Cover Crop Economics: What the Data Shows

0:00 If your internet signal's good it shouldn't be a problem. All right we are live now letting people tune in so I'll give it about 30 seconds before we get started just to let everybody log on. I think we're live on Facebook as well.

0:35 Okay well we're going to go ahead and kick things off here for the season finale of season three. We do have some more webinars that we're going to have coming up with Christine Jones here in about two weeks, and Keith and I have talked a little bit about the next two weeks about Keith and Dale coming on to do just kind of a general Q&A and answer your guys's questions. Be looking for that to come here in the next either next week or the week after that, as well as Dr. Christine Jones's four week series. But this is going to wrap up the current series that we're on.

1:12 We've got a guest on here this evening to talk about cover crop economics. I'm not going to spoil Keith's intro for our presenter, but I will just kind of kick things off. Let you guys know that everybody is muted. If you have questions or anything during the presentation, we're going to go until about 6:15 with the presentation and then we'll get to your audience questions at 6:15 and do about 15 minutes of that and conclude at 6:30. With that Keith, do you want to go ahead and introduce our speaker?

1:42 Yeah thanks Noah and thanks everybody for tuning in this evening. It's my pleasure to introduce my friend Dr. Rob Meyer. Rob is with the University of Missouri and he's also the director of the North Central region of SARE, Sustainable Ag Research and Education. And that's actually how Rob and I got to know each other. We started the Green Cover Seed in part because we did a SARE grant back in 2008. We applied for one of the small farmer ranchers SARE grants because we wanted to see how much moisture cover crops were taking. So we got this small grant, got a little bit of money to buy some moisture sensing equipment and did that series of experiments in 2008 where we planted all the different cover crops and put the moisture sensors in.

2:32 And Rob, little did we know, you know, the impact that that would have, you know, not only on us and on SARE because you know we've been able to leverage that in a lot of different conversations and a lot of different studies have referenced some of that stuff that we've done. So that's how I got to know Rob back in 2008 through the SARE program. And I really enjoyed getting to know him over the years, speaking at similar events, being on speaker panels on a lot of different places. He's just about as knowledgeable as a guy you're ever going to find.

3:08 And what better topic, you know, to close our season with than economics, because you know cover crops are great, you know, building up soil health and that's all super excellent, but if we can't make money doing it, you know, making money being profitable is the ultimate in being sustainable. And so it has to go together. And so Rob's got some great information from different surveys, from different studies that they've done on economics. And one other thing that I do want to mention about Rob and I's relationship over the years is another connection point that we have is that several years ago Rob kind of led a charge to make a soil health documentary. It's called The Living Soil. I'll post a link to it in the chat here in just a little bit, but Rob just told me that thing's been viewed 2.2 million times now. And if you have not seen it, you really should do it. It's certainly worth an hour of your time. It features our farm and probably many of you have seen the very famous video of my air seeder coming unhooked from the tractor as I'm driving down the road and it comes unhooked and it goes into the ditch. Well that was filmed in the making of this. So we can't say that no air seeders were harmed in the filming of that because one of them was. But it all ended up well but it's a great piece of film work and actually Rob's daughter was the producer and the director. The filmmaker did an excellent job so I'll post the link. And if you haven't seen that I would highly encourage it.

4:49 Rob, with that introduction I'm going to turn it over to you. You can give just any additional background and then take it away.

4:56 Sounds great Keith. Well yes, it's been wonderful to get to know you over the years and see all the amazing things your company is doing. I tell people I first got started with cover crops at a very

5:06 Young age on our family farm in central Illinois. We had cover crops through the 1960s and I still remember as a boy my dad pointing over to one of our corn fields and saying well look how that corn looks better where we had cover crops two years ago than the corn next to it and you could see it. Then, but like so many farms once wheat left our system we also took cover crops out of the rotation. So by the time I was a teenager we weren't doing cover crops anymore but the memory of that stayed with me and I started doing work on cover crops in the early 1990s and have worked with most of the last 30 years.

5:46 So I was asked to visit with you a little bit today about the economic aspects of cover crops and although my particular background is more on the agronomy side I did minor in ag econ. I like to say, but more than that, just because of my farm background I recognize if you're going to do practices in agriculture and learn this from my dad you better show that they can pay. So we undertook a big effort with some economists and others and worked with a lot of advisors from across the country to look at farmer data we had from surveys and other information to see what we could learn about what do cover crops really do to the bottom economic line with corn and soybean production.

6:30 So I'm going to walk you through some of what we learned. There is a report that's available if you wanted to see more details on what I'll be presenting. I think Keith or Noah will put that in the chat box the link for that. It's a free publication you can order copies of or you can just read it online. This was released in the summer of 2019 and it's based on five years of data from the national CTIC cover crop survey plus other data that was available. We have a lot of farmer examples in the publication. It's very much a publication for farmers and farm advisors.

7:08 So anyway just wanted to make you aware that that resource is available to read online or request a print copy of.

7:16 So of course when we talk about cover crops the first thing that often comes into mind is the cost of doing the seeding and as I think probably all of you are well aware there's a wide range of seed prices. Keith and Noah could tell you, depending on whether you're doing legumes in their mixes or just a straight cereal grain you're going to have a wide range of prices. We also know that there can be differences in the way the seed is planted. On our own family farm our two tenants both do tend to put the cover crop on with fertilizer in the fall so they don't really have any extra cost because they're out there fertilizing anyway. And in their case they don't have any termination costs because they normally do a burn down spray with glyphosate.

8:01 So in the case of our study based on national survey data and this goes back to some early survey data we assumed a median cost for seed of 25 an acre. Now some of you that are using cover crops probably are doing it for less than that, especially if you're just using cereal rye. I know of farmers that are doing it for as little as 10 or 15 dollars in seed but we wanted to be fair to what we'd seen in the survey data which included by the way some horticulture users as well as corn and soybean growers.

8:31 We do know that cover crop seeding can be done less expensively, again depending on species, seeding rates. I find with cereal rye for example there are people that put on 70 or 80 pounds an acre, there are people that put on 20 or 30 pounds an acre depending on what their goals are. Seeding method can certainly make a big difference. This is the Rulon farm in Indiana and I was there for a tour of some of their cover crop work. They do cover crops in about 5,000 acres and they said well they use airplanes, they use grain drills but their preferred method is to use their big row crop planter because they can get over a lot of acres in a hurry and that keeps their cost of seeding down. And then of course the cost, the seed source can make a difference as well.

9:12 But for purposes of this analysis we assumed an average cost of 37 an acre and again your cost might be considerably less than that or if you're doing a complex mix and doing some grazing your cost might be a little higher than that.

9:27 So what are the returns with the cover crops? This is the part that gets a little trickier right to decide what's going on. First of all is there any yield impact so we're going to look at some data on that. Are there any lower costs with using the cover crops and then greater resiliency and we'll end up with that piece because in some ways that's the most interesting aspect of what happens that can really pay off economically.

9:51 So at the time we did this survey the data we had from national

9:55 Farmer data was from this 2012 to 2016 period. 2012, of course, you all remember was our major drought, and interestingly in that year corn and soybeans responded very well following cover crops. Soybeans were slightly better than corn, but both around 10 percent yield advantage following cover crops versus no cover crops. So this is data from farmers who had both fields with covers and fields without, and we asked them to only report their yield data if they had comparable management—about the same planting date, same varieties of corn or soybeans, and so on.

10:32 In subsequent years, the yield difference is not as large—a little bit more for soybeans, tending to be around three to four percent for soybeans, about two to three percent for corn. But again, just keep in mind in that drought year there was a much bigger yield advantage. We'll talk more about that later.

10:51 So one thing we did was we dove into that data, and that was about 500 farms a year, by the way, providing that data—so a really large data set from a lot of different states in terms of corn and soybean yield impact. Probably not surprisingly to you, one thing we saw very clearly is that the longer farmers used cover crops, the more of a yield increase they saw. Now, definitely there were farmers the first year they used the cover crop that had a yield loss, especially if they were doing corn after corn and maybe didn't adjust their nitrogen management. But in general, on average there was a positive trend, and it just picked up year over year.

11:30 Now, what we don't know is: is there a big difference from five years of cover cropping versus ten? I would say there's probably, you know, continues to be some improvement, but we were able to look at about seven years of data and saw a continued trend over that time.

11:47 So I'm just going to kind of simplify this and break it down into one, three, and five-year impacts of cover cropping. And what we saw with the data, specifically looking at the 2015 and 16 growing seasons, which were fairly normal weather years over most of the corn belt, with about 500 farmers each of those years—we had good data on how long the farmers have been cover cropping. So if they'd been cover cropping for a year, just a year, not a whole lot of impact on the corn on average. Now, again, there were some that lost yield, some they had a little more of a yield bump, but on average, you know, just barely any difference. Soybeans was a little bit more positive—about two percent in that first year.

12:29 But then as we go through the years, we start to gradually see more of an impact. And again, not dramatic differences—only three percent after five years of corn, about five percent in soybeans. And again, this is in relatively normal weather years. I showed you that data for 2012 and how there was more of about a 10 percent money average difference that year.

12:51 So what does that mean in terms of yield for baseline returns? So we factored in those cost of seeding that I showed you, and then just a very small amount of adjustment after a few years in fertilizer and herbicide cost, particularly in case of corn a slight fertilizer savings on nitrogen by the fifth year, and then with soybeans a little bit of herbicide savings but not much, and none at all in year one. So you do see in year one some cost to doing the cover cropping that's not going to be a surprise to anybody listening to this webinar.

13:25 Maybe one of the interesting things was we looked at this really extensively. On average, and I want to emphasize that average part, it took about three years to break even with cover cropping. And then after five years, we're definitely making money with cover crops. And get into that fourth and fifth year, the returns are positive, and then in theory they're going to continue to be positive and definitely after that. So what about that first year or two, though? You know, there's some expense to doing it. Is it really worth it to dive into this? Maybe you're already cover cropping, but maybe you've got a neighbor or a relative that's kind of asking that question.

14:01 Well, I want to tell you a little bit more about these baseline assumptions, and then we'll get into some more specifics overall. So for soybeans, we were at that time in the summer of 2019 assuming that early spring of 2019 that the soybean prices were an average of nine dollars a bushel. And we looked at average bushels per acre—60 corn, 350 a bushel, and 200 bushels an acre. Again, for both of those crops, we were assuming a very tiny amount for reduced expenses with erosion repair, that would be if you had a situation where you had to go out and smooth out some gullies or do some other repair to erosion areas beginning in year three but not year one. And we recorded a small savings in weed control cost, and then with fertilizer, no change for soybeans in year one.

14:51 The only change in year three and five based on some of the farmer data we saw was a very slight savings in phosphorus and pumping that up just slightly to 20 pounds an acre in year five. A small savings in phosphorus for corn, again no change in fertilizer in year one, and then some modest reductions in nitrogen and phosphorus as the soil health builds.

15:15 So you can see some of those numbers there. Now I want to emphasize that there are a lot of farmers who use cover crops who do not change their fertilizer practices. They just stick with what they've been doing. On the other hand, there are farmers who've been cover cropping for several years that have made bigger changes in their fertility. We'll talk more about that in a minute.

15:35 So just using these baseline numbers like I showed you a minute ago, again some cost here and year one, breaking even in year three. So how do we think about that? Maybe you're talking to a neighbor or somebody else who's kind of wondering about should I do cover crops, and they're saying well it's gonna cost me money if I go out and do it this year. Then that's probably true in most situations.

15:59 Well I would tell that neighbor or viewers or family member is willing to invest in lime and it's pretty rare that lime will pay off in one year. Usually we talk about that taking two to three years. About those equipment purchases that we all make on farms, whether it's new or used equipment, you've got to pencil that out. How long is it going to take for that to pay back? It's certainly not going to be in one year in almost any case when we talk about equipment.

16:25 So we do need to think multi-year. That's part of the story that I want to emphasize. But I also want to talk about how different management scenarios may affect cover crop economic returns because I told you what we looked at to this point was averages. So no farm is average, right? You've all got different circumstances. Some of you got cattle, some of you got particular weed issues, some of you got compaction.

16:52 So we really spent a lot of time in this analysis effort looking at if you've got particular management issues you're dealing with, what does that do to cover crop economics? So I'm going to walk you through seven specific scenarios, some of which may apply to your farm and what that might do to when the cover crops will pay off for you.

17:12 So the first thing I want to talk about is herbicide resistant weeds. You know, these have been showing up everywhere. I can't believe it. I drive all over the Midwest for my work and I know many of you are seeing this in your areas. Our family farm in Illinois is starting to see some of these herbicide resistant weeds and it's just a really big problem. You go further south, you know, even with modern chemistry, sometimes they're not able to even harvest the crop because these get so bad.

17:41 Well we found with doing our analysis that with certain average assumptions based on data that was out there, there would be about an average extra herbicide savings of 27 an acre. Now it could be more or less than that obviously, but that would allow cover crops to pay off in year two for corn and actually in the very first year of soybean use if you had this herbicide resistant weed situation and if you're able to cut back on some herbicide expenses that you would otherwise have.

18:13 And our report goes into the details of those assumptions behind each of these. I'm going to just outline them briefly. So in this case, we said if the herbicide resistant weeds were a problem, there could be some costs of control go up. Now we didn't assume any grain dockage or anything like that. We do know that often there's an extra post-emerge herbicide application or a more expensive residual chemistry.

18:40 So what we assumed was that there was a 12 dollar savings on doing one fewer post-emerge spray. Now you may be saying well I only do one spray anyway, but I will tell you, like on our farm where we've had some of these herbicide resistant weeds in the past, our farmers had started doing two sprays. Now the good news is since they've started cover cropping, they've been able to go back to doing just one spray. So in their case, yes, they had that savings on a second spray.

19:01 One of our tenants who's been doing cover crops for longer now, he actually has found that in about probably two out of the last three years, he's also been able to not use a residual product in his soybean field. So that's giving him some savings. In this case, we just assumed that we could use a little lower cost there.

19:24 So those savings again added up to about 27 an acre. So herbicide resistant weeds is one scenario you might have that would allow those cover crops to pay more quickly.

19:36 How about compacted soils? Many of you probably experienced really wet weather in 2019, and whether it was the spring or harvest period, you know we've all seen fields like this. What's our normal solution? Go out there with a big piece of equipment, right? Try to deal with that compaction through tillage. Well, there's a cost to doing that, of course. It takes labor, it takes fuel, takes the equipment. That breaks down to an average of about 15 dollars an acre.

20:01 And if you're not sub-soiling and using cover crops, which have actually been found to be more effective on many soils for dealing with compaction than deep tillage, Ohio State did a five-year study on that and showed the cover crops had the advantage. You'll get some savings there that makes the cover crops pay off in year two for soybeans and break even in year two for corn. So again, it pushes that planting horizon up a little bit if you've got that problem.

20:30 What about fertility? I mentioned earlier that could be a factor. Let's say you've just rented a field that's been, you know, kind of not managed very well. You've taken on this field and it just, you know, it hasn't had P and K put on to it or, you know, the organic matter has been depleted. But what about that situation? Well, if you've got that and you've got a situation where the cover crops can help with fertility, that too can speed up the payoff. If the cover crops can break even a little more quickly for corn two years instead of three, but for soybeans we felt the difference was marginal and still looking at about a three-year break-even point.

21:09 So what we were looking at here was a very modest savings for soybeans, slight reduction in phosphorus beyond what we assumed in our baseline, and then an extra 10 pounds of potassium savings. For corn, we assume we might have some legumes in there and get a very modest nitrogen credit of 40 pounds. Now some of our legume cover crops can give much more nitrogen than that if we let them grow long enough. But usually there's the trade-off, right? We want to get the corn planted instead of letting the cover crops grow another few weeks. So if you're organic, you might let that clover or other legume grow long enough to get over 100 pounds of nitrogen per acre. But for many farmers, they're going to be terminating earlier. So some modest savings, but it does add up.

21:54 Now this was an interesting scenario I've been hearing for years, as some of you probably have, that when you convert to no-till, you're going to take a potential yield bump in many farms depending on soil type. So that probably comes about on many of our soils because, as I just said, compaction can be an issue. We don't have some of the nutrient dynamics worked out when we immediately switch to no-till. So we get that yield dip, and you know, it's just it holds people back from doing no-till. But what we're learning is if you start with a cover crop, let's say you plant cereal rye in the fall and then you no-till soybeans into it the next spring as your first no-till step, well you can—it depends on the soil type again—but you can avoid that yield dip. And when you put those two together, you get some nice economic savings because you don't have those tillage operations. You've got less labor, less fuel. You do have the cover crop seed cost, but this starts to make things pay off in year two for corn. You can actually even break even in year one for soybeans if you do that, start with cereal rye, go to no-till soybeans. Again, this is an average. It's going to vary by field and situation.

23:07 So what we're assuming here, we're avoiding that normal yield dip with no-till by doing the cover crop with it. That cover crop's helping with reduced compaction, better nutrient availability, improved rainfall infiltration. We've eliminated some tillage operations such as a fall chisel operation, a couple seed bed prep passes. So we've got some savings there.

23:29 How about grazing? I know Keith every day is probably talking to farmers about grazing options with cover crops and green cover seeds. Done a great job serving farmer needs with that. I think anybody that's familiar with this would tell you that the number one way to make cover crops pay for themselves is to use them effectively in grazing. We see here some high tensile electric fencing, doing it in a management intensive way where the cattle are moved frequently. Really helps the economics. The low-cost fence makes it affordable to do. You, of course, got to think about a watering system. But let's look at this for a little further detail.

24:08 So there's a lot of ways you can evaluate grazing and cover crops. You can look at the rate of gain in the cattle. We chose to look at a hay replacement.

24:16 Model I'm going to show you the details of that, but the bottom line number was an average return of about $49 an acre for grazing. So that makes grazing pay off in year one if you've already got some electric fencing and if you've got access to water source. Now if you've got to pay for those two investments, then yes it could take two or maybe even three years to make that grazing system work. But it can be very profitable in the long run.

24:47 Now this hay replacement model wins himself and grazes cover crops himself, so he definitely knew what he was doing and he used pretty conservative numbers. But here were his assumptions: that the cereal rye was generating about 1,500 pounds of dry matter per acre. That's a pretty low number—rye can do more than that if you let it grow long enough. He assumed about 50 percent of the rye biomass would actually be lost from hoof action and selective grazing, so we're only using half that. That 750 pounds of rye that is used is replacing the equivalent of about a little over a thousand pounds of hay because we're assuming that 78 of the hay is utilized and has 88 dry weight, so that's how those numbers balance out.

25:27 He assumed at that time in 2019 that the hay was valued at $80 a ton, and he assumed an additional amount of savings of a little over five dollars per acre for reduced machinery fuel and labor from not hauling the hay. So when you put all those things together you get the $49 an acre. Now again that's a relatively conservative number—I've seen other studies that show profitability of over $100 an acre but of course you can lose money too if you don't have a real efficient system set up. And again we're assuming that you've already got the electric fencing and you've got some access to water. If you've got to invest in those it's going to take longer of course to pay off.

26:10 Okay, I'm getting down to the last couple scenarios here. You're all aware that there are cover crop incentives available but you maybe haven't seen the rates in your state. I will tell you that the way NRCS sets their Environmental Quality Incentive Program or EQUIP rates is at the state level and they can change from year to year, so these numbers are from two years ago just to show you a kind of range of states. You can see Illinois is higher than Iowa. I've looked at every state in the U.S. and most of the states are at about $50 an acre or more, but there are a few in the $30 or $40 dollar range.

26:43 Now that's the basic rate if you're using a single species. If you use two or more species every state will give you a little bump, usually it's five, six dollars an acre something like that. And then there's a higher rate if you fall into certain category—maybe you're a beginning farmer, maybe you're doing some other special situations. So even the bottom line here with many of these states is that if you had at least $32 or $33 dollars an acre the cover crops will pay off in year one. So just keep in mind I've heard people say well it's a hassle to go there—yes, you know you can go in there. Depending on the number of acres you're doing and very quickly walk away with it. If cover crops are costing you $37 an acre that first year but you're getting back $50 or more dollars an acre well then you're making an extra $14 dollars an acre.

27:51 Okay, last point is dealing with managing soil moisture and this gets at what I showed you with the 2012 data when we had such a big impact on yields after drought. So you may have seen a rainfall simulator like this but if not what we're looking at here is some pans that have been lifted intact from different field situations. So this is obviously a tilled field here, second from left got a cover crop, mixed species here in the middle, got a no-till field right next to it. This is a pasture area here. And then an inch of rain is applied in a relatively short amount of time from an overhead sprinkler and they can watch whether the water runs off that pan of soil—it's slightly angled—or whether it soaks through.

28:38 So you can see the tilled soil actually it's running mostly off here, it's going into the front jar whereas we look at the cover crop soil you can see it's going in the back jar. So there's some holes in the bottom of these aluminum pans or tin pans and it's not running off the cover crop field. And I've seen this on our own farm after a big rain—you just don't see any soil coming off, the water is clear and it's infiltrating well. But I saw this the first time and I thought well that's good, kind of makes sense, but this is what really sold me when I first saw this done several years ago. When you flip over those pans of soil, this one in the front is the tilled soil and in the back is the cover crop soil.

29:21 In all my years as an agronomist, I quite honestly had not really thought about the fact that rain might not soak into that tilled soil very well. What we learned is in many of our soils it kind of seals shut. The clay particles once it starts raining, plus there's no macropores, the channels created by earthworms and so on to help get that rainfall into the soil.

29:45 Just think about that. If you're getting a big rain on a conventional field, probably having a lot of it run off and not soak in very well compared to a cover crop field with minimum disturbance. Just to kind of look at that cover crop on the left, if you visualize that tilled field, you're getting a uniform upper layer. By the way I've seen people do that tray with the stirring the soil with their hand right before they rain on it.

30:11 What we want is those macropores created by the earthworms and the root channels as roots decay, and that allows that rain to get into the soil quickly and to penetrate deep into the depths. Plus we've got better aggregate structure. You can see kind of the aggregate soil particles here versus the situation where tillage has destroyed that aggregate structure. So that gives us better storage capacity.

30:34 As we do these systems over time, of course we get more organic matter that acts as a sponge to help hold some water in that root zone. So all those things work together to improve our soil moisture dynamics, but it's more than that. There's actually several other things that contribute to cover crops really helping in dry conditions.

30:51 So depending on our cover crop, if we have a vigorous biomass, this is rye soybeans have been planted into, well of course that's going to reduce evaporation from the soil. So we're going to retain what soil moisture we have longer. End of the season it's going to keep those roots cooler, which helps.

31:08 What about mycorrhizal fungi? You've probably been hearing about them. These are pretty amazing organisms in the soil that form kind of a symbiosis with the crop roots, and they effectively act to enlarge the amount of soil volume that our crop roots can access.

31:25 So you think about a dry year, what's the problem? Well, the corn can't get to the water and nutrients because it's not going to grow through a dry soil. I've dug up a lot of roots in various soil moisture tests and they simply stop growing when they hit dry soil. Well, those fungi are better at kind of working their way deeper into the soil and exploring that soil volume for moisture and nutrients.

31:46 And why would they give that moisture and nutrients to the corn roots? Well, the corn roots are exuding carbon. You may have heard Keith talk about underground carbon economy, and there's this interesting trading going on between the fungi and some bacteria with the crop roots that helps that whole underground nutrient cycle work. So they play an amazing role, especially in a dry year, but at any time they're helpful.

32:09 There's other things that can happen. In Missouri where I'm at, we have a lot of soybeans after soybeans. We find that some of our cover crops like rye will root more deeply than the soybeans. So let's say the rye roots six inches deeper. What happens if after we have that deep rooted cover crop, the cash crop will tend to follow those root channels of the cover crop down. So the soybeans may root another four to six inches deeper after a cover crop than they would have without one. So that helps in a dry year.

32:38 So you put all those things together and there are even other dynamics that really pays off. We looked at what happened in the drought of 2012 with the extra returns of about 58 an acre on corn and 65 on soybeans. Boy, those cover crops pay off right away the year one.

32:55 So you think about buying, let's say crop insurance, right? That takes a little while to pay off. It may be three years, five years, seven years before you get a crop insurance payment, maybe never. Well, same thing with cover crops. It may take two or three years before you have that year where the cover crop really pays off big. But it could easily pay for the expense of the cover crop once you have that bad year, whether it's a really dry year or even a really wet year.

33:24 We saw in 2019 we had in the Midwest 19 million acres that could not be planted at all. They were never planted for corn and soybeans in 2019, and we paid out as U.S. taxpayers 4.2 billion dollars for those 19 million acres of fields that could not be planted in crop insurance payments.

33:43 So this is a field in Oklahoma that spring in 2019. This farmer who sent me the photo on the left, cover crop no-till field on the right is the conventional field, same soil type. Well, you can guess which field would be planted first, right? The cover crop no-till field. So think about trying to get in. We had farmers that year that didn't plant until July or even well late June for sure.

39:07 Program are you seeing that increase? You know you get a lot of questions about that. What's your take on where that's going?

39:16 Well I focused on the incentives that are available from NRCS and I just showed EQIP. They also have the Conservation Stewardship Program, but there are many private sector payments available depending on where you live. A lot of the programs have been rolled out are geographically targeted. I know there's some from General Mills in Kansas. There are others like with cotton in the southern states from Wrangler, but one of the broader ones in the Midwest recently was Bayer. Launched a program, of course the company that used to be Monsanto, but Bayer has a program they started last fall that's paying ten dollars an acre to do either cover crops or no-till or strip till if you haven't done that on a particular field before. And that's not as big as what NRCS is paying, but it's a pretty easy to sign up for a program.

40:09 There's other groups like Indigo Ag and others that have been offering soil carbon payments and I'm expecting that to only increase over the next year or two. There's so much discussion about that and we may even see more federal payments related to soil carbon.

40:24 Yeah, I know we just had a soil health conference at our Kansas location down in Southeast Kansas. And one of the things, one of the programs that we talked about that you know people that farm in that area, Eastern Kansas area would be eligible for, No-Till on the Plains has a is working with Unilever and Country Crock on essentially a cover crop incentive type program. And I know at the time they said you know they're still acres that can be signed up. So if you're in that Eastern Kansas area, you can contact us or you can contact the folks at No-Till on the Plains. But Rob's right, there's there's a lot of programs. Iowa has some pretty good ones that will give incentive payments to do some of this. And I we personally haven't been in an area that could take advantage of that, but my understanding is the sign up requirements for these are far easier and far less difficult to do than like an NRCS program. So don't not do it just because you think there's going to be a lot of paperwork. At least check that out a little bit first.

41:35 So Robin, did you look at any people that have been doing soil health practices you know for a long period of time, you know 15, 20, 25 years? Has there been a study done on that and looked at the economic impact of that real long term instead of just you know the five to ten year type thing? Yeah, do the benefits keep getting better?

42:00 I wish I knew a definite answer to that. We did have some farmers in our survey that had been doing cover crops for 10 years or more, but we didn't have enough to kind of have a statistical evaluation of their impacts. I mean, it kind of looks like you know those benefits could kind of continue to improve. I think they probably slow down a little bit. But certainly we've seen farmers that are doing cover crops and no-till in combination for let's say 20 years continue to gradually build their soil organic matter. And anytime we build organic matter we're going to have a more productive resilient soil. So that alone should be a clue that we're going to get some improved economic returns that are continuing to gradually improve. Now yes there might not be a dramatic change between your 10 and 20, but if it's an extra 10 dollars an acre, you know it all adds up.

42:54 Well, Noah, do you got a couple questions there in the Q&A box?

43:00 Looks like you're on mute, Noah. You can, I think it's like I haven't done this for three seasons. At least I caught myself before I got into an hour-long story. Was there any yield difference from just a fall rye to a multi-species full season cover?

43:20 Yeah, we didn't have a chance to break that down because we didn't really know what cover crop species the farmers reporting on the yield data were using. Now we did in that same survey get data on the whole mix of cover crops the farmers were using on their farm. But the problem was we couldn't, let's say they used, they said they planted 500 acres of rye and 100 acres of a mix, well we didn't know which field was correlating to the fields they were reporting yields on. So we could have guessed at it, but we didn't since we didn't know for certain. We didn't want to try to break that down. I would say you know anecdotally, as probably many of the listeners know, the more biomass we have, especially if we've got a mixture of cover crops, generally we're going to see some.

44:10 Rye is kind of a unique case because if we have great growth of rye that can be, as I said earlier, really helpful for something like herbicide resistant weeds. There's some studies showing that if you want to get suppression of Palmer amaranth or waterhemp, that you know you need a pretty good amount of biomass. I've seen even some people saying up to 8,000 pounds an acre. I think that kind of depends, but whereas on the other hand if you're doing rye before corn, well then a lot of rye biomass or a big rye crop can create more nitrogen challenges. So we can deal with that if we manage our nitrogen correctly, put on some extra nitrogen at planting time, but it just kind of depends on the cropping system and timing of termination.

44:59 Kim, do many farmers direct sow after rotating with a cover crop? If it's no-till, otherwise is the cover crop being tilled in? And then also what is an average cost benefit in each of these techniques? Yeah, you know, farmers that are experienced with cover crops, I would say the vast majority are direct, they're planting without any tillage into the cover crop. Now they may be terminating it two, three weeks ahead of time. In other words, that cover crop is dead well before planting the corn or soybeans. But we also see the longer farmers use cover crops, the more they tend to let that cover crop grow because they want to get the maximum benefits. So that's where we get the planting green scenario where the cover crop is still alive at the time the corn or soybeans are planted.

45:48 As far as farmers that do till the cover crop in, we do see that on some organic farms, we see it on some vegetable farms, but we did a survey this past year and had more horticulture producers and we found that even among horticulture producers, if they were using cover crops, they were less likely to do tillage than conventional vegetable operations.

46:14 Okay, what is the shortest amount of time you would consider necessary to make a cover crop worth planting? The shortest amount of time, well I think it depends a little bit on the cover crop species and the goal of using it. But let's say we're dealing with erosion. I have a picture I show in some talks that I was sent by a Michigan extension worker and it shows rye that's literally about maybe an inch and a half or two inches tall. And you wouldn't think, and it was not thick enough to make the field look green or anything. You know, it was, you could still see the soil very easily. But there was a photo of a conventional field next to the field with the rye. There was a tremendous amount of soil blowing off the conventional field and none at all off that rye. So in that case, just a little bit of growth was making all the difference to stop the wind erosion. We see some of the same things with water erosion, but it doesn't take too much to get that anchoring ability with the roots.

47:16 On the other hand, we look at something like radishes. Well, if we only wanted to sequester a little nutrients in the fall, we might not need a huge amount of growth. If on the other hand we're wanting to suppress something like marestail with the radishes, then we want that radish to get big enough to have leaves covering the soil. So it just kind of depends on the situation. But I'll tell you this: the bottom line is the longer we have living roots around the year, so even if it's just extending it from October to December, that's going to help. So organisms stay alive for longer and we'll have more earthworms, we'll have better fungi populations, and so that's going to pay some dividends. So even a little bit of growth is a good thing.

48:00 Yeah, no, I might chime in on that too because that's a great question by the way, whoever asked that. And I heard someone ask that at a conference that we had where we had Dr. Christine Nichols speaking. And they asked her that same question. And I thought her answer was quite interesting. She was approaching it because she's a microbiologist. She was approaching it from the rhizosphere and what are those plants putting out for the microbiology. And she said is she thought with 30 days of growth, you know, which 30 days of growth, you don't necessarily have a real big cover crop. But she said 30 days of growth, she felt like there was significant enough root exudates being put out by that young cover crop plant that at that point it became economically viable to where it would pay for the cost of the seed. Now, you know, maybe it doesn't pay for the cost of the seed and the seeding and the termination and all that, but she felt like you know you were getting enough benefits to at least cover the cost of the seed. And I think whoever asked that question to her was asking specifically about you know this time of the year.

49:08 Didn't get anything planted in the fall. You know I'm going to be planting corn and beans here and in April or whatever, is it still worth going out and planting some oats and peas now? And that was kind of the context of the question, and her answer was you know, strictly from a soil improvement through the root exudates and enhancing biology, she felt like 30 days of growth would be a kind of your break even, and then anything you get above that, you know, that's just a bonus.

49:37 Yeah, Keith, I've had some good success seeding cover crops in the spring. It of course depends on the species, but things like crimson clover are some of our faster growing legumes. Austrian winter peas, you said oats, you know, they'll put on a remarkable amount of growth in about six weeks. So if we can get them in, frost seed them or get them in late March, they can do some good things for us as we get into Maine.

50:04 Do you have any suggestions or experience with tropical cover crop species?

50:10 I have. You know, probably the one that's been the most looked at, at least around the U.S., is sun hemp. That comes to us from the tropics. It's kind of an interesting, tall, vigorous plant that seems pretty good. It's worse in forage use. I assure Keith that you're selling it in some mixes. Kind of a plant that was originally looked at in the U.S. for its fiber potential in the stems. And so that's one I've looked at. Lab lab beans are being looked at particularly in the Southeastern U.S. They're a tropical legume, kind of a long vining runner type bean. For my area in Missouri, I've grown them several times. They're okay if you plant them like right after wheat, but it's not something you plant in the fall. So that's one thing I would say with these tropical cover crops. These are things you're going to use in the summer. They're not things you're going to plant in almost any situation in the fall because they're going to be easily killed by frost, and they're just not going to get that much growth. But we look at summer mixes like Green Cover Seed sells a lot of. They can certainly be part of the portfolio, Keith. What do you think? Are there any summer cover crops?

51:20 Yeah, on the tropicals, some sun hemp is definitely the leading charge on all that, but you know, really sorghum and millet are tropical plants too. They're very well adapted down closer to the equator. So we don't think of them as tropical plants because they're so commonly used here, but they certainly are. One that we experimented with last year and it was really kind of fun to see it grow because it just really got huge was a plant called Sesbania. And it is another tropical legume, got very large, had big old woody stems, but you know, really was a big plant. And we were kind of excited about what we saw. I'm supposed to be getting a full pallet of that in this year from India. So if anybody wants to get a little bit of Sesbania and give it a try, you know, some people worry about some of these becoming a weed issue, and they potentially could down in the South where they would grow long enough to make seed. But as you move North like that Sesbania, had barely just flowered before it froze out, and we planted it in May. I mean, really long season sun hemp just will never make viable seed on any kind of consistent basis to ever become a weed issue up here. So you know, you do have to be concerned about that sometimes bringing in some of these more exotic things, but you know, if we could produce seed on these, they would already be grown for seeded places and they're not. We have to import those from other countries. So I really don't see that as being an issue, but it's fun to experiment with some of those.

52:56 I know that in our grow room at our Iola location, Dale is experimenting with some velvet beans and scarlet runner beans and some of those, and they show great promise. Part of the issue, and Rob, this is one of the issues with lab lab too, is seed size is so large. You know, some of those things are like the size of a lima bean. They're just not going to make, they're not going to mix well with other things. That's why sun hemp is really nice. It's got a small seed size. Sesbania is a small seed size. So that's another thing that you have to kind of watch out for when looking at some of these is how can you get it through your drill?

53:32 I've grown scarlet runner bean. It's not as vigorous as lab lab, but it does put on some growth.

53:38 So Keith, you mentioned kind of an interesting point there about the fact that cover crops can often become a weed issue. Rob, have you done any kind of studies as far as looking at the negative

53:50 Costs of cover crops when they become a weed as far as is it just an extra chemical cost to terminate those or have you done any kind of research on that end?

53:59 Well I know what you're getting at Noah, but I think I'll take a slight exception to saying cover crops become a weed. So when we talk about a weedy species there are certain things we usually have. We have hard seed that allows them to germinate over multiple years. Among our common cover crops the only one that has that trait consistently is hairy vetch and there's actually effort underway to develop what would be called soft seeded hairy vetch that would not germinate for multiple years in the soil.

54:26 So most of our cover crops are what we would call true annuals. They're going to germinate at a particular time point, the seeds are all going to come up in one flush and that makes them pretty easy to knock out with tillage, with mowing or with a herbicide of course.

54:41 Now the slight issue that can happen is if you get a load of seed from just who knows where of cover crop seed that maybe hasn't been cleaned real well, yes you could get some weed seed in that cover crop. And I think when we hear about a weed issue with cover crops that's usually the problem is getting a batch of seed that has not been cleaned well, hasn't had the kind of quality standards that we'd like to see. But as far as the cover crop species themselves I can't think of a single instance where I've heard somebody say that became a weedy problem. How about you Keith, is that something you hear about?

55:15 Yeah, no not long term. I mean you can have some issues with things like buckwheat or mustard which bloom very quickly and readily make seed. You can have some volunteer issues that next year. They're typically pretty easy to control with management.

55:31 Where you can get in trouble with that is in an organic situation where they can't take that out chemically and the timing, you know, they can get they can get rid of some of it through the timing but not all of it. So you know we have to be a little careful sometimes about when do we put buckwheat in organic mixes, especially if they're coming in with wheat the next year because that buckwheat would be making seed and would be harvested right with the wheat.

55:55 That can be an advantage if you're trying to grow two things and you're separating them and I have people that do that. It can be a disadvantage if that's going to make you take a dock when you're trying to sell you know your primary crop.

56:08 We see that once in a while with some of the perennials you know like chicory or some of those things that are really deep-rooted perennials. They can be difficult to terminate and move on to the next thing. So we typically don't use those things if somebody's just doing an annual cover cropping system. We would save those when they're doing a perennial setting and they want those plants to grow for you know four or five, six years. Then they could be very beneficial. The perennials are definitely a different story.

56:35 I've grown buckwheat probably 15 years in Missouri in rotation with corn and beans or other crops and it can volunteer but it's rarely an issue because it's a pretty easy crop to knock out with a variety of methods.

56:50 Yeah, and buckwheat is really kind of an anomaly because it has no tolerance to cold weather. So first frost it is dead. But yet it comes up in very cool soils. And I've seen that buckwheat come up in probably 45 degree soils.

57:06 Brendan Rocky out in Colorado, he plants buckwheat with his potatoes. So he's planting that stuff, you know, but those potatoes are planted four to five inches deep and that stupid buckwheat comes right up. I told him I said you're wasting your money, you can't do that. Of course he had to do it to prove me wrong and he was right. It'll come up from very deep and in cool soils, which is kind of an anomaly for a plant that has no cold tolerance. So you almost always see flushes of buckwheat in the fall or the spring that will germinate in cool soils and then the frost takes them out.

57:42 All right, well I think that'll conclude this evening's webinar. Thank you so much for your time Rob and Keith, both of you guys. Like I said, for those who missed the beginning, next week we're going to have Keith and Dale on as basically just frequently asked questions. You guys can come on and ask them any questions that you guys have. We'll stump we'll stump Dale for sure.

58:06 Excited for that. Thank you again Rob. You have any final thoughts for us before we let you go?

58:11 No, watch that movie Living Soil if you haven't seen it. It's got not just Keith's farm but some all across the country, although Keith is probably the star of the film. So he did enjoy, but you should watch it in spite of that.

58:24 You can fast forward through. That's right, that's right. That's good. All right, well thank you guys so much for your time. We'll see you all next week and thank you all. We'll see you then. Okay, goodnight.