This week we’re heading east of Green Bay, to the shores of Lake Michigan where Aaron Augustian runs a dairy farm with his brother Todd. They grow alfalfa, corn silage and winter wheat and have about 1500 animals on site.
The Augustians are all in on cover crops. Aaron, along with his dad, Eddie, just built a 30-foot, 12-row interseeder to plant cover crops into corn. As far as they know, it’s the first interseeder of its kind.
For this installment of Cover Crop Strategies, brought to you by Verdesian Life Sciences, Aaron tells us how the new interseeder works and breaks down the key to getting a successful cover crop stand.
The Cover Crop Strategies podcast series is brought to you by Verdesian Life Sciences.
At Verdesian Life Sciences, we believe that supplying healthy water and soil for the next generation is just as important as supplying efficient nutrients for every crop farmers grow. For us, sustainability and profitability go hand in hand. That’s why we call ourselves The Nutrient Use Efficiency People. We have dedicated ourselves to providing prescriptive nutrient use efficiency solutions that improve plant uptake and reduce fertilizer losses, helping preserve the environment and make the most of your investment. Learn more at vlsci.com or talk to your ag retailer today about Verdesian products.
Full Transcript
Noah:
It is time. Once again, for another edition of Cover Crop Strategies, the podcast brought to you by Verdesian Life Sciences. We have a lot to talk about today, but before we get started, let's thank our sponsor. They have this special message for you.
Noah:
At Verdesian Life Sciences, we believe that supplying healthy water and soil for the next generation is just as important as supplying efficient nutrients for every crop farmers grow. For us, sustainability and profitability go hand in hand. That's why we call ourselves the Nutrient Use Efficiency People. We have dedicated ourselves to providing prescriptive nutrient use efficiency solutions that improve plant uptake and reduce fertilizer losses, helping preserve the environment and make the most of your investment. Learn more at vlsci.com or talk to your ag-retailer today about Verdesian products.
Noah:
Buckle up, this week we're headed east of Green Bay to the shores of Lake Michigan, where Aaron Augustine runs a dairy farm with his brother, Todd. They grow alfalfa, corn silage and winter wheat, and have about 1,500 animals on site. The Augustines are all in on cover crops. They started slow with about 40 to 50 acres. Only took him about four years to expand that and really go all in.
Noah:
Aaron, along with his dad, Eddie, just built a 30 foot, 12 row interseeder to plant cover crops in the corn. And guess what? As far as they know, it's the first interseeder of its kind. For this installment of Cover Crop Strategies, Aaron tells us how the new interseeder works and he breaks down the key to getting a successful cover crop stand. So let's get the conversation started. Here's Aaron.
Aaron:
My name is Aaron Augustine. I farm here in partnership with my brother Todd. We are east of Green Bay, Wisconsin, about 35 miles, right on the shores of Lake Michigan. We farm about 1,500 acres. We are primarily dairy farm, we milk a thousand cows have about, I would say 1,400-1,500 animals on site, and we grow a lot of alfalfa, corn silage, and winter wheat for our crop rotations. The last couple years we've been trying to get into more no-till, but we do have dairy manure that we have to get out on land and try to work that in with our cover cropping system, but things have been working great the last couple years with the help of the NRCS and some other officials on figuring these systems out.
Noah:
Now, what's it like working with your brother? And I know you work closely with your dad as well. I mean, that has to be a come true to just be able to work with family every day?
Aaron:
Yeah. So my brother Todd, he's the cow guy here, he's in the barn and he takes care of the cattle and I take care of the crops and maintenance, down on the shop end. So, Todd and I joined in partnership about 15, 17 years ago. He took over the farm from our parents back in 2000, 2001. I joined him in about 2005, 2006. At that time, we were only milking 60 cows and we had a barn fire. We lost everything, so from that point moving forward, we moved over to a green site and built a 400 cow dairy. Then in 2015, we more than doubled inside again to get to where we are today. Our father still is involved in the operation. He works for us. My dad is very hands on when it comes to working in the shop and that kind of stuff. So when it came to building this interseeder and other equipment, he'll sit down and draw the stuff out and bring to fruition. It's amazing having him around help with all this stuff.
Noah:
Yeah. He sounds like a really smart guy. We're going to jump into that inter seeder here in just a second, but first I wanted to ask you, when did you guys first start implementing conservation practices on your farm?
Aaron:
So to look back, I'm going to say it's been six years ago? Five, six, seven years ago, roughly. I'd have to look at the exact number. We're in a group of farmers here in the Door-Kewaunee demo farms, it's a conservation group. A group of farmers got together and works with NRCS and USDA on implementing new practices on land. So, that's kind of when we got our first step into it. We wanted to do something different. We were the old moldboard plows and chisel plows. We'd go out every fall and turn that soil. Being this close to Lake Michigan, we just knew that we couldn't continue this practice, heavy rains in spring, the waterways and creeks would turn brown. We wanted to try something else, and at that time, the NRCS was working with no-tilling and cover crops.
Aaron:
The cover cropping kind of caught my eye. So we started that. We started small, we only started with probably 30, 40, 50 acres the first year. Then we grew all those numbers the second year and third year. I would say the fourth year we were all in. Last year in 2021, we planted a hundred percent green, we didn't work any ground. This year in 2022, we had to high speed disc, I would say less than a third, maybe, maybe a quarter of our acres, just do that, putting manure the spring, we put some ruts in some of the fields. So we had to go out there and level them out. But our goal is here to get back to a hundred percent no-till and planting green. We just we've seen the benefits in the last five to six years. Just tremendous with raising organic matter in the soil and the soil health and water holding capacity and stuff like that.
Noah:
What cover crop mixes do you use? Have you experimented with a lot of different species?
Aaron:
So what we do is after corn silage is just chopped off in fall, we'll come back with about 25 to 30 pounds of cereal rye.And no-till that in, after the corn silage is off, third week of September. We learned there in the beginning five, six years ago, we were putting down 60 to 80 pounds and that is just way too much to try to come back and plant green. So we backed those numbers down to 25 to 30 pounds. Then with the dairy manure that we're putting out there, 25 to 30 pounds gets you a great catching in spring. You would actually have a really nice mat out there to plant into. We do not harvest any of our spring cover crop, being that we just have dairy animals here in some dry cows, all of our heifers or down in Kansas. So we have no need for lower quality feed. So we leave that out on the soil. I firmly believe that helps build soil health, too. Then, so that's our fall program.
Aaron:
Like I said, moving into spring, we no-till plant green right into those fields. Then after winter week, we have came back with a combination of annual rye grass, hairy vetch, clovers, red clover, and crimson clover. This year. We're going to switch that up a little bit and just go with red clover, hairy vetch, and a little bit of rye to help the hairy vetch crawl up. But our plan is to use the interseeder on that and grow our nitrogen for next year's corn crop. It's something new. In the past, it was like I said, those clovers and a little bit of turnips after weeks, and that has worked great. And then we go out there and we'll put a application manure on in fall, possibly two applications in fall of about 6,000 gallons to get our nutrient needs for corn crop for the following year.
Aaron:
We do do interseeding in the corn that is just red clover, crimson clover, annual rye grass. That we plant down at about 15 to 18 pounds an acre. We try to get that interseed in the corn and the corners at V4 V5 right before it shades. Been doing that for a number of years, we first started with broadcasting that on six years ago, with air seeder through the co-op on one of their big aggies. We didn't have much luck with that, we didn't have good seed to soil contact. So the following year I had the local company that spreads my urea mix interseeding in with urea. They went out and spread it, and then we had a 12 row cultivator and we cultivated in. We got great seed to soil contact, great emergence, but I felt we were moving too much soil. And when we came to chop in fall, we had a lot of ridges in those fields from the cultivator. So we only did that for a year or two and decided we didn't like that idea.
Aaron:
So from there we worked with Brown County. They had a six row interseeder and we rented that for one or two seasons, but the problem with six row is that it's only 15 feet. On a good day, you cover 80 acres, we just couldn't get the acres covered. So we moved on to the interseeder that we'll talk about a little bit later. Then one more cover crop that we plant after alfalfa. We've been pretty fortunate the last couple years, we'll take third cutting off end of July. Then we'll terminate that alfalfa field. We'll come in there with a multi-species cover crop, which is purple top turnips, radishes, annual rye grass, some sunflower, a couple species of clovers, hairy vetch. So I think there was eight or 10 species in that one. And we've had great results with that, same thing with that.
Aaron:
We'll put manure on there twice in fall at 6,000 gallons in the acre and maybe once in spring, when... Oh, the other one in there was just your annual cereal rye. So that pretty much covers the cover cropping, the seeding that we do throughout the year. That process has been working good for us. We have been kind of dabbling and switching around some seeds. Our goal is to try to grow a little more nitrogen this year with nitrogen prices the way they are. But we work close with the local NRCS official, and we could only try these different blend outs you how they work.
Noah:
Yeah. You've used a lot of different species over the years, it sounds like. And you mentioned seed to soil contact. Now, would you say that is one of the biggest keys to getting a good cover crop stand?
Aaron:
Yeah, I would say that's 80% of the challenge right there is seed to soil contact. And then we have to have mother nature do her part and give us some rain. Once we get that stuff planted. It is kind of hard. I want to say two years ago, when we seeded our cover crop end of July, beginning of August, after alfalfa was terminated, that stuff didn't grow for a month. So that set us behind, because we didn't have any rain there. The little bit of manure that we did put over the top wasn't enough to help germinate it. So 80% of it is seed to soil contact and the other 20% is getting modern nature to get some of those rains, which end of July, beginning of August and up here in Northeast Wisconsin, where we're kind of dry at that time of year. But if we get that one shower of a half inch to an inch, those cover crops seem to just tape right off.
Noah:
Back to the conversation in just a second. But once again, let's thank our sponsor, verdesian Life Sciences, and they have the special message for you.
Noah:
At Verdesian Life Sciences. We believe that's supplying healthy water and soil for the next generation is just as important as supplying efficient nutrients for every crop farmers grow. For us, sustainability and profitability go hand in hand. That's why we call ourselves the Nutrient Use Efficiency People. We have dedicated ourselves to providing prescriptive nutrient use efficiency solutions that improve plant uptake and reduce fertilizer losses, helping preserve the environment and make the most of your investment. Learn more at vlsci.com or talk to your ag-retailer today about Verdesian products. Now back to the podcast.
Noah:
Let's talk about this interseeder that's been making a lot of news here in Wisconsin. So tell us about it, and how did it come about? I know your dad had a big hand, as you mentioned, in putting this thing together.
Aaron:
Yeah, so, like I said, in the past, we were using an 15 foot interseeder from InterSeeder Technologies that Brown County Conservation Office owned, and it worked great. It really worked good, but we just could not cover the acres in a day that we wanted to cover. We were planting upwards at 200 acres with that thing. Like I said, that was a three day process. To try to hit that window, making second crop at the time, and if we had some rains in there and then all of a sudden the corn shades and you don't get it done in time. So I had the idea of, okay, we have this 12-row cultivator frame sitting here in case international cultivator frame. Why can't we make an interseeder with air box on and blow it to the row units?
Aaron:
We looked for a year for some type of used grain drill to get row units off of, but we didn't have any luck finding the right contraption that we needed for our distances down from the bar and stuff like that. So I reached out to Dawn Equipment. They make a DuoSeed row unit that is made for interseeding. So I reached out to them. They were able to set me up with 36 of those row units. We mounted them to this toolbar. We have three rows in between each 30-inch corn row. So the challenge there was the weight on the toolbar. Our plan was to put the air seeder on top of the toolbar with all the row units. But once we started building this thing, we realized we couldn't do that.
Aaron:
So my father took some time and sat down and thought, how are we going to pull this air box? How are we going to bring this behind us? At that time he was looking around and he thought, let's make some parallel linkage off of the back of the cultivator. Then we took some parts off of an old [inaudible 00:14:26] Air swivel axle and made a frame to put the Salford air seeder on. That worked great. So we have the swivel wheels all back and then it pivots in the center on one pin. Then that air seeder... I think that thing was about 1800 pounds empty and it'll hold 60 bushels of seed. So we fill that up. That thing trails behind us on 120-inch spacing in between the corn rows. It's worked phenomenal, the row units on the cultivator itself. Like I said, we have those set in.
Aaron:
We were easily covering a hundred acres in a nine-hour day. We're out there at six and a half, seven miles an hour when you get into a nice big square fields. So I have to give a lot of the credit to my father for designing and coming up with all this stuff. Then the employees in the shop helping him assemble this machine. With supply chain issues, we ordered a lot of these parts in January. We were supposed to have them in March and we didn't see them until about the first or second week of June. So the guys had about 120 hours in it, in a week's time between two and a half, three guys putting this machine together. By the third week of June, we had it out the shop doors doing testing on it in the field.
Aaron:
We have to come back this winter and do a couple little updates to it, nothing real major, just cleaning up a little bit. But we covered over 400 acres with it this year and it was pretty amazing how everything came together.
Noah:
Yeah. It sounds like it's working tremendously. There's a video of you guys showing it off on YouTube. We actually have that on our website on our Cover Crop Best of the Web article. So if anyone out there wants to see it in action, just head there and check out the video. But as far as you guys know, too, this is the first ever 12-row interseeder, correct?
Aaron:
As far as we know. I know I talked to a couple regulatory officials last week from the NRCS, and there has been a couple... I guess there's one or two other ones out there that were kind of built, but they were really heavy, they didn't work overly well. And that's the issue we ran into was the weight on the three point hitch. But by making the parallel linkage with the Cardell back, that solved all those problems. But as far as I know of, I don't know,I don't think there's any in production. If there is, I apologize we to the companies out there, but we've looked for them and we couldn't really find anything that fit our needs. So that's why we went about designing and building our home.
Noah:
How good did that feel after all those hours you put in to design it, put it together, and you've been searching for this kind of equipment that could work like this. How good did it feel to see it out there in action and see it really working for you guys ?
Aaron:
You know it's a tremendous, tremendous sigh of relief. We knew the process of interseeding work. We've been doing it for multiple years and it worked great. But, trying to design your own machine here or, I wouldn't say really design it. I mean, a lot of the parts are, like I said, they're from [inaudible 00:17:35] or they're from Dawn [inaudible 00:17:37] toolbar. It's just assembling it together and getting it to work.
Aaron:
The biggest thing was there was a very large investment in this machine. That was the scariest part, laying out all this capital out front and then trying to get it together and not knowing if you're going to be able to lift it, if it's going to be too heavy, if it's not going to trail right. Then if you're going to have to go back to the drawing board. But I think my father hit it right on the first path. Like I said, we have a little updates to do with this winter, but nothing major at all. Just kind of clean up some of the hoses and make some brackets and stuff to hold that kind of stuff. But I would say the scariest part was the investment we had in all the parts and getting them assembled, and not knowing if it was going to work after it was assembled.
Noah:
Yeah. Well, the fact that you invested that much and an interseeder shows how beneficial the process of interseeding is for your operation. Just tell us a little bit about interseeding and the benefits that you've gotten from it over the years.
Aaron:
Yeah. What we're seeing with interseeding here is there's a couple benefits. Like I said, we literally farm land on the lake banks of Lake Michigan and then three, four miles inland. So I think some of the benefits we're seeing interceding here with the grasses and the clovers is we're always a couple growing degree units cooler than if you go inland 10 miles. So we get a good catch on our interseeding that last week of June, first week of July. The interseeding kind of sits dormant until we harvest corn silage, which is normally the second week of September on an average year in Wisconsin here. When we harvest that corn silage, we already have that field planted. The sunlight hits that interseeding in a matter of 10 days, it goes from four inches tall to about 10 inches tall. It's there.
Aaron:
The reason we wanted to do this interceding is we all know how labor is nowadays trying to find labor. When we're chopping corn, we have eight to 10 guys out there between pack tractors, trucks, choppers, you name it. Some years dump carts. We just don't have that last guy to sit in that no-till drill and get out there and start drilling cover crops. And it's crucial that you get those cover crops in right after the corn's harvest it. So we feel that this alleviates some of that time constraint in fall. If we can get out there end of June, beginning of July, when we're kind of looking for a little bit of work for the guys around the farm here.
Aaron:
So I think this year we did about 250 acres of interseeding of our 700 acres of corn we grow. The plan is to keep upping that number. I don't know if it's going to happen next year, but the goal is to eventually have all this corn interseeded.
Aaron:
Then when fall comes, when we're done chopping corn, there's very minimal cover crops of plant at that time. Then, like I said, when the sunlight hits that stuff, it just blossoms and takes right off. So when our manure guys come in fall, we use a low disturbance manure application tool that kind of just a wavy colter to put a little slit in the soil. We run that through these cover crops and it just gives those cover crops the food they need to grow into the late fall. It helps fold that manure to the soil, instead of leaching down and getting to the places we don't want it to get.
Noah:
As you're interseeding, what do the fertilizer applications look like? Do you apply fertilizer while you're interceding or before? Or how does that work?
Aaron:
We talked about putting 28% tanks on the interseeder and doing it at the same time, but after my father and I ran this machine this year, there's a lot going on with that 12-row interseeder. So I think as of now, we're going to hold off on applying the 28% on the interseeder. That may come in the future, if we get a tractor on it. This year, we didn't have a tractor on it with GPS, but if we can get a tractor on it with GPS and let it steer itself, then maybe we'll look at putting wide drops on and doing 28. But normally we just come back with a hundred pounds of urea and have the local coop, a female that we work with, spread that out there. Then as we go through with the interseeder, you get a little bit of soil movement cover some of that urea up.
Noah:
Well, this has been a great conversation. It's really interesting to learn about how you put this interseeder together. Those are all the questions I have for you, but before we let you go, anything else you want our listeners to know, just about either the interseeder or how conservation practices and the usage of cover crops have impacted your farm over the years?
Aaron:
Well, I think this year, when you talk about the impact cover crops, I think a lot of farmers have seen it. When we can go out there in the spring and we have to do minimal tillage with $5 diesel fuel this spring, it was a huge savings. We're not running those two passes, three passes over some of these fields with the field cultivators like we've done in the past. The labor shortages is the way they are today too, you don't need those extra guys out there. And I think conservation is number one, being that we're right along the banks of Lake Michigan here with our dairy farm, we have to do everything we can to protect the water quality nowadays. Farm practices are different than what they were 25 years ago. We want to be part of that to help make sure we have a clean, renewable water resource moving into the future.
Aaron:
If anybody has any questions on the interseeder or how we built it, or if they want to come see it, please reach out to myself or my father. We'd be more than willing to help other farmers out to get this worked into their equipment, fleet, their rotation, if they want to get into interseeding. It's growing in popularity in our area, too. We went out and did a little bit of custom work this year. I think we could have had a little more custom work, if we would have had the machine done a little bit earlier, but we'll cross that bridge next year.
Noah:
Great stuff there from Aaron. Really appreciate him joining us for this week's Cover Crop Strategies podcast. And before we go, let's thank our sponsor for Verdesian Life Sciences.
Noah:
That will wrap things up. I'm your host, Noah Newman, associate editor. Thanks again for listening. We really appreciate it. And remember until next time for all things cover crops, head to cover cropstrategies.com.
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