So now, let's talk about cover crops.
What you're looking at is 22 tons
to the acre compost with no cover crop.
So now, I'm going to move 10 feet
to the right, right next door.
And I'm going to show you what the exact same rate of compost
looks like with cover crops.
Totally amazing, isn't it?
What we see consistently when we try cover crops in dry land
crops in Utah is this scenario.
Here, we grew hairy vetch and winter pea.
It was planted as a frost seeding, a dormant seeding.
So it was planted about Thanksgiving time.
Went into the winter as a seed.
And germinated as early as it could
in the spring as temperatures started to warm
and the ice melted.
And we allowed it to grow until about the mid part of June.
And then, we went in with tillage and terminated it.
And then, in the fall, we came in and planted the wheat.
And so, essentially, what we did is we substituted the fallow
period with a cover crop.
And it has just completely annihilated the yield.
So really tough thing.
And I mean, even if the cover crops
are small when they're terminated,
they're still using some water.
And that little bit of water that they're using
goes an awful long way to making a big difference in the yield.
So we still haven't figured out the puzzle
of how to grow cover crops in Utah dry land.
We've got some new ideas that we're going to try.
But just to straight up go into the fallow period, seed a cover
crop, and terminate it, and plant wheat following it,
it seems to be a great recipe for having a significant yield
reduction.
So here is a look at the soil.
And this is going to be another high rate of compost.
This was applied in 2019, so this past fall.
And I want you to look at just how normally this soil would
be just as hard as a rock.
But we're as dry as a bone.
And this soil has a little bit of darkness to it,
a little bit of color.
It's not near as hard as it is in other areas.
This is just an area to contrast that.
You'll see that the soil is just as white as a ghost.
You can see why this place is named Snowville.
Maybe it's because the soil is white.
But the soil is pretty much hard enough
that you can land a 747 here in this field and be just fine.
I think most of you know that I'm
a weed scientist by training.
And I love a good field of weeds.
And I love a good opportunity to explore
the latest and greatest in weed management techniques
and chemistries.
And so one of the things that's amazing about this
is we are on an organic farm that
doesn't see a sniff of herbicides of any kind.
And I want you to take a look in between the rows of this wheat
how clean that is.
I mean, that is just as clean as can be.
And I'd like to say that there's some magic here, or something
special that's been done.
But really, it's entirely because of the fact
that this is a low-precip area.
After about April, this place sees no moisture at all.
And as long as you get a good stand of wheat,
does a really good job of keeping the weeds suppressed.
And they just don't get enough moisture to even grow weeds.
So here you manipulate the crop to get a great looking crop.
And you have the weeds that don't really
have a chance to grow due to low moisture conditions.
And pretty amazing, but that's just a side note on the weeds,
just because I like weeds.
On the theme of weeds, you'll notice here
that we have a pretty healthy stand of Russian thistle.
And it looks like halogeton.
And I don't think I see any kochia.
But you'll notice the weeds are pretty healthy here.
So just the fact that Snowville is ultra dry
doesn't mean that you don't have weeds.
Weeds will still grow.
It's the fact that weeds have some competition with them
that helps to suppress them that makes it good.
So we'll just kind of step over here to the side.
You'll see an area with a better wheat stand.
And you'll see that the weed pressure is greatly
reduced where we have a good stand of wheat.
I just can't get over how clean this plot is.
Not a weed in there.
Pretty amazing.
And here is an area to contrast the high compost
rate with no compost.
So one of the challenges with doing dry land research in Utah
is that the dry land here is run on a wheat fallow
system, which means that we grow a crop every other year.
And we use tillage or herbicides to control weeds
and to save up moisture in the off year.
And so in order to speed that up from a research standpoint,
we have a trial land that's in wheat this year
on one side of the road.
And then across the road, and we have the exact same trial
that's currently in fallow on the other side of the road.
So we'll go take a look at that now.
So we're out here in the fallow area now.
And as you can imagine, there's not a whole lot to see.
But in order to be successful in organic production,
you've got to do a really good job on your fallow season weed
control.
And Richard Grover here does a wonderful job with that.
And now, we're over in the cover crop area.
And you can see some of the cover crop skeletons
in the fallow.
And they are breaking down in the soil
and getting ready to try to grow a productive crop of wheat
in the spring.
Just found a few cover crop escapees.
That escape must have gone between shanks
on the tillage equipment.
And you can see this is our vetch.
And then here is our pea.
This is mid-July.
And so you can see how short all of these grow.
And it's just because we're so moisture
limited in this environment, but these were planted in March.
So there we have it.
That's our virtual tour of the Snowville dry land wheat
project.
Hope you enjoyed it.
Appreciate the cooperation of Richard Grover and his crew.
They've been outstanding to work with.
And they continue to put up with this.
But if you ever want to come and take a look at this in person,
feel free to give me a holler, and we'll
bring you out and show you around in real life.
So thanks.
Bye.
OK, so that is our experience with cover crops on dry land.
And we haven't quite figured out how to pull it off yet.
And it's just the fact that there's just
not a whole lot of moisture.
And the desire of people is to try to work those
into the fallow year.
Because we're already just only getting a cash
crop every other year.
And the thought of maybe doing a grow your wheat.
And then have a fallow.
And then grow your cover crop.
And then have another fallow.
And then grow your wheat again.
You've really extended that window,
and that's just not going to fly.
So trying to come up with options
to introduce a cover crop or add some diversity
to the cropping system in a really short turnaround
like that has been a real challenge
because they do suck moisture.
And in a moisture limited area, it's going to deem your yield.
And in our experience with about five years of doing it now--
well, actually, no, we've done about 10 years
at both Snowville and at Blue Creek.
Every year, we've seen a yield hit.
Sometimes it's a massive yield hit.
We can minimize the yield hit if we plant it really, really
early in the year.
And we terminate it early.
So you let the cover crop get about six inches tall by about
May, and then you till it.
And you won't gain your yield too bad that way,
but the problem is you don't get any real benefit from it either
because you had to had to kill it so early.
But what you looked at there would
have been a June termination.
So it started growing in March.
We terminated it in June.
And then, we dropped about 75% of our yield by doing that.
So anyway, that's what we've learned.
And sorry to rain on your parade,
but we don't have any good answers for dry land yet.