Building Local Agriculture During Economic Disruption

0:00 All right, I'm going to mute the mighty Steve Tucker and we'll probably get started here. A couple people will be tuning in but just want to thank you all for tuning in here for our kickoff, the first of our webinar series, and we're going to do our best to keep on schedule and keep things running smoothly. But this is our first go at it and I'm sure there might be a few hiccups on the way, so just bear with us through all of that.

0:26 Going to go over some of the basic instructions here for how this Zoom webinar is going to work and how we'll conduct mostly here the questions. I have some preset questions for the panelists, so I'm going to start by keeping everybody on mute just so that we can get through some of those. But if you have a question for the panelists in regard to what they're currently talking about, feel free to go ahead and put that in the chat button or the Q&A, and I will monitor all of those and ask those to the panelists, and then they're going to answer some of those questions until about 6:10, 6:15, and then we'll open it up to the audience.

1:06 So if you guys have questions that you want to ask over the phone, go ahead and hit the raise your hand button on the bottom, and that will allow me to then unmute you so that you can ask your question, and the panelists can then answer that.

1:25 We're going to start with introductions here. Obviously, many of you know Keith Andale, but just want to give you maybe a fun fact about Keith that you don't know: that he was honored by the White House in 2016 as a champion of change for sustainable and climate-smart agriculture. He did develop the Smart Mix calculator, which is one of the most widely used cover crop selection tools on the internet. He has his master's degree in agricultural education from the University of Nebraska and teaches on cover crops and soil health more than 30 times per year to various groups and audiences. Keith was also recently appointed to the chairman of the Nebraska Healthy Soils Task Force by Governor Pete Ricketts. Keith, maybe you can touch on that in a little bit.

2:15 And Dale, I don't have a bio on you, but why don't you share a little bit about how you almost got stuck in Africa?

2:26 Well, I was in Africa a couple weeks ago and I got a notification that my flight had been cancelled and they were closing the country. So I scrambled and my host took me to their travel agent who was able to get me a standby plane leaving. And I stood in line for three hours and came along, started counting people and cut the line off one person behind me, so I got the next to last seat out. So feel fortunate to be here, although I thoroughly enjoyed Africa.

3:14 Very good. Well, I will start off with the first question. Obviously, one of the main reasons we're doing this webinar is because of the coronavirus, and so I just wanted to ask you guys: what are some opportunities that you're seeing within regenerative agriculture amidst this pandemic?

3:35 Yeah, I'll start that one, Noah. You know, from the people that I've talked to, I don't think that a lot of farmers are being directly affected as far as the actual health aspect. I mean, farmers are the ultimate in socially isolated anyway or socially distancing, so I don't get the sense from a lot of people that that actual part of it is affecting very many people. But what is affecting us all, of course, is just the whole crash and collapse of the economy—you know, everything from fuel prices hitting in the tank, which means ethanol is not worth near as much, and I don't know about in anybody else's area, but here in our area they're starting to shut down some ethanol plants. And so the price of corn is in the tank. In fact, somebody just heard somebody say that the local price at the co-op today for corn was $2.99. It's been a long time since we saw corn with a two in front of it. Unfortunately, it's not going to be the last time for a while, probably. So certainly the grain farmers are going to be affected with commodity prices. You know, cattle, of course, are in the tank as well, up and down with just a tremendous amount of volatility there. So I think what's affecting us as a farm community much more than anything else is just simply the downturn in the economy and just a tremendous amount of uncertainty.

5:00 Goes along with that so some of the opportunities that we've been talking about here on our own farm as well as with a number of customers and clients, and Dale I'm sure you've had this conversation with some as well, but we're encouraging people to take this opportunity since it's really hard to pencil out much of a profit growing corn, beans or wheat, the traditional cash crops. We're encouraging people to take a look at maybe taking that piece of ground that's always the trouble piece, the one that's the least productive, the one that takes the most inputs, is rarely profitable. Take that out of cash crop production, put it to a cover crop and turn some cows in it, kind of like the picture I have in my background here. Put some cattle out there and try to capture some income on grazing, even if you don't own the cattle yourself. There's plenty of people around that have cattle that will pay you to graze. Just use this as an opportunity to heal that soil up and start rebuilding the soil, and do it in a year where you don't have a lot to lose because commodity prices are pretty depressed right now anyway.

6:08 Dale, have you talked to any of your customers that you visited with since you've been back about doing something like that?

6:15 Absolutely. It's actually a very common theme of conversation now. People are putting in current prices, of course no guarantee that current prices are what prices are going to be at harvest, but this is usually a time when we have fairly high corn prices because everybody's trying to buy the acre, and right now nobody's trying to buy the acre. It seems like nobody wants the acre.

6:48 I think one of the keys to surviving things like this economically, I'm talking the economic conditions, not the coronavirus of course, but the key to surviving these types of low price cycles and scares and economic downturns is to be a low-cost producer. And it's easier to be a low-cost producer when you have really good soil. You can either spend a lot of money with a really high mortgage to buy good soil or you can just make the soil you have better. Soil that's more fertile, you can use this opportunity to plant some leguminous crops and build some nitrogen, use grazing to cycle phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, all those other elements, and really build up some fertility.

7:48 When I was an intern, I saw some Haney test taken before and after summer-grazed cover crop blend, multi-species cover crop. It was just unreal how much the Haney test went up after just one season of grazing mixed cover crops. I mean, nitrogen going from 10 to 200, and I mean it was about a tenfold jump in both nitrogen and phosphorus.

8:22 And that's very similar, I think, to what Jay Fuhr and the boys up in North Dakota saw on the Monokin Farm. When their district bought that farm, they said it was one of the worst farm pieces of ground in the whole county. It was just completely wore out, and they literally transformed that thing in one year by planting two different sets of multi-species cover crops and then properly managing and grazing. They turned that thing around from one of the worst farms in the county to where now people come from all across the world to see that thing because it's one of the best farms around. They're demonstrating how those concepts you talked about, Dale, the principles of soil health, they're showing that they're being applied, and they're no longer only grazing. They're raising very good cash crops now in addition to the grazing. So it works hand in hand.

9:14 One thing that you said earlier kind of triggered something. You said something about you can either spend a lot of money and go out and buy good soil or you can grow it yourself. I just got done reading Steve Groff. Steve Groff is coming out with a new book this summer called The Future Proof Farm, and he sent me an advanced copy to look at and do a little bit of a review on it. One of the things that he had in there that I really liked, he said soil health is not something that you buy, it's something that you do. And I really like that because you can't just go out and buy soil health. It's something that you.

9:52 Have to do. You have to be dedicated to the practices. You have to be dedicated to the system, and once you do it, then it's worth a lot of money because, like Dale said, it helps you be that low-cost producer.

10:07 Yeah, and those are really good points. One of the things that sets us apart is our ability, Keith—you said—to network with people all over the country. What are you guys hearing from customers or even people in how they are taking advantage of, which I hate to say in such a horrible cause with the coronavirus, but there's a lot of opportunity out there. How are you guys seeing producers react to this? And is there a benefit to—obviously at the grocery stores they seem to be sold out of food, and I've talked to a lot of my customers that say they can't keep up for production. What are you guys hearing in regards to producers and how they're being affected by this market?

10:51 Yeah, that's a good point, and you know, maybe Craig Fiser is on, maybe he can comment when we open it up a little bit. He sells, you know, direct to the consumer—his bison meat and different products. It has to be just a tremendous, tremendously huge marketing opportunity for folks that are already growing something that people can consume directly. So many of us as farmers, we're so far removed from the food system that we're no longer growing food. We're just growing commodities, and for those people, there's really not a lot of opportunities. You know, it's all bad opportunities because, again, corn now has a two in front of it instead of a three here in our local area. But for those people that are growing a product that people can consume or it can go into, you know, more directly into that food chain system, it's a huge marketing opportunity, and hopefully it will not just be a short-term opportunity. But hopefully, as we go through this as a nation, as a people, you know, that it will give a renewed emphasis on soil health and eating healthy and just healthier lifestyles. And hopefully, people will make better choices, you know, not only to grow their own food, but when they go out and purchase food, you know, that they're really looking at the source of where that food was produced and how it was produced, and how will that benefit, you know, my body and my family. And so, hopefully, you know, this is not a short-term thing, but it's a wake-up call for all of us to live better lifestyles and make better choices.

12:30 Dale, what are you hearing? I was kind of been thralled by listening to that.

12:39 Actually, that's almost exactly what I'm hearing. I think, you know, as farmers, we often hear people—we—people take food for granted, and I think up until about two weeks ago, that was true. Now, when people are on Facebook and the internet, other forms of social media, complaining about how there's no food in the grocery stores, now the importance of food is starting to hit home with. Yeah, and also the fact that, you know, we had this disease that originated in China, and people are starting to discover just how much of our—even though we produce and export a lot of commodities—is imported from foreign countries and or processed in foreign countries. And I think a lot of people are rightfully very nervous about where their food is coming from, and I think, like you said, there's getting to be more awareness. And now is a time to possibly capitalize on some of that awareness.

14:01 If I had five-gallon buckets and selling survival containers of wheat and encouraging people to get, you know, their own home meals—be a little bit more self-reliant. And I'm sure you can get better than market price for wheat sold in five-gallon buckets to people for home use.

14:25 Yeah, and there's probably a large number of people that just last year finished up all the rice they had squirrel away after Y2K, so now they have to restock their supplies on that. So, yeah, Jack. I'm Jack. I'm curious—you're down in Jackson, Mississippi. What are you seeing in the grocery stores down there? Is it different there in the urban area? And then, you know, what are you hearing from customers that you've been talking to?

14:56 Can he hear me now?

15:01 Yep, he should be. Oh, did you ask that to me? Yeah, I.

15:05 I heard the question but didn't hear my name. I'm not sure how my connection is—it says it's a little unstable, but hopefully it works okay. Yeah, down here south in Jackson, Mississippi. In the grocery stores there's rows of paper towels and tissues and stuff like that that are out. For the most part there's been food in the grocery stores at least lately, so haven't seen too much outages. But that's what I've seen when we've braved it to Kroger a couple of times.

15:42 And that kind of leads into my next thing—this isn't a question but more of a plug. Keith, do you want to talk a little bit about the Milpa concept and the fact that we're trying to build communities and actually grow some produce and not just a commodity? Do you want to touch on that a little bit?

16:01 Yeah, yeah, I will. So many of you probably saw the email that I sent out. You're familiar with our Milpa Garden concept. If you're not, Milpa is a Mesoamerican term that the Native Americans would have used and some of them continue to use it. But it describes a system of growing food where you grow all these different things together—it's beyond just the Three Sisters of corn, beans, and squash. You're growing many more things all together. And we used to call it a chaos garden, but when I came across this term in the book 1491, they talked about the Milpa Garden. I said yeah, that's exactly what we're trying to do.

16:44 So what we're doing with this concept of trying to grow all these things together, it's also been termed the Lazy Man's Garden because you can put all these different things in and just go out and drill it in a larger area and not have to actually plant a garden. So we've got our Milpa mix this year consisting of about 55 different products. It's got everything in there from basic clovers to help build nitrogen to a number of different beans—so there's probably five or six different kinds of beans, a few peas in there. And then there's squash and melons and pumpkins and cucumbers—all sorts of different vine crops. There's beets, radishes, turnips, collards, kale, okra, and then a few things just kind of for ornamental—some sunflowers and some buckwheat that you're not necessarily going to eat, but they're there to help with pollinators and they're there to help with the aesthetics.

17:42 So again the theory is that we have all this mixed together. We put it all together and then people just go out, plant half an acre, plant an acre, and then you just let that grow. And then you go out and you glean, and that's one of the fun parts—just walking through that thing because it's a little bit like a miniature jungle out there. So you walk through and you never know if you're going to come across a squash or a cucumber or a pumpkin, or you can pick some okra and bring it back, or cut some greens. So you're essentially just going out there and harvesting whatever you can find.

18:16 So one of the things that we did, started several years ago and it's really continued to grow in popularity, is that we put this program out where we will donate up to one acre worth of this Milpa garden seed to anyone who is willing to establish some good solid relationships with a local food bank or a community group of some sort—homeless shelters, different things like that—where they can get this produce to the needy people that can really take advantage of it, really benefit from it, and really turn it into a community project of having others help come in and do the gleaning. Because not going to lie to you, it's a lot of work to go out there and pick all that stuff and get it to the people that need it. So that's where you can bring in church groups and 4-H clubs and FFA chapters and different things like that, and they can help do the gleaning and the harvesting and then get it to the folks that need it.

19:10 So we sent out that email that I sent out to about 14,000 people advertising that. Now I was smart enough to say don't contact me if you want this seed—email Noah if you want this seed. And Noah, you might just talk a little bit about the kind of response that we got from that.

19:36 Was perfect timing with the fact that a lot of people when they have emailed me in requesting this seed they've said man I've just been thinking about doing something like this because I've got a portion of ground that I never really thought about doing anything with. I was maybe going to garden with it but I call it the Lazy Man's Garden because that's exactly, I'm just a lazy gardener and it works so well to just plant that and not have to maintain it as far as like weeds.

20:04 And so the response that we've got has been really overwhelming from people who first of all just the fact that people are willing to put in the work and people have thanked us, you know, thanks for donating the seed, but I thank them right back saying well you're the one that actually has to put this in the ground, you're the one that has to harvest this and take it to your food bank. So really it's been cool to see people's willingness to help out their community and to switch to producing food.

20:29 I think that's been the coolest change in mindset that I've seen over the last couple weeks. And just to give you an indication of how fast this is growing in popularity, when we first started doing this three years ago we probably made enough milpa seed for, I don't know, 20 acres or something that we were just kind of fumbling around starting on it. This year we'll probably mix up close to 15 to 16,000 pounds of this milpa garden seed.

21:01 And so you know that'll go out at, you know, 40, 50 pounds an acre, that's going to cover a lot of acres and hopefully produce a lot of produce. You know it's a little bit, you know, especially in these difficult times that we find ourselves in, especially if you can share it with your community, it's a little bit like the Victory Gardens that people planted in World War II to help support the war efforts.

21:22 And maybe later on when we turn the audio back on Steve Tucker is old enough he can probably tell us what it was like living through World War II and telling us about those Victory Gardens. But it's a way that you can give back to your community, it's a way that you can support your neighbors as well as your own family.

21:45 And so it's, we're excited about it and we're happy to be able to do that. I wish I'd ordered more vegetable seeds this winter when I was ordering, now because I'm afraid we're going to run out again. But that's good, it's good to see the demand and that people are wanting to do things like that to help out their communities.

22:02 Yeah and we have enough seed at this point to cover just about 300 acres worth, so that's pretty cool. I'm going to switch topics here just a little bit. Jalen, did you want to say something or?

22:13 Yeah I had one other comment, just an additional benefit possibly to the milpa beyond what's already been said. I was talking to a gentleman yesterday who was hoping to get some more in, you know, the milpa mix for like three different areas to hopefully get some other people out, you know, especially in this time but any time. But you know, when people are in their houses a lot, what a perfect way to get out and maybe still not be around a bunch of other people but be in their gardens and planting.

22:43 So on the front end it can be a community project as well as the back end of harvesting and consuming the stuff. So just another added benefit to kind of have a healthy activity during this time.

22:57 Yeah, that's a good point, that's really good. I'm going to switch a little bit from the coronavirus, obviously we could talk about that for a long time, but there was a lot of people that requested talking about spring planting cover crops. So obviously March is basically over and so it doesn't feel like spring, especially not around here, although it's starting to warm up. But is it too late to plant a cool season cover crop and how would you design that for grazing?

23:24 Obviously that's going to depend a lot on location, but what's your thoughts on when is it too late to plant a cool season crop? Dale, you want take first stab at that?

23:36 Okay, yeah, it's not too late. Obviously we prefer, at least at this latitude, to get those oats, spring peas, spring barley, spring triticale, all of those we prefer, you know, the stuff that was planted a month ago is, you know, barely peeking out of the ground, so you're not that far behind if you plant now.

24:09 At this latitude, you know the Kansas Nebraska line, I70 to I80 where we're located, mostly I'd say another two weeks. Once you get in two weeks from now I would start seriously looking at BMR corn, forage soybeans, popcorn as some possibilities, sunflower, safflower, those would be some more productive uses of the sunlight and moisture that we'll be receiving. Once the soil temperature gets above 50, I think it's time to start switching to some warm seasoned species. I think a lot of people really ignore the potential of BMR corn planted around April 15th. It's a tremendous product, extremely high quality, and so I'd be looking at those.

25:07 I would add on to that, you know if you want to maximize your grazing on a field, say you have a 60 acre field I would take 20 acres of that and try to get out there soon as I could and plant a oats and barley peas type mix. Then in two weeks from now I would plant another third of it to a mix very much like what Dale was talking about with the BMR corn and soybeans and sunflowers. You could add collards and turnips to both of those. Then I would take the final third of that and I would wait probably a month to five weeks depending on soil temperatures but then plant that to your sorghum and millet and cowpea type mix. Then you've got three different grazing mixes out there, three different timings, and it makes it much easier to rotate through that than if you just plant it all to oats and peas right now, because you're probably not going to have enough cattle to take advantage of that when you need to, and then you're going to run out and you're going to be looking for stuff.

26:09 It's more work, it's more management to stagger those plantings out like that, but in the long run it's really going to pay dividends. Because what you do then is after you graze that oats and peas, you know you'll probably be done grazing that sometime in mid to late June, and then you come right back and you plant warm season in that again. So that particular piece of the field now it's gotten two plantings. Just think about the tremendous amount of diversity that that's going to get, tremendous amount of animal impact, and all the benefits that come with that. So when you get to this time of the year, don't just be thinking it's all or nothing with the cool season things. Be thinking more about well I'm not maybe going to do as much as I would have if middle of March would have been warm, but I'm still going to do some, and then I'm going to switch other pieces of my field over to other strategies.

27:04 If you didn't get a fall cover crop planted last fall, can you still plant a cover crop now and follow it with corn or beans? That's another question we get a lot. The answer to that is probably, well I remember somebody asked, I think it was Dr. Christine Nichols, and she was helping us with one of our field days that we were doing, and somebody asked her how long does a cover crop have to grow before you really get your money's worth out of it or the benefits out of it? Because they were thinking if it only grows for six weeks is it worth doing? I always remember her answer because I thought it was really good. She said cover crops will start to benefit the soil probably in as little as two to three weeks because they're going to start having roots put down, they're going to start pumping carbon into the soil. But she said in order for you to really get your money back out of the cover crop, she says it probably takes at least a month.

28:02 When you look at a cover crop that's only grown for a month, it doesn't always look that impressive and you may go I only got five inches tall, I don't really know if it was worth it. But from what she was saying, and again she's a microbiologist so she studies what goes on under the ground more so than what's going on above the ground, and according to her, she felt like you could get 20 to $25 worth of benefits to the soil from a cover crop that had four to five weeks to grow. So if you can stretch that out and get six, seven weeks, it probably definitely is worth it.

28:36 First guy in your neighborhood and to plant corn and you want to be planting corn, you know April 20th, don't do it. It's not going to be worth it. It's just going to be a waste of money. And again you wouldn't do it on all your fields, but you maybe have a field where you're going to plant some short season corn or something and you can plant it a little later. Then you still have some opportunities to do something like that.

28:58 Yeah, that's really good. So you guys both kind of touched on this as far as the gap between cool season and warm season. But when do you guys start looking at switching to warm season and what are you guys looking for when designing a warm season mix for grazing specifically? And Keith, I'll let you start that one.

29:20 Okay, my rule of thumb is for cool season things I want to see a soil temperature minimum of low to mid-40s. For what I would call the transitional crops—corn, soybeans, sunflowers—things like that, I want to see low to mid-50s. And for the true warm season thing—sorghum, millets, cowpeas, things like that—I want to see low to mid-60s. And so that, you know, that kind of holds true regardless of where you are from north to south because that's going to vary greatly because down in Oklahoma they're starting to gear up to start planting sorghum and millets and all that because, you know, I think Brett said they were in the mid-90s the other day. So just depends on where you're at, but that's my rule of thumb: low to mid-40s for your cool season, low to mid-50s for your transitions, and low to mid-60s for your warm season crops. And then, you know, you may hit that in April, you may hit that in May, but do it based on soil temperature and not based on the calendar.

30:25 I agree. I had a conversation today with some guy who said, 'Well, I hear you can graze sorghum 40 days after you plant, so I'm going to plant in mid-April so that I can be grazing by the first of June.' And it doesn't quite work that way. You tell them to move. Yeah. Unfortunately this was Kansas, but if you plant sorghum, especially in soil that's too cool, you will severely stunt the growth of that plant. It will never fully develop and you really don't gain anything. People say, 'Well, can I plant oats and sorghum together and soon as the oats are headed off, the sorghum will come on?' Now it really doesn't work. I wish it did. It would make things very convenient, but it just doesn't work that way. You really do need warm soil before you plant those warm season crops. There's very, very few crops that you can plant warm season crops that you can plant in the cool season that will go ahead and come up without some sort of penalty. Japanese Millet maybe one. Crabgrass is another. Lespedeza works very well that way. And then you got some crops like buckwheat. Buckwheat will come up in cold soils, but it will tolerate no frost. So you could plant buckwheat now and it would probably come up when the sun is shining, but most likely it's not going to survive because the frost is going to nip it off. But like sunflowers, you know, you could plant sunflowers along with your oats and most likely they would live and survive. They're not quite as cold-hardy as a safflower, but they're pretty decent. And so I wouldn't be afraid to throw some sunflowers in with oats too. So there's some crops that are much more versatile than others, but like I say, those temperature ranges are going to give you a pretty good idea of when you could be looking at the different types of crops.

32:36 Here's a question we got earlier from Mike McDonald. He said, 'What data and metrics do you gather or suggest to establish a dollar figure to determine how your cover crops directly or indirectly equate to improved soil capacity?' Well, I said earlier that definitely sounds like Mike's question—very, very thoughtful, very deep. Dale, I'll take a shot at this and then you can clean up my mess on this here. But you know, there's tons of different things you can test and you can spend a whole bunch of money on testing and you may or may not know exactly what you have. I do like the Haney test. I would recommend that. But you have to know what you're looking at with a Haney test and you have to understand that it's a little bit more of a benchmark and it's very helpful if...

38:08 Kinds of things I think people get really hung up on practices like well I planted a cover crop and it cost me 20 bushel in my next crop so I'm never doing that again. Well why did it cost you 20 bushel? What went on? Cover crops neither increase nor decrease yield of following crops. It's only factors that affect yield. You know, if I grow rye in front of corn, I can soak up all the available nitrogen, my corn won't have much. Now if you don't, you can see a yield decrease. That same tendency of rye to suck up a lot of nitrogen could be very beneficial in front of because it could reduce your weed competition, but you need to be able to understand that.

39:12 I think it's the folly of human nature and farmers in particular, we see practice and then we see yield up or down and we don't take the time to understand why we had a yield increase or a yield decrease. If you understand the why things happen, then you can predict and be able to manage around things that may reduce your yield and take advantage of the things that increase your yield and take odds. You know, if you're a football coach and you called a play and it got stopped in a scrimmage, you say well, I'll never call that play again. Wouldn't it be helpful to know that okay, you have an offensive tackle that's tipping off the play or you had the other team was in this defensive formation? I mean, unless you understand why things are happening, you will never ever be able to make improvements.

40:20 When you shift to biological systems, you've got a lot more moving parts. People say when you shift to regenerative forms of agriculture, it becomes much less hands-on management and much more eyes-on management and mind-on management. It becomes much more of a mental game rather than writing big checks and throwing more jugs at the field.

40:59 That was a very good answer, Dale. You left me speechless for a second there. I was going to say either everybody's saying we need to get Dale off of here or I left everybody speechless. I was just sitting here thinking I'm getting a football lecture from a K-State Wildcat. I'm not sure what to think about that.

41:19 Well, I think at this point I still have a couple questions, but I am going to open it up to any of the participants if you guys want to either type your questions below or you can raise your hand and I will unmute you. You can ask those questions. In the meantime here, I've got one from Mike Imhoff on Facebook who said I'd like to hear a little about field border mixes for wildlife and pollinators. Somebody want to take a stab at that one?

41:49 Yeah, we've got some good options for that. You know, we've got a couple different types of pollinator mixes. There's a couple different ways you can go on pollinators. You can spend a lot of money and put in perennial pollinators to where that border or that field is going to be just pollinators, you know, for the next 20 years or whatever, and you could do that and there's places where that's the right thing to do. It's very expensive to do that and they're fairly slow to establish, so a lot of times people don't want to do it that way. So what we do is we have a couple different mixes of just annual plants. We have one that's primarily warm season and one that's primarily cool season, depending again on what your soil temperatures are and when you want to plant. Those are relatively inexpensive to plant. When I say relatively inexpensive, you know, you're probably talking between 30 and 40 dollars an acre, but I've seen the price tag on a perennial pollinator mix can be 200 to 300 dollars an acre if you're going to do that to NRCS specs for some of their programs. Can be very, very expensive.

42:53 So what I would recommend if you're wanting to attract the pollinators is just look at one of those annual pollinator mixes and, you know, get it out there and you know you may come back to that same piece of strip piece of ground for pollinators the next year and that's okay because you can probably cut your seeding rate down because a lot of those plants would have seeded out and that's okay. You'll have some free seed for next year. If you don't, just know that that strip you'll have to kind of manage some of.

43:18 That volunteer, and again it's on a fairly small area, so it's not a huge deal. But just get a lot of things out there that are flowering and get a lot of diversity because it's not just flowering plants that can be beneficial for pollinators. There's other types of things that can provide nectar that doesn't come just through a flower or a bud. And then there's additional things of course that will benefit life or wildlife as well.

43:45 But fairly narrow strips, I don't like to see those strips more than probably 10 feet wide. I think that's sufficient. I'd rather see multiple strips that are 10 feet wide kind of throughout the field than to see one strip that's 30 or 40 or 50 feet wide in one place. So spread it out as much as you can.

44:05 I think a good place to put perennial type pollinator mixes is around your pivot tracks, you know, create a perennial type sod that your pivot tires can run on if you're in an irrigated region, field access roads, those sorts of places that really are not productive for some reason or another or a natural place.

44:35 One other wildlife consideration that I have been asked a few times this winter is how do I, you know, people either want to attract wildlife or they want to decrease wildlife damage, particularly deer. And the suggestions that I give people if they have deer problems on their corn is you can plant something that deer like better than corn, and the only thing deer like better than corn is BMR corn. And brown mid-rib corn is absolute candy to deer, whether you want to attract deer to a certain location or keep them out of the rest of your cornfield, you can drill or plant a strip of thickly planted BMR corn along the edge of your field corn, and the damage will be limited largely to that strip.

45:39 You can somewhat do the same with sun hemp and cow pea, or sun hemp and soybeans. If soybeans are your crop of course, they're very attractive to deer. I've heard of people planting a strip of sun hemp, which deer seem to prefer over soybeans. And they completely eliminated their soybean damage from deer.

46:07 If you really want to create a barrier, I've heard of people planting a strip of safflower between trees, you know, wooded areas where deer like to spend the day, and planting a strip of safflowers in between the trees and the soybeans to keep the deer out of the soybeans. And you can combine that with the sun hemp as well—have the sun hemp next to the trees, safflower, and then soybeans. And you don't have to give up a lot of land to do that. It doesn't take a very big strip in order to keep those deer out of that field.

46:49 So some pretty innovative ways for pollinators and wildlife. Have you guys seen any tests or research done? Obviously Jonathan Lungren is doing a lot at Blue Dasher. What kind of tests or resources do you guys have on that? People can look for in pollinator benefits.

47:15 Yeah, I mean Jonathan's done probably some really good work. Some of his graduate students that he's had have done some really good things too. I would get on YouTube and search for Jonathan Lungren or I'm trying to think what his graduate student's name is. It's slipping my mind at the moment, but there's some good work out there. Actually, our Soil Health Resource Guide has a really good article in it right now on beneficial insects and the benefits that they can bring. If you go to our website, we have some of Jonathan's stuff archived from previous resource guides. So yeah, there's a lot of good information out there as to the benefits of that.

48:05 Thomas Jansky is asking, does anyone have an opinion on interseeding mixes that may benefit corn in V4 to V5 stage that would benefit a following crop of soybeans? And I'll let you guys answer, but also just want to let everyone know this is something that we're going to try to do somewhat consistently. And interseeding is one of the topics that we've had a lot of interest in, so we will have some people on to talk about that. But for the time being, you guys can kind of answer that knowing that there's going to be a webinar that may be more dedicated to that.

48:40 There's probably no topic in our world that people ask more questions about or are more desperate to really make it work, because if we could make that work it would solve so many problems and help us in this corn soybean rotation get something in there and get it established. To be honest we've seen some things work pretty well and then other years we do the same thing and it doesn't work all that great. Again, highly dependent upon weather.

49:11 Three things that we know about interseeding: number one, you need to get the seed in the ground and don't just broadcast it, so try to get some sort of equipment that helps get the seed in the ground. Number two, you got to have the timing right. If you wait till V6 to V8 you're too late and you're going to get a poor stand. V3 to V4 is when you need to be rolling on that and getting that seed in the ground to get it up and going. And then number three, you really got to be careful of the herbicides that you're using because you can really ding, especially if you're trying to do a lot of broad leaves and you use some fairly aggressive broadleaf chemistries, you can really ding what you're trying to do. So those three things, if you can kind of get those three things right, you got a decent chance of making it work.

49:54 The things that consistently we've seen work the most: annual rye grass, hairy vetch, red clover, and then some of the brassicas—you know, radishes, turnips, rapeseed, collards—we've seen them all work somewhat. And then another approach that some people are taking is putting a warm season plant out there like a cowpea that's just going to grow really fast and get enough growth to keep some foliage and leaves up at the top of the corn canopy. We've seen that work pretty well.

50:24 One of the best sources that I have seen, we reference this again in our resource guide—if you go there's a website, I'll type it in here for everybody, but it's called interseeding covers. Jacen, can you look that up and post that to the chat room? I think it's interceedingcovers.com. I don't even know who puts that together but it's a really good website. They've got some good information on there, they've got some research studies, so I would recommend if you're interested you go there and check that out because they've got some good resources.

50:57 Another angle on this is the sudden popularity of 60-inch rows with corn for the sole purpose of increasing the success of an interseeded cover crop. You know, just a few years ago this would have been considered heresy—you know, why would you go to wider row spacings instead of narrow row spacing? Because the trend throughout history has been narrower and narrower rows. And the idea, if your goal is solely to raise corn, then don't mess around with any of this stuff. You know, anything you do is probably not going to increase your corn yield.

51:42 If, however, your goal is to create better soil and to capture sunlight, if when you change your mindset from 'I'm going to grow corn' to 'I'm going to capture sunlight and change it into something useful,' then all of a sudden you start seeing great possibilities. You see, when you crawl in between a tasseling corn, crawl between the rows of a tasseling corn field and you see a little fleck of sunlight hitting the ground, you see that as waste that could be put to use. And so when you look at it from that perspective, all of a sudden you start seeing opportunities for converting sunlight that otherwise would go to waste into something useful. And that may not be that year's corn crop, but it may be a fall grazing crop and it could be a boost in yield on next year's soybeans because you've got better soil.

52:50 If you can take that otherwise wasted sunlight—and me, the biggest waste of sunlight on the North American continent is the sunlight that falls on our 94 million acres of corn every year from black layer to harvest, that's roughly a month of sunlight on 94 million acres that creates nothing. And I think some people are starting to get very creative about how can we capture that full month, six weeks of sunlight and convert it into something useful. And maybe that's wide row corn, maybe that's doing some—

53:31 Sort of aerial seating high moisture harvest ear, some means of removing that corn canopy and getting something started underneath it. And there's some very creative ways of doing that that I see floating around. I tell you what, here Keith, why don't you go ahead and answer Thomas in the chat, and then Dale, why don't you go ahead and answer this question over video from Facebook. Kevin Elme says, how important is increasing plant diversity in blends?

54:14 I'm typing an answer to a chat question. Okay, I'll take the diversity then. Basically this whole cover crop thing is kind of evolving as we begin to understand what the explanations for the magic of cover crops are, how come they work as well as they do, how do you create better soil using cover crops. Since basically we're feeding, let me back up just a bit. If you are feeding cattle, if you fed your cattle nothing but wheat straw and corn stocks for a full year, and you fed your entire cow herd nothing but wheat straw and corn stocks for a full year, how many live calves would you expect on the ground next year? I mean, I think everybody would say very few. I mean, you would not be a successful cattleman. And when you're feeding cattle, you're actually feeding the rumen and microbes. You're not feeding the cow itself. You feed rumen and microbes, the microbes then in turn feed the cattle. So they're eating microbes, and you're feeding the microbes. And it works the same way with the soil. So if you want to feed the soil, you think about it—for 150 years we've fed our soil microbes primarily a diet of wheat straw, soybean stubble, and corn stocks. You would not expect a cow herd to survive on that, and we shouldn't expect our soil microbes to survive on that other than the four or five months out of a year where they get root exudates. We've been starving our soil microbes for a century and a half. So if we change our system to feed those microbes more, longer period of time by using cover crops, and it's not so much the top growth although that's important, it's the root exudates. Now, when you are feeding cattle, let's say you're feeding corn grain—obviously more nutritious—you would not think of feeding your cattle only corn grain. You'd have a protein supplement out there. Your soil microbes are the same way. You want diversity of food sources for those microbes. Our grasses tend to produce root exudates that are high in sugars. Legumes tend to produce root exudates that are high in protein. Sunflower might produce a root exudate that's high in zinc and in lipids. Flax also high in lipids. And so you get a diversity of nutrients, which creates a much bigger microbial biomass.

57:22 And it looks like Keith here responded to Thomas with that. It is 6:30, so we're going to wrap up. I appreciate you guys for tuning in, those who are live here in the webinar and those who are on Facebook. If you're on Facebook or watching this as it's recorded, we do encourage you to sign up for next week so that you can ask your questions live and we'll try to get those answered. Next week we're going to try to have Colton Certson, Brett Pesik, and we're trying to convince Jonathan Cob to come on as well. They are all associated here with Green Cover Seed and they're going to talk about grazing sheep and pigs and cattle on cover crops. So feel free to join in next week on that and ask them your questions. In the meantime, we hope you guys have a great week and you stay healthy, and I'm going to close the meeting out here. Any final thoughts from our panelists?

58:16 I would like to know when Steve Tucker is going to start his presidential run. I want to know when he's going to put his hand down. Or get his bucket cleaned out. Now seriously, thank you everybody for joining us. This is our first attempt so I know we had a few technology glitches. I think the internet is really overloaded right now so we're having a little bit of issues there, but all in all I think it went well. Thank you Noah for putting all this together, thanks Jalen for joining us there as well, and we just look forward to hopefully people can jump on every week and we can continue to do this. Thanks everybody, thanks for joining. Thank you all, have a wonderful week, see you, thanks.