Episode 115: Covering Ground: How Cover Crops Can Change Your Farm with Brian Magarin

Hi friends. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. This is John and before we dive in, I want to let you know that you have until Friday at midnight to invest in our public crowdfunding campaign at We Funder where we are raising investment funding. You can join over 500 people who have invested some over $2 million in AEA at this point, so want to invite you to participate in that if you are so inclined. It's going to be a lot of fun here at AEA the next couple of years and we want to welcome our farming community to be a part of that. So thank you all to you who've invested so far. I've been looking forward to the conversation today for quite some time. I've met Brian McGarren a couple times at a couple of different conferences. We had several very interesting conversations and I get asked the question quite regularly about how is it possible for us to farm without Roundup? How is it possible for us to farm without glyphosate? And there is this kind of, this perception that if we want to grow crops on a broad acre, commercial scale, then doing so without Roundup while maintaining yields is just a non starter. And I don't believe that that's the case. And Brian is one of the examples for why I believe that to not be the case. But I'll let you hear directly from the man himself. Brian, thank you for being here and for agreeing to share your experiences. Tell us a little bit about the context of your operation and your journey, what you've been working on and where you are now.

Thanks for having me, John. I appreciate the opportunity here. I've been Farming for about 20, I guess 24, 25 years now. Started out in the conventional world, moved over into the organics about 12, 13 years ago now, and then slowly been moving into the regenerative side more and more. Just seeing the problems that we're using with conventional agriculture and the chemistry and that sort of stuff, it seems like we're just putting more and more and more on our fields and that's not a good thing. So with the, with the organic side and, well, I guess kind of started in the non GMO side first, which led into the organic kind of the got the ball rolling and it just never stopped. So. But now I have my own operation, was running about 3,000 acres of organics and now I kind of transitioned into a different role managing farm for Belltown Farms here in south central Nebraska. So we're managing about, about 9,000 acres underneath this operation and then still Doing some on my own on the side.

And for those of our listeners not familiar with that region and context, what does that mean from a rainfall and soil and management perspective? And what types of crops are you farming?

Most of what we're farming is corn and soybeans is mostly common to the area. Our rotations, corn, soybeans, wheat and alfalfa, as in the rotations, what we do, we've got also a bunch of cereal grains that we grow for cover crops and that sort of stuff. And then obviously using covers in between every all of our conventional crops. Rainfall, that's a moving target for us. The National Weather Service actually was in contact with them last fall, and they told us that our area here in southwest Adams county was actually as dry as what it's been in the 1930s in the last recent years. So 2000, I believe it was 2019 or 2020, we received 47 inches of rain throughout the growing season.

Wow.

And I don't think we've received 10 inches since then. Wow. We've had the. What you would call the extremes from one end to the other, that's for sure.

And that pattern is becoming. Or that none pattern is increasingly becoming a pattern across many parts of North Americ, isn't it?

Oh, absolutely. If it wasn't for irrigation in our area right here, it would be a desert. So irrigation is saving us and keeping everything green and keeping everything afloat in our area, that's for sure.

Yeah. So what did the. As you started going through the transition of first looking at non GM crops and then into organics, organic certification, how did your cultural management practices evolved? And I think one of the pieces that you've become very well known for is your effective weed control. What does, what does that system look like for you today?

Well, today it's a lot of COVID crops. That's what we rely on for most of our weed control. I always say that every year I shoot for 100% no till now. Obviously, in the management role that I'm in right now, it's a little bit different. But on my personal farm, that's what we've always shot for, is 100% no till or organic no till every year. And then we let Mother Nature determine what percentage that's actually going to be. If she helps us out and we get some timely rains and the covers grow as they should, then we might be 100% no till that year and use the regenerative practices of roller crimping and those types of. Those types of practices. But then on Some years where, you know, we have a real late and cool season, we still have to play the, you know, the insurance game in this world for crop insurance. So we're kind of pushed up against those planting dates, which is always an issue. And sometimes we have to go back to more conventional, you know, conventional ways or conventional tillage in order to get things up and going. So it really just depends on the year going back. I guess our, the. The big push for us is when I started in conventional farming using chemicals and that sort of stuff, I was coming out of alfalfa, so I was used to not using any, or using much of any fertilizers or chemistries because the alfalfa kept the ground covered 100% of the time. And then when the dairy crunch came in, that kind of pushed the alfalfa industry out of our area, just because all the dairies went, you know, went under or were joined and had multiple, you know, multiple dairies become one big dairy instead of all the little dairies. So that became an issue for us, and that kind of pushed us into the conventional world. I started out with no till and, you know, I guess no till in our area means you just don't till. It doesn't mean you put cover crop. It doesn't mean anything else. It's just you, you plant, you spray and you harvest. And our issue is we don't get enough wintertime moisture to deteriorate that crop residue that's out there. And so it just kept more. We'd have places that we'd have drifts of, you know, 8 to 10, 14 inches of crop residue left over from corn crops. And we tried strip till. We went from no till to strip till to try to do that. Well, then all that did was just pile it up into bigger piles in between the ropes. Then when the wind would blow like it usually does here In Nebraska, usually 20 plus mile an hour is a decent breeze for us, you know, or a slight breeze, I guess, is the way I should say would. We'd get everything pushed out of the way with the strip till machine. Well, then, you know, by the time we come back a few days later or, you know, a couple weeks later with the planter, it would just blow it, everything back shut. And so we'd have to push it back out of the way again. Well, if the wind would blow before the corn came up, now our corn had to come through, you know, 8 to 10 inches of residue, and we were just losing stands, and it was just a mess. One thing after another. After that we switched into actually completely full tillage. We went back in with the ripper, open ground up. We had tremendous ground compaction. We had some farms that were no till for I would say close to 15 years. And when we went through them with a ripper, we couldn't hardly pull, you know, the ground, the compaction was terrible on them just because there was no living roots. It was just, you know, corn crop, soybean crop, corn crop, soybean crop. It wasn't actually true what I would call true, no till. But after that, once we got into the tillage, well then when we got into the tillage we realized, hey, we don't need all the chemistries because we were removing our pre emerged chemistry with a tillage pass. It was actually saving us money and it was actually increasing yields. But then we were working with a fertility company out of eastern Iowa and their big push was the non GMO crops and using non GMOs and getting away from fungicides and getting away from pesticides and all the stuff that we were spraying every year. That's really what kind of got the ball rolling. And that was about 2009 for us. We were only really into the heavy chemistry for about two to three years. But then once we got into that, we started working with higher fertility rates and playing more in the fertility side to see if we could increase yields. But in the back of my mind it was always, well, what is the baseline? That's always an issue of where is ground zero? If we don't do anything, where do we end up at? Is zero, zero, you know, is that what it is? Or is zero a hundred bushel? You know, nobody knows unless you actually do it. So we did some testing of, with some, excuse me, with some narrow rows and high populations, high fertility. And then what we were doing, just run of the mill stuff of 2000, you know, early 2010era of, you know, normal crops and fertility rates. And then we started cutting back 50%, you know, 75% cut rates. And the crazy thing was is when you looked at the yields, of course the yields fell off. But when you started looking at the ROI of it, what you were putting in versus what you were getting out, the less we raised, the more money we made. I mean it was, it was the exact opposite of what everybody, every co op around and what everyone said was, was going to happen is what was happening. And you know, at the end of the day, the books is what tells the story. The, you know, sure, I can't go to the coffee shop and brag that I'm raising 350 bushel corn. But I can tell you that I have the most profitable acres. You know, I can tell you what acres on my farm are the most profitable. Excuse me. Because of, because of that. Sorry. I've been fighting the cold for the last couple of weeks, so I hope.

You get better soon. No need to apologize. So what, what did you, what did you discover your baseline to be when you backed off your fertilizer application rates by 75% or by 50%? Did you try any? At zero? What was your baseline?

Well, at zero, we were dropping. Normal for us is around, I would say, 200 pounds of nitrogen, you know, give or take. You could you get plus or minus 20 pounds. We could drop down to 150 pounds of nitrogen on soybean stubble and still raise a, you know, 220, 230 bushel crop. That was pretty common for us. But you know, we started cutting back. I cut back to a hundred book or 100 pounds. I vanished. And honestly, the first year or so we didn't see hardly any pull, you know, any drawback. We cut all the way back to zero on some of it and started working with biologicals and, you know, we seen that flip, you know, of yields where we did absolutely nothing. We were shooting, oh, I'd say in that 100 bushel range, 110 bushel range with zero inputs, you know, as far as the fertility wise. But we, you know, we kind of based some of that off of residual what we had for nitrogen left in the soil, you know, just depleting that nitrogen down. But, you know, when we started switching into organics, that's really kind of what we seen. You know, we started to add manures and that sort of stuff. But it seemed like everything we added, we were always fighting the new weed, you know, where it's like, well, we would add manure. Well, then we'd start fighting pigweeds and we start fighting this or we start fighting that. Well, then we get those under control and then the next weed would come along of sunflowers or waterhemper. I mean, it would just seem like was one right after another that we were fighting and that we were working with COVID crops at that time. And really I can't say that we went to complete zero because we started putting the COVID crops in to work, you know, to start to counteract the adverse effects that we were seeing. And the COVID crops started changing the soil and started making things better. So, you know, to say that we actually went all the way to zero. I don't know if I actually got there. We went the other way. I mean, we went as high as 300 pounds of nitrogen, 80,000 seeds per acre, you know, high fertility, high population corn, and grew some tremendous yields. I mean, yields that I guarantee you probably never see again in this area. You know, it's. It's a great thing when the combine bins running over and you're not even to the pivot point yet, you know, and normally you're going all the way through the field, so. And I've got a couple of guys that I don't know if they'll ever listen to podcasts or not, but they might know and they could back me up on that. It was an amazing thing to see. But at the end of the day, there wasn't any more money in that, you know, high population, high fertility corn than what we've seen in, you know, in the 50% range of fertility. And now what we're seeing with organics and the regenerative and, and working on that side of stuff, it's the, you know, the ROI is what matters. It doesn't. Bushels per acre don't pay bills.

Yeah. So you made a comment a bit ago when you were talking about COVID crops that your. The COVID crops started changing their soils and of course, they start contributing nutrient release into the system. And that's why you never got to zero. One of the conversations that you and I were group conversations that you and I were participating in at a conference this last winter. You made a comment that really caught my ears. You said something to the effect of, I make money with my cover crops and I lose money if my cover crops don't do well. I might be paraphrasing a little bit here. Can you elaborate on that? What were you describing?

Well, and in the. In our area for organics is what I was really going into. Our biggest issue is fertility. We're a long ways away from the chicken barns. We got a lot of cattle manure in our area, but cattle manure is not nitrogen. I mean, it's. It's, you know, you got your fossil, you got everything else in there, but you don't have true n, which is, you know, something that we. That we do require or is needed in, in a way, so our cover crops can grow as much fertility as what we can go out and buy. And we've used vetch in the last few years, six, seven years now. We've used vetch and alfalfa and clovers. And that sort of stuff, legumes. And we've raised 200, you know, 200, 210, 215 pounds of nitrogen and had, you know, cover crops that looked 5, 6 foot tall when we were planting into them. Actually, my screensaver on the other computer here is one of them that we're dragging. And you can't even see the planter bar behind the tractor because it's being encompassed by the COVID crop that we're planting into. And you know, on those years when we had that plentiful cover crop, that diverse cover crop out there, that produced everything for us and we didn't have to have all the logistics of bringing in that fertility from, you know, hundreds of miles away in our case.

So when you say that produced everything for you, obviously you had the quantity of nitrogen that was needed there in the COVID crop residue. But what does the release curve of that look like? Did the COVID crop residue release nitrogen in time for the COVID crop? Was, was there enough for the COVID or, excuse me, for the crop? Was there enough for the corn crop throughout its entire lifetime? And what did that translate to in terms of actual yields?

What we seen was I wish we had a pop up, just something right away because we planted in and we did some studies a couple of years in a row, about three years in a row of planting in or planting green prior to it being roller crimped and then planting in after it was roller crimped. When we roller crimped prior to planting, it released obviously sooner. And we've seen the corn seem to do better. But as far as ease of planting into and I would say longevity of the COVID crop was actually better. We got a better kill where we waited about four to five days after we planted before we actually roller crimped. That seemed to work better because it. What we've seen and especially in vetch and the alfalfa that we've messed in the. It's like when you drive through with the planter, it's like it stresses the crop, it stresses that cover crop and it actually causes that crop to flower more. Well, when it flowers, it's reproductive. When you know it's producing nodules at that time. And it seems like it produces more when you can stress it right at that right stage or that last stage of its life.

That makes sense.

And then when you roller crimp it, it actually kills better on the vet side because it's, it's more, you know, it's further along in its maturity state and you have more flowers out there and it crimps a lot easier. And as far as yield, I mean, our best yields, we've had, oh, 5,000, 5,000, 5,500 pound popcorn on what I would call zero input. Zero. The only input was that vetch. Now we've also had 1500-2000 pound crops on that where the vetch just wasn't as good. And we tried it, we just didn't have enough cover and we had to end up going back in and, you know, supplementing that fertility. So it's not perfect, but if you have the opportunity to grow it, oh my goodness, it will, it will absolutely produce. I would say the most important thing to this, and if you talk to anyone that's ever grown cover crops, it's that fall. It's the work the previous fall. You've got to get it in in time. If you want to double crop soybeans behind wheat, that doesn't work. You know, this is a crop that needs to go in behind wheat or behind a cereal. It needs to go in first part of September, late August, first September. It needs to go in and it needs to get a good root and get established because that will produce every time. Every single year that we've done that. We've had tremendous luck with it. Now, the years that we've pushed that if you have a wet spring, but a warm wet spring, you can get by with pushing it a little bit later just because that crop comes out of dormancy earlier. But it just seems like if you push that into first part of October, when you're planting those clovers and that vetch, by the time they come out of dormancy in our area, it's too late. They just don't have enough time. And the weeds, the weeds are just as, you know, just as aggressive as what the COVID crop is. And it just doesn't seem like it works. But when you do your due diligence and you make sure that you do it correctly, so far we've, it's been success after success, but it's where we push that envelope. That's where we've had our, what I wouldn't call a failure, but I'd call an unsuccessful attempt. It's where we push that envelope and, oh, it's still warm this fall, we'll be okay. But we, you know, when you don't have growing degrees, you just don't have growing degrees.

Yep. You know, when you mention the possible benefits of a row starter, you know, there is a company that makes organic and regenerative Row starters that could give you a nice pop up.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, you know, I mentioned that because I find it interesting. I spoke at a conference in Saskatchewan this last winter and out of 150 people, six of them had not listened to the podcast and most of them did not know that a company was associated with the podcast. Which is. On one hand it's a good thing because I'm not here to be an infomercial, but to really to share and to help share other people's stories. But on the other hand, it was an intriguing dynamic as well. I've perhaps done too good of a job.

Well, I'd say you have done a good job in that aspect.

So this whole cover crop dynamic, needing to get it established early, planted early, and then get it really taking off aggressively in the spring. Earlier in the conversation, you mentioned that in the years when the COVID crop doesn't work so well is when you bump up against the required planting dates because the COVID crop isn't large enough yet and hasn't matured yet to a point where it's in effective weed control and. Or where it's providing the quantity of fertility that you need. Tell us a little bit more about that dynamic and what is the. Yeah, what are the drivers in those determining those planting dates and is there any opportunity to get flexibility there in the future?

I hope there is. I've been in touch with people at the RMA Federal Crop. I've spoke with all the local insurance companies and pushed as much as I can push. And, and I think it's, you know, some of the, some of them that you talk to, they say, well, just get a written agreement. Well, it's hard to get a written agreement, you know, in every single case, because some insurance agents will push a lot harder to help you. And some just, you know, they can easily sell thousands of acres of crop insurance. So they don't care, you know, to help you out. I think it's going to have to be a push, you know, from the regenerative side of things. Maybe some politicians, I'm not for sure where that's going to come from. But, you know, I think a lot of us that, you know, met at these conferences the last few years that are doing the same style of farming with roller crimping and that which is approved practice by the insurance industry. But I think there's just a misunderstanding on their part that it can be done by the calendar, not by the crop condition. And it's the crop condition that determines when those dates are and what I've seen is we've planted corn, you know, uninsurable corn into the 15th to 20th of June, you know, thinking, well, this is going to be a, you know, we're not going to make this work. It's. It's past our June 5th is our late planting date. That's our cutoff. And we planted, you know, like say the 15th to the 20th, and have had no yield loss comparison to stuff that went in in May. Just because you're growing degree days, you know, you're hitting the peak of the growing degree that corn goes in the ground, the ground 65, almost 70 degrees, it comes up and, you know, in a matter of a couple of days, some of it. I swear it comes up in hours.

I have. I have seen corn emerge in less than 24 hours.

Yeah, it's in. Especially when you're dealing with COVID crops. The summer that I talked about that we had 47 inches of rain, we actually would not have been able to plant. We probably would have had failed acres that year had it not been all in cover crop because we were planting into green cover crop that was five foot tall. And we actually planted. And one of my neighbors, one of the conferences we were at, he was actually riding with me. And while we were planting, we received an inch of rain while we planted a quarter of corn. And that corn was some of the best corn that we had. And it was raining as if we were running the windshield wipers on high to keep it going. And we had no buildup of mud on the planter. Every now and then we'd plug the closing wheels, but that was a design flaw by yours truly. I had built the closing wheels myself and I didn't allow enough area. And we were. And the problem was, is we were actually picking up turnips and radishes and. And it was plugging the closing winds. It wasn't the COVID crop and it wasn't the muddy conditions. It was actually that. But the planter was clean. And Brian can back me up on that when we get out and dig it out. And the only reason why we had any mud on our hands is because the closing wheels plugged up. So it was kind of crazy.

That's a remarkable anecdote to be able to continue planting in the rain.

Yeah, and we just floated and the tractor never got muddy. It was. It was the craziest thing he ever seen. My agronomist was there that day and seen what we were doing. And we sent him a couple of pictures and photos and made him Drive over there. And he says it's gonna turn, you know, like concrete. It's gonna, you know, everybody said that's gonna be the worst stand of corn you're ever gonna see. And ended it. Ended up being one of our best. Because when we laid that cover crop, because we were planting into standing cover crop, then we roller crimped it about two days later so that, you know, the COVID crop is what we were floating on. There was probably three inches of COVID crop underneath of us the entire time we were planting. And you know, you can't pack soil that has green living plants on it.

And that has roots in it, but.

It'S got living roots. It's going to open that soil right back up.

Yeah, it's the roots in the soil that are equally or maybe more important than the residue that's on the soil surface.

Yeah, Yep. The residue on the soil allowed us to plant into the muddy conditions.

Right.

The roots underneath the soil allowed us to not have the compaction. And I think when we got all said and done that time, I think we were dropping 36, 37,000 seeds per acre. And the final plant, we were like 35,000 final plant. I mean, it was just as good, if not better than the stuff that we were planting into bare dirt, you know, a week or week, week and a half, two weeks earlier. So it was kind of one of those. We're doing the exact opposite of what everyone said. We're going to have concrete and we had the most mellow soil you've ever seen. It was absolutely, it was absolutely beautiful. Craziest thing we ever seen. We're, Brian and I were sitting in the cab together and we were both laughing the entire time we were doing it because, like, how many rules and how many old farmers will be turning over in their grave thinking about what we're doing right now?

Yeah. So as when you, when you think, Brian, about the system of farming that you started in versus the system of farming that you're in now and how like there is. You've lived, you've lived the transition. But if you were to take those two separate realities and just look at them without looking at the transition, it would appear as if, though there is no bridge between the two. Like they're on two completely opposite planets. And I think this is a struggle for many people who would desire to change, who desire to go through the transition, but they look at the very radically 180 degree difference system that people like you are implementing, and they say, how do I get there from here? And I'd love to get your thoughts on that. What does the process, what is the. An effective process look like? How do you get there from where you are?

It's. It's a struggle because the, the first thing you have to overcome is. Is the mind, you know, the. What you have in your head and what you think you know about farming and you know, what everyone has taught you and your neighbors do and all that stuff. That's. That's the hardest part to get over or to under know to. What's the word am I looking for to understand that, you know, hey, there is a different way. And when something isn't going quite right, that doesn't mean just because you think it's not right doesn't mean that it's not right because you don't know what the other side of this looks like in two weeks from now. And a lot of it I'd say that I've learned over the years is there's things that I thought were complete failures that ended up being the best scenario I've ever come up with. But when I looked at it from the conventional farming, I thought, wow, there's no way this could work. You know, in every book written by the universities, by whoever, it would never work. You know, this is not farming. This should never work. And then it does, and it leaves you scratching your head going, okay, why did this work? How did this work? And what can I do to mimic this again? And how can we test this to make sure that it wasn't a phenomenon or something like that, that it was actual repeatable series of events or scenario?

What are some examples of some of those instances where you thought it was a complete failure or would appear that it has no chance of being successful, and it turned out to be vetch.

The very first year that I planted vetch, I'd actually. Well, I shouldn't say first year. It was the third year that I planted vetch. Trying to roller Crimp started in 2017, I think it was, is when we started to try to roller crimp. 17 or 18, I can't remember, but we tried to roller crimp. And the 15th of May, I went out and looked this stuff and I said, there's no way, absolutely no way. And we just did it under because the vetch was 10 inches tall, the weeds were there, and it's like, oh, this is gonna be a disaster. So we distood it under. The next year I tried it again and same thing, 20th of May, we went out there and Looked at it, it's like, this is a loss. It's not gonna work. We disted it under, you know, and conventional farmed it organically. Conventional farm, conventional tillage, I should say.

I already know. I already know. I already know where this story is going because I grew up with my dad growing veg. And it's remarkable what happens after the 20th of May.

Yeah. In the third year, the 20th of May, we went out and looked at it and said, it's a loss. It's a complete loss. And the only reason why I didn't get to the field was because I had to unhook the scraper to hook up to the disc. And the disc had a bearing out on the wheel. So I went and I had to get parts. I got parts. I got everything put together. And when I got everything put together, it rained. We got an inch and a half of rain and we couldn't come back till about the 26th of May. Between the 20th and 26th of May, that stuff went from a foot tall to three foot tall. And we looked at it and my agronomist and I sat there and like, I think we need to give it another week. And we left until the 1st of June. And I'm telling you what I did not understand vetch. I did not understand that way of farming. It was a complete, complete shock. And now I say I don't even look at the fields of vetch. If I think I'm going to try to roller crimp it. I don't even want to look at that field till the 25th to, you know, 28th of May. That's when I need to make my determination. But when you're talking about the insurance side, I mean, that don't leave much room for, you know, that, that window, you're. You're 10 days from late planning. June, I think. June. June or May 25, I think is our late planting date. Then you have 10 days of late planting, or in that ballpark, at least. But yeah, I mean, you're pushing right up against there. But, man, when you wait, holy cow. That. That vetch took over. We had, you know, I would say, you know, all your normal spring weeds out there, but that vetch, it. It powered past all of them. There was nothing out there but a field of purple. It was absolutely gorgeous when we planted it. It was the mo. It was the most relaxing field I've ever planted in my life because it just floated. Everything worked. It was just. I loved it. It was great.

Those fields that have that much vetch residue on them. Like we, I grew up growing vegetables and vetch was one of our favorite cover crops. And you would have 3 to 4 inches of residue that we would be incorporating and plowing in with a team of horses on a moldboard plow. And it's, it's remarkable what that does to a soil profile and how, how a field changes with that vetch inclusion. So one of the topics we haven't really gotten into is weed control during the season and of course particularly the, the one of the tools that you're using, if you're not quote unquote, conventional farming, it is roller crimping. I'm sure with the years of experience that you've had, you've learned lots of tips and tricks and techniques for roller crimping that are perhaps not as widely understood because I, I see a, I get to have conversations with lots of growers who try rotor crimping and their mileage varies significantly. And because maybe they don't have the best tool design or they don't know quite how to manage it, they get the timing slightly wrong on the COVID crop. It's a process that is fairly knowledge intensive. It's not as easy as going out and spraying roundup on it. So what have you learned and what are some of the opportunities that you see for growers to greatly improve their success with roller crimping?

What I've seen with roller crimping, the biggest thing is patience. In all honesty, that that's probably the biggest thing is making sure that the crop that you're going to crimp is ready to crimp. If it's not ready, I don't care if you have a thousand dollar, you know, hunk of iron that you put together to make a roller crimper or if you have the latest and greatest roller crimper that's on the market, neither one of them are going to work because the, the COVID crop is not ready. You have to make sure that the timing is right. Once the timing is right, then it's a matter of figuring out. And I guess what we have seen, we run a double roller crimper, small, small rolls, high speed double crimper versus the kind of, I would say, I'd say more the industry standard of a larger 16 to 18 inch drum, you know, maybe a 20 to 24 inch drum with a blade on it or a blunt edge to roller crimp. That's in the single where they more rely on weight. I would say the, in our experience and this is. This is just us. I'm not going to say this for any other part of the world because I don't know, but for us, a single roller crimper, the normal, like the one at the Rodale Institute, you know, kind of has the drawings of that works really well. In Rye in our area, in Vetch in our area, that roller crimper does work. But you. You have to be well over, I would say probably 70, 75% bloom before it works as successful as it needs to. Otherwise, you're. You're trying to roll it twice, and when you roll it twice, it seems like you damage and you start pulling up that beautiful mat that you laid down that first time and you start poking holes in it, and then you start having issues. I watch a lot of YouTube videos and I've done a lot of research over, I'd say the course of about four years. And I spent a lot of time on European websites and watching what they do, just due to the fact that they haven't used chemistries the way that the US has. And, you know, in the past 20. Well, honestly, in the past 30 to 35, 40 years, they've got a different way of looking at it. And when it comes to the regenerative side, I'd say in cover crops, you know, they're probably, I'd say, 15 to 20 years ahead of us in the way that their soils are and the way that their cover crops are and their understanding of COVID crops. But when I looked over there, a lot of times they would run smaller rolls, you know, small fields, but they'd run smaller rolls and they would run much higher speeds than what we would be talking about here in the US and they would talk about the tearing and pulling and that of the COVID crop and not just the true crimp of what we talk about here in the United States. So that's why we built our own and went to a double crimper, smaller rolls, and then increased the speed, we actually decreased the weight. But by decreasing the weight, increasing the speed, and having two rollers side by side or behind each other, it actually started that pulling and tearing. And I guess the way that I kind of look at it is if you've ever been in the alfalfa industry, you know, a crimper is a crimper, you know, a steel crimper, steel on steel, or a steel on rubber, it actually breaks that stem. And that's what you're looking for with this one. It's more like what I would call, like A V tine conditioner, you know, where it's a like a flail shredder, it doesn't actually. It will crimp, it will create that break. But the two rollers working together actually kind of pull and tear at the stems and at the, you know, the branches of the plant and actually cause that plant to break down. Not really. I guess I shouldn't say break down, but to get a better kill on it because you're damaging more of the above ground structure and getting a better crimp and pull on it.

What creates that pulling action? Is it because the two rolls are different sizes, different diameters? What creates that action?

I know it's so the front roller, I guess if you think of this like a, like two 12 inch tires, basically the back of the front roller. From what I've seen driving beside this, and when I've flown the drone up as close as I can and actually rode on the machine, it's like the front roller lays it down and crimps it, but then as it comes around and that front roller on the backside actually kind of pulls the crop up just a little bit. Well, that second roller is right there. And so as the front one's pulling it up, the back one's beating it right back down. And I think that's where you're getting that, that little bit of a pull and a tatter tear to it. And this is, this is completely my guess on it. And just kind of looking at it from an engineering stance of that, that's where I think that is happening. The rollers are exactly the same size, but it's just the other way I describe it because one of my neighbors does a lot of rotary hoeing and he says the difference between a single hoe and a double hoe, he says you can take a rotary hoe across the field one time and it does a good job. But if you take it across the second time, it damages, it damages the crop. But if you take a double hoe and go across it one time, it does twice the job of a single hoe, but it doesn't damage the crop. And I think it's the same in my mind, it's kind of that same deal of you're not allowing that soil, you're hitting it as more times, but you're doing twice as much in one quick action. Instead of trying to do it one time and then coming back later an hour or minutes or days and doing it a second time. I think it's just something where the two Roles work together and it just seems to do a, it just seems to do a much better action. But the problem with that is, is we, that does a tremendous job in vetch. Vetch and multi species cover crops. I love the double roller. But now if we want to jump back to a mono species where we're talking like just a single rye crop, it's almost too aggressive for that rye crop because it will actually chop it. And if you know in rye when you're trying to do that, you don't want to chop it because if you chop it off a lot of times it'll regrow and you don't want that. And we have had some issues with that double roller that it's just, it's too aggressive on a rye crop. If the rye crop doesn't have the full biomass that you, you know, that you're looking for, if you hit some light spots or something like that, it actually will just chop it up and spit it out the back of it. You know, it's too aggressive on that side.

But so as, as you've developed and built and engineered your, your own roller crimper, what is the, what is the current roller diameter and have you changed the, the chevron design or have you changed the crimpers in any way at all?

We started out with a 6 inch tube and with a 4 inch, what I'd call a 4 inch flute, a 4 inch blade. Then we went to an 8 inch tube with a 3 inch flute. Basically the same size, just increased the size of the tube because we're having bearing issues now we've got a different bearing that we're trying, we're on, I don't know, generation four of it, a different bearing that we're trying to use which actually allowed us to go back down to a 3 inch tube or excuse me, a 6 inch tube, but then with a 3 inch flute to try to actually go smaller than what our original one was. Because the 3 inch, the 3 inch flute flute or the 3 inch blade actually seems to work better than the 4 inch. And we don't have as much bending, you know, we don't have rocks in our area. But you know, the crown does get a little hard and we do have some concrete chunks here and there. But we seem to have not as much damage on a 3 inch blade as what we do on a 4 inch. And it's just a piece of quarter inch mild steel. It's nothing, it's nothing crazy or you know, special. It's just a piece of steel as far as the pattern, ours is just a 2 in 2 foot long blade and we just stagger them around, you know, two foot. The two blades kind of work together. There's two blades on one bracket.

Are they straight, straight across, parallel with the shaft or are they angled across the surface?

They are angled. They are angled. We set them back. We set them back. And it's, it's highly scientific. It's about a finger width underneath each end of the blade is what we do. I've got it, I've got a jig for it that it's more scientific than that. But when we played with it the, the very first time, I set some more aggressive, less aggressive. Obviously you can't go straight because it just, you know, it chops something terrible and you can't ride it. But it's, it seems like it's, it seems to work okay. And it's just a, it's just a straight blade. It's nothing crazy.

And as you've experimented with the smaller diameters, one of the key pieces that you mentioned was going with the higher ground speed as well. How has your ground speed shifted compared to the original design that you were working with?

The original design that we had I would say is a five to seven mile an hour tops. That's one that you can add water into the drum, you know, that sort of stuff to add more weight. And honestly what we found with it is the slower you ran, the more weight, the better it did. But when you got faster, it's like you couldn't get enough weight on it. And it almost wanted to ride up on the crop, I'd say like a boat on a wake, you know, the faster you went, it just kind of rode up on top of the crop. And it just seemed like we didn't get that good of a kill. If we pushed much over that five, I'd say five to six mile an hour. It just didn't want to, it didn't want to do it. Now, comparison to our smaller rollers, I would say our bottom speed is seven to eight mile an hour. And I've went through on some, you know, we've got a couple of fields that are just tabletop flat and they are smooth sailing. And I've pushed it as high as 14, 15 mile an hour. And honestly, I don't know if there is a top end other than the fact that it's just kind of scary when you look down and you see iron flying around that fast, you know, that close to you. So, yeah, it makes you really think about all your welding skills and all that. I wonder what would happen if one of those would fly off right now. But yeah, it just seems like the higher the speed the better and the heavier the COVID crop, the faster the speed, the better the job it did. So it's a. I don't know, it's one of those. It's kind of out of my mind and out of my realm of thinking of why it is that way and why it works that way. And I wish I had more time to spend with that crimper. But with managing this farm and doing everything else, it's kind of one of those things that's kind of taking the wayside. And right now I'm trying to put the crimpers back together at night and make a new bearing holder and everything else in our machine shop. But it's one of those when, when you have all the design and the everything in your head and it's. I know what I want it to look like, but it's hard for me to describe that. And I don't have the CAD system to put it on there to, you know, to make it make a 3D part of it. So it's kind of trial and error. It's a little expensive at times. So.

Aside from your experience with Harry Vetch, what were some other experiences where things you expected to be a complete failure turned out to be a very valuable learning experience.

Corn into alfalfa. That was one that I always looked at that. I love the vetch but the biggest issue for us is just getting it established. You're locked into a rotation where you have to have a cereal grain or a summer producing crop so that you can get that vetch in, in time. And you know, I always looked at that's the stepping stone to a permanent cover crop. And you know, the, one of the best cover crops in our area, and that's why I went back to my days of putting up hay in the early 2000s is Alfalfa would choke out absolutely anything. You know, there was nothing that could compete with alfalfa. So we had a couple of quarters of alfalfa and we started playing with planting corn into them, you know, into a living crop. We tried multiple different ways of roller crimping and you know, like what Rick Clark has done in the past out in Illinois. Where? Illinois, Indiana area of roller crimping it. We tried flaming it. We've tried cutting it off and just letting it lay on the soil. We've tried cutting it off and green chopping it tried a little bit of everything. I can tell you. The one thing you don't do is just plant it and let it go, because it will overtake a corn crop, there's no doubt about that. But we've tried a lot of different things with it, and every one of them is successful in its own way. And I'd say the roller crimping is probably the most successful of all of it. But we've also done some green chopping that I'd love to do more research with, planting the corn and then allowing the corn to actually come up and then chop it off when that corn's basically, and I won't say a stage, because stages don't work when you're living in cover crops. You got to go by crop height. But when that corn is about inch and a half to two inches tall, we went out and cut it off. And if we had a way of cutting it off, windrowing it, and coming through with a green chop immediately right after that, that corn took off from there. And my goodness, that was probably our best results. But when you look at the equipment, which is the other struggle to what it is that what we're trying to do, you know, you can't just have a, you know, 25 chopper, trucks and choppers driving across your cornfield. You know, then it comes into, okay, well, are you going to do a tram line? And, you know, do you want to pull a trailer instead of having trucks come alongside? And it becomes a whole nother lineup of equipment that you don't have. And how do you make that work? Because that's not, you know, that's not readily made equipment that I need a chopper that runs on 90 inch centers and a wagon that runs on 90 inch centers. And then I need, you know, trucks to haul it away, or what do I do with the alfalfa once I take it off? And, you know, it just. It's kind of that snowball effect when you get down to it.

Yeah. So what has the. What has the roller crimping of the alfalfa been looking like? And how has that been working for you? I'm assuming you're going in that direction more on more acres rather than the. Than the green chop.

Yeah, the roller crimping is the best as far as the. I would say the best for the simplicity sake. Now, the one thing that, that Rick and I have sat down and talked multiple times is Rick has a good, good chance when he does this. He actually kills the alfalfa. And we have not, I Cannot kill the alfalfa with a roller crimper. Now, excuse me, maybe that's the difference in roller crimpers there, where he's using a single crimp and I'm using the double crimp again. Or I think it's also some of the fact that Rick runs 20 inch rows where we run 30 inch rows. So I think it might have something to do with the canopy shading it.

Out much more quickly.

Yep. So there's more research to be done there. And I've talked with the Rodale Institute, I've talked with Aaron Sylvia on this and a lot of different people of trying to understand why we get results one way and results another way. And I've actually spoke with a couple of seed producers on for alfalfa, saying, hey, do you have a variety that's laying in the back of the warehouse that doesn't like the heat of summer? You know, that. That produces a tremendous first cutting and then it kind of goes dormant all summer during the. During the heat, you know, just grows 4 or 5 inches tall and hangs out and. And then in the fall it comes back on strong so that you'd have a, you know, a nice cover crop or, you know, if a guy wanted to do some fall grazing or something like that in those corn stalks. Because we've actually bailed off the alfalfa and corn stalks when we got all said and done because we were afraid it was going to choke out the alfalfa because there was so much residue out there. So we bailed it off. And I mean, to tell you, as far as cow hay, that was some of the best cow hay. And the guys went absolutely crazy over it because it was about a 50, 50 blend of alfalfa and corn stalks. And the cows would lick the ground clean wherever you put them out because it had everything that they were looking for.

Wow. Wow. I had another question for you, Brian, but what you just said completely took my mind away from the question that I had a moment ago. I was going to comment on. I think your question on asking the seed breeders for alfalfa varieties is the right question to ask because I've been intrigued by other researchers who I've heard these stories of people who have been trying intercropping alfalfa or using interseeding alfalfa into a cereal crop as a nurse crop. And we tend to think of alfalfa as alfalfa or red clover as red clover, but they're actually observing that there are specific varieties that have a completely different influence on the cereal crop that they are being planted with and that we shouldn't think of these different varieties as being one universal species and expect them to all respond the same way. I think there's a tremendous opportunity for us there to do. There's a lot more homework. As you said, the Europeans in some ways are a decade plus ahead of us because they have been looking at specific varieties and influences and interactions between specific species and specific varieties to a much greater degree than we have been. There's a lot of opportunity for us there.

I completely agree. I always said that. You know, I wish, I hope that by the time I get out of this game that I can understand when I look at a soil test or look at a soil conditions and that sort of stuff, that I can look at the varieties of COVID crops that are there and say, you need to look at this, this, this and this and not saying it as a rye, as a legume or alfalfa or this. And more of you need to look at this specific variety because that variety does what it is that your soil needs or what it is that you're looking for. You know, it's kind of like, I guess, you know, same way we have corn and soybeans. You know, they know what soil type it does best in. They know every aspect about that, that corn, that soybean, that cereal, whatever. They understand that very well. But when we talk about COVID crops, it's, oh, yeah, we got some seed left in the bin. You know, there's just not that. There's not that push to understand those cover crops and the varieties of COVID crops that we have. And I really think that that's. I really wish there was a lot more push into that. The problem is, I know everything's pushed with money and there isn't a lot of money in that side of COVID crops because unfortunately, that goes against the retail ag side of selling chemistries and fertilizer. So I understand it, but at the same time, I guess maybe that's where some private money needs to get invested and actually do the research on the COVID crops and develop them more. I know we've been working with it, but it's kind of hard to do on your own when you feel like you're the lone man out here trying to do it on your own.

Yep. So, Brian, what comes next for you in the sense of, as you see your farming system continuing to evolve and constantly learning new things, where do you see the areas of opportunity that you'd like to see your operation evolve and Become better in the future.

What I'm looking at, obviously taking over this management role, it's kind of changed my focus and now I have, I feel like I'm not as focused on the day to day operations of out in the field, but I can actually focus more on these types of things, these projects that on my own soil, on my own ground, that I can do a, I can do more experimenting and I can spend more time with those smaller areas and develop it with those plots. I really want to spend more time with the alfalfa and understand that more because I think a lot of the alfalfa is timing, timing of planting versus when like the alfalfa is at a certain stage and roller crimping at different stages, you know, whether it's full bloom or partial bloom, seed set, whatever that is, and then working more with the different varieties. That's in my mind, it's not so much of growing crops anymore. I really want to try to focus more on how do we produce everything that we need for that growing crop. Because growing a crop, I mean, unfortunately it isn't hard to do. You know, you can go about anywhere and get the rules on how to raise a corn crop or a soybean crop, but in the way that we're trying to do it with, you know, being regenerative and sustainable and having everything right there on the farm and allowing the farm to produce its for itself, I think there's just so much more to learn there. And that's what I really want to focus on and learn what my soil is actually telling me. Instead of guessing. In a way, I kind of feel like I do a lot of guessing. At the end of the day when you're looking at, you look at the soil test, the Haney test, the whatever it is, the you know, kind of a analysis that you're running. But at the end of the day, do we, do any of us actually understand what those numbers mean? You know, because for every soil type and you know, for field A versus field Z, you could look at the same soil test and have two completely different problems, but when you look at it on paper, it might look like it's the same problem.

Exactly.

So I really think there's just, there's more research that needs to be done in understanding the soil structure and what's actually going on in the soil. Instead of looking at a piece of paper and saying, oh, this is what you need.

Yep. Yeah, I think the, there was a very good reason why agronomy has been defined in terms of Chemistry for the last century and being the very simple reason that that was the one thing we could easily measure, but that has really led us astray in some very crucial ways. And I'm really optimistic about some of the new science taking us in different directions. You know, Brian, one of the questions that comes to my mind, I've been. I have this. I don't know quite how to describe it, this personal experience where I repeatedly. I have conversations with people where things that appear to be very obvious to me or that appear to be very simple or intuitive, like it's just. Yeah, it's obvious, it's the way it is, are non obvious to other people and. Or things that appear to be very easy and simple to me appear to be very complex for other people. What are those pieces for you? What are questions that you get asked? What are the things that to other people that you perceive other people see as being very difficult or complex to achieve and yet seem to be very easy for you?

You know, that's a good question. I have a lot of things that I could say to that, but some of them I probably should keep to myself.

Why start that now? Why start the self century now?

Well, there might be some people listening that I should probably keep some comments to myself. I would say the biggest thing is the simple one to point out is cover crops. You look at cover crops and in our area where we talk about irrigation, we live and breathe and die because of irrigation. A lot of people will say, well, we can't afford to plant cover crops because they take too much moisture. And I'm on the other spectrum of that saying, I've planted cover crops and yes, it takes more moisture, but it doesn't take more moisture at the end of the year, throughout the entire year, it takes more moisture at different times of the year. So like right now, today we're watering cover crops. Right now it's, you know, the 23rd of April and we've been watering cover crops for about 15, 20 days where everybody else, the pivots are parked and they're saying, well, you know, the argument is going to be at the coffee shop that, well, they're going to pump twice as many inches on this year as what we're going to. No, we're not. Because we're pumping water into the profile. It's not running off our cover crop. Sure, our cover crop is utilizing some of that moisture. But when we lay down that cover crop, or if, you know, in some cases where we work that cover crop back into the soil, all that green manure back into the soil. Our water holding capabilities are through the roof. Comparison to the, the quote no till conventional tillage. We've seen our infiltration rates the last five, six years. I would say I don't, I don't think triple is even close, quadruple, maybe even more. You know, years ago I would say for us 60 hundreds was 60 to 70 hundredths was a pretty good circle for a pivot and you might see a little water running out the end today. This, well, this last fall and the fall before we did some, some tests. I slowed a pivot down and was dumping on two and a half inches and had zero runoff. Now obviously we are in a drought but you know we watered all summer long and we were just doing some testing at the end of the year as to you know, in a normal year I would say the water here we kind of seal over the soil when we irrigate all summer and the water doesn't want to infiltrate into it. And now we don't have that problem. We can turn on the pivot and I can run a pivot as slow as I want to run it and the water goes in. I pay attention I guess when we have our rainfalls it seems like we get them in 3 inch increments in 20 minutes. But I pay very close attention as to what my fields look like and what my neighbors fields look like. I've got one that is directly upstream from me and it's an 18 inch tube that runs from his side of the road to my side of the road on half of his farm and a 24 inch tube that runs on the other side of the farm. So they're about a quarter of a mile apart. The one that's an 18 inch tube runs a quarter of a mile before it runs out of my farm. The one that's a 24 inch tube runs just a little under a half of a mile before it runs off of my farm. We had a 3 1/2 375 rainfall this it was last fall. The water came onto my farm but never left. The COVID crop was there and it just fell away. We had a. This winter, this past winter we had a. I'm sorry, it wasn't this past winter. It was the winter prior. Between 22 and 23 we had about a 10 inch snowfall and the ground was froze. But we had. The bare ground was froze. We had a heavy cover crop on and our soil was froze on top but it wasn't froze deep. And I watched it was in March, then the March, about March, April, February, March of 23. I watched all the snow melt off of that quarter of ground and come on to ours. And I was literally watching from my shop how far the water was running onto my farm before it would disappear. I drained off. I think there's about, I'd say 120 acres of his farm drains into those two tubes and comes across of 10 inches of snow. And he had corn stalks on there. So the corn stalks were full. It never got more than 300ft out into my field. And it just soaked away. And everything that was laying out in our field soaked away because we actually have to pool about 6 inches of water before it runs across the road into one of our other fields. And we never had water run across that entire spring. We never had water run across the road. Now, we did have one flood event. That water did come across the road, but it came across the road from the southern side of my field, not from the quarter that I'm talking about. That was to the north side of the field. So it was just kind of interesting to me as to how we can absorb so much more moisture than what the neighbors can in the conventional farming. And to me, that speaks volumes of what it is that we're doing. But to them, and I shouldn't say to them, but to the normal person, the normal farmer, they look at that and say, well, that cover crops taking up that much moisture, well, I know it's not. It's the exact opposite. And you know, so I'd say as far as common knowledge, you know, for us that have been in this side of it, no, it does take more water at different times of the year. But during the peak and the heat of the season, if you let that lay on top of there when you roller crimp it and let that mat lay there, you don't need the summer, you know, to pump all summer long when the wind's blowing 50 mile an hour, we don't have to pump, you know, because you have that reserve there.

Yeah, you have, you've mulched the soil effectively. You're not losing moisture from the soil surface. You have better infiltration rates, you have better water percolation in the soil profile. The list of all the various contributing factors is a long list. But. But the net effect is that you have a much greater reserve of water that lasts in the soil profile. You're not losing it and you're not vaporizing it constantly.

You don't have. In our biggest issue in our area here in Nebraska, and I don't think it's measured appropriately, is sun and wind evaporation in corn and soybeans. You know, when you chemically kill everything and they say, well, the ground is covered because, you know, you look out there and you have a green mat. But the, you know, the amount of sunshine that gets down into that soil or gets.