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“It’s about resiliency. If you have a system that’s resilient, then you’re going to come out ahead.”
— Ray McCormick, No-Tiller, Vincennes, Ind.
For this episode of the Cover Crop Strategies Podcast, brought to you by Sound Agriculture, listen to a panel discussion from the 2025 National No-Tillage Conference. This discussion, centered on cover crops and extreme weather conditions, features 4 growers from 4 different states who all have a wealth of experience using cover crops.
Listen as No-Till Legend and former Ohio State Extension ag engineer Randall Reeder moderates this panel featuring Ray McCormick, Loran Steinlage, Barry Fisher and Allen Berry.
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Full Transcript
Mackane Vogel:Welcome to the Cover Crops Strategies Podcast, brought to you by Sound Agriculture. I'm Mackane Vogel, Associate Editor of Cover Crops Strategies. In today's episode, listen to a panel discussion from the 2025 National No-Tillage Conference. This discussion centered on cover crops and extreme weather conditions, features four growers from four different states who all have a wealth of experience using cover crops. Listen as No-Till legend and former Ohio State Extension ag engineer, Randall Reeder, moderates this panel featuring Ray McCormick, Lauren Steinlage, Barry Fisher, and Allen Berry.
Randall Reeder:Well, let's go ahead and those of you are standing room only out in the hallway, I think we can squeeze you in here at least along the wall. Welcome to this panel on handling drought and wet conditions. Let me just go ahead and ask you this. Is there anybody here who had an issue in the last five years with either too wet or too dry?
Speaker 3:[inaudible 00:01:17].
Randall Reeder:All right, I think we've got the right audience here. We have an outstanding panel here today and they decided that we're just going to sit here on the front of the stage and have an informal discussion with those of you. We got Ray McCormick, Lauren Steinlage, Barry Fisher, and Allen Berry.
Mackane Vogel:The two Berries are down here.
Ray McCormick:Both of us together. [inaudible 00:01:46].
Randall Reeder:No, we got more black hats here. I should have worn my own white Will Rogers hat to give it a little contrast, I suppose. Well, I'm going to ask each of them just to do a one or two minute introduction so that you have an idea of where they're coming from and if they have a specific comment about wet or dry, they can mention it now or it'll come up later. Go ahead, Ray.
Ray McCormick:Ray McCormick from Southwestern Indiana. I've been no-tilling into cover crops since June of '86. I had a photo taken when I first did it. I guess I've done about everything right and wrong you can do so it's been exciting and interesting. On my farm, a dry year is a good year. I raise big yields in a dry year. In a very wet year, I get hurt. I've learned a lot about farming wet ground with cover crops, dealing with flooding and so forth. Wetness problems are a bigger problem for me than drought.
Randall Reeder:All right. Lauren?
Loren Steinlage:Lauren Steinlage, West Union, Iowa, which is in the far Northeast corner. We're right on the edge of the Driftless area, so we've got about every type of soil you can ask for and then some. I've been quoted before for saying we've got 25 different soil types in the same pass and that really became evident this year. We started out in the D4 drought and then we had about 30-some inches of rain, give or take 20. Then we ended up in a D2 drought and then harvested, and now we're back about 15 inches above, so 50-some inches and normally we get about 35 inches this year. But roller coaster year, probably the biggest thing I've seen is the better the covers, the better we could handle the moisture and stuff like that.
Randall Reeder:Barry Fisher.
Barry Fisher:Barry Fisher, our farm is in West Central Indiana. I worked for nearly 40 years with the USDA and finished with the National Soil Health Division. The thing I've been lucky about is I get to work with so many really top-notch farmers across the country and see how they do a lot of things and I get to go back and pick all the good things and try it on my own farm.
I don't come up with anything very often on my own, but I'm around a lot of smart people, so that whole crowdsource knowledge is really, really beneficial. But our farm's been continuous no-till and cover crops with rotation of corn, beans mostly, but corn, beans, wheat, occasionally, so for 25 years since we've had it.
We've always had a local network there in West Central Indiana and it branches out to different areas, but there's a lot of group of farmers right there that have had a really tight network and sharing strategies over the years for more than 40 years. It's a lot of, never underestimate the power of multiple minds trying to fix problems. It really, really works well.
Randall Reeder:All right. Allen Berry?
Allen Berry:I'm from West Central Illinois. If you go to Indianapolis and go straight west of the Mississippi River, I live two mile back from the river. We're all on upland soil there. The river on the Illinois side doesn't bother us. We do farm across the river and both Iowa and Missouri. We're right where the three states come together. Lauren there, he causes trouble down river on our Missouri farm, that's a bottom farm. This past year we had nice soybeans standing down there, well over ankle high, not quite knee high, and he sent too much water down. That was a little-
Loren Steinlage:It didn't come off my farm.
Allen Berry:It didn't come off of yours? Well, somebody sent it down to us. But anyway, we've only got a couple hundred acres. That most of our ground is all upland soil and better deals.
Randall Reeder:All right. I didn't think I even mentioned, I'm Randall Reeder, I'm from Ohio, a retired extension ag engineer, and I don't, well I've got three acres but that hardly counts. But I'll mention this, in Southeast Ohio it was a record-breaking drought this year and everything is still dry. At the same time in West Central and Northwest Ohio, which is our main corn and soybean producing region, they had a wet spring so there was delayed planting. Then that ended up being dry, not drought but dry.
But I think overall, don't quote me on this, but I think our yields were reasonable this year overall, where some farmers had practically nothing. Well, one quick example, somebody posted this on Facebook because the soybeans especially dried down really quick. They said on the yield monitor, and I'm making up a number here approximately, but the moisture of the beans was 6.7%, really dry, and the yield was the same number. Anyway, drastic situation.
Do we have anybody here who is just getting into no-till, transitioning into no-till? [inaudible 00:07:29]. All right, that's fantastic. How many, show of hands who have been no-tilling at least 10 years just to get a feel for the audience here? Anybody? Let's see about high numbers. Anybody over 30? How many?
Speaker 3:[inaudible 00:07:50].
Randall Reeder:40 or 50 years? Great. Anybody at 50? Well that's fantastic to have that experience here. But back to those who are transitioning. Barry Fisher with his work with as a soil health specialist with NRCS and his own experience in no-tilling has put together a kind of what I'd call a transition plan. If you're tilling and you're going to go to continuous no-till, he's got a step-by-step process. Barry, if you would just summarize or go through that quickly as to how to do it. One thing I remember, and I'll put this out first, do not no-till corn the first step. Right?
Barry Fisher:Those of us learned the hard way years and years and years ago. That's why we struggled as long as we did. But knowing what we know today and anybody that's paid attention during this conference, there's been a lot of information on carbon and nitrogen and understanding your carbon and nitrogen. Going to no-till is one thing that changes that carbon to nitrogen ratio in your soil and that affects your nitrogen cycle. Add cover crops to that if you decide to no-till into cover crops. That's what gets a lot of people in trouble is because they don't understand that no matter how good a job you do of replacing your nitrogen and selecting your nitrogen, over half of your nitrogen in your corn crop is going to come from the soil. What you do to change the carbon and nitrogen ratio in your soil or add biomass of cover crops is going to change the delivery mechanism to your soil.
That's why when you're transitioning, you're coming out of a tillage system that that tillage was providing a lot of that was a big nutrient release, that was a big nutrient application. When you stop doing that all at once, that's where people get in trouble, especially when they go corn first. We tell people that start that system no-tilling beans first, or if you're going to add cover crops at the same time, start your cover crops after corn and plant beans into that cover crop. Make that your first two no-till operations in that because you've got to let that soil wean itself off of, they got to get some biology, you got to get some aggregate stability. You got to get over that collapse of aggregates and that immobilization of nitrogen at least for a full season. If you can start with cover crops first, that makes a big difference because you immediately start building soil aggregates, then you no-till corn, no-till beans into that cover crop and then you come back the next year, you plant another cover crop. You're continually building aggregates, you're building your soil, you're fixing some of those immobilization issues.
You're still going to have to, then when you come back to corn the following year and plant into that, you're going to have to understand that the immobilization is still occurring and you're still not getting the big burst of tillage nitrogen that happens when you're burning off the carbon, burning off the organic matter through that tillage. It's releasing that. You're going to have to have some starter nitrogen as you move into that. If you don't have a significant amount of early starter nitrogen during transition, that's where your corn yield will suffer.
Now that we understand more about carbon nitrogen, what the biology is doing in the soil, we can offset so many of those yield drags that you heard nightmares over throughout the years and stuff. You probably would've, that's just a simple corn-bean rotation. If you had wheat and that was a normal part of your rotation, we can start even better. We can even offset that even better after wheat and stuff. But these guys probably have some other kick in or starting step in processes that are proven too.
Randall Reeder:I'm assuming that if somebody not in the Midwest and not with the corn, soybeans and wheat, that there are suggested step-by-step process for cotton and maybe continuous wheat or continuous small grains as well.
Barry Fisher:We put together a guide sheet for the Western Plains where there's more traditional wheat fallow areas and how to step in there. There's one that we put together for the Wisconsin region in dairy country and where there's a lot of silage and things like that. We'll try to find links to those kind of, they were just two-page guide sheets that at least gave you a place to start, be successful.
Randall Reeder:All right. Go right ahead.
Ray McCormick:There's one thing that Barry didn't mention there that as I pick up farms and so forth, you're never going to till the ground again. Please get the field as smooth as you can if you're going to plant a cover crop in the fall and so forth. If there's rough areas, if there's been chiseled or anything, get as smooth as you can because you're never going to change the surface of that ground. You're going to hold it in place. This is your chance to get as good as you want and then get that cover crop on there. Some people say, "Oh, you need to rip it or you need to line it or you need to do this or that." Having it smooth because that's the way it's going to be for the rest of your life, that's going to be the smoothness of the surface of that ground.
Loren Steinlage:I think probably one of the things you really need to look at when you're making that move too is along with what you're saying, let's get that fuel tiled because I think tile is about the number one thing if you want to control your weather extremes. We got to get that surplus water out of the field. I'm a big believer in tile. You mess up a no-till field real quick when you will go out with the tiling machine and start plowing in tile.
Barry Fisher:If your soil needs tile, get that tile done ahead of time. You've got then an opportunity to integrate manure, get your lime and pH in good shape while you're doing the smoothing process, you're incorporating those things. We put together a whole entry phase management worksheet too that we'll give you a link to.
Loren Steinlage:You're able to control that water table with the topsoil.
Barry Fisher:I would think because I did so much research on compaction, if you've got a severe compaction layer or plow pan, go ahead and get that done. Then I would always add to that then adopt control traffic, which is ideal if you could do that.
Loren Steinlage:Tile and drainage seems to be one of the big misnomers going on right now. A lot of people want to start condemning that, but what they really need to do is start paying attention to what's actually going on out there. As we start building water holding capacity in that stuff, we start creating our own issue. One of the first reason I got into cover crops in that was to improve our drainage because all our farms are pattern tiles 70-80 feet. Well, we learned, we started improving our drainage, we could mitigate that. Now we've improved our water holding capacity to the point where we probably should have went in and split them tiles and everybody's like, "Oh, you're getting that water rid of that water quicker." No, we're getting rid of excess water.
About 10 years ago we started doing tie line monitoring and stuff like that and that led to some of the other studies we're involved in right now. There's going to be some data come out this year when we're talking about weather extremes. How many people remember the floods and all that stuff of Cedar Rapids is relevant to me. When he says we sent water down to him, that's why I can confidently say it probably didn't come off our farm. There's data coming out now that if everybody farmed in our watershed like I did or do, we'd mitigate flooding by over 50%. There's some three year data starting to come out this year that they're going to model that for the flood of Cedar Rapids and they're going to start listing how many houses we could have saved. That's stuff John Q. Public's going to start paying attention to.
Ray McCormick:Along that line, a couple of years ago, they wanted to do nitrate test on my tile outlets and I patterned, I bought a tile, wow, and patterned tile these fields and so forth. It didn't work because when the wet period was over, nothing was coming out of the tiles. You couldn't do a nitrate test because no water was exiting your tiles. It goes back to just what we talked about. You formed this sponge and so water, excess water, there isn't so much excess water at that point. It's going into the ground and it's staying in that sponge so no water coming out of my tile.
Loren Steinlage:Well, to further back that up and the number I remember several years ago when we were in Australia the one year is for every gram of carbon we can hold in the soil, we can hold eight grams of water. Now think about that. What's the main reason to sequester carbon? Is it to sell it down the pipeline or to actually sequester more water so we can actually whether these extremes and stuff like that?
Allen Berry:I've seen the numbers on that. If you increase your organic matter by 1%, it's so many thousand gallons.
Loren Steinlage:47,000 gallons per percent.
Allen Berry:Water, so that all helps out.
Mackane Vogel:We'll come back to the episode in a moment, but first I'd like to thank our sponsor, Sound Agriculture, for supporting today's podcast. Did you know you can build a water and nutrient superhighway in your soil? You just need the maximum acre solution from Sound Agriculture. The easiest way to maximize your crop's access to all season long. First, Source turns your soil into a nutrient factory, then Blueprint builds the delivery network by expanding the crop's reach beyond the roots. For the maximum acre solution that provides bigger, healthier crops, source it with Blueprint. Talk to your dealer or visit sound.ag. Now let's get back to the discussion.
Ray McCormick:I have targeted buying wet ground for various reasons, for flooding, for waterfowl hunting, for cheaper prices.
Allen Berry:You're along the Wabash River? Is that right?
Ray McCormick:Wabash, White and Ambrall. I mean any river out there where farmers didn't want it and it's too wet, I was after it. Let me give you some tips. Is plant corn late? You get your highest yields, the fastest growth, the less likely you're going to have your stand drowned out by planting corn late. I went through that this year where we planted all the sloughs in the field late, all the high ground early, and the sloughs were making 50 bushel an acre better than the early planted corn. My advice to you is you have wet ground, don't rush it and go in there and plant corn. Corn these days does fabulous planted in early June and my friends are doing this and so forth.
We begin to question why do we plant corn early when our lake corn's doing so well? Another tip, and I really got burned on this year, when you're planting late, you got to cover crop that tall. When you get heavy rains, you can't see where the stands drowned out. I can't walk 1,500 acres of wet corn. When you walk out or go out there with a planter, you see this area is wet and you replant it and you replant there. I missed half of it. My wife, because I had to do something, she bought me electric, one of these electric hunting bikes and they've got a wide tire. Now I can zoom back and forth across the fields.
Some of my neighbors use little four-wheelers because they'll go down the rows. But you have a hard time seeing that you don't have a good stand here and there. I can't walk 100 acre field. That can be a problem when you got cover crop this tall and you're getting heavy rains and it's damaging or drowning out the crop is being able to see where it did that. You have to be able to have a way to find those areas down in the field.
Speaker 8:For the farmers who they're afraid of seeing anything green when they go to plant their corn and you have this wet environment, they're afraid cover crops going to get away from them. They can't get it killed, but they don't want to see green when they go to plant their corn. Ray, you kind of touched on it, maybe waiting later could be the answer, but what do you tell that farmer that's new to it, and maybe this is something that's holding them back? Is this fear of their fields lay wet, they aren't going to be able to get their cover killed in order to plant?
Ray McCormick:I don't worry about the kill because it's non-GMO. It's a very difficult problem because if it gets away from you, if the grass gets away from you, you're sunk. You can't get rid of it. I plant all annual ryegrass on every acre, hard to kill. What we do is that field gets ready to plant. We go in at least three days before we're going to plant it and we double dose it with Roundup. You got to kill that annual ryegrass. Annual ryegrass loves wet ground and it improves wet ground. If you've got a lot of sheet water out there, use annual ryegrass and cover crops a few years, you don't have sheet water. It goes into the ground.
We make sure and kill it. Non-GMO corn, you got to kill it. We make sure and kill that annual ryegrass, and because I'm putting tubular nitrogen on the back of the planter, it's burning the leaves. If you try to kill it afterwards, you're going to have green strips. I try to get in. I use Roundup and Dicamba Diflexx, which is Dicamba safened. It's expensive, but it protects your corn. We get one shot to kill the annual ryegrass, kill the broad leaves, kill the clover, and then wait three days and plant. If you're going to do that, I recommend planting late.
Randall Reeder:Any other reaction up here among us three?
Loren Steinlage:Usually the safer option is what I would probably promote. Help them through that transition as safe as you can. Don't push them to the extreme right away. One of the things we've found over the years is the same drill that we started interseeding with is the same drill we do all our cover crops with anymore. All our cover crops go in precision so we got a gap where to plant. That's a safe option for a lot of people because it's basically no-till. We've got the cover crop there to support. But it's a nice transition.
Case in point here, a year or two ago we hit that dry spring. The local service provider was telling everybody, "Terminate, terminate, terminate." Neighbors was like, "What are you guys talking about?" "Oh, it's drying everything out." Well, he's like, "Man, this is the best planting conditions I could ask for," because we had that little buffer zone in there to help them through that. It's just simple options like that can help the transition a lot of times.
Randall Reeder:I think there was a question over here.
Speaker 9:I guess with all the power lines going across fields and with yield monitors on all the combines, has anyone noticed a drop in yield underneath the power lines due to the thing they're calling EMF, the electromagnetic frequency? With that, I guess there's a system, Geofieldsystems.com, and they have a box that has magnets and all that that go, and I guess it also applies to cell towers in fields. If anyone's noticed any yield difference around cell towers or cross country power lines, I didn't know if it's a concern or not.
Randall Reeder:We'll just go with that question. Any yield drop or any measurements under high tension power lines?
Ray McCormick:I have lots of power lines across my fields. There's five coal-fired power plants on the borders of my county. We plant and farm under a lot of the world's biggest power lines. I have not seen yield drops on monitors going under those. But those towers certainly are a drag on yield because you're having to go four times or two times the width of the planter around each power line to be able to fill that in. The yield drag is from the towers. But no, I've never seen on my monitor a loss in yield under power lines.
Randall Reeder:Any comment from you, Allen?
Allen Berry:We don't have any major power lines, I guess, involved with any of our particular farm, so I wouldn't have anything to respond to that.
Randall Reeder:All right.
Loren Steinlage:I was going to say that seems like a nice lack of neighborhood problem. I mean we don't have many neighbors, so we don't have near the power lines.
Randall Reeder:Well, concerning the poles, the big issue is make sure with auto steering you don't go to sleep and run into one of them. You've seen pictures of that. Any other questions? Right here?
Speaker 10:Lauren, you're in the colder country up there and it was extremely dry, knowing your neighborhood a couple of years ago, in the fall, how did you get your cover crop start when it was in a D2-3 drought?
Loren Steinlage:How do we get the cover crops started when it's extremely dry in the fall?
Speaker 10:Yeah, trying to get-
Loren Steinlage:We get snow usually. I mean most of mine went in this year. I mean we waited. I've got to the point where if I can get them in early, great. But I've seen too many times with cereal rye, especially, we get, the only way I can describe it is cold and [inaudible 00:26:24] corn. We'll get that cold, wet rain in the fall and it's almost like it's stunts to cereal rye. I've got to the point where we'll wait until almost freeze up and put the rye in that down and we'll get snow and all that. It'll be there in the spring now.
Speaker 10:We've tried flying it on and it gets real streaky and you just don't get a good germination, especially in the corn canopy.
Loren Steinlage:To me, it's about having as many options on the table as possible. Last year everything got applied by drone because it's like seeing the wheat coming, nice spot. We had five inches of rain, hit it with a drone or plane, whatever you got access to it. But generally, August is usually pretty dry for us leading into harvest. It's having options and being ready for anything that mother nature throws at us. I have no hard plans anymore.
Speaker 10:That's farming. If you do that and it's not germinated, I mean the only option you got is to lightly till it or something to get it going, but we've had some of them dry falls that didn't matter. The seeds there, it just didn't do anything. What's the approach after that? Just hope it comes up in the spring and you get a little bit of help?
Loren Steinlage:Well that's, as I said earlier, cereal rye is usually our last go-to. I mean from 1st of October on, our soil temps drop below 50 degrees pretty early and not long as I can get it out there, I mean, when did we finish this year, week before Christmas? We were spreading cereal rye and at that point we'll just spread it on top, residue work it, moisture will work it in. Keep it simple a lot of times. I would love to have the perfect stand early, but it's not an option always and something's better than nothing usually.
Randall Reeder:I think all of you have seen Ray's situation where he puts the cover crop seed on as he's harvesting corn where the Gandy seed are mounted on the combine so that way the residue drops right on top of the seed and helps with the moisture. I think I heard somebody else?
Loren Steinlage:I think Marion's starting that now is what I heard.
Speaker 3:Good thinking, Marion.
Loren Steinlage:Good job Marion.
Randall Reeder:We're going to convert-
Loren Steinlage:Sorry, I had to.
Randall Reeder:We got to convert Marion to cover crops here to help with these stratification. I think I heard-
Loren Steinlage:[inaudible 00:28:56] corn heads with McCormick cover crop seeder on it.
Randall Reeder:I think I heard earlier that-
Loren Steinlage:I think we're officially good [inaudible 00:29:05].
Randall Reeder:In a dry fall, obviously spreading seed on the surface doesn't work very good, especially if you don't have residue on top of it. But if you get it drilled that there will be, now this may be after you're in no-till a while with cover crops, but if you get it drilled, there may be more moisture there than you realize and that seed will germinate and grow, or like Lauren pointed out with cereal rye, it may lay there through the winter and you'll have a lush growth in the spring.
Barry Fisher:I know Paul Yasa talks about planting Austrian winter pea two inches deep. He has no intention of it coming up in the fall necessarily. He's putting it deep so that it stays there until, if Austrian winter pea comes up in the spring, it grows like crazy. There's all kinds of strategies that you can kind of come up with. But if it doesn't get very tall in the spring, well that goes back to-
Randall Reeder:Well you wouldn't-
Loren Steinlage:I'm happy if it gets that tall. I mean that's just reality where we're at. If I can get that much growth, but that's also why we'd be balled to the late termination and stuff like that.
Barry Fisher:If cereal rye is in that also, you've got some good out of it, for sure. But back to the early planting that we were talking about earlier, all the data that farmers look at who are nervous about it being too wet and not getting to plant early and all this kind of stuff, all the data that seed corn plots and seed varieties were selected from, that was all tilled up ground. There we're trying to beat the heat, so to early planting, that's why it performed so well. If you will wait a little bit in these systems and let a little bit of that residue form so that you keep the soil cooler in the summer during pollination, you've got moisture, you've got cooler temperatures, the penalty for planting late is not what you might think it would be from the data that you're looking at in a lot of the trials.
Speaker 11:As we talk about weather, when you folks are planting, how much are you looking at the weather that is coming at you? If it's good to plant today, are you planting or are you looking at, oh man, it's supposed to rain tomorrow or it's going to rain for the next two days? But if you can go, do you go or are you waiting for a time when that new seed is going to have some good conditions?
Ray McCormick:Howard Martin who started the Martin Row Cleaner really started a lot of this attachments on the planter. He said, "Ray, if a cold wet rain's coming, stop. You're way better off planting it a little wet after the rain than it is going as hard as you can into a rain. Cold, wet rain in no-till cover crops is a bad thing to do. When it gets cold and wet with a big cover crop on there, you're in trouble with corn." That was Howard Martin, inventor of Martin Row Cleaners said that to me 30 years ago.
Randall Reeder:All right. I think all four of these folks came prepared with a couple of specific tips. We'll find out. Allen, did you have a specific tip concerning continuous no-till? Go ahead.
Allen Berry:I think one of the things, if you're dealing with weather extremes, you better always be ready and be prepared to change plans. Kind of reiterating what Warren said there a while ago, you need to have a general plan that you want to follow, but have that equipment and everything ready to go and have alternative plans. Don't get caught with having to make changes that you hadn't anticipated. Just always figure the weatherman is going to throw some changes at you. Be prepared with some of the alternatives. I think that's an important item.
Randall Reeder:Plan B, plan C, plan B, whatever it is.
Allen Berry:Have alternatives and be ready to go with them if you have to pull the trigger and go. You can't fiddle with waiting around and wasting time.
Randall Reeder:All right, Barry? Any specific?
Barry Fisher:Same thing. You got to be a game-time coach. The coach that wins the college football, that coach can make a change when they throw a different defense at you. I mean, it's the same way. You may need to own one of Junior Upton's ATV sprayers so that if it's too wet, you got to be able to burn down.
But on the dry side though, I mean we've had three years of greater than six-inch negative rainfall in our area. I mean, during just the growing season, we've been six to eight inches shy and yet, have had either record or very on-par yields. A lot of that was over six weeks of no rain at a time at different points during the growing season. When it comes to you've got to have a soil that's resilient to dry and that goes back to organic matter.
Either you've got to be really good at selecting your grandparents and who knew where to find that high organic matter soil, and that's where you farm. Either that or you've got to have an intentional management plan to build organic matter because I've got some fields that entered at different times and because of their location, I could run different rotations. I could graze cover crops and multiple. Over the twenty-some years, there's become about a percent difference in organic matter. Some are four to four and a half, others are three to three and a half. They all started at two. But just because of management and in these last three really dry years, that 1% organic matter has equated to about 20 more bushels per acre. It's all doing good. We still last year had had record-breaking yields and we're down eight inches of water for the growing season.
This year, it wasn't quite, but it was right on par. It wasn't terrible yields at all. We were down to that really low water again. This building organic matter, I think the numbers that you threw out, I think those were done in a lab so they're conservative. Organic matter matters more where it lives. If you leave it and you're building those deep roots that Jill Clapperton showed and we showed those, if your organic matter is all along the rhizosphere that is now four feet deep and that's a path of least resistance, that organic matter is way more valuable than just a percent of humus in the surface that is mostly what we look at in our organic matter numbers on our soil tests. But these systems build resilience and it's very doable.
We understand how to do these today. This is not some difficult management system. We've got enough people that's been doing it enough time, we can figure out how to do this. But we have to have intentional management toward building organic matter back in our soil and building biology back in our soil, and all that goes together.
Randall Reeder:I think we've heard more than once this week that carbon is worth more to you than it is to anybody else.
Barry Fisher:That's exactly right.
Randall Reeder:I think our long-term no-tillers know in contrast perhaps to those who are with the carbon program saying, "No, we don't want you guys. We just want the new ones to switch to no-till." The fact is that you long-term no-tillers are still adding carbon to the soil. It's just going deeper and you're adding the percentage. As Barry pointed out, if you've got higher organic matter three feet deep, that's great, works out good. Lauren?
Loren Steinlage:Learning how to create that adaptive mindset is probably one of the hardest things for a lot of people. Everybody asks me what our rotation is. I have no clue. We evaluate daily. I would almost say anymore what we're actually cropping. I always used to joke, we made the final decision. I don't intentionally go into certified to lend a June anymore because I don't know exactly what we have in the field. Now that would probably scare most people. But case in point this year with the weather we had, April 25th, I had some of the best looking rye I ever had, was set up for the relay crop. We're out there fixing tile. I'll wait a day or two to plant, get the tile fixed. Well, 30 inches of rain later, I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth and butcher it. We decided I guess we're growing rye that day.
I called the insurance agent and I was like, "Well, I guess we're going to grow rye this year. Can I put some hail insurance on it?" Well, the next day the feedlot guy comes and says, "Hey, I need some rye. I need forage." Two days later we're planting beans in that field because he took the rye off and we could plant beans in there, so learned to adapt whatever mother nature's throwing at you. I always used to say lemon, lemonade, but learn how to throw a little of vodka with it when you get the chance.
Randall Reeder:Ray, closing comment.
Ray McCormick:The data's there. I mean, you can look on the internet, you can look at the data. In my area, the intensive rainfall events are way more frequent and they're higher. Now when you get five inches of rain, that's nothing. People go well down the road, they got 11 inches. We're talking about growing these crops. But when I'm sitting there and it's May 5th and we've had five inches of rain, the neighbor's soil is running out across the road. We don't have to worry about the crop. The most valuable thing you have is that soil and his soil is headed to the Mississippi.
Number one, Barry said it, build resiliency, but part of that is keeping your farm on your farm when we get a five-inch rain.
Secondly, I talked about I would rather have a dry year because I don't see much impact in a dry year because I'm growing annual ryegrass on every field year after year. Quite frankly, my corn roots are down there where they've never been before. Nutrients and water availability with deep root systems, I don't see hardly any impact on my corn. In these wet fields, I don't have drowned out areas. I got a crop from one end to the other and it's very resilient to drought. Barry said the word resiliency so that your crop, your farm can take a wet rain, but your crop can take what is statistically there longer, more intense drought periods. That's just a fact. If you have a system that's resilient, then you're going to come out ahead.
Mackane Vogel:Well, that's it for this episode of the Cover Crop Strategies Podcast. Thanks to today's guests, Randall Reeder, Ray McCormick, Lauren Steinlage, Barry Fisher, and Allen Berry. Thanks as always to our sponsor, Sound Agriculture for helping to make this podcast possible. A transcript of this episode and our archive of previous podcast episodes are both available at covercropstrategies.com/podcasts. For our entire staff here at Cover Crop Strategies, I'm Mackane Vogel. Thanks for listening and have a great day.
