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On this edition of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Environmental Tillage Systems, we’re headed to Sioux Falls, S.D., for the Conservation in Action Tour and a special panel discussion about the state of soil conservation.

Listen in as Strip-Till Farmer president Mike Lessiter leads a panel discussion about the latest strip-till, no-till and cover crop trends and challenges with Brian Chatham, agronomy manager for Ducks Unlimited, Carrie Vollmer-Sanders, president of Field to Market, and South Dakota grower and agronomist Brian Hefty.  

The Strip-Till Farmer podcast is brought to you by Environmental Tillage Systems.

SoilWarrior® systems help you defend your land and improve soil quality. With a choice of durable models, features and accessories, your SoilWarrior helps you minimize erosion while creating precise, nutrient-rich zones.

Let us help you defend your land and improve soil quality. Check out SoilWarrior systems online or request a demo today at www.soilwarrior.com. 

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Full Transcript

Hey, great to have you with us for another edition of the Strip-Till Farmer Podcast, brought to you by Environmental Tillage Systems. I'm your host, technology editor, Noah Newman. Today, we're headed to Sioux Falls, South Dakota for the Conservation Inaction Tour where a special panel discussion about the State of Conservation Act took place. So we're going to listen in as Strip-Till Farmer President, Mike Lessiter, leads a panel discussion about the latest strip-till, no-till, and cover crop trends and challenges with Brian Chatham, agronomy manager for Ducks Unlimited, Carrie Vollmer-Sanders, President of Field to Market, and South Dakota Grower and Agronomist, Brian Hefty. Let's listen in.

Yes, thank you for that introduction. It is fun to be back at CTIC. My dad answered the call in 1981 for the initial letter that went out to inquire about forming this organization. I've known those acronyms my whole life, basically, so great fun to be here.

What we're going to do here is we're going to have a free flowing discussion on the state of soils and soil health, keeping the soil where it is, and I'm going to have everyone introduce themselves in a moment, but I'll just get things started with a couple quick facts from our No-Till Farmer publication and the benchmark survey that we did, and I'm borrowing from John Doberstein right here, who's our lead editor.

But a couple quick hits. While no-tillers like to talk about profit and margin more so than yield, our new study shows that no-till corn and soybeans and strip-till both out yield the national average. So we're doing a good job on yields. Nitrogen use efficiency is increasing. The percentage of growers who are using less than 0.8 pounds of nitrogen per acre has increased from 15% 10 years ago to 27% last year. So doing a good job there.

About 60% of our audience is planting green and cover crop use is very, very high, about 80%. No-tillers are leading the use in cover crop and the total acreage in cover crops increased by 150 acres the last two years. About 30% are using variable rates.

So those are a couple highlights. Will say that no-till acreage in the US has stagnated. It's about 110,000,000 acres today. It has not grown as fast as we thought it would. Still have very high hopes for it, but that's a challenge that the adoption has stagnated some.

Oh, my name's Brian Chatham, I'm the Manager of Agronomy for Ducks Unlimited, primarily in the Great Lakes region. I run all of our ag programs or oversee all of our ag programs, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas, and I go all over on Ducks Unlimited, speaking about cover crops, our Virginia Ag program. We kind of focus in the prairie pothole region. Like we learned about this morning, that's our primary focus.

And we work with farmers to reduce tillage to get cover crops on the ground, livestock on the landscape, et cetera. I guess a quick snapshot of state of soil health. I think the Virginia Ag movement, the no-till cover crop movement gained a lot of traction early. I think there's still a whole lot of room for improvement and it boils down to education of landowners and producers.

I'm Carrie Vollmer-Sanders. I'm the President of Field to Market and also a sixth generation farmer in both Ohio and Indiana. I lived in Indiana, most of the farms in Ohio, so that's why I say that. But I'm really excited to be here.

If you don't know who or what Field to Market is, it's a non-profit. It was started about 20 years ago, and for this whole purpose to bring together the ag value chain, understand what sustainability was, define it, and then figure out how to measure it so that we could help the whole ag value chain, support the adoption of conservation practices and sustainability throughout it.

We've got five different sectors, if you hear of... Field to Market talks about our sectors. We've got the grower sector, agribusiness, brands and retail, our affiliate sector, which is government agencies and researchers, and then the civil society. Those five sectors equally govern who we are, what we do, and how we help farmers.

So I was really excited to become president of Field to Market to lead this organization in August of this last year because it is looking at the whole ag value chain. It's not one piece. And farmers have the equal voice as brands and retail and agribusiness.

But one of the things that I'm proud about with Field to Market, when we think about the state of the state with soils, we've seen the improvements, right? We've seen adoption of cover crops, maybe it's a little slower than what we had thought, but there is improvement, there is momentum behind it and I'm excited about where we're going to be going in the future.

All right. I'm Brian Hefty, welcome to our farm. Thanks for being here. We appreciate it.

So I am very excited to speak today just because my grandpa was a big conservationist years ago and I just look at today, we have so many more tools than he did back then. A little more about myself, we farm about 3,500 crop acres around here. My brother Darren and I hosted Ag PhD TV for 27 years now. It's been a long time, but a lot of fun. We do a daily radio show on an Ag PhD Radio, and then also we have FDC company where we supply seed and crop protection products to farmers.

Now, when the group asked me to talk, I was a little hesitant and I'll tell you real quick why, because my two least favorite words in agriculture are conservation and sustainability. But please, don't misunderstand. What I mean by that is this. If you look at what are the meanings of the words "conservation" and "sustainability," it's basically to stay status quo, to stay equal. And I do not think that God put us here on this planet, I don't think my grandpa went through all that he did, my dad went through all that he did to just keep things even. I think we are called to make things better and we have the opportunity to make things better.

And it's kind of like in any of our businesses around our farm, we always say we have three goals. Number one is to produce more yield because the world needs more food. Number two, we've got to have more profit, otherwise we're out of business. And number three, we have to leave the land in better condition for the next generation. And a lot of people will say that, you'll hear a lot of farmers talk about that, but what steps are they taking? And that's one of the big things that we are very passionate about talking literally every day. How do we make things better? It's not just about today, it's about tomorrow as well.

So again, thanks for having me here. I appreciate it.

And thanks for having us, Brian. It's great facility and thanks for your support. The next question, I guess we'll ask the panel, until you've identified the problem, you can't find the solution, right? So I'd like each of you, and I'll start with you, Brian, half to you this time, what do we believe that the greatest barrier, we'll say outside of the funding situation for a moment, the greatest barrier that we're having that's keeping farmers from moving to more of the conservation practices that will improve and do all the things that you just mentioned about? And we'll go down the panel line with that question.

Yeah, so every farm is a little bit different. Even if you look at a lot of our ground, we have a lot of tillage out there. Why? It's not because I really want to do that. We were doing lots of strip-till, but there's an enormous dairy that you can see out that window just a mile away and they have lots of manure that they have. And it's good for our land, that's awesome. But in order to keep the smell down and to keep any environmental issues down, we have to inject that manure and when they inject the manure, there's tillage done.

So because of that, we've now gotten into cover crops. We ended up with an issue last fall, though, where we had zero rain for three months. So our only way to get the cover crops started was to follow the manure applicators and hopefully we can get some of the cover crop growing. So we ended up with lots of different challenges.

The other big challenge we've had around here and in much of the northern US is just by the time we finish harvest, the snow is flying. It's hard to get a cover crop established at that point. And then along those same lines, because we're so far north and so cold, a lot of people have been doing tillage and trying to make the ground black just so it was warm enough to plant in the spring, and so they could get a crop planted.

If you look at the Dakotas and northern Minnesota, that's the biggest area of what they call prevent plant in the entire United States for farming. So we run into these issues where in the spring, guys want to plant, but the ground is just simply too wet and they can't get it planted. It's not a pond or anything else. It just doesn't dry out until June. Well, by June, you can't raise a crop that's profitable. So these are the biggest issues we run into here in the northern US.

So it's interesting, I come back to two words, "margin" and "coordination." I think that's what's preventing us from doing more and scaling faster.

So if there's that margin in sustainability, cultivation practices, essentially the farmers aren't going to be able to keep up with it. They're not going to have the financial profitability. The same is true for all of the agribusinesses, all the advisors around it. They all need to have some margin, otherwise they're not going to promote a program that decreases their profits. So you have to think about the margin in each area, each segment in the supply chain and the value chain.

The other thing I think we need to take a closer look at is the coordination. So I work with a set of agronomists on our farm. Those agronomists have different preferences for what I should be doing, who I should be selling to, but there's not coordination in the ag value chain. That's one of the things we're trying to do at Field to Market is help with some of that coordination.

But I think it's difficult, right? A brand sets a goal, they want to decrease their carbon footprint. That company doesn't ever work with farmers now. So there's all these pieces in the ag values and you've got to figure out how can they support the farmer to get margin in their back pocket.

So I think that's two of the things that I think we could do better.

I'll have to say that probably the biggest downfall of adoption of new practices is it boils down to two different things. One is education and the other is management.

Anytime we go from conventional tillage to even strip-tillage or no-till, we manage that field completely different than we traditionally do. And so to educate our producers and our agronomists and these landowners on that proper way to manage that field, and then there comes in the education piece, having the right tools, there's dozens of... We live in a technology age, you can pick up your phone and within 0.2 seconds, you can Google or whatever you want, any kind of anything. So there's a lot of information out there, good and bad, and it's just getting the right education too, though.

So I would say working with... I mean, I'm working with producers, on Montana Highland, they get eight inches of precipitation a year and all the way down into the whole side of things. And here in the upper Prairie Pothole Region, we're about 10 days away from a drought at any given time. So being able to educate these guys on the different management styles to adopt these conservation practices and get them to actually take that quantum leap into that is probably our biggest hurdle.

All right, let's burn a quick time out, and here's a message about environmental tillage systems, SoilWarriors. SoilWarrior Systems help you defend your land and improve soil quality. With a choice of durable models, features, and accessories, your SoilWarrior helps you minimize erosion while creating precise, nutrient-rich zones. Let us help you defend your land and improve soil quality. Check out SoilWarrior Systems online or request a demo today at soilwarrior.com. That's soilwarrior.com. Now, back to the conversation.

And that's an interesting point, it just popped into my head. John Bradley, these guys... Dwayne Beck knows, the old timers know, John Bradley, Dan Towery, some others had told us when no-till first got going in the early '70s, there were about 3,000,000 acres. There's now 110,000,000.

They examined where the growth took place and there was common denominator that they mentioned. There was a champion grower there, but also a champion ag extension or advisor that was making all of that happen. So void of that, that's a concern that we'll probably all face and then how important those ag advisors out there.

So I just want to mention that. That was an interesting piece of history on where it grew and why.

But I got to manage the clock here, and so I'm going to wrap up with one question here.

And Casey spoke about it last night at our reception about the stories and how important the stories are.

And I'd like, while we have everyone's attention, if maybe you can draw back into your Rolodex, your inventory of success stories and just share one that comes to mind that we in turn can take back and start the dialogue back in our own regions.

What's a great success story of moving to conservation practices and impact that you've seen in your scope?

I have loads of stories. One of them is a historical just reference.

So you were talking about no-till, I think no-till really took off when we had a no-till drill. We had NRCS, had this TBY 2000 goal. Monsanto came out with this thing called Roundup, and then you had this concerted effort.

So you were hearing from, we got a no-till drill from our Pioneer seed dealer to rent. So then we had access to test it out and try it out. That's really when no-till started off.

We had the easy button, if you will, to try it out before you bought the equipment. You heard that from the farmer today. Equipment's expensive, you don't want to own too much.

The second piece is we had several different folks in our advisor team that was telling us, "Yeah, try this. This will help. We can test this out."

And so you have that support network and I think we've got to keep replicating that, whether it's doing more no-till, adding in cover crops, getting nutrients where they need to be, spoon-feeding them.

All of that takes this concerted effort by a bunch of people and it did work. And I think we need to get back to that.

It's not going to be just the federal government saying, "Do this and give us money."

It's got to be the whole value chain working together.

One that comes to mind that really sticks out, and I've used this in a lot of my talks is when I came to work for Ducks Unlimited, it was the first time in 16 years I had been on a tractor at home. And I moved to Brookings, South Dakota the day before COVID shut the country down. So, yay.

And I don't know how many of y'all are from here or from this area, but I know Brian can relate to this, but 2019, spring of 2020 was the wettest in the history. My very first landowner visit with Ducks Unlimited was in White Lake, South Dakota, a little bit west of here. I couldn't even get to the guy's farm. There was this winded around, the roads was closed, flooded out.

Anyway, long story short, it's a second generation farmer, young guy, family, and he had drunk the Kool-Aid of jumping in whole hog regenerative. Okay. So we met with him, we developed a plan, Ducks Unlimited provided some cost share. So I was helping technical assistance, giving this guy some brain power, so to speak, some encouragement.

And I can remember that spring when he got into the planting season, phone would ring at 9:00 on Sunday morning. The dude was beating his head against the wall. And then come spring, when we were doing some spraying, "What's going on? Nothing's working." And just boom, boom, boom. So that was year one. Year two, sort of the same. Year three, things started turning a corner.

And year four, he had developed a secondary business off his cover crops. So he was custom grazing his cover crops, turning profit on that. His no-till cover crop fields were outyielding his non-cover crop fields with the same or less inputs. And so we had that aha moment and it was really one of those things when you're out there meeting with the landowner and you get the phone call of the yield monitors and you see the reports that he turned a corner and was really improving and his farm profitability had almost tripled.

So that's just one of my biggest of many success stories that I've worked with in my five years with Ducks Unlimited. But that's the one that really sticks in my mind and obviously developed a friendship with this guy, a personal friendship and a business partnership.

Before I get into my story, as Brian was talking about cover crop and then grazing, see, I don't view that as a cover crop. I view that as a second cash crop, and you'll get a lot more farmers excited when you say, "You can raise a second cash crop."

Anyway, my story is a personal one. I mentioned my grandpa earlier. He put in some terraces not too far away from here and there wasn't a whole lot of soil. But back then, the only way to kill weeds, insects, and diseases was tillage, tillage, tillage.

My dad was originally a farmer in north central Iowa. It was tillage, tillage, tillage. And the reason why we started doing some no-till was back in the early 1990s and the NRCS said, "We want you to have a little more cover out there." And so we were talking about how to do that and we said, "All right, well, let's just give no-till a try."

Now, for my dad, it I think physically hurt him every time he had to drive past the field and see that the field didn't look perfect all the time. He could not stand the residue out there in the spring. It drove him nuts. But as we looked at it throughout the next couple of years, we had a lot less erosion.

And the other thing that I mentioned right away with my grandpa is we have the technology today that he didn't have. So herbicides were mentioned, the equipment, there was no no-till planter, no-till drill, there's no way you could do it back then.

And the other big thing I talk an awful lot about is drain tile properly placed. I'm not saying draining duck ponds, but when it's out in a normal field situation to keep the water table down, well, now we don't have to do the tillage to dry the field out. That top two feet is dry and now it gives us more opportunity to do strip-till and no-till and those kinds of things.

So when I step back and I think about, like for my dad, that was a massive change. And without my brother and me here, I don't know that he would've made that change. I mean, he's a smart guy and wants to do good things and everything else, but if you look at why did soil organic matter decrease in the United States for like 100 years in a row, it's because of the massive tillage we did.

We have to figure out, how do we reduce tillage? Doesn't necessarily have to be no-till. Strip-till Is a great compromise, I think, but we have to reduce tillage somehow, some way.

And the big thing anymore that I talk to farmers about is soil organic matter is good. If we have good soil organic matter or the soil's more spongy, less likely to compact, we have more nutrient release, we just raise better crops and our ground is worth more.

And so those are some of the things that I'm usually talking to people about and just my experience with it.

David? Five minutes? Strip-till just for a minute, and it was great that you guys brought the ETS over so everyone could see it. What do you think the outlook is for strip-till and adoption up in this area?

Well, I think that there is certainly possibility there. One of the challenges that we run into is for a lot of strip-till, people want to get done in the fall, like we do.

And many farms, it's one person or two and in the fall, they have so much crop and more drought. Think about yields keep going up. What does that mean? It means a lot more chucking and it just takes longer for carts. Even though we have great big equipment, you have to truck that stuff away.

And so for a lot of farms, they're strapped on time in the fall. Now, last fall it was easy because we had a long fall and it was pretty dry. But if it gets to be a short fall, and snow comes early if it's really wet, then that gets to be one of the challenges and then people go back to how they've done it.

These machines aren't super cheap, but we love them because we now can, just in one pass, we can make that strip, we can put our fertility down and then we go follow that in the spring, we can plant.

So I think it's fantastic and we talk about it all the time. Hopefully it's going to grow.

I really would love to see more people that strip-till for others. I'd like to hire that done on our farm because we don't have the time to do it, nor the finances to buy a new strip-tiller. So we farm in Western Lake Erie Basin. I don't know if many of you are familiar with that area, but incorporating the phosphorus is something that's important to keep it in the soil and not moving into Lake Erie. So it's an easy way to get the phosphorus incorporated without having to [inaudible 00:24:18] over the whole field.

I ran a farm in Nebraska that we ran the same outfit, ETS, 16 row. We were able to increase our yields versus conventional tillage and we get that direct, like Darren talked about earlier, out of the site out there, we were able to get that exact fertilized placement in the root zone. I would love to see more guys, especially Eastern South Dakota, Eastern North Dakota, love to see more guys get into that versus full tillage. South Dakota, the wind never stops blowing, and this time of year, there's an awful lot of dust clouds from guys pulling field cultivators and all the likes of that. So it's a great compromise between the two.

I think we got to wrap it up. I think what we'd ask you here to do is just briefly one parting thought, one thing to send us out with here. Either a takeaway from earlier today or yesterday or just one final message as we wrap things up.

Farming isn't easy. This year isn't going to be easy. There's a lot of things that are going on, whether it's with labor or chemistry or the weather, drought conditions, et cetera.

So we work with farmers, be a resource for them, help them do more, better. If you are a farmer, reach out. Make sure you're talking with your advisors, you're talking with someone about what's going on so you can plan ahead.

I think the next couple of years might be difficult financially in the ag world. And if you're here, you want agriculture to thrive, so be a resource.

Think how your company can do more, do differently to help farmers. And implement conservation or sustainability practices because I think that's the direction that we need to go in to keep the markets open.

I guess my final parting thing would be our most valuable resource we have worldwide is our soil.

And the more we can do to protect that soil, it's the circle of life. It's what we live on every day. Everybody has to eat. We take a lot from the soil, we put a lot back in. But if we don't protect that and manage it and honor it, then we're in bad shape.

We see some of these countries that have run their soil down, they're starving to death and rely on the United States of America or other countries for inputs.

But if we can protect our soil, particularly here in the breadbasket of the world, then we can ensure for future generations, your kids, grandkids, et cetera, that they're able to farm and ranch properly.

I want to leave you with a positive note. A lot of people are talking about tariffs and trade and everything else. I'm going to tell you right now, we're going to have better commodity prices next year. The farming economy is going to be better. I'm 100% confident in it.

And honestly, if you go to the farm every day and you're 100% confident it's not going to be that way, you're in big trouble and maybe you should go do something else.

Also, we have unbelievable technology today that many people aren't even using and it's going to keep getting better. There's no reason at all why we can't make the soil better, we can't make our food more nutritious, we can't provide more food for the world. We can do all these things.

So my three goals that I gave you a little bit earlier, we can absolutely raise more yield, we can absolutely be more profitable, and we can absolutely leave our ground in better condition for the next generation.

Great stuff there. Thanks to our all-star panel for those insights. And thanks, once again, to Environmental Tillage Systems for making this podcast series possible. Remember, for all things strip-till, head to striptillfarmer.com. And for all things strip-till conference, head to striptillconference.com. I'm Noah Newman. Thanks so much for tuning in. We'll see you soon.