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Digging Deeper:
Better Profitably with Soil Biology
2-day Workshop with
Nicole Masters
June 3-4, 2025
At Green Cover in Bladen, NE
What will you gain from covering your soil?
All over the nation, farmers like you are finding that cover crops—especially multi-species cover crops—can drive meaningful change on the farm.
And it all starts with the soil.
Cover crops build healthy soil
when you follow the Six Principles of Soil Health
Principle: Keep the Soil Covered
Cover crops protect the soil
Bare soil is vulnerable to erosion, water loss, and temperature extremes. By keeping it covered with growing plants and the residue they leave behind, you’ll protect the soil against erosion and insulate it from severe heat and cold.
Principle: Living Roots as Often As Possible
Cover crops help you maintain a living root in the soil
Life recruits life. Keeping living roots in the ground keeps your microbiology fed and flourishing.
Principle: Maximize Biodiversity
Cover crops enable you to maximize diversity
By adding multiple plant species, you get a diversity of roots, blooms, nutrients and you have a more resilient crop than any single species.
Principle: Minimize Soil Disturbance
Cover crops can help reduce soil disturbance
When incorporated into a no-till system, cover crops build soil structure and suppress weeds, reducing the need for tillage and chemicals.
Principle: Integrate Livestock
Cover crops provide forage for livestock integration
Integrating livestock naturally fertilizes the ground and feeds beneficial microbes. Using cover crops as forage gets livestock into row crop fields, mimicking the soil building buffalo herds of the Great Plains.
Principle: Know Your Context
In order to truly regenerate your soil, you have to know your context
At Green Cover, we’ll help you choose a cover crop solution that matches your context and your goals.
Build resiliency on your farm
with cover crops.
Decrease your input costs
Decrease your input costs
No matter where the markets go, buying inputs never seems to get cheaper. But you don’t have to be locked into this never-ending cycle of cost increases. Cover crops offer another way forward. By increasing nutrient cycling, cover crops enable your cash crops to get the nutrients they need without being dependent on synthetic fertilizers. Of course this doesn’t happen over night, but we’ve seen farmer after farmer reduce their fertilizer use as their soil health increases. And the difference to your pocketbook is real.
Additional resources
- What Can I Plant to Make Nitrogen for Next Year's Corn?
- Nitrogen: the Double-Edged Sword by Christine Jones, Ph. D
- Prioritizing Profit by Kevin Fulton
- Nitrogen by Nature by Larry Reichenberger
- Video: Reduce Your Inputs with Dale Strickler
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Grow high quality forage
Grow high quality forage
The opportunities for using cover crops as forage are endless—you could add a forage planting to your crop rotation, add plant diversity to your pasture, or even graze your livestock on green foliage in the winter.
Additional resources
- Making Cattle Profitable – Year Round Grazing by Dale Strickler
- Soil Health Principles – Livestock Integration by Alex Heier
- Overseeding Fescue With Warm Season Annuals by Davis Behle
- Cattle As The Cash Crop
- Video: What to Put in Your Spring Forage Mix
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Improve your soil moisture retention
Improve your soil moisture retention
Every living plant needs water to grow—including cover crops. In the last few years, many people in the US have experienced both extreme lack and extreme excess of water. You can address both of these problems through consistent use of cover crops. When you can hold more water in your soil, you’ll be able to make it longer in a drought, and catch more water in an extreme rainfall event.
Additional resources
- Video: Cover Crops and Moisture Usage with Keith Berns
- Webinar: Building Drought Resiliency with Dale Strickler
- Everyone Complains About The Weather
- Regenerative Rainmaking by Alejandro Carillo and Allen Williams, PhD
- Soil Health Principles – Keep The Soil Covered by Paul Ackley
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Suppress Weeds
Suppress Weeds
What can be done about herbicide-resistant weeds? The solution won’t come from a brand new chemical herbicide. But with the combination of thoughtful crop rotation and cover crops, you can get ahead of weeds before they even have a chance.
Additional resources
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Protect against erosion
Protect against erosion
Nothing protects your field from runoff and erosion like having living plants in the ground as often as possible. Even if you don’t get a lot of growth from your cover crop before winter, the soil will benefit from its soil armor.
Additional resources
- Soil Health Principles- Keep the Soil Covered by Paul Ackey
- Soil Health Principles- Living Roots As Often As Possible by Yadi Wang
- Why Plant Rye in a Drought?
- The Importance of Living Roots
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Reduce pests
Reduce pests
Can we also reduce the need for pesticide use by building healthy soil? With a careful approach to management, the answer is yes. When you build healthy soil with cover crops, your plants will be healthier, and more naturally resistant to pests and diseases. Diversity in your cover crop mix will also break pest cycles and attract beneficial insects who can help keep pests in check.
Additional resources
- Diversity and Pest Management by Jonathan Lundgren
- Build Resistance Against Armyworms
- Get Off The Armyworm Treadmill
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Boost Your Profitability
Boost Your Profitability
At the end of the day, farming is a business, and cover crops cost money—is the investment really worth it? Soil health does pay off in the end, but we don’t want to sugar coat it—cover crops aren’t an instant fix for the pocketbook. However, cover crops really do offer opportunities for increased profit. By diversifying your crop rotation and integrating livestock, you can break free from the cycle of rising input costs and falling commodity prices. Regenerative farming with cover crops puts you back in control of your profits.
Additional resources
- Video: Soil Health Makes Sense, but Does it Make $$$?
- Prioritizing Profit by Kevin Fulton
- Cultivating Profits Through Tough Times
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Ready to start seeing the benefits of cover crops on your farm?
Get your seed from the cover crop experts
At Green Cover, we know cover crops.
Reach out to us and one of our expert salespeople will craft a custom mix that meets your goals, and fits your budget.
Or call us at (402) 469-6784
You know your operation better than anyone else.
That’s why we built the SmartMix Calculator—to put the power to build the perfect cover crop mix in your hands.
Simply tell SmartMix about your goals and your field, and add species until you have the mix you want.
Start Mixing
We’re farmers too, witnessing the benefits of regenerative farming
Green Cover sprouted in 2008, when brothers Keith and Brian Berns experimented with cover crops on their family farm. They observed and experienced how diverse cover crop mixes leverage the biological processes that God designed into creation and Green Cover was launched to make cover crop seed available to other farmers.
Today, Green Cover is still family owned and operated. We grow, clean, mix, and deliver cover crop seed directly to agricultural producers across the United States and Canada.
Our purpose is to help people regenerate, steward, and share God’s creation for future generations.
