Cover Crop Q&A: Grazing Mixes, Fall Nitrogen, and Forage Balance

0:19 All right well I think we'll go ahead and get started. Brett and I are going to attempt to answer any questions that you have.

0:30 As you probably saw from Noah's email, we're kind of in between seasons. We kind of completed the six guest speakers that we had lined up. Starting here in a couple weeks we're going to have Dr. Christine Jones from Australia. We're actually going to have four weeks in a row of Dr. Jones and kind of an extended period. She'll talk for at least an hour and then we'll take questions. Do Q&A for at least half an hour, so that's going to be really, really rich content.

0:59 The one session is going to be a recording of the Phosphorus Paradox that she did earlier last year, but then the other three are going to be all new content, so we're really excited about that.

1:11 But instead of just doing nothing for the next couple of weeks, we thought, well, what the heck, we'll get on and we'll see what kind of questions we can answer for people here.

1:21 I had Brett come on because all the hard questions, I'll just shift over to him. I'm the cancer for Daniel, actually.

1:33 Yeah, Dale was going to be on and he may even join later, but he's got some kind of back issues and has really had troubles getting around here, so hopefully he'll be able to make it on next week. But Brett has a really deep background not only in cover crops and recommending cover crops and planting plots, but also the practical application of using them on his own farm and being out on a lot of other people's farms, seeing how they're used and seeing how they work.

2:06 I am trying this is something new for our webinar. I have clicked on everybody that's on right now and have given you permission to talk, so I don't think you're mostly probably on mute. But if you want to, like Van, I see that you're off mute there, do you want to try talking to see if we can hear you?

2:34 I was, I hit that button by mistake, but I ignored it at first.

2:42 So I would say go ahead and keep yourself on mute until you have a question to ask, that way we're not picking up a lot of background noise and stuff. But I will try to watch as other people come online here. I'll try to give them the ability because I'd much rather have you ask the question verbally than to just have to type it into the chat box there.

3:06 So Peter, I see that you're on. Great, I know you had emailed Noah some questions, but why don't you kick us off here?

3:15 First of all, Peter sent us some of the coolest looking pictures from Florida that Brett and I and Dale have seen in a long time. He's doing some really cool things with some interceding and I think that was in the Bahaya pastures. But Peter, why don't you jump on and tell us a little bit about what you've done with your cover crops into those warm season perennials and then ask your question?

4:00 Well go ahead and address one of his questions that Peter sent in to us here. He was asking about how do we manage grazing of an annual cool season mix of grasses, legumes, and brassicas? How mature should it get before you start first grazing?

4:21 Keith, you want to kind of start on that?

4:24 Yeah, you know, like most answers, it probably starts with 'it kind of depends.' It depends on what species you have in there, and it depends on if you are planning on doing two or three rotations through the whole thing or if you're kind of, you know, with the way your rotation is set up, you're going to kind of come in and do a one and done kind of a thing because you're going to move to something else.

4:48 If you're planning on rotationally grazing it and you're going to try to come through two or three times on each paddock, you know, to take advantage of regrowth, then you want to start sooner rather than later because if you start with the first paddock when it's relatively small, by the time you get to the last paddock it's going to have enough growth to where you really want to be there. And then of course by the time you come back to that first one, you're going to have quite a bit of regrowth.

5:13 So there I would, you know, again depending on the species and how much time in the season is left that you have for regrowth, but I wouldn't be afraid to start, you know, when you're, I don't know, Brett, what do you think, 10 to 12 inches of height if on a lot of your grasses on that very first initial one? But you don't want to be in there very long. The smaller it is when you start, the less time that you can spend in that paddock and then as they get a little.

5:39 More mature a little more growth you can stretch that out and have a little more stock density and a little more time on those. And then by the time you come back around to that first one that you started on kind of early but didn't hit it very hard, it'll be quite a bit more growth that you can hit.

5:56 Yeah, a good rule of thumb that I've found that's been pretty useful in cool season mixes—now it may vary a little bit between the species—but about eight to ten inches of growth is about one ton of dry matter of what you have available forage.

6:20 The benefit in your scenario, Peter, that you are grazing over the top of a perennial base, and so the nice thing is you can afford a few mistakes in that learning curve because you have that perennial sod underneath.

6:37 The other thing that I find in grazing those cool season mixes over the perennial sod—the more residue you left and planted into the following fall or winter time frame is going to protect the base of that plant a lot better versus something that's been grazed down really tight. And so the cattle or livestock aren't going to go digging for that residue if there's plenty to eat. They're not going to bite it off at the very bottom of the plant. And so I find the regrowth in those scenarios also do a little bit better than something that's a clean field.

7:26 Sorry guys, I just figured out how to get this thing working. In doing so I missed part of the answer to my own question. Well, where I'm coming from with a question is I've been reading about a couple different schools of thought on how to graze the cool season annuals properly. I noticed that I've been trying to do top third grazing and it seems like the cows—the manure has been pretty staying pretty runny, a little bit of acidosis look on the manure. I've tried supplementing with dry hay but it hasn't taken as much, and I was reading something else that was suggesting that maybe you should let it get as mature as possible then go into it and take it all but go a lot slower to give yourself a longer recovery before you come back, and to me that's a little scary but I'm just searching for some different advice.

8:44 That's a possibility I wouldn't say to rule that out because you are over the perennial base. The one thing that I find it depends on what time of day you're moving and rotating. You know if those animals are out grazing early in the morning they are getting the lowest brix or lowest sugar and carbohydrate content of that grass first thing in the morning because that plant grows in the middle of the night, and so your nutrients are diluted. And so if you can rotate towards the middle of the afternoon that should help a little bit.

9:24 On that, those mixes are—you know if it's predominantly all cool seasons, some of those species are really high in protein and don't have the energy in them yet, and so that's the more diversity the better. We can get—wait, the way the pictures you showed us, I wish we could show it to everybody. You have a lot of green in front of you, so the top third is going to be the best bite and the most highest in brix. But I'm not sure if that's a perfect answer for your question. It just depends.

10:13 There might be some other options. I mean if you have brushy species in the paddock, things like that, rotating to those and letting those cattle browse some of those—those are going to be high in mineral and that might make them a little more efficient on getting better stool. But basically you're getting too much protein and not enough energy at that acidosis-looking manure.

10:41 Brett, do you think that in his situation he's not really worried too much about regrowth on those cool season annuals because as he gets into his Florida summers those things are going to kind of burn out in his warm season grasses are coming in? So he's not really looking at the regrowth of those cool season annuals as a component making his decision. Correct?

11:05 Yeah, I would agree. There are some things in there that we had like plantain and chicory that we'd like to have regrow through the summer, but those things actually take pretty severe grazing fairly well. And so if you wanted to let things get up in front of them a little bit more and take more at that, that's fine. It depends on how much grasses were in the mix versus legumes too.

11:35 If you're heavy on the grasses, pictures now yeah, those are some awesome pictures. So Peter, do you want to talk just a little bit about what you got going on here?

11:53 Yeah sure, that's obviously one of my better pictures, but it, this is the funny thing about this picture is this was an area that was overcome with briars. And several years ago, three four years ago actually, and I fed hay in this area quite a bit. And I addressed the pH of the soil with some liming and things like that, but this is one of my best areas.

12:28 What, going back to the question about the grazing, the other thing about our situation down here is we're getting 54 inches of rain a year, but sixty seventy percent of that's in summer. We get a little drier starting in November, and our springs are really dry. So the other concern I have about maybe taking it down too low, you know, would I be shooting myself in the foot because of that? Some of the stuff you put in my mix like the faba beans and some of the brassicas and so forth, they don't go to first unless you force them on it. Yeah, I feel like it helps keep a little shade on the ground, maybe helps hold the moisture and keep the sun off of it. You know, for instance today it's 88 degrees. Yeah, so we do go through some dry warm points, you know, during our cool season.

13:33 Yeah, I know I agree. I like those species, and particularly those species, so the brass, because if they're not hitting them, they're high in glucosinolates or starches. And so your claim is a little bit different to where you're not necessarily getting a freeze. Now if those were to receive a freeze, those starches would turn to sugars and all of a sudden they would hammer on those. But like you said, I, you know, we don't mind leaving some of those species in there. And it's not going to, I've done some trials on bermuda grass, but leaving that canopy there, it may put a little pressure on your early season of your bermuda or bahia coming out, but what I found is it delayed it more to where it was greener farther into August. And for me that's the harder time frame to be grazing than it is here in the spring, just because we're so hot and dry.

14:39 Yeah, and Brett, some of those species you know are higher in tannins like the fava beans tend to be kind of high in tannins. Why don't you talk a little bit about what tannins do and why that can be a good thing in a grazing mix?

14:52 Yeah, so tannins, there are tons of different tannins and it's hard to touch on all of them. Tannins typically aren't feedlot friendly. A lot of the feedlots have taken tannins out of the diet because it's limiting protein. But when you're out in the grazing world, mitigating some protein by binding it up and making a bypass protein is really beneficial. Those animals are less likely to blow on tannins. Certain tannin species are correlated with anthemic properties or deworming properties. There's just there's a whole variety of them. So the tannins do limit some palatability and it doesn't necessarily mean that's a bad thing. They might just come back to those species at a later date. You know, for instance we've seen guar and sun hemp have high tannins, but once they start flowering, same thing with hairy vetch. Once those species start flowering, something happens in the tannins in that plant to where those animals just turn on. And so it's, I don't think we understand them entirely, but they're not entirely a bad thing. Now if you have a solid tanning diet you might run into some issues, you know, if you don't, if everything is really high in tannins, you might have some issues there. But you know, again diversity is a key role in there.

16:36 We're just wanting to know if the technical difficulties are on our end or yours. Must be on ours. Well, I think you're pretty well, what kind of technical difficulty, you're not muted? It must be on our end. Are you not able to hear us? Okay, yeah, we didn't get any of that last about the crops. It's okay. It must be our end, we have sketchy internet.

17:10 Now that does happen. We'll just sit and wait. We can't hear you now. Feel free to go to the chat box if you have any questions and we can hopefully help answer them both in typing in and verbally. So and we're also recording this, so even if you aren't able to listen to it now, hopefully you could listen to it later. So yeah, what other questions do you folks have out there?

17:42 We run four, make it 12-7. Next up for the roughness. I'm kind of in a different situation, I guess. Can everybody hear me okay? Yeah, okay. I'm in a different situation. I'm kind of in the southern south plains of Texas where our rainfall is very sparse, but I have an opportunity where I'm grazing a pivot and it's been row cropped for a lot of years. And I've picked it up several years ago and try to keep a cover crop on it of some kind all the time. And now I'm looking to go away from row crop and just grazing the sheep herd that we have.

18:19 So my question is, do you try to chase an annual and do that a winter annual and then a summer annual, or do you go to more of a perennial and work it that way? And I know the cost difference is there in the seed and in planting, but whether they're mixes or monocultures, but preferably mixes. I didn't know. I've tried to do a little research. I've actually read Dale's book and I can't really pinpoint anything in there and maybe I'm just not looking hard enough to give me an answer on that.

18:58 Yeah, I can help answer that a little bit. Your first and foremost on the grazing side is perennials are always going to be the cheapest grazing over a long term. If that's 10 years, 20 years. If this is something that you think that might be a five-year system to where you're moving in grazing animals for four or five years, biennials are really a good option and then using annuals over the top.

19:32 Okay, now I think that in your climate, going all perennials is not necessarily a good thing because then you get, for instance, Bermuda grass is productive from April first to October 1st and then you have to fill that huge gap in the fall with hay. So if you go all perennials, you could get yourself into where you're doing a lot more hay, which double and triple and quadruple the cost of keeping animals. And so that's where I really like, you know, if you're a grazing system of utilizing a perennial but using annuals that reseed themselves, biennials like chicory and plantain are really great for sheep. Small burnet's another one. So that keeps your nutritional plane higher than what a perennial is.

20:36 And even on the perennial side, you want diversity. That's something that we have gotten ourselves into with the Bermuda grass. We've gotten ourselves into this triangle of inputs of spraying, haying, and fertilizing because we're trying to keep it a monoculture for max production. When we get diversity in there, say for instance alfalfa, a 50 percent stand of alfalfa in Bermuda will out yield 200 pounds of nitrogen put on Bermuda grass. There's been several studies done with alfalfa and Bermuda grass, and so that just shows that the diversity can be really beneficial for you.

21:25 And then the advantage that you have, you know, down where you're at, pretty far south, you have a long growing season. And with the water that you have, you can do a lot of the things like what Peter was doing. We showed a couple pictures there. If you have predominantly a warm season perennial, you know, like the Bermuda and alfalfa, you can still come in on the back side of the life cycle of those perennials and do your cool season, you know, rye grass or a cereal grain with some brassicas, some peas, things like that. You know, you really should be able to grow something there just about all year long in that climate that you're in.

22:08 And so then you can do perennials and annuals, biennials like Brett was saying. You can really kind of do all that at the same time. You may still not necessarily have year-round grazing because you just may not have enough acres unless you really break that pivot into multiple sections, but I'm sure you've got other grazing access as well.

22:29 With the growing season and with the water, I would really consider doing the warm season perennial and then being able to come in with the cool season annuals in that off-season.

22:43 The one thing I would say that, whether it's cattle or sheep or if you're trying to breed back in a lower energy point, energy is going to dictate 80 percent of your breed back in any reproductive herd. And so using annuals to stockpile energy for the fall time frame or for whenever you're trying to breed back can really be beneficial to getting that productivity up. You know, I was listening to Steve Campbell here this last week and, CAVS, 40 percent of your profitability is getting the breed back. And so having proper energy and having proper diversity out there to...

23:36 Help those animals breed back. It's not necessarily protein. A lot of people have been thinking protein, but he had a study that showed where it was low energy and high protein, that only one out of 10 cows bred back, where it was low protein and high energy, 10 out of 10 bred back. So it's very, very interesting studying, and I learned a lot there that just shines a light on how much diversity can play a role for us.

24:11 Hopefully that answered your question. As a general rule, red dead perennials are always going to be the cheapest in the long run. Annuals, of course, are a better short-term solution. You also have a lot more flexibility with annuals because you can, if you know you need grazing September first, you can just back that calendar up about 60, 75 days, and you can plant something and have a pretty good knowing.

24:49 Yes sir, that did answer my question. I guess the other spin on this that I did not tell you is it's lease ground, so it's not something that I own, and so you kind of have to think about, okay, well, you either need to make sure you sign a long enough term on your lease, or just stay with annuals from a risk standpoint of putting a lot of work in and then just having to walk away from it.

25:13 Yeah, exactly. That's a big emphasis on anything with lease. You know, what is your time frame we're talking about? So if I didn't have a five year lease or something, I don't think I'd consider perennials on it.

25:32 Great, good stuff. What other questions you folks have out there? Feel free to unmute yourself and ask the question.

25:43 Bob Kincaid here, central Missouri. Can you hear me?

25:50 Yup, go ahead Bob. We have a really problem here with the fescue, the toxicity from it, and so a lot of or overseed a lot of red clover early in the spring, but both those are cool season, and so our big time tough time to get through winter doesn't give me much of a problem, but July, August, you know, and sometimes that's June 15th to September 15th, and anyway it varies, but roughly 60 to 90 days of grazing.

26:29 This year we're trying, and I wish I could have had this question answer session earlier, but anyway, we did this on eight acres last year, just mowed, did not graze the fescue early, and then mowed it and burned it. We mowed it, let it cure just like hay, and then burned it. Now we did not have, we didn't put any clover on that for a year. This year I've taken 30, 36 acres I think it figures out in paddocks, it's eight paddocks, and going to do the same thing and trying to, I actually got didn't graze it as hard late in the fall so that we would have enough fuel to carry a good hot fire to suck us back, and everywhere we set had good fire.

27:31 I really got a good stand of all that broad brown leaf sorghum sedans type things and some sunflowers, and I don't know, but this year we're trying, I don't know if you can pull this up Keith, the number on the order is S 21 2409. Can you do anything like that?

28:00 Probably not. Yeah, let me go ahead and keep talking. Anyway, it's got soybeans, mung beans, forage peas, cow peas, sorghum sedan, pearl millet, teff, and there's a foreign collards and rapeseed and buckwheat too. Yeah, that's got all those, and if I get these things in the ground by April 15th, I'm going to try to be, you know, 10 days before that we're going to do the mowing and burning April 1st, you know, weather permitting, and I've rented one of those fancy Hutcheson drills that'll be a first two because last time we just overseeded it, disk kind of disk it in on that eight acres, that's we're going to try that drill, and is what is, would you guess would be a minimum length of time before I could come in and graze that?

29:17 I'll kind of answer that. So you're looking at mid-April planning. First of all, I really like the mix. I think part of that burning that you're seeing at success on is you're getting some nitrogen release from that residue, and when you're going grass on grass, say like a fescue to sorghum sedan, they're too much alike to where they're competing. So when you're getting more taprooted broadleaf species in there, they're going to be competing less for those nutrients, so the peas, the cow peas, I think that'll be good. April 15th in your climate might be a little bit early. Some of those species like cow peas, sunchein really like 65, 70 degree soils, and so they might start a little bit earlier.

30:17 Or a little bit later than like the spring peas, the buckwheat, sunflowers and collards. I would say, you know, obviously climate permitting, 45 to 60 days in that scenario is where you'll be looking at potential grazing. Because I think those warm seasons aren't going to come in a little bit later based off your climate, which is fine. Those seeds tend to hang around a little bit because again they have high tannins in the seed coat and those don't rot near as bad as say like a conventional soybean in the soil.

31:06 Another thing that you could consider on that, there Bob, is taking you know you got 36 acres in this field, you could take you know say eight or ten acres and you could come in even earlier than April 15th and plant something like a brown mid-rib corn and soybeans, which are both going to do well in the heat of the summer but will germinate at much cooler temperatures. You could even add sunflowers and buckwheat things like that, and that will come up and get going much quicker and then that would be the first stuff that you graze. Because that corn is not going, corn and soybeans aren't going to regrow very well, but you can get a lot of growth in that first six weeks and then you can be out grazing that while your sorghum cowpea type mixes are still you know gaining steam and growing and getting biomass. And then you hit those a little later, so you don't have to plant everything to the same mix. In fact, it's good to stage it out just a little bit to match the grazing that you want to try to accomplish with it. So that might be something to talk to Zach about is if you want to try some of that. The corn is relatively cheap to put out there. You don't have to have a whole lot of money invested in the BMR corn to get some. I wouldn't do it all that way because you're not going to see the regrowth and you may not get the diversity that time of year, but you could certainly do that on a portion of it.

32:33 Eric, I see you have your hand up.

32:40 Yeah, we plant after wheat. We're from central Kansas and we're putting in barley oaks, turnips, radishes, collards, and he was saying something there earlier about breeding problems. We turned bulls in on about the middle of the third week in November and we've getting quite a few returns when they're on that. We put they go on the cover crop about the 15th of October and we don't supplement anything, little dry hay. We give them, are we missing something there that's causing the returns?

33:18 Yeah, we ran into this scenario a little bit with the barley, the turnips, those things are still very vegetative again, high protein. I can't say that it's exactly this scenario, but more than likely you need a little more energy because I had a guy just north of you in Red Cloud, Nebraska had same scenario where they're breeding on lush rye in the fall and then on corn stocks, and the corn stocks weren't getting the returns. Well, corn stocks are high energy low protein. Where the rye, he was doing a rye monoculture, was very high protein and no energy. And so the other thing that could be happening is called blood urea nitrogen. When you're getting onto too lush of forage, you're getting a lot of protein which is nitrogen, and you're clotting up their kidneys. And typically the excess nitrogen is going to pass through the urine. When they start getting scours, usually you're starting to clot up the kidneys with too much nitrogen, which can affect your breed back. It'll increase the nitrogen in their blood content and it can be a, it's probably one of the most leading issues into pink eye because they're getting too much nitrogen in their diet.

34:58 A quick easy solution, say if you're planting after wheat and you're going say planting in August time frame, throwing in some cheap sorghum or BMR corn that you know it's going to winter kill, but those or even spring peas or spring oats. Spring peas and spring oats I love in the fall because they'll get twice the height, which is also that much more energy. But they're going to winter kill and so that kind of gives you some standing hay with that nutritious forage that you have there. But that could be very too much protein, not enough energy, is why you're getting some returns until it gets farther into the year where the energy content starts to come up. Brett, what do you think about like some brown top millet or something in there too, would that.

35:51 Japanese millet, you know, there's a whole list of things you can do in August. It doesn't need to be just overwintering species when you're grazing. I love the spring species because if we get an early frost it typically doesn't hurt them. If we get a long fall and it stays hot they still do pretty well. The spring peas are really drought tolerant in the fall. Throwing in a little bit of millet that's cheap, the grazing popcorn or BMR corn in the fall, that will get waist high planted mid-August in central Kansas.

36:42 Once it starts, if you're planting in say early September or late September it's harder to get some of those species in there. But if you're planting because you're going after wheat, you have a big opportunity window with a lot of heat units typically, getting in there with a little bit of other diversity early can be real beneficial. Even some things like sunflowers that would give a little bit more of that fiber. If you're planting towards the end of July, these sunflowers will put some heads on and even make some seed. Those oil seed sunflowers are extremely high in energy and that will really give a big energy boost as well.

37:35 They don't like sunflowers, they want to eat the turnips. They're going after that sugar content once it starts freezing. That's really high protein, but you do start getting decent energy in there. If it's winter barley and some other things in there that are overwintering species, you probably have a lot of protein content there that they really don't—they have too much and not enough energy. So throwing in things in there that might winter kill, cheap is a very good emphasis on that because we know it's winter killing. But the other solution would be putting out some straw bales or some real high dry straw for them to utilize to help balance that diet.

38:28 Now we have trouble getting the peas to get a stand to them for some reason. Is that cow peas or is that spring peas? Well cow peas is what we've been planting. Yeah, that's something that we could talk about a little bit. In the fall in that time frame, I really like—the cow peas are more of a warm season and those will frost kill. The spring peas or your 40-10 spring peas, they don't really winter kill until it's about 20 to 22 degrees. If they get really big in the fall they're more likely to winter kill. If they don't get very big they'll go quite a ways into the winter before they winter kill and they give you some nice nitrogen production for your spring time frame.

39:44 Keith is asking—did somebody else have something to say there? Yes hello, do you hear me? Yeah go ahead. I'm no fail from northeast Tennessee and my question is, can cover crops be used—we know that cover crop can attract beneficial insects—so my question, can it be used like to deter pests like as a pest management? My concern is about ticks. My land is pretty new, it's forested and I'm trying to clear it and thin it and it's full of ticks. I have sheep that I treat but I don't want to use a pesticide on the land. So is there a solution for this using cover crops?

40:49 Probably. Our pests down here, we do have ticks. The one that we really focus on is army worms here in Oklahoma and Arkansas. Your parasitic or your predator insects aren't really going to probably be targeting ticks. But what your goal would be is to attract more birds into your operation—so quail, western meadowlarks, songbirds, those turkey. All those species really need flowering plants in the early stages of their brood life. The chicks can't digest seeds very high. That's why I say bermuda grass can be kind of hard on our areas for those beneficials, whether it's insects or birds, because it's not providing any insects early in the season, it's just late in the season. Attracting dove, quail, all those species will really help your tick numbers. Turkey are great, and that might give you a joint opportunity to raise some chickens or guineas or something like that in that same system.

48:06 You know, I wouldn't be afraid to try a little bit of spring because if there's not a whole lot there, you have very bacterial-dominated soil more than likely, and you want to get more fungal. So at least maybe using some annuals in there with those perennials—say barley. You could use like a beardless barley and use a winter barley in the spring, where it's not going to head out if you're going to try to train animals out there on that land.

48:46 Cereal rye should be able to tolerate at 8.2. If you plant cereal rye late in the spring, it's not going to get over six inches tall, and so that would at least get some roots in the ground with those perennials to start building that fungal community.

49:06 Yellow blossom sweet clover would do well in those high pH's too, and that's a biennial, so you know you should get some decent growth out of that, I would think.

49:22 Those are tough situations. When you once you get going and you can grow something, then that gives you more organic matter which helps you grow even more. So it's a self-perpetuating circle, but to kind of get that flywheel started—that carbon flywheel started—it can be a real slow process. And it is very expensive to import carbon because that has to come in the form of like manure or compost or a hay bale or something like that. It's much easier to grow it, but when you're starting out with really tough conditions, it's not always a fast process.

50:04 A lot of people I know, some of the farmers around here, they use, they used to use gypsum, but to me gypsum would raise—you know, it's carbonated in it—wouldn't that raise the pH?

50:17 It's used in high pH scenarios. I'll be honest, I don't know a whole lot about it. It is a calcium-based product. But from what I understand, its nutrient tie-up is what the issue is—why the high pH. I can't remember if it's potassium or potash that it ties up. I believe it's potassium that high pH's are tying up, and that's causing your lack of plant growth. And so like I said, I don't know enough about to really give you a recommendation on it. But I think that you're right—gypsum is a calcium-based product. But my understanding is, from a chemistry standpoint, that calcium is all in an unavailable or tied-up form, so that when you put that into your soil, it's not raising pH like if you were putting lime out there. It's a whole different chemical formulation, and so it can actually help lower the pH, which doesn't make any sense to me at all because where we farm, we have low pHs, so we're trying to raise them. We use a product that's similar to gypsum in that it comes out of the coal plants from the scrubber stacks, but it's called power line. And basically it's sort of like gypsum, but all of the calcium is not activated and tied up. We're able to get some effectiveness out of that calcium to help raise the pH's. And so with gypsum, my understanding is that calcium is all in a form that's not going to raise your soil pH, but yet it can do some of the things that Brat was talking about there.

52:10 Yeah, I can chip in there. The what ag-lime does—it's actually the carbonate part of the ag-lime that neutralizes acidity. The calcium in gypsum is combined with sulfate—calcium sulfate. So even though the calcium has a bit of an alkaline effect, the sulfate has an acidic effect, which neutralize each other. And one of the reasons why gypsum is so beneficial on certain high pH soils is if you have sodium issues, which causes that very hard, tight soil. A lot of times, you know, water doesn't go in, water doesn't come out, makes a greasy-looking soil that when it's wet and it's rock hard when it's dry. A lot of times you'll have salt issues there as well. Calcium will displace the sodium off the clay, and when you have sodium in the soil, it causes all the clay particles to separate and you lose all your soil structure and just basically turns it into something like plato. And when you get calcium, which has a different ionic radius, to displace that sodium, calcium will chemically combine those clay particles into aggregates, so you can get some air and water flow through the soil. So that's kind of how the gypsum works.

54:02 What kind of a rate would you put on? Typically, is it kind of like lime or is it lower rates?

54:10 It's similar to lime. It's usually in the 1,000 to 2,000 pounds an acre range.

54:17 Depends on how much sodium you have. And then of course if you have a high pH due to excess calcium, then gypsum is not going to help that situation. It's only when the high pH is caused by biceps that is beneficial.

54:44 Keith, I had sent you the back then I had sent you a copy. Well I threw Jacob. Yeah you're kind of cutting in and out there, I didn't really hear quite all that. I said when I was working with Jacob back in September, I had sent you a copy of this all analysis I sent him and he gave it to you to get recommend what seeds to use. So I don't know if you would still have that but that would tell you whether if I have a high salt or other kind of issue.

55:26 I will look for that and we can get that over to Dale to analyze it. Okay, if not I can email it to you again. That might be the quickest way to make sure. I'm not going to lie, I've had a lot of emails between now and then so I imagine so. I stopped a couple times since then. Okay I'll go ahead and do that. Perfectly, thank you. All right that's it for me, thank y'all.

55:56 You bet. Well we got time for a few more questions if anybody else has anything out there.

56:07 Hello guys, this is Willie Gibson in Vermont. Hi Willy, thank you very much. You guys really help a lot of us. I really love the fact that you guys are so willing to put out so much energy and your educational part. I've never bought a seed from you and I'm not sure if I ever will. I live up in Vermont up here in the Northeast. I'm an agronomist of sorts and work with a company as a sales rep as well, but my main concern is, as it has always been, is really trying to help farmers make a better living. And one of the issues that I'm really grappling with right now is trying to adopt the use of interceding cover crops into our corn fields up here, probably mid to late June or something like that. And we're always numbers of years behind the Midwest in terms of equipment and crop advances and things like that just because it's our part of the world. And I've learned a lot about interceding and yet at the same time, getting that to actually work up here in the Northeast on mainly silage fields. Love to hear your tips, you know, anything you could say about it would be great to hear.

57:39 I'll pitch in a little bit here. I'm definitely not familiar with your climate, but there's some really good research to look up in New Zealand and Australia. It refers a lot of diversity, especially like your plantain and your chicory. Utilizing them, now they're comparing it in a perennial rye grass scenario. A lot of times their big monoculture crop is perennial rye grass for their dairies, but they've really shown some light on people that, you know, if you're talking a silo scenario, the benefits of tannins and some of those highly mineralized species. How it can increase animal performance even in the feedlot. And so they have some really good research that I would look up: chicory, plantain, some of those species in those regions that may help you answer some of those questions. Again, you know, it's context to where you are and stuff like that, but I look at their research because, you know, they don't carry the feed to the animal so much. Where they take the animal to the feed. And so that's really part of that battle too.

59:10 Willie, for the most part, would you say that guys are wanting to do this interceding into silage corn for soil health and just to give the corn a little extra boost? Or are they looking to produce additional biomass that can go into the silage pile as well? It's both, but you know the initial is to try to get a good cover crop established for soil health and potentially, you know, just better nutrient cycling and that type of thing. But I have had the question posted to me, you know, are there some things that we could potentially plant that would add to the feed and the feed quality potentially? So I appreciate you mentioning that about some of those particular species that I could be looking up a bit more on.

59:58 Yeah, so with interceding in corn, your number one limiting factor is almost always going to be sunlight. You know, because that corn just jumps out ahead and it does a great job of canopying the ground and it keeps weeds from growing once you kind of get out ahead of them. And it does the same thing to the cover crop.

1:00:16 Cover crops, you know it doesn't know that that's not necessarily the weed but you want it to go. So the key there is to try to figure out how to work around that limitation of lack of sunlight. And several ways that you can do that: number one, get it planted earlier. You know, if you wait till V5, V6 to get your companion crop planted with your corn, your corn is just going to outgrow it and you're not going to hardly have anything there. So a lot of guys have been experimenting getting in there at V2, V3. If you're past V4, you're probably too late. V2, V3, which should be just fine, and in a silage setting, you know where anything that you can grow is going to be additional tonnage, I don't know that I would be afraid to plant it at the same time as your corn.

1:01:08 And then what you're looking at in that scenario is getting something to grow fast. So you're going to be looking at something like a forage soybean or cow peas. Cow peas can tend to grow fast and they can even bind and climb up the corn plants so they keep their leaves up in the top of the canopy, which can really help with that lack of sunlight issue.

1:01:33 There's been a lot of experimentation going on with widening the rows of your corn to let more sunlight in to the corridor space, right? That's mostly been done with grain corn because you can spread that out and not necessarily hurt your grain yield too much. I don't know that I've seen any studies with it done on silage corn to see what that would do to the overall, you know, TNY gel. But it's interesting to think about.

1:02:03 Yeah, we have a good university researcher up here, Heather Darby in Vermont, who's actually done some of the 60-inch rows for the past couple years on a research farm that she has. So that's all those things are kind of possibilities for sure. I think the timing and the species are really the key. And then once we get the equipment set up for it, I mean, I really feel like we need to really seed these in. We can't just kind of broadcast them and scratch them around with a cultivator.

1:02:37 I worked with extension years ago and we did that in the mid-90s with a bunch of stuff. We did a bunch of interseeding in corn and used a cultivator to kind of scuff the soil a bit, and it sort of worked. But honestly, we're using cool-season plants and that's still kind of what most people think about. And I'm like you, I'm not thinking that the cool-season plants are what makes sense because they don't like the heat and then they get shaded out as well and they just really don't make it.

1:03:07 I would only do the cool-season plants if it was regular grain corn and you don't want a significant amount of growth there. You're just trying to keep something alive and then hope that it can kind of come back and grow in the fall. But in a silage setting, I would go warm season. And I say a forage soybean or cow pea are going to be your best choices there to really get as much growth as possible. You can throw other things in there too. You know, buckwheat. I've had guys throw sunflowers in. You know, if you can get that sunflower to make a head, it adds a lot of value to silage. The stock part doesn't but the head and the oil certainly does. I would experiment with a number of things on a small scale to kind of see what you could get to work.

1:03:51 Yep, I think gourds would be a great contributor to silage corn as well.

1:03:59 Gourds? What's that, gourds? I don't even know what that is. This is my spelling like decorative gourds: G-O-U-R-D-S. You have to forgive my southeast Kansas hillbilly lingo here.

1:04:19 Well, that's all right, I just didn't. I only got you in one ear and it's probably my bad ears.

1:04:28 Yeah, how about sun hemp? Sun hemp is—well, there's two things that you do kind of have to be careful. There's an alkaloid in your most, you know, your invasive sun hemps that you have to be careful of, and it's also really high in tannins. The other side of that is that stock does tend to turn to rope once it starts to lignify. I'm not sure how that would look in a silage chopper. I'd hate to be the guy that has to cut it out.

1:05:05 And so yeah, we've had enough going on with hemp up here already, making combines burn up and things like that. So yeah, I don't think I'd do sun hemp, just strictly from a harvestability standpoint.

1:05:19 I really like the sunflowers and like, like Dale said, the gourds or pumpkins.

1:05:26 Those forb species and even the chicory and plantain, those species are really high in minerals. And you have to kind of take, you know, most people are controlling their mineral program in the feedlot, but the minerals in your salt block or loose feed are only 20% available to the animal. The other 80% come out the back end. If those minerals are coming through a plant, those are 90% available to that animal. And so you get a lot more absorption. And the more diversity you get on those 40 species, so I do like that idea of those other warm season species that will compete.

1:06:14 Well, that's really helpful. Thank you, guys.

1:06:18 I've got one question here submitted in the question and answer box from Eddie. He's asking about if he starts planting wheat again, should I plant fixation belongs to clover after wheat harvest, or can you frost seed it? Didn't know if the clover would outgrow wheat before you could harvest it.

1:06:35 Eddie, on that one, you know, I would not plant. I wouldn't do either of those, to be honest. Fixation is a very cold tolerant annual clover. You're going to have the best results with that if you plant that around the end of August, first part of September. You'll get some growth on it. It will overwinter, and then it will just go bonkers in the spring, early enough to where you can still roll that down and plant corn into it. Then it doesn't do nearly as well if you spring plant it, and it doesn't have that chance to kind of go dormant and vernalize. It's not going to be the same plant.

1:07:14 So you can harvest your wheat. You could probably even do a quick crop of like buckwheat and mill it, depending on when you harvested your wheat, or you can just kind of wait. I would plant that Balanza if you're east of Kansas City. You know, I would think somewhere in that around Labor Day would be just about right, and you'll have all kinds of growth on that the next spring.

1:07:42 All right, so yeah, go ahead.

1:07:47 No, just thanking you for that. I was wondering, you know, I'm corning beans now. I'm trying to figure out a way to get nitrogen from my corn, but not be too late planting it. And you know, I'm no-till and I'm cover crops too. I'm, you know, getting seed from you. If you're doing that wheat rotation, you know, like he said, those warm seasons like cow peas. Say if you're trying to plant in the fall, obviously you don't want to mix clover and peas together because they're two way different seed sizes and they're going to separate out the drill.

1:08:24 But you could use some spring peas in the fall. I do like those larger seeds because they have more stored energy in the seed to where they'll start faster. So spring peas in the fall will fix most of their nitrogen that fall and winter kill, and then your Balanza would fix most of its nitrogen the following spring.

1:08:48 Yeah, so if you're coming in right after wheat harvest, you could come in with cow peas, sun hemp, mung beans, spring peas, and things like that. I bet you could grow 150 to 170 pounds of nitrogen and have it all winter kill. And then you could plant your corn as early as you wanted to.

1:09:08 If you come in with a hairy vetch or Balanza clover or a winter pea, that's going to give you most of the growth in the spring. It probably is going to delay your corn planting unless you're willing to sacrifice some nitrogen production by terminating those cover crops early. So you've got a couple of options there. And I've had organic guys that will do both. They'll grow warm season stuff for 60 days. They'll either mow it, till it, or roll it, and then come in with either hairy vetch or Balanza clover around that first of September, even mid-September if they didn't get their warm season stuff planted. That's kind of extreme, and you know, organic guy, that's that may be their only chance of getting nitrogen, so they're willing to do it.

1:09:53 But you can certainly have a lot of options after wheat that you don't have in strictly a corn bean rotation. So you know, would not be surprised at all for you to grow 150 to 180 pounds of nitrogen in that time frame.

1:10:06 Would you put some winter barley or something that's something to keep green, and then not last year I know-tilled green to that and then burned it down?

1:10:19 You sure could. I mean, you're going to have volunteer wheat as well, and I would just let that volunteer wheat grow as part of the cover crop. But you could do a winter barley or something like that in addition to it.

1:10:32 All right, well, folks, I think we'll wrap up for this week. I have recorded this, Noah. We'll get this posted if you want to go back, or if you gave such wonderful answers you want to share them with your friends. If you think they could benefit from it, we'll be here again next week. If you signed up for this week's session, I'm pretty sure Noah will already send you the invitation for next week. We'd love to talk to you again next week, and hopefully we'll have lots more good questions to answer then. So thanks everybody for joining us and have a great evening.

1:11:12 You guys, thank you.