In part 1 of this 2-part No-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment, world renowned no-till expert and former Dakota Lakes Research Farm manager Dwayne Beck shares essential lessons learned from the early days of no-till that can help growers turn their modern-day operation into one that is sustainable and profitable.
Beck focuses in this episode on the need to farm with nature instead of against it, including the need to keep residue in fields and promote ecological diversity on farms to improve resilience.
|
|
No-Till Farmer's podcast series is brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment.
Yetter Farm Equipment has been providing farmers with residue management, fertilizer placement, and seedbed preparation solutions since 1930. Today, Yetter equipment is your answer for success in the face of ever-changing production agriculture challenges. Yetter offers a full lineup of planter attachments designed to perform in varying planting conditions, multiple options for precision fertilizer placement, strip-till units, and stalk rollers for your combine. Yetter products maximize your inputs, save you time, and deliver return on your investment. Visit them at yetterco.com.
|
Full Transcript
Welcome to the latest edition of the No-Till Farmer Podcast brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment. I'm John Dobberstein, senior editor of No-Till Farmer. In part one of this two-part No-Till Farmer Podcast series, world-renowned no-till expert and former Dakota Lakes Research Farm Manager Dwayne Beck shares essential lessons learned from the early days of no-till that can help growers turn their modern-day operation into one that is sustainable and profitable. Beck focuses in this episode on the need to farm with nature instead of against, and the how and why on preserving residue in fields.
Dwayne Beck:1987, we built a drill from scratch because we didn't have anything that would work, and do what we needed to do. We're not going to spend a lot of time on this today, but a lot of the principles we've talked about for over 30 years were put into that drill, and that was, what, six years before the first No-Till Conference. [inaudible 00:01:09] '07, '06, we had a no-till rotation study that we needed to drill. The 750 drill was not around yet, that was still six years off. This one would plant corn and place all the fertilizers. There was some young guy that was kind of skinny that would tell you what it would do.
We got started in no-till because of irrigation, believe it or not. The guys in Central South Dakota were trying to irrigate hills with pivots. Pivots really weren't invented until the '70s, or ones that could climb hills. The water drives were, but the electric drives and the hydraulic drives. They took water out of the river, they put the big dams in, and they were going to do a bunch of irrigation in the central part of South Dakota where it's flat but it didn't need the irrigation. These guys were trying to irrigate on their hills, and just keep running the water back to the river because somebody told them that tillage made water go in the ground. There are still people out there that believe that. Duh.
What we did is we did a big experiment to figure out how to make water go in the ground. We found out no-till was the way to do that. Then the question is how do you no-till without killing yourself with herbicides and insecticides, and diseases, and all those things? We still use some herbicides. We haven't used an insecticide in over 18 years. But how do you manage the system?
What I did is instead of looking at other farming systems, I looked at the native prairie. I encourage you to do the same thing. Look at what the native vegetation is where you farm, because that tells you what you can do there. Not what you want to do, but what you can do, what Mother Nature would do, how she cycles her nutrients and how she captures sunlight. She's pretty good.
The first thing I look at was, when we get our no-till going right now, this is how we irrigate. You can see we're not on real level ground. We put two-inches of water on in nine minutes with no run-on. The first thing I do if you come and visit us, and it's in the summer and we're irrigating, is I'll walk you behind an irrigator. Because we can two-inches of water on in nine minutes, you can walk in and not get your feet muddy and not sink into the ground. That's the way it should be. That's the way it is if you walk into a native prairie or walk into a forest when it's raining. You don't slop around because Mother Nature is taking care of that.
What do we need to do? How did the prairie get seeded? Well, the buffalo did it. Buffalo one came alone and stomped that seed into the ground. Buffalo two covered it with loose material. Buffalo three, and four, and five spread the fertilizer. I actually used that one time, there was a product development guy from Case IH that came. This would have been in the early '90s. You know what Case like to do at that time was buy somebody else's idea and paint it red. He sat down in my office and he says, "What's the best seeder ever developed?" I said, "The buffalo." He said, "Oh, Flusher Manufacturing in Nebraska." I said, "No, the brown one with horns." He'd flown the corporate jet out, and I think he thought he'd really just wasted a whole bunch of money. As the discussion went on, he started seeing what I was talking about.
Ideal conditions, you want the seed pushed into firm, moist soil and covered with loose material. It's just that simple. I don't care how you get it done. I've also told people who have asked me what's the best no-till seeder, I said, "The Mayan or Aztec planting stick." I was in El Salvador about a month ago, they're still using those up in those hills. Their farms are less than a half-an-acre, but they're on really steep slopes. You can't put a tractor up there. That thing still works because it produces this kind of result.
With the John Deere planters, especially at that time, if we look at conventional till, they made those angled closing wheels because they wanted to firm the area underneath the seed. That's what those wheels that are like this, those rubber wheels, they're designed to firm under the seed because you till too deep and you would be planting your seeds with the old, prior to the MaxEmerge planters, those old planters, you'd be planting into loose soil. You wanted to have firm soil underneath, and they're designed to pack underneath. But when you use them in no-till or even in wet conventional till soils, we had a huge amount of compaction.
We have all these reasons that you shouldn't do no-till. All these constraints, and I gave a whole list of them, but none of them made any damn sense. There's all these people that want to do halfway in between things. Do tills now and then. If you get married, you can't be married sometimes and then other times you go, "No, I don't feel like it today." You've got to make a commitment. We talk a lot about commitment to people. Commit to this whole idea that you're going to do this, and you're going to mimic that natural ecosystem. When you had breakfast this morning, if you had bacon and eggs, the chicken's involved but the pig is committed.
Doing the wrong thing better three years ago. I talked about doing the wrong thing. A lot of us are trying to do this thing, but we're often doing the wrong thing. One of the wrong things is looking for a new herbicide because you've got a problem with weed-resistance. A new herbicide isn't going to solve that problem because weeds are going to become resistant to that as well. In St. Louis, I think in the mid-'90s, I shook the world up a bit because I predicted that there was going to be resistance to Roundup. Monsanto at that time was still saying that wouldn't happen.
Bureaucracies governs corporations, or operated by people with limited tenure, short term goals. You as farmers have to have longterm goals. Dakota Lakes is a group of farmers. We have had longterm goals. I worked for the university during that whole period, a cooperative thing. But my bosses, the guys that I was working with at universities always had short term one or two year goals. We need to be thinking 600 years, and we do that with our farmers. Once every year, we sit down and start making really longterm goals. We had a longterm goal that we established in the 1990s to get some land that was developed from glacial till because that's a predominant soil in Eastern South Dakota. We finally got that bought a year ago this fall. We just stick to those longterm goals. The university would have been gone a long time.
It's owned by farmers, irrigators, and dry land guys. We started out with mostly irrigators. Now all but one is a dry man guy. We've done 100% load disturbance, no-till, and no-hose, and those kind of things, since 1990. What about the word no don't you understand it? No-till. The production enterprise supports the research. We have about 1400 acres now, and we have livestock integration.
80% of the total what we're working on right now is energy, and have been for about 10 years. 80% of the total input costs to agriculture can be traced directly to fossil fuel use. That's scary. If you do a strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, that's a threat. We can't be that dependent on fossil fuels, and it's not the right thing for the environment, either. We've got a goal to be fossil fuel neutral by 2026, which is just a year away. I think we're going to make it. 150 years ago, the energy used was essentially zero. It'll have to be zero again. We really don't have a choice.
We've been pressing our own oil seeds for a long time. By neutral, we can't really burn our own oil seeds right now because we don't have the tractors here that can do it, but you can get them in Germany. They just won't let you bring them here. But we could burn straight vegetable oil. But we trade that to buy our own oil. We produce more oil than what we use. How much do you get? Well, if we do a canola crop, we get 60 to 80 gallons an acre. Your great-grandfather or grandfather used to grow oats to feed the horses.
You see a lot of terms. Sustainable, no-till, regenerative, organic, zero-till. We got all these terms. What the hell do they mean? They mean different things to different people because they haven't been defined. Organic is one of the worst ones because it's defined on inputs not on outputs. Don't use this, don't use that. What we want to do, and I don't care what you call it, we've got regenerative on the sign, it's been there since the early '90s. I think it's a good term. But what regenerative means to me is we match those natural water, energy, and nutrient cycles. Whatever you call it, it must be based on science and not tradition. Organic is based on tradition or feelings, it feels good. And measured by outputs or results, and not on what you're putting in there.
Doing the right thing environmentally is almost always a cracked economic approach in the long-run. We impact a big area, go all the way into Canada. There's a couple friends of mine from Alberta here. But I can measure it on this central part of South Dakota, that would be where we'd have the most impact. That area right now is 97% no-till. You can't really find a tilled field unless it's some really old, grumpy guy. We always look at the differences in productivity, and that's not important. It calculated to $1.15 billion in 2010. Right now, it's about $1.8 billion difference in productivity if we take today's price, what they produce now and what they produced before 1990.
What does that lead to? It's led to more grain bins and nice new houses. But it's also led to more kids coming back to the farm, and the schools that were almost ready to close because they didn't have enough children now having one and two sections of every elementary grade. Farmers and ranches harvest sunlight, carbon dioxide and water, and produce products we can sell. The United Corn Grower, the United Soybean Grower, you produce products that we can sell. Right now we sell a lot of corn and soybeans, and they go to China or some place else. That's doing a better job of doing the wrong thing, because we shouldn't be exporting all those nutrients.
Some of what we produce is human food, we need to be aware of that, and we probably need to focus more on trying to do what we need to do for food production. If we want to eat beef, maybe we should focus on raising beef instead of just raising the corn and beans, and whatever that go into feed lives.
John Dobberstein:We'll come back to the episode in a moment, but first I'd like to thank our podcast sponsor Yetter Farm Equipment. Yetter Farm Equipment has 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 to agriculture demands. The Yetter lineup includes a wide-range of planter attachments for different planting conditions, several equipment options for fertilizer placement, and products that meet harvest time challenges. Yetter delivers a return on investment in equipment that meets your needs and maximizes inputs. Visit them at yetterco.com.
Dwayne Beck:Weeds and disease are Mother Nature's way of adding diversity to a system that lacks it. If you got a weed problem, add more diversity, don't look for a new herbicide. Somebody said that last night at the roundtable. "Well, I looked for something else to put in there to compete with this weed." Over-reliance on herbicides leads to resistance. It also leads to disease problems because we go out there and spray too often, and the surfactants take the wax off the leaves, and then we got more leaf diseases. Goss' wilt and those kind of things all of a sudden start showing up because we're putting too many surfactants out. I got lots of data that shows use of insecticides causes more insect problems because you kill your predators. I think three years ago, I talked about Washington and Jefferson discussing the need to quit eroding the soils.
Sanitation, rotation, and competition are our methods of pest control. Don't think if I use herbicides, I use insecticides, think about these things. Sanitation, rotation, competition. Herbicides are part of sanitation, they keep weeds from going to seed. Herbicides are part of what happens with competition. I keep the weeds down until my crop can take over, but I use as narrow rows as I can, and those kind of things, and I keep my residue in place. Pesticides are only part of sanitation, rotation, and competition.
Fertilizer placement, and residue management are all part of competition. If you take your residue off and sell it, not only have you taken the nutrients off, you've taken your competition away. Everybody thinks they need to put the fertilizer underneath the corn. But if you notice when that plant first perceives light, it develops these roots between where the seed is and where the surface is. That's why they tell you to plant corn deep enough so you form your roots where they need to be, because they can get too shallow. They want you to plant the corn deep enough to leave room for the roots. You get almost no fertilizer from the soil up from the radical, but at V-2 you get those roots above the seed that start taking in fertilizer. We put our fertilizer three-inches to the side of the side and at the same depth as the seed, not deeper. Because that's where those roots form if you've got surface residue, that's where those roots form.
If you don't have surface residue, then roots have trouble growing, and then they have to go deeper. If you've got problems with phosphorus, for instance, it might be because you don't have enough residue there to let the roots grow well, because they don't grow well in hot, dry soil. We have a fertilizer opener in the front that cuts the residue and place that fertilizer three-inches to the side. Then we have a single residue manager, that's a Dawn version of one that we made homemade that's on there for the residue manager. You notice that the teeth don't come straight out, they come out as an angle. It's more like a rake. It's not trying to dig things. Most of the residue managers look something like that now. We keep our residue in place from last year's crop until the canopy on this year's crop grows and fills in.
We don't kill our rattlesnakes, and we do have them. Have a lot of them. Excuse me. We move them. We don't kill our coyotes because the coyotes eat the mice. In France, they have a huge problem with mice in their no-till fields. Every Saturday, everybody in every little village loads the hunting dogs up, and goes out and hunts fox. Just a big sport there. "We all load up, and we go out, and we chase fox around the countryside." Well, that's why they have mice. We put up, somebody last night mentioned perches. That coyote, maybe you can't see that, but there's a coyote standing next to that milo field down there, about 100-yards from where my tractor is if you look real close. He doesn't really care. I've had mama coyotes run with me on the columbine. They'll follow the columbine around, waiting for me to chase mice out. They got babies some place to feed, so they're not afraid of us.
You need to spread your straw evenly. We use stripper headers on all of our things, so it leaves the straw in place. But guys that use the regular type headers would have something like this happen. When that straw blew over on the stuff they hadn't cut yet, they picked it up the next time, they left those streaks in there. I said, "You got to harvest into the wind." That's what we do on windy days, you harvest into the wind so it's working for you. It does the second thing. If you start a fire, the fire goes away from your grain that's not been cut instead of into it. 20 years from now or 100 years from now, some kid will go out to harvest and the dad will say, "Yeah, it's kind of windy today. You better harvest into the wind." The kid goes, "Well, why are we doing that?" "I don't know. Grandpa always just said windy days, you got to harvest into the wind. Have no idea why we do it." Now you know why.
Proper nutrient cycles are extremely important. Ecosystems that leak nutrients turn into deserts. That's the definition of desertification is taking the nutrients out, especially the carbon. Saline seeps are symptoms of improper nutrient and water cycling. If you got drain tiles, take sample of your water. You're shipping a lot of nutrients away. Then you end up buying them and putting them back in again. I'm not a big fan of drain tile for that reason. It's really hard to manage that.
Nutrient placement is part of cycling. We want to put the nutrients where our plants can get them and our weeds can't. We want to take, during periods when we're not growing something like the wheat on the left, we just harvest wheat with a stripper head. You can see it stands up nice and tall. If we don't do something there and we get rains, the nutrients are going to move down. That's what we're measuring here, is the difference in nutrient movement between that and the cover crop on the right. We call this catch-and-release nutrients. I stole that from a guy in North Dakota. I told him I was going to steal it. I just went up and said, "That's really good. I'm going to use that." That was all. Jeremy Wilson's his name.
Fertility management for us is where is your available nutrient? Is your available nutrient where you have active roots?
Speaker 3:Jean [inaudible 00:22:55].
Dwayne Beck:And VAM mycorrhiza fungi are part of the root system. If you're doing tillage, you don't have those. If you're doing too much fungicide, you may not have those. But if you got good mycorrhiza fungi, you don't have a problem. Then is there water there? Is there nutrient in a place where you got cool soils that are covered with residue so the roots can grow, and that soil stays moist?
Our soil phosphorus Olsen tests are all less than five parts-per-million. We get no response to broadcasting, adding high rates of phosphorus. We just put a little starter on it. Everybody just is scratching their heads, but a lot of guys are starting to do that. We have 6000 pounds of total phosphorus in the top four feet. Run a total phosphorus test on your soils. Wherever you send them to say, "I want not only Olsen, or Bray, or Mehlich, or whatever you use, I don't only want that, I want the total." Because what Olsen, and Bray, and Mehlich are doing is telling you how soluble it is. The more soluble it is, the more likely it is to get into the lakes and the rivers. If you're going to use it, put it in the soil next to the seed, and that's what we're doing.
Developing proper water cycling information is important. Knowledge, where do you get the knowledge of the soil's water-holding capacity? Where do you get the rainfall data? Well, you get the soil's information from Web Soil Survey. You use either your information, or National Weather Service, or Mesonet, or something like that. Covering forage crop were really designed to help you fine-tune this. We farm some soils that look like this. True vertisols, if you're a soils guy. 80% to 90% [inaudible 00:25:08] in the clays. Two-and-a-half to three-feet deep over shale. They get these big cracks. So if we go to work on machinery in the summertime, you put down a tarp because if you drop something, peter principle, it's going to go down. The probability is 99% it's going to go down a crack some place. They don't hold very much water, so they're like sandy soil with a really bad attitude.
Web Soil Survey, I was amazed the other day that a longtime fertilizer dealer and a longtime farmer, I ran into them in an airport some place, and we started talking soils. I said, "Well, go to the Web Soil Survey." How many of you people use Web Soil Survey? Yeah, every hand needs to go up. It's the best thing that the US government ever spent money on. It tells you what you have. I could do a Web Soil Survey telling you what soil's underneath this hotel before they put a hotel on it. It's that good. There's no other country that has this. I travel all over the world.
John Dobberstein:That's it for this episode of the No-Till Farmer Podcast. We'd like to thank no-till innovator and living legend Dwayne Beck for all of the actionable and insightful no-till information that we were able to share with you in part one of this two-part podcast. Stay tuned for part two, to come out by the end of this month.
We also want to thank our sponsor Yetter Farm Equipment for helping to make this podcast possible. The transcript of this episode and our archive of previous podcast episodes are both available at notillfarmer.com/podcasts. For Dwayne Beck and our entire staff here at No-Till Farmer, I'm John Dobberstein. Thanks for listening, keep on no-tilling, and have a great day.