The Ultimate Weed & Feed

[Music] hey everybody Keith Bern's and Dale circular with green cover seat here and we've got some really cool things to show you this is our experiment into kind of a planting crane and planting into massive amounts of cover what we're standing in here is a rye hairy vetch combination that was planted last fall and actually the the batch was actually planted in the end of July with buckwheat because we double crop that day laughter we harvested spring triticale if you remember we had a big spring triticale crop out here and then we double crop the buckwheat and we put 15 pounds of hairy vetch in with the buckwheat we harvested the buckwheat the first week in October and then we came in and we planted rye into that so the Vettes has actually been going since the end of July about 15 pounds of that and then the Rye was seated after buckwheat harvest so the result of all that is this massive amount of biomass that we're looking at here what would you estimate is here Dale for for dry matter and just overall tonnage I would guess just eyeballing this there's probably about three tons out here and fair percentage of hairy vetch of course this can accomplish several things number one weed control and erosion control I mean we had how how hard did the wind blow here the other night that's probably 40 50 mile-an-hour winds yeah and that's blowing everywhere and you know complete soil protection here and when you park the canopy there are no wing off so we have no weeds underneath and then once this is terminated and put down on the ground that soil protection remains in addition both rye and veg contain allelopathic compounds that keep controlling weeds even after they're dead the mulch prevents weed seedlings from getting sunlight and this vetch being a legume it's a great nitrogen fixer I don't know what the biomass it is here will have an analysis later we think we sent two tests into Ward labs yesterday right how much of the nitrogen or how much nitrogen is contained in this biomass we can get a reasonable estimate of how much nitrogen will be released but one nice thing about the nitrogen in this form is its it's not in the form of nitrate mm-hmm and I was taught in school that you know you want nitrate for your plants now we're finding out that nitrate even though it gets into plants easily we really don't want plants taking up a lot of their nitrogen in the form of nitrate we prefer that they take it up as ammonium or intact amino acids there's some real benefits to having your nitrogen in an organic form that slow-release I think some of John Kemp's work shows that when it's in the nitrate form the plant has to expend a lot more energy to convert to that ammonia form so if you can have it in that or an amino acids form it's much easier the plant has to expend far less resources can write in it then that's more energy for it to grow yeah if you think about what's going on in the soil like this is this is nitrogen in the form of protein when that goes on the soil there microbes that take that protein use it as an energy source and take that amino acids there are other microbes that take those amino acids use them as an energy source so they're pulling energy out kick out ammonium and then there's another bacteria that takes ammonium takes energy out of it and that's at night right and then another bacteria that takes my try pulls energy out and creates nitrate and that's and we we were taught that that's the nitrogen the plants want because it moves it's the form of nitrogen that moves with water and gets into the plant well if you've got a plant with a very limited root system and no mycorrhizal fungi that that's important to have nitrogen that moves with water or limited water supply right and so but once that nitrate gets into the plant then the plant has to add night had has to add energy to change it to night right more energy to change the nitrite to ammonium and then a bunch of energy I mean a lot of energy to change that ammonium into an amino acid and then more energy yet to change it into protein if you can protein to begin with just just use the protein and you don't have to the plant doesn't have to expend all that energy plus most weeds have to have the nitrate they are our weeds fulfill an ecological niche of bare soil disturbed soil they are nature's scab and because of that they they are adapted to use nitrogen in the nitrate for yeah and if you do not have an abundance of nitrate in the night nitrogen in the nitrate form in the field weeds just don't do well they just don't grow well so bare soils and a lot of nitrates you're just asking for a weed issue and ask and you shall receive if you can provide this as a combination I mean to me this is the ultimate weed and fee this is much better weed and feed than than pendimethalin coded urea this is going to provide weed control and slow release nitrogen in the protein / amino acid form that we'd prefer that our plants have because I'm going to go out on a limb here and I'm gonna estimate what I'm seeing here I'm gonna say this is probably somewhere between 120 and 140 pounds of nitrogen is what this is going to return and we'll have those results back from the lab soon yes and about half that's probably available carbon nitrogen ratio my guess is going to be around 20 to 25 in this which means 1/2 that's probably going to come available yeah and the in that carbon nitrogen range but like you said remember in the soil the microbes always sit at the table first so they're going to incorporate what nitrogen they need to meet their needs and then they will in turn be consumed by nematodes and beneficial nematodes protozoans and they're going to kick out amino acids an ammonium that the plants can then utilize yeah so in other words this system would still work very good for weed control if I didn't have a lot of biology but from cycling the nutrients and providing nitrogen for this next crop that's coming it's not going to be nearly as effective if I don't have a big Biological Bank down here which we've been building on this farm because we've been doing no-till and we had new in cover crops and like say this had actually three crops planted on it just last year the the triticale the buckwheat the the batch and well four actually and then the Rye so in four different crops growing here so we're pretty confident how much biology we have and it'll be really interesting we'll do periodic updates to see how fast all of this massive amount of biomass disappears in cycles yeah and the people watching this video and unfortunately there's no way we can they the way it smells or sounds yeah I mean just the smell it's like a freshly mown alfalfa field yes when we look at the what's been rolled down it's pretty amazing and then you know when we were out here planting this and we have some good footage of it being rolled I commented to Davis I said I think there's 20 pounds an acre of nitrogen out here just in the innocence I mean it was just a swarm as that roller went through it was just a sworn unfortunately a lot of those are mosquitoes that are still here yeah if we could but there's bees and walk and all sorts of other things just flying all over in this small strip that we left for this Democrat they talked about what percentage of the phosphorus in the Great Plains oils originated not from the rocks that are here which contained very little phosphorus or the geologic material it came from the manure of seabirds that migrated in from the Gulf of Mexico anyway that are just deposited and so yeah animal animal migration yeah an animal impact whether it's insects or birds or whatever does have an effect on your soil and insects probably much more so than bird because an insect is just applying package of nutrients yes cycle that back through your system so yeah better yeah yeah and and you know just from a from a maturity standpoint now we're we're shooting this video I think it's June 11 so it's it's getting pretty late what we're going to look at these fields that have been planted a little earlier we had a cold spring so this is all kind of slowed down from that cold spring normally we would want to hope to see rye and batch at this stage ideally around the third week in May you know so that you could roll in plant in that time frame it's getting a little late and this this certainly is a little beyond what is crime rolling I mean the Rye has already shed its pollen there's no more pollen on here if you look at this vet you know it's starting to form seed pods and it's starting to put seed in those pods so the ideal rolling time for them probably seven to ten days ago and and that's when a lot of this that we're going to look at here what was planted and it works pretty well but we did want to leave this as a demonstration and we'll we'll come in here and plant something in a strip yeah and see how well it rolls down and I think it along the value you know we've talked a lot about companion cropping and you know interceding corn and 60 inch rows and then planting companion crops in between or our corn and 30 inch rows planting companion crops or cover crops interceded in between and one of the biggest obstacles to people doing that is well there's no way I can control the weeds because we have this you know our only weed control is either tillage which we don't promote or chemistry yep and the both of them are disturbances but right them or toss money right and so how can you plant a corn crop or a sunflower crop or whatever crop that you want to provide companions with and without herbicides yeah well there you go yeah weed and feed weed and feed yeah talking about the weed control portion this is the spot that we clipped Davis clipped this and this is what we sent in to ward labs so we could get an accurate test of how much nitrogen how much carbon c2 n ratio biomass and all that so this has had all the residue removed but I mean look at this there's not a there's not a weed in there anywhere he clipped this just a few days ago but you can see that there's good residue there from the previous triticale crop on the layer and Sandy bug right there there's our insecticide so yeah yep natural natural insect control with insects so yeah very impressive you know this the holy grail of soil health I've always said the holy grail of soil health is organic no-till this type of system makes me think that that is much more possible than I ever thought before [Music] okay Dale so this this right here what we have is what we were just standing in with all that Mayo mass but this is Friday this was planned in Tuesday so you know what four days ago and what they did here this this is a field we have a five acre patch here where we're doing Russian mammoth sunflowers so that's the sunflowers they're supposed to get like ten feet high and have the huge heads well we're trying to grow some of those so what we did is we came in here with our planter John Deere stacker planter this year we put the Don ZRX rollers crop rollers on it so that ran through planted the sunflowers and 30 inch rows and then after that we came back through with the air cedar with seven and a half inch disc spacings and we seeded our companion crops so there's clover and there's buckwheat and there's flax and there's mung beans and all manner of other types of things that will grow in the understory here and this has had no herbicides on it this probably hasn't had any herbicides on it since I've probably a year and a half and so this vetch and the Rye has been completely killed just mechanically but it took two passes to really do this it will look at another field where it just had that planter and the rollers there's so much biomass those ZRX rollers I don't think we had enough weight on a planter we didn't have enough down pressure to completely kill it in a crimp but the combination of the planter and the cram pers and then the drill with a disc roll in every seven and a half inches was very effective I'm gonna say you know we're gonna have at 99.5% killed on all of this biomass air hold and when we look at it go ahead and let's pull this back yeah I mean it just looks like you you took office labs and laid out here yeah yeah I I've planted the garden and I've just taken flakes of alfalfa hay and laid it and we've got a seven and a half inch white flake of alfalfa hay essentially here except it's Ryan bench cover crop so we didn't have to buy it and and break it apart and put it here this hook was all done during the planting process yes this is not a separate operation from the planning this was all accomplished at planning and this is we're talking earlier how this is like lasagna you've got a layer of pasta here and then you've got last year's if you you can pull this up there's last year's pasta here and then if you you look at this crumbly stuff that was the previous year's pasta last year's pasta this year's last year so the crumbly stuff has to be the ground beef we can't we can't it was on your day all right we have to have our coniferous part there that may be the meats all the microbes that are eating the vegan f so again this essentially this is this is not organic because it's not certified organic but it's going to be grown essentially with no chemicals yeah and no no core I don't think we'll need any fertility inputs on this there should be sufficient nitrogen here you know if we were estimating 120 to 140 we can get half of that to release plus with the other biology and the great efficiency of this type of nitrogen that should be enough nitrogen to grow a pretty good sunflower crop now what we will do here we will run some nitrogen strips through this to see if added nitrogen did help with yield or if it didn't make any difference we'll do some strips and test that theory to see if we have enough ore for leaving yield on the table out there by not having and some observations from people that have done stuff like this is that if you do this one year you know like you said there's probably going to be about 140 pounds of total nitrogen in this iron 20 and about half that's going to be available that's not enough to raise the two of our own crop by itself but if you do this year after year there's something similar to this you get half of last year's 1/4 of the years before 1/8 of the year before yeah you know you add all those fractions together and you start a buildup yeah and where your banking things yes and you're building not just the legume but also the free-living nitrogen-fixing bacteria Zoda Becker the azo spiral um the Bayer Inca all those organisms start to thrive in the absence of soluble nitrate fertilizer and you can start getting biology to creating fertility for you plus the fact that again as we talked about this there's nitrogen being in the protein and amino acid form it's going to be much more efficient getting into the plants and you know so I wouldn't have to put 200 pounds of nitrogen out if it's in the right form you probably only need 120 to 130 they'll reduce 200 bushel corn there's some evidence of that you know and you know and the the plant because it's expending less of its energy to I guess upgrade the nitrate into amino acids yeah more that energy produced through photosynthesis is available for root exudates to feed free living night engine well here so here's kind of the double-edged sword of this though because this is has a fairly low carbon nitrogen ratio that's a good thing in the fact that it's going to cycle quickly and this nitrogen is going to be available for this crop of sunflowers the bad side the flip side to that is this is going to cycle pretty quickly and the residue is going to disappear open me opening me up to to weeds coming so that's the reason that we planted this twice once with the sunflowers and the second time with the companion crops because we know that this residue is going to be excellent weed control here for the next probably 30 to 45 days yes but after that enough to get out of that it's going to start disappearing cycling that's what we want that's what you need but you have we have to replace that with something otherwise I'm going to have there's there's plenty of weed bank out here and those weeds would come if we give them an opportunity so that's we're hoping our companion crops will fill in and we'll have a second layer of a canopy coming a living canopy this time and we've selected things that will stay relatively short relatively low water users and then the sunflowers of course will get tall and we can harvest and have that companion growing down below yeah and you know one way of looking at weeds wheat weeds are a sign from God that we are not using all the sunlight and the moisture and the soil nutrients he's making pretty loudly use more of what I'm giving you come on yeah I mean they're they're a sign that we are not using you fully utilizing the resources provided to us yeah people out west say well we can't grow anything in wheat stubble so well if nothing grows in wheat stubble why are you running your sprayers out there four times you know that weeds are a sign of unutilized from sources so anytime you've got a cropping system with the situation where you've got weeds growing that's a sign that you need to increase your cropping content so no there's resources that you need to be taking advantage of if you don't take advantage of it weeds will yeah and the gaps in between our crops may be one of those things so so we put something in here on purpose to take advantage as we know that this is going to break down in about 30 days and and then if we don't plan something there will be getting weak now [Music] [Music] the Dale now we're looking at a little patch that we planted in our milpa garden we've talked a lot about the milpa garden concept and we pride it for several years and it had mixed success mostly because weeds the sois came in and just kind of took over so this year we we tried to be a little more intentional we planned a little bit better and where we planted this milpa garden was into that that big biomass cover crop that we looked at earlier so we probably laid down three plus times a dry matter here and again this there there's no this was no herbicide here at all this was just drilled now some of this probably got drilled twice because a couple reasons we didn't have the drill Fahrenheit we need a drill calibration video but the other reason is sometimes especially if you're on a small patch it's not a bad idea to cut your seeding right in half and drill it twice if you're trying to get that roller crimper effect yes because this is a hundred percent kill on all that rye and all that batch and this has been planted longer than the one we were just in so there's nothing green here anymore because this has been in the ground for probably Oh ten to fourteen days and we've got stuff emerging there's a fairly good-sized plant right there pumpkin or a squash of some variety and so so this has been long enough to where we're confident that again we've got a very good kill on all that cover now there's there's a few things that aren't completely dead and and that's okay I mean it'll add to the diversity so you have the melt oh but I'm confident that we're gonna have far better weed suppression and control probably not a hundred percent but far better than we've ever had before by doing it like this oh yeah and you can see some of the other benefits of course we have the bird's nest there bird's nest right and even look at just integrated right into the the straw right there yeah and you know people talk about I hear from people a lot of times especially in the Corn Belt people in Iowa they talk about there's no pheasants anymore why are there no presents anymore in Iowa well where's the pheasant going to nest it's corn soybeans in the spring you know pheasants nest in May there's nothing yeah it's corn beans air-ground and then went from planting fencerow to fencerow to taking the fence rows out yeah throw there's not even the fence row anymore it's just you know you plant right up overlap the neighbor's field and and then first one to harvest gets that one extra row at the edge of the field and so um there's no nesting habitat and you think well big deal well it is a big deal because we've probably all heard the story about how the Mormons were getting wiped out by Mormon crickets and then the flocks of birds moved in and say they save the crop and without the flocks of birds what do we do now I'll get with insecticide and then you know and one of the things from the first meltdown here there is a big ground beetle crawling around here and he's since hidden that ground beetle is a predator of slugs and so the things that we Harbor here whether it's Birds or ground beetles or wolf spiders or any of the other things here you can create a habitat where it controls a lot of our problems and if you listen you can hear a lot of birds even though we're not there's some trees around but not super close but there's birds right out in all this because those needles are a food source for the birds then as well yep and that one's very annoyed that we are out here and nobody was there that might be her nest right here yeah come on guys that's Mike that's my kids own there but yeah so this this is creating problem and I think it's it's odd sometimes people say well can you give me a mix but I don't want anything too complicated I'm like why should well I can't manage complicated no the more complex the mix gets the less management you have do you know it when you get a diverse enough mix you get a diverse enough system you don't have to do anything you don't have to spray and herbicides you know have to spray insecticides it's not saying that you may never have to but it really decreases the odds of any one thing becoming a big Asian over yeah yeah and and this people say well when I have all that stuff mixed together I can't pull weeds I can't Oh Edie I can't call the baby I don't want to do that anyway right I don't want to do that anyway so let's set up a system where you don't have to wear wields simply you create the conditions where weeds do not thrive you know thick mulch nitrogen in the form of protein rather than soluble in high school [Music] okay Dale now we're in the same field again all this biomass that they got rolled down this particular part of the field was planted again about four days ago or five days ago and this was not drilled it was just planted so this is popcorn that were growing for to harvest for cover crop seed and so this was just hit with the planter and the Don ZRX rollers and so there's areas of it like this where we had almost a complete kill look looks really really well and then there's areas like over here where it just kind of dinged it up but it's obviously coming back pretty well so this section did get sprayed I think they came in with some Liberty to just kind of knock the the batch out it's pretty amazing 100% kill on the Rye I would say from controller but probably only I don't know 50% kill on the badge I think had we don't think we had enough down pressure because when you're running that roll or on your planter it's difficult to have enough down pressure for the rollers and all your planter you yes takes a lot of way if we'd had just a regular dedicated cover crop roller I think we would have got a better kill or like where we looked at where the sunflowers are growing had we hit it with another pass with the air seat or a drill and had another opportunity to cramp and roll and mash that down I think we would have seen a lot a lot of matches a bit of a finer stem than what the Rye is and so it you got a it likes it needs a little more down pressure to get that good crimp back yeah but but it's still very impressive we you know again same thing with the massive amounts of ground cover the smell that's all this batch is just you know some really sweet smelling but what's impressive is that this this popcorn it's already up yeah and it's only been I say about a week you know maybe a week or so and it's already up and going and one thing about planting late like this is that your corn does not set in the ground for ten 14:20 days where it comes up it gets up and it gets going fast yeah yeah so by delaying your planning two or three weeks you may only really be delaying your crop by half that time because it gets going so much faster in these warm soils yeah and you might save yourself some disease issues yeah you don't need treated seed if you're planting into oils we're coming up see yeah there's some things you can get away from and again you wouldn't do this on all your field that you might consider the later planning on some fields because there are benefits of doing that yeah again diversity you spread your risk oh yeah so you know again this this this would not be this is not going to be grown in an organic system because we did have to supplement some herbicide to help knock this out looking back what perhaps what we could have done we could have maybe run the drill through here and drilled the companion crop of clover in fact we may we may still try that on a strip or two here there's nothing says we can't do that typically we don't like to intercede in the corn at the same time you plant the corn because of the competition issue but clovers I think are slowing upcoming if we didn't have the rate too high and especially the all this residue would really slow a clover down I think it's still calm but it would come slowly yeah so we may still try that and just see how that works because you know that one-two punch may be what it needs to really get this stuff terminated yeah and I don't necessarily want to horrible Hannah clay myself although it's getting more and more tempting because it looks like I can do it more and more physically yeah you could do it without the tillage yeah thank you very little you know and the big drawback to me with organic farming has been I didn't want to do any tillage but if I can do organic farming without tillage in cash in on those premiums and do a good job of weed control and providing fertility why not you know at least I have the option and even if I don't go do an organic farm I fewer inputs I write fewer checks that appeals and you know there's no perfect system and if if we were doing this in an organic setting and we would have seen how what kind of job that planter was doing because we knew that it was not going to kill this batch immediately just by the way that it looked so then we would have had to go to some sort of Plan B which could have been you know just hitting it again with those rollers or I say running the drill through here to kind of chop it up and further crimp it so there's other things we could have done had this been an organic situation without this batch because I guarantee you if nothing had been done to this batch it would continue to grow and it would severely hurt this corn in fact it would pretty would there would probably literally zero yield in these areas where this veg to docq yeah but you know I think we've seen plenty of examples our last 10 years where herbicides don't always work haha ten percent yeah that's right [Music] now we're standing in a strip of batch only that nothing has been done to since the buckwheat was harvested last October and the reason this is here the the pivot sets right here and and we didn't get any ride planted here last fall because the pivot was here and we just didn't take time to move it I swing it all the way out so this is VAT by itself and a relatively thinner stand is only planted at about 15 pounds per acre normally if we would plant vats for seeds production or something we speed 30 to 35 pounds seeding rate so this is only about a half rate of batch but yet we've got a good stand there's there's no weeds here whatsoever but but one of the things that strikes me is how much shorter this batch is and then it was over there where it had the ride to kind of climb up now there may be just as much better because it is a very binding crop and you know it's all tangled together and when you pull it off I mean there's there's a lot of that's there but it's just it's lighter to the ground so there's no doubt yes yeah and there's not a big area here so I don't know if we'll try to harvest it for seed we might just to see how it works this is going to be hard to Arvest because this is going to be flat on the ground but it is a carpet it's a mat again zero weeds because of just how this just intertwines that it just Majan trying to be a weed growing in this yeah you're gonna get sucked down Andy and sometimes I'll put together and makes it for somebody and they'll say well I just want because I want all the nitrogen I can get well that sounds good in theory but in practice I mean the field or the the mixture that we saw before because of the ability of the vets to climb exposes more leaf area to sunlight because all that nitrogen fixation is driven by photosynthesis and you play synthesis occurs because of leaf area exposed to sunlight so if you give this the ability to climb right because these bottom leaves are getting anything no they're falling off their yellow and brown down below there so if you can make a corrugated field yeah like this way more surface area more surface area exposed to seven so you have the occasional tall plant that vets can climb up same idea with Kalki's and know people say I want a summer nitrogen fixer getting cow peas or mung beans I said that you want cow peas with something put sunflowers in there I said well I don't want sunflowers I don't want to pay for them because they all fix nitrogen said well by having a few sunflowers in there you get that core game canopy more leaves to size same way with adding a little bit of Civ and there they don't fix nitrogen they give you that corrugated canopy and smooth diversity and the amount of bees and butterflies and other insects in here birds is the course they have the pivot they can set on right here and there's the fence row and whatnot but it's it's truly impressive how much you know biological life is here partly because it hasn't been disturbed and we'll probably leave this like say we may try to see if we can do a little bit of a practice you know I always tell people that is one of the easiest crops to grow it's one of the absolute partners he wants to harvest because it's very indeterminate this this stuff will still have blooms on it you know two months from now I have a lot of people say I want to raise Betsy but looks like a goldmine yeah yeah so but I think if you want to raise batch and you have the ability to separate the seed what we looked at before where the veteran rider on together is gonna be way way easier to harvest than this right here the birds that have this take down into their territory are not happy with us we're interfering with their back home got a lot of good investment [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Green Cover Seed

Views: 18,191

Rating: 4.9280577 out of 5

Keywords: Green Cover Seed, Cover Crop Seed, Soil, Soil Health, Field, Cover Crop, Keith Berns, Seed Mixes, Farming Agriculture, Climate resilience, Cover crops for grazing, Cover crops gardens, Cover crops meaning, Cover crops definition, Cover, Farming, Crop, Tutorial, How to, Sustainable, Gardening, Nutrient management, Stewardship, Sustainable agriculture, Grazing, Regenerative agriculture, Improving soil, Organic matter, Nutrients, Plants, covre, gren

Id: iAgeLMR9kLM

Length: 36min 32sec (2192 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 29 2020