Episode Number
10470
Episode Show Notes / Description
The October 29, 2026, edition of the Closing Market Report, hosted by Todd Gleason, begins with a daily commodity market recap before transitioning into a special audio tour of the University of Illinois' Morrow Plots. Led by crop scientist Andrew Margenot, the tour celebrates the 150th anniversary of the world's oldest continuous crop rotation experiment, highlighting how a century and a half of specific planting practices and fertility treatments have impacted crop yields and depleted native prairie soil organic matter. The program concludes with an agricultural weather forecast from Mike Tannura of Tstorm Weather, who details an upcoming rain system expected to slow the harvest in the U.S. Corn Belt, varying moisture conditions for domestic winter wheat, and the ongoing wet and unusually cool weather patterns currently affecting crops in Brazil and Argentina.
02:04 Audio Tour of the Morrow Plots Crop Rotation Experiment
18:44 Ag Weather with Mike Tannura, Tstorm Weather
02:04 Audio Tour of the Morrow Plots Crop Rotation Experiment
18:44 Ag Weather with Mike Tannura, Tstorm Weather
Transcript
cmr261029
The October 29, 2026, edition of the Closing Market Report, hosted by Todd Gleason, begins with a daily commodity market recap before transitioning into a special audio tour of the University of Illinois' Morrow Plots. Led by crop scientist Andrew Margenot, the tour celebrates the 150th anniversary of the world's oldest continuous crop rotation experiment, highlighting how a century and a half of specific planting practices and fertility treatments have impacted crop yields and depleted native prairie soil organic matter. The program concludes with an agricultural weather forecast from Mike Tannura of Tstorm Weather, who details an upcoming rain system expected to slow the harvest in the U.S. Corn Belt, varying moisture conditions for domestic winter wheat, and the ongoing wet and unusually cool weather patterns currently affecting crops in Brazil and Argentina.
02:04 Audio Tour of the Morrow Plots Crop Rotation Experiment
18:44 Ag Weather with Mike Tannura, Tstorm Weather
---
Todd Gleason: From the Land Grant University in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, this is the Closing Market Report. It is the 29th day of October 2026. I’m Illinois Extension’s Todd Gleason. Coming up, we will not talk about the commodity markets with Matt Bennett from agmarket.net. He’s away from the office this afternoon. However, I will take you, actually Andrew Margenot from crop sciences will take you on a tour of the Morrow Plots. If you’re a farmland owner, a farmer, or just interested in the transition of the prairie soils from prairie to crop rotation, you’ll want to stay with us. And then of course, as we wrap up our time together, we will take a look at the weather forecast, too. We’ll do that with Mike Tannura from Tstorm Weather on this Thursday edition of the Closing Market Report from Illinois Public Media.
December corn for the day settled at 4 51 and a quarter, a half of a cent lower. The March contract at 4 64 and three quarters, down a quarter. And May futures 4 73, up a quarter of a cent per bushel. November soybeans 12 19 and three quarters, four and three quarters lower. January 12 34 and three quarters, down three and a quarter cents. And the March at 12 43 and a half, it finished two and a half cents lower on the day. Bean meal futures at 3 29 30, down 6 40. The bean oil 65 64, eight cents higher for the afternoon. Wheat futures, December contract in the hard red or soft red rather, at 6 03 and three quarters, four and three quarters higher. The hard red December at 6 45 and a quarter, up two and a quarter cents. Live cattle futures a dollar and two and a half cents lower. Feeder cattle down 15 cents and lean hogs up a buck 22 and a half per hundred pounds. Crude oil 79 cents lower a barrel at 71 and 99 tenths of a cent. And the wholesale price of gasoline is two cents lower at 3 08 and nine tenths of a cent.
announce: Todd Gleason’s services are made available to WILL by University of Illinois Extension.
02:04 Audio Tour of the Morrow Plots Crop Rotation Experiment
Todd Gleason: The Morrow Plots at the University of Illinois stand as the world’s oldest continuous crop rotation experiment, tracking the boundaries of agricultural sustainability since 1876. Across three distinct test sections, as you’ll hear, the plots compare 150 years of continuous corn against two and three-year crop rotations to measure the exact long-term impacts of planting practices and fertility treatments on crop yields. Andrew Margenot is the director of the Morrow Plots. Yesterday, we celebrated their 150th anniversary. I was there to document that event and recorded the speeches. We’ll bring more of them to you over time. Now, Andrew took those gathered on a tour of the site as we closed out the day. The plots aren’t really very big. Remember, they’re located just to the south of the main quad at the University of Illinois. So Andrew was able to lead the tour from the mic stand as those seated looked on. That makes this particular tour ideal to listen to and visualize. So here’s yesterday’s tour of the Morrow Plots, this historic site detailing how a century and a half of management methods has directly influenced the depletion and retention of native prairie soil organic matter, and the influence of crop rotation and fertility treatments on crop yield. Here’s Andrew Margenot.
Andrew Margenot: If you don’t know, the Morrow Plots again are the world’s oldest continuous crop rotation study, as Dr. Davis said. Which means that they’re the only experiment of this age that looks at how do you change crops from year to year. And that’s what you see before you. It’s quite nice to look at the plots in this year because it brings out these differences. On the north third, you have continuous corn. This is corn every single year. In other words, there is no crop rotation. We hear about corn on corn as not a very common practice, it’s usually not good to do for a farmer more than 10 years, 150 years of corn on corn. That’s quite impressive. The second crop rotation is a two-year. And as I’ve mentioned, it began as corn, oat, and now it’s corn, soybean. And that switch was made in 1968, about two decades after soybeans had replaced oats because it was clear by then that soybeans were here to stay as a grain crop. And again, this happened because, as we mechanized after World War II, there was no need for horses, for livestock power to pull plows, etc., and so oats were a source of fodder. It was not for human consumption, mostly it was for horses. But the spirit of this rotation has remained the same. It’s a two-year crop rotation. And then finally on the southern third we have the three-way or the three-year. So one crop each year for three years before it goes back to the corn crop. And this three-way crop rotation is corn, oat, and alfalfa. And you might be wondering, well you just said Andrew that we don’t have horses, so why are we having oats again? This is, I think, the preservation of one of the original rotations, so for historical value this three-way rotation has been preserved. And this is currently following the harvest of alfalfa, we did two cuttings this summer, it will return to corn. So this means by the way that next year, which only happens once every six years, the one-way, the two-way, and the three-way will all synchronize in the corn phase. And you can really see the differences not just in fertility treatments, but also in how crop rotation impacts corn yields. On that note then, if we look towards the northern third where the corn is, you can see some pretty marked accentuated differences in the height of the corn crop. And that is a reflection of the eight subplots within that northern third. So each of these thirds are split north, south as one half, and then east to west into four sections for eight subplots. These have been assigned three treatments of fertility: unfertilized, fertilized with the fertilizer du jour (I’ll get back to that in just a second), and then manure. So the very tall corn that’s in the back, that is the treatment, excuse me, of the fertilizer of the day, du jour. In 1904, when that began with Dr. Hopkins, that was steamed bone meal, bone meal from the bison herds, would be railed back to the eastern states, steamed, and then that would be ground up and applied as a source of nitrogen and of phosphorus. That was then accompanied with limestone and with phosphate rock. Today we don’t use bison bones, there are no bison left, but also bones are a rare input, we use urea, potassium as potash, and triple super phosphate. So again, these are inputs that no one could even dream of, this is pre-Haber Bosch’s discovery of synthetic nitrogen in 1915, in 1876. The corn that’s a little bit harder to see, but it’s on the very northern edge by that hedge, that’s the unfertilized corn. And it’s shorter than the corn on the southern side that you can see, which is the manure. Now we’ve kept these rates of manure historically the same, and we know now with modern hybrids it’s not enough to keep up. So that’s why the manured corn is a little bit shorter, that will be changed for the next year, for the phase six of these plots, we’re in phase five currently. But you can just make out from the height of the corn alone the stark differences in how fertility can impact yields within the same rotation, or in this case the lack thereof.
Todd Gleason: So let me interrupt Andrew for just a moment to recap what you’ve just heard. The Morrow Plots are 150 years old. They were planted for the first time in 1876. The northern end of the plots have been continuously planted in corn each year ever since then. The center plot has been in a crop rotation that began as corn and then oats, and then in the 1960s was a two-year rotation, corn and soybeans. And the southern end of the plots have been in a three-year rotation the entire time. That’s corn, oats, and finally alfalfa. Every six years the entire plot is planted to corn and that’s when the magic happens.
Andrew Margenot: Next year, I encourage you to come and visit these plots because you will see marked differences that also reflect how crop rotation impacts yields. Going back to page seven of your pamphlet, the photo by Dr. Davis shows the effect of no fertilization on corn yields. So the corn cobs that are closest to you in that photo, as you go from plot three, which is the northern one, plot four is the middle one, plot five on that photo is the southern one, the front row of corn gets bigger. And that’s the effect of, without any inputs of anything, not even limestone, the mere effect of rotating crops, an ecological approach to crop production, that alone can more than triple corn yields. Of course, rotating and fertilizing gives us the highest yields, which is shown by this photo, but also by the data. So we’re talking about 20 bushel per acre corn, if it’s corn on corn, unfertilized, all the way to 320 bushel per acre corn in a three-way crop rotation with inputs of potash, urea, and phosphorus. So that’s one story of the Morrow Plots. Again, as I said earlier, it seems obvious to us that rotation and fertilizer can benefit yields, but again in 1876 that was not really understood. The Morrow Plots has done a good job if that answer seems obvious. Now Dr. Davis hinted at an exciting story that we have uncovered, which I think exemplifies the value of these studies. The Morrow Plots may not tell farmers how to go home and change how they farm today. It did through the 1950s. But there’s a lot of scientific value that has implications for the home farm through the next hundred years. And one example of this is using modern techniques and science for understanding things like organic matter. So organic matter is what makes soils tick. Soils are this beautiful amalgam of physical, chemical, and biological, and organic matter is the integrator of all three processes, of physics, chemistry, and biology. It’s what makes soils alive, it’s what also supports crop production, it’s why we enjoy the highest yields of corn and soybean in the world per acre right here in East Central Illinois.
Todd Gleason: I shouldn’t, but I’m going to interrupt here again because I think it’s really important to understand how short a period of time these soils in Illinois have been cropped. For instance, I know a man that knew a man that broke the prairie on his farm. Now here’s Andrew Margenot again.
Andrew Margenot: Now we know that under the native prairie that was here only about 180 years ago, not that long ago, that under prairie these soils had much higher amounts of organic matter. To give you some numbers, we think that prairies, there’s not many left so we think, that soils under prairie had roughly about 16 to 20% organic matter content in the top six inches. Now that falls off with depth, but that’s the extreme end of what prairies could have had. But it’s at least 10 to 15% organic matter. Those of you who work in ag or in soils know that that is a tremendously high value, that you will rarely if ever witness under crop production systems. And the Morrow Plots shows this quite well. We go from a low end of about 3% organic matter from the 15 of prairie to about 7 to 8% with the three-way crop rotation with inputs either as manure or as NPK. So we have this large 2x difference in organic matter from the quote unquote worst case to the quote unquote best case. But still we’ve lost over half of the organic matter from the days of the prairie. That’s not a bad thing, that’s simply a trade-off. I don’t think that we should mimic nature because nature did it a certain way, but there are lessons that we can borrow from nature to improve crop production. And I would say Hopkins in this book for example harps on the selective mimicking of nature for sustainable ag.
Todd Gleason: Again, just a quick note. Andrew Margenot is holding up a copy of Cyril Hopkins’ book published in 1913, a compilation of things that had been published in the newspapers at the time. Hopkins, of course, worked for crop sciences here on the University of Illinois campus and he really believed that fertility could be managed on cropping systems. The name of the book that Andrew is holding up is The Farm That Won’t Wear Out.
Andrew Margenot: So the story gets deeper. We’ve known that we’ve lost organic matter from conversion of prairie to ag, that’s not a secret, but what we can do today is that we can look at the kinds or the source of organic matter. This is using a thing called isotopes. So if you’ll brace with me for 30 seconds on some chemistry, isotopes would be an element like carbon, and organic matter is roughly half carbon by mass, so we can use carbon measurements as a proxy of organic matter, it works quite well, you’re roughly half carbon by mass as well. And any element like carbon, the atom itself has a slightly different mass called an isotopic value. And long story short, there’s a distinct kind of carbon of the prairie species that used to blanket these landscapes versus the kind of crops that we grow, specifically what we call C4 crops, like corn. So because prairies were mostly C3 crops, or species I’ll say, and corn is C4, we can distinguish today how much of the carbon present and thus of the organic matter was from the original prairies versus of the corn crop. And because that is corn on corn for 150 years, almost contemporary with the conversion of prairie, we had the unique opportunity, first time in the world to understand in modern cropland how much of the carbon left was from the pre-ag ecosystem. We also can date the carbon, you’ve all heard of 14-carbon dating for artifacts, well we’ve also completed that work. So here’s a question for the audience, any guesses on A, how old is the organic matter in these soils on average, and B, what percent of the organic matter is still from the native prairie? And how much is coming from the corn stalks and leaves and all of the residue? So for the first question, the average age is 2,200 years. So again that’s an average, there’s a distribution, but on average most of the carbon here is quite old. Which already gives you a clue to the next question’s answer, that the age and the percent are related, older carbon would imply it’s from the prairies, we find that 60% of the carbon today is still from the prairie. This is important for a few reasons. One is that, well no one has figured this out till now, but because of this experiment we can leverage these techniques. There’s an important implication for crop production. We know that roughly half of the nitrogen for corn and for soybean these days is coming from organic matter. It can mineralize, it can convert organic nitrogen to forms that crops use, and so this is a major subsidization of corn and soybean crops. But if half, or more than half of that organic matter which includes organic nitrogen is still from the prairie’s inheritance, what happens when that prairie organic matter runs out? We might see yields sag, for example, that’s worst case. So we’ve been enjoying these subsidies of fossil or relic or remnant prairie carbon, choose your term, but there’s an important insight here is that we’ve been able to enjoy the fruits of these soils because we’ve not quite realized that it’s a precious resource and maybe it’s time to rethink what we’re doing for organic matter for again, the farm that won’t wear out. So this is a nice example of how Hopkins could never have conceived of even isotopes, I think it was a theoretical notion, much less to conduct these measurements for a day’s worth of labor costs today. It’s cheap for us to figure out these answers. And it gives answers to questions like what he penciled in 1913 in this book, The Farm That Won’t Wear Out, which is how do you preserve organic matter? If we keep on losing organic matter slowly but steadily, and Bob Dunker collected the data that shows this to be the case, then there’s a bit of an alarm, not in a way to freak out, but we should be a little bit more mindful of how to design cropping systems holistically for the next 150 years. So that’s one example of the value of these studies, that sometimes there will be techniques and insights that we cannot conceive of that our future scientists will be able to tackle. So I can only imagine, not really, I can only imagine that I can’t imagine, the kinds of techniques that can be leveraged on these plots in the year 2100, 2176.
Todd Gleason: You’ve been listening to University of Illinois crop scientist Andrew Margenot giving a tour of the Morrow Plots to those gathered yesterday afternoon, just north of Mumford Hall and east of the undergraduate library, to celebrate their 150th anniversary. Now the Morrow Plots are the oldest crop rotation experiment on the planet. They were first sown in 1876, just nine years after the Illinois Land Grant was established. If you’re on campus, please do visit them. There’s a brand new gate for seeing, and the hedge that has hidden the plots for decades has now been replaced with a fence to protect them, but which also makes them easy to see.
18:44 Ag Weather with Mike Tannura, Tstorm Weather
Todd Gleason: Let’s turn our attention to the growing regions across the planet. Now the climate is impacting each of them at this point. Mike Tannura is here. He is the president and CEO of Tstorm Weather out of Naperville, Illinois. Hi, Mike, thanks for being with us. We have a lot of places that we need to visit today. Begin in the Corn Belt with harvest weather conditions in the upcoming timeframe.
Mike Tannura: Well, initially it’s just going to stay dry and mild, so things are looking pretty good over the next couple of days. Once we get into the weekend and especially next week, that’s where things will go downhill for a little bit. We’ll see some rain coming in this weekend, but it shouldn’t be too heavy, so not a real big deal. The bigger deal is what follows early next week. A major system is going to move through from Monday through Wednesday, and that’ll produce a lot of rain across a very wide area. So anywhere from one to two inches is on the way early next week, and that will slow things down for corn and soybean harvesting. Once we get beyond that though, there’s nothing behind it, so it does look quite a bit drier once we get into late next week and then lasting beyond then. So Todd, initially things are going to go downhill next week, but then they should rapidly improve just a few days after that.
Todd Gleason: Now turn your attention to the winter wheat crops. Let’s start with the hard red winter wheat in the United States.
Mike Tannura: Well, they’ve just had a lot of rain this autumn. This is one of the wetter autumns on record. Very little of that crop has been drier than normal over the last 30 days, and that’s going to continue. We have rain coming up this weekend, we have quite a bit of rain coming up early next week, and that crop is going to be about as moist as you can get heading into winter. So pretty much things are looking good there as far as we can tell, and temperatures will stay unusually mild, so both…
Todd Gleason: I’m sorry, but Mike drops out here for just a moment. He transitions at this point from the hard red winter wheat crop to the soft red winter wheat crop in Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and points east.
Mike Tannura: …that’s a little bit of a different story. It’s been very dry. You could actually argue that much of that crop is in a drought. About half of it was drier than normal over the last 90 days, and most areas haven’t seen much rain over the last couple of weeks and even the last couple of months. Now, they are going to get some nice rains with that system we already talked about. So things will change a little bit with a nice drink of water before winter approaches. But once we get through that, there’s not really anything behind it, so this is probably the last big event heading into winter.
Todd Gleason: So hard red and soft red in the United States taken care of, the Corn Belt as well, and what harvest looks like. Probably should turn our attention to South America, begin with Brazil.
Mike Tannura: Well, we’ve talked about this on the show many times in recent weeks, and the story is the same. They’ve had a lot of rain, and they’re going to continue to see a lot of rain. The main storm track is essentially lined up right across the country, and that’s going to keep making for thunderstorms in different areas at different times. We saw a lot of rain late last week and last weekend in the south, and that area has been drying out a little bit this week, but more rain is ahead next week, and some of those totals will be heavy, so it’s just more of the same for Brazil, Todd, wet, wet, and wet.
Todd Gleason: And in Argentina?
Mike Tannura: Well, they’ve been getting rains too. I mean, pretty much all of South America. The rains haven’t been quite as unusual, but the thing that has been unusual is that it has been very cool. October will go down as one of the coolest, if not the coolest, of the last 50 years for most of their crops in Argentina, and that’s just from this El Nino-driven weather pattern. Going forward, it won’t be as cool once we get into next month, but it doesn’t look all that mild either, and they’ll have a mix of rains here and there. So overall, nothing really too concerning there, but just an unusual weather pattern that’s been going on this fall.
Todd Gleason: Thank you very much, Mike.
Mike Tannura: Thank you, Todd.
Todd Gleason: That’s Mike Tannura. He’s with Tstorm Weather at tstorm.net online. He’s the president and CEO there in Naperville, Illinois. You’ve been listening, of course, to the Closing Market Report from Illinois Public Media on this Thursday afternoon. Don’t forget we’ll record our Commodity Week program at two o’clock this afternoon, posted by around six o’clock today to our website at willag.org, and you can check it out online in its entirety in your favorite podcast applications simply by searching out Commodity Week by name. You have a great afternoon. I’m Illinois Extension’s Todd Gleason.
The October 29, 2026, edition of the Closing Market Report, hosted by Todd Gleason, begins with a daily commodity market recap before transitioning into a special audio tour of the University of Illinois' Morrow Plots. Led by crop scientist Andrew Margenot, the tour celebrates the 150th anniversary of the world's oldest continuous crop rotation experiment, highlighting how a century and a half of specific planting practices and fertility treatments have impacted crop yields and depleted native prairie soil organic matter. The program concludes with an agricultural weather forecast from Mike Tannura of Tstorm Weather, who details an upcoming rain system expected to slow the harvest in the U.S. Corn Belt, varying moisture conditions for domestic winter wheat, and the ongoing wet and unusually cool weather patterns currently affecting crops in Brazil and Argentina.
02:04 Audio Tour of the Morrow Plots Crop Rotation Experiment
18:44 Ag Weather with Mike Tannura, Tstorm Weather
---
Todd Gleason: From the Land Grant University in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, this is the Closing Market Report. It is the 29th day of October 2026. I’m Illinois Extension’s Todd Gleason. Coming up, we will not talk about the commodity markets with Matt Bennett from agmarket.net. He’s away from the office this afternoon. However, I will take you, actually Andrew Margenot from crop sciences will take you on a tour of the Morrow Plots. If you’re a farmland owner, a farmer, or just interested in the transition of the prairie soils from prairie to crop rotation, you’ll want to stay with us. And then of course, as we wrap up our time together, we will take a look at the weather forecast, too. We’ll do that with Mike Tannura from Tstorm Weather on this Thursday edition of the Closing Market Report from Illinois Public Media.
December corn for the day settled at 4 51 and a quarter, a half of a cent lower. The March contract at 4 64 and three quarters, down a quarter. And May futures 4 73, up a quarter of a cent per bushel. November soybeans 12 19 and three quarters, four and three quarters lower. January 12 34 and three quarters, down three and a quarter cents. And the March at 12 43 and a half, it finished two and a half cents lower on the day. Bean meal futures at 3 29 30, down 6 40. The bean oil 65 64, eight cents higher for the afternoon. Wheat futures, December contract in the hard red or soft red rather, at 6 03 and three quarters, four and three quarters higher. The hard red December at 6 45 and a quarter, up two and a quarter cents. Live cattle futures a dollar and two and a half cents lower. Feeder cattle down 15 cents and lean hogs up a buck 22 and a half per hundred pounds. Crude oil 79 cents lower a barrel at 71 and 99 tenths of a cent. And the wholesale price of gasoline is two cents lower at 3 08 and nine tenths of a cent.
announce: Todd Gleason’s services are made available to WILL by University of Illinois Extension.
02:04 Audio Tour of the Morrow Plots Crop Rotation Experiment
Todd Gleason: The Morrow Plots at the University of Illinois stand as the world’s oldest continuous crop rotation experiment, tracking the boundaries of agricultural sustainability since 1876. Across three distinct test sections, as you’ll hear, the plots compare 150 years of continuous corn against two and three-year crop rotations to measure the exact long-term impacts of planting practices and fertility treatments on crop yields. Andrew Margenot is the director of the Morrow Plots. Yesterday, we celebrated their 150th anniversary. I was there to document that event and recorded the speeches. We’ll bring more of them to you over time. Now, Andrew took those gathered on a tour of the site as we closed out the day. The plots aren’t really very big. Remember, they’re located just to the south of the main quad at the University of Illinois. So Andrew was able to lead the tour from the mic stand as those seated looked on. That makes this particular tour ideal to listen to and visualize. So here’s yesterday’s tour of the Morrow Plots, this historic site detailing how a century and a half of management methods has directly influenced the depletion and retention of native prairie soil organic matter, and the influence of crop rotation and fertility treatments on crop yield. Here’s Andrew Margenot.
Andrew Margenot: If you don’t know, the Morrow Plots again are the world’s oldest continuous crop rotation study, as Dr. Davis said. Which means that they’re the only experiment of this age that looks at how do you change crops from year to year. And that’s what you see before you. It’s quite nice to look at the plots in this year because it brings out these differences. On the north third, you have continuous corn. This is corn every single year. In other words, there is no crop rotation. We hear about corn on corn as not a very common practice, it’s usually not good to do for a farmer more than 10 years, 150 years of corn on corn. That’s quite impressive. The second crop rotation is a two-year. And as I’ve mentioned, it began as corn, oat, and now it’s corn, soybean. And that switch was made in 1968, about two decades after soybeans had replaced oats because it was clear by then that soybeans were here to stay as a grain crop. And again, this happened because, as we mechanized after World War II, there was no need for horses, for livestock power to pull plows, etc., and so oats were a source of fodder. It was not for human consumption, mostly it was for horses. But the spirit of this rotation has remained the same. It’s a two-year crop rotation. And then finally on the southern third we have the three-way or the three-year. So one crop each year for three years before it goes back to the corn crop. And this three-way crop rotation is corn, oat, and alfalfa. And you might be wondering, well you just said Andrew that we don’t have horses, so why are we having oats again? This is, I think, the preservation of one of the original rotations, so for historical value this three-way rotation has been preserved. And this is currently following the harvest of alfalfa, we did two cuttings this summer, it will return to corn. So this means by the way that next year, which only happens once every six years, the one-way, the two-way, and the three-way will all synchronize in the corn phase. And you can really see the differences not just in fertility treatments, but also in how crop rotation impacts corn yields. On that note then, if we look towards the northern third where the corn is, you can see some pretty marked accentuated differences in the height of the corn crop. And that is a reflection of the eight subplots within that northern third. So each of these thirds are split north, south as one half, and then east to west into four sections for eight subplots. These have been assigned three treatments of fertility: unfertilized, fertilized with the fertilizer du jour (I’ll get back to that in just a second), and then manure. So the very tall corn that’s in the back, that is the treatment, excuse me, of the fertilizer of the day, du jour. In 1904, when that began with Dr. Hopkins, that was steamed bone meal, bone meal from the bison herds, would be railed back to the eastern states, steamed, and then that would be ground up and applied as a source of nitrogen and of phosphorus. That was then accompanied with limestone and with phosphate rock. Today we don’t use bison bones, there are no bison left, but also bones are a rare input, we use urea, potassium as potash, and triple super phosphate. So again, these are inputs that no one could even dream of, this is pre-Haber Bosch’s discovery of synthetic nitrogen in 1915, in 1876. The corn that’s a little bit harder to see, but it’s on the very northern edge by that hedge, that’s the unfertilized corn. And it’s shorter than the corn on the southern side that you can see, which is the manure. Now we’ve kept these rates of manure historically the same, and we know now with modern hybrids it’s not enough to keep up. So that’s why the manured corn is a little bit shorter, that will be changed for the next year, for the phase six of these plots, we’re in phase five currently. But you can just make out from the height of the corn alone the stark differences in how fertility can impact yields within the same rotation, or in this case the lack thereof.
Todd Gleason: So let me interrupt Andrew for just a moment to recap what you’ve just heard. The Morrow Plots are 150 years old. They were planted for the first time in 1876. The northern end of the plots have been continuously planted in corn each year ever since then. The center plot has been in a crop rotation that began as corn and then oats, and then in the 1960s was a two-year rotation, corn and soybeans. And the southern end of the plots have been in a three-year rotation the entire time. That’s corn, oats, and finally alfalfa. Every six years the entire plot is planted to corn and that’s when the magic happens.
Andrew Margenot: Next year, I encourage you to come and visit these plots because you will see marked differences that also reflect how crop rotation impacts yields. Going back to page seven of your pamphlet, the photo by Dr. Davis shows the effect of no fertilization on corn yields. So the corn cobs that are closest to you in that photo, as you go from plot three, which is the northern one, plot four is the middle one, plot five on that photo is the southern one, the front row of corn gets bigger. And that’s the effect of, without any inputs of anything, not even limestone, the mere effect of rotating crops, an ecological approach to crop production, that alone can more than triple corn yields. Of course, rotating and fertilizing gives us the highest yields, which is shown by this photo, but also by the data. So we’re talking about 20 bushel per acre corn, if it’s corn on corn, unfertilized, all the way to 320 bushel per acre corn in a three-way crop rotation with inputs of potash, urea, and phosphorus. So that’s one story of the Morrow Plots. Again, as I said earlier, it seems obvious to us that rotation and fertilizer can benefit yields, but again in 1876 that was not really understood. The Morrow Plots has done a good job if that answer seems obvious. Now Dr. Davis hinted at an exciting story that we have uncovered, which I think exemplifies the value of these studies. The Morrow Plots may not tell farmers how to go home and change how they farm today. It did through the 1950s. But there’s a lot of scientific value that has implications for the home farm through the next hundred years. And one example of this is using modern techniques and science for understanding things like organic matter. So organic matter is what makes soils tick. Soils are this beautiful amalgam of physical, chemical, and biological, and organic matter is the integrator of all three processes, of physics, chemistry, and biology. It’s what makes soils alive, it’s what also supports crop production, it’s why we enjoy the highest yields of corn and soybean in the world per acre right here in East Central Illinois.
Todd Gleason: I shouldn’t, but I’m going to interrupt here again because I think it’s really important to understand how short a period of time these soils in Illinois have been cropped. For instance, I know a man that knew a man that broke the prairie on his farm. Now here’s Andrew Margenot again.
Andrew Margenot: Now we know that under the native prairie that was here only about 180 years ago, not that long ago, that under prairie these soils had much higher amounts of organic matter. To give you some numbers, we think that prairies, there’s not many left so we think, that soils under prairie had roughly about 16 to 20% organic matter content in the top six inches. Now that falls off with depth, but that’s the extreme end of what prairies could have had. But it’s at least 10 to 15% organic matter. Those of you who work in ag or in soils know that that is a tremendously high value, that you will rarely if ever witness under crop production systems. And the Morrow Plots shows this quite well. We go from a low end of about 3% organic matter from the 15 of prairie to about 7 to 8% with the three-way crop rotation with inputs either as manure or as NPK. So we have this large 2x difference in organic matter from the quote unquote worst case to the quote unquote best case. But still we’ve lost over half of the organic matter from the days of the prairie. That’s not a bad thing, that’s simply a trade-off. I don’t think that we should mimic nature because nature did it a certain way, but there are lessons that we can borrow from nature to improve crop production. And I would say Hopkins in this book for example harps on the selective mimicking of nature for sustainable ag.
Todd Gleason: Again, just a quick note. Andrew Margenot is holding up a copy of Cyril Hopkins’ book published in 1913, a compilation of things that had been published in the newspapers at the time. Hopkins, of course, worked for crop sciences here on the University of Illinois campus and he really believed that fertility could be managed on cropping systems. The name of the book that Andrew is holding up is The Farm That Won’t Wear Out.
Andrew Margenot: So the story gets deeper. We’ve known that we’ve lost organic matter from conversion of prairie to ag, that’s not a secret, but what we can do today is that we can look at the kinds or the source of organic matter. This is using a thing called isotopes. So if you’ll brace with me for 30 seconds on some chemistry, isotopes would be an element like carbon, and organic matter is roughly half carbon by mass, so we can use carbon measurements as a proxy of organic matter, it works quite well, you’re roughly half carbon by mass as well. And any element like carbon, the atom itself has a slightly different mass called an isotopic value. And long story short, there’s a distinct kind of carbon of the prairie species that used to blanket these landscapes versus the kind of crops that we grow, specifically what we call C4 crops, like corn. So because prairies were mostly C3 crops, or species I’ll say, and corn is C4, we can distinguish today how much of the carbon present and thus of the organic matter was from the original prairies versus of the corn crop. And because that is corn on corn for 150 years, almost contemporary with the conversion of prairie, we had the unique opportunity, first time in the world to understand in modern cropland how much of the carbon left was from the pre-ag ecosystem. We also can date the carbon, you’ve all heard of 14-carbon dating for artifacts, well we’ve also completed that work. So here’s a question for the audience, any guesses on A, how old is the organic matter in these soils on average, and B, what percent of the organic matter is still from the native prairie? And how much is coming from the corn stalks and leaves and all of the residue? So for the first question, the average age is 2,200 years. So again that’s an average, there’s a distribution, but on average most of the carbon here is quite old. Which already gives you a clue to the next question’s answer, that the age and the percent are related, older carbon would imply it’s from the prairies, we find that 60% of the carbon today is still from the prairie. This is important for a few reasons. One is that, well no one has figured this out till now, but because of this experiment we can leverage these techniques. There’s an important implication for crop production. We know that roughly half of the nitrogen for corn and for soybean these days is coming from organic matter. It can mineralize, it can convert organic nitrogen to forms that crops use, and so this is a major subsidization of corn and soybean crops. But if half, or more than half of that organic matter which includes organic nitrogen is still from the prairie’s inheritance, what happens when that prairie organic matter runs out? We might see yields sag, for example, that’s worst case. So we’ve been enjoying these subsidies of fossil or relic or remnant prairie carbon, choose your term, but there’s an important insight here is that we’ve been able to enjoy the fruits of these soils because we’ve not quite realized that it’s a precious resource and maybe it’s time to rethink what we’re doing for organic matter for again, the farm that won’t wear out. So this is a nice example of how Hopkins could never have conceived of even isotopes, I think it was a theoretical notion, much less to conduct these measurements for a day’s worth of labor costs today. It’s cheap for us to figure out these answers. And it gives answers to questions like what he penciled in 1913 in this book, The Farm That Won’t Wear Out, which is how do you preserve organic matter? If we keep on losing organic matter slowly but steadily, and Bob Dunker collected the data that shows this to be the case, then there’s a bit of an alarm, not in a way to freak out, but we should be a little bit more mindful of how to design cropping systems holistically for the next 150 years. So that’s one example of the value of these studies, that sometimes there will be techniques and insights that we cannot conceive of that our future scientists will be able to tackle. So I can only imagine, not really, I can only imagine that I can’t imagine, the kinds of techniques that can be leveraged on these plots in the year 2100, 2176.
Todd Gleason: You’ve been listening to University of Illinois crop scientist Andrew Margenot giving a tour of the Morrow Plots to those gathered yesterday afternoon, just north of Mumford Hall and east of the undergraduate library, to celebrate their 150th anniversary. Now the Morrow Plots are the oldest crop rotation experiment on the planet. They were first sown in 1876, just nine years after the Illinois Land Grant was established. If you’re on campus, please do visit them. There’s a brand new gate for seeing, and the hedge that has hidden the plots for decades has now been replaced with a fence to protect them, but which also makes them easy to see.
18:44 Ag Weather with Mike Tannura, Tstorm Weather
Todd Gleason: Let’s turn our attention to the growing regions across the planet. Now the climate is impacting each of them at this point. Mike Tannura is here. He is the president and CEO of Tstorm Weather out of Naperville, Illinois. Hi, Mike, thanks for being with us. We have a lot of places that we need to visit today. Begin in the Corn Belt with harvest weather conditions in the upcoming timeframe.
Mike Tannura: Well, initially it’s just going to stay dry and mild, so things are looking pretty good over the next couple of days. Once we get into the weekend and especially next week, that’s where things will go downhill for a little bit. We’ll see some rain coming in this weekend, but it shouldn’t be too heavy, so not a real big deal. The bigger deal is what follows early next week. A major system is going to move through from Monday through Wednesday, and that’ll produce a lot of rain across a very wide area. So anywhere from one to two inches is on the way early next week, and that will slow things down for corn and soybean harvesting. Once we get beyond that though, there’s nothing behind it, so it does look quite a bit drier once we get into late next week and then lasting beyond then. So Todd, initially things are going to go downhill next week, but then they should rapidly improve just a few days after that.
Todd Gleason: Now turn your attention to the winter wheat crops. Let’s start with the hard red winter wheat in the United States.
Mike Tannura: Well, they’ve just had a lot of rain this autumn. This is one of the wetter autumns on record. Very little of that crop has been drier than normal over the last 30 days, and that’s going to continue. We have rain coming up this weekend, we have quite a bit of rain coming up early next week, and that crop is going to be about as moist as you can get heading into winter. So pretty much things are looking good there as far as we can tell, and temperatures will stay unusually mild, so both…
Todd Gleason: I’m sorry, but Mike drops out here for just a moment. He transitions at this point from the hard red winter wheat crop to the soft red winter wheat crop in Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and points east.
Mike Tannura: …that’s a little bit of a different story. It’s been very dry. You could actually argue that much of that crop is in a drought. About half of it was drier than normal over the last 90 days, and most areas haven’t seen much rain over the last couple of weeks and even the last couple of months. Now, they are going to get some nice rains with that system we already talked about. So things will change a little bit with a nice drink of water before winter approaches. But once we get through that, there’s not really anything behind it, so this is probably the last big event heading into winter.
Todd Gleason: So hard red and soft red in the United States taken care of, the Corn Belt as well, and what harvest looks like. Probably should turn our attention to South America, begin with Brazil.
Mike Tannura: Well, we’ve talked about this on the show many times in recent weeks, and the story is the same. They’ve had a lot of rain, and they’re going to continue to see a lot of rain. The main storm track is essentially lined up right across the country, and that’s going to keep making for thunderstorms in different areas at different times. We saw a lot of rain late last week and last weekend in the south, and that area has been drying out a little bit this week, but more rain is ahead next week, and some of those totals will be heavy, so it’s just more of the same for Brazil, Todd, wet, wet, and wet.
Todd Gleason: And in Argentina?
Mike Tannura: Well, they’ve been getting rains too. I mean, pretty much all of South America. The rains haven’t been quite as unusual, but the thing that has been unusual is that it has been very cool. October will go down as one of the coolest, if not the coolest, of the last 50 years for most of their crops in Argentina, and that’s just from this El Nino-driven weather pattern. Going forward, it won’t be as cool once we get into next month, but it doesn’t look all that mild either, and they’ll have a mix of rains here and there. So overall, nothing really too concerning there, but just an unusual weather pattern that’s been going on this fall.
Todd Gleason: Thank you very much, Mike.
Mike Tannura: Thank you, Todd.
Todd Gleason: That’s Mike Tannura. He’s with Tstorm Weather at tstorm.net online. He’s the president and CEO there in Naperville, Illinois. You’ve been listening, of course, to the Closing Market Report from Illinois Public Media on this Thursday afternoon. Don’t forget we’ll record our Commodity Week program at two o’clock this afternoon, posted by around six o’clock today to our website at willag.org, and you can check it out online in its entirety in your favorite podcast applications simply by searching out Commodity Week by name. You have a great afternoon. I’m Illinois Extension’s Todd Gleason.