Cows on Cover Crops: South Dakota Farmer Adds $86/acre and 70 Bu Corn

On our spring tour of South Dakota farmers integrating livestock, my partner in crime, Joe Dickie, and I left Huron, and a couple of hours later crested the rise where Ryan Urban lives. Ryan identifies himself as a fourth-generation Pukwana crop-and-cattle producer—he jokes that they’re “cattle people who farm on the side.” With a name like Urban, I half expected him to grab a guitar and sing us a country tune. Instead, he grabbed the keys to his pickup, and we rode out into the fields under a seventy-degree sky, Joe filming, Ryan talking, and me listening.

Around us lay pastures of switchgrass and big bluestem, calving grounds that double as pheasant cover in the fall. A little further on, cereal rye stood ready to graze, stretching the feed window before the native range comes on. This rhythm—calves born in the grass, cows turned into rye, full-season cover crops in summer, aftermath and stalks in winter—spoke to a simple but powerful principle: every acre of farm ground, every year, sees a cow.

Ryan’s words hung in the air: “Every acre sees a cow.” It wasn’t just a slogan—it was an operating system. Grain fields, cover crops, corn stalks, even neighbors’ land without cattle—he brings livestock across them all. In his math, the returns are hard to ignore: grazing corn stalks netted him $86 an acre last winter. Add in the fact that his corn yields are up seventy bushels an acre while using a third less fertilizer, and you start to understand why he says the cows are working for him, not the other way around.

On one site that was once a gravel pit, he sifted a shovelful of soil through his fingers, the story deepened. This was no gravel lot anymore—though it once was, back when the interstate was built. Years of no-till, cover crops, and cattle have coaxed back life. Organic matter on some fields tops eight percent, water infiltration has improved, and runoff is nearly gone. “I struggle to keep water in the dugouts now,” he laughed. “It all soaks in.”

Critics often say livestock compact the soil. Ryan doesn’t dismiss it—he manages it. He moves cattle off when the frost comes out, uses sacrifice pastures, and times grazing to conditions. It’s not problem-free, but neither is it the obstacle some imagine. What he’s built instead is flexibility: cereal rye in spring, full-season covers in fall, grazing nearly eleven months a year. He measures success not in bags of feed bought, but in days he can graze a cow without opening the checkbook.

Ryan’s story has a kinship with others we’ve heard on this tour. Like Cody Merrigan east of Vermillion, who bends his system to fit family life. Like Nate Hicks near Yankton, who treats cows as land managers as much as livestock. Each has carved out a system tuned to their place, their rainfall, their soils. Ryan’s version is rooted in Brule County, where water is scarce, winds are relentless, and resilience is currency.

As we wrapped up, the sun slanted across fields where rye, cows, and calves stitched together the fabric of his farm. Ryan said it simply: “I can tell how profitable I’ll be with a cow by how long I can graze her, instead of feeding her.”

That, in the end, may be the truest definition of livestock integration—not an add-on, but the living hinge of the whole operation.

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