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“We have a more holistic approach to our grazing management of making a plan to have the cattle out on the land year round, and there's a lot of savings with that.”
— Eli Little, Grower, Castlewood, S.D.
In this episode of the Cover Crop Strategies Podcast, brought to you by Go Seed, listen to a presentation from the 2022 National Cover Crop Summit featuring South Dakota father-and-son farmer duo Barry and Eli Little.
They explain how their 2,500 acres of cropland and pastureland have improved by incorporating covers and ruminant animals on every acre, as well as how they use rotational grazing with their cattle and the economic benefits they’ve enjoyed from implementing covers and livestock.
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Full Transcript
Mackane Vogel:Welcome to the Cover Crop Strategies Podcast, brought to you by GO Seed. I'm Mackane Vogel, Assistant Editor at Cover Crop Strategies. In this episode, listen to a presentation from the 2022 National Cover Crop Summit, featuring South Dakota father and son farmer duo, Barry and Eli Little. You'll hear them explain how their 2500 acres of crop land and pasture land have improved by incorporating covers and livestock.
Eli Little:I am Eli Little, and this is my dad, Barry Little.
Barry Little:Hello.
Eli Little:We're going to talk about our journey with Cover Crops and what we've done in about the last 10 years, and show you some numbers, and hopefully, we can all learn something. So we call ourselves the Blue River Ranch, unofficially. That is the very little Sioux River Ranch and we are located in Castlewood, South Dakota, in the northeast, eastern part of the state.
Our elevation is 1700 feet, compare that to the average elevation of Iowa of 1100 feet, so that influences our climate. Average rainfall is less than 24 inches a year. Annually average temperature high is 54, average low is 31. Just want to point out on that map that there's that... It says Coteau des Prairies. The Coteau plateau is what we sit up on top of and that has a lot to do with our climate. So from Castlewood, Barry and I are located just northwest.
In Barry's experience, the latest frost he's seen is June 12th, and the earliest frost he is ever seen was August 10th, not in the same year, that would not be fair. But that is our context is a cooler climate. So what do we do with that? So it is easier on livestock. Deep freeze helps break up compaction. We don't have bugs year round and we can use the freezing to kill cover crop species or weed species.
We do have a shorter growing season, not just time between frost, but the time in between is cooler. And our soil is usually colder in the spring, leads a lot of guys doing a lot of tillage in our area, and we don't usually plant more than a 95-day corn and early bean varieties as well. And because of all this as well, we have a shorter grazing season and that's where cover crops really come into play.
Barry Little:In a normal year, we don't see hardly any days over 90 degrees, so we don't deal with the excessive heat stress.
Eli Little:Another con of having cooler climate is we deal with a lot of snow in typical year. We've been fortunate the last few years, but we will get it one of these years. So just a little farm overview that we grow, corn, soybeans, spring wheat, winter wheat, oats, started doing cover crops in 2009.
Barry Little:Our usual rotation, and we don't have a set in stone rotation, we are flexible in all of that, but about 40% of our crops are corn, 35% soybean, and 25% small grain.
Eli Little:And with our corn, we strip-till and we'll do variable rate fertilizer and seeding. So on the livestock side, we have cow, calf, [inaudible 00:04:30], do custom grazing. We also have sheep, [inaudible 00:04:35], chickens for eggs and for meat.
Barry Little:We're currently going to calve out 250 red cows this spring between the end of April and the 1st of July. And we're going to run about 60 yearlings on grass during the summer. Our custom grazing operation varies from... We have some herds that we keep year round and calve out for the owners, and we have some herds that come in for part of the year as dry cows for us to custom graze because what we charge is cheaper than buying hay and feeding.
Eli Little:We got started with cover crops in 2009. We followed spring wheat, we had a spinner, and then we worked it in with a vertical tillage machine, just turnips, radishes, and oats. And then we let the cows out on this 50 acre field.
Barry Little:So that first year, we had such fantastic luck that we thought we had found the answer to running out of feed at the end of the year. The cover crop, which was a lot of volunteer wheat, grew up to waist high and we turned out a herd of 150 cows. The first thing they did was eat all the spring wheat. Then they went to the field next door, which was corn stalks, and they grazed corn stalks for a while, and then they came back and ate all of the turnip and radish tops. Then they went back to the cornfield and grazed there again.
And finally, they came back and they ate all the turnips and radishes that they had pulled out and laid on top of the ground. So when people talk about their experience with grazing cover crops, it depends on what the cow is hungry for at the time, what they're going to eat. And in the end, they cleaned everything up really well.
Eli Little:It left nothing on the field.
Barry Little:Yes.
Eli Little:So we found out through the next four years that you need a little bit of moisture. So we continued following spring wheat with cover crops, but we were still in the mindset that we needed to remove the straw and that we needed to run ourself right over our wheat ground because we didn't think we could get cover crop to grow up through where there were windrows of straw.
We didn't have a lot of species and we didn't get a lot of germination in those years, but we were mainly doing it to cover our conservation stewardship program that was kind of, well, we do it to get paid from the government and if we get grazing out of it, that's a bonus. And that was our mindset back then and it's changed now. So in 2014 through 2016, we did a full season cover crop trial.
Planting after spring wheat wasn't working, so we thought why don't we just try some full season and we'll get into that later. And then we had some hail in '17 that we'll get into as well. And since 2018, we've been more focused on growing that cover crop and we'll get into that. So just a little cattle history here. Barry and his brother had cows for probably 30 years.
Barry Little:At least.
Eli Little:At least. And in a set stock grazing, you put them in there until they run out, and then you find a different place for them. So after 2008, we started looking at rotational grazing. We didn't really know what we were getting into. We had a custom herd that they wanted different herds, and we had, I think, four different groups and-
Barry Little:They wanted each group of cows to be bred by a different bull, so they wanted to keep separated so they could keep track. It was a registered Angus herd and they wanted to keep track of Cyrus.
Eli Little:So it wasn't ideal because we had to keep our herd and our custom herds separate and it's not ideal for rotational grazing. So in 2014, we started fencing a lot of crop land and started focusing on extending our grazing, knowing how much we could save by just keeping the cows out on the land. And then in 2018, we finally were able to convince some customers to allow us to put all the cattle together.
And we have a more holistic approach to our grazing management of making a plan to have the cattle out on the land year round. And there's a lot of savings with that. So in 2014 when our mind set changed because we started hearing about soil health, I believe Barry heard from Gabe Brown up in Bismarck?
Barry Little:Yeah, Gabe Brown's well-known in the regenerative ag circles. He is like our guru on this stuff. We heard him first in 2014 and he started talking about soil health and he started talking about regenerative ag. And one of the things he said was, for each 1% increase in organic matter, you add a one inch to the water holding capacity of your soil. And the biggest concern for most of my life has been a lack of moisture for making yield. And it sounded like it was something we should study.
Eli Little:I don't think we... We know we didn't fully understand what soil health meant, but we wanted to try it out. But ever since about 2018 and the more people we listened to, we knew it needed to be the main focus on our farm. And we needed to make regenerative agriculture our ultimate goal. So this is where we started our journey in soil health. We went all in on a full season cover crop on a 50 acre field that had low spots and sandy spots, and we wanted to see what we could do with it.
So we planted turnips, radishes, some clovers, [inaudible 00:11:24], flax, sunflowers, millet, oats. So this was our plan. We'd start in that corner with a sandpit there that holds water and we'd let the cows graze there until they were done and move them south, and then let them to the west there and move them south. And that was what we were going to go with. So in late August of '14, we implemented our plan. We let the cows out to their paddocks and let them destroy everything.
Barry Little:Jim Gerrish is a well-known cattle researcher, cover crop guy, and one of the things that he made us repeat at a seminary he put on is, I will not be afraid to waste grass. And conventional thinking says that that picture there on the left of that waste high feed would make an awful lot of tons of silage or round bales of hay.
And you would get a lot more feed out of it if you took it off the land instead of letting the cattle graze it. That's conventional thinking. Our thinking is we're better off to let the cattle out in it, let them eat a third to half of it, trample the rest into the ground to improve our soil health.
Eli Little:So this is what it looked like after they grazed it in '14. You can't see the ground on that and ground cover's one of the principles of soil health. So we were covering that. So then we didn't do anything with it until the next spring. And this is where the clover started growing back. We went in and planted oats, peas and barley, and-
Barry Little:Obviously, this was all no-till, no tillage involved.
Eli Little:We ended up putting up 20 acres of it for silage, but the local beekeepers would drove by and noticed all of the flowering plants and asked if they could put some bees on our place and they've been bringing them ever since. And then we went with another cover crop mix, I think turnips, radishes, oats, and [inaudible 00:13:49] sorghum, just a few species after that. And that was then grazed in February of 2016. So then we decided to do some tests with strip-tilling. We had a full recommendation for 200 bushel and acre corn, was a 500 pound an acre rate of PKS and nitrogen urea.
So results. The 500 pound an acre, we got 197 bushel an acre. And the 225 on the west side of that, it averaged 203. The zero rate, we averaged 142 and the half rate continuing east there, went 184. So what did we learn?
Barry Little:Okay, so we're using land costs at $200 an acre. That's what my mortgage payment was, so that's what we've used in all these examples. So in 2014, other than land costs, we had seed costs for the cover crop and one trip with a no-till drill and $10 an acre. Extra labor to set up and take down the temporary fences. And based on the number of days that we grazed there and the number of cows we had, we estimated that we took 5,000 pounds an acre off that land and we use a figure of 40 pounds per cow calf pair per day just as an estimate of what a cow the size we have will consume. And $1.60 is what our custom grazing rate is for people that hire us. So we've got a return, a cash return to the full season cover crop of a minus $55 an acre-
Eli Little:In 2014.
Barry Little:But that doesn't calculate any of the changes that we've made in our soil. So then the next year, same land costs. Seed costs are 50 because we seeded it twice and equipment's twice because we seeded it twice. The labor's half because everything was set up from the previous year for grazing. So our total expenses were $285 an acre. And that year, as we said, we grazed it twice. We grazed it once when it was five feet tall and then we grazed it again the following February, everything was frozen, but there was still a lot of feed out there. But we figured we got 10,000 pounds of feed per acre and with our calculation, that's $400 in value. So a net return of $115 an acre for a cover crop as compared to planting a grain crop.
Eli Little:So over the two years, we averaged $30 an acre. So let's go to the corn.
Barry Little:So in 2016, we planted that field to corn and the line at the bottom says, average fertilizer, $65 an acre. Comes to $100 or $500 an acre, total expenses. And the average yield on that field was 181. So that gives us an average profit of $151 an acre. But if we look at the individual test results, where we use the full fertilizer, it costs $130 an acre. We had a pretty good yield, but the profit was lower because the fertilizer costs did not pay or the yield increase did not pay for the extra fertilizer.
The part of the field where we put on the half rate of fertilizer yielded really good for cutting the rate back, pretty good profit on it. The three-year profit was really nice. The zero pounds of fertilizer went 142 and the profit was much lower there indicating that even though we're down our soil health journey, we haven't reached the point where we don't need fertilizer.
The interesting one for me is the 225 pound rate, which was the part of the field where we had removed all of the biomass from the first cover crop. We had wind-rowed it and chopped it for silage. Even though we had done that, through the grazing for two seasons of cover crops, we had increased the soil health enough that that test was the highest profit one out of the four.
Eli Little:So just getting into our results here. So our average profit was $71 an acre, potential was $95 an acre, and there was more potential out there. We know now that we could have gotten more out of our grazing. I know we looked at that don't waste grass quote, but we do a lot more efficient grazing now and we'll get into that too.
So what do we have for obstacles? That's the cows got out into the corn in '16 when we did our tests. They thought it was still their pasture. So inexperience with this whole testing, we probably could have gotten more out of it. But what else did we do for the field? We're down our soil health journey, we're improving organic matter, water holding capacity and available nutrients. And those are things that as the years go by.
Barry Little:So back in 2016, I did some research on the internet and found values for cow manure and urine, and calculated that for each ton of dry matter that a cow herd eats off of a field, you get $20 worth of fertilizer spread across the top of it. And that was with fertilizer prices in 2016. So I think in today's dollars, we would at least double that.
Eli Little:So 2017, we had a heck of a hailstorm come through. It wiped out about 1,000 acres of Barry and his brother's crop land, corn and beans. So the bottom field there is Barry's... We call it the middle field and kitty corner from that to the north is a field of his brothers'. And those are both corn in '17 and they both got zeroed out with hail. So here's what we did. So like I said, both fields were strip-tilled, planted the corn, sprayed, and [inaudible 00:21:28].
So basically the same costs put into them as far as that goes. And then it got hailed out and Barry decided we're going to plant full season cover crop. We did turnips, radishes, oat, sorghum-sudangrass, millet, and then we grazed it that winter. His brother decided to plant millet as a lot of people just thought that was the thing to do and then he cut, rake, baled, and hauled it. So this is our comparison.
So here's what we did with that grazing. We wind-rode about 90% of the 65 acre field. And we baled up along the trees where we assumed there was going to be a lot of snow. And so we left a little bit standing just to see how it compared. When we started grazing it, we gave them three to five days of grazing. We'd roll out the bales that were in their next paddock. We moved a temporary fence by drilling holes and putting our little posts in. An idea that Barry found on the internet. But we figured we took about a ton an acre off of grazing.
Mackane Vogel:We'll come back to the show in a moment, but first, I'd like to take a moment to thank our sponsor, GO Seed. Plant GO Seed's Fixation Balansa Clover and save up to $37 per acre in fertilizer input costs. At a trial conducted at the Ewing Demonstration Center in Illinois, Fixation Balansa Clover fixed nearly double the nitrogen per acre over Dixie Crimson Clover. Fixation Balansa Clover is the cover crop to improve your soil health, increase cash crop yields, and make a positive impact on the planet. Visit www.fixationclover.com to learn why GO Seed is the industry leader in cover crop breeding and research. And now, let's get back to the episode with Barry and Eli Little.
Eli Little:So let's compare costs and benefits here.
Barry Little:Okay, so in 2017 that was the hail year, we had spent an awful lot of money growing a corn crop that was zeroed out. But because of that time, we were carrying full coverage, crop insurance and full coverage hail insurance, we actually made a profit on hailed out corn. But rather than be satisfied with that, and plus, we always need more cow feed and this was an opportunity to get some pretty cheap cow feed. So my brother's side of the fence though, he doesn't own any cows anymore and he thought that [inaudible 00:24:31] might be pretty valuable. As you can see, he got two-and-a-half ton an acre. So he actually netted more dollars per acre than I did that year.
Eli Little:That year is the-
Barry Little:But he removed all of the biomass.
Eli Little:So let's go to the next year.
Barry Little:So in 2018, we both planted corn back where we had tried to grow corn the year before. Because I assumed that all the fertility I put into the previous crop was still there, we did not strip-till my field, we just no-till corn into it, came back with 30 gallons of 28% when it was about knee-high. And that was all the inputs that I put into that field.
And my brother had to put on a full rate of fertilizer because he had removed all of the fertility from the year before with his millet crop and he did have a higher yield than I did. But because of the extra $120 cost, over the two-year period, I had a little bit better profit.
Eli Little:That's a lot of soil. I think we should point out that middle field, that 187 bushel an acre, was the best yield that field has ever seen. I think the previous high for that field was 152 bushels an acre. So it was a great year for corn, but a great year to save on it as well. So in 2019, we had a wet spring. Commodity prices weren't there obviously, so there wasn't a lot of incentive to get the bottom ground planted.
So we had a lot of prevent plant and we knew exactly what we were going to do with it, we were going to plant cover crops. So here is an example of a cover crop on prevent plant. So we started on the south end with cattle. That dot is where our water tank in that pasture was. So, and we worked our way north. We were taking off probably 10,000 pounds an acre to start with until the cows decided to ruin our plants. But on the north and south side of that, we did plant [inaudible 00:27:14] soybeans. So we're going to compare that. But here is what we did with that field. That sorghum-sudangrass grew up and you can see how tall it's there.
Barry Little:So if you look closely at the picture, you can see the top leaves of that sorghum-sudangrass has been frosted. And this is on the ninth day of October, which is an unusually late fall for us. Normally, we see a frost between the 15th and 20th of September and sometimes much earlier. But lately, we've been getting extremely late falls, which allows us to get that kind of growth out of a cover crop.
Eli Little:So we have all these species of cover crop, but I believe it was called the early grazer mix from Mustang Seed. In those years, we've been buying mixes and as we've learned through these mixes, we can make our own now and save a little money.
Barry Little:So this table is a comparison between the soybean crop that was our first intention on the whole field and what the graze cover crops turned out. In both examples, the land is at 200. Seed for soybeans was 35 for non-GMO, 35 for the chemicals. Equipment charges, 70. Insurance, 25. The field went 55, I got $11 for non-GMO beans and I had a profit of $240 an acre.
Now the other side is the cover crop, which could have been left fallow, but the reason for this table is to just compare what would happen if you took crop land out of production, planted a full season cover crop because you need the feed for your cattle. You can see that if we had been able to get the full 10,000 pounds an acre that was out there, we would've made an extra $160 an acre. As it was, we ended up averaging about 6,000 pounds an acre. So the cover crop matched up to the soybean crop.
Eli Little:So just comparing the grazing cover crops to just leaving it fallow.
Barry Little:Yeah, so if you got to prevent plant field, and you own livestock, it is a really simple decision to go out there and plant that as soon as you can, as soon as it's fit. For a cost of an additional $75, we got $240 out of it.
Eli Little:And that's using our custom grazing rate. So that would be assuming that all of the cattle are custom. When you own cattle, you're looking at a lot of savings. You got any numbers on that?
Barry Little:Well, if we get to the end of the year and we don't have enough feed to get through the winter and we have to start buying feed, it's going to cost $2 to $2.50 a day per cow to feed them purchased feeds. So if you can grow something fairly cheap and allow your cattle to graze it, you can save a lot of money on your cow herd.
Eli Little:Then this is what you get a fallow. So again, with grazing prevent plant, we're trying to work towards not having that prevent plant anymore. How do you do that? You build up soil structure. If you want to do that quickly, you add cattle to your cover crops. So since 2019, this is where we were at. We no-till everything except we do strip-till our corn. We don't apply fungicides or insecticides, except-
Barry Little:We are searching for a seed corn supplier that does not put a seed treatment on their corn. We don't believe we need it.
Eli Little:We haven't used starter fertilizer in five years and-
Barry Little:And all of our nitrogen is split applied. Most of it is applied after the crop is up and growing.
Eli Little:Our goal is cattle on every acre at least every two years. We want to look at cutting down on herbicide usage and the cost. Just question what the agronomist tells you.
Barry Little:So we hire an agronomist and we don't listen to him very well. He's going to tell us to go out right after we plant or before we plant and apply a pre-emergence herbicide to corn. We have found that we can wait until the corn is six to eight inches tall before we spray anything because we don't have any weeds coming up because we don't plant them with tillage.
Eli Little:So we've been doing a lot more winter wheat because when we started off with cover crops in 2009 through those years, we couldn't get much growth out of planting after spring wheat, especially when we were removing the straw. So by planting winter wheat, the difference between winter wheat and spring wheat as far as their yield and price, there isn't much difference.
But when you can buy yourself two to three weeks of extra growth, that can make a big difference. And we'll show that from 2021. We've been doing some planting oats with clover either to combine and then plant another cover crop into or for haying or grazing. And we've also implemented interseeding corn and we'll get into that. So in 2021, we think we did a good job of grazing cover crops. So here is our plan or what we did on this 90 acres of irrigated winter wheat.
So that sandpit is from the year before or from '14 and '16. So that was their water source. And then they would come in to that middle part there. And every day through October, I would move them to the next two-and-a-half to three acres. And we learned that the fence needed to be on, we had insulated ends on it, on the temporary fence, and I'd set up for two or three days, and usually, it only took me about half an hour a day.
So while we are combining soybeans and corn, we're grazing cover crops efficiently. And I thought this was cool in our SFS program, they updated the maps and this is the first day of grazing. We had the cover crop wind-rowed because it was sorghum-sudangrass and it froze, so we didn't want to lose all the quality of that sorghum-sudangrass. So we had it all wind-rowed.
Barry Little:If you counted all the little dots on that picture, there is about 500 head of cattle grazing there together.
Eli Little:So this is the mix that we came up with, oats, millet, cowpea, sunn hemp, turnips, radishes, flax, sunflowers, buckwheat, Crimson Clover, African cabbage, sorghum-sudan-grass, soybeans, and of course, a new volunteer winter wheat out there.
Barry Little:When we say we mix our own cover crops, we pick out the species we want and we have a local cover crop blender, B&L Ag out of Clear Lake, South Dakota. And we tell him what we want and he figures out what rates of each thing to put in and he saved us at least 30% to 40% on our cover crop costs.
Eli Little:Well, I think we're probably spending about the same that we did the years before, but we're adding all these species. And by adding these species, we're cycling nutrients more, we're adding diversity and that's really helped. So let's... Want to get into this?
Barry Little:Sure. So the field we're talking about that I had planted winter wheat on in the fall of 2020 is across the road from my cousin's pivot, which he planted the soybeans in the spring of 2021. And when the corn market started looking like it was taking off in May, he stopped at our house and he said, "You really ought to go out there and spray Roundup on that winter wheat, plant the corn because you're giving up an awful lot of money by sticking to your program."
So that made me think, I better see if he's right. So if we had planted corn on that field, this is what our costs would've been, about $600 an acre. And by planting winter wheat and cover crops, our costs were about $150 an acre less.
Eli Little:So then-
Barry Little:But on the revenue side, 85 bushel acre, winter wheat at $7 is shy of $600 an acre. But we measured 4,200 pounds an acre of dry matter consumed by our cow herd, which adds almost $170 an acre. So anyway, our net from the winter wheat was $306 an acre. And if we had planted it to corn, we would've needed over 180 bushel an acre because $5 was the harvest price.
So maybe we did leave a little money on the table as far as maximizing dollars, but the things that you can't really measure is that next year when we do plant corn, we won't have to buy a trait corn and we'll be able to use less fertilizer because of the amount that the cattle put back into the soil. There's no need for micronutrients when cattle cycle it. We won't need as much irrigation water.
And soil health analysis is something I stuck on this page because I was involved in a South Dakota State University study for soil health. And every, year they came and took a soil sample and sent it to Cornell for a complete soil health analysis. And the field that we're dealing with here has gone from a score of 75 to a score of 85 on a scale of 100 over the last five years. So we're going in the right direction.
Eli Little:So in 2018, we started looking at interseeding cover crops into corn. This is something we made out of a old rotary hoe and a Gandy box that had been used inoculating non-Bt corn.
Barry Little:The idea came from a man named Jerry Ackerman who sells cover crops somewhere in southern Minnesota. There's a welding shop down there that makes these and sells them.
Eli Little:So we started in '18, we had an elevator spread urea with the cover crop and we didn't have the inter-seeder yet, and it didn't really work. The only place we saw cover crop growth was where the guy turned his spreader around. So from '20... In 2019 and 2020, we had him spread it again, but we used the rotary hoe to work it. In 2021, we added the Gandy box. So we were able to just put down our cover crop seed and it runs us about $12 an acre.
But more importantly, for when we added that, we weren't using urea anymore. We liked to side dress 28%. And thank goodness we did that in 2021 because there was absolutely no moisture for the urea in June that would probably have just left. So this is what our inter-seeder looks like. Now, those hoses blow it in front of the rotary hoe kinds and I go about six and a half miles an hour.
Barry Little:The ground cover is almost 100%. And these are old rotary hoe blades that are spinning there. And they're not really doing any tillage, all they're doing is throwing a little bit of dust up in the air and covering the seed.
Eli Little:So why are we doing this? Why are we interseeding cover crops in the corn? So it can add up to 500 pounds an acre of forage, which by itself, is a $20 an acre value, which covers the cost of seeding and then the seed. So what else do we have here? Polycultures are proven to be more drought tolerant than any monoculture. And we can provide diversity to a corn crop. Corn is a warm season grass, so we're adding a cool season grass [inaudible 00:41:50], and a cool season legume.
We're keeping [inaudible 00:41:57], which is a [inaudible 00:41:59] soil [inaudible 00:42:00] and we're building organic matter. Where we had hilltops that would typically dry out in a drought year, we had the corn put out in a year, but we had this mat of cover crop underneath that you're not going to see. Typically, we'd see this just gravel sand on top of these hills.
Barry Little:So the most common question we get when people hear that we are interseeding into corn is, aren't you afraid that that cover crop is going to use up all the moisture and fertility in your soil? And the answer is, not at all because the cover crop in 30 inch row corn does not grow very much, but it does grow enough that it begins to feed the microbes in the soil.
And one of the speakers, I can't think of the name now, that we have listened to in the past, said that a several inch tall polyculture will release more root exodus than a seven-foot tall corn crop will. So that little bit of fuzz growing on the ground in our cornfield is doing more for our microbes than the corn crop can do.
Eli Little:That was Dr. Christine Jones.
Barry Little:Okay.
Eli Little:So over the years when you do a lot of experiments, sometimes you lose, usually, you learn. So this has been an issue for the last couple of years, compaction in spring grazing. I know that that's something that scares a lot of people when they start hearing about cattle on their land. So we know now that we got to pull the cows off the crop [inaudible 00:44:09] before thaw and we have a plan for this spring and we hope to implement it.
Something else we've had issue with is when the snow flies, the forage is gone. So we started doing the winter wheat and that adds a lot of tonnage. And then we do the wind-rowing and then we'll bale up. We were fortunate, we baled off about a 90 acre cover crop field and got 130 bales and we just left them there, and the cows are going to graze them here the next week. And so we knew they could get to all of that. And this goes along with the holistic management, just you got to plan way ahead for these things. Another concern was for our cattle was adequate nutrition and that's why... So we've been using this Mix 30. Want to get into that?
Barry Little:Mix 30 tastes like molasses with an awful lot of salt in it. It's a high fat mix. We put it out in lick tubs. What we've discovered is when our cattle are getting pretty good nutrition from the cover crop and cornstalks, they don't eat it. But it's our indication of when we need to move to the next field is when they start eating up all of the Mix 30.
Eli Little:And being able to diversify the cover crop mix with... Being able to add species with that extra time for growing after winter wheat, that helps with nutrition. They don't want the same thing every day. And adding that rye grass, and turnips, and radishes, and Crimson Clover to the cornstalks, all that together is a total mixed ration for them. So we will see them go out in a cornfield and just not leave even if they have a cover crop field to go to because they have everything in there that they need.
Barry Little:Chemical carryover is another thing people ask about. How can you spray your corn and then interseed a cover crop into it? And I think it has to do with the health of the microbes in our soil. We normally spray our corn about June 10th and we normally interseed cover crop 10 to 15 days after that. And the cover crop isn't going to germinate for a little while, but in a matter of 20 days, any of the residual herbicides that we have applied are evidently broken down enough that they don't stop our cover crop from germinating.
Eli Little:We did have a little issue with that hailed out corn using, was it Stinger?
Barry Little:Yes.
Eli Little:Yes. You can't use Stinger if you want to plant cover crops. And also after wheat, we usually used 2,4-D, but we've been using Liberty for our burn down on wheat because we know there's absolutely no carryover with Liberty.
Barry Little:The problem with 2,4-D is if you get a lucky rain right after you spray it, it'll go down in the root zone and keep your cover crop from germinating.
Eli Little:So I'm sure a lot of people have questions about water supply. That can be an issue. I pointed out the couple of places we have water. Not everybody's going to have a spring fed dam, we get that, but... So this... I think in January we had to put in a rural water hookup. You can put wells in. A lot of those things have cost sharing. Just talk to your local FSA NRCS, even different people like game fishing parks, Pheasants Forever, Ducks Unlimited. Those entities know that getting cows out on land is important, so just talk to someone.
Along with fencing, a lot of times, we can talk to a neighbor and say, "Hey, can we use an outlet and it'll keep the cattle out of your yard." Usually, they oblige, otherwise, we invest in solar fencers. And then you just debate whether you need temporary fence or you need permanent fence. And we can keep our cattle in with a single wire around them. And as long as it's atop.
Barry Little:And what's the minimum joules you'd want in a fence?
Eli Little:I like to keep seven to eight joules. They say three, but I don't believe it. And then you got to work with customers. Custom cattle, you got to explain to them what your goals are, what your system is. We can't take on cattle that are babied, that spend their life in a feedlot getting fed 40 pounds of corn.
Barry Little:We also can't take on cattle that spent their life doing that and now they're losing their teeth. We've had cows that have hardly any teeth, but they've spent their whole life foraging. And I know we had some cows that were 16 years old that were doing just fine, but they have to have grown up in the system.
Eli Little:Because we've had cows that were five years old that just weren't going to make it with us. So it's not the breed, it's just how the cow's been raised.
Mackane Vogel:Big thanks to Barry and Eli Little for today's discussion. The full transcript and video of the episode will be available at covercropstrategies.com/podcasts. Many thanks to our sponsor, GO Seed, for helping to make this cover crop podcast series possible. From all of us here at Cover Crop Strategies, I'm Mackane Vogel. Thanks for listening and have a great day.
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