Former civil engineer Michael Vittetoe runs a 1400-acre multi-generational family farm with his dad and sister in Washington, Iowa.
Over the last three years they’ve gone 100% all in on cover crops with their corn and soybeans.
For this episode of Cover Crop Strategies, brought to you by La Crosse Seed, Michael shares step-by-step how he’s maximizing the benefits of cereal rye in front of cash crops.
His family experimented with interseeding several years ago. Michael explains how that got the creative juices flowing when it comes to using diverse mixes for grazing. He also shares one valuable tip to consider when terminating covers.
The Cover Crop Strategies podcast series is brought to you by La Crosse Seed.
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Full Transcript
Noah Newman:
Hello and welcome once again to another edition of the Cover Crop Strategies Podcast. I'm your host, Noah Newman, Associate Editor. Before we get started, let's thank our sponsor, La Crosse Seed.
Noah Newman:
Solving the soil health puzzle, La Crosse Seed has you covered. Cover crops are an important piece to future profit, but it takes work and is puzzling at times. La Crosse Seed delivers quality Soil First cover crop products, plus training and tools to help you succeed. Whether you're looking to grow your cover crop seed business, get product tips, or find local Soil First dealer, La Crosse Seed is ready to help. Learn more at soil1st.com. That's Soil 1-S-T dot com, or call 800-356-SEED.
Noah Newman:
Former civil engineer, Michael Vittetoe, runs a 1,400 acre operation with his dad and sister in Washington, Iowa. Over the last three years, they've gone 100% all in on cover crops with their corn and soybeans. For this episode of the podcast, Michael shares step-by-step how they're maximizing the benefits of cereal rye in front of those cash crops. His family experimented with interseeding several years ago. Michael explains how that got the creative juices flowing when it comes to using diverse mixes for grazing. He also shares one valuable tip to consider when terminating covers. Without further ado, here's Michael.
Michael Vittetoe:
My name is Michael Vittetoe. I'm a farmer in Southeast Iowa. Farm with my dad and my sister, multi generation family farm. Primarily corn and soybeans. We've also started growing some cereal rye for cover crop seed, and then we also have livestock. We've got some confinement hogs, and then I've got about 50 head of cattle, and I've got about 40 chickens as well, so we're kind of playing around with some different stuff out on the pasture with the cattle and the chickens as well.
Michael Vittetoe:
So yeah, about 1,400 acres. Primarily corn and beans, like I said. We've been no-till since, I want to say the late '80s, sometime in there, when dad and grandpa started playing around with no-till and whatnot. So that's been going on for quite some time, and then I want to say about 10 years with cover crops. In the last three years, we've been 100% cover crops on our operation, primarily cereal rye as the cover crop. So, yeah that's kind of our operation in a nutshell.
Noah Newman:
Yeah, we'll jump into the details about those cover crops here in a second, but I wanted to ask you about this. So, you spent five years working as a civil engineer before returning to the farm. So, what made you want to come back and how does your engineering experience help?
Michael Vittetoe:
Oh, that's a good question. Yeah. So when I was growing up, I wasn't super into the farm stuff and whatnot. I spent some time out in the hog buildings. We were fair to finish. So, I was in the ferrying house and loading hooves and whatnot. And it wasn't something that was super appetizing to me, I guess, as a kid. So, when I was getting up there in high school, I decided I wanted to go to school for engineering, and went ahead and did that and got a job and was working in an office. You know, the normal cubicle farm life, working in an office for five years, and kind got a wild hare that I wanted to try this farm thing at one point, and talked to mom and dad, and we were able to make something happen.
Michael Vittetoe:
And so I ended up coming back to the farm full time in 2014, and I've been around here ever since. But yeah, it's definitely a lot different working on the farm as opposed to working in an office for a big corporation. There's a lot of things that are different. It's just a couple of us out here a lot of times we're working all alone or by ourselves, as opposed to being in an office with hundreds of people and whatnot. So, it's definitely a change of pace. And the different things that we're getting into, some days we're plumbers, some days we're electricians, some days we're a grind man, sometimes we're heavy equipment operators, all the different stuff that we get into it kind of keeps you on your toes and makes life interesting.
Michael Vittetoe:
But I think the biggest thing that I've pulled away from the engineering side of things and brought it back into the farm isn't so much to do with the actual engineering, bookwork and whatnot that I did in school, like applying any of that type of stuff, so much as it is the problem solving ability and whatnot, troubleshooting and figuring out the root causes of problems and trying to fix those problems. I think that's something that is kind of deeply ingrained in everybody in engineering schools, solving problems and whatnot. And so I think that is something that has been a big value, benefit, whatever you want to call it, on the farm, bringing it back to the operation and a couple examples of that comes down to anything like troubleshooting in the hog buildings and that type of stuff, anytime we have something acting up, I like tearing into it and figuring out what the problems are, but then also you get into some of the agronomic stuff with it, like weed problems and anything like that.
Michael Vittetoe:
When I, first came back to the farm, we were still just running Roundup Beans and Roundup every year was working less and less and less, as far as burn down herbicide. Like it wasn't killing our water hemp anymore. And so we were having some issues with that, and that's one of the things that we've able to overcome with our cover crops, by utilizing the cover crops to the maximum that they can possibly be used, letting them get big and leveraging their weed suppression ability to address some of these weed issues that we were running into to the point, now, where we've cut back our chemical use by probably something like 75% at this point, I want to say, and we're able to have clean fields and whatnot. So, it went from, we were having to ramp up chemical more and more and more, and still having weed issues. But now that we kind of figured out how to solve the actual problem that we have with our cover crops and use them, we're really not having any weed problems anymore, other than just kind of little patches here and there, but it's not difficult to spot treat those. So, I think that's definitely been a big benefit for us.
Noah Newman:
I know you wanted to talk about really maximizing cereal rye in front of soybeans.
Michael Vittetoe:
Yep. So, cereal rye is the main thing that we're utilizing. We run it in front of both corn and soybeans from a convenience factor, as much as anything in the fall. That way we've just got our seed that we grew and we keep it in the tender or keep it in wagons until it needs to go in the tender. And then we don't have to worry about cleaning the drill out in between corn and beans and whatnot. Maybe make some rate adjustments between the two, but that's kind of a thing that we've been able to make work around here is just running rye, monoculture rye. I know that's not necessarily the best thing from the slow health standpoint, running the monoculture cover crop, but that's what we've been doing and we've been able to make it work.
Michael Vittetoe:
And so what we're doing is, after we harvest our cash crops in the fall, we go out and we drill the cereal rye. Typically, we're drilling in 10 inch twin rows, and that's on 30 inch centers, everything's on 30 inch rows. So my drill's got 10 inch rows on it, and I just plug every third opener to make 10 inch twin rows and leave a 20 inch gap. And then that's where we plant our corn or our beans the following year. And so that way we're kind of able to have some separation between the cover crop and the cash crop come the spring. This time of year, I believe today is June 1st, so we've got essentially all of our planting is done and now we're starting to shift into cover crop termination time as far as in our soybeans.
Michael Vittetoe:
So the rye is all big and headed out right now. And so it's been growing all spring here and so, now what we do is we go out with the InRowl roller and roll the rye down in between the rows and that'll knock it down and we've got the chopping blades on these things. We've got the InRowl rollers in rolls, just built this toolbar this spring, but so, we've got the chopping blades on the InRowl roller row units, and we're going through and knocking everything down and chopping it up. It's not quite ready to crimp yet as far as maturity goes, but we're rather dry, so we're trying to get this stuff managed a little bit so it doesn't keep sucking water super hard from our soil profile and get it laid down. And then we'll come back with a herbicide pass here in probably the next week or two sometime, depending on what our weed presser looks like out there now that we're getting it laid down. So that's kind of the best way that we've figured out to go about it with our soybeans; 30 inch soybeans planted early and let those things go and run the rye on twins and go in there and roll it down in between 30 inch rows and it creates an awesome mat and suppresses weeds really good and whatnot. So that's definitely the go-to for us around here with soybeans.
Noah Newman:
Now, the roller, is that something you've used for several years, or as an engineer, are you always looking to kind of tinker with your equipment and try out new things?
Michael Vittetoe:
So the roller that we're using this year, we just got it put together like a week ago. So it's got brand new Dawn InRowl roll units on it. It's a 40 foot roller with 17 roller row units on it. So we just got that put together, so we're getting the bugs worked out of it and kind of tinkering on it some, but I really like the job it does, but we've been doing this InRowl rolling thing for a couple years now, previously, I had built a homemade InRowl roller out of some old DMI strip rolling baskets and beefed them up with some extra steel and whatnot. And so that's what we've been using the last couple years to figure out what we can do with this system, what we can't do with this system and kind of gain the confidence that you need to go ahead and write the check for the expensive row units from Dawn, so that's what we've been doing.
Michael Vittetoe:
So this is our third year with the InRowl roller, but first year with an actual legit InRowl roller. And I'm liking what I've been seeing so far. I think this tool has the ability to do a lot of stuff other than just rolling cereal rye, but that's obviously the bread and butter of what we got it for. So we're using it for that right now, but I think it'll be something that can be a highly versatile tool for us moving forward for years to come.
Noah Newman:
So then just to kind of lock in your timeline, so you put the rye in, in the fall, and is that in October or November?
Michael Vittetoe:
Oh, it kinda depends. So, on corn stalks, we're going to soybeans. I'm one that likes to wait a little bit longer so my rye isn't super aggressive, kind of spring time. I want it to be a little bit more mellow because we're going to be planting our cash crops into that and letting it go for a while. Especially our soybeans, we'll plant our soybeans in early April if we have a good weather pattern and then let everything grow together for two or three months, even, I think that checks out. At least two months, typically we're running everything together, six weeks to two months. So I'm trying to not make my rye super aggressive to the point where it completely shades out my soybeans that I plant in the spring.
Michael Vittetoe:
So typically I'll go out, I'll at least wait until October. First week of October's okay. I really like the second, and third week of October, that's kind of the sweet spot, but then we'll keep drilling all the way into December if we have to. But so on corn stocks, I like to have it out there in that mid-October, late October timeframe. That's kind of the sweet spot, but on soybean stubble, where we're going to corn, I don't like to go out and drill that stuff until, at least we hit November, just to even further set the rye back. I've found that rye ahead of corn works a lot better when it's seeded really late in the fall and it doesn't get a whole lot of fall growth. It just doesn't have quite as big of a root system.
Michael Vittetoe:
And it's a little bit more tame come the springtime, and it's not quite as aggressive. So it's not nearly as problematic with the corn come the next year because we're out here to grow corn, to make money, not grow cover crop to get likes on Twitter, so whatever we need to do to get the best corn yield, that's what we're going to do, and that's where the late plan to dry ahead of corn seems like its kind of a good way to make the rye work in our system anyways.
Noah Newman:
Let's take a quick time out, back to the podcast in just a second, but once again, let's sync our sponsor, La Crosse Seed, solving the soil health puzzle, La Crosse Seed has you covered. Cover crops are an important piece to future profit, but it takes working at puzzles at times. La Crosse Seed delivers quality soil, first cover crop products, plus training and tools to help you succeed. Whether you're looking to grow your cover crop seed business, get product tips, or find a local soil first dealer, La Crosse Seed is ready to help. Learn more at soil1st.com. That's Soil 1-S-T dot com or call 800-356-SEED. Now, back to the podcast.
Noah Newman:
Now I know interseeding is something that you guys kind of dabbled in several years ago, not necessarily doing it anymore, but what did you learn? What were your big takeaways from when you guys were experimenting with interseeding?
Michael Vittetoe:
Sure. So we started playing around with interseeding back in 2016, I believe it was. And so 16, 17, and 18, we were doing some interseeding trials, some small stuff, small acre stuff, just to kind of see what we could get going. The main thing we were trying to do with that was just get more diversity in our operation as far as plant species go without having to bring a small grain in and whatnot. That was something that we were playing with. And, generally speaking for us around here, we've got quite a bit of water hemp in the area. So water hemp is a big issue where, if you run the herbicides that you need to manage the water hemp sufficiently, it's difficult to get the interseeded covers to come through those herbicides, whether it be, Callisto to burn the water hunt down, it has a little bit of residual and that's going to take out any of the small seeded broadleafs like clovers and whatnot.
Michael Vittetoe:
They're not able to get through that. And then the same thing with any Group 15 residual like Dual or acetochlor, anything like that. It seemed like when we were running the rates that we needed to get decent water hemp control, we weren't able to get the covers to come through that. And then if we backed that stuff off, then we weren't having good water hemp control and the water hemp would kind of overrun everything and choke the cover's out and whatnot. So, that was where we played around with it a little bit and weren't able to have super good luck with it. And so kind of just quit doing it back in, I think 19, we did a little tiny bit of it that would've been our last year doing it. But from that point, 2018 was when I started my cattle herd.
Michael Vittetoe:
And so that was kind of where that creative energy from the diverse covers and whatnot, that kind of got moved into the cattle side of things where we're able to do full season grazing, cover crops on some acres and that type of stuff to really maximize the benefits of that type of system. And so that's what we've been building kind of ever since then. So, I'll run with my cattle and my full season grazing paddocks, I'll run the same thing, like your cereal rye in the fall, or oats in the early spring, just like a cool season cereal on the front end of the growing season and graze that in the spring until that stuff's no longer good to graze and then go out and just drill into that a warm season mix, like with sorghum-sudangrass, some millet, some cowpeas, throw some soybeans, even some corn in there if you wanted to.
Michael Vittetoe:
Then also, if I don't have much, as far as clovers or annual ryegrass in the seed bank, then I'll throw some of that stuff in there. But generally speaking, I've gotten my seed bank built up on all those paddocks to the point where I don't need to throw the clovers or the annual rye or anything like that in there anymore. So I can just kind of run more the straight warm season stuff in the drill, which cheapens up the mix a little bit. But, that's kind of how that works. So, graze the cool season stuff early on until it's no longer good then drill the warm season stuff in there and let it take over during the heat of the summer. And that seems to work pretty good.
Michael Vittetoe:
A little bit of manure makes that system work a little bit better. Gives it a little bit more nutrition for that forage to really get off and run in and whatnot, otherwise, if it's a pasture that hasn't necessarily been a pasture for very long and it doesn't have all the good stuff from the biology already in it, it might not have the punch to really push that warm season to the ability that it possibly can. So, a little bit of manure makes a big difference on that, but yeah, that's kind of what I've been working on the last few years is getting that system dialed in. So, right now, today, I've got my cattle on. They're about halfway through the oats on their first grazing pass.
Michael Vittetoe:
So the oats are not quite boot stage yet right now. So they're really tender, they're going through them really good, chomping on those, getting that grazed off. And then I'll probably get one more grazing pass on that, on that oat crop before I drill the warm season. So warm season stuff's generally drilled anytime, first, second, third week of June, kind of seems to be the sweet spot. You get much past summer solstice, and growth doesn't quite match what it could be if it would've been out a little bit earlier, but you can still get decent growth out of it in the right conditions. But that's where some of that diversity stuff has been getting applied instead of the interseeding thing in the corn because we're able to really push the envelope a lot farther with the cattle than we were with corn, so.
Noah Newman:
Yeah. How much of a game changer has that been for the grazing operation when you're using a diverse set of mixes? I mean, it sounds like you're using close to 10 to 15 species at a time. Would that be accurate?
Michael Vittetoe:
Oh, I mean, yeah. I would say there's some paddocks out there where there's even more stuff than that. It's just kind of going to depend on a number of things. Like I said earlier, I've been trying to get my seed bank built up to the point where I don't necessarily have to put all those species in my seed mix that I'm putting through the drill every year. And so on some of those fields where I've been doing that for quite a while, we've picked up some seeds from the historic seed bank, some of them are weed seeds, but some of those plant species or weed species that were out there, the cattle will graze them really good if you can time everything just right.
Michael Vittetoe:
And so, that's what I've been kind of playing with, just seeing what grows and what we can get the cattle to graze and the more diversity the better, it seems. So if there's something out there that nature says that we need to have growing, then I'm not going to really try and get in the way too terribly much, unless it's something like cockleburs or something that's going to be a really bad deal if it starts taking everything over. So, there's some paddocks out there that probably have 30 plus species, or 40 plus species growing in them. I don't know, I haven't even counted, but generally when I'm putting seed out, I'll probably put anywhere from five to 10 species in there, depending on what my goals are and what the seed bank looks like in that paddock.
Michael Vittetoe:
So it's definitely a neat thing to watch once all that stuff starts going and growing together and whatnot, there's some really cool stuff that happens, but as far as being a game changer, I guess for me, that's the only way that I've ever done it. I didn't have a cattle herd to start with, so I didn't have any previous experience or any other habits or anything like that. So, when I started the cattle herd, it was to do stuff like this. So I don't even know what it would be like to try and graze the other way without having that.
Michael Vittetoe:
But I know in the middle of the summer, when that warm season mix is in its prime, you're talking mid-August in there, the cool season grass pastures, even the stuff that I have, that's getting managed pretty good, they're just not really doing a lot of growing at that time of year. Everything's hot and it's dried out and the cool seasons are kind of dormant, so some people call that the summer slump, but that's right when the summer annuals, the warm season mixes are in their prime. So you just keep the animals on the really good stuff all year round and let the cool seasons kind of rest in that hottest period of the summer. And then they'll start growing again, pretty good in the fall and you can jump back on them at that point. It seems like it's a really good system, to make that work.
Michael Vittetoe:
It can be tricky to graze year round, I try and do that, obviously in the wintertime I feed, but during the growing season trying to have something that's in prime forage all the time can be a little bit tricky, but that's where you can get real creative with some of the stuff you use, the rye, and the oats, and then the perennial stuff, and then the warm seasons. And then you get into some more cool seasons and get in the fall and whatnot. And it's neat to need to link everything together into a good grazing program like that, and the cattle seem to really appreciate it too.
Noah Newman:
Yeah. Sounds like that system's really working for you. You mentioned earlier that cover crops, one of the major impacts they've had on your operation is just decreasing the amount of herbicide usage. Anything else that you could think of in terms of most noticeable impact covers have had on your operation?
Michael Vittetoe:
Oh, I mean, the erosion control benefits obviously are a big deal. Anywhere that we've got any sort of slope, if we aren't running covers we'll typically, even in a no-till system, we'll see a little bit of erosion. And part of that, just as we might not be doing as good of a job at infiltrating as we possibly can, and then you start getting some runoff and it concentrates in the low spots and you start getting washouts and whatnot. And what we've noticed is since we've started using covers more and keeping living roots out there all year round we're infiltrating a lot more water and that's making it so we don't have the runoff and we don't have the washouts and whatnot developing from heavy rainfalls. It also has its own set of challenges when you start infiltrating that much water.
Michael Vittetoe:
If we get a really wet spring, then you're infiltrating all that water and you start to deal with other issues as far as that goes, like nitrogen loss and whatnot, because you're flushing more water through the soil. But that's where we're trying to address that by stabilizing stuff, with things like humic acid and whatnot, where we're putting our hog manure out in the fall, just to try and keep things in the system that we want in the system. And not be sending nutrients downstream if we can help it. Inputs are expensive these days, so anything we can do to keep those nutrients in our field, and that's what we're going to be trying to do.
Michael Vittetoe:
So that's a big deal, the erosion control. And then, and then also, we have been using the rye the way we have been on soybeans. We just don't really have issues with our soybeans having wet feed anymore because the rye this time of year is really pulling a lot of water out of the soil. So if we have a wet spring, we let the rye go and suck as much water out of the soil profile as we can, and it just kind of keeps that top layer of soil from getting too terribly saturated and keeps it aggregated a little bit better, having that root system there longer into the year and then that lets the beans get up and running. And once they get their root system established, then it's about time to roll the covers down and get them out of the way and let the beans take over, so it's a nice buffer against the weather as far as far as moisture goes. On some of our flat heavy fields, we've got some really heavy clay soil, so that's something that we've battled over the years and it seems like the way we're doing our soybean program seems to really take care of that in a good way.
Noah Newman:
Well, I like to always close out the podcast by asking our guests for a tip or, or some kind of advice for people out there who might be listening. It is called Cover Crop Strategies, so do you have anything you'd like to offer to our audience before we let you go?
Michael Vittetoe:
The main thing I have to say is if you let your cover crop get big, do whatever you can to get laid down on the soil. That's going to maximize the benefits from that. If you can get that cover crop rolled down instead of spraying it out and just letting it fall over on its own. I feel like there's lots of benefits to rolling big covers down. So if you can figure out how to make that happen on your operation, you'll be on the right track.
Noah Newman:
Thanks to Michael for joining us this week. Before we go, let's once again thank our sponsor, La Crosse Seed. Are you solving the soil health puzzle? La Crosse Seed has you covered. Cover crops are an important piece to future profit, but it takes work and is puzzling at times. La Crosse Seed delivers quality soil first cover crop products, plus training and tools to help you succeed. Whether you're looking to grow your cover crop seed business, get product tips, or find a local soil first dealer. La Crosse Seed is ready to help. Learn more at soil1st.com. That's Soil 1-S-T dot com, or call 800-356-SEED. That's going to do it for this week's edition of Cover Crop Strategies, the podcast. Hope you enjoyed listening. Thanks for being with us. And until next time, remember for all things cover crops, head to covercropstrategies.com.
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