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“Whether it’s doing more no-till, adding in cover crops or getting nutrients where they need to be — all of that takes this concerted effort by a bunch of people. And I think we need to get back to that. It's not going to be just the federal government saying, "Do this and give us money." It's got to be the whole value chain working together.”
— Carrie Vollmer-Sanders, President, Field To Market
In today’s episode of the podcast, brought to you by the National Strip-Tillage Conference, listen to a panel discussion on the state of soil conservation from the most recent Conservation in Action Tour that took place earlier this month in Sioux Falls, S.D. The panel is moderated by Lessiter Media’s own Mike Lessiter, and features manager of agronomy for Ducks Unlimited, Brian Chatham, president of Field To Market, Carrie Vollmer-Sanders as well as South Dakota grower and agronomist Brian Hefty. The discussion covers several hot topics in the world of conservation agriculture including cover crops, no-till, strip-till and much more.
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Full Transcript
Mackane Vogel:Welcome to the Cover Crop Strategies Podcast, brought to you by the National Strip-Tillage Conference. I'm Mackane Vogel, associate editor of Cover Crop Strategies. In today's episode, listen to a panel discussion on the state of soil conservation from the most recent Conservation in Action tour that took place earlier this month in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The panel is moderated by Lessiter Media's own Mike Lessiter and features manager of agronomy for Ducks Unlimited, Brian Chatham, president of Field to Market, Carrie Vollmer-Sanders, as well as South Dakota grower and agronomist, Brian Hefty. The discussion covers several hot topics in the world of conservation agriculture, including cover crops, no-till, strip-till and much more.
Mike Lessiter:Thank you for that introduction. It is fun to be back at CTIC. My dad answered the call in 1981 for the initial letter that went out to inquire about forming this organization. I've known those acronyms my whole life basically. So great fun to be here. What we're going to do here is we're going to have a free-flowing discussion on the state of soils and soil health, keeping the soil where it is, and I'm going to have everyone introduce themselves in a moment, but I'll just get things started with a couple quick facts from our No-Till Farmer publication and the benchmark survey that we did, and I'm borrowing from John Dauberstein right here. He's our lead editor. But a couple quick hits.
While no-tillers like to talk about profit and margin more so than yield, our new study shows that no-till corn and soybeans and strip-till both out-yield the national average. So we're doing a good job on yields. Nitrogen use efficiency is increasing. The percentage of growers who are using less than 0.8 pounds of nitrogen per acre has increased from 15% 10 years ago to 27% last year. So doing a good job there. About 60% of our audience is planting green in cover crop use is very, very high, about 80%. No-tillers are leading the use in cover crop and the total acreage in cover crops increased by 150 acres the last two years. About 30% are using variable rate. And so just those are a couple highlights. We'll say that no-till acreage in the US has stagnated. It's about 110 million acres today. It has not grown as fast as we thought it would. Still have very high hopes for it, but that's a challenge that the adoption has stagnated.
Brian Chatham:My name's Brian Chatham. I'm the manager of agronomy for Ducks Unlimited, primarily in the Great Plains region. I run all of our ag programs or oversee all of our ag programs, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas. And I go all over on Ducks Unlimited. We have, speaking about cover crops, our regenerative ag program. We kind of focus in the Prairie Pothole Region, like we learned about this morning. That's our primary focus and we work with farmers to reduce tillage, get cover crops on the ground, livestock on the landscape, et cetera. I guess a quick snapshot of state of soil health, I think the regenerative ag movement, the no-till cover crop movement, gained a lot of traction early. I think there's still a whole lot of room for improvement and it boils down to education of the landowners and producers.
Carrie Vollmer-Sanders:I'm Carrie Vollmer-Sanders. I'm the president of Field to Market and also a sixth generation farmer in both Ohio and Indiana. I live in Indiana, most of the farm's in Ohio, so that's why I say that. But I'm really excited to be here. If you don't know who or what Field to Market is, it's a non-profit. It was started about 20 years ago for this whole purpose to bring together the ag value chain, understand what conservations was, what sustainability was, define it and then figure out how to measure it so that we could help the whole ag value chain support the adoption of conservation practices and sustainability throughout it.
So we've got five different sectors. If you hear of... Field to Market talks about our sector. We've got the grower sector, agribusiness, brands and retail. Our affiliate sector, which is like government agencies and researchers, and then the civil society. Those five sectors equally govern who we are, what we do, and how we help farmers. So I was really excited to become president of Field to Market to lead this organization in August of this last year because it is looking at the whole ag value chain. It's not one piece. And farmers have the equal voice as brands and retail and agribusiness.
It's one of the things that I'm proud about with Field to Market, when we think about the state of the state with soils, we've seen the improvements. We've seen adoption of cover crops. Maybe it's a little slower than what we had thought, but there is improvement, there is momentum behind it, and I'm kind of excited about where we're going to be going in the future.
Brian Hefty:All right. I'm Brian Hefty. Welcome to our farm. Thanks for being here. We appreciate it. So I am very excited to speak today just because my grandpa was a big conservationist years ago and I just look at today we have so many more tools than he did back then.
A little more about myself, we farm about 3,500 crop acres around here. My brother Darren and I hosted Ag PhD TV for 27 years now. It's been a long time, but a lot of fun. We do a daily radio show on Ag PhD Radio. And then also we have Hefty Seed Company where we supply seed and crop protection products to farmers.
Now, when the group asked me to talk, I was a little hesitant, and I'll tell you real quick why. Because my two least favorite words in agriculture are conservation and sustainability. But please don't misunderstand. What I mean by that is this. If you look at what are the meanings of the words conservation and sustainability, it's basically to stay status quo, to stay equal. And I do not think that God put us here on this planet... I don't think my grandpa went through all that he did, my dad went through all that he did to just keep things even. I think we are called to make things better and we have the opportunity to make things better.
And it's kind of like in any of our businesses around our farm, we always say we have three goals. Number one is to produce more yield because the world needs more food. Number two, we've got to have more profit, otherwise we're out of business. And number three, we have to leave the land in better condition for the next generation. And a lot of people will say that, you'll hear a lot of farmers talk about that, but what steps are they taking? And that's one of the big things that we are very passionate about, talking literally every day. How do we make things better? It's not just about today, it's about tomorrow as well. So again, thanks for having me here. I appreciate it.
Mike Lessiter:And thanks for having us, Brian. It's a great facility and thanks for your support. The next question, I guess, we'll ask the panel until you've identified the problem, you can't find the solution. So I'd like each of you, and we'll start with you, Brian Hefty this time. What do we believe that the greatest barrier... We'll say outside of the funding situation for a moment, the greatest barrier that we're having that's keeping farmers from moving to more of the conservation practices that will improve and do all the things that you just mentioned about. We'll go down the panel line with that question.
Brian Hefty:So every farm is a little bit different. Even if you look at a lot of our ground, we have a lot of tillage out there. Why? It's not because I really want to do that. We were doing lots of strip-till, but there's an enormous dairy that you can see out that window just a mile away, and they have lots of manure that they have and it's good for our land, that's awesome. But in order to keep the smell down and to keep any environmental issues down, we have to inject that manure. When they inject the manure, there's tillage done. So because of that, we've now gotten into cover crops.
We ended up with an issue last fall though where we had zero rain for three months. So our only way to get the cover crops started was to follow the manure applicators and hopefully we could get some of the cover crop growing. So we ended up with lots of different challenges. The other big challenge we've had around here and in much of the northern US is just by the time we finish harvest, the snow is flying. It's hard to get a cover crop established at that point. And then along those same lines, because we're so far north and so cold, a lot of people have been doing tillage and trying to make the ground black just so it was warm enough to plant in the spring, and so they could get a crop planted.
If you look at the Dakotas and Northern Minnesota, that's the biggest area of what they call "prevent plant" in the entire United States for farming. So we run into these issues where in the spring, guys want to plant, but the ground is just simply too wet and they can't get it planted. It's not a pond or anything else, it just doesn't dry out until June. Well, by June you can't raise a crop that's profitable. So these are the biggest issues we run into here in the Northern US.
Carrie Vollmer-Sanders:So it's interesting, I come back to two words, margin and coordination. I think that's preventing us from doing more and scaling faster. So if there's not margin in sustainability conservation practices, essentially the farmers aren't going to be able to keep up with it. They're not going to have the financial profitability. The same is true for all of the agribusinesses, all the advisors around it. They all need to have some margin, otherwise they're not going to promote a program that decreases their profits. So you have to think about the margin in each area, each segment in the supply chain and the value chain.
The other thing I think we need to take a closer look at is the coordination. So I work with a set of agronomists on our farm. Those agronomists have different preferences for what I should be doing, who I should be selling to, but there's not coordination in the ag value chain. That's one of the things we're trying to do at Field to Market is help us with that coordination. But I think it's difficult. A brand sets a goal. They want to decrease their carbon footprint. That company doesn't ever work with farmers though. So there's all these pieces in the ag value chain. You've got to figure out how can they support the farmer to get margin in their back pocket. So I think that's two of the things that I think we can do better.
Brian Chatham:I'll have to say that probably the biggest downfall of adoption of new practices is boils down to two different things. One is education and the other is management. Anytime we go from conventional tillage to even strip-tillage or no-till, we manage that field completely different than we traditionally do. And so to educate our producers and our agronomists and these landowners on that proper way to manage that field. And then there comes in the education piece, having the right tools.
We live in a technology age. You can pick up your phone and within 0.2 seconds you can Google or whatever you want, any kind of anything so there's a lot of information out there, good and bad, and it's just getting the right education to those. I'm working with producers on the Montana Highline. They get eight inches of precipitation a year and all the way down into the whole side of things. Here in the Upper Prairie Pothole Region, we're about 10 days away from a drought at any given time. So being able to educate these guys on the different management styles to adopt these conservation practices and get them to actually take that quantum leap into that is probably our biggest hurdle.
Mackane Vogel:We'll come back to the episode in a moment, but first I'd like to thank our sponsor, the National Strip-Tillage Conference for supporting today's podcast. Are you ready to take your strip-till game to the next level? Then don't miss the National Strip-Tillage Conference happening July 31st to August 1st, 2025 in Iowa City, Iowa. Unlock over a decade's worth of proven strip-till strategies and insights from the industry's top minds.
This is the premier event where profitability meets innovation, featuring six powerful general sessions, 13 in-depth classrooms, 14 collaborative roundtables, and a bonus field day experience that brings it all to life. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just breaking into strip-till, you'll walk away with actionable tools to maximize your success. Plus network with forward-thinking farmers from across the country. Register now and use the code covercrop10 for 10% off the early bird rate. That's C-O-V-E-R-C-R-O-P-10, covercrop10. Head to striptillconference.com to reserve your spot today. The future of strip-till starts here. Don't miss it. And now let's get back to the podcast episode.
Mike Lessiter:And that's an interesting point. It just popped into my head. John Bradley, these guys... Duane Beck knows, the old timers know. John Bradley, Dan Towery, some others. They told us when no-till first got going in the early '70s, there were about 3 million acres. There's now 110 million. They examined where the growth took place and there was a common denominator that they mentioned. There was a champion grower there, but also a champion ag extension or advisor that was making all of that happen.
And so void of that... That's a concern that we'll probably all face. And then how important those ag advisors out there. So I just want to mention that there was an interesting piece of history on where it grew and why. But I got to manage the clock here. And so we're going to wrap up with one question here, and Casey spoke about it last night at our reception, about the stories and how important the stories are. And while we have everyone's attention, if maybe you can draw back into your Rolodex, your inventory of success stories, and just share one that comes to mind that we in turn can take back and start the dialogue back in our own regions. What's a great success story of moving to conservation practices and impact that you've seen in your scope?
Carrie Vollmer-Sanders:I have loads of stories. One of them is a historical reference. So you were talking about a no-till. I think no-till really took off when we had a no-till drill. We had NRCS, [inaudible 00:16:39] goal. Monsanto came out with this thing called Roundup. And then you had this concerted effort. So you were hearing from... We got a no-till drill from our pioneer seed dealer to rent. So then we had access to test it out and try it out. That's really when no-till started off. We had the easy button, if you will, to try it out before you bought the equipment. You heard that from the farmer today. "Equipment's expensive. You don't want to own too much."
The second piece is we had several different folks in our advisor team that was telling us, "Yeah, try this. This will help. We can test this out." And so you have that support network and I think we've got to keep replicating that, whether it is doing more no-till, adding in cover crops, getting nutrients where they need to be, spoon-feeding them. All of that takes this concerted effort by a bunch of people and it did work. And I think we need to get back to that. It's not going to be just the federal government saying, "Do this and give us money," it's got to be the whole value chain working together.
Brian Chatham:One that comes to mind is really sticks out, and I've used this in a lot of my talks is when I came to work for Ducks Unlimited, it was the first time in 16 years I hadn't been on a tractor or combine. And I moved to Brookings, South Dakota the day before COVID shut the country down. So yay. And I don't know how many of y'all are from here or from this area, but I know Brian can relate to this, but 2019 and spring of 2020 was the wettest in history.
So my very first landowner visit with Ducks Unlimited was in White Lake, South Dakota, a little bit west of here. I couldn't even get to the guy's farm. There was just this winding around, the roads was closed, flooded out. Anyway, long story short, it's a second generation farmer, young guy, family, and he had drunk the Kool-Aid of jumping in whole hog [inaudible 00:18:58].
So we met with him, we developed a plan. Ducks Unlimited was to provide some cost share. And so I was helping technical assistance, giving this guy some brain power, so to speak, some encouragement. And I can remember that spring when he got into planting season, [inaudible 00:19:21] at 9:00 on Sunday morning, just the dude was beating his head against the wall and then come spring when we were doing some spraying, "What's going on? I can't figure out... Nothing's working." And just boom, boom, boom.
So that was year one, year two, sort of the same. Year three, things started turning a corner. And year four, he had developed a secondary business off his cover crops. So he was custom grazing his cover crops, turning a profit on that. His no-till non-cover crop fields were out yielding his non-cover crop fields with the same or less inputs. And so we had that aha moment and it was really one of those things when you're out there meeting with the landowner and you get the phone call of the yield monitors and you see the reports that he turned a corner and was really improving and his farm profitability had almost tripled. So that's just kind of one of my biggest of many success stories that I've worked with in my five years at Ducks Unlimited but that's the one that really sticks in my mind and obviously developed a friendship with this guy, a personal friendship and a business partnership.
Brian Hefty:Before I get into my story, just as Brian was talking about cover crop and then grazing, see, I don't view that as a cover crop, I view that as a second cash crop and you'll get a lot more farmers excited when you say, "You can raise a second cash crop." So anyway, my story is a personal one. I mentioned my grandpa earlier. He put in some terraces not too far away from here, and there wasn't a whole lot of slope. But back then the only way to kill weeds, insects and diseases was tillage, tillage, tillage.
My dad was originally a farmer in North Central Iowa. It was tillage, tillage, tillage. And the reason why we started doing some no-till was back in the early 1990s, and the NRCS said, "We want you to have a little more cover out there." And so we were talking about how to do that and we said, "All right, well, let's just give no-till a try." Now, for my dad, it, I think, physically hurt him every time he had to drive past the field and see that the field didn't look perfect all the time. He could not stand the residue out there in the spring. It drove him nuts.
But as we looked at it throughout the next couple of years, we had a lot less erosion. And the other thing that I mentioned right away with my grandpa is we have the technology today that he didn't have. So herbicides were mentioned, the equipment. There was no no-till planter or no-till drill. There's no way you could do it back then. And the other big thing I talk an awful lot about is drain tile properly placed. I'm not saying draining dump ponds, but when it's out in a normal field situation, we keep the water table down. Well, now we don't have to do the tillage to dry the field out. That top two feet is dry and now it gives us more opportunity to do strip-till and no-till and those kind of things.
So when I step back and I think about for my dad, that was a massive change. And without my brother and me here, I don't know that he would have made that change. He's a smart guy and wanted to do good things and everything else, but if you look at why did soil organic matter decrease in the United States for like 100 years in a row, it's because of the massive tillage we did. We have to figure out how do we reduce tillage. Doesn't necessarily have to be no-till. Strip till is a great compromise, I think.
But we have to reduce tillage somehow some way. And the big thing anymore that I talk to farmers about is soil organic matter is good. If we have good soil organic matter, our soil is more spongy, less likely to compact, we have more nutrient release, we just raise better crops and our ground is worth more. And so those are some of the things that I'm usually talking to people about and just my experience with it.
Mike Lessiter:How are we doing on time, Ryan? David? Five minutes? Strip-till just for a minute, and it was great that you guys brought the ETS over so everyone can see it. What do you think the outlook is for strip-till and adoption up in this area?
Brian Hefty:Well, I think that there is certainly possibility there. One of the challenges that we run into is for a lot of strip-till, people want to get it done in the fall like we do, and many farms, it's one person or two. And in the fall they have so much crop and more crop. Think about yields keep going up. What does that mean? It means a lot more trucking and it just takes longer for harvest. Even though we have great big equipment, you have to truck that stuff away.
And so for a lot of farms, they're strapped on time in the fall. Now last fall it was easy because we had a long fall and it was pretty dry. But if it gets to be a short fall, if snow comes early, if it's really wet, then that gets to be one of the challenges and then people go back to how they've done it. These machines aren't super cheap, but we love them because we now can just in one pass, we can make that strip, we can put our [inaudible 00:24:30] down and then we go follow that in the spring to plant. So I think it's fantastic and we talk about it all the time. Hopefully it's going to grow.
Carrie Vollmer-Sanders:I really would love to see more people that strip-till for others. I'd like to hire that done on our farm because we don't have the time to do it, nor the finances to buy a new strip-tiller. And so we farm in Western Lake Erie Basin. I don't know if many of you familiar with that area, but incorporating the phosphorus is something that's important to keep it in the soil and not moving into Lake Erie. So it's an easy way to get the phosphorus incorporated without having to run something over the whole field.
Brian Chatham:I ran a farm in Nebraska that we ran the same outfit, ETS, 16 row. We were able to increase our yields versus conventional tillage, and we get that direct like Darren talked about earlier, out at the side out there, we were able to get that exact fertilized placement in the [inaudible 00:25:38] zone. I would love to see more guys, especially Eastern South Dakota, Eastern North Dakota, love to see more guys get into that versus full tillage. South Dakota, the wind never stops blowing, and this time of year there's an awful lot of dust clouds from guys pulling field cultivators and all the likes of that. So it is a great compromise between the two.
Mike Lessiter:Very good. I think we got to wrap it up. I think what we'd ask you here to do is just briefly one parting thought, one thing to send us out with here. Either a takeaway from earlier today or yesterday or just one final message as we wrap things up.
Carrie Vollmer-Sanders:Farming isn't easy. This year isn't going to be easy. There's a lot of things that are going on, whether it's with labor or chemistry or the weather, drought conditions, et cetera. So if you work with farmers, be a resource for them. Help them do more, do better. If you are a farmer, reach out. Make sure you're talking with your advisors, you're talking with someone about what's going on so you can plan ahead. I think the next couple of years might be difficult financially in the ag world. And if you're here, you want agriculture to thrive, so be a resource. Think how your company can do more, do differently to help farmers and implement conservation or sustainability practices. I think that's the direction that we need to go in to keep the markets open.
Brian Chatham:I guess my final parting thing would be our most valuable resource we have worldwide is our soil. And the more we can do to protect that soil... It's the circle of life. It's what we live on every day. Everybody has to eat. We take a lot from the soil, we put a lot back in. But if we don't protect that and manage it and honor it, then we're in bad shape. We see some of these countries that have run their soil down, they're starving to death and rely on the United States of America or other countries for inputs. But if we can protect our soil, particularly here in the breadbasket of the world, then we can ensure for future generations, your kids, grandkids, et cetera, that they're able to farm and ranch profitably.
Brian Hefty:I want to leave you with a positive note. A lot of people are talking about the tariffs, trade and everything else. I'm going to tell you right now, we're going to have better commodity prices next year. Farm economy is going to be better. I'm 100% confident in it. And honestly, if you go to the farm every day and you're 100% confident it's not going to be that way, you're in big trouble and maybe you should go do something else. Also, we have unbelievable technology today that many people aren't even using, and it's going to keep getting better. There's no reason at all why we can't make the soil better, we can't make our food more nutritious, we can't provide more food for the world. We can do all these things. So my three goals that I gave you a little bit earlier, we can absolutely raise more yield, we can absolutely be more profitable, and we can absolutely leave our ground in better condition for the next generation.
Mackane Vogel:That's it for this episode of the Cover Crop Strategies Podcast. Thanks to today's guests for that excellent panel discussion. And thanks as always to our sponsor, the National Strip-Tillage Conference, 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. And for our entire staff here at Cover Crop Strategies, I'm Mackane Vogel. Thanks for listening and have a great day.
