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Conservation Ag Update is brought to you by Sound Agriculture. Hey, welcome to Conservation Ag Update. Great to have you with us as always. The future of no-till is now, but what's it going to take for the next generation to continue promoting and increasing the adoption of conservation practices? Well, I asked a couple of young farmers for their take at the No-Till Conference earlier this month. Let's listen into what they had to say.

The younger crowd has to really step up. I can count on my hands how many guys that are under 40 farming in my area, and we're a pretty good size area. The average farmer is probably 1,500 acres, so we don't have a lot of really big farmers, so there should be a lot more, but it trickles down. We have to all step up and do more. I mean, your communities, churches and fire departments are short on help, but so we need to find a way to bring young people back and that's kind of my goal. I don't like herring my laundry out, but I like to tell people how my operation got started because my long-term goal is to try and find a way where if we could put one young farmer in every county in the Midwest or United States farming, that's extremely doable. Every county has at least one guy wanting to retire that doesn't have another family member. If we could rejuvenate that with a young family, I mean that would just multiply and ripples and help communities. So-

What do you think, Joel?

I think a lot of things. I think it's not unique to the farming community first of all. I think all of our rural communities are struggling and it's maybe most signified on the farm, but there's so many little towns across rural America that are a shadow of what they once were, and we're probably young enough that we've never even seen them how they once were. But we hear stories and you can see old buildings falling in that used to be thriving businesses. And I think it's a problem that's bigger than agriculture, but to try to focus it in on what we can do, I think it's being open to young people in your community that might be interested and find a way to get them on your farm. I don't know. I know that's going to look different for everybody and finding good help is hard and paying good help what they deserve is even harder. But we've got to be open to it and looking. And if you're not looking for something, it's very difficult to find it because then they've got to find you. But if we can be proactive and trying to find good people rather than good people just falling in our lap, that's going to help us a lot as an industry.

Great perspective there. James is a first generation no-tiller in Iowa. And Joel farms with his dad, Brad in Kentucky, and they started no-tilling about seven years ago. Moving on, friend of the program, Tony Peirick has been planting soybeans and corn green into cereal rye for about a decade now on his Watertown, Wisconsin Farm. Tony has some words of advice for those who are nervous about adding cover crops to their system.

Try it. I mean, we got to go this route and there's so much peer pressure out there. As I travel and talk to different farmers in other states, farmers don't want to change. They don't want to be the odd person out. It's too bad because just try something and see how it works. And once they understand why we should be using covers and no-till on the benefits of it and the water infiltration, and again, our biology back so we can get more nutrient dense grains that we need to grow is something that we've got to do. So just try it. I mean, here in Wisconsin we're lucky we've got a lot of farmer led groups. We're seeing more and more farmers trying something because they're not afraid to be ridiculed. But as I say, as I travel in other states, there's a lot of peer pressure out there in other states, such as nobody wants to be the odd person doing something different.

As a former coworker once told me, "Outside the comfort zone, that is where the greatness happens." On that note, let's send it over to McCain Vogel for today's cover Crop Connection, McCain.

Thanks, Noah. McCain Vogel here with this week's Cover Crop Connection. Well, the 2025 National Cover Crop Summit is right around the corner. The fully digital event takes place from March 18th to 20th and is completely free for all attendees who would like to register. The summit will feature six outstanding presentations from seven excellent speakers. Here's one of our speakers, Butler County, Pennsylvania grower William Thiele, to give you a quick preview of his presentation, which is titled Using Cover Crops as a Forage.

Since we're talking about making covers as a forage, is it to not look at covers as just covers, if that makes sense? So we thought at first the covers were just okay, it just prevents erosion. Which they do, but they can do so much more. And so when we found out the covers can fix nitrogen and mine phosphorus and all these things, and we thought, okay, there's a lot of benefit to this. And then after that, which you'll find in my presentation, that necessity is the mother of invention, that because we to that we saw the forage or the covers as a potential feed source. We consulted with our nutritionist and he said, "Maybe you should try to use this as a forage." And we thought, I never thought of that, cover crops are just cover crops, right? Well, they are, but they can also be used as a forage. And so we did that out of necessity and we found great benefits from that. Then it's now part of our regular farm plan to do that now for years to come.

The 2025 National Cover Crop Summit will also feature Gary Zimmer, Nick Voss, Jim Studi, Roger and Nick Wenning and Alyssa Essman. So be sure to head to covercropstrategies.com to register for the free event. Well, that's all for this week's Cover Crop Connection. Until next time, I'm McCain Vogel. Back to you, Noah.

Thank you very much, McCain. Congratulations to Tuscola County, Michigan Farmer Tom Hess, who recently celebrated his 40 year no-till anniversary. Round of applause for Tom. Hess started no-tilling in 1984 to solve his erosion problems and he's never looked back. His big focus now is feeding the livestock in the ground because that soil life dissolves tillage, he says. I paid a visit to Tom's farm in early May for a look at one of his long-term no-till fields.

I'm actually standing in one of our CRP fields. This has been in CRP now for probably 30 years. And the reason is a little more obvious. If you're standing here, there's so much grade. We're looking down off a hill with 50 feet of fall probably, and 100 feet here, 150 feet. And then we're overlooking a field where we've interseeded with a Hiniker interseeder, a twin row in between the corn that was put in about V-4, V-3, V-5, somewhere in there. Things move pretty quickly that time of year, you're side dressing and different things. But our goal was to get the interseeded cover crop established germinated, and then allow the corn cash crop to overrun it and overshade it. The cover crop more or less kind of goes dormant. And by harvest, we were hoping it would look more like this at harvest, it was there, you could see it from the combine, but it wasn't real big. And then over the winter it stayed relatively green. We had a mild winter, so we're hoping we were feeding that biology all winter long, keeping our solar panel out, feeding that biology, capturing some sunlight and some CO2 and putting it in the ground, potentially building our organic matters up.

And Hess also flies on a good chunk of his cover crops, about 50 pounds of cereal, rye, barley, and rye grass per acre in early September. Well, 17% of no-tillers use drones in 2023 according to the 2024 No-Till Farmer Benchmark Report. And as drone expert Jason Sorensen tells us there's several reasons why drones are becoming increasingly popular in the precision ag world.

They have a lot of uses. One, the farmer themselves can take control of their application rather than having to hire it out. The drone is far less expensive than a traditional ground rig is. It also shines in small acres, smaller plots that have more obstacles in them, where something like a traditional aircraft wouldn't be able to get in there and necessarily apply those fields or those acres.

All right, let's wrap things up with the photos of the week. We want to share a few slides from retired USDA soil scientists Don Reicosky exploring the true meaning of conservation and why tillage shouldn't be part of the equation. Let's check it out. True conservation is carbon management. The two primary practices that contribute to the largest amount of conservation are no-till and synergy crops. In nature, tillage is a catastrophic event. Feed the soil biology with roots and carbon exudates. Don't slice and dice them with tillage tools. And you see the picture there saying, "Replace steel with roots." Plant roots go deep into soil for water, nutrients and carbon storage. Check out that impressive photo of a sugar beet root following a worm channel two meters deep.

Next slide. The showdown of the century, nature's plows versus man's plows. The root system and the earthworms are the plows and the conservation system here. And Don's next slide says, "There's a battle between tillage machinery and the soil biology. Which one is going to win? Who is going to lose?" And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Or should I say tip of the soil in this case. That'll do it for this week. Shoot me an email at nnewman@lestermedia.com. I'd love to hear from you as always. And hey, we'll see you next Thursday for our next episode. Thanks for tuning into Conservation Ag Update.