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Mike Howell (00:08):
The Dirt with me, Mike Howell, an eKonomics podcast where I present the down and dirty agronomic science to help grow crops and bottom lines. Inspired by eKonomics.com, farming’s go-to informational resource, I’m here to break down the latest crop nutrition research, news and issues. Helping farmers make better business decisions through actionable insights. Let’s dig in.
(00:39):
Well, hello again everyone. Welcome back to The Dirt. We are still in Fargo, North Dakota and recording a few episodes while we’re up here. I’ve got quite a busy schedule while we’re here, but we’re able to squeeze in a few podcasts here in the studio. It’s a lot different than recording in my home office there. We’ve got all kind of cameras and lights and trying to get everything just right, so if anybody’s interested in checking out the YouTube, we’re also putting these out on YouTube as well now. So I encourage everybody to check those out and hopefully we’ll be able to bring you a little more information on that later on. I’ll be able to actually show some of the data we talk about as well as just hearing about it.
(01:14):
But today we have Dr. Franzen here with us. David, welcome to The Dirt and if you will just tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and what you do at NDSU.
Dr. David Franzen (01:22):
I’m an Illinois native, at least for half my life. Grew up outside of Chicago, went to University of Illinois, fell in love with soils, got my BS, my MS there, went into the retail fertilizer industry, first as an agronomist, and then as agronomist/manager of a string of independent fertilizer locations. Worked there for about 18 years. Last four years, got my PhD along with working. I don’t recommend that for anybody, but then after I graduated, it was clear that place was going to sell. So this job came up in North Dakota and I applied and got it and I’ve been here for, it’s coming on 30 years this coming June.
(02:01):
I’m an extension soil specialist and they let me do research, so I’ve done a lot of work in site-specific ag and then also revising, overhauling all of our nutrient recommendations for 18 important crops in the state.
Mike Howell (02:14):
That sounds great. Well, David, I’m from south Mississippi and I’ve spent my career working with soils down in that part of the world basically. I kind of cover everything east of the Mississippi River and then some other areas there as well, mainly the areas that grow cotton, but I’ve been working in the Fargo area a little bit this summer. We’ve got some projects going on here and got to studying a little bit about the Red River Valley and didn’t realize how fertile the soils were and a lot more about this region. So, if you will, talk a little bit about the challenges that may be associated with North Dakota. What kind of fertility challenges the producers face every day and how you manage those challenges?
Dr. David Franzen (02:51):
Well, the huge difference between here, the whole state really, the region from about 60 miles east of here to west of the mountains, is the salts. People don’t realize we have soluble salts up here. They wonder why the land prices are a lot lower than they are in Iowa. Well, one of the big reasons is because of the salts. The other reason is it’s a short growing season, but the salts are everywhere. It’s a semi-arid area. There is more evaporation in the summer than there is precipitation in most years. The water tables tend to be a little bit on the high side and capillary water draws the salts up to the surface.
(03:25):
I bet in the whole 25, 26 million acres of crop land in the state, I bet only maybe a couple percent of them really don’t have any salts to speak of. So that’s really one of the big challenges. Part of it is being addressed by the crop breeding programs, a lot of people were bringing in corn and soybeans for the first time. Wasn’t a lot of screening one around here and soybeans, especially, really suffered, but a lot of progress has been made and there is a lot still to do.
Mike Howell (03:54):
You mentioned the salts there and that’s something that’s coming to the forefront several places I’ve been this summer. I used to never see that, but over the last few years I’m seeing more and more of it, even down in Mississippi. Typically, we get enough rainfall during the summer or spring that it flushes those salts out of the system and we really don’t have to worry about it unless we really mess up and apply too much fertilizer at one time or something like that. How do you go about managing those salts in this area?
Dr. David Franzen (04:19):
Well, the thing with salts is you can’t neutralize it. Salt is the end product and that’s why the oceans are salty. It’s like the earth’s cesspool with the minerals, it’s the end point. You can’t neutralize it like you can soil pH.
(04:32):
It’s a water table issue, so you lower the water table. When I came here, gosh, I bet there wasn’t 200 acres of tile drainage in the entire state and I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re well over a half a million and growing every year with tile drainage. It’s a challenge here, because it’s relatively flat. It’s not flat, flat, flat, but it’s really kind of flat. It takes a pump to pump the water out into a ditch and get it away from the field. So it’s challenging and it’s expensive. The soils, at least in the hub of the valley, are very high clay. The spacing has to be very close together, so it’s really expensive, but not growing a crop is pretty expensive too, so people have learned to do that and cover crops come into that too. And the movement toward no-till in many parts of the state has helped out, as has continuous cropping and not crop fallow like there used to be 40 years ago.
Mike Howell (05:26):
Well, I’m glad you mentioned the tile drainage, and we didn’t talk about this before we started, but the podcast that we aired last week, we actually did an episode about drainage tiles and the importance of that and removing that excess moisture, and that was one of the points they brought out, was it was able to help with the salt situation. So you’re just verifying what they told us in the earlier episode.
Dr. David Franzen (05:46):
Yeah, that’s absolutely right. It may not be the main reason that people are doing it in some areas, but some areas they are. The other reason is you just able to grow a crop most every year where before, anytime it got wet you were done.
Mike Howell (05:59):
So are there any other fertility issues that you deal with on a recurring basis?
Dr. David Franzen (06:03):
A huge amount. One of them is we’re not just corn and soybean. There are some farmers that are corn and soybeans and think they’re in Iowa, but most people have at least a third crop in there. We have sunflowers. We have flax. We have canola. We have barley. We have a couple different kinds of wheat that you have to worry about protein in. And so, the recommendations for all of those crops is very, very different.
(06:24):
For barley, for example, you want the protein to be low, so you kind of run the tight rope on enough nitrogen to get a decent yield, but you don’t want to go overboard because you don’t want to get out of your malting contract because that hits you some years, $2, $3, $4 a bushel. That’s huge economic impact.
(06:41):
Sugar beets especially, there’s quite a few of them in the Red River Valley and into Minnesota, and again, if you have too much nitrates, you have a lower sugar and so you get the lower payment. In this area, you don’t get paid by the tonnes, you get paid by the recoverable sugar, because the factories themselves are owned by the growers and so there’s huge incentive for them to balance that nitrogen just right.
(07:04):
It’s difficult sometimes because nitrogen is not friendly. It’s biologically active and you have to watch when you apply it, what you apply, and what you put with it and don’t put on any too late and what was a previous crop and you pay attention to that. And then people soil test every year before beets, that two foot test used to be four, but most of the sugar beet area now has been in sugar beets long enough that the beets have cleaned out the soil, if you will. It’s a very clean, environmentally friendly crop, because it really cleans the nitrate out of the, from deep depth the roots down. I’ve dug pits or been with people that have dug pits down to eight feet and there’s still roots down there, so it really cleans well.
Mike Howell (07:44):
Wow, I didn’t realize that. Sugar beets not a crop that I spend a whole lot of time in, but maybe something that we want to do another episode on one of these days and talk about sugar beets and the fertility requirements and how they’re managed and that kind of stuff. We’ve talked a lot about some other crops, but that’s one that we still haven’t got around to, so.
Dr. David Franzen (08:01):
Well, don’t ask me about peanuts.
Mike Howell (08:05):
Well, I’ve already got peanuts covered. I used to work in peanuts and we had an episode on peanuts with the people down in the University of Georgia back earlier in the year, so we got a good one on that one.
Dr. David Franzen (08:15):
Well, I can rest easy.
Mike Howell (08:18):
David, another thing that I wanted to talk to you about, your name got quite a bit of attention back earlier in the spring. You published a paper with the help of some other people in surrounding states, different universities, but the gist of the paper was talking about a lot of the biological products and the nitrogen fixing products that are the talk of every trade show I go to, any farm press I pick up, there’s advertisements in there. We’ve actually done a couple of podcasts talking about these. We had Dr. Brian Arnal on with Oklahoma State, and he talked about his experience with them. But, one thing that we talked about on that episode was the lack of independent third-party research, research from the land grant universities to back up what some of these claims were and some of these claims can be pretty outlandish. I know you and your co-authors did a lot of work with this. If you would tell us a little bit about that project and what was involved, how the project went, and a little bit about the results?
Dr. David Franzen (09:09):
So I will, but I’m a context person, so I want to tack this onto the very front of it. My first year at NDSU, I was asked to speak at the Manitoba North Dakota Zero Till conference and it was in Minot and it was in January. It was the coldest day I’ve ever spent here. When I woke up in the morning, it was 45 below and that was not wind chill, that was temperature. So I remember because of that, but I also remember it because the night before, the people that put on the no-till conference and it was big back then, I think over a thousand people, but the original, no-tillers from the area were there. So they’ve been in no-till for about 20 years. They came from Saskatchewan, Alberta, Montana, North Dakota, and some of the names I still remember, but I remember that they were happy to see me, because the position had been open for a little bit, but they also told me in the next breath that they didn’t pay any attention to North Dakota nitrogen recommendations for their crops anymore.
(10:05):
I asked them why and they said, well, after they’ve been in no-till for a number of years, they found that they could start shaving rates and they’d shaved them enough so that they didn’t resemble our recommendations at all, so they just ignored them.
(10:17):
I was like, okay, and I’m from Illinois, what do I know? But then around 2010, I’d accumulated, gosh, I don’t know, 150 site years of nitrogen rate data for spring wheat and durum. And before I put a pen to the recommendations, I remembered the conversation. And so I divided it out into long-term, no-till sites and conventional till sites. And they were right that it took about 50 pounds less than to grow at least the same yield of wheat and at least the same protein with the wheat, which is important economically here, as a conventional till.
(10:49):
And so that was enlightening. So when I went to dove into the corn nitrogen rates and accumulated 130 site years or something like that, from then until about 2015, I deliberately put in long-term no-till sites along with conventional sites and they were right again. And then I did the same thing when I visited the sunflowers and they were right again. And then, just recently we just published our nitrogen calculator from malting barley, two row malting barley, which is new, and they were right again. And so the question is, where does that nitrogen come from? I think part of it is because, there are more microorganisms in a long-term, no-till thing six years or more. There’s a lot of biology there, a lot more biomass of biology and then a greater range of types of microorganisms in it than there are in a beat up conventional till system.
(11:38):
And microbes take in ammonium nitrogen, not so much nitrate, but ammonium. So you’re put fertilizer on in the fall, put on the spring up here, and the microbes are absorbing it as well. And some of it’s being absorbed in the conventional till, but a lot more is being absorbed and so it’s being protected from leaching, it’s being protected from denitrification and then it’s acting like a slow release, because some of the bacteria die every few days and then they rot and then they give up whatever it is and it gets taken up by somebody else. I think it’s working like a slow-release fertilizer.
(12:11):
But then, prompted by a question from an audience, I started to think, is there something else? How about asymbiotic bacteria? The literature says that in a conventional till system, maybe five, 10 pounds of nitrogen per year comes from the activity of natural asymbiotic bacteria.
(12:28):
But I thought, well, okay, so all those studies are conventional till. We’re not saving their houses. They don’t have that much to eat, so what if we had a stable housing for them and a greater amount of food for them to eat? I wonder if they’d be more active. And so I did a paired study. I went to 13 different sites in North Dakota, very long term, no-till field and then right across the road or fence there was a clueless neighbour that didn’t get it. And so I sampled their field too, and I found that the activity of those as asymbiotic bacteria were a lot, or organisms, whatever they are, is a lot higher in than there are in conventional till.
(13:05):
So, then I started hearing more than rumblings about asymbiotic bacteria commercially available. And so two years ago, this coming November, which will be November, 2021, I’m in a group, it’s an agricultural experiment station group called the North Central Committee on Non-conventional Additives and Amendments. Our mission, I guess, is to investigate unusual things. So the conversation at the conference in Des Moines was all about these things and most of the people that were representing their states were going to do some work on it. I suggested that we pool our resources in November ’22 and put together a publication. The group had done that before decades ago on different products. So we decided to do it.
(13:52):
That’s what happened is, everybody pooled their data and I put it together and we even came out with it. What we found is, even though these are the top soil fertility people in the whole Midwest, we know how to put out N-rate experiments. We do it every year. We’ve done it for decades, some of us, and so it’s not that we didn’t know what we were doing and followed the label and there were over 50 sites that we had in corn. I can’t remember exactly the right number.
(14:20):
There were two of those sites that something gave a little bit more yield and then the nitrogen rate that was without the material, but it only amounted to maybe half of what you hear on the advertisements. So, just a really low percentage of anything positive that came out of it. My message from the material is not to throw mud at companies, because there’s a hundred companies out there that are selling this stuff and I’m not going to smear anybody, but I think what bothered me more than anything else is that I went out and tried to buy a product once the March before our first year working with it, and they were sold out of everything. Farmers had just bought it up and that depressed me. These are brilliant businessmen.
Mike Howell (15:07):
That brings up a good point. Back when I was working with Extension, there were all kind of new products coming out and I got asked to test a lot of products as well, but when a grower would come to me and say, what do you know about this? If it was a product I hadn’t tested or one of my colleagues had tested, if you want to try a little bit, try it on a small acreage and see how it works. And then if it works on a small acreage, then increase it a little bit and make sure it does it the second year before you put the whole farm in it. The way I understand it, a lot of these people now are just okay, that’s what they’re saying and we’re going to put the whole farm in it. I don’t think that’s quite the mentality that they ought to be having. I still like them to verify this and we’ve talked about this earlier. Verify it through third party independent research and I really like the land grant system for that.
Dr. David Franzen (15:49):
That’s true. But frankly, there’s hundreds of these products around and so how in the world are we ever going to test them all? So if somebody in the neighbourhood is selling something and it sounds really good, then the first thing the farmers should do is to decide to try to replicate it on themselves. The way not to do it is to compare one field to another or split a field and put it on half the field and half on the other. And I can go to a field and I can throw a rock over to the left side of it and not throw a rock over on the right side of it. About 50% of the time, that place where I threw the rock is going to be higher yielding than the place I didn’t.
(16:23):
So you don’t do it like that, you replicate it and farmers have the ability to do that now. They know where they’re going to apply the product because of the GPS. They can flag it and then they can flag it when they combine it and they can extract that out of their yield map. They have probably hundreds, maybe thousands of points where they put these individual yields they get back from the yield and you can put it into a simple Excel program, a T-test, just a simple T-test, and you can get an idea whether that difference is real or not. Farmers have the ability to do that. It’s not like it used to be. So, that’s the message to the farm. We sell something, it’s not going to kill you to win a year. Find out if it really works or not, and if it really works, then put the whole farm on it, but you’re not going to learn anything if you put the whole farm in it.
Mike Howell (17:07):
That’s right. I believe you mentioned there were some 50 plus studies in corn. Was corn the only crop you evaluated in this study?
Dr. David Franzen (17:15):
There were one or two sites that Dan Kaiser did in Minnesota on beets and that came to naught. My colleague up in Minot did some with spring wheat and canola. He went a little bit off the base. He’s from Brazil and they’ve used some of these things, or he had colleagues that used some foliar applied, that really the foliar really wasn’t on the label and he tried it anyway. And so we don’t have that much data from the spring wheat and the canola and the sugar beets. What we have really didn’t show anything, but at least with the spring wheat and canola, a couple of the studies were a little bit off-label and there’s not enough to really hang any hat on or anything. There’s still a lot of work to do with all of this stuff.
Mike Howell (17:53):
You mentioned that everybody working in this is a soil fertility expert and knows how to set up trials. I’m assuming that you had multiple rates and multiple nitrogen rates to compare this to, just like you would with any other trial and to see if it was a benefit at lower rates or higher rates?
Dr. David Franzen (18:08):
A couple of my colleagues put in with and without at all the rates. In the nitrogen rate study, you want to have the nitrogen rate increments close enough so that you can see differences between them and it’s usually around 40 pounds, something like that. Some people go to 30. I might put mine on at 40.
(18:23):
The other thing, we have response curves the yield with different rates of N, with and without, and most of them, they just kind of lay right on top of each other. They’re really no difference. In my study because of the variability we have around here. We don’t have that nice lust stuff that they do in central Illinois. It’s glacial till and the variability is tremendous. So, I don’t like to have my studies really big. I put the with and without out at the check plot, the zero and the 80 pound rate, and we didn’t see anything with those. When you have the check plot, it doesn’t mean that there’s no nitrogen out there. Check plots, around here with corn anyway, commonly will make at least 70 bushels, sometimes 120 bushels. There’s always some residual in and so zero really isn’t zero. There’s always something there to feed the crop, to feed whatever’s there.
Mike Howell (19:10):
That’s right. And weather conditions the previous year will determine a lot of how much nitrogen is left over for this year. If we have a really dry year, we could have extra nitrogen or if it’s a really wet year, we may have lost some of that residual nitrogen, if I understand it correctly.
Dr. David Franzen (19:24):
Yeah, so you’re letting your Mississippi stuff come in here, but here there’s a lot of fall nitrogen. Our studies were applied in the springtime. We used a Super U, which is a gold product with the DCD and the MVBT in it just to make sure. We didn’t want any losses that we can help, but they’re soil testing before corn. That’s a recommendation and a lot of people do it. I would say the greatest majority of people do it before corn. So we sampled it two feet, usually in the fall and figured that out, and then that comes off our nitrogen recommendation where we’re actually doing something for the farm. What we did is, we just had that as our background. We knew we had it there, and so the response was on what we call total non-available NTKAN. It’s the zero plus the residual nitrogen we had for the study.
Mike Howell (20:08):
Another thing that you mentioned in this nitrogen cycle, that these soil organisms are going to take up some of this nitrogen. They need that to survive and when those organisms die, they’re going to release that back and make it available. I’m from south Mississippi,, and we have a lot of warm winters. We can go through the winter and those organisms don’t go into a hibernation, so to speak, state. They’re constantly going through this lifecycle. So any nitrogen that they would release during the wintertime, chances are there’s not a crop there to take it up. If we come up here in Fargo, I would venture to guess those organisms are pretty much frozen until it thaws up in the spring, so they can complete that cycle and release that nitrogen. I guess the point I’m trying to get at here is, these products may work differently depending on what part of the country you’re in, depending on the weather conditions and things like that. Am I way off base with this?
Dr. David Franzen (20:55):
Since we came out with that paper, I’ve had conversations with a half a dozen companies that are thinking about releasing it in various stages of development. So, these are the main points that that conversation brought out. One, is that all of these companies are going to have a live organism in that container when it leaves the manufacturer. And so the next question is, how do you ensure it’s going to be viable when it hits the field?
(21:18):
`I talked to one company in the UK, okay? So you manufacture it in Scotland or something. How is it going to get over there? It’s going to get in an airplane, in a baggage compartment, it’s going to fly for half a dozen hours at 30 below zero. What’s that going to do to it? When it gets to where it’s going to go, is it going to go in the storage for a while? What kind of a unit is it going to be? Is it going to be refrigerated? Is it going to be at the proper temperature once it gets to the distributor? Do they have a drive-in cooler that’s going to be exactly 42 degrees or whatever the nice temperature for the organism is? When it gets to the farm, if they deliver it on Tuesday, that farmer’s not going to plant 5,000 acres of corn on Tuesday. So, during that period of time, does that farmer have some kind of a cooler they can put these two pallets of material in to store them until it’s ready? So the distribution stream I think, needs to be addressed.
(22:12):
The second thing is there needs to be some kind of a quick assay, some kind of a quick analysis that you can know if it’s really viable or not. To my understanding, I don’t think there is. At least one tech person told me that there wasn’t. He wished there was, but there wasn’t. Not only in the distribution stream, but also once it gets in the field, can you really tell if it’s active? So that’s the third thing. How is its ability to compete? You’re not putting it in a sterilized environment. There are other things there that want to eat you and there are other things that also the free living asymbiotic organisms are already there. Are they competitive or do they defend their territory? I don’t think anybody knows anything about that.
(22:54):
Then like you said, the differences in environment. So if something did indeed work in say central Iowa and you bring it up here, how’s it going to handle the salts? How’s it going to handle the pH differences? We have fields that have areas of a pH of five to pH of 8.2 and so is it going to survive in all that environment?
(23:15):
A whole list of questions. So it would be really, really nice if these were all answered before they came to market. So, I guess that’s my message to the industry and it came with conversations from companies. I just didn’t dream this up. They’re thinking about it too.
Mike Howell (23:29):
You made a lot of good points there. You mentioned peanuts earlier and said you didn’t know a lot about peanuts, but I’m going to relate back to the peanut world.
(23:37):
When I was working in peanuts, Mississippi was brand new into the peanut industry. We had to inoculate those soils. Well, everybody was putting the peanut inoculate out and thought they were doing a great job by it. And then we got to do some research when we started having yellow peanuts. In some areas, that’s a living organism and you have to take care of it. Like you mentioned, they would go to the farm supply store and pick up a truckload and let it sit out there in the back of the truck while they were planting and it usually didn’t survive through that, especially with the sun beating down on it and the temperatures we had at the time.
(24:07):
Another thing that I don’t hear anybody talking about was when we mix those products with water to spray them down in seed furrows, we had to use non-chlorinated water. Well, the drinking water has chlorine in it and it’s there to kill those bacteria so that we don’t get sick off of them. And I hear nobody mentioning things like that. So if we’re mixing this with chlorinated water, chances are we’re spraying dead critters out there with water, is basically all we’re doing.
Dr. David Franzen (24:32):
Yeah, when my colleagues and I put out these studies, I can’t remember if the labels told you not to use chlorinated water or the tech people told us all, but we were very careful not to. I think my non-chlorinated water came from distilled water from some big box store, something like that, and others did the same thing. Also, starter fertilizer for corn is very, very useful up here and most corn growers use some. So we worked with a tech person so they chose the low salt fertilizer that we were going to use with it and so we tried to cover all those bases also.
Mike Howell (25:08):
Well David, we could sit here and talk about these products all day, but let’s move on and talk about another area that I hear you’ve done a lot of work with. A lot of people are talking about soil health and regenerative agriculture and we want to promote that as much as we can and we’ve done some episodes on the dirt talking about that. One that we did recently, we talked about how everybody, depending on where you are, things will work a little differently and your system may not fit in my part of the world and mine may not fit in your part of the world. But, one thing that’s common, talking these systems, is the use of cover crops. And I understand you’ve done a lot of work with cover crops. So if you will, tell us a little bit about some of your experience with cover crops. Do we want to use broadleaf crops, legumes, or do we want to use grasses or do any of them work and when do they work and when do they not work? Tell us a little bit about your experience.
Dr. David Franzen (25:54):
Our enemy with cover crops is a short season and if we’re corn and soybeans, we’re probably taking them off the field, the last field, we’re probably taking them off maybe a week before the snow or week before the freeze or a couple of weeks after the freeze. About this time of year, we start to get nervous, about the middle of September, when we’re doing this recording here and usually by the 1st of October we’re going to get a freeze of some kind to kill something. So, some of the cover crop species, the cool season ones will maybe live past that or maybe they won’t. It can get cold really fast and in a day be 75 degrees and two days later the high will be 45 and it’ll get to 25 at night. So it’s just really fast. So that’s the enemy.
(26:37):
So, this year especially, it’s going to be really hard to get a cover crop in the ground. People are just finishing up getting their small grains harvested and it’s the middle of September. Well, they got maybe two weeks or something like that for a cover crop to grow, even a volunteer spring wheat, to grow before it might die. So that’s a problem. In years that you can get the small grains off in August then there’s way, way more time. If a cover crop is ever going to be very helpful in any different way, it’s really going to be in that short season crop, not after corn and soybeans. We’ve done, I don’t know, half a dozen years of corn and soybeans. The best we can get out of a cover crop by freeze up is, maybe a thousand pounds or so of dry matter. And that’s interseeding the corn, say at six leaf with the end row planter that puts it inside the ground, not flying it over. That’s pretty iffy, maybe about 25% of the time that really takes. The rest of the time, it’s just a waste. So a corn and soybean cover crop is just, kind of, a no-go.
(27:33):
We’re also exploring 60 inch row corn with cover crop in between, but we just have a very limited data set on that and I’m not going to go out on a limb and tell people that’s the way to go or if it’s not the way to go. There’s still some work to be done. You can imagine if you had a really, really big cover crop growing in between the corn rows and it turns dry, it’s sucked all the moisture out of that, and that could be a big, big problem. If you have a lot of rain, then it’s really not going to care. So all these things we have to think about. We get, what, 10 inches less rain here than we do in central Iowa as a rule and a much shorter season by probably a month. So we’re limited on what kind of cover crops we can use. It’s not like Beltsville, Maryland where this kind of started, where they can grow a legume all winter time. They call it winter. It’s really not winter. You have winter in Mississippi, but it’s definitely not winter.
Mike Howell (28:23):
Not like your winter for sure.
Dr. David Franzen (28:24):
No, we’re serious about winter up here. So, they just don’t grow. And so putting some expensive seed in the ground, that’s going to try to give you some kind of nitrogen for the next year, it just doesn’t work. We don’t have the time. It’s first going to extract the nitrate out of the soil, which any cover crop is going to do. By the time it’s lasted its 30 days, it has what, two weeks or something like that of making nitrogen. It’s just not enough time, so it just doesn’t work.
(28:49):
So we’re back to cereal. Rye is very popular. Letting the spring wheat volunteers grow until they die is popular. Letting the winter wheat grow is popular, although we don’t have that much winter wheat because of winter kill in a lot of years. So, it really puts people off on that. The radish can be sensitive to salt, but there are people that blend the radish in with it too. We don’t have that many options.
(29:12):
The other thing is, regardless of what kind of blend we use, we’ve used blends that had field peas in them and fava beans in them and, actually the first year we worked with it, we had a winter wheat field and I think we had what, 4,000 pounds of dry matter in the 150 pounds of nitrogen that was taken up by that cover crop. We didn’t see a peep of that released the next year, not a bit of it. And I think Matt Rourke at Wisconsin seen the same thing. We wrote a little article in one of the magazines about it, so it’s not the same thing. We’re still trying to figure out where that oxygen goes. We don’t think it evaporates. We have smectite clays, the two to one clays that have fixation properties with potassium and they also have fixation properties with ammonium. We think it goes into there, but we’re not a hundred percent sure yet.
Mike Howell (29:56):
You’re not the only one I’ve heard say that. Our listeners are familiar with my colleague, Dr. Allen Blaylock. He was reporting something very similar to that from some of his travels this summer, not getting the nitrogen to release out of those legumes in time, at least, for the crops to take it up. In my part of the world, we have a totally different scenario than you just described. I’ve heard farmers joke that they actually farm 13 months out of the year. We have something actually growing on it. In some places they actually do. They’ll overseed the winter crop while the summer crop is still growing and harvest over the top of that next crop. But, the cover crops can actually grow and get so large that we can’t manage them. When we start thinking about burning down and getting ready to plant the next year’s crop, our growers really want to have the first tire tracks in the field want to have a planter hook to it.
(30:43):
That’s how we get things done. If we have that much residue in the field or that much cover crop to deal with, we have to figure out how to control it so we can get in the field. It’s also going to make those soils stay a lot wetter, longer into the year. So we can’t get into the fields as early. So, we’ve got the same issues just maybe on the other end of the spectrum. I really like cover crops where they work, but I want everybody to realize that they don’t all work for everybody.
Dr. David Franzen (31:08):
No, they don’t. And the farther west you go in North Dakota, the less practical they are, just because of the moisture problem. They’re going to take up water, the next crop is going to need the water. So, they’re more popular here on the eastern part of the state where you get more moisture, but the farther west you go, the less popular they are. Really just keeping the field in no-till and having a diverse rotation has really been the answer for that area.
Mike Howell (31:33):
David, we really appreciate you taking time out of your schedule to visit with us today. A lot of useful information for our listeners to chew on over the winter months. Do you have any take home message you want to leave before we wrap this up?
Dr. David Franzen (31:44):
Well, I think the main thing is, this is going to be broadcast to a lot of people and the big thing is that fertility is local. So, I would never want to make recommendations for Mississippi and hopefully nobody in Mississippi is making recommendations for up here in North Dakota. Even with something as simple as our nitrogen recommendations, we have, depending on where you are in the state, we’ll have three, four different regions of different recommendations within the same state. So it’s not one size fits all. The more local you are, the more individual it is. And I would encourage farmers to continue to be curious about products and recommendations, but on the same hand be skeptical and to test them with replicated strips on their own farm.
Mike Howell (32:27):
Okay. David, thanks a lot. Listeners, as you know, it’s now time that we move into our next segment where we talk about somebody famous in agriculture.
(32:37):
Today, I thought we would talk about a man that anybody that’s ever had a high school science class has heard of. Today we’re going to talk about Gregor Mendel.
(32:45):
Dr. Mendel lived from 1822 to 1884. He was a German and Czech biologist. He also worked in the fields of meteorology and mathematics. But where he is most famous for is, he’s known as the founder of modern genetics. Now, farmers have known for centuries that cross-breeding animals and plants could favor certain desirable traits. Gregor Mendel was able to document this in his famous pea plant demonstrations that he conducted from 1856 to 1863. He established many of the rules of heredity that’s now referred to as the laws of Mendelian.
(33:20):
From this work, he coined the terms recessive and dominant in reference to certain traits that these organisms possess, and he published this work in 1866 demonstrating the actions of what he called invisible factors. Those invisible factors are what we now refer to as genes. Just want to thank Dr. Mendel for his work in the field of genetics and helping us improve the traits of these crops that the world is dependent on.
(33:43):
We want to remind everyone you need more information on anything we’ve talked about today, you can always check out our website. That’s nutrien-eKonomics.com. Until next time, this has been Mike Howell with The Dirt.
