Cover Crops in Harvested Seed Corn: Building Diversity Beyond Brassicas

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0:04 Basically what you see here is a harvested corn field with signs of already being harvested this year, earlier. Majority of there's a lot of producers now going into more sophisticated equipment to go ahead and spread that cover.

0:48 On a personal note and what I've been trying to educate producers, historically up in this area they originally when I first started up here years ago it was turnips only and brassicas and things like that. What bothered me was you have

1:09 Brassica that's burning up we're getting better. You've got it, you've got a cash crop here at dozens where they have any organic matter. So what I've been trying to promote in working with guys is to add other things in with the brassicas and majority is either rye, mainly, they're there, some guys that are at oats and we've tried this here on can science farm compared to basically for livestock feed. And we know that the oats will grow faster than the rye will so that give them a good fall crazy.

1:58 Drop and then hopefully in the spring the riot come in and that's happened on their farm board. We had a combination of the rights and oats and rye so they're an annual ryegrass is fairly commonly right with guys who want to diversify into a grass. Yeah, that's from, that's right, that's probably the most popular in this area and a ryegrass I think or the more that I see it I think it has some advantages in a lot of different areas that even better than rye so that that'll be kind of the next step I believe on getting guys educated.

2:43 On that and you're right grass does have a kind of a bad reputation of it's hard to kill just like that but you know what they've said that about my before. So as we progress in this I think over time we'll get to see some more grasses mixed in with the brassicas. Your own we've got really a very good scheme good growth and again in that commercial corn is all about lack of sunlight and see corn we have excellent growth because there is sunlight coming through the the male roads that have been destroyed.

3:24 Female rows that have been tasseled and so they're quite short, so you know there's a lot of wheat pressure on these fields because they are a fairly weak canopy crop. You know, seed corn is, and so all the more reason to get cover crops. And because we're having a good stance to cover crops, there is far less wheat, you know, the Brassica grow this exceptional. We've got some really nice-looking radishes out here. They already started to do a lot of good work penetrating the soil, and now that this corn has come off, this stuff's.

3:58 Just going to explode right across the road we see a pivot running even though that corn's been harvested they've made the commitment to run that pivot because they get as much cover crop growth as they can out of that and I think Noah said they'll probably run the pivot over here if it doesn't rain so we've got excellent growth here and the brassicas we've got collards, there's Ethiopian cabbage out here, there's purple top turnips one of the most impressive things is the amount of.

4:24 Flax and the growth on the flax that is here, okay. Some of this flax is approaching 12 inches tall now. Flax is not going to be a plant that you would use to enhance the grazing of this. It has almost no forage value whatsoever because the cattle are not going to eat it, which can be a good thing because we want some of this residues left. We want this flax. This plant will double in size before it freezes out and come next spring it'll be that same size that it'll still be standing there. Flax is a very durable, very long lasting residue.

5:28 Much corn growing so this stuff has been growing in pretty much full sunlight since it was seeded out here. What it's probably been out here for five weeks. So you can see even though there was a lot of fun like here where there was no sun, competition for sunlight, tremendous amount of growth. But we're going to see this not take off and really explode and they'll probably have cattle out here. They well, they told me yesterday that cattle probably won't be coming in here for at least another three weeks, man. Long so this will.

6:01 Probably double the amount of growth here, and a lot of that timing depends on, you know, we've had lots of rain, pastures are good. So these cattle producers can keep their cattle in the pastures longer. A year or two ago this was being fenced about right after the pickers left, so they had to have it. So all those procedures basically go back to mother nature, way up what she deals out.

6:31 One of the most important things is being accomplished out here in addition.

6:37 To suppressing some weeds and erosion prevention but these cover crops will sequester almost all of any free nitrogen that this seed corn did not use. It's going to hold that nitrogen in the crop plant material and it will cycle it back later next year but it will hold that nitrogen in the plant and prevent it from leaching into the groundwater. Very, very important in seed corn.

7:01 There are companies that seed companies that do provide a twenty and twenty dollar an acre incentive for their growers to incorporate cover.

7:14 Crops which is pretty bold on their part. I believe so yeah that's a good thing for a lot of those producers. If anything in many cases it pays for the scene. Yeah most most of these mixes that would go on to seed corn like this we're gonna cost somewhere in the ten to sixteen dollar range beyond what all you put in there. How diverse you get, how have you spread. The guys that are going after the best great scene are gonna be probably at the upper end of that level. The guys that maybe aren't grazing, just want to do some sequestering, they could be you know that ten twelve dollar an acre range. So it's cheap, it's very easy to put on and you've got lots of sunlight coming in. So tonight's and I know grant and I've never seen and found. Yeah it's a no-brainer, it's a no-brainer going in the C seat.