Could harvesting two crops on 1 field-in the same year-be the wave of the future? Reporter Sarah Gustin explains one demonstration trying to conserve every last drop of moisture in western North Dakota.

More and more researchers are making the switch to no-till planting.

(Jon Stika / NRCS) "By doing less disturbance, having more diversity keeping the soil covered the residue. Those types of things we know help the soil food web and make the soil function the way it is suppose to."


Three conservation districts, the Natural Resource Conservation Service and the Dickinson Research Extension Center-as well as a few producers are putting their research efforts into this plot. The quarter of land is broken into eight fields to prove that no-till planting mixed with a diverse crop rotation improves soil health and soil quality.

(Jon Stika / NRCS) "They wouldn't have to go all the way to no-till. Although that is the least amount of disturbance we have the technology to do at this time. But to reduce the amount of disturbance they do and diversify their crop rotation."


(Sarah Gustin / KX News) "One of these clumps of soil came from a field that has been cropped for a very long time, the other is just a piece of sod out of a ditch that hasn't been disturbed for very long. When you put them in the water you can tell which one is which by how fast it falls apart."


(Jon Stika / NRCS) "You can see this is the one from this field right here that does not have very soil health. And this is the soil from the sod and those aggregates stay together when they get wet and most of that water should go down trhough the soil instead of running off."


This field of cover crops will not be hayed or grazed. Instead the bugs and organisms in the soil will do the harvest to help make the fields more productive for years to come.

(Jon Stika / NRCS) "In a teaspoon of health soil their is suppose to be about 6 billion individual organisms, which is the same as the number of people on earth right now. So everything that happens in the soil has to go through them."


To see the true benefits a rotation system has to offer-the demonstration is planned to last 10 years. watch the video | save this article / add to your favorites list