray McCormick:

That sprayer's a hundred-foot wide, going 10 mile an hour. That's a pretty easy way to get the field ready.

Nathan:

[inaudible 00:47:21].

Ray McCormick:

No bearings going out, no busted hydraulic lines that you got with all that tillage equipment.

Nathan:

Yeah. I don't envy it. I mean, I think it's probably easier getting a nice-looking stand, initially, in the season, whenever they work it down. But other than that, I mean after a big rain like this, it's sealed.

Ray McCormick:

It's concrete.

Nathan:

Yeah. That's it. All that water's going off instead of down.

Ray McCormick:

Yeah.

Nathan:

And you know that.

Ray McCormick:

Well, I know, but as Michaela and I are doing this stuff, getting more people to do it is not easy. They don't go to meetings, they don't learn about it. They deny it. You get over in Illinois and Iowa, they try to intimidate people that are going to do cover crops and stuff because they don't want that in their community. They're so against it that they don't want anybody doing it that other people can see.

Nathan:

I think the one thing I've learned is more or less figuring out what you're comfortable with, doing that and then sometimes you get forced into doing stuff that you're not so comfortable with.

Ray McCormick:

I'm never comfortable.

Nathan:

And then you find out, well, it didn't turn out too bad.

Ray McCormick:

But what is comforting is like to go into this field and go back there and look at your trench. It was perfect. It was freaking perfect. And I'm like, it's paying off. And last year harvesting, it's paying off. The accumulation of getting better soils and everything. It's paying off. So it's tough. But when I got behind the planter back out there, I went, my god, this is going in perfect.

Nathan:

Well, I keep telling myself that one day my boys are going to be happy that I did it.

Ray McCormick:

Have you got them driving tractors yet?

Nathan:

No.

Ray McCormick:

How old are they?

Nathan:

They're only one, the oldest is about to turn three.

Ray McCormick:

Well, that's getting close.

Nathan:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

I'll bet he thinks he can drive the-

Nathan:

He would like to. Then I have a nine-month-old and I tell people I can't prove the science or I'm not smart enough to prove the science to you. But one of these days we're going to be glad that we were doing it. Well, I'm going to go check my gates back here and see what-

Ray McCormick:

All right. Good luck.

Nathan:

Yeah.

Ray McCormick:

You don't need the irrigation today. You're okay. Be careful. So let's walk out here, if you want. So flying around are some swallows. If I had my planter out there, there'd be a bunch of them following me. And listen. You can hear meadowlarks and meadowlarks are in trouble. They're a prairie song, prairie bird, but lots of birds out here.

So this is a very flat, wet field. And look at it, five inches of rain. Look at it. It's doing okay. So this is what we haven't planted into, but we burned down. So I called a bee guy the other day about not killing all the bees out here and he was saying, and I might be pronouncing that wrong, but I call it balansa clover. And he said, "That's great for bees. That is a very good clover for bees." But when you're doing it on hundreds of acres, think of the impact, not only in all these birds we hear, but all the bees that were out here. And I see snipe out here, I see a whole variety of birds that are living out there in that habitat. We got to plant through it, but still a lot be out there after we plant. Here that? Those are meadowlarks not doing well, but they're doing well out here.

Michaela Popper:

Yeah, they like it here.

Ray McCormick:

So this is a very poor producing, very wet field and it's got better and better and better. Just like he said, the water infiltration is a big deal in these kind of fields. So when people say, "It won't work in my soils," yes, it will. It'll make them better. So they claim that soils like this, you can't do it. Well, you absolutely can and you can have it better than disking it up or chiseling it. And then you got big dirt clods because it's degraded soils with high clay content, so it won't work down, so you work it another time. You're making it worse and worse and worse. This makes it better and better and better. And there's big farmers down towards Evansville that farm nothing but these kind of soils. And they're all no-till cover crops. That's how they make it work.

Mackane Vogel:

Thanks to Ray McCormick for today's conversation. And thanks to Yetter Farm Equipment for helping to make this podcast series possible. The third written installment of the 2024 Fellowship Series with Ray McCormick appears in the November issue of the No-Till Farmer Magazine. And to catch up on the previous podcasts and articles, go to no-tillfarmer.com/fellowship. That's no-tillfarmer.com/fellowship. Well, from all of us here at No-Till Farmer, I'm Mackane Vogel. Thanks for listening. Keep on no-tilling and have a great day.