(gentle upbeat music) - Hello, I'm Dan Hoffman.

On today's episode of "Farm Connections," we attend an AFREC event in Rochester with research coordinator Bruce Montgomery.

Anna Cates, extension specialist, joins us to discuss soil health, and the University of Minnesota Extension provides us with a new Best Practices segment.

All here today on "Farm Connections."

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- Welcome to "Farm Connections."

We're in Rochester, Minnesota for the summer meeting of AFREC, and with us is the research coordinator of AFREC, Mr. Bruce Montgomery.

Welcome to "Farm Connections," Bruce.

- Thank you very much.

It's wonderful to be here today.

- Well, and it's a beautiful day.

But we might ask the question, what is AFREC, and what does it stand for?

- Oh, sure.

I'd be glad to explain that.

AFREC stands for the Ag Fertilizer Research & Education Council.

It is a fund that's paid by farmers.

It's a tonnage fee that goes on every time a fertilizer gets sold in Minnesota.

What's interesting about this particular program is this money goes into a dedicated account, and it's solely used for soil fertility research across the state.

- Well, that's really important for a number of reasons, but of course, we all like to eat.

But what other reasons are we to fund this program?

- Sure.

Well, besides the importance of the fertilizer and the soil fertility and all those things that go along with it, there's other things to consider.

And one big one is environmental impacts.

And one of the things we've certainly wanna try to address as well is we use more fertilizer, we wanna use it efficiently, but at the same time, we wanna protect the environment.

And I think this program goes a long way in helping us do that.

- Bruce, I've sat in a lot of the meetings and proceedings today, but it looks like it's a statewide program.

- Oh, absolutely.

Every farmer puts into this.

And so we wanna distribute it across the state as much as we can.

Obviously, most of the ag is down in the southern third of the state and then up into the valley, but there's projects that go on throughout the whole state.

We use the research and outreach centers to the University of Minnesota for a lot of this work, and those are distributed across the state fairly evenly, but we also use other research sites, such as what we're gonna see today at the (indistinct) site, just east of Rochester.

So that way the university and the researchers that do this work can get work done in a variety of soils, a variety of climate, and a variety of cropping systems.

- Well, speaking to that, when we look at our state top to, bottom east to west, it's a very large geographic area, but it's also diverse in soils.

- Tremendously.

We have about 21 million acres of crop land in this state and a lot of different soils.

And the climate changes drastically rainfall-wise from west to east and north to south.

So it's imperative that this work is done on a very localized level.

- Well, we heard researchers speak this morning about different soil types.

Sand near Becker that drains different than Southeast Minnesota soil.

So is the idea to get recommendations based on their local area?

- It's based on a number of different things.

For nitrogen, we have five different zones, regions, what we call BMP regions.

And the university researchers tend to design those recommendations within each of those five zones.

For example, the southeast karst is very, very different than the northwest glacial tills and outwash from Lake Agassiz.

So they very much customize those recommendations for that geographic region.

So the geology's different, the climate's different, and a lot of times the cropping systems are very different.

And the university does a really good job of trying to match that and have site-specific or at least soil and regional soil-specific information to go into those RECs.

- That sounds like a real challenge for a research coordinator to bring all that together for meaningful impact.

- Well, fortunately, we have a wonderful university system.

And, you know, they've been around for a long time and a lot of it, you know, the heartbeat comes from those research and outreach centers.

And so they're kind of the drivers of this, but I also wanna say that not all the work that AFREC does is through the University of Minnesota.

Some of it's done through private contractors.

Crop consultants are a wonderful source of information for us 'cause they know some of those very minute, but important differences in a localized area.

So in some cases, that money is contracted out to either federal agencies or private consultants to help with them as well.

- Bruce, how old is the program?

- The program started in 2008, but it didn't really get rolling till about 2010, once we got the tonnage fee attached to it.

Then it was funded.

We had a program without funding to start with, as commonly legislative things start out that way, but in about 2010, the 40 cent a ton went in.

And what that does is generates about a million to $1.2 million a year.

All of that money goes out the door for this type of work.

It's a highly efficient system.

- So it began in 2008.

And of course, something that brings value, we hope it continues.

How does the future look?

- Well, this program, like all legislative-enacted systems, it has a sundown or a sunset.

This one is scheduled to sunset in 2025.

So that means the legislature has to reapprove the project.

The farm groups, by and large, are extremely supportive of this.

They see the economic value, they see the society value, and they also recognize the environmental value of the program.

What we have to ensure is that we're all on the same page, we understand what we're funding.

It costs the average producer about 6 to 10 cents an acre per year for the program.

When everybody kicks in a lot of the hands, pretty powerful.

And to generate that type of money to do this kind of work is incredibly important.

If we wanna keep this program going, it's imperative that we're all on the same page, we're supportive of it.

We've learned a lot since 2010.

There might be some minor changes we wanna make to how we distribute money or who makes those decisions.

The thing that's so interesting about this program is it's not the University of Minnesota driving the programs, it's not the Department of Ag, it's farm groups and farmers.

They're here today with us.

There's 11 farm groups that govern AFREC.

They make all of the funding decisions.

It's a tremendous partnership.

The university, the Department of Ag, myself as coordinator, we can all chime in and influence, but they have the final vote.

- Well, data's important to make good decisions, correct?

- [Bruce] Oh, absolutely.

- What's the most important data that's come out of the research so far?

- Probably the biggest impact is sulfur research.

We've seen just a tremendous increase in fertilizer sales as we've changed and cleaned up our air quality through emissions.

You know, better gas, low-sulfur gas, less coal being burnt.

The atmospheric deposition of sulfur has dropped dramatically.

This has been a huge success story over the last 20 years.

The problem with that is now, all of a sudden, we have sulfur deficiency in our soils.

We've never seen a sulfur response 20 years ago.

Now it's very common.

And as you saw today in some of the data, we're seeing a tremendous economic and yield response to sulfur applications now.

So I would say if there was a single thing to point out, it's probably the great work that the university has done at really trying to answer that question on sulfur, not on just corn and soybeans, but also alfalfa, as we learned today, and some of the other, you know, smaller acreage crops like potatoes and sugar beets.

- Well, to wrap up today, Bruce, what's your hope?

What's your hope for the future?

- Well, I hope that we can keep this program going.

I hope we can make some good, solid decisions going forward in the next couple of years with the state legislature and the farm groups on what's the right amount of money to charge, if it's gonna go forward.

Are we answering all of the questions that the ag community needs to do their soil fertility work correctly?

And I think we're in a good position to try to answer that question 'cause some of the great work that the university and other partners have done in the last 10, 15 years of the program.

- And one last thing, Bruce: Do you have a website that our audience can go to to learn more?

- We do.

mysoilfertility.com, or you can go to the Department of Ag website and just type in AFREC, and you'll be able to link directly to it.

- Thank you so much for your time.

- You're very welcome.

Great talking to you.

- Stay tuned for more on "Farm Connections."

- [Narrator] "Farm Connections" Best Practices brought to you by.

(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Nathan Drewitz, University of Minnesota Extension educator for crops out of Rochester, and this is today's best practices.

Today, we're gonna talk about alfalfa.

Of course, as we get into the middle part of August here and into September, we are gonna start seeing those third and fourth cuttings start coming off.

If you're in a three-cutting system, I would expect that to be closer to the middle to last week or so of August, with our fourth cutting coming there at the first part of September.

This also indicates to me that we're gonna be starting to look at fall and winter management, especially looking at how do we prepare our alfalfa stands to over winter and to help us limit that potential for winter injury.

When it comes to winter injury, there are a handful of things that we can and we do have influence over, and a handful of things that we don't.

It's things that we do have some level of influence over.

Things like soil pH.

When it comes to soil pH, if we are in a 6.5 to 7.0 range, that is typically our best range to help us at least limit some of that winter injury.

The other soil amendment that we look at when we're looking at our winter injury and looking at helping our stands over winter is potassium.

Now, the key here is that if you're soil potassium, based off of a soil test, is at optimal levels or above, typically adding extra potassium isn't going to help out our alfalfa stands and help them over winter.

But if your optimum or less, adding a few extra pounds of potassium to that alfalfa stand, especially as we head into the fall here, can help with the overwintering of that stand.

The final thing here that we're gonna look at that, really, we truly have that influence over is harvest timing.

So when it comes to harvest timing, there are four main numbers that we want to keep in mind as we go through this.

The four numbers are 24, 41, 200, and 500.

The first of those four numbers that I look at when I'm looking at overwintering and timing of our last alfalfa cutting is 24.

That 24 stands for 24 degrees Fahrenheit.

That is the temperature at which alfalfa goes dormant.

That is what we also classify as our killing frost for alfalfa.

The next number is 41.

That factors into the growing degree day model.

That is our base temperature for our growing degree model for alfalfa.

The other two numbers also play into that.

So 200 stands for 200 growing degree days, and 500 stands for 500 growing degree days.

Our goal is to time that last alfalfa cutting with either less than 200 growing degree days left in the season, or more than 500 growing degree days left in the season.

Keep in mind that we don't actually have to wait for that frost date before we could take that final cutting.

We need less than 200 growing degree days to ensure that the plant itself, as it regenerates, does not have enough time to pull all those carbohydrates and energy from that crown system and put it into regrowth, or more than 500 to ensure that what is there has replenished those carbohydrates and other necessary energy reserves in that crown system for regrowth next spring.

So in summary, remember our four big numbers here: 24 degrees Fahrenheit, 41 degrees Fahrenheit, 200 growing degree days, and 500 growing degree days.

I'm Nathan Drewitz with the University of Minnesota Extension, and this has been Best Practices.

- Welcome to "Farm Connections."

Today, we have Dr. Anna Cates from the University of Minnesota Extension talking about soil health.

Welcome to "Farm Connections."

- Thank you.

- Well, soil health, does health become important with soils?

- Well, it's a metaphor, right?

What is health?

And we don't really know what human health is, either.

We would say that health is some combination of a whole bunch of different properties that we're interested in with soil or with people.

- Well, define soil health in a good way.

- To the NRCS, define soil health is the ability of the soil to function as a vital living ecosystem.

So again, making that comparison to humans, depends on what functions you want, what you want your soil to do.

That can be the gauge by which you decide whether or not it's healthy.

And obviously, you want different functions in a cornfield than you do in your lawn, and you want different functions in either of those than you do in a wetland somewhere.

- You mentioned NRCS.

That's a nice acronym, but our audience might not know what that means.

- That's the Natural Resource Conservation Service.

And so they have been talking about soil conservation and soil health for a long time.

- Well, I'm pretty sure soil health is important, but can you tell us, so others can learn why it's important, why is soil health important to everyone in addition to farmers?

- Fair enough.

So soil health, as I said, comes back to soil function.

And when we think about the functions that are important, a big one is crop production, right?

That's the one that farmers think about a lot, is how many bushels are we getting out of our soil?

And that is a true function, right?

That's not just something to talk about at the coffee shop.

That's a function for everybody.

The other functions that soils do are a more public benefit, not just benefit to an individual farm business owner, but a benefit in terms of filtering water that lands on the land.

It goes through that farm land.

It goes through the soil profile.

It ends up down in your groundwater or in surface water.

And so what happens to it while it's in that soil is a function of soil.

Does it filter?

Does it go fast?

Does it go slow?

That's a big function that I talk about with farmers and with the public.

How fast the water moves affects the public in terms of water quality and public land, but it also affects the farmer because it affects when they can get in the field, and it affects how much water their crop has to grow.

So those are two big ones.

- When I hear groundwater, I'm thinking about drinking water.

- [Anna] Yeah.

- Thoughts?

- Yes.

I don't work specifically on groundwater, drinking water connections, but a lot of the reasons that policy is made around soil health is to address those.

So we hope that our soil health practices can reduce the number of contaminants, nutrients in those waters.

- Well, what's the most important piece of research you've done so far?

- Hmm.

Well, I think it's ongoing.

I've been in my position about four years.

And for the last couple of years, I've been running a study trying to understand whether soil health practices, like reducing tillage, like using cover crops, can change when a farmer can get into the field.

So this is something farmers tell me about all the time.

They're really excited if they can get into the field a little earlier, if the sweet corn truck can come out and harvest earlier than the neighbors, if they can cut alfalfa.

You know, any number of operations are time sensitive, not just planting, not just harvest.

And so they are interested in practices that make their soil more resilient after a big rain.

You've probably noticed some big rains on the landscape the last few years, and we expect those to continue.

After you get that big rain, how long before you can resume your normal operations?

So we're doing some surveying around that to understand whether certain practices do lead you to get in faster after a big rain.

And then we're also looking at soil properties.

And a sneak peak is that it's not that the soil health systems are drying out faster.

That wouldn't be why you could get in the field earlier, just that they infiltrated faster and dried out faster, but really that they have better structure.

So soil is made up of these mineral particles.

They're organized into larger packets.

And you wanna have some big aggregates so that water and air can flow around them.

And when you have that, you have more resilient soil to those big rains.

- Anna, you mentioned getting into the field earlier.

Why is that important in Southern Minnesota or anywhere in the Upper Midwest?

- You know, I think Southern Minnesota in particular is in this really interesting pinch point where we can grow Iowa-level corn, right?

We can grow a lot of corn, but we've got a fewer days to do that in.

And so everything is tightened.

And so we don't have a lot of flexibility in the logistics and scheduling in our farm system.

When you get up in the Northwest, they tend to have more diversified systems, and they aren't trying to grow 250-bushel corn, generally.

Or maybe they are trying, bless their hearts, but they're not getting there, usually.

So anyway, we have this system which is just super tight in Southern Minnesota, and every day can matter.

Either for a yield perspective, you can't see those yield declines, especially with planting later in the season, but you also have a big quality of life effect, where if you're condensing your season into a smaller period of time, you know, you're missing family events, you've got, you know, issues with getting labor that can be there with you.

There's just a lot of kind of connected pieces of the system that get a little more flex if you can get in it earlier.

- And it seems like you're alluding to growing degree unit days and also that abrupt stop in the fall when frost happens.

- Yep, yep.

Like I said, it's just tight.

We only get so many growing degree days every year, and, you know, when the frost happens, can't go back from there.

- End of growing season.

- [Anna] Pretty much.

- You mentioned resilience in the soil.

- Yeah.

- Why is that important?

- So resilience is just your system's ability to respond to a shock.

And I brought up some big rains, but a shock could also be something like the drought last year.

It could be, you know, a big heat wave.

It could be any number of different shocks in the system.

And farming is all about trying to decrease your risk by having a system that's stable to many different growing seasons.

You know, they say a farmer gets 40 years, right, to figure out how to be a good farmer.

And you can multiply that by however many different fields they're working in because each field is gonna be behave a little differently every year.

But if you can take out some of the lows of the system and build that system that's more resilient to a shock, that can really have a big effect in terms of making the whole business more profitable.

The margins are tight, and that resilience can make a difference.

- If a large rainfall comes and the resilience in the soil is high- - [Anna] Yeah.

- what's going to happen to that rain?

- Good question.

So water that hits the soil, it can either leave the soil on the surface, or it can go through.

Depending on the below-ground system, it can go through straight into groundwater, or eventually end up in surface water via tile drainage.

And you want more of the water to go into the soil than to go out over the surface.

'cause water going over the surface inevitably carries soil with it.

It carries nutrients with it, including nitrogen and phosphorus.

Those are lost to the system.

If they're in your ditch, next year's crop isn't gonna be using them.

I always say soil erosion might not be the most, you know, interesting phenomena to look at anymore, but if you're losing your soil, you can't have healthy soil.

You gotta keep your soil to have healthy soil.

So when you think about that big rain coming in, you wanna capture as much of it as possible.

If it's a huge amount, you know, five, eight inches like we see sometimes, you want it to move through as quickly as possible.

So that's where those big pores between soil aggregates come into play.

At the same time, you want small pores in your soil that hold the water for later in the season when you might not get a rain.

So you wanna capture it so that you can keep it for when you need it.

- And if we had two soil samples here, one would be categorized as healthy and one not so healthy, what would be the differences between those two?

- Yeah.

Looking at soil visually, you can say a lot about whether it's healthy or not.

A big thing I look at is the soil structure.

So if you just poke your shovel into the field, when I'm in a soil that has good structure, that I would consider healthy, it's easy to get the shovel in.

Of course, this also has to do with moisture and the time of year and everything like that, but it's easy to get the shovel in because there's a little space.

There's a little flexibility and give.

Sometimes people describe it as a chocolate cake sort of texture, as opposed to a brick.

If you have a soil that, you know, has seen a lot of tillage that destroy those aggregates, then you lose the air and water space between soil particles, and it dries down into something really tight and hard to work with.

- I like that description.

Chocolate cake or cake versus brick.

- Versus a brick.

I know, that's kind of leading the witness in terms of which one you might prefer, but.

(laughs) - That's spot on.

- [Anna] Yeah.

- And most of our farmers think beyond just today.

They think beyond just today or this year's crop.

They're thinking about a legacy, a soil that can sustain their family beyond that.

Does soil health fit into that picture.

And if so, how?

- Oh, absolutely.

The farmers who are committed to soil health practices, like reducing tillage and cover crops, inevitably bring up their children and grandchildren.

They know they're stewards of a resource that, like I said, we all depend on, and they know that they're also stewards of a resource that specifically their children may depend on, their inheritors.

And they're excited to pass on something better than they got.

They're excited to pass on something that they have improved in measurable ways, in visible ways, like we talked about.

- Research is hard work, and it takes focus and dedication.

What drives you to do it, Anna?

- Oh, I think the farm system is just fascinating.

There's these soil pieces.

You know, I'm a nerd about soil organic matter and soil aggregates.

I'm really interested in that.

But that's interacting with the local retailers.

It's interacting with the community in terms of how their, you know, ditch policy works.

And that's the farmer interacting with his or her family, too.

So there's a bunch of relationships, both at the family scale and the community scale and the societal scale, that go on top of this really interesting, mysterious soil organic matter system.

- And how can the public help soil health help farmers help our ecosystem?

- Yeah.

There's a lot of interest in soil health from the public and from the legislature.

The Minnesota Legislature is working towards a healthy soil action plan for the whole state.

So you can contact your legislator and see if they supported that and how they're interacting with that.

A lot of that is motivated by water quality concerns.

The One Watershed, One Plan process has brought soil health goals into many watersheds around Minnesota.

So any member of the public who's working with a One Watershed, One Plan process can say, "What are we doing about farmland here?

What are we doing for increasing water storage on farmland via soil health practices?"

That's a really good way to advocate at your local level.

- Do you have a website that the audience could go to to learn more.

- Sure, I work for the Minnesota Office for Soil Health, or MOSH.

And so our website is mosh.umn.edu.

- Thank you so much for the work you do, but also joining us on "Farm Connections."

- Sure.

Pleasure to meet you.

- Stay tuned for more on "Farm Connections."

Research continues to help provide us with better technologies and solutions to deal with our problems.

The time, effort, and expense put forward today makes the work that needs to be done tomorrow more achievable.

I'm Dan Hoffman.

Thanks for watching "Farm Connections."

(upbeat music) (gentle upbeat music)