Cover Crop Q&A Part 2: Silage Alternatives, Rye & Corn Yield, and Planter Options

0:33 Hey Brett. Hey Keith. You guys get more rain down there today? Yeah we had about a half inch so that was about right. We have good subsoil moisture. I think we're going on 10 inches in 10 days. Here we've had three inches this go around and probably seven last week it's crazy.

1:02 Well I think we're going to have to find a new mowing guy for this summer. Was that he made the front page news of the went to jail for selling drugs. Apparently he had a summer business and a winter business. Yeah well that's yeah there is such a thing as bad publicity I guess huh. Unlawful possession of controlled drug with intent to distribute drug activity and unlawful possession of drug paraphernalia which has to be.

1:46 Being here again we are live on Facebook as well. Basically what we're doing today, same thing we did last week we are here to answer questions so we just want you folks to ask questions. Myself I'm Keith Burns. Brett Peschick, he is my main guy down in Oklahoma my sales rep and agronomist down there. And then we also have Dale Strickler on the phone. He will be here to answer questions as well Dale say hi. Hello everyone so you can ask any question you want, any topic around soil health around grazing. You know Dale's written a couple of really good pasture management grazing type books if you have any questions around that. Brett is running a variety of different animals down in Oklahoma, pastured pigs sheep goats as well as cattle. So we've got quite a bit of experience here on the call.

2:49 I am since we're a relatively small group, I am allowing everybody to talk so if you'd like to ask a question just unmute yourself and ask your question or if you want to raise your hand there should be a little button at the bottom of your Zoom screen where you can click on it and you can raise your hand and then I can specifically call on you to do that so anybody got a question they want to start with.

3:29 All right we can maybe answer one of Eric's questions that he emailed in yesterday. Eric is in northeast Iowa, corn yields 225 and he chops silage about 25 to 30 tons per acre. Is there something else that we could plant the same amount of feed for cattle, would like to diversify but corn is awfully hard to beat on the yield wise in that climate. Dale do you want to kind of start off with that.

4:06 Yeah I've got some thoughts. I mean agriculture, it's all about converting sunlight into something useful and obviously in this case there's something useful that thereafter is silage and every day that you can capture sunlight is good in producing biomass. And not that corn is bad, corn silage corn really only occupies the ground for about four months which leaves eight months open to grow something else. And so you know I look at someone who's trying to maximize silage yield and do so at minimal expense, I think something that I would consider in addition is let's say you go ahead and produce the corn silage and then as just as soon as that silage is off the field go in and plant a cool season crop and say triticale or triticale mixed with a few other species for added diversity and maybe a vining species like a winter pea that could fill in the gaps between the triticale tent, produce some protein and then harvest that in say late May the following year and which might be a little late for planting corn but is right on time plant a forage sorghum, a dwarf forage sorghum that's much cheaper to plant than the corn, also gives you a little diversity in your system and that could be chopped in say late November and then that could in turn be followed by another cover crop just put there to hold the soil you know do what a cover crop does, maybe some rye or hairy vetch just to give a little bit back to that soil because silage is a very soil depleting crop, especially if the manures never return back to the field. You know the other thing you could do is diversify that corn. Instead of corn by itself you could plant something like corn and cow peas or corn sunflowers or something interceded between the cornrows.

6:52 So that the day you harvest silage you have something there photosynthesizing already, returning some root exudates to the ground and maybe that can be pastured in the winter if pasturing is an option. I mean there's a number of ways to diversify out of this system. What do you guys think?

7:14 Yeah, I was going to highlight that particularly in interceding corn, you know a monoculture, you hardly ever capture over 50 percent of the actual sunlight in a monoculture system just because of the angle of the leaves. But the more diversity you can add, you're catching more sunlight. You're creating more carbon, you're stimulating more biology.

7:47 So I really think that adding to that corn, whether a cowpea, a sunflower, something with height, you know even a squash or a pumpkin in there. Part of that is also, you know, 90 percent of your minerals are available through a plant in the dry form if you're if you have a mineral program. A lot of times that mineral that's coming in the bag is only 20 percent available to that plant. So getting in the plant form through biology through soil health is going to be a lot better for animal performance.

8:23 So part of it is yield here, but other parts may be animal performance if you add BMRs in there. Every degree of palatability can increase animal performance, or digestibility can increase animal performance three to five percent. So there's a lot of options there. You know, part of it is yield, part of it is dry matter intake, part of it could be mineral density, plant diversity for the animals' health benefit. There's a lot of aspects to that.

9:04 So yeah, I agree though, I mean corn is pretty hard to beat, you know, the initial question. How can we add to it is what we really do look at in that scenario. Yeah, no, that's right. Corn is going to be hard to beat. You need to kind of be like my wife, you know, when she gets something it's 'oh, this is really nice, so what else do I get too?' And so the answer is not what can I have instead of corn.

9:30 The answer is what else can you add with the corn to extend the benefits. And I think you guys gave great answers on that. So definitely, you know, I wouldn't necessarily try to replace the corn, but what can you add to it? Not only to build diversity but also to build that overall tonnage. And I think even by going to a shorter season corn if you needed to, you know, if you took that triticale silage off in late May, you could go to a shorter season corn or like Dale said, even a forage sorghum for silage. And your overall tonnage for the year is still going to be higher, especially in that good country there in Iowa. So great answers there, hope that helped, Eric.

10:23 What other questions do we have from out there either on Facebook or from our people that are logged on here? Surely somebody's got a question. You didn't just come on to hear answers, did you?

10:35 Well, I would like to add, I would love for somebody to try gourds in silage corn because it vines like a pumpkin but it climbs and the fruits hang up in the canopy. I think that'd be a great way of adding a lot of energy density to some silage crop.

10:57 Yeah, Nebraska has done a lot of research on pumpkins, particularly for energy content. And a lot of your vining species are really high in energy, you know, 80 percent digestibility in energy.

11:14 Yeah, and that, you know, you can go out there and, you know, assuming my wife does hear this and I'm beating the dog house, see, I could go out and pick a whole mess of gourds for her to decorate the house with and get out of the dog house before we take silage off. That so we do have a question in the Q&A box from an anonymous attendee. And this is a great question. How do you deal with Palmer amaranth? How do you do it with fewer herbicides? Plus, if you do have to use herbicides, how will this set back restoring soil health?

11:48 So Dale, why don't you start with that because I know you've got an entire presentation and we don't want you to give the entire presentation about Palmer amaranth control. I will find the link to that and I'll put it in the chat box so people can watch that on YouTube.

12:06 Go ahead and kind of give us the cliffs notes version of how to deal with this.

12:11 If you've ever watched a movie about an assassin, the first thing the assassin does is they study their target. And if you understand the needs and wants of palmer amaranth and deprive that plant of those needs, then palmer amaranth is going to have a real hard time.

12:40 What conditions does palmer amaranth like? Well, it's a very small seeded plant so that seed only contains a small amount of energy and it really has to have its nitrogen in the nitrate form. It has a hard time using even ammonium. It does not utilize well. It likes nitrate. And so it likes bare soil.

13:15 Why does it like bare soil? Well, that seed contains only a small amount of energy—it's only about enough to grow a three quarters of an inch long sprout. So if it germinates in soil that's covered in mulch that's more than three quarters of an inch thick, those seedlings have a very difficult time reaching sunlight before they run out of the energy stored in the seed. So having a good thick mulch can control it.

13:44 And then depriving the plant of nitrate. And if your next crop is soybeans, using a cover crop like rye—really any winter cereal, but rye is particularly effective because it has an added layer of control as we'll discuss in a bit. But just sucking up all that nitrogen that's left over from the previous crop. And you're not making the nitrogen disappear, you're just changing it from nitrate into protein in that residue.

14:21 And if your next crop is soybeans, they're a legume. They make their own nitrogen, so they don't mind having a low nitrogen condition. In fact, they'll thrive and fix more free nitrogen in a low nitrate condition.

14:37 And then the other things that can really help in the fight against palmer amaranth is allelopathy. There are some cover crops that are allelopathic towards pigweeds, palmer amaranth, waterhemp and so forth. Rye is probably the most famous of those and has three compounds that are toxic to pigweeds. Curry veg has a compound that's toxic to pigweeds. And in our plots last year we noticed that spring peas and winter peas also seem to be very very suppressive against pigweeds. And some of the mustards appear to be pretty suppressive against pigweeds.

15:34 And then finally another tool that you can use is mycorrhizal fungi. Pigweeds are not mycorrhizal hosts, so they don't benefit from the association. Which means if you give your crops mycorrhizal fungi that extend out and expand the ability to absorb water and nutrients out of the soil, they can basically out-compete the pigweeds for any nitrate that's in the soil. And without that nitrate, remember pigweeds just don't thrive.

16:18 We've got a picture we can probably post of one of our plots and it's not palmer amaranth but it is kosha, which is also non-mycorrhizal. And where we inoculated the plot, two adjacent plots one inoculated one not, the size of the kosha shrank from waist high to about six inches tall just to the line where we inoculated mycorrhizal fungi. Really gives a tremendous advantage to your crop.

16:52 I'm a little nervous that you know how to think like an assassin quite so well. I'm going to get nervous. By the way, can I have a raise? I see you studying me so intently there.

17:08 But to your point on the mycorrhizal fungus, I think it goes beyond that even. You know, as people are doing these biological soil tests and they're seeing their fungal to bacteria ratio get better and have more just overall fungal component and less bacteria, they're seeing less and less pigweeds and weeds in general, but certainly pigweeds specifically, because they thrive in a bacterially dominated soil and they do not want to grow in a fungal soil.

17:44 And things that will promote bacterially dominated soil are tillage and monocultures and high doses of synthetic inputs, which many of us, you know, we're still guilty of that on some of our stuff too. And so sometimes we create our own.

18:02 Problems and then we go kind of back our way out in figuring out how to deal with that. Brett, do you have anything to add to that? We got a couple questions on Facebook, I'll go to next. Oh, not a whole lot. I mean, Dale really hit the nail on the head there. I'll just say a little bit of what I've done down here is I've really done some trials of cutting cold turkey on fertilizers down here in a grazing system, and I have not seen a pigweed on my place yet, and I know they're there. It's just since I've cut out the artificial inputs, I haven't seen it. Now I do have marestail and other types of weeds that are of a concern or finding other ways to control, but as far as the pigweed, the boogeyman in the closet, has not shown its face in terms of my system doing it that way.

19:00 Yeah, you know, to add on to Dale's point about that residue, that thick mulch mat to prevent that seed from germinating and coming on. Most of the time what we see when we grow cover crop rye is we can really have effective control. We can almost completely eliminate mare's tail because that comes on so early, and I can really put the hurt on the early flushes of pigweed and waterhemp and amaranth. But it seems like as I get into the summer and my canopy, that residue mulch breaks down. What makes Palmer such a tough enemy is it just will germinate all through the year. Our organic guys in Indiana who have been doing this for a long time, here's the number that they tell us, and this is a big number. They say to have season-long control of weeds from a cover crop, they want to see 8,000 pounds of dry matter. Now that's not 8,000 tons of wet clipping. That's 8,000 pounds of dry matter out there is what they think they need to get in order to have season-long weed control from that mulch.

20:15 So you know, that's going to be a pretty good rye crop that's six feet tall and heads out before you roll it down. You can't be spraying your rye out when it's 18 inches tall and expect to have much weed control once you get into June, July, and August. So just keep those things in mind though. You know, that may not be as important to you as moisture conservation if you're in a drier area. You may not want to delay your planting in order for your cover crop to get to that stage. So there's a lot of considerations to be made there, but that's just a number that I hear thrown out there on how much biomass you need for that really good control.

20:57 Michael Thompson has a great question on Facebook. He is asking if open-pollinated corn in a warm season mix is a good viable alternative to BMR grazing corn in that same grazing mix. Michael, my answer to that is we're going to find out, and you're going to help us find out. We've been selling a couple of different types of BMR corn, and they've worked pretty well. But we are going to be looking at some open-pollinated corns this year. We're going to be trying to grow some Jimmy Redcorn. Based on some of the things that Michael and other people have been seeing out in their fields, you know, we do think that some of these older heritage-type open-pollinated corns can be a very viable option because they don't have as high a lignin as some of the new modern varieties, certainly not like what a GMO like a Bt corn or something like that would have. We just think that palatability is going to be higher. When you go out and do a Brix measurement in the summertime, those open-pollinated, especially the older heritage types like a Jimmy Red, are going to be higher in that Brix level. I don't know, Brett, have you done much with open-pollinated corn?

22:16 I haven't done a whole lot, but a little bit to kind of address the particularly that high Brix is what's really intriguing to me because part of your digestibility, you need mineral density for that process. When the corn or sorghums reduce that lignin trait, but we're not necessarily increasing the mineral density. Now if we have a plant out there with a higher Brix content or can host with soil health better or whatever to raise that Brix content naturally.

23:02 Think it has a lot of merit in a system like that. Both of them are going to have both good traits. The BMRs are still very beneficial in a feed system, but the Brix indicator on the other side of that is if that plant is producing higher sugars and minerals, according to John Kemp, if that plant is putting off more sugars, we're hopefully leaching more sugars to the soil biology too. That's an opinion or assumption of mine is that we are essentially putting off more sugars to the biology with a crop that tests higher in Brix.

23:51 There's a lot of factors that do affect Brix. Maturity, climate, stresses, etc. do affect Brix. Soil health affects Brix. But on a scale, if that plant particularly is always testing higher in different climates, then I think that's a good opportunity or good plant to be using.

24:23 Steve asked the follow-up question on Facebook how does popcorn compare in that mix with BMR corn, open pollinated corn, popcorn. We have been using popcorn for a couple of reasons. Number one, it is going to be lower in lignin and it is a guaranteed non-GMO because it does not cross pollinate with dent corns. So we have a really high confidence in its non-GMO purity.

24:52 Dale, have you seen—we've sold a decent amount of popcorn. We grew some popcorn last year that was a monstrous plant. We got a variety of popcorn, we went to the popcorn breeders and said we want the biggest, tallest, leafiest popcorn plant that you've got because we don't care about the grain yield. We just want a lot of biomass to graze. And the breeder said, 'Oh, I've got just the thing for you.' We grew that, and if any of you were at our summer field days last year, you saw it. That stuff looked like field corn. It was a huge plant.

25:28 Dale, what have you seen in the guys that you've sent popcorn out to for grazing? They like it. It's definitely better than dent corn, especially modern dent corn with BT and so forth. The palatability is well in excess of normal field corn. I would say it's probably comparable to the open pollinated bent corns and it's going to be a notch below the BMR corn.

26:07 One place I really like to use popcorn is for an August planting, and because of the round seed size and how easily it goes through a drill, it does stand a lot better in the fall and winter than what BMR corn does. BMR corn, because of the lack of lignin, really kind of melts away and lays flat on the ground after frost. Popcorn will actually stick up a little bit, and that can be valuable.

26:48 Eric had his hand up for quite a while here. Just one thing before we move on—we are going to be doing some trials this coming year and we'll have the BMR corn, the open pollinated Jimmy Red corn, and popcorn all side by side. We'll measure them for biomass, we'll measure them for nutrient content, and then we'll turn cattle in and graze it and we'll do a palatability study. We want to do this in several locations, so if you think you're set up to be able to do that and collect some good data for us or at least allow us to come in and collect some good data, shoot us an email and let us know because we are going to be doing some of those side-by-side comparisons.

27:36 I would like to add a little bit to that on the popcorn. I did plant some this spring here down in Oklahoma, and I think the seed size is a huge benefit of popcorn. I'm actually running it through soybean plates in my John Deere 7000 planter and doing a mix of peas, popcorn, and so hopefully we'll know in a couple weeks if I'm doing too much seed damage there. But as far as I can tell, I'm finding that the popcorn flows through soybean plates in a John Deere 7000 relatively easy, so it makes mixes a lot easier to do through a planter.

28:20 Eric, if you want to unmute yourself, you could ask your question now. You've got your hand up. Can you hear me? Yes, sir. I was going to try to no-till plant into corn into living rye and then spread.

28:44 Urea 80 pounds with an N serve, and then I'll come back with Y drops. Is that gonna get enough nitrogen being it's on living rye, or am I going to run short before it gets to it?

29:03 Well, you're definitely right to be concerned about that nitrogen tie-up because when you plant green like that, the biggest risk in my opinion is nitrogen tie-up because that rye is going to have everything in your soil profile sucked up. It's very good at doing that, and that's great ahead of soybeans. That's exactly what you want. Ahead of corn, you really have to manage that well. So you're wanting to spread the urea at planting time. Is that the timing on that?

29:32 Yeah, right after I get it planted, I'd go back. Yeah, and you do 80 pounds of actual in, and then how much would you put on with your Y drops? From probably about another 80. Yeah, you know, 160 pounds all, you know, after or at planning or after. I would think that that's going to be pretty close to, you know, getting you a full nitrogen needs.

30:06 You would want to make sure you got that rye killed, you know, terminated immediately after planting so that it doesn't linger out there and, you know, suck up half that 80 pounds that you put on, you know, right after you planted your corn. So are you rolling that rye down, or how are you going to terminate that?

30:26 Most years it, I'm the one from northeast Iowa, and it usually hasn't been getting very big. So it's been I don't know, eight inches tall is about as big as it's been when the corn, last year the corn was about two inches tall when I killed the rye, was eight inches tall.

30:49 Okay, so if you're terminating your rye at that stage, I wouldn't have any concerns at all with nitrogen tie-up because your carbon nitrogen ratio on that is so low. That rye is going to disappear. Whatever nitrogen it has in its biomass is going to cycle back through the system, and I think you'll be fine. Where people have the issues is when they're planting a little later, they're planting in the rye that's starting to head out, you know, it's five feet tall. That's where you really have those issues. So with the program that you're talking about, I think your nitrogen program is spot on. I don't think you'll have any issues with that at all. And in fact, if you did get your corn planting delayed for some reason and that rye got even bigger, I think you'd still be okay from a nitrogen cycling standpoint because you're delaying those applications, and you know, you're going to cycle that through. As long as that rye is, when it's pre-boot again, that carbon nitrogen ratio is pretty low and it's going to cycle pretty quickly.

31:52 Okay, I would add something to that. A lot of times there's a yield depression of corn following rye that really isn't, doesn't seem to be accounted for completely by nitrogen. And I'm looking for an article I was going to try to send it to Keith that talks about Iowa State did some study, and they found that corn planted into green rye had very high levels, eighty percent plus levels of lithium and Fusarium root rot when planted green, and dry. It's like the rye acted as a green bridge for those organisms. And corn planted into rye that had been killed more than 14 days prior had five to ten percent of those diseases. And there's quite a yield hit in those fields now.

33:11 That's not to say that it's a guarantee if you plant green into rye that you'll have those issues, because, you know, those organisms need specific conditions and they need a certain amount of moisture. And you know, no guarantee that that's going to happen. But I think most of the yield depression that we see in corn planted into rye is due to nitrogen, but that green bridge to that builds up those pathogenic populations can also be an explanation. And their recommendation was to kill the rye two weeks prior to planting corn. So that's, you know, not maybe not the best for long-term soil health, but it will help preserve the yield potential on your corn.

34:10 That our treatment. My neighbor has, he's been doing the cover crops here, rye and strip till for I don't know, 10, 15 years. And he does custom strip tilling, so he's always late getting his corn planted. So his rye is big, and he's had, he's got 80 acres that he split the long way, and he's been

34:39 Doing cover crops on the one half and just strip till on the other half and no cover crop. And over the years he's been a couple bushels more in the rye. And then this year it got laid or he planted his corn no tilled at this time into the rye. They had nitrogen on the planter and then it got wet. He did get the rye killed right away and the rye was like three feet tall before they got it killed. And he didn't knock it down or anything so the corn had to grow through it. And we had a bit of a dry year this year and the corn that was in the rye cover crop was like 40 acres and 40 acres. It wasn't a perfect comparison but it was like 27 bushels better this year. And it come through great, big rye and everything else but he did have the nitrogen right there by it when he planted. That's quite a difference.

35:45 I would like to highlight a little bit, you know, if he's been doing that for quite a few years too. You know, if it's your first year, second year, you may not necessarily expect that. But we do see those cases of success too when times are really stressful. But the highlight is consistency and soil health as a program. It's a long-term goal versus a one-year fix.

36:19 I saw University of Nebraska did a study, gosh I think it started in the 80s, where they grew corn into rye. And kept the nitrogen at 200 pounds an acre and the yield levels were about 160, so pretty well fertilized with nitrogen. And they did it for 10 years in a row. The first three years the corn in the rye was 30 bushels less than the control. And I guess this is why it's good that we have long-term research because any farmer probably would have quit the practice at that point. I'm not going to spend extra money to take a 30 bushel yield hit. The next two years though the yields were dead even and the final five years of the study they got a 30 bushel bump every year just like clockwork. There's almost exactly 30 bushel every single year after that.

37:32 What's the explanation here? Well, the first year maybe there was nitrogen tie-up. Maybe there was an increase in root disease, maybe there was some sort of a allelopathy. But whatever it was, the longer you stuck with it, that became less and less of an issue. And I think a lot of the people that are planting corn into rye green and say they have absolutely no issues have been no-tilling cover cropping for quite some time and have pretty healthy soils. And if that's the case, those root diseases are going to be far less of an issue than they are if you're doing it the first year out.

38:21 Yeah, those are all great points. And you can't just do it a year or two and give up, like Dale said. That's the advantage of long-term research. And there's enough people that have done it for many years. You know, like your neighbor Eric, that is seeing those benefits now. And from additional organic matter, additional biological activity, those soils are just so much more resilient that they can handle all of that. Let's pivot to another question here on biology. We have a question, Dale. We'll start with you on this one because the question is, what's the best way to add AMF or arbuscular mycorrhizae fungi? What's the best way to add that to fields? Is it through manure, through a Johnson Sue, you know, compost extract or something like that, seed coatings, other inputs, not tilling, or something else? Tell us a little bit about the best way to get the AMF in the soil and maybe even a little bit about whether those organisms are already in the soil. Do I need to add it?

39:28 Well, most of our cropland, I studied 56 paired samples that had been sent into a lab for analysis. People wanted to know whether or not they had mycorrhizal fungi. Of those 56 paired samples taken from all over the U.S., only four had adequate levels of mycorrhizal fungi and all four of those were cropland that had been recently cleared from either prairie or forest. Typical cropland has very low levels of mycorrhizal fungi, if any at all, because mycorrhizal fungi dies out during fallow periods and almost all of our cropland has had fallow periods as part of the

46:31 Than your small seeds, clovers alfalfa chicory plantain. They're kind of a lot like that pigweed question we talked about earlier is they don't have a lot of stored energy in that seed and so it's going to take some time for them to establish and a lot of times starting this light in your environment those smaller seeds are not going to work until the fall time frame so vetches sunflowers buckwheat those have all worked really well with larger seeds here, you know right as bermuda is either breaking dormancy or a couple weeks before.

47:13 I have seen some people plant some grasses now. I typically I'm not in a fertilizer scenario and so I really focus on the broad leaf table tap root legumes to fix my nitrogen in that scenario and not so much on the grasses because bermudas scavenges a lot of nitrogen, ties up a lot of nitrogen and so typically the grasses I wouldn't say that you don't use any but keep them below 30 percent in the mix if you're not planning on using nitrogen just because they're not going to outperform.

47:56 Now I've seen some plots down around San Antonio that one of our partners did and he heavily grazed an area with sheep and goats and grazed it down and so it received a lot of fertility through manure and he planted in some sorghums right at the time bermuda was breaking dormant and had decent luck. It definitely added to his biomass but you know if that soil isn't receiving a lot of extra fertility then I really focus on the broad leaf and tap roots and probably the bigger question to ask before you really get started is what your pH is. That's probably one of the bigger limiting factors is that ground was farmed for a long time in cotton or peanuts and we naturally put it to bermuda grass because it was degraded and no longer performing and so we're expecting bermuda grass to perform in a soil that was already mined out and that's why we need so much more for fertility in bermuda and so understanding where your pH is at is probably your first step in in getting legumes in there fall time frame.

49:09 Rye grass works good but again the legumes getting some nitrogen in there you have a lot of carbon built up from the bermuda grass getting some organic nitrogen for your biology to help cycle that carbon is what's really going to help you increase your water infiltration your biology your organic matter along with building you know fixing nitrogen for the following year so vetch is in the fall work good. I would highly look at alfalfa chicory and plantain in the fall as an opportunity but you're going to want to graze that down to about four inches or so to get those smaller seeds in there so you'll do a pulse grazing there in the fall before you plant so but like I said there's a lot more details in that article and that helped explain that process.

50:06 And looking at that of what I've learned over the couple years, Dale why don't you speak a little more specifically about kind of the concept, same concept, because somebody else on the Q&A also had a question about interseeding into perennials. Why don't you talk about it from the perspective of what would be more common up in our area where you have a cool season grass you know like brome or fescue or something, what can you do to get warm season things growing there through the summer?

50:36 Okay yeah and I might just add on top of Brett, he mentioned about sampling for pH in a pasture situation where all of the nitrogen is broadcast on the surface and has not been historically incorporated a lot of that acidity builds up from that nitrogen fertilizer right in the surface inch and so a six inch sample might show up it's fine in pH but that surface inch I've seen where a six-inch sample tested 6.2 in pH and the top inch tested at four and nothing grows at pH four. You won't get legume seedlings to thrive at that and luckily it only takes you know one sick if you're only trying to neutralize the top inch instead of six inches it only takes one sixth of the lab recommended amount of lime to neutralize that but it can be pretty important for getting something established there.

51:44 As far as getting something seeded into a cool season grass sod it's usually a bit more difficult than a cool season into a warm season like bermuda grass because the cool season grass in summer does not go completely dormant like a warm season does in winter.

52:06 Winter, so you've got that competition from the cool season grass. How do you minimize that? How do you still do this interceding thing? And it's a great idea because cool season grasses just do not make effective use of that summer sun because it's just too hot. So getting a summer annual grass or summer annual legumes or forbs out there is a really good idea. But the timing is important. You don't want to go too early because the cool season grass is still too competitive. So like here in Kansas, Nebraska, May might have the proper temperatures to get those warm season plants going, but it's still cool enough. The cool season grasses are still active and still competitive. But by mid-June, however, it's starting to get warm enough that those cool season grasses are starting to brown out. And usually we're still getting some rain in the end of June. You know, it seems like the rain usually shuts off and it gets too hot and dry to really grow much of anything after the Fourth of July. So I really like, if you're going to drill warm season into a cool season sod, I like the last two weeks of June unless you're going to use a herbicide or something like that to suppress the sod.

53:51 If you're not going to use a herbicide to suppress it, I would target, I would graze it down fairly close, you know, like Brett said, four inches or maybe even a little more, and drill into it those last two weeks of June. And the plants we've seen that work well drilled into that sod, number one, far and away, is Egyptian wheat, which is open pollinated sorghum. That stuff just flat works. I don't know that I've ever seen Egyptian wheat fail in a sod seeding. Why it is so much better than the hybrids, I can't tell you. It just seems to be. Had good luck with sorghums in general, pearl millet does okay.

54:49 Hey Dale. Yeah, I'm sharing my screen and I'm showing that picture that we had in a resource guide a few years ago with you standing out in that field in Kansas, so you can kind of be describing that as well. Yeah, well, you can see that a very prominent plant there in that mix. You can see some pearl millet seed heads poking up there. But the sun hemp was really dominant and sun hemp works exceptionally well. I have heard that Sesbania does well. We're starting to carry a little Sesbania. A little unsure of the grazing value of Sesbania, but it does seem to thrive. Cowpeas function well. Sunflowers are kind of iffy forage. Soybeans seem to do well. Sunflowers are so cheap though that you can throw several pounds out there and not run into a lot of money. And then we've got some people trying some popcorn. I haven't had good luck with dent corn, but if you can get some leftover seed corn that you know can't be sold, broken bag, leftover plot seed, whatever, I tell people going out into a cool season grass pasture with it. It's a good way of using it.

56:23 Yeah, and dude, being soil and mice, is it accurate to say that this picture you're standing here, this is the same field, just works to not put the inner seed? So where you're standing here is the same as where you're standing there, just without the inner seed? Same field. Basically, interceed was on the east half of that field, and the other photo was on the west half of that field. There had been 16 inches of rain in July and August on those fields. So that was a very wet summer, which obviously contributes to the success of that inner seeding. But you can see how little use the brome alone made of that 16 inches of rainfall.

57:17 All right, good. So there's a lot of potential. It's not going to work like that every year, but man, you get that kind of production, that doesn't have to work every year. Yeah, that's neat. Yeah, what's interesting though is that every year you do it, you know, conditions, assuming the conditions are the same each year, it seems like it gets more successful each year. You know, when I first tried it, I had what most people would call a failure. The first year is very dry. And but I was encouraged enough by what I saw, it was a lot more feed than I had without doing it. The second year I did more acres, and where I did it the second year was so much better than where I did it for the first time. And side by side feed, that was actually the same field, just.

58:12 More acres within that same field and so every year you do it it seems to get more and more successful.

58:22 Look I kind of refer to that system as you know a lot of our perennial systems with by chemical applications of herbicides we've taken out a lot of the legumes and broadleafs. I kind of refer to it as like feeding a cow. You can kill a cow with too much fiber and we're starving our earthworms and our biology by having a lot of carbon and no organic nitrogen there or mineral cycling for those biology to digest that carbon and so that's what I saw in the bermuda grass. Once I got these legumes going the organic matter and the color of the soil profile drastically changed in a relatively short amount of time because I had the carbon there. There's just nothing, no organic nitrogen there for the biology to digest it and you utilize it changed in a relatively short amount of time because I had the carbon there, organic nitrogen there for the biology to digest it and you utilize.

59:42 Yeah sorry about that. Okay let's do one more question here from Facebook. Derrick is asking about there's a lot of research going into interceding corn. Are there tips on interceding anything a grazing mix into standing soybeans without interfering with harvest and we have gotten that question a decent amount.

1:00:06 I have always said the answer to that is not really because you know you're harvesting those beans so low to the ground that whatever you have out there is going to have to go through the combine and that is still true. I do have some pretty innovative guys up in Minnesota we're sending a mix up there to them. They've experimented with this and they're kind of moving forward. They're planting their beans in 30 inch rows and so they've got a little bit more time for the for the cover crop to grow in between the rows and they've got a mix. They've got several different things in there buckwheat blacks and different things but you definitely are more restricted because you are harvesting those soybeans very low and whatever is out there is going to have to go through the combine.

1:00:53 Now with that being said I don't know how much grazing benefit that you'll get because again you're running that through the combine. If you're planting it with the beans if you fly that on when the bean leaves are starting to yellow you know you can get rye grass or cereal rye or different things like that going that can have some grazing benefits after harvest. I have had guys that have planted buckwheat either on purpose or they just had volunteer buckwheat come with their soybeans and you know they either spray it out with a post spray application that they were going to do anyway or they just let it mature and that buckwheat pretty well goes you know makes seed and goes to seed and isn't a harvest issue because of that. That tends to work pretty well too. You may end up with some buckwheat in your soybean in the combine tank because you're probably going to harvest some buckwheat with that but you know that's a tough one because you know soybeans just you know the way that we harvest them doesn't allow for a lot of other stuff underneath it without having to go through the combine.

1:01:58 Daily Bread have you guys seen anything with that that would make you think something's worth trying? Yeah I mean that's kind of where that pasture cropping idea really probably has more merit of growing soybeans over the top of a cool season grass a perennial and you know we're looking at the summer dormant chisholm fescue here as a as a potential opportunity in the south because it physically goes somewhere dormant and so we can grow a cow pee or soybean over the top of that to where it starts coming out in September and we can harvest harvest that in October.

1:02:44 As far as your rye your rye grass your annuals a lot of that benefit is not going to occur until the following spring on the grazing side so you'll have you might have some really high protein grazing there in the fall but you're not going to have a lot of energy and so you're not going to have the highest higher stocking rate that you would want to as say corn stocks or something like that so yeah I would caution people to stay away from trying to aerial seed turnips or radishes soybeans at leaf yellowing just because if harvest gets delayed.

1:03:28 With a long wet fall you could get some development above ground to those roots that are going to make harvest very difficult.

1:03:40 Yeah, typically cereal rye or annual rye grass, if that gets up into your header you're just clipping those real fine, you know, grass leaves off and that's not that hard for your combine to process. But yeah, if you start getting a bunch of turnip leaves up in there, you probably aren't going to be very happy. So you know, there's some things that can be done, but it's definitely more difficult.

1:04:04 In soybeans, we'll take one more question here. Marvin is asking he bought an old no-till corn planter, 30 inch row John Deere 1240, and he wants to use it to plant sweet corn, candy plant, sunflowers, pumpkins, and other legumes with this. It's a plateless planter. You know, what options are out there for using a planter like that to plant some of these diverse mixes?

1:04:30 Well, I'm not super familiar with the plateless planter, but I know there's a lot of YouTube videos. That's the reason why I bought a John Deere 7000, you know, still I can plant sunflowers and pumpkins and things like that. I think if it's a finger pickup system, you're going to be somewhat limited on density and the seed size on doing mixes. And so if it's the kind of the cup drop, or you know, I've used some plates like cotton plates and things like that, playing around with seven or eight-way mixes of similar seed size, and that seems to be working. But it kind of depends. A lot of it's going to match up on seed size, and that's what you're primarily paying attention to on something like that. But I think there's some opportunity. The benefit of pumpkins and vining crops is they'll cover 90 to 120 inches relatively easy, so you don't necessarily need to put them in with your corn or your sweet corn. You could do your sweet corn on 60s and put pumpkins in between on the other 60s or whatnot, so there's some opportunities there.

1:05:51 My level of expertise with machinery is almost as good as it is on computers, so I shouldn't even touch that one. But yeah, you know, I'm like Brad. You know, we have dealt mostly with plate-type planters, and I know you can buy special plates that allow you to plant some of those different mixes and stuff. All I can say is you know, experiment with it. It sounds like you're probably doing it on a relatively small area, so I would experiment on an area and see what happens. If you can get some of that stuff to go through that, you know, great. If not, you may have to look for a small drill or another type of option to get that done. But I know with the plate planters, you can buy plates that will allow you to do cover crops now, and you know, they're getting better and better all the time.

1:06:44 Folks, thank you for joining us. Lots of good information. If you have not signed up yet for what is starting next week, please make sure you get signed up. We've got Dr. Christine Jones from Australia. Many of you have heard her. She is probably one of the top soil microbiologists in the world. We're going to have her for four weeks in a row, so a four-week Dr. Jones marathon, if you will. And it's not just going to be for an hour. We're going to let her talk for at least an hour, and then we're going to do at least 30 minutes of Q&A after that. So you might want to get a snack and bring it with you because it's going to be good.

1:07:25 Three of the talks will be live. She'll be doing the secrets of the socio microbiome. She'll be doing one on nitrogen, and then the phosphorus talk, which will be the Tuesday after Easter. She did that one last fall, so we're just going to play that recording. We're still working with her to see if we can do a live Q&A on that one or not. With Easter in there, we don't know exactly what her travel plans will be, so we'll kind of be a little bit of a re-run. And then the fourth one will be a focus on cover crops for vineyards and orchards and kind of specialty-type crop things like that.

1:08:06 So if you haven't signed up, make sure you get signed up for that. If you don't have the sign-up link, shoot me an email. That's just keith@greencoverseed.com. We'll get you the link for that. We are hoping to have a really good turnout for that one, and you know, really have Dr. Jones give us a lot of good information and teaching. So thank you everybody for joining us. Enjoy your evening, and we will see you next week on the Dr. Jones webinar. That'll start next week at 5:30, and we'll go for the next four Tuesdays after that. So thanks everybody.