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On this episode of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment, Gary Zimmer shares 50 years’ worth of biological farming experience to help strip-tillers examine their nutrient distribution in a new light. 

Internationally known as the “Father of Biological Agriculture,” Zimmer is a big believer in strip-till. “It’s like putting a flowerpot under every plant,” he says. “It allows you to concentrate your nutrients in a row, but you’ll need a better source of nutrients as salts may make things worse.”

Zimmer, the owner of Otter Creek Organic Farm in Lone Rock, Wis., dives deep into various biological products, fertilizer types, nitrogen (N) sources, application timing, how to improve soil health and much more! 

The Strip-Till Farmer podcast is brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment.

Since 1930, Yetter Farm Equipment has been providing farmers with profitable solutions. From residue management and fertilizer placement to seedbed preparation, our equipment is designed to maximize your inputs, save you time, and deliver a strong return on investment. Explore our full line of planter attachments, precision fertilizer placement options, strip-till units, and stalk rollers at yetterco.com. Let Yetter help you prepare your equipment lineup for success today.

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Full Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the Strip-Till Farmer Podcast, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment. My name is Noah Newman. And today, Gary Zimmer shares 50 years worth of biological farming experience to help strip-tillers examine their nutrient distribution in a new light. Internationally known as the father of biological agriculture, Zimmer always brings the energy. And in this presentation from last year's Strip-Till Conference, he dives deep into various biological products, fertilizer types, nitrogen sources, application timing, how to improve soil health, and much more. Gary, take it away.

Pleasure to be here. It's my first time in front of this crowd. How many have heard me speak before? If you have watched some of my podcasts, I got the reputation of talking really slow and easygoing, and I'm a little high energy. I might be a little bit older, but I'm pretty high energy. And yes, I have not anything to do with soils. I'm a dairy nutritionist by training. But cows and soils are very similar. They're biological systems.

So I was teaching at Winona Technical College a farm operation and management course in the early 1970s, and I got introduced to what you put on the land changes the feed that a cow eats. I spent my career making ideal feed for dairy cows. You see, you can change the mineral level. You can change the digestibility. You can change the preference of that feed. You can change feeds. So then, I got introduced to soil. So I'm self-taught in soils. I left teaching career because it didn't fit what I wanted to accomplish, and I became a Brookside consultant for a while, so I got quite involved in it.

I couldn't then get the products I wanted. I was in Southeastern Minnesota. In those days, I couldn't get what I wanted. For fertilizer, I wanted a calcium source. I wanted trace minerals. I wanted different products. I didn't want to buy something cheap and soluble. I wanted to buy something that performed. And so anyway, I left Minnesota, moved back into Wisconsin, and started Midwestern BioAg with a couple other people. And so we got facilities yet around the countryside. Two of the consultants are sitting right here in front of me, making sure I do everything right, I guess. So anyway, that's the story.

We called it biological farming when I started Midwestern BioAg because I wanted the farmers to change their focus from chemistry to biology because biology trumps chemistry any day of the week. So if I can get a biological system working, I don't need all that chemistry. And so that was why we called it biological farming. And of course, now, all kinds of... This world has really changed. See, when I started Midwestern BioAg, there was the only place you could get the kind of minerals I'm going to talk about or have talked about was through us. Now, things have changed. You got opportunities out here that we never had, and so the BioAg had made some different direction changes also. So I've got a lot of stuff to present as always, and I'm trying to give you a... paint a picture and to give you some things. If I can't rattle your cage and get you to think about something, I haven't done my job.

So this is a biological approach to regenerating land. At first, when the word "regeneration" came along, I wasn't really keen about it because there's no guidelines to regeneration. But that's the good news, not the bad news, because every one of you have to do something different to regenerate your land. Some might need to do physical, some might need to do biology, some might need some minerals. But biological farming, I have six rules to biological farming. If you lay those out and follow those... and they were written in the '90s. I've been at this a long, long time, and I've been around this planet a lot of times. I've been in every little world out here.

And by the way, that's our farm right there. You're looking at it. We're organic. I've got the most radical farming system you've ever seen because I wanted to focus on the fact, "What if you focused on something different? What if you focused on soil health?" So we actually have... and I'll show some more pictures later. We have one year soil building and one year corn. Every other year, corn, and we farm about... My son farms alone on 1,500 acres, certified organic, in a 45-mile circle. Farms alone.

Now, we just finished combining rye, and the culvert is this tall, and the rye this year, all the rain. We got the head as high as it'll go on the combine, just taking the tops off the rye. And we didn't get a great rye crop this year, but we sure got a beautiful cover crop. We're not interested in the rye. We're interested in building soil. What are the two biggest problems with organic? Nitrogen and weed control, and I think we solve both of them. So anyway, I'll talk more about that, but that's what soil I look at.

Why would soil want to look like a chocolate cake? Because the organisms in your soil want to make it look like that because they need to breathe. They need oxygen just like you do. And if you don't have a loose, crumbly ground... See, I'm not really big on no-till. I followed a lot of no-till. And for you guys that are no-till, I'm not being critical. There are some really good successful no-till farmers, but it's too big of a risk. And there's too big of problems with it, and it's got too big of issues, compaction, nutrient stratification, on and on the list goes. I'm a strip-till guy. I've been for a long time.

We are trying to develop an organic strip-till system. I would like to have my clover in the springtime then. We would like to build our strips in the fall. In the springtime, let that clover get that big, and then mow it off, and blow it in the row and mulch. I mulch all my gardens. There's no weeds in it. And if I could get that clover so it wouldn't come back, we could have a strip-till organic farming system that really works. I'm going to roll more. Our trouble is, my trouble is my son is way too busy to spend time on our farm doing it. We can't get the job done. We can't get... I got the equipment. We never get it done. You probably know what I'm talking about, so.

So, biological farming. What really is it? And of course, you're going to hear some things about tillage, and no-till, and all those kinds. You realize that the soils on our farm look like that and we do tillage, but we never till bare ground, and that's what you got to remember. Don't you dare till bare ground. You're going to destroy your soils. But what if there's residues this high and you're running a high-speed disc across the field and shallow incorporating residue? I'm a real believer in shallow incorporating. So that's a rotorvator. When we were smaller, we used to run those.

Biological farming is doing everything you can to get your soils healthy and mineralized. What does that mean? I want to have mineral exchange. I just don't want a high mineral soil test out here. And so then, why are you strip-tilling? What's your objective? I say compared to no-till, and strip-till is a modified no-till system, isn't it? It reduces your risk. It reduces your risk.

Boy, boy, if you're not going to do anything, and it's raining and raining, and you got compaction out there, and you're harvesting the crop when you get... and you've got this nutrient stratification we heard about last year at this event out here, and you got all those crazy things going on out here, strip-tilling really came along to reduce all your risk out here, because now it's like... I always say I'm the guy that put that term forward that... Strip-tilling is like putting a flour pot under every plant. You got to take advantage of that. Are you trying to improve soil health? It's going to take more than corn, beans, corn, beans. That's not a crop rotation. You're going to have to have some kind of a... other plants. Something's got to be photosynthesizing. Something's got to be putting more roots in your soil. And neither one of those two put roots in the soil.

Do you realize I was at a meeting 30 years ago with a Pioneer seed rep, and he said, "Pioneer is going to breed corn with smaller roots because it takes too much energy to build the roots." That's called a failing farming system. Ha, you want to fill your soul with roots? Double your roots to some, cut your water, and fertilizer your half. And that's what strip-tilling does for you if you really manage it.

And so I want to get nutrient efficiency. I can now place the nutrients in. I can use a higher quality nutrient. I'm not going to buy a cheap salty ammonia fertilizer and dump it into that zone. People that fail at strip-tilling have missed the major points. They aren't building a good strip. They're fully full of salts and ammonias. One guy said an article in the paper, "All my soil is all blowing away." I'll guarantee you, if you've got beautiful, loose, crumbly soil structure out here, it's not going to blow away. It blew away because you got dirt, not soil.

And then the other thing is I want to eliminate nutrient stratification. I want to mix my nutrients all the way out here. So nutrient stratification is a huge problem for no-till, guys. And I want to reduce my cost by getting more efficient with it, and taking some of my risk out, and be more resilient with it. And I want to be able to increase yields. What is your... Not necessarily. Maybe I just want to reduce my cost. We were having this discussion here over breakfast about farmers out here that have really changed their farming system and not necessarily driving more yield, but really taking away their cost and taking away... and by growing cover crop by having a whole totally different kind of a system of farming.

So what is your objective? Why are you doing strip-till? What's your objective with this thing? What's your plan? Buying biological stimulants? It's called snake oil, you guys. You know what? I came from that years ago. I've been around long enough. Now, you're all buying snake oil. Aren't you excited? You see, that was just a blastic away. So I'm not saying you shouldn't add a biological. I'm not saying... But see, what lives in your soil and what's there is based on what you do, what you've been doing. If you want to change it, you almost got to create an ideal home and feed it. You can stimulate biology by feeding it. You can add different organisms that might not be in your soil, but ideally, you change your farming system to create a whole new model with a whole different group of organisms living there.

See, the whole secret is that the more biology in the soil, the more diversity there is out here, the less trouble you're going to have. See, corn and beans don't give you enough diversity, and that was why every one of you got E. Coli in your system and you're not running to the John here yet because you got good guys against bad guys. Now, we've had a lot of success. I see Purple Cow guys are sitting right here. We've had a lot of success adding a biological, direct fed microbial along with some molasses and those kind of things you can do out here, but that's just a piece of the puzzle. That's not the whole puzzle necessarily.

Low-salt fertilizers. If you're not going to use a low-salt fertilizer, you better buffer that salt. You sure as heck don't want to put it in that zone. The solution to pollution is dilution. You want to spread that with a high-speed spreader, clear custom field... Don't you dare stick it next to your seed? Oh my gosh. What are you trying to do? So you wouldn't stick salt in that row.

And the other thing is carbon-based fertilizers. See, I first started out 45 years ago changing the fertilizer ingredients we bought, not based on price, based on performance. And then we started making carbon-based fertilizers. We bought ampel down in Harvey, Iowa, and we started making huma faucet, huma cal, putting carbon with our fertilizers. And now we got involved with making fertilizers in the back of an anaerobic digester. And so I want to say a carbon-based... Have your nutrients tied to them.

You realize in nature, there's no such thing as phosphorus falling out of the sky or potassium falling out of the sky. There might be a little bit of nitrogen from a lightning storm. But reality is that the minerals, really, are in plants. And then when the plants die, they dish them out. The minerals are always tied into a carbon biological cycle, and that's how you ought to deliver your fertilizers to a farm.

And then cover crops. The purpose of a cover crop is not only... It took me a long time to learn this, and you're going to get it in three seconds. The plants determine the soil life. Whatever you add doesn't determine the soil life. The plants. And just like the plants determine the minerals you're going to take up. Look at oats and buckwheat. What do they do? They're high users of phosphorus. They take up a lot of phosphorus. Oats. Our grandparents grew oats because they grow on low-fertility ground. It's a really good phosphorous suck. What about mustard? What about tillage radishes? They take up sulfur. And certain plants that take up more potassium than other plants. So you have a diversity of plants, you can get more minerals extracted from your soil. More trace minerals, more minerals.

So part of the diversity of plants is not only to have diversity of biology, it's to extract more minerals that are already tied up in your salt. Corn and beans are not going to do that for you, and that's why you almost have to have some kind of cover crop. How does that fit? You figure it out. You can plant a shorter-day corn as we're talking about over breakfast and plant rye in the fall following both corn and beans. You can intercede. You can put on... get Highboys out here. If you're going to do this strip-till thing, you've got to take advantage of... That's only one piece of the puzzle. If you want to take it down to have that farm really functioning with healthy immunized soils, it takes more than that.

And nitrogen use. I get tired of people telling me the price of nitrogen. Nitrogen's problem isn't the price. It's a negative. Why do you think you're spraying fungicides? Why do you think you got tar spot? It's kind of fun. Our neighbors are conventional, and they used to criticize me. "Whoa, you're spending so much time running across the fields," they said. They make nine trips across their field every year to grow conventional corn. They sprayed the herbicides three times and the third fungicide passing. They got tar spot wiping the crop out. We farmed next to them, have never seen an economic loss to a disease or insect, have never seen tar spot on our farm.

And Brandon is here. We used to go Beck's Hybrids and walked on our fields. It took about half a day to find a spot on a leaf, and the neighbor's corner is dead. And now they spray fungi... They sprayed again fungicides the other day. I think John yesterday was talking about that. And so we get hooked on doing something that never makes your farm better. So nitrogen use to me is I want to use as little as possible because excess nitrogen, free nitrogen into a plant is what brings on your fungal disease. It causes a lot of issues for you. It burns up your carbon. So as little as possible. How many units of nitrogen does it take to grow your crop? Depends on how you use them, where you use them, and when you use them.

And then your strips. I like my fall strips, and put my dry down in the fall, and come back. Now, that's in Wisconsin, in the Midwest, and come back in the spring, and do a little refreshment on my strip, and then get my liquid starters or whatever I'm going to put down for a starter in the spring. So I can get my work spread out, and I can build my strips in the fall. But I heard someone yesterday talking about they like to build their strips in the spring.

It doesn't really matter. Some places, you got to do one thing different than the other. Usually, if you're building a strip, the fastest place for growing strip-till farming is where? Western Minnesota. That black oak gumbo clay soil, if you didn't expose some dirt in the fall, you probably won't get the crop planted next year. You got to build your strips in the fall. It'll be 10 degrees warmer, that strip, in the spring by making it in the fall. So anyway, what's your plan? What are you trying to achieve? See, if you're here and complaining about strip-till and haven't taken advantage of all the things that need to be taken advantage of, I think you're missing some points.

Now, this slide, if nothing else, I want you to take this one home. If I had to change the name of my company again, I would focus on soil health and soil fertility. If you walk home tomorrow... Not about greatest variety. It's not about buying the greatest... So your whole focus is this, "I'm going to do everything I can to get my soul the healthiest and have the highest level of fertility."

So health means it functions without intervention. If you have to use insecticides, fungicides, pesticides, and lots of extra plant protective compounds, biotechnology, obviously, it's not very healthy. If you're out here today... I'm 80 years old, by the way, and if I took a handful of pills every day, you sure as heck couldn't call me healthy. Now, I joke about this, and people heard this before. I tell people I don't take pills, and the secret to that is if you never go to a doctor, you never have to take pills. That's the secret. So I didn't tell you that. My wife says I'm irresponsible. I don't want to know. I'm a pretty fanatic on health though, by the way. What goes in this body gets paid attention to it as I'm on trips.

So health is that capacity. Soil fertility isn't what the soil test says. It isn't what the... It's the uptake of minerals. It's the exchange of minerals, and it's the balance of minerals. It's the utilization of what you got in your soil to get into the plant, and that's the secret to this whole thing out here. Soil health and soil fertility ought to be on it, and we got our chemical, physical, and biological properties.

That's nice-looking soil. See that? This is really an interesting concept. This is up by Northeast Iowa. I've been a customer of BioAg since I started the company 40 years ago, and he's a strip-till guy. And he came to a morning meeting about five years ago, and he said, "When I started with you 30 years ago," he said, "I used to grow 140 bushel corn, put on 140 units of nitrogen." He said, "Now, I'm at 220 to 240 on corn." He said, "But I stalled out." He said, "I've never changed my nitrogen. I'm still only putting on 140 units of nitrogen." He said, "You think nitrogen limitation is my problem?"

I said, "Well, you've got beautiful soils. Look at those little earthworm castings and all the things in those soils." So I said, "Ah." I said, "Well, that's really simple. You see, nowadays, you guys all do your own research. All the technologies that are out there, your own farm, you got GPS, you got yield models, we got global positioning. You can really tell what's going on your own farm. You don't need to count on someone's research plot. Test things out."

Midwestern BioAg did 250 on-farm trials last year to try to figure out what products fit where and how they work for you, and you got to give them a three-year thing. So I said to him, "Nitrogen is really easy. You're side dressing nitrogen. Add 10 more gallons. 28 with some carbon in it, and add 10 more gallons. See what it does for you. Do it for three years." And then as we got to talking, this man has never, ever grown a cover crop, and this is how I got trained. All that is, is changing minerals. That's all that is.

So soil health is soil health. Does any of these things here help my soil health? Does any of this... Who would like to argue with me? Any of those things make your soil health any better? They might prevent a problem. They might be the cheapest source of delivering something, but they have nothing to do with soil health. They might do the opposite of soil health.

So anyway, what does this guy do out here? Now, you got to realize he is a... Soil health is really quite different. It's the capacity to function without intervention. And so I did meetings all across Minnesota with NRCS a couple winters ago, and I thanked NRCS. I said, "The first time I ever paid my taxes and I was happy to do it because you finally came up with something I can use." They said, "We didn't come up with that. I don't know who did. This is the soil health." I thought NRCS did this.

This is spot on. When it rains, your water better soak in that ground. You see, when it doesn't soak in and gets water-logged, everything that breathes can't breathe in it, and it dies, and it silts tight. You cannot let your ground get water-logged. Yeah, I know we've got a lot of rain. Come to our farm. Water soaks in. It doesn't run off.

And the other thing, nutrients got to cycle. That doesn't mean that from irrigation water pumping it back up. I mean, through plants and biology. You got to keep cycling it through plants, through carbon, through biology. Minimum disturbance. It doesn't say no disturbance. I guess I'm a real believer in shallow incorporating residues. The fence post rots off up here. I said leaving everything lay on top of the ground, sometimes your soil won't dry up and warm up, but shallow incorporating it, I still leave a huge blanket, and I'd never till bare ground, remember, because we're a high-speed dispute. We got a limpkin and we got coon/crows interceptor, and we shallow incorporate, and that's how we seed our rye.

That no-till farm from Southeastern Minnesota, I think, is doing such a good job. He said, "I'm a no-till guy, but I run an interceptor." He said, "I shallow run my high-speed disc so I can plant my rye." That's called shallow incorporating residues, and don't be afraid of that. You got to break that crust on the top of your ground because you cannot have a crust. And that's why you got to have plants and residues, and you got to break that crust up. It's got to breathe.

This is a living life system. That's why the loose, crumbly chocolate cake kind of soils. You got to have a lot of diversity out here. Now, if you want more diversity, go organic because you'll have weeds, and you don't even have to buy it, and then now you got diversity out here. See, we're going to get our cover crops for free. It's called weeds. And then living roots in the soil at all times.

You see, there's a lot of things that you have to unlearn to learn. See, this is new stuff all the time. I can't quit because new stuff comes along. See, for years, and years, and years, and years, you were taught that if you wanted to get organic matter in the soil, you had to grow organic matter. That's like you say, "If I want to get my steers fat, I got to feed them fat." Now, they can get some energy out of fat, but you feed them corn to get them fat. So now they figured out that... and someone brought that up yesterday. I talked at breakfast about this. It's one of these little things I have fun with the guys.

"I raised my organic matter 1% last year." I said, "Really? 2 million pounds in the top six inches. 1% is 20,000 pounds. 20,000 pounds of organic matter means you put on 200,000 pounds of residues last year. How did you do that? It takes 10 years to get 200,000 pounds of residues that break down to 1% organic matter. So if you're getting higher than 1% organic matter over 10 years, you got a testing problem. It's mathematically impossible."

Now, if you want to raise your organic matter the fastest you possibly could, you switch labs and go to Brookside Lab. They got the highest reading of organic matter of any lab out here. That's the fastest way to raise organic matter. But living roots. So we thought putting all this carbon in the soil. Now, they're saying, "No, no, it's the liquid..." Jerry Hatfield spoke here. It's the liquid carbon. Him and Allan Fowler used to work for me. And Alan and him, they come along this liquid... Christine Jones out of Australia. It's the liquid carbon.

The plants are... It's like your animal. You feed them extra corn, they got extra energy, they put down fat for reserve. When you feed extra carbon to your soil from liquid photosynthesis, if you want to increase your soil again, but have more photosynthesis, and those liquid carbons in their biology got extra sugar in food, it stores complex carbons for its future. You lose just like any animal would. It's no different out here. So I got to have living roots in my soil at all times.

That's why I'm with a group called Rye Revival. We think rye is a plant that's here to save the planet. People don't know how to manage it very well and planting rye in the fall even if it doesn't... We plant rye after corn. And then in the springtime, we frost seed cover in it. And so rye is one of those crops. We don't make any money on rye, but it sure changes our farm. Rye itself, harvest rye and sell this 25 bushel an acre a seed doesn't... We're not interested in the rye. We're interested in the covered crop under it.

And then I need to have minerals. Now NRCS didn't put the word "mineral" out there. I did. Can you imagine if they start promoting balanced fertility and started talking about putting on soluble calcium and some of those things? I don't think they can get away with that, and so I got to add the word. What two minerals will really affect your soil health? Phosphorus. Get that phosphorus uptake. Phosphorous is energy. The Krebs cycle. Density and phosphorus. You want to get your plants healthier? You dry phosphorus up in the plant.

I think phosphorus is misunderstood. The reason people are doing things out here to get more phosphorous up there, more mycorrhizal fungus. I'm a dairy nutritionist. We've doubled the phosphorus uptake on alfalfa. For the last 15 years of dairy farmer, we never fed any commercial phosphorus to our dairy cows. We got it into the plants. And what's the other mineral? Soil health. Calcium. Not just having the right pH, not just adding lime, a soluble calcium source.

See, Midwestern BioAg, in the beginning, we started out with choosing fertilizer sources. Then, we made carbon-based fertilizers. And now we got three very unique products we've developed. And one of them for 40 years, I've been marketing a burnt hydrated lime, burnt lime out of a kiln. The guys were down here visiting it yesterday here. It's down in Southern Iowa. And so it comes from where they make food grade calcium oxide. So, see, if you take rock phosphate and treat it with ammonia, you make MAP or DAP, Monoammonium and Diammonium Phosphate.

If you get lime and you burn it, calcium carbonate, lime has got carbon in it, you end up with calcium oxide and calcium hydroxyurea, and you now just made fertilizer, and that changes soils. So getting a higher levels of calcium, because calcium puts in pectins, and it protects your plant, and it's got a lot of things that goes on. Calcium is a trucker of all minerals. I'm a Mr. Calcium guy. There's no question about it. But you got to make sure you're getting the calcium into the plant. You just can't put on lime and expect that's insoluble.

Put rock phosphate and see how well you do on dead soil. I want to see how much phosphorus uptake you got out of it. No different than lime. And so you got to imagine decay of residues. Things laying out there for two years are going to cause disease and insect problems. You got to break things down. That's why I like to shallow incorporate and get something working. In fact, going on and break that crust into my soil.

So, regenerate. It's really about optimizing inputs. This is from our University of Wisconsin. There's climate differences. That's why there's no one rule for everybody out here. But what is common ground between me as an organic farmer and you as a conventional farmer? What are you trying to achieve out here? I think cover crops are a common ground. How are you going to get those in?

Diversity of plants are common ground for everybody out here and having a blanket on top of that ground and those soils. And whether you spray that down or shallowly working it, I think we're talking about some of those guys that are just letting the rye get out there and spray it in. Anybody that complains about rye has never learned how to manage it. It's just management problems, and so you got to learn how to manage the residues. And sequestering carbons are already talked about. That's the liquid carbon part of it. You got to have photosynthesis going on all the time. Something's got to be green growing out there all the time. Your coal right now to be interceded with something growing green in between the ropes. Get the equipment. Get this thing figured out.

So here's what's going on. I don't know if you can see. This is since the 1990s. Nutrient use efficiency. Nitrogen. Everything, and you say, "I know how much nitrogen it takes to grow corn. I know how much phosphorus." "Really? You do?" Nitrogen is 30% to 70% usable. If you're at the 70%, you can put on different levels to grow that same crop. Phosphorus, 5% to 30%. And yet, we keep... "Oh, I got to put out my hundred pounds of dap." 5% of it at best you're getting to use. Potassium, 30% to 60%. Micronutrients, from 0% to 70% available out here. And the reason for this might be... This is since the 1990s, nutrient use efficiency, and that is the reason you can now tap into the reserve.

You see, I spoke to this guy. I said, "Oh, you don't need to buy any fertilizer. Just put some biologicals and some cover crops." And I said, "I got some land you need to take a look at. I've been in CRP for 25 years. Phosphorus is in the single digit, potassium about a hundred parts a million, and pH is five, five. And you're going to do nothing but plant corn?" No. I want to take over land where the guy went broke buying fertilizer or put on so much manure that he now... and he went out of the dairy. I want that land. I want a land that's got a reserve of nutrients. I never have to put fertilizer ever again, unless I'm selling hay. What am I moving off with corn and beans? Energy. You're just moving off grain. You're not selling many minerals, but get it fixed first. And so anyway, now, we can tap into all that stuff that's out there, and that's why you can get more efficient. But figure out how to tap into that reserve you got out here, if you got a reserve.

Well, let's start talking about strip-till. Anybody know who that is? Don Schriefer. If I'm the father of biological farming, he's the father of strip-till. He died in '99 of leukemia. In the 1980s, I met him. He's from De Motte, Indiana. He was a corn and soybean specialist, and he was an environmentalist agronomist. And he's written a couple of books, and he was the corn and bean guy, and I was the dairy guy. And then when he died, I got them both. I didn't really want his job, but boy did I learn a lot from this guy out here.

All those phrases you heard, just like the 400 bushel corn grown by Francis Childs way back in the '90s. What do you think he was? His customer. What do you think he did? A mini moldboard. He plowed 14 inches deep and tipped it up on edge. He's the guy that started the strip-till thing with Ray Rawson, Rawson Coulter System, and that's when... In Minnesota, Rawson Coulter went up against Michigan State University with their strip-till in the middle of Michigan and beat him by 40 bushel corn that first year run.

Ray passed away just a year ago. He was my age. One of his sons now works for the molasses company out here, but Ray... Don Schriefer was the foundation of this strip-tilling thing, in my opinion. He's written several books. The first book, From the Soil Up, it's really good, actually. The second book was supposed to be called Tillage and Transition, but he died before it was done. I had a transcript of his book out here. Then, they changed it five years later. His wife allowed him to finish called Agriculture and Transition. It was really about... He was a tillage guy. He helped work on the disc chisel. It was invented by Landoll Equipment. He worked for them. He was a tillage guy. And see, in those days, you got to look at where he came from and where would he be today. He started on the strip-till for a really good reason out here.

He got involved with some of these phrases, "row support fertilizer." See, another thing you have to unlearn, it doesn't matter if you got a picket fence out there or not, does it? What is that? 1% or 2% yield difference. What does matter? Everyone comes up exactly at the same time and exactly the same height. Row support, getting... What do you put? Like, putting a colostrum mix in top of that seed.

We work with some farms in the countryside that are no longer putting any fertilizers down in that strip zone anymore. They're putting on a biological, a seed treatment. What's the cheapest thing you can bring to your farm? Seeds and seed treatments. How about putting biology and biologicals with seeds? They're putting some liquid down on the row. I'm looking at Benny here now with Purple Cow. I said, "I want to get that little plant."

You know what? When you plant the plant out here, that plant has no idea what the soil looks like a foot away. If you can trick it with a colostrum mix, the same thing you use a colostrum for a calf, to do that same thing for corn so it's like, "Wow, this is really great. I'm going to grow good root systems. We're all going to come up at the same time." And that's what you ought to be looking at doing when you're achieving strip-till, because you have the opportunity to make things worse by putting everything in a zone, but you have a real opportunity of changing your complete farm by what you put in that zone.

So this here was... Actually, a picture there. We were talking about using some MKP, Monopotassium Phosphate is a really good phosphorus source. Some orthophosphates are really good. So a lot of guys might put some phosphorus down in here. The farms that we're looking at here are now just putting on nothing more than putting on a product called RootSurge that BioAg makes, and it's really kelp, humates, and a gelling agent that holds water and nutrients right on top of that seed, along with a biological seed treatment. And that looks a whole lot better where they put a high-quality liquid at eight gallons an acre. There's a huge difference not putting any fertilizer in there and getting the biology and the stimulation going on a lot better.

You see, like I said, the plant doesn't know what's a foot away. It doesn't realize that when you plant that seed, whatever you can do, that little zone right around that seed, you can have a huge impact on this crop. You got to get it out of the ground all uniform, and that's the secret to getting higher, better quality corn. The one that's late is just going to be a drag on the whole field, and so what's in that little zone of updraft in here, and that's what he was talking about. That rose fertilization out here is getting those nutrients and getting that thing started out here, but it's a lot more complex than that. So what would you put down in there? A biological to stimulate some biology? Maybe adding some biology? Maybe adding some food for the biology. Fish, seaweed.

We had a discussion last night about putting iodine. Where does iodine fit in? How much iodine you put on your corn? You got to realize that you, and your livestock, and your crops are not much different. You need iodine. They need iodine. What is a good iodine source? Kelp. Seaweed. We've been using kelp on our farms for a long, long period of time and seaweed has some real benefits. A higher-quality nutrient. If your fertility is really low, you might need to put some nutrients down that zone, but use a higher-quality one, buffer it out, have something that holds water.

We've been working with this Bio-Gel, this gelling agent that holds water and holds nutrients. So that's why we had a lot of success in dry land farming, because when the soil dries out, what goes away? Nitrogen dries out and potassium. So your crop is starved to potassium when it gets dry. What if I had an agent that held the water, and held the potassium, and held the night into the dry periods? And so we've been playing around with that, and the root system was... That way, roots doesn't cut your water and fertilizer in half, and put some sugar out there to feed biology. And of course, we work with molasses over the years.

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The zone of updraft. When you plant that little seed, you got to be... That's why you can't have a stratification layer below. You can't have a concrete level, a hard pan. As the plant sucks up nutrients, more nutrients should be drawn in, and this is all Don Schriefer's work. The zone of updraft is to get water and nutrients to move into that red zone as the crop is taking them up, and that zone of updraft is really a big part of it. And this here is really key.

You see, for years, and years, and years, that's why your soil... Why does the soil need to look like a chocolate cake? Or someone said cottage cheese. I don't care what you want to compare it with because why would the soil organisms make it look like that? Because they want to breathe, and they want to have air going down in the soil. And what's your number one yield-limiting factor of 90% of the farms out here? Carbon dioxide. And the only reason you're getting higher yields are right now because we got more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than we did 20 years ago. Come on, take credit for it. We all did it.

So the carbon actually is going in the ground. Those organisms are like us. They need air. That's why you can't have compaction. That's why you can't have water log. And now the carbon dioxide boils off, and you say, "Just a minor on the bottom side of the leaf, not on the top side of the leaf." Why would the pores that absorb neuters on the bottom side of the leaf? Because they want to absorb carbon dioxide, carbon dioxide with sun energy, carbon dioxide, sugars, make sugars, photosynthesis. So carbon dioxide is huge on here, and so that's really a big part of getting your higher yields there.

Get a carbon dioxide meter and go in your cornfield in the middle of July, maybe not this year, and see how much carbon dioxide is boiling off the ground. Those meters reach zero, and that's why it's organic eyes. We make our last cultivation. We can look back, and the corn jumps a foot. We just put air in the ground. You got to be careful. Don't put too much air in the ground. Well, from cultivation, but see, this is why you have that zone of up there. Your soil has got to breathe, and that's why it's got to have a loose crumbly structure on that top of that ground.

That's our farm, and we do tillage, but we never till bare ground, remember. And look at that. We didn't make that soil like that. Our field days are August 19th with old grain, the organic grain out of the University of Wisconsin having field days on my farm for about the 30th time. I used to have them every year, and we're on the third Tuesday of August. It's never rained on the third Tuesday of August in my hometown. That's why we have field days that day, and we're doing the one the next day with the Savanna Institute there, the agriforestry people on the 20th of August at our farm, but that's our soils, and that's how you get soils to breathe, but you got to create that. You got to work at getting that. You got to spend some time getting that.

And this year, it's really about nutrient use efficiency and some of the things. This is some private research out here, putting out some of the products to be able to get... How do we measure? Let's do a paste test of the soil. Let's see how many nutrients we're getting into action. How many nutrients we're getting into our plant? See, I know that we can double the minerals into an alfalfa plant. I can double them into anything. Now, corn is not a big mineral-utilizer. But see, we get more nutrient use efficiency out here, and that's like, "Can we hold and get more nutrients active into a plant?" And that's another big part of what we got to do. So some of those ought to be your focus, and you all can do this.

See that top strip? You can measure what's going on. You get yield monitors. You get area of global positioning. You can say, "Obviously, that's green. Something happened out there that was quite positive. We put that RootSurge down in that zone, and we put on some of this TerraNu fertilizer we make on the back of [inaudible 00:33:43] digested on Fair Oaks, Indiana. And so we could see a change going on in those farms. And see, you can now monitor yourself. You don't have to rely on any snake oil salesman. You don't have to rely on anybody else. Turn your farm into a test plot, and test it for three years, and make sure you know what you're testing, and make sure you're found a limiting factor that's going to help your farm before you start doing the testing. Talk to some of these BioAg guys.

How about this? This is the University of Illinois. I shouldn't show these slides, should I? Now, isn't that a great root system on those soybeans? Isn't that wonderful? Where are the roots in the soil? I am sorry. They blame the disc for making a compaction layer. They blame the plow for making the compaction. You know what it is? You ever see brown snow in the wintertime? I got beautiful pictures from St. Cloud, Minnesota driving along, and the snow is brown in the ditches, and all of a sudden it's white. You better stop and look at the soil structure. The white guy is not seeing dirt. Boy, one is dirt, and the other is soil structure. So, right here, what causes that disc plant? Any structural change in the soil created by a disc, or a plow, or any tillage tool, then the silt from the stuff that runs off when it rains, the little fine, silty stuff that percolates down through the soil and creates that hard pile. The disc didn't create the hard pad. The disc created a structural difference. The poor soil structure created that hard pan.

And that's why I was a real big ridge-till guy years and years ago. I thought ridge-till was doing... Before we had tiling, we had ridge-tilling. Ridge-tilling failed because they got hard pans under the ridges. They couldn't figure it out. "We're not driving until the ridge... How do we get a hard pan? We're not plowing." It was a silty. When they built that ridge, it was poor soil structure, and the silt went down and made it a hard pan, and they were low on potassium. They never figured out the potassium and the hard pan. But you see, it's going to take... Look at this. Where are the roots? When you dig a pit, that should be solid full of roots in the soil, and that's how you change soils. Fill that thing full of roots.

What did I learn last year here? I heard Marion talk about nutrient stratification, so I'm nervous. I go back home and say, "Oh my gosh, maybe we got nutrient stratification." I don't know if she'd do any... We're two, three-inch till is all we do. Just do a shallow incorporating residue. That's all we do. Now, we have run big inline rippers. Yeah, they're rusty now because we quit using them. We grow sweet corn, sweet corn. For that, we got to tackle it out like this this year. So I went out there.

This is a big job, by the way. It's not an afternoon. I took one of our fields, and every four inches, I went down soil sample and says, "Oh gosh, it's an all-day job. I want to know where my nutrients are." Now, notice this is not a soil test out here. Phosphorus, 117, 122, 96, 68. It dropped a little bit. Do you realize what is the recommended level for phosphorus on a soil test supposed to be? 25, and that's not right. 25, if you buy a lot of fertilizer and if you're willing to buy insecticides, fungicides, or pesticides.

Phosphorous is a good guy. You better get that baby high. There's no disadvantage to being 120 on phosphorus. There's no disadvantage. And see, just like potassium, see, we're fairly high on... Reserve phosphorus is really high too. Our potassium levels... If they would have gone up as we've gone down, would have meant that we're leaching all the potassium too deep. But see, they were pretty uniform distributors. Look at magnesium and calcium. The same all the way through. Look at our trace minerals. It's pretty hard to find. Anything on here, you need to buy. Why do you think we don't buy fertilizer? What would you sell me? Try to sell me something. What do I need? Okay?

Brookside guys, and he realized that I've been at this for so long, the objective... You know what we buy at our farm? Sulfur and boron. That's it. That's it. I don't need any more nutrients. We've fixed these soils over the last 25 years. We were a dairy farm, and now they're fixed. If your soils are not fixed like this, you probably still need to add some minerals. Otherwise, your objective is to get here and never have to buy minerals again. Do it for your grandkids, if nothing else.

I got trained with all brick. Brookside. 1975. I became a Brookside consultant. That farm I was showing you out here, that healthy soil, that's all he's ever done is changed minerals. Calcium was king. Calcium is the driver of all minerals. He just changed sources of minerals to see that kind of a soil. And yes, he's got a soil strip. Everything that BioAg recommended. See, Mark Bauer developed that SoilWarrior. Environmental Technology has got it, and he was a customer. He was a friend of Ray Rawson's and that group out here, but he had stones at Faribault, Minnesota. That's why that SoilWarrior got developed.

Yes. What would you put in that zone? You have the opportunity to really destroy things by putting salt and ammonias in that zone. There's some complaints about a farmer down in Illinois who knifed an anhydrous in the zone and put on 300 pounds of DAP or 60 on the zone. I wonder why his corneas went backwards. There's no wondering about this, folks. Why would you put all that salt, and all that ammonia, and all that nitrogen all that stuff right down in that zone? What would you put in that zone? All these soils got changed, but loose, crumbly ground, lots of earth, and nothing but changed minerals. He didn't grow cover crops. Now, he does because he wants to go up about 300 bushel corn, and he stalled out probably at that 250 on what he was doing. But you can get that far doing this.

Roots. You see, no-till was about minimal disturbance. What was strip-tilling all about? Putting a flower pot, and we're fine. It was to grow these huge roots. In the beginning, does anybody still do this? We placed nitrogen deep. What makes roots not grow? You see, what's the story? If you plant in dust in fall, your bins will bust. You see, because if there's no water, the plant grows bigger root systems.

Now, it's raining and fertilized... looking for nutrients. That's why you put all kinds of nutrients next to the seed, and it's got plenty of water. Why would it grow roots? Everything on this plant is lazy. Why would it grow a root system? It didn't have to. But see, we originally started out strip-tilling was to place that nitrogen deep, and forcing that plant to go after that nitrogen, and fill that full of root systems.

Now, here is the secret to tillage. Never tear middle zone up. A chisel plow, a moldboard plow. Anything that tears that middle zone means you're going to start all over again, and you better have a bloody good reason. I know a lot of guys plow and are very successful. Dairy farms, Amish guys, horse and buggy farmers. They don't plow at eight miles an hour. They don't plow six inches deep. They've got a team of horses pulling a plow about three inches deep going real slow, and they're flipping it over. And they got really healthy soil, but they don't do it every year, and they also got to see... You got to look at what we're doing, is that middle zone.

So once you got that soil filled for those root channels and earthworm channels, the next crop can now follow those root channels. But see, if you're a strip-till guy and you move your strips over and put it between the middle of the row, and then you go corn, beans, corn, beans, you're always going corn roots on top of corn roots and bean roots on top of bean roots. And now, you solve that problem, but that's another thing. But I want those channels in my soil, not only for breathing. So the most fertile spot on your farm is a half in circle around it. So perfect soil tests don't grow perfect crops. But look at that test from a strip-till farm. Folks, that's a root system.

I send the consultants out to the farm, and I say, "If you go to a farm and a guy says, 'I'm no-till,' you get your shovel out, and you start digging, and taking a look, and get your penetrometer. If the guy says, 'I'm a strip-till farm,' don't bother. He should have solved some of these problems." I went down to farming down here in Iowa, Southern Iowa and walking along this field. He was no-till for years and had thousands of hogs. I walked through the corn field and just popped them right in the ground. One way after the other. The roots are about that big and flat as a pumpkin.

Now, you got to see that farm today. Yield monitor broke. He was growing 125 bushel corn. Now, it's over 300, but he's got all this hog manure, and he has the calcium sulfide more, and his biological is completely changed, but that's the kind of root system... Once you got that, you don't tear that all up again. You can do anything you want to the top two or three inches. Notice that? But don't tear up middle zone. That's the secret to making this thing work.

So, soil testing, I won't spend a lot of time. The old soil test have been around for 75 years. Don't turn your back on it. What soil test is, is to tell you what you're working with. What type of soil do I have? What's your pH? What's your CEC? What's your organic metal? I need to know all that stuff. I can make some changes here. I need to know what I'm working with. The heavier the CEC, the more it's going to take to change my soil. If my pHs are low, I can address it. So this year is about soil correction. It has nothing to do with your crop. I don't care what crop you're growing. It doesn't make any difference. This is about taking care of that soil out here.

I work with the Savannahians too, and we're growing trees. We got hazelnuts to go one year earlier in production. I got vineyards that get... Wine. We get grapes one year ahead of time by fertilizing and getting it ready before you plant the bloody tree, fixing this first.

What's worse? P and K levels. I'm not saying you ought to ignore this. The university is not wrong. They're very critical nutrients, but I think after 40 years, you guys would've fixed them by now. Haven't you had enough yet? You still want to add more? I know, maybe you need to, but where are they? They're critical.

You see, our phosphorus levels on that test. You can't read them, but 175, 150, 180. This was a farm that was... The Neighbors had chickens. They dumped on there chicken manure for 40 years. Oh my gosh. The nutrient levels are off the charts, and you ought to see the soils. You ought see this farm perform. I don't care. The phosphorous level is going to be really high, but you can't do that with potassium because you'll interfere with magnesium, and magnesium is a major mineral. If iron is essential to you for hemoglobin, magnesium is essential for photosynthesis. And what suppresses magnesium uptake? Potassium. Potassium. So you got to be really careful. Don't overdo that potassium and reduce your magnesium because you're going to reduce photosynthesis.

What is calcium and magnesium? I don't know. 65%, 68%. Calcium-magnesium is at 20%. I don't mind that. I got to have enough magnesium. So when I add sulfur to get magnesium into the plant, you're going to have to use sulfur. It forms Epsom salts. I did my graduate work on sulfur, so I'm probably too educated on sulfur.

What about trace minerals? If you've got disease and insect problems, you better look at trace minerals. You better look at biology. You better look at plant diversity. You can solve that problem without buying insecticides, fungicides, or pesticides, or more biotechnology. That's a solvable problem, and that's what you got to really look... If you're going to survive the next generations of farming, either you got it all paid for, and you got a lot of money right now, and you're just farming it, or you got to figure out some of these things so you can survive. The consumers are going to demand it. Environmentalists are going to demand it at some point in time.

And then about uniformity. Where's the place to spend my dollar, the first dollar I ever going to spend? But a soil test doesn't tell you if the nutrients are available. A soil test doesn't tell if there's any biology, even as hard as a stage. The soil test could look good. It doesn't tell you that. It doesn't tell you if it's soft, and crumbly, and loose, and doesn't tell you if there's any earth or any life in it at all. It doesn't tell you that. It just tells you what minerals were extracted.

And the other thing you got to be really careful. You go into a cover crop this tall, take a soil symbol. Are you measuring what's in that cover crop? No. You're only getting a piece of the puzzle. Don't make soil tests in your religion. About every three to five years, do a soil test is often enough. Once you know where you're going, you head it into that direction best you can. If with the economics you have available, and then check it every three to five years to see how well you're doing.

A tissue test. A sap test... There's some issues with sap testing. I'm sorry. John Kemp used to work for me. I know all about sap testing. I did a lot of it myself. I spent a lot of money on this stuff. I spent $5,000 in sap testing. I don't know what to do with it. I spent thousands of dollars on Haney tests. I don't know what to do with those tests, but I know what to do with a regular test. I know what to do with the tissue test. I want to get it into my plant, and I want to get a uniformity of minerals into that plant. I got to monitor my plant. My soil test is my project. The tissue test is my report card.

So here's another interesting change that's going on out here. Years, and years, and years, we were taught what? Get your nutrient level, your soils really high, and then the roots will run in contact with those nutrients and suck them into the plant. You saw nutrient use efficiency sucks. Now, we got two methods to getting minerals into the plant. Isn't this exciting?

One is abiotic. That's the old days. In other words, you had to have a physical interaction. The root had to touch some mineral out here in the soil. That's why it would make sense to double your root systems. But see, and that one was pH-dependent. Why do you want a 6.5 pH in your soil? The only reason you want a 6.5 pH soil is because your soil is dead as a stage. If your soil is biologically active and you're not overdoing things to make it acidic, I'll guarantee your pHs will be 7 or 7.2.

We farm organic, and you cannot lower the pHs on our farm. It's impossible. The earthworms want it 7. But biologically, when the minerals are in a carbon biological cycle, now they can't leach. They can't tie up. They can't hook up with iron or aluminum. Your phosphorus can't get tied up. They can't get away from you. They're tied up into plants. They're tied up into biology. And that's this biotic movement going on right now, and that's how you want to deliver your minerals. 

Yes, they capture them when they digest... or bacteria live 20 minutes in the soil. They tie up things, and it gets going on. So that's why if you see this thing out here, you look at here, you see that right there? If you can dig, it worked out, and wash the dirt off, you're missing biology. That plant is extradited. Why would a plant give up half of its nitrogen that produces some photosynthesis to dump it down into the soil?

You see that symbiotic relationship? If you can go to your next root, the half inch circle around it, you want to really go home and test something. Spend a lot of time sending your oldest kid out there when he's nasty. Take a soil sample, half inch around each root going down through soil if there's a lot. That's your most fertile spot on your farm.

When you take a soil sample, you're doing a composite, mixing it all together. That's an average. It's like one foot in a bucket of ice water, one foot in a bottle of boiler water. On an average, you're comfortable. It's average. But that's why you want to leave those roots once they get in there and let the next root follow those things. There's a lot of things you can do to increase fertility without buying it, and that's just one of those things out here.

Now, this is the next one, James White. Plants. I have a lot of friends that are vegetarians. I said, "Oh, but the plant is not a vegetarian you're eating. The plant eats animals. Their little hair roots and growing new roots out here, doubling their root system. See what burns off hair roots? Get your fertilizer phosphate handbook out. DAP, Diammonium. Ammonia burns off hair roots off your crop, and you're putting it down next to the seed. Are you serious? You want those little hair roots out here on that plant, absorb bacteria. Take the bacteria in the plant.

Dr. James White, Rutgers University, takes the bacteria in the plant, digest the minerals, and takes the bacteria back out to grow a new shell and bring in more minerals. But you got to have hair roots. You got to have new... Filling your soil with fine hair roots on your plant is critical of this thing, and what do you do that destroys those roots? You have to be really careful about this. Those are there because they cannot be interfered. They are really fragile. Those little hair roots got to have nice soil to crawl through, and you can't let them be interfered without here.

This is on my farm. I had a field days it says on the 19th of August this year at my farm, south of Spring Green by Taliesin. You have a field day, you always got to compare yourself to your neighbor. Now, this is some pretty nice soil right here, but we also farmed the clay hills with stones and rocks. We farmed half our lands on the hill and half is on the bottom of the hill.

So anyway, I went and dug up a cone pine. You always got to go to your neighbors and compare it. And I'm annoyed by the fact that the genetic people did such a good job of breeding corn, the stupid stuff of getting year on them when it shouldn't. There shouldn't be any year at all on this stuff. It's growing on hard dead, compacted, poor soil. But the year was pretty good. So I dug up mine and compared them, and we were looking at the roots and things.

A week later, finally getting around to clean up after my field days, I went out there, and look what happened. You see, mine on the right side is still living, alive. That's called resilience under a drought, under stress periods. My son likes a drought. Our farm does not function. Droughts don't affect us. It just doesn't. We're on sandy loam soils, but look at that. Look at that soil. A week later, one dried out to bricks, and the other is still living, alive. That's resilience. That's called resilience. You can't account on rain every day. This year, you can get rain every day, and you'll have a bumper crop of corn that you can sell for $3 a bush. Aren't you excited?

This is Ray Archuleta's thing about... Carbon is the link. We got to get carbon. You got to have carbon-based fertilizers. This is Jason Fuller. He's a friend of mine. I gave him my compost turner. He's got carbon cycling. He's outside of Madison, Wisconsin. And see, we're making designer compost. I work with a guy. My book is in Spanish, by the way. It's also in Polish. I don't know why, but... because I've been to those countries, and they translated them into Spanish.

I was in Mexico just a little while ago. The guy makes 100,000 tons of compost, and they add minerals to the compost. See, adding minerals to that compost pile, that's what we did on those fruit trees. Now, the minerals are bound up to carbon, and so now we can... They had a huge gym. The guy in Mexico, he's got four facilities taking and making compost, and they pelletize the compost. They mix it with commercial fertilizer. I'd like to put the minerals in the compost. So he doesn't. He hasn't got the capability. 100,000 tons all over Mexico.

This is our farm. Now, we don't have a pretty good compost. We got a big old pale. We're a dairy farm. We got all leftover equipment sitting in the shed everywhere, big old pale loaders and all kinds of stuff around here. So you can see that pile right in front of you. See the yellow stuff on the end? It's called sulfur. I don't like elemental sulfur very well, but I don't need calcium. I don't need potassium. So I don't need potassium sulfate. I don't need calcium sulfate. I don't have any way to get sulfur anymore, and so I have to put elemental sulfur into my compost pockets. Sulfur is really critical. Sulfur makes complete proteins.

I did my graduate work on methionine. I did that whole thing about studying methionine in dairy cows. That was the first research ever done on feeding methionine to a dairy cow. Now, it's a standard practice about sulfur containing amino acids. And in order to make a complete protein, you have to have sulfur, and that's why sulfur is so critical. Otherwise, you got free nitrogen. When you got free nitrous, you're going to have insects and disease problems. Biting and chewing insects. Incomplete proteins. It's not complete proteins. That's why overdoing nitrogen and not heavy sulfur is setting yourself up for disease and insects.

So anyway, that's most of our farm. We put a ton of compost per acre. Now, we sell all our corn to a poultry operation, and they live 10 miles from our farm, and we get all the manure back. We used to have a dairy hair... We bale up the hay from the pastures. People laugh at us. We got to bat way more. We bat way more down, rake it up, bail it up, and put it as the base of our compost, and put the chicken over on top of it, and we add sulfur and more.

Now, the pile to the right, you can see some yellow-white stuff. I got a few fields and some land we took on just recently that needs a little more P and K. So I get rock phosphate. The cheapest source of delivering phosphorus to your farmer is rock phosphate. Why don't you buy it? Because insoluble. Make it soluble. Put some humates with it. Put it in the compost pile. Get a biological active soil. Rock phosphates is still $300, $400 a ton or whatever they are. They're still the cheapest source of phosphorus. There's some really good sources out west. And so we got a rock phosphate, and I got sunflower ash from the Dakotas because we're organic. So we're going to add a little P and K to that. 50 pounds of rock phosphate per acre and 100 pounds of potassium. That sunflower ash, which has also got some phosphorous, and it's 34% potassium.

So now that's in a pile, so we'll turn this, and turn this, and turn this. We're going to start turning compost. We'll start turning it next week because we're done with the rye now, and then we'll add the minerals later on. And then we'll grew it up for about a month, and then we spread them out onto our fields. We're going to make one trip. We got a big RTX spreader. We can spread a ton to the acre. We can spread a thousand pounds an acre. Holds a semi load of compost. We farm in a 45-mile circle, so I want my minerals in a carbon biological cycle.

Now, this one here is another interesting one. This is out in Colorado. You see, you got to realize that yellow plants in the background is mustard. Biofumigants. That mustard plant. I took the yellow flowers. See, yellow flowers. I was in Australia at a conference, and this guy said to me, "The color of the flour determines your soil fertility. If it's a yellow floor like dandelions, it means the dandelions are sucking up more calcium because your salt needs more calcium availability. That's why you got so many dandelions. If you have high levels of calcium, you won't have dandelions." I went, "Okay. You can get a thick level of alfalfa. We don't have dandelions on our farm."

But anyway, so I went through this mustard. It's a biofumigant. This is light soil in center of Colorado, and then I took a soil test. I took tissue tests of those yellow mustard. Look at the sulfur. It's a three-to-one, nitrogen to sulfur. You want to be a 10 or 12 to one in your plant, in your plant. That's a three-to-one. That plant sucked up all that sulfur on low sulfur soils with no sulfur added, and that's why you have a diversity of plants. It's a biofumigant just like your tiller radish is a biofumigant. That's why they stink like hell when they rot because they got all this sulfuric acid thing going on.

But look at the phosphorus level. That's double normal. Hay. Look at calcium levels. They're really high. Magnesium is really low, but potassiums are. You can't have both high magnesium and high potassium in the same plant. You can't. You can't have both. You have one or the other, or a balance. You put a lot of potassium, you're going to suppress magnesium, you're going to suppress photosynthesis.

So anyway, now, like I said, that's not on the soil test. That's where you want your minerals. As that plant breaks down, there's one more thing you got to add to cover crops. I'm a dairy nutrition guy, and what word do we use? Digestibility. How fast does it break down? "Oh, I got my rye. They're tall. Here, my corn never turned out, never got from beyond." Yep. Well, it's still trying to digest down, and sucked up all your nutrients, and robbed all your nitrogen.

Manage digestibility of your cover crops. As a dairy people, we don't let our hay all head out. I was at a meeting at Pennsylvania at the university, and they had hairy vetch in there, and they said, "This is the highest level of nitrogen credits were ever grown, and the corn was yellow." And they had some red clover. He said, "It was only this tall. That corn is bright green." And I said, "Uh, digestibility." You don't take a dairy cow and feed them headed out alfalfa. It might have the most nitrogen pounds per acre, but it's undigestible. You got to manage your cover crops like you're feeding the cow.

How fast you want to break it down? If you're going to grow soybeans, you can let rye get bigger. You don't need to add nutrients. You want to tie up something until you get more nodulation pops. But on corn, corn is like feeding cow giving 100 pounds of milk. You better make sure that ration is hot. You better give it high-soluble nutrients, and you have something that breaks down. So you got to manage digestibility if you're going to have success out here just like oats.

Oats killed more cows than the feed we ever fed them. Not the grain, the forage. I'm a dairy nutrition guy. As farmers got better with managing nutrients, they put manure out there, and plant oats, and feed it for dry cow feed. Oh, toes are up in the air. They're dead. It sucks up potassium and nitrogen like it's coming through a straw. Why do you think grandpa grew it on low-fertility ground?

So if you're in the springtime, see, what you got to get out of your head is the fact you don't need to grow 120 bushel... 120-day corn to get 250 bushel corn. You can do it on 85 days, 75-day corn. 240 bushel corn and 78-day corn on our farm in Wisconsin. That's a Beck's Hybrid. It's organic. One I got from Brandon. But you see, plant in the springtime now. If you got manure or something that nutrients have, plant oats. On the left-hand side, that was rye planted in the fall. That was oats planted in the spring. I got a farm in Northeast Iowa over here by Farley, and they planted oats and peas this spring the first week in March.

They planted corn a little bit later. They still got it done like in the first week in May and let the peas and oats get about a foot tall. And then they went and planted green and sprayed it. And he said, "Oh my gosh." He said, "Our weed control was better. Our soils were... But peas. Why not peas and oats? They grow in cold, wet soils." So if you want to start cover crop, plant a week later. Pick a field and say, "I'm going to drop my day-length corn by 10 days and plant 10 days later, plant the first week in May, and I'm going to plant oats and peas first thing in the spring, and oats is going to suck up all the solid nutrients."

Now, at that stage, it's highly digestible, but you don't want it tie up for corn. You want it to slowly break down. And so that's why that guy in Southeastern Minnesota plants rye in front of his corn and beans, but never lets the rye get taller than a foot. Plants that rye in October, plants this corn in April, shorter-day corn. So oats is really good at capturing those nutrients. Now, we got them tied up, can't leave, can't erode, can't get away, and we're photosynthesizing, and we're giving soluble nutrients in a carbon biological cycle.

This is our farm. This year, rain, and rain, and rain, and we got a new variety of rye came out of Pol- That's why the book is in Polish, Danko Rye. It's this tall. We had the combine head as high as it would go combining our rye because the clover is this tall. I got sweet clover, and nobody wants to plant sweet clover, but sweet clover has got a [inaudible 00:56:37]. I dug down roots that are two and a half feet deep. I don't want to pull the root plant anymore. I want to get those roots down in the ground.

And so this is a year ago. You can see we just combined the tops of the rye off. Then, we batwing mowed. It's unbelievable, this stuff. So we batwing mowed it now. We'll batwing mow it again in September, and then we'll let it go. It'll go into winter. It'll be this tall going into winter. Next spring, when it gets this tall, we take it down because I got to have a highly succuble, digestible clover in front of corn if I want to grow a high building corn without fertilizer, with no fertilizer.

I tested these two crops. This is what you looked at. See that? I do four. We get that clover. I buy expensive clover. We buy that freedom red clover. We buy a white clover. We do sweet clover. Sweet cover never comes back. The red clover dominates. But I got a high volume red clover out here, and see, the... It's just two cups. The first growth right under the combine, and then the second growth in September came back, and so that's 186 units a hand. 

Our organic farm, just measuring what's above ground, not counting nodules, not counting below ground, we end up with 400 units a night and dumped that on our land on an organic farm from cover crops. You want to take it by economics? I shared this with farmers. We make money every other year. Our goal is to average 200 bushel corn on marginal soils in Southwestern Wisconsin, certified organic. And my son farming alone on all those acres. And one year is rye. Half the farm is rye, and half the farm is corn, and half of it is soil building.

Look at that. We got 95 pounds of phosphorus. 200 pounds of potash. That's 300 pounds of... Oh, 60, 350 pounds. Oh, see? All in just two. I got two more coming yet. So we end up with over 900 pounds of nutrients, a thousand pounds of sugar just measured in my cover crop. All those minerals in that cover crop. So as they break down for the next crop, you see why we don't buy fertilizer? See what cover crops are supposed to do for you?

Now, how do you do it on your farm? What if ever one of you said, "I'm going to take a year off and just year or year [inaudible 00:58:25]?" We might not have a surplus of corn. You might get paid more. If you ever did what I did, we'd be short of grain. We'd get paid. Isn't this exciting? Oh, I know you won't do it.

Here's another one. I'm running out of time. Humates. Humates. We get them out of North Dakota, mined humates. They got a 3, 4 pH. When you're low on pH, what does that mean? You're missing minerals. What minerals? So they're very acidic. And so when you add something to them, they attach to that humate. We use dry humates mixed with minerals. However, we use them in our organic calcium source. We use them down in our fertilizers for our tracement of fertilizers. We put humates because we want to have something to attach those minerals to, and low pH humates is a fairly nice way to use oxidized leonardite. It's a carbon source. It works quite well.

And I got just a couple more left. The other thing is, as an organic farmer, if you said, "You could have one tool conventionally," what tool would I take? Ammonium sulfate. I like ammonium sulfate. I want brown ammonium sulfate. There's all kind. This is Midwest Lab's research. That's not mine. According to them, if I was going to put something down that row, it didn't count on biology, and having a carbon mix with my ammonium sulfate, ammonium sulfate increases the uptake of all those other minerals.

If you're trying to get more nutrient efficiency, how about ammonium sulfate down that zone? We would put a little bit more, 100 pounds ammonium sulfate down on our zone and get more nutrient uptake. You're trying to get more nutrient efficiency. You're trying to develop a biological system. And this here might be midway in between. I don't know if this would interfere with much. 100 pounds of ammonium sulfate is only 20-some pounds of nitrogen. It's not going to destroy your farm. It's 20 pounds of sulfur. You need at least 20 every year anyway. That'd be a good way to get some 20 pounds of sulfur. I don't really mind 200 pounds of ammonium sulfate.

So what makes your fertilizer different? Have the pH of your fertilizer low, or have it biological with a lot of carbon in it. Have your soil pH can be neutral. You don't have to have to get your soil acid around each little BB fertilizer. That's why we use MAP instead of DAP. MAP has got a low pH, and DAP has got a high pH. Around each little BB, you hold your minerals, hold in there longer.

I don't want them all soluble. I want to balance soluble to soil release. I want to buffer those fertilizers. That's why with compost, with humates, with carbon, with the digested fertilizer on from anaerobic digest, something that buffers out those nutrients. So they're not just soluble nutrients dumped out there, because in nature, that never happens. I want to have a balance of all nutrients. I want to trace them with all that. Hey, it better be food for biology. If it's going to destroy my biology, it's not fertilizer, and I better have a low salt index. That's what you got to look at on fertilizer.

So your job. Balance your minerals. Maximize photosynthesis. Make sure you get enough magnesium uptake. Make sure you got enough plants. Make sure you got things photosynthesizing year-round. Get as many plants photosynthesizing as you possibly can. Maximize photosynthesis. Manage air and water. That's why I'm not big on no-till. Once you go, "I'm going to be a no-till farmer come hell or high water," a lot of times, you're in the high water and hell both. 

I said, "Why would you do that to yourself? Why would you do that to yourself? You got a job to do. If you're out there compacting in the mud this fall at harvest, you better do something about it." One thing I've been on really good no-till guys, they drive on top of the road they just harvested. If you're driving on top of those cornstalks this year, at least you're not driving in between the road where there's no roots or no nothing and sinking in this deep for next year's strip-till.

Manage air and water. Manage crop residue, decomposition. Feed and improve soil biology. That's your jobs. Figure out how to do these, and do them really well. And strip-till gives you an advantage to do them really well. You got a tool out here that other people don't have and haven't caught onto yet. You can achieve these goals a lot easier, strip-till, than you can.

I don't think you can achieve them no-till, but you can call, "Oh, go to your... I'm a no-till. I'm a strip-till guy. I'm a no-till guy." I saw a conservation lady who lives next to our farm, and we've gone round, and round, and round because I'm organic, and I do tillage. I told her we had a heavy rain a year ago that came through graders and dug the mud out of the row on my neighbor's conventional farm, and I got pictures of no-till farms and soybeans. Just rivers running down through the field and gullies through the field.

And I said to her... She was always complaining. I said, "Until I see your footprints on my farm and you take a picture of the gullies from erosion on my farm, you have no right to say what I do." Go to Iowa County and ask her about what soil conservation is all about. I got her to back off on no-till as I did. I did at University of Wisconsin. I got them to back off on no-till and say, "Let's do the job. Let's do the job. Don't do a stupid practice where I'm going to till and not till. It's your decision. Why would you till if you don't have to? But you better till if you have to."

And my last slide. Live like you're going to die tomorrow. I'm 80 years old. I could die tomorrow. You never know. That's how I'm going to live. But farm like you're going to live forever because someone else is going to take it over. That's the fun in farming. So thank you very much. I hope I gave you some things to talk about.

Wow, what a presentation from Gary Zimmer there. Thanks so much for tuning into the Strip-Till Farmer Podcast. Thanks again to our sponsor as always, Yetter Farm Equipment, for making this podcast series possible. Head to striptillfarmer.com to check out some of our previous podcast episodes. And hey, head to striptillconference.com if you want more information on this year's Strip-Till Conference in Springfield, Illinois for the first time ever. We're hard at work putting together the program. Really looking forward to it. My name is Noah Newman. Hope you have a great day. See you next time.