2020 Soil Health Conference Keynote Speaker: Derek Axten, Southern Saskatchewan, Canada

what you're gonna see here is I guess basically just a tour of our farm and I'm gonna kind of walk you through how our farm is sort of just a bunch of ripped off ideas that I've got from everybody along the way and and made them work on our farm and sort of put them in our system and really what we're trying to do is build resilience and I think I guess you'll see as we go through the the things that we do on our farm and how that helps us build resilience because you know just like he said earlier we've gone from droughts to extreme light years and I haven't experienced quite what you guys did this year but you know we had triple the rainfall we've ever had in our area this year and we're learning that everything we do to build resilience is really helping move our system forward so I just want to give you some context I'm going to kind of sort of give you some background and then start to walk you through a system so this is a really big picture of our farm and my family my wife Tanis is here with me today and she's really the brains behind the operation so all the technical questions I'll be able to gladly direct to her and and my dad I always like to involve a picture of my dad because he was with me with on that very first trip down to Dakota lakes and he's always sort of been behind the whole way he's actually in Lake Havasu City enjoying the warmth right now so I'm sure he'll be made me catching this on video later and just sort of a picture just give you a bit of background of what we look like so when you look west of our farm we we farm against 50 miles in native Prairie so we're in super fragile environment I guess maybe that's kind of what led me to start this journey sooner than most I guess something else I wanted to add include I guess was the fact that we've become a seed farm and dad what was a seed grower back in the 70s but with the the high dollar green prices that happened in the seventies that all got thrown away and like everything else on our farm the seed the seed portion hasn't become a recycled idea something I wanted to make a mention of is I'm not here to tell anybody had a farm I just want to tell you or explain my know what we do I guess and they share our experiences and what has worked and definitely what hasn't worked so we're in the heck is MIT in Saskatchewan we have a saying in Saskatchewan it's easy to draw and tough to spell and the little green star here at the bottom is where our town is we're 12 miles north of the of the Porter Eamon and the little red line is the North Dakota Montana border that is the rough stats we're sort of in a 10 to 14 inch annual precip zone we're a clay loam soils we've been glaciated with every glaciation there is so we've got super rocky really undulating hills and we're generally or generally dry and just a rough idea sort of the map layout of our farm were two fairly substantial blocks so for us it's been able or easy to include the grazing so this is where it started why make changes so this is a mono crop it took me a little digging but this is actually from the year in 2006 from when we went down tot do Dakota Lakes for the first time at the time we thought that was great and on the other side we have needed Prairie which is across the road from my farm we wound up by absolute accident in Gettysburg South Dakota in search of a no-till drill we thought at the timers this is as far ahead as I could think was that if we disturb less soil we would lose less moisture and that was about as exciting as I could make it and we are local John Deere dealer wanted to have zero to do with this drills because they look complicated and he didn't wanna have anything to do with that so we went on the old Tandy and did our research and the closest one was in Gettysburg South Dakota so we that fall my dad and I jumped into pickup and drove down to the John Deere dealer in Gettysburg and lo and behold made a deal on this drill and the sales manager said well you know if you're here to buy a dis drill in Gettysburg you must be coming to see dr. back all right dr. who you know I guess right for your crowd I mean we didn't have a clue who this was so he gave us a little background on the research farm and where they're at so we went home with that in mind and seated that next for that crop that spring and had all sorts of problems feeding with a district for the first time and we had no idea or doing or dealer didn't give us any help and we were so we were had residue problems and you name it so we went back that next summer to field day and we actually got there the day before because we were able to go ahead with back and I had emailed them and anyway we get there and getting his golf cart I mean drive out and he's you know pointing out all these things along the way and eventually we get to this irrigator and yasss I'm gonna drain you think that's foot nine and I guess to know this crowd you guys probably all know but we all guess like half an inch an hour I have one cousin there's one pivot within 100 miles of my farm my cousin has it and if he puts on more than a half an inch an hour it's running everywhere so we all guessed a half an inch an hour would you believe two inches in nine minutes no no no I wouldn't believe that actually good as if it did it would be running you know we're parked this far away from the edge of the field and we get off the golf cart and walk in behind and you can reach out and touch the ureter and there's no mud in our shoes well this is this is Wow this doesn't happen so because I know where we live being hilly and the farming we were doing if we get it down poor two-inch nine minutes I classified it as a downpour it's running in the ditches we have washouts we have everything goes wrong so I said you need to tell me how to do this I'll do whatever you need I'll do whatever you know and so he starts talking about rotation and diversity in high carbon crops and earth worm channels it's the first time I'd ever see someone put a shovel in the soil I didn't know that was a thing nobody carries a shovel where we are our draw animus didn't have shovels so and we look at the you know you look at the structure and he talked about infiltration rates things that I had never I'd never ever been at whatever exposed to so I'm a slow learner so it took me a few trips back-to-back to see that and one of those trips running Aggie Brown total freak meeting in wing North Dakota and same thing we got to go to Gabe's and saw his soils and it was the same thing it was that we don't put the shovel in the soil and want the structure that black chocolate cake and I thought well you know you just you've you've been born and your grandpa got off the train in the right place so you know this is you've got good mature to work with we walked across the grid road and no it was Minton it the his neighbors feel that he always shows was the same kind of soil that I had to work with at home and the thing I liked about going to Gabe's for me is it's it's a five-hour drive you know I go into it's a similar rainfall and for me I always thought that it it just was a little bit more believable for lack of a better term so with those things in mind and and the things about that other things back it said in mind was always keep your native context in mind you know so look at your native plants and and look at what you're growing and I mean we were growing one cereal and you go across the road indoor well-managed native systems and there's a hundred and twenty-five different plants well we were a long way from that I mean and you looked I used to think they look good but when he really looked there's nothing on the ground between those rows so we had major changes to do and the other thing that I loved the boat back was how we instilled urgency and like this isn't but we have to do this now we don't have what no I always think that I'm 42 you know I don't look it but I'm 42 and so I've got 40 harvest left I want to get changes happening soon so what does that look like this is just sort of a brief outline of what I'll get into all this we start with low disturbance eating yeah I use control traffic I'll get into why we do we use stripper headers love those things I'm a big believer in stubble retention we do not bale straw off we're big in diversity and I'll get into how we got into diversity and how we make diversity fit on our farm now a lot of that diversity is comes in our cash crops and we do companion planting which I'll talk about intercrop s-- is a huge thing now and I'm gonna a little bit about synthetic inputs a lot of I get a lot of questions about this because I might run out of time because that happens a lot we've reduced our synthetic fertility use by about eighty percent so that's on the synthetic side I have introduced my bill by 80% because we replace those synthetics with some carbon base inputs in our compost extracts and some microbes and I'll get into a little bit into detail about that just want to give you a little bit of numbers we haven't used any seed treatments or any insecticides on our farm in any form in seven years we treat cover crops fairly pragmatically I'm in a super-short rainfall or a super short growing season so we have we struggle and I'll get into a little bit of how we fit those in but we really struggle to get anything after harvest this harvest was a perfect example but the biggest most important thing on here for me and and I get asked a lot interviews or just talking at the bar you know if you can do one thing on your farm if you could pick one thing and I hate to pick one thing but for me it's more live roots it's more live rooted days more diverse live root days if I could pick one thing I would do all of that before everything else and why do I want more live roots because on the soil food web the only place that we really have any control is here the Sun is going to shine every day we hope I mean and everything after the live roots and what we can do and this in are not the top 4 inches you know is that is that's where we have our control and that cannot contributes to everything that happens after that and something that I became aware of that I didn't know that we could do and I'm a big believer and I can't manage what I don't measure and I was lucky enough to run across dr. Laningham at a presentation in Montana and lo and behold this is something that you can't manage and measure I I know people used to talk about biology biology is good I know I want it I probably want more I don't know if I have the right stuff and she talked about how the fact that this is something that you can measure and manage and I was fortunate enough to have a very willing and energetic wife it was got a bit of a biology background so I came home from this this conference and got 10s involved she took her courses and at the same time we also stumbled across dr. wen Utah hurry we got invited by absolute chance once again this is why you go visit people and why you go to conferences we were at no-till on the plains down for you was there introducing us to everybody left right and center it was awesome and we met Wendy Tahiry standing around a barrel eating peanuts and drinking beer and just so she got tongue I didn't know who she was no she's telling us what she does and she said I might have a course you know how to teach people how to identify mycorrhizal fungi well we would be super interested in coming to that so what I don't know what how long it was later than the next summer David Brown's farm we got an email booked their flights and we were there so many interesting things came out of them courses that I I could do a one hour on those but one of the big things was we learned that we don't have to be buying nearly as much stuff as we think we would and the fact now that we can manage these things we've now looked at all the crops we've grown on our farm the last four or five years we're seeing an excellent micro iyslah colonization I don't have to buy stuff in a jug we can count on our natives and encourage what we have so this is sort of what we okay the back up here after Wendy's course and Elaine's course by this time this is like 2015 were being diverse and we're growing into crops and we're doing all these wonderful things and so we're doing a good job right you know we're gonna make a slide that's gonna be wicked awesome no it was terrible it was actually quite bad it was all bacterial yeah look a long way to find a fungal strand talk about a you know full stop now what well at the same time we'd been learning about how to make these compost extracts and how we can really back our synthetics down even more and bring those in and to me it was just a we need to make more drastic changes and I looked at that training I guess like I look at any other training you know we've been to management courses we've been to financial training courses this is just another training course this is just one more course or something one more thing we can learn to do and today if we look at some of our soils we'll see things like this a lot more diversity decent fungal hyphae you know decent micro arthropods nematodes not a dirty word you know for us we don't see the nematodes I guess the root feeding ones that I think that have become a problem that got the bad rap for all the other nematodes and luckily as we been moving forward we've been seeing more of this but you don't have to have a microscope to look at your soils I don't ever want to overwhelm people and make you think like well I don't know microscope so I can't do that still probably the most used tool on our farm today is a shovel and you can mean we can really relate a lot back from when you look at a good well aggregated soil you know you can tell pretty well back to that what you're gonna see meaning I can never say for sure but I mean for us it's a really simple easy way to go well now when I go to visit people I always like to see if they actually take a shovel out of their truck if we're gonna actually look at soils or if we're just gonna walk around and talk about it so and I also want to include this picture I've seen some of the photos you guys put up down here and they are so awesome but this is a bit of reference for what I have to work with Martha Mintz was there from the furrow of this summer to do a thing for us and she wanted to take a picture of a comparison and I had never thought about doing this so we just bought a farm right beside us this spring and we noticed a crop wasn't as good obviously but when we went out and dug in that soil that's literally four hundred yards away from the other soil that really showed us the changes that we have mean and trust me I've got a lot of work to do that is not super awesome but it is a lot better than the other one and that's sort of that's the things we want to look at so this soil is the first lighter color one obviously is some stuff that we just took on and the other one too some stuff we've been working on for about eight years we work pretty dry at the time so you can see we're a little crumbly but we are actually seeing some drastic color change and for me I mean that knows we're definitely going in the right direction so the other thing that I love to do and I think is a nice and cheap and I've actually got my infiltration test from you guys so thanks for that we do as many infiltration tests as we basically feel we have time for I think it's been a real indicator for us as far as management goes this is this spring was unusual for us we were dry we had no range from snowmelt till June 18th and then June 18th 19th and 20th we had an inch a day on the 21st we went out and did infiltration tests I think for us that's a pretty good time to do it I'm willing to make you watch first 29 seconds the last 10 minutes isn't in nearly as exciting so our first date was 29 seconds and ie it actually amazes me that we can make that much difference so this is given as 6 inches an hour it's still not back 2 inches in 9 minutes but we're getting there we're gaining on them so this was flax lentils double and I'll get into why we still see residue later on but we actually do have decent ground cover still so when I look at our whole farm system it's just the five pillars of soil health but Tanis and I like to come back to this every time you make a decision every time we're gonna make a major change if we're gonna try a new product if we're gonna try a new farming practice or different you know something major we go back to this and make sure that we're gonna fall into these five it's something that's helped us guide our daily decisions you know and I don't think of any of these things is specifically once more important than the other I think of them all as tools you know and I mean everything we do on our farms tools and everything has a place and for us it's just a matter of making them fit where we can in our farm and I've always found to that I'm learning as I get older is there is no hill that I'm willing to die on you know there's yeah there's things that I've had to do that I don't like but I'll do it sometimes you know further for the greater good in the end so where do we start I like to start with with seeding I would say that that this no slow disturbance seeding for us has addressed two things that's what I seated with in 2006 before I went down to see back that's a faint flex coil 5,000 if you come to Saskatchewan and your no-till and if you see with that thing when you leave the field is black but it's no-till and one of our seeding outfits today we've actually which is super unusual I mean you guys have seen planners yeah whatever that's a planner good for good for you but in small grain country this is unusual we've actually gone to wider spacing for lots of reasons one of them is 15 to 10 inch is 50% less soil disturbance for me and we haven't seen any yield reduction not and I'll give it into a little bit of detail about what all we're doing with that planter but so far so good because I like to obviously keep more surface residue and tank intact and we also find that we're doing way less damage going into the fields of this compared to the 8090 that we seed with so stripper adders we were just actually having conversations here right before the presentation of Oh stripper headers I think that they should be sold as a matching pair with diss drills I learned very very much the lesson had my ass handed to me I guess the first year I think for lack of a better term we had 36 foot MACT on call or headers and 96 hundreds and didn't really pay attention to strong offers so that very first year we learned about the word hair painting which um I'm lucky actually the dad let let us go one more year after some of the wrecks that we had the very first season but we went back to back and same thing he said well obviously you need a dist or a stripper header and I didn't we didn't know what those were we had to go to Kansas to buy our first two stripper heads and since then we've had a few other ones but those are the stats I'm not gonna read them off for you but I mean the for us the big thing is harvesting snow and it's not so much the volume of snow but it's how we harvest it we're hilly and we find that if we don't keep even snowfall we get great big snow banks you know we're hilly rate so the wind blows off every time it snows wind blows that's pretty much a guarantee and we get these big snow banks on the side Hills and our hilltops are bare and then when spring comes our hilltops are bare and drying off thinner you know we have to wait to get to the field but in the strip's double the snow catches even all up doesn't matter how steeper Hills are the snow catches even and the other interesting thing is how at state the snow stays soft and mellow and you can walk through it all my neighbors the snowmobiles love me because they come in right around in there because it's nice snow all year and it keeps the ground from freezing so we seem to get on those fields the soonest funny story like a 2008 would have been the first winter we went through we were growing Kyle Durham I mean yeah Durham's just like a tall old wheat it's super tall we stripped it and then the coffee shops relax things aren't gonna be seen until July because the fields will be full of snow till then that's the first fields we seeded so there has been a slight bit of uptake there since that but what an eye-opener I mean I this is one of the few pieces of equipment I think I would have a hard time giving up in the stripper heads combine efficiencies fantastic the amount of things it allows us to do we're stripping more and more crops all the time and I'll get into that when I started talking about our inner crops this is one of the hills that I won't die on I wound up in control traffic for funny reasons at the same time I was making changes biologically I had been in contact with a Nuffield scholar by the name of Steve rockin the guys are familiar with a Nuffield scholarship the big kind of this guy gets a scholarship and they get to travel all over the world and learn from other people and it's pretty cool and his topic of study was control traffic farming nothing to do with soil health from his perspective he's in Moore in Alberta he's on heavy clay soils hi in my opinion high input shank opener high disturbance we went to his farm in 2011 for the first time twelve in there it's the first time I've seen soil aggregation it's somewhat resembled Beck's and games only thing that was the same was control traffic I'm super impatient if you have a nose I want changes yesterday and so I just thought well I'm gonna do all these different practices and try to make things happen faster you know this water and filtration is a big one with this soil structure but it allows us to do so many other interesting things that I didn't think about once we go on this tram system we can do and early in a row seating we can do really seating we can do tall gosh all sorts of wonderful things but one of the cool things about it was lost between I thought oh one of the cool things about it for us is that we run on a 3060 system so all of our we actually want to work backwards from your combine if you're ever thinking about doing this we can email or whatever but it's start with your combine and then work backwards from there we want to make sure we can spread our residue and we also want to make sure that it works in our hills so we're are combines or 30s or cedars or 60s our sprayers 120 so on one of my biggest fears of control traffic in the Hills is tramline erosion because trams basically good we seed them but they get traveled on and you know eventually right problems so ran into another Australian innovation these chaff decks so what they do is well obviously put chaff on the tram lines but how it happens is behind this black piece of rubber I'm not exactly sure but I always like to tell people there's magic because somehow it separates the heavy portion of your chaff so not all your chaff a very small portion of your chaff which is mostly weed seeds and crack and puts that on and in delivers it out behind your wheels so does a whole bunch of things it is a mechanical form of weed control which is great because we all have resistant weeds I think I know I do and it also eliminates the the chaff the dust and the erosion honor tramps like I said this spring no rain our sprayers are running on those trams no dust and the neighbors were just rolling in balls of dust you know no residue and big fat tires running and in all sorts of lead skips you know we wonder how resistance happens so this thing kills about three birds with one stone and it's super simple hooks on once it once it's on and around and it's running and no horsepower requirements it looks to me like it's helping sort of problem solved as far as I can tell when we came home from Gabe Browns and Dwayne back with all the you need more diversity in your rotation you need to grow cover crops yeah but I'm too dry I don't have enough season for that so now that was in my my mindset 2010 so how are we gonna do this how are we gonna why can't grow cover crops so we once again by accident discovered intercropping through a mistake on our own farm in 2009 we learned about growing two different crops at once and in 2011 we did our first official pecan old intercrop I guess for lack of a better term we grow two crops same time seed in the same time harvest on the same time obviously we control everything the same time the only noticeable and I'll get into this is is alternate role versus same role we try to do as much same role as we can but there are some things that we do alternate role for disease plant health reasons Lattin equivalency ratio you're gonna see Cler there so I'd like to explain this land equivalency ratio is simple as if you had a 50 acre field of canola and a 50 acre field of peas and did them all separately and how you do it however you do it and then combine them separately and your yields and your net profit is a 1 whatever that is then if you took that same field and seaton them together and combined them together and harvested them and paid some money to separate them and sold them what would that number be on our farm that's one point two seven I know farm that are one point three five I know research farms that have proven one point eight five like numbers that really make you go show me how to do that there's a research farm at red versus catcher another one in southern Manitoba Waddell Scott Chalmers they've been doing some phenomenal things the higher the rainfall the better this seems to work it's one of those things that there is no recipe it's taken me a long long time to figure out the crops that work on our farm this is a list of crops I've tried and they actually don't all fit since 11 there's been there's been more since we enter crop all of our broadleaf acres we found broadleaf acres work every time mixing like so I mix a legging and a forbs so you know camelina and large green lentils that's a good example we did that this year worked very well cereals and legumes I've struggled with I'm not saying that they don't work they just haven't worked for me but forb legume thing has been working phenomenally well I have yet to have a serious problem with maturity I've talked to guys who have had problems I'm not sure what we're doing I've talked to Jack Schultz a little bit about that I mean the plant signalling and plant communication I feel like is half as helping us flax and lentils should not work but it does we've got to the point where the clocks would just start to get a little dusty on the hilltops and the length of the flack should be continuing to grow but the Fox comes we desiccate normally we've lost some we use reg loan we don't use glyphosate and that's harvest them together and separate them afterwards that picture started a little red arrow that's phablet beans and flocks that one hate to be fat but you may be here fallow beans fab beans just don't like Saskatchewan because they need August rain to fail and we generally don't get that so we'll get talk growth and then a whole bunch of flowers and empty pods not so a little bit into flax Allah knows this is one of our winners it's one of our homerun crops it's one I like to talk about a lot this might be the only original idea I've ever had I think this I've all the research I didn't know I don't think anybody else was doing this one and we just want we even we had been growing our lentils with yellow mustard which is a pretty thin Brassica and I always felt like the Brassica was holding our lentils back so we decided well flax is thin and basically non-competitive so if we go a low seeding rate you know if it gets that tall lots of wind and man I didn't ever work good first year we did flax lentils our neighbors across the road I don't know if you guys have a there's a root rot we have really bad in central Saskatchewan Montana called finem ICC's it's a loose poor base it's bad you don't want it's our yield killing can't get rid of it starts in the low spots this is my cross the road you can see that premature yellowing and low spots which is usually the opposite would happens it's Kachua normally we get dry in the hilltops turn yellow so we're all your yield is for the most part goes away there's a couple labs one swift current one in left bridge they've got some of our soils now they're actually doing some work on this they're trying to figure out what we're doing that we're not seeing it because it's literally across the fence and we're not seeing finem ICC's so the other wonderful thing about the intercropping with say flax or any of the time we add that other form to it it completely changes the carbon nitrogen ratio of the residue we've noticed that before with lentils or peas I mean you guys have probably seen it two months after you harvest residues gone field your bear eats it up it's gone burns it up add the flax completely different environment now we have residues through the spring over the winter which is a big game changer for us because we can't always get a cover crop in place and harvest ability those efendim ICC's lentils they go flat as a pancake with that little bit of flax in there you can just those call my skin sick along we can cut lentils at 6 miles an hour which if is frost is that fast normally we you know if you got lentils are laying down I remember in that like years ago we used to spray a fungicide intentionally just to make them stand better I remember having that conversation we're gonna spend $10 to make them stand better well we can do this we can make more money not use fungicide and make them stand better and get better residue another one of our witnesses doesn't have to be forged Peas we use forage peas because we move them into a sprouting market you can just put specialty pea there I mean generally I like to put down when we started we use the yellow peak canola simple weed control you know in my mind right away went well why are we using canola seeds expensive and yellow mustard I can keep my own seed and yellow mustard was shattered tolerant before shatter tolerant was cool you know so that's we started that in 12 we started we switched a mustard and then also that same year we Wow why are we growing a penis stands up let's grow those Peas I remember going for is peace for seed back in the early 2000s for good money but harvest no nobody wanted to be around at harvest now they can trellis and they stand you know those peas that were this tall will stay still stay stressing the whole way and at harvest they get a little Leaney but we can still get under once again residue I mean not adding that mustard I mean it isn't doesn't have a CN ratio of flax straw but it's significantly better than the peas by itself flax and chickpeas I pretty much everybody this was kind of the game changer for our farm financially we and we he's locked onto this right when chickpeas went crazy we so that was it was good timing for lots of reasons all right we quit growing chickpeas in early 2000s because I was sort of it was a joke that we ran out of seed because the disease is so bad basically it was awful we couldn't spray him enough so when I went to read verse two the research farm in Solana Shah was growing these things in a four inch high rainfall zone than I was with basically no fungicide I was like well Ana you need to tell me what you're doing because I'm doing that and at that time her research had said that the alternate Rose was sort of the promising since then things have changed of maybe a little bit from her perspective but for us in the alternate real scenario it gives the plants more room to breathe I think not exactly sure the flax forms a bit of a barrier they're both highly mycorrhizal which is super awesome right so I mean that I don't know if there's any sharing we don't use a whole bunch of fertility in front of these actually in fact I should have mentioned it earlier all of our intercrop we don't use any synthetic fertility Wow we used a little bit of micros and we use some of our biological stuff but we haven't used that was sort of my gateway drug to stopping fertility when we did our first intercrop that was kind of in the back of my head when those guys were talking about you know these multi species covers well let's just do that with our grain crop so fast-forward flax and chickpeas this is what this is kind of what it looks like and if anybody's ever growing chickpea crop when there's flowers on the plants and you can pull a rental it back and not see a bunch of brown spots or corn flakes I like to call them when they're on the ground because the disease is moving in that's a good sign and then this is kind of what it looks like in the grain hopper combine settings they're surprisingly easy that's a desi chickpea we grow kibou these as well they're a large white we grow yellow phlox just because we grow yellow phlox if you grow brown phlox I highly suggest you continue to use Brown you mean because they don't like and it doesn't matter what kind of flax you grow but you can get a surprisingly good sample out of out of these Manor crops without having much of a problem and I'm I'm gonna show us a separation slide here in a bit what it looks like when you separate this was a little bit of a challenge the very first year we had a bore goal 3710 I think everybody lovely we called it the boat anchor at our place and we we actually took the hoses from the front from the middle bounders and did a bunch of whatever farmer adaptation I guess we'll call it to make it work the first year but we found out that chickpeas don't like you know corks and holes and plugged off runs we just didn't get really good distribution we did enough to know we had a good crop and it was gonna work so the next season we ordered this 60-foot 1890 and they're intentionally ordered a double shoot cart because that's a bit of a challenge with 1890s lots of them don't have double shoot carts and we pulled the John Deere manifolds off because it's pretty tight when they fold and we actually got these towers from the smaller towers from exactly who I actually see has a booth here so they're smaller and what I like about them too is the holes goes over the outside so what we do is we have in other words I get this one over here so this tower the low tower wood has no hoses that becomes the chickpea Tower we take the hoses from this side and we just move it over if they're all numbered one guy can genuinely run down the drill or walk carefully I guess from a safety perspective down the drill and with a screw gun and move hoses from one to the other we put plugs in where the hoses come off that becomes a flax tower and the tower with the proper number of runs becomes the chickpea Tower because the chickpeas then seem to be okay flax doesn't seem to care if they have corks but if you try to take of tower and put corks in and do chickpeas you have plugged runs and you learn all sorts of new words and ask yourself questions about your life while you're in the field so I highly recommend doing something along this line but it and the scene view those towers those break things they totally talked me into that I thought it was a big sales thing but man for what doing this and trying to split up air the 1890 or that card the 1910 card hasn't always known been for great for air balancing and these helped a lot so this works really well and yeah and we're also able to move our blockage so then I don't have to do anything fancy with blockage on the computer because my 73 year old dad runs this most of the time so he doesn't want too many buttons to push other than like his facebook feed so it doesn't he wants to make sure this is working well so we can keep up with social events so the other because I'm not satisfied basically with anything as far as seating goes on our farm we just wanted to go one more and I've always been intrigued with a double-disc planter opener and singulated small grains and this is our fifth planter Tannis my wife's been she's been putting up with my purchasing random things for anyway so this is our first season the guys at harvest were great so on how the question was how do we get to seeds in the furrow to do our inter crops or companion crops in a planter row unit that was a struggle so the guys at harvest I'll get the next picture will show so really we're just feeding from a valemar it's a 24 unveil mark 48 run planner 60 foot and then we've got the CCS splitters so we just around 24 hoses and then split them and it goes the throw unit and then it goes into these handy-dandy little pipes that they bent up for us so we can deliver a second stream of seed right behind the seed tube and in the Keeton and whatever can put them in this in it worked really well the only problem was it showed up on the 28th of May so we were a little pretty much done seating by the time we got this thing running so Mike we got enough seeded to know that it works got the bugs out and we'll be more than ready for next year very happy with what we saw it gave us a lot of things to think about and a lot of things to work on for next year we're gonna probably do all of our cereals with this mean machine next year one of the things that blew my mind was how low we can seed things seed from what I'm used to from a seed saving standpoint I and crop health and light penetration there's things that this thing's doing that I had once again it wasn't the reason we did it but I'm happy that's a pound and a half hour out of seed that's a really good example of what not to do for diversity but we wanted to see what it could do so we just kept lower and lower and Lauren you know normally when we were seen ration it makes me were doing two or two-and-a-half pounds and it makes to get if you wanted that much the fact we were trying to if we were going into a new field we really wanted to put radishes and you know to get that many was was quite a bit more so from a seed savings protected and that is wheat at 42 pounds an acre on 15 inch spacing there's yellow blossoms sweet clover under that that will hopefully have for next year worked really well finding that the wider old with more light penetration or giving his green leaves right to the bottom something I always thought with maybe a deficiency thing or a drought thing for me but we're seeing we're seeing green leaves way lower on the wheat plants than I ever saw before and this is kind of what I really why we want to do this we're struggling add diversity to our cereals I've tried every kind of an inner crop I could think of every time I add a pea I just get less wheat really limits our weed control options so I started thinking maybe we're doing this wrong maybe we're trying to add diversity at the wrong time and with in you know in the spirit of everybody relase eating soybeans into their winter wheat and whatever I started to think well why don't we just really see that's not a harvestable crop we don't have the season for that but let's get her let's get our cover crop seeded sooner because we know that we have a certain amount of time to put carbon in the ground and from the point of harvest coming like crop maturity harvest seeding crop emergence six weeks two months for us I might only have a month after that when we have two weeks after that if I can have that cover crop growing in the standing crop that's a game-changer for us and the other thing that reasonably thought in my mind that I have to do this is because the way things have been changing is we don't have sir by the time the crop gets this big you look in here you can see how crappy my surface are residues gone so we it's getting to be we need to do this we need to have a cover crop there in place unprotected again so that's kind of the other with the 15-inch rows in our control traffic we can go into 48 rows and drive over to which are the only they're the trams so it's not a big deal and we can get our cover crops and I personally have a lot more time to seed in July before harvest than I do during harvest when we're trying to see eating combine and separate inner crops and whatever you know keep my sanity you know and then try to see it on top of that it's it's a real struggle so this has been an interesting thing so far in our farm happy with what we're seeing it allows us to use some some herbicides in our cereals though you know we have some we have wheat right and when with cover crops we have sometimes have to be careful this time usually gives us enough time that if we seed them basically at this stage sort of after flowering then they start to dry up the sunlight penetrates and they seemed to kind of take off I need to do more of this we did not get hardly any of this done this year thanks to mother nature but we've got proof of concept and we know that this works so well one of the other unintended consequences I didn't even know what this fancy green box when it came with my planter what all it did and then you guys are probably well versed but of it really answered a lifelong question I've had of why I can never set the downforce properly on my 1890 this is a delta found force aureus is in kilograms I will translate 200 kilograms is like four hundred and fifty pounds and negative well into 50 pounds so our headlines now your scene is like four five four and fifty pounds you know in the middle of our field in lots of places it's lifting up 50 pounds so I go out there on my it really explains a lot you go up well you have you guys the hands and these guys behind your drill when somebody else is going back and forth trying to figure out how to get this thing set right no wonder I had no idea there was this much difference we're playing around I don't sell that stuff by actually it drives me the guy that sold me drives me crazy but it's quite interesting the information we've got from it and how yeah interesting I guess so I just wanted to show that and with that low seeding rates and the Delta Force yeah we're just were seeing root growth like I had just never seen before this is an old crop actually Christine hi had Christine in this field in the summertime and yeah it's there's been some really interesting changes so that planter thing has got some it for small grains has definitely got a fit for us so how do you separate those inter crops and how do you harvest those intercropped harvesting is surprisingly simple the member I had a lot of anxiety about this the first year because I you know we grew it great now what we've tried about every specialty concave known to man but I've today when our combines I've got green ones so one small wire two large wires and I can put covers from one to five as I need them generally we start with one and five covered that's a we don't have big ones we got class thousands so we cover our return and we cover number one and then it's just a matter of fooling with covers till we get that kind of thrashing that we need and it works great anything from chickpeas like ten mill chicks down to derm down flax doesn't matter it seems to work but I love this picture because we were doing we were strip and flax and chickpeas two years ago three years ago had snow laid him down broke him down we had one quarter left why not tried to strip him coding again and we were shelling more else than we were getting so we went home dropped him off grabbed reflects heads that's the same crop like what a substantial difference from what we could strip to what we didn't you and this is those best we had those advanced fancy advanced power cast whatever they're supposed to spread no matter what well I have a space you know so I'm not happy I don't have to worry about it here because we don't have to spread what we don't cut yeah the ground covered just I thought this is well worth putting in so if you drive in my yard in August or September generally you would have seen this it actually only takes one ringmaster for this circus generally if he's good what we do is there's we have a surge bin and so we started with rotary okay we started with rotary screens that was awesome first year did that for two three years quick clean did thought you know that there's nothing wrong with those we just needed because the hosta farm now his inner crops that the rotary I just there wasn't enough hours in the day so we wound up buying this machine in the middle which is a mobile cleaner there's this indent scalper aspirator big air screen and a gravity people so to me when I bought this this is a intercrop separator great big fast one so we just pull in here we dump and then we have a surge bin and the clean stuff comes here so say lentils flocks over there and something we started doing a couple years into it was refuse lights all of our pod sticks fluff weed seeds that goes over here does that ends up in our compost so a year into this again unattended didn't think about going there well we I can make it clean enough to sell it as export so that's worth more money so well then why don't we grow stuff that we can clean them sell a seed so nests is how we wound up being seed growers because if we're gonna run it through a plant anyway we might as well clean it to export standards or seats back and then captured some value this thing will put 2 cents a pound on most stuff you know as far as exports back and then if you want to get into see don't mean the sky's the limit right so today hopefully there's a whole bunch of guys working around this this isn't a live view it's only two months behind schedule but this is what we're doing now so this is uh this will be food grade spec we're actually taking a different direction again which has happened because of everything that happened in 2006 because it back basically if I would have just stayed home it would have been so much simpler yeah so this yeah they'll be legs and pipes and this we're a long way from as far as we should be this is a yeah it's a high throughput food grade cleaning facility and we'll be able to get into some food markets and then there's some other value-added things we can do once we have that food grade quality and yeah it's all thanks to one trip to Gettysburg South Dakota so people are maybe kind of curious this is a close-up that's a flax lentil dirty editor that's in the Columbine that's what it looks like so not so bad no looks like a mess this is a flax that's through so this flax is not export clean by any means there's still some weed seeds and whatever but actually go to town I mean you can phone your broker and say I've got some flocks and put on a truck and going you know there's 2% dockage in that lentils there they're not a one obviously but I mean there's a few little blemishes but as far as cleanliness goes they're pretty good those can get spit into a sea-can or put into a 50-pound bag and value out and in our refuse I don't know how what made us do this other than it it we didn't start doing it for the reasons we're doing now we were actually what would happen is so you'd have a hundred percent product rate so you separate it and take the lentils and I've got this 50% now you have concentrated all the screenings into your flocks that's a problem that's a bit of a pain to clean again so let's just get it out well we started adding up how much refuse to be started we were somewhere between two and three hundred tons a year we would hold back at home well that was a lot of stuff that I was either paying Freight or paying someone else Freight figurative and then giving it away so that now goes into a compost back to the lane stuff one of the big things with compost that I find this super-important is low cost low cost low cost low cost so across the road from our farm is a cow a guy I don't have cows but we have not we have a arrangement with the cow guy and he has been her that he is landlocked that he can't get out so I'm actually making him money by taking his burner because he has to pay someone else to make it go away so we take them in her we include our other products the refuse when I say straw it's other people's Fox Trot people in our area have a tendency to want to give away their flat straw instead of do something with it so we'll gladly we cost us the baling generally to get it if we need it and then fluey on our farmers a bunch of low with the know there's blue spots and I have a guy was like 60 cows he goes and cuts all this loose and I get you gives us a third of it and the slowly actually is an interesting catalyst we found in our compost that we found a big improvement in compost quality final quality by adding that bit of Slough a and then obviously the green screens and holes so this is actually makes the tanis's Department but she made this really nice slide for me so what we do is we do this we like to get it nice and warm and we turn it multiple times what we found is by using this big old TMR this thing that nobody else wanted because it takes three hours power to turn it we get a really really nice even distribution of ingredients so we get this really nice even heating so we know that we're getting our pathogens and we know we're getting our weed seeds killed which is super important because I'm putting weed seeds in there so I want them dead and then we make our compost extract so interestingly prior to we had Christine Jones that are farmers for a field day luckily and we used to always think it was just the biology of things we could see and we still do I mean obviously we use that to monitor but it's a lot of things we can't see plants signaling compounds and stuff but I'm sure she's even tell you about I just know enough to be dangerous so we we make we take so there's like 12 windows let's say 14 windows 2000 tons 3000 tons a year we make and Tanis picked sort of our best ones and that's what we put in these little buckets on top of the tank we fill with water there's air pumps in the bottom we fill these little containers with compost and there's an area thing in the bottom of it and we fill that with air and water and bubbles and we get this compost extract so it's basically washing the biology out of the compost and into solution and that then becomes the base of our the base of our liquid product that we put in for seeding we used to be like a low salt starter user so this was kind of our crutch and sort of our transition to getting rid of our low salt starter so from that we had all these little video so what looks like so just a little nice little rolling boil we got to change those a few times usually to get the concentration that she wants into into that liquid but then we we had about 5 gallons of that per acre plus the micro makes we make which is I guess what sort of what we come up with fun on our farm and in a few biological foods we add and then that goes right right to the field so we just basically use this as a holding tank and we have all of our stuff off to the side and then the tender truck comes we just take our micro mix we take a certain amount of this accomplice extract and put it in furrow so that actually is like right in the furrow with our seed I guess is how we sort of how we do it peristaltic pumps once again thank you know till on the plains I met an Australian there I was actually having the same talk about this and explaining about how I was having so much trouble with chunks of this and not plugging everything in out and I had arguments about that and he offered this solution these things are made in Australia and now it's just a peristaltic pump we use a 16 mesh we use way coarser stuff it's actually almost like you see chunks and now for our liquid and we just everything we pull a liquid caddy just like everybody else does but there's different things in it and it just gets meted out with these peristaltic pumps and it works great too and another wonderful thing that I learned from this Australian I used to be a big believer in granular inoculant specially for chickpeas and other non-natives and we he said well why not just put what they do is they just get the cheapest peat powder and Ocalan bacon buy so super cheap stuff we just dump it in the tank with our other liquids and we have fire rolls we mix it in and then it just goes in furrow with our you know with the mixture and right in the furrow and like that chickpea I dug like I tried to do a nice job I picked some of the soil off of the nodules but it's like as big as your thumb and that was a dollar I used to spend 12 this is Canadian funds so just cut that in half so it cost us about a buck now so yeah I mean cheaper and I'm feeling better so what we're seeing now is things are kind of coming to life I mean now if we have a mica slide this is what we're looking that was a slide from from a fall arrived from two Falls ago if we put is like just popped and we got roots like that this is what we'll see if we make a slide out of that so we're kind of we feel like we're sort of head in the right direction now and then when you have things alive like that what do we want to do we want to keep putting carbon in the ground and cover crops I mean I think somebody said something about putting take a knee out of 18 right so that was that's this we found on our farm that we took these pictures under residue beside residue huge difference I mean that's that we're seeing those we're seeing those differences we know we got to keep it covered by all means and that's what I was getting back to why we had covers because you know the crop we're struggling to maintain on our crop residue like we used to is starting to go away so we're trying to replace the crop residue with a live root instead of a live plant I've never had a cover crop that I've never grown and as dry as I am in the fall that's ever cost as any yield in the spring I feel it every time I grow a cover crop we're just building our sponge bigger just some examples of covers I'm you guys have seen lots of them the big thing about this for me for the Pico mobile cover crops when I learned that if I increased my soil organic matter by one percent that's about an acre inch well in 2017 when I had 1.5 inches of rain all season boy one more inch would have been nice you know so everything we can do if we can harvest that snow and make it go in the ground or yeah everything we can do right I mean back to that boat rebuilding resiliency you know this is what I can do in my short growing season I mean I can't you know if you guys got Maureen and more time you know things can only be better a quick note about companion crops back to the whole idea with really seating my covers if you can see the annual clover or biennial clover with your annual crop in the spring it also provides that same bridge the only for me I guess the only downside it's been is it doesn't grow the biomass of a regular cover I haven't found but it definitely is a good you know Plan B for me I think so really like the Companions you know so it harvest like there's there's a canola root and that's how big the clover is a harvest already so that's a way and that's way way way better than nothing I could have an entire day long talk about this if you'd like but it basically boiled down to have a plan you know have a plan have a plan and use mixes I think if I could sum it up in two words you know know your snow your herbicides and have a plan and if you have a mistake it's a fantastic time to incorporate livestock he brings large groups I do what I think Rick beaver coin flash grazing we don't have super small paddocks in the winter we do the bulk of our grazing in the winter we have cows out there now on our ground his cows a group of four hundred older cows and we basically two things happen we don't have a smaller paddocks but we find the snow helps limit it don't have to worry about compaction obviously when the ground is frozen nearly as much and he's super flexible and he understands sort of our needs and our wants and our goals so it works really well we've have done 24-hour grazing just one of the pictures he asked me when we're gonna do it again the only problem I found with working with cowboy is he's super cheap if you can imagine so for us to share that profit it gets to be a bit of a struggle financially to take the land out so kind of what does this all sum up to I wanted to put these in real quick this is some soft analysis that we do this is sort of this is our greeting this is our score sheet what they looked like I work with a fellow one of the guys I work with I guess is Joel Williams I'm sure you guys maybe heard his name he's so smart highly recommend you look him up he sort of helped us build this micro program this is from the very first year we did it we had some holes in the system we just used a full extraction soil analysis to build our micro program so first year this is our second year got better we increased things like a half a pound like slight amounts you know so like our micro program was kind of a ten dollar thing item I'm not I don't spend a bunch money on anything if I have to spend a bunch of money something's wrong and Joel's very good at understanding that Joel's got a really good understanding of biology and chemistry and how those two things fit together so anyway one of the things we have been noticing I've got 15 of these on is our ammonium levels are through the roof and I'm looking for some advice even Joel struggling with that we put a total of 16 pounds of Ann on our cereal crops so every other year that's the amount of and I use and we've got more and than we know what to do with so we feel like we're going the right direction but this ammonium thing I think something's wrong I mean it shouldn't be like that the last score Carter uses this green and out green nutrient analysis we've been working with Jill Clapperton Reza Tara this was sort of a store card to start with but once again no chill on the plains I met a lady by the name of Sarah Harper who was running this are just rounded growth and she's connecting Ruth's farmers using regenerative practices I never going to call myself a regenerative farmer because I'm not there yet it's more of a journey so farmers using regenerative practices and food companies who are looking for farmers like us and there they're out there so we're using nutrient density analysis of our grains which they find very very attractive and the fact that there are differences and uh we'll do like a for example in our farm we'll do chemical residual testing glyphosate it's a big thing if you can imagine so we do grill at glyphosate testing to prove that we don't have it on our grains you name it the that yeah till those companies want to know our story just like a lot of people are know things about their food they want to know about our story and I highly recommend you look her up and yeah she's been a game changer and that's why the sea planets going up or part of the reason and there's my contact if you have any more questions and I'm pretty sure I'm over both oh man alright Mike thanks a lot [Applause] you know the enemy forgets well with Gary okay sound good how do we spread it okay yeah so good question because we use literally three tons to do the extracts very little you don't need much and the other mm we have a bunting vertical spreader well what they cover they call it simple canopy it just covers the beaters and we go out and we actually try to spread our compost in the standing crop because then the leaves can capture anything the losses right so we try to spread compost in the standing crop ahead of a rain I mean if you weather forecasters right so we sure try if things are good thing is spread yeah 70 acres a day you know hauling from home what if we were more efficient we can do a better job yeah that's what we do on our travels so yeah okay so everybody got that with soybeans there's been some experimenting with flax again one nice thing about flax is its non-competitive for the most part if you keep your seeding rates low something I didn't talk about with seeding rates we were on super like way lower than you think like our flax and our lentils is like 12 pounds like when we grow monocrop flax it's like 50 but we find at an 12 is Lots I know guys that are growing like a couple of pounds of flax with they're just simply to act to add to cover you know they don't even they don't even bother separating it but flax is I know one people have been fooling with for sure and it's easy to separate weed control works got time for one more question that you know you guys write your questions down or at least remember because dr. Christine Jones and and Derick are gonna be on the question/answer built into this and don't give great you'll see and of social whatever but got time for one more question at least have one word with the group here do we do anything do we do any folios good crash with compost or diss in general we've yeah we've done we do like if like if we pull those stops when we got some okay the question was do we do any foliar feeding with compost or with anything and or and we've done both we did a lot of compost teas sort of the first year we really got set up and we didn't see a huge financial payback we saw benefit but not huge but we have done if we pull at least we SAP you know everything every year sometimes multiple times and if we see a big hole we'll go back in and and we'll use the compost extract as a carrier just because we can it's super simple and cheap we're gonna put something in the sprayer and then we'll just same thing just by some the micro we have to and go out there but it's been very little this year we this year well like to list here we had to spray our chickpea sand and we went back in it wasn't super ideal but yeah does that answer your question [Applause]

Channel: USDA NRCS South Dakota

Views: 12,669

Keywords: science, natural resources, soil, water, air, plants, animals, conservation, soil health, South Dakota, USDA NRCS, USDA NRCS South Dakota

Id: A0O9BN0A-AI

Length: 62min 7sec (3727 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 03 2020