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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 episode two of this two-part No-Till Farmer Podcast, world-renowned No-Till expert and former Dakota Lakes research Farm manager Dwayne Beck shares another round of 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. In this episode, Beck discusses the benefits of livestock integration, proper crop rotation and residue retention in regenerative No-Till systems. He also covers the potential for perennial crops to further improve soil health.

Crop insurance skews your decision-making process, unfortunately. And I'd like to see that change. There should be no need to use a ground-engaging component to seed. Mother nature doesn't do that, should be able to just put seeds out there and have them grow. Sounds better than it is, but we spent quite a bit of Howard Buffett's money one time about 10 years ago trying to make clay seed balls work. But it's hard to do that on a mechanical level, to have something that'll work as a seed ball and then be able to go through some kind of a mechanism to seed it.

And but if you haven't read it, I encourage you to go on the internet and read One-Straw Revolution, which is a system they use in China and Japan that basically it's three crops in a year and all of it's done without any seeder. They just broadcast the seed. I think down the road we're going to have little robots that'll go out and take seed stakes and just stick them in the ground for us. Instead of us going out and do that, we just give them a big pile of seeds and they can go do that type of thing, go down between the corn rows and put stuff in the ground.

That kind of stuff is doable now with our technology. Livestock integration will probably be needed. We need to cycle the nutrients. We can't be sending them over to China and Japan and to the ocean and whatever. China uses our soybeans to grow their pigs. Why don't we just ship them the pigs? That sounds a little bit too easy, doesn't it? They help with nutrient cycling. The cows help us with rotational flexibility. We can do things if we've got cows there to harvest the cover crops and whatever we could never do if we didn't have that.

I think it's got to be multi-species, but it's got to be automated. Nobody wants to. We have that problem at Dakota Lakes. Nobody wants to move the damn fences when it's 20 below, even though we've got them tied on the irrigators. You guys have probably seen those videos. And all you got to do is move the irrigator. You don't have to move the posts and whatever. Everything moves. You just got to go out there and push a button and they say, "Oh, that's too damn much work. It's cold out here." It does give a chance for young people to enter. It's another enterprise.

If you're making a transition, you can add things to your system you have without buying more land, because land's too damn expensive. So cows are probably too expensive as well. But anyway, they're a nice cycling thing. I think we're going to need to use perennial sequences or perennial crops and that one's going to be the big lift. But if we're going to cycle nutrients like the native vegetation, you've got to have that really deep-rooted crop in there. In this area it was trees most likely. And when we biked the Allegheny gap this summer, my wife and I, between Pittsburgh and Cumberland, Maryland, we bicycled that 159 miles, that's all trees.

If you're going to produce crops there, it's got to be done in association with something like a tree. And that's what we do in El Salvador and Ghana and Rwanda. Those kinds of systems are the most successful. Nutrient cycling, rotational flexibility, building organic matter. Organic matter is the most important factor in determining the productivity of a soil. Within all textural groups, matter what soil they have, is the organic matter increases from one to three percent, we double the water holding capacity.

That's really important because if you've got drain tile, one of the problems is you're not holding all the water because somebody's tilled that ground in the past. If you can get your water holding capacity up, your drain tiles aren't going to run as much and they're not going to carry as much stuff in them. When organic content increased to 4%, then it's over 60% of the available water holding capacities associated with organic matter. This is huge. Here's an experiment.

We started these dry land rotations in 1990 and this was, we didn't notice for about the first 10 years that there was a difference. And if you look at those rotations, there's two rotations I got compared there. Corn pea winter wheat, soybean corn pea winter wheat. The two years before winter wheat are peas and corn in both cases. Shouldn't be any difference, right? But after 10 years, in 2002, we started in 92, we had a really dry year, 6.4 inches of rain in 12 months, rain and snow in 12 months. From the time the peas were harvested until the winter wheat was harvested, we had 56 versus 28 bushel.

And the first time that happened, I thought, "God, I must've done something wrong." But we started to watch it. And in 2005 we had a really good year, but it started out dry, 92 versus 57 bushels. And then in 2006 it happened again, 60 versus 29 with 7.9 inches. The organic matter was different because we have two high residue crops out of three in the one rotation and only had 50 50, a lot of you guys are 50 50. It's not enough carbon. Your native vegetation was probably 90-some percent high carbon nitrogen ratio stuff, and that's how you build organic matter.

So what we've done with this is we've changed that poor rotation to be like the good better rotation. It's still not good. We've got a better rotation than that. So we're now using the corn pea winter wheat on everything, but in the fields that had the bad rotation, we put a five-year perennial sequence in as we go through this sequence. So we'll go through the wheat sequence four times and put in five years of tall grass prairie. Makes a huge difference. It's amazing how much difference that makes. So this is what that looked like in 2006. That's a poor rotation. The low residue rotation. There's a high residue rotation.

See the difference? Can you see it from the air if you using infrared? We were talking this morning at breakfast with a couple guys about taking the corn stalks off to make ethanol or taking the corn stalk off to make boards. That's a new thing. We're going to make corn board, boards made out of corn stalks. This is what you're selling. If you have a 150, this be dry land for us, 150 bushel acre corn crop, 50 pounds acre van, five pounds of pea, a hundred pounds the acre K, and 3000 pounds of carbon.

Right? And that's your energy, that's your driver. So a lot of our good No-Till guys that have cattle that need to buy some hay or need to make a lot of hay, they don't make their own hay, they just buy hay from somebody else because they'll make it cheaper. If you count the nutrients, they'll make it cheaper. Sell it to you cheaper than what the nutrients are worth. Organic matter makes a difference. Early on I went to, in the 90s, I went to Argentina. They were still doing that seven and seven system. They had seven years of agriculture, what they called agriculture or cropping doing corn beans and wheat type systems and they have time to do double crops.

They do wheat double crops, part of what they do. And then they would do seven years of grazing, put it to a perennial, they'd graze it for seven years and then they'd put it back into agriculture for seven years. And that was a wonderful system. They never had to use any fertilizer to speak of. They had cattle in there and stuff. They just never had to use fertilizer. He had very little trouble with weeds and diseases and the Argentine government decided that they wanted more money.

Imagine that. And the Argentine government gets almost all their money by taking 34% of a bean crop. When the guy shows up at the port to load the beans onto the ships, the government gets 34%. So they don't need the IRS and all these guys with cars and buildings and just need one guy with a gun, one guy with an auger, right? And they wanted more so they outlawed the export of beef. So what's that do if you've got a system that's based on producing beef? All your cows go away and they start growing crops continuously.

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 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 and equipment that meets your needs and maximizes inputs. Visit them at Yetterco.com.

But if we do tillage or we do bad rotations, we destroy that good structure. And I went back to that exact place 10 years later when they were doing mostly soybean, soybean, soybeans, occasionally a corn. That exact place, it looks like this. You can destroy that structure in a hurry and now they got lots of dirt even though they're quote unquote "No-Till." They don't have enough residue, they don't have enough carbon in the system and their soils are really getting badly degraded. What about if you have lots of water where we irrigate? We don't produce as good of yields there as you can produce in the corn belt because we are too hot at night to really get the three.

I mean, we get over 300 once in a while, but we don't continuously get there. But if I take a long-term 15-year average, we have a rotation that's been continuous corn since 1990, which is a real kick. When college students come to visit and we walk in that corn field, I tell them that this field has been in corn longer than you've been alive. Right? It's really fun. They go, "Oh God, he's older than my dad." So we've had continuous corn and we don't have to use insecticide on it because we've got enough crab and beetles to take care of the corn rootworm.

Interesting. I mean, that's where a lot of that research on predators and stuff came from, was because we started this in 1990, in the mid-90, late 90s, we were doing all this work with why we didn't have BT corn at that time. So why don't we have to use insecticide here? And even at that time when we did a BT versus non BT, the non BT was better yielding because we didn't have the corn rootworm pressure. We have a corn soybean which has our worst soils. And if you go to that video I gave you the link to, you'll see these soil differences. Go to that video for nothing other than just we're taking a spade and we're sitting there looking at, and they had really good cameras.

The university did a good job of getting the technology in there. And then we have a rotation that we do that's two years of corn and then we do a soy soybean and we do a wheat, winter wheat with a cover crop that we graze and then another soybean. And the first year corn in that rotation is 256 and the second year is 213. So it's more like the corn bean thing. Okay? So what's that mean to you as a farmer? Well, if I did 5,000 acres of continuous corn, I get over a million bushels of corn. I also have more grain dryers and trucks and grain carts.

Right? It's just a huge amount of stuff to try to manage and you try to hit one window there, so you wouldn't do that. Corn soybeans, if I have 5,000 acres means I have 2,500 acres of corn and 2,500 acres of soybeans and no wheat. And you can see the yields there. We get that other rotation with corn, corn soybean, wheat soybean. The first year the two corns together give me for just a little bit less corn, but the soybeans actually on 2000 acres of soybeans versus 2,500 in the one above, we get more soybeans, get more total soybeans on less acres because we've diversified the rotation.

Right? So I'll put it like an easier thing. I get 9,300 bushels more soybeans on less acres. I get 73,000 less bushels of corn, but on less acres because the corn doesn't yield that much better. But I get 120,000 bushels a wheat in that more diverse rotation. So I would trade, and I think you would too, look at the markets. I would trade 120,000 bushels of wheat for 73,000 bushels of corn. I mean, that wheat's a better deal, so. And less herbicides and whatever. If I was going to do it with the same machinery and labor, I can only do 2000 acres of continuous corn.

I can do 4,000 acres of corn soybean and I can do 5,000 acres of that more diverse rotation with the same equipment in the same manpower. I used to do this a lot at meetings where we had a lot of wives there. There's a few wives here, but we used to have these evening meetings and a lot of wives would show up and I'd say you have the same combine, the same tractor, same sprayer, same combine, and same wife to drive the combine. And then the ladies would kind of look at me a little bit and I said, "Ladies, you can drive a combine." And we were talking about this the other night that women are actually better combine operators because they take their time.

But I said, "You can run that combine. He's going to tell you it's too complex and whatever." I said, "It's got knobs that have rabbits and turtles." Right? I mean, what's so tough about that? And he can't run the dishwasher and he can't run the washing machine because it doesn't have buttons with rabbits and turtles. So you can run the combine. This is easy enough. Better wildlife habitat provides opportunity for using cover and forage crops better, better workload spreading and improve soils. In the early 1990s, we were involved in a project in, not directly involved, in a project in Afghanistan prior to the war.

There was a guy from South Dakota that was doing missionary work there and his brother was one of our No-Till guys. And they showed up one day and said, "Do you think they could No-Till in Afghanistan?" I said, "Yeah, I think they can." And so they went about getting a John Deere drill ship through Russia into Afghanistan. They're pulling it with a Belarus tractor. If they thought there were land mines out there, they'd put a roller in front of that tractor to explode the mine before the tractor got there.

And in the background is the Hindu Kush, which used to be one of the most fertile areas in the world. Right? So that's what you're looking at. And they're "No-Tilling," quote unquote. What's wrong with that photo? There's no residue. Where in the hell did the residue go? And we have this in Rwanda, we have the residue and then somebody wants to take the residue and put it around their bananas. Right? So they can take all the residue out of the cornfield and put it around their bananas, so but they have no residue in the field.

It makes a difference. So they have no residue. What happened to it? Well, Abdul took it and he pulled it up by the roots if you look real closely, and then they put it on their semis and haul it into the buildings and trash it there. So they have the residue in the buildings. And in the US we used to do that with threshing machines. Right? We used to bundle it and haul it to the house and thresh it there so we had all the residue in the building for our cows, but we hopefully spread it back out was the idea.

But in Australia, they never did develop a threshing machine type thing because they didn't need the straw. So they actually used stripper machines that did strip the grain right off the wheat and put it in the bin and never did take the straw in. Organic matter makes a difference. Have three daughters and a wife. My thing they hate me to say the most, but they're not here is when I asked the genie for a household of women, this wasn't what I had in mind. But when they were younger, they're all have master's degree and they all have good jobs and only one of them has a husband. So guess they don't need men. But I put them by this picture of a prairie grass plant.

Look at the root system. Soybeans and corn aren't even close to matching that. It's not even close. And they were in middle school and high school then, but the youngest one graduated with a master's from Harvard. So I guess maybe she gets more zoop than everybody else. But the point of today's talk is you can't just stop doing tillage. You have to change everything. You have a very complex system and we need to view it as an ecosystem.

If we just change tillage and don't change everything else, then the whole system collapses and we have a lot of that that's happened. I think most of you guys are pretty successful no-tillers, but you need to constantly keep thinking about this type of thing. We're at peak oil, we've got to change. We've got to get rid of using oil for a lot of reasons. And one of them, and I don't know why we're so gung-ho about oil as farmers. I mean, we shouldn't want to make oil into food.

That's it for this episode of the No-Till Farmer Podcast. I'd like to thank No-Till innovator and living legend Dwayne Beck for all the actionable, insightful No-Till information that we were able to share with you in this two-part podcast. To see part one go to no-tillfarmer.com/podcasts. We also want to thank our sponsor Yetter Farm Equipment for helping us make this podcast possible. A transcript of this episode in our archive of previous podcast episodes are both available on our podcast page. 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.