Design Cover Crop Mixes for Soil Health Using Your Goals

0:20 Okay thank you for coming back. Sometimes after you've heard a guy one time and then people don't show back up, it always kind of makes you wonder. So everyone coming back, it's always a challenge to keep people awake after a good meal, so we'll do our best. What I want to talk about this afternoon is a little bit conceptually of what we go through in designing mixes, and then I'll take you through and we'll actually design a mix or two with our cover crop calculator.

0:49 So again, we farm in Nebraska, and over the past three years, not including this year, we've made about 10 million pounds of cover crop seed mixes, and we will probably mix close to 8 million pounds just this year alone. That gives you a little bit of indication of how quickly the whole cover crop sector of agriculture is growing, and particularly the mixes.

1:19 When we mix seed, we do fairly diverse mixes, especially as compared to some other companies. When we say diverse mix, we're talking about more than four different species mixed together. A lot of them that we do will have seven or eight or even 10 species mixed, and some guys, you know, the gab Browns and stuff, you know, they'll want us to just put pretty much everything we have in there. They'll want 20 to 25 different species in a mix, and so that gets somewhat complicated and very labor intensive. But we've set our company up to do 100% custom mixed per customer order. We don't have standard or stock mixes because the philosophy that we've had with our company is that we want to allow the customer to either design their own mix, or we want the flexibility to help them design a mix for their field, for their goals, for their situation.

2:23 Because we've got over 60, but we've got close to 70 different species of cover crop species that we can select from. So the number of combinations is virtually infinite, and we want to try to help people put together just the right mix for their location, their timing, and their goal.

2:44 So with that in mind, I just want to kind of quickly go through some of the thinking behind cover crop mixes, and some of this will be a review of what I talked about this morning and also a summary of what some of the speakers talked about yesterday. But if soil health is the goal of your cover crop program or of your farming program, and it should be (we should all have a goal of having soil health), then crop diversity cannot be ignored or overstated. We talked quite a bit about the importance of diversity, how we can get some of that diversity into our cropping systems this morning, and again it would be best if you had a diverse crop rotation and diverse cover crop mixes. That isn't always going to be possible in everybody's situation, so if you can't diversify your rotation, at least make your cover crop mixes as diverse as possible.

3:38 And plants were created to grow in diverse ecosystems. Again, we talked about that this morning. Resilience comes from diversity. If you know, the pictures I showed you of Nathan Pierce's cover crop mix that he had out there, he planted the exact same mix but he planted two weeks apart, and he's already seen significant differences. They look like they're two different mixes simply because the environmental conditions of when those things were emerging and growing were different. Because they're two weeks apart, it looks like it's two different mixes even though it was the exact same seed because it all came out of the same truck. And that's what we say: the resilience of that cover crop mix is coming because of the diversity because...

4:23 He's got 10 or 12 things in that and so depending on if it's hot or whether it's cool or it's wet or it's too dry he's going to have something in there that's really going to work well and then everything else will kind of fill in the gaps. And his two different fields it may be two different things that are really working well but there's going to be something there that really fits the weather pattern right. So it's very resilient because it's very diverse.

4:48 We want a balanced diet for the soil biology and but we also want balance because even good things like legumes and like brassicas, you know they're great for grazing, they're great for the soil, but when they're not used in a moderated balance they can become harmful. You know if you have too rich of a feed ration out there, you know you can bloat the calves, you can kill the animals. So we want to be in balance and again the balance is going to come from having good diversity.

5:18 When we're doing a mix we want to try to get four things right. We want to have the right species, we want to have the right inoculant, and we want to have the right seating rates and we want to have the right seating time. And so some of these are easier to get right than others but certainly you know we want to put the appropriate species in for what your goals are going to be.

5:40 We want to have the right inoculant because if you're putting legumes out there and you don't have the right type of inoculant you're not going to get them to nodulate. And you know soybean, you know because I'll have people say well I've grown soybeans out there before won't that work well. It'll work if you're putting soybeans in your cover crop mix but soybean rhizobia will not colonize the roots of peas. They will not colonize the roots of cowpeas or sun hemp or mung beans or clover. Each one of those legumes has a specific rhizobia that it allows to colonize its roots and so you've got to get the right inoculant on there.

6:15 We want to do the right seating rates and we had a discussion over lunch here about how do you determine what the right seating rate is when you're doing these diverse mixes. You know is it how many seeds per square foot or how many pounds per acre? And I'll address that later on of how we try to get that right. And the right seating time and again that kind of goes back to the thing with the species because when's the right time to plant a cover crop? You know just about any time that you can get something to grow out there is the right time and there will be something that will work in that window and we'll talk about that a little bit too.

6:53 So kind of number one and number four go together because the right species often times will depend upon the seeding time that you're doing. And we want to answer these four main questions: What are your goals? You know if you call us up in order to cover crop mix, you know the first thing we're going to ask you is what do you want to try to accomplish? You know what's your goals for doing this cover crop mix? Because that in large part is going to determine what species that we would recommend that you do. What are your environmental conditions? What's your time frame? And what's the budget?

7:25 We're going to look at each of these four in a little bit more detail. So when it comes to looking at what your goals are, these are probably eight of the most common goals that people will tell us they have for doing a cover crop mix: soil health, grazing, increase fertility, you know maybe you've got nitrogen there that your previous crop didn't totally use so you want to capture and cycle that. You want to build additional residue or additional cover, suppress weeds, break up disease cycles, erosion control is a huge one especially the further east you go the more rain you get the more important that becomes.

8:01 Certainly important even in Western Kansas too. They're using cover crops as erosion control and often times for preventing wind erosion even more so than water erosion. Compaction breaking is another one that people will say, well I've got compaction that I want to try to get broke up. So different things will work better or worse for these different goals. That's why it's important that you kind of zero in on what you want to try to accomplish. Now you can accomplish multiple ones at the same time, but there are certain ones of these that if you do one, it's going to be very difficult to do one of the other ones.

8:39 For example, if you want to try to increase your fertility by growing a lot of nitrogen with your legumes, it's going to be very difficult to accomplish that one and number five at the same time because the more legumes you put in, the less long lasting residue you're going to have because those legumes are going to break down very quickly. It's all about the carbon nitrogen ratio, and the calculator tool will kind of help you get that in balance.

9:06 Then we talk about the environmental factors. We want to take all these things into consideration in building your mix as well. How much rainfall do you get? Can you irrigate? What's your evapotranspiration? Because if you're in an 18-inch rainfall in Bismarck, North Dakota, that's way different than an 18-inch rainfall in Western Kansas because they have so much more heat and wind in Kansas as opposed to North Dakota. They utilize their moisture differently. What's your growing season like? Soil type and condition. How are you going to seed it? Are you drilling this? Are you broadcasting it? Putting on with an airplane? What's your previous crop? What's the next crop? And what herbicides did you use because you can have herbicide carryover?

9:50 I want to applaud the University of Missouri. I know yesterday on the tour I went on, they had those weed plots. They had some really good research there on the popular chemicals used in the spring on corn and soybeans and how they affected late summer planted cover crops. That was some good work and I was glad to see that. But that all needs to be taken into consideration. The time frame—you know, again, you can plant cover crops just about any time of the year when you've got a legitimate shot at getting something to grow.

10:19 Typically in the spring, you're looking at fallow ground or something in real early prior to another spring planted crop. Or it may be, and we're going to see more of this, like what Nathan Pierce did—planting it simply to graze all year long. That's now his cash crop is the cattle, and so it's not really a cover crop as much as it is a forage crop, but it's accomplishing the same things. Those are typically going to have to be terminated either chemically or mechanically. Early summer, we do a lot of this right after wheat harvest. Guys are getting their cover crops in between late June and mid to late July.

10:56 Again, you can time things here where you can let the frost take it out. If you put the right species in, you can pretty much have 100% frost kill, or you can do chemical or mechanical termination. Late summer, like this time of year right now is what I would consider late summer, and you can get some really nice cover crops in this time of year as well. Again, that's going to typically be after wheat harvest, although we've got guys now who are planting this stuff into hailed out corn and soybean acres, which you can't really plan for, but it's an option. Or guys that are taking off some corn silage—it's another opportunity to get a cover crop in if you're doing some silage, and then of course in the fall after your fall crops.

11:41 And there you're looking at frost termination or planning something that's going to over winter and then you're going to have to chemically or mechanically terminate it next spring and of course how much does it cost and that varies, but this is kind of a general rule of thumb. There's low, medium, high and higher and the low, less than $20 an acre, that's going to be relatively low seating rates and very few legumes. The legumes are going to drive the price of a lot of your cover crop mixes because they tend to be some of the more expensive seeds.

12:15 A medium and we sell a lot of this $20 to $30 an acre range type things, average seeding rates, some legumes. It's not going to be a real big nitrogen fixing cover crop but you're going to have some legumes in there. And then the higher rates, $30 to $40, we'll get into some of that, especially for guys that really want to push grazing, they want to do some real intensive grazing, they want some of the specialty things in there that are going to be higher in protein, higher in digestibility than some of the cheaper brassicas, and also higher percent legumes because they're wanting to push the protein levels up.

12:49 And then the real specialty type stuff, you know, $40 to $60 an acre, that's typically going to be a very specific end use. Organic guys, you know, who say I need to produce 140 lbs of nitrogen for my corn, well okay, we'll plant 30 to 35 lbs of hairy vetch. He's going to let it grow to the middle of May before he turns it in and he'll have an incredible amount of hairy vetch growth and he'll have a lot of nitrogen but he's going to have to wait to plant his corn to get that growth.

13:18 Or we've got guys who are growing potatoes and they need to control the nematodes because Columbia root knot nematodes will destroy a potato crop. So they're doing a specialty mix of some brassicas and specialty crops like that that will control those nematodes the year before they do potatoes. So that's kind of general rules of thumb on budgets.

13:43 Just a couple other general rules here: the more specific your goals are, the less diverse your mixes will typically be. So if you look at that list of goals and you have one thing that you want to accomplish and that is the only thing that you're really concerned about, then you're probably going to not have a real diverse cover crop mix because we're only going to select things that help you with just that one single goal. But if your goals are a little bit more general, you know, like general soil health, then we can be a little bit more diverse in what we do.

14:18 And also the tighter your planning windows are, the shorter the time period you have to get things to grow, the fewer species will work and the less diverse your mixes will be. So if you call me up and you want to plant a cover crop mix after wheat, you know, there's probably 40 or 50 different things you can choose from and they'll all work well. But if you're coming in after soybeans or corn, that list may be down to four or five. Now so the tighter your windows, the less diversity you're going to be able to get, but you can still get some diversity and some is better than none.

14:55 And even if you get out to the 1st of November, you can still plant cereal rye. Even though it may be the only thing you plant, it's still more diverse than corn soybeans by itself. So just because you can't do this 10 or 12 way mix doesn't mean you shouldn't do a cover crop. It just simply means that's the only thing that makes sense that time of year for that particular situation.

15:19 So the way that we put this together is we have this tool called the smart mix calculator. Colton, you want to come up here and run this? Most of you, many of you, maybe have met Colton. He's out at our booth.

15:32 There Colton is one of our top salesman. He's about the only salesman we have besides me, but Colton is a Maryland native who went to school at Northwest Missouri State, fell in love with this area, fell in love with the local girl, and never went back to Maryland. So yeah, it should be open on Internet Explorer. I'm going to have him kind of walk us through this as I kind of describe what we're doing. But basically, if you go to our website www.greencovered.com, everything that we're doing, we're doing live on the internet right now, so you can do all this at home.

16:13 Why don't you go back and go back to the homepage so they can see where that's at? Just yeah, open up a new window. Now with this new version of the calculator, you have to have an account, but you can easily just establish your own account. So there's two versions. What we're going to be showing you is the new version. The old version still works too, but it doesn't have as many of the features that we're going to show you here. So you simply click on that and it's going to take you to a login screen. And if you don't have an account, you just click on where it says register right there. All it asks for is your email, and then you come up with a password. And then the next screen you'll put in your address information and stuff like that. It's real simple to do. If you already have an account, then you can just go ahead and log in.

17:06 Now what you're going to see when you log in, there's a lot of climate data in here. And so when you log in, it's going to know what your ZIP code is, and this is based on the information you gave it when you signed up. So it says based on your ZIP code is 68928, which is Blade, Nebraska. Average annual rainfall is 26.73. My first frost is around October 3rd. The last frost is around April 30th. And my plant hardiness zone is 5B. And this is all based on 30-year climate histories. So you may say, well, you know, we don't get that anymore. Well, you may not, I don't know, but this is all based on 30-year historical averages.

17:51 So we don't want to design a mix for Blade and Nebraska. Let's go ahead and do Columbia, Missouri. What's the ZIP code here for Columbia? 65201. Okay, so when he types that in, it changes it to Columbia, Missouri. And now it says your average annual rainfall is 43.4. Lucky dogs. First frost is October 23rd, so that's almost three weeks longer than mine, two and a half. And your last frost is around April 9th, so you've got about two and a half to three weeks longer growing season on either side of the season than what I've got. You've got an extra 15 inches of moisture. Your plant hardiness zone is 6A. And all this climate information is going to go into helping us put together this mix that we're going to do.

18:36 So right here you can give it a name if you want. You can choose your bagging option, and this is if you want it put in bulk or totes or 50 lb sacks. The seating method, how are you going to be putting this out there? Are you going to drill it? Are you going to broadcast with some sort of incorporation or just regular broadcast? We're going to drill this. What's your next cash crop going to be? Because we want to make sure the things that you put in your cover crop mix are not going to be detrimental or harmful to the next cash crop. So we're just going to do, let's just do a fairly simple mix. You know, say we had wheat here and we're going to be doing corn coming back with corn next spring. Because we can do a nice diverse mix, you can change how many acres you want to plant. It defaults to 100, but you can set that to whatever you want. And then you put in the seating.

19:24 Date and the seating date and the termination date are going to help the program calculate some of the numbers that it's going to come up with. So let's just say we're going to plan it today. Do you like that? That's Internet Explorer shows that map like that. It's kind of weird, just type it in, put in 11 there instead of eight.

19:47 Basically the program is looking at, it knows what your frost date is. So if you're using any warm season species, it will take your average first frost date and that will be the termination date for that species. So it's looking at every species that you choose individually, and for the species that won't kill with the frost, it's going to look at the termination date that you set. And so we've got 92 days here and we've got a bug here, Colton. What's that? Explorer? Internet Explorer. If something doesn't work we like to blame it on being an Internet Explorer, and you laugh, but I don't know how many times I'll have people call and say, 'Hey, this smart mix steel isn't working, I can't get logged in,' and I'll say, 'Let me guess, you're a government employee and you're running an old version of Internet Explorer on your computer because they won't let you upgrade.' Yeah, how'd you know? Because it doesn't work.

20:47 Growing Degree Days. This is supposed to be calculating Growing Degree Days here. We'll see if it does on the next page. And then we choose our goals. The goals—this is one of the most important things because it's going to be scoring all the different species. It's going to give each one of them a score as to how suitable it is. So let's do the price of cattle, let's do supplemental grazing as our first goal, and then let's do increased soil organic matter, and then let's do erosion reduction.

21:19 Okay, so we've got our three goals. You don't have to choose three goals, but you have to choose at least one. So we click the next button and it's going to take us to this page. Anyway, it gives us a summary again of our climate data here. The other thing that it's telling us is from our August 14th to November 14th here in Columbia, on a 30-year average, you get over 11 inches of rain just in that period of time.

21:47 I like to show that to people because often times, and probably not so much out here as further west, they'll say, 'Well, I don't have enough moisture to grow a cover crop because I need to save it for my next crop.' But when you start looking at on a historical basis how much moisture you get in that period of time, most people can't hold that much in their soil anyway. And when you can't hold that much moisture in your soil, only bad things are going to happen. Number one, you'll get runoff which will create erosion, or you'll get water just running down through your soil profile which is going to leech nutrients away. So there's, you know, you just as well be using that moisture to grow something for the soil.

22:31 In this 92-day period we got 1,259 Growing Degree Days. This one I think is supposed to be calculating off base 40. Base 40 is what we use for cool season crops. Base 50 is what we use for warm season crops. And Growing Degree Days, we're looking at that because we're trying to determine the species that we choose, what growth stage are they going to get to? Because we're going to use that to calculate our carbon nitrogen ratio. So all this information here is going to change as we go through and we build this mix. This information will change and update, and this box right up here is all about the cost. And one of the unique things about this tool is that as you go through and you build the cover crop mix, it's going to give you a realtime.

23:13 Accounting of what the cost is going to be because this is using our actual products and our actual mixing cost and inoculant cost so this will tell you exactly what this mix would cost if you get it from us. Now you can use this tool and you don't have to buy seed from us, that's okay. We don't mind that. We don't have enough seed for everybody anyway so we can't sell to everyone, but it's a good tool to use even if you're not buying seed from us. It kind of gives you a baseline of putting a mix together so don't feel like you have to be our customer to use it. It's out there, it's free, it's for everybody to use.

23:48 So let's go ahead and add some crops. Colton's going to click on the legume button. Now we divide all the species that we have up into legumes, grasses, brassicas and broadleaves and legumes are listed first but that doesn't necessarily mean they're the most important. It's just that's the order that we put them in. So that has nothing to do with the goals that we chose or anything else. But when he clicks the choose box within the legumes, now it has things ranked and it has them scored. You know, we've got some work to do on this yet. We don't have all of this where we necessarily want it, but these scores that are showing up here—40% of that score is coming from how well does that species meet the goals that you have chosen and it always gives more emphasis to goal number one than it does number two and number two is ranked higher than number three. 30% comes from how well does that species work with your next cash crop coming so 30% of the score is coming on how well it matches up with the next cash crop and 30% of the score is coming from how well does it make sense to plant this time of year in this plant hardiness zone. You know, if we're planting in September or October, the warm season crops are going to get scored very low because it doesn't make any sense to plant something that's going to grow two weeks and then die with a frost.

25:29 Colton, go ahead and just start picking some things out here. We got some things that are probably ranked higher than they should be and some things that are lower than they should be and we need to this winter hopefully have some time to go in and kind of tweak these numbers a little bit to where we're more comfortable with them. But as he's putting things in here, you can see the species here he's got cow peas and right here this rate basically what that is doing is it's saying if you were planting this as a cover crop in a monoculture and that's all you were planning, this would be the recommended seating rate. So cow peas, it's saying if you're doing cow peas by themselves, 60 lbs is the recommended seating rate for this area. Now if we were doing this for Western Kansas, that number would be quite a bit different because you know they get less than half your rainfall so we don't want nearly as many plants out there in their situation.

26:28 So based on this rate, now the zero here—this is how much we're putting into our cover crop mix. So if we got 60 lbs of cow peas is a full rate, we may want to put, you know, maybe eight or ten pounds in our mix and again this kind of depends on how many different species we want in the mix but we'll go ahead and put ten pounds in. Now as we're doing this it populates all these fields over here. This is telling me that this is a warm season broadleaf plant. I've got 17% of a full rate and that's simply what ten divided by 60 is, is 17% and that's how we are determining if.

30:47 High of a nitrogen fixing crop, but that's a decision that they made, that that's where they want to be budget-wise. So anyway, as you go through and you build these numbers up, here are going to be changing. The nitrogen fixing, I'll talk about carbon nitrogen ratio in a little bit here. All these others are on a scale of 1 to 10 with one being the lowest and 10 being the highest.

31:10 Nitrogen fixing, it's just giving a rating of how well does that mix fix nitrogen as compared to another mix that you might choose. Now 1.1 is not saying it's going to produce 1.1 pounds an acre of nitrogen. It's just saying that this is not a very good mix for fixing nitrogen because we have relatively low percentages of legumes here. It's a 6 out of 10 on grazing and we'll want to see that number even higher because grazing was our number one goal. So we're going to want to have that, you know, probably eight or above. And then it's just got ratings for drought tolerance, frost hardiness, winter hardiness, a diversity score and a salinity score, how well will it do in a saline soil. And again, those are all on a 1 to 10 scale. So if you got something that's 9 or 10, you're really doing well in that particular category.

32:01 The question was, is there a temporary populate button? Or is there a button that you can push that makes your mix for you based on the goals and stuff that you chose? And we talked about doing that, but we really feel strongly about the person building the mix needing to have some ownership in it. So this is not a really easy tool to use if you know nothing about cover crops. I will fully admit that. But it's a tool that you can use to teach yourself about a lot of these different things. And so oftentimes what we will do is we will do this for the customer and then send it to them so they can look at it. And then a lot of times what we'll find is we may do that the first year or the second year, but by the third year they're doing it themselves and sending it to me saying, hey, this is what I want. We haven't had a push this button and it will design a mix based on your goals, simply because there's like 15 or 16 legumes that fit the profile for the goals that we chose. So I don't want to be responsible for choosing those legumes for your mix without having you have that input into it.

33:17 Yeah, go ahead, Rob. Well, Keith, I think one of the advantages of this mixture you designed is that people can get a feel for seed prices. So you can go in here and realize maybe, as you said earlier, that leg is going to make it too exorbitantly expensive. So it's a good way for people to get a feel. Yeah, and much of the learning comes in the process of putting something in and then taking it back out or adding to it or taking pounds away. We eventually probably will have some suggestions. We've had that on our website before. So you know, if you want a grazing mix for the summer, you know, try selecting from species within this subset, type thing. We're not quite there yet.

34:11 So what he's got right now is he's got a mix with six different things in it, and you can see what he's got here: cow peas, spring peas, millet, oats, turnips, and collards. And it's still pretty low in nitrogen fixing, but that's okay because producing nitrogen was not one of my goals. He's got grazing to a 10. This is going to be a really good grazing mix. Decent drought tolerance. All these other numbers here, the percent of a full rate now is 122, and we would look at that number and we'd say that's.

34:46 That's pretty close to where we want to be and it will tell you that you've got 1,562 thousand seeds per acre and you can calculate that out to seeds per square foot if you want, but we typically we're not looking so much at pounds per acre and seeds per acre as much as we're looking at this percent of a full rate.

35:07 Now you know we get a lot of seeds in here because turnips and collards are very small seeded, and some of these other things you know we've got fairly high poundages to get our grazing number up there. It's not the perfect way of doing it but we still think it's a better way of looking at seeding rates as opposed to pounds per acre or seeds per square foot because we're mixing large seeds and small seeds and it's just very difficult to do it any other way.

35:35 And so you know you can change these numbers right now this is a $40 an acre mix, which again if a guy's not grazing that's probably too much. We probably need to knock that back and get it down under $30 and we could do that. We can switch things around because the collards are more expensive than say rapeseed but it's a much it's a far superior grazing brassica.

36:00 So if you told me you weren't grazing I'd put in rapeseed instead of collards and save you some money there. We may put in radishes instead of turnips because they're going to root down deeper and you don't necessarily need the turnip if you're not grazing. So there's different things that we would do. We could change it up to either cheapen it up or change our scores up here.

36:24 And again this is all based on it's based on the research that we could find and incorporate into this but a lot of it to be honest is based on our observations and our experiences and our best estimates on what is going to happen in these different situations. So it's not a perfect tool but it is a tool that will help you compare one mix to another.

36:45 Yes Jody, well the question was annual and perennial legumes for a situation and I assume you're talking about like alfalfa or red clover, yellow blossom, sweet clover things like that. You know I like those species if I'm planting it now and I know I'm going to maybe be grazing that all again next year. I think it's worth doing then.

37:12 If you're only growing that for a short period of time and then you're going to be terminating it and going to another crop anyway I don't know if you'll get your money back out of that because perennials are always more expensive than annuals. So if you're going to put the investment into the seed they need to be left out there long enough to get the good out of them.

37:32 You know so if you're putting plantain or chicory some of those expensive perennials you know don't do that if that cover crop's going to grow for 60 days and then it's going to get sprayed out. But do that if you're going to plant it now and you know that all next year you're going to plant a couple different cover crop mixes in there and you can take advantage of those things growing back and you'll get some good out of it every time you go out there and graze.

37:56 So I like it in the right situations. Don't typically use them if it's short windows of application. You're better off you know with like a crimson clover which is an annual and grows fast, or if it's earlier in the spring maybe burro clover because it'll grow better in the heat. Or going with a cheaper annual like a lentil or a vetch or something like that.

38:18 So it all depends on the situation of whether or not that's going to work properly or not.

38:28 Yeah, yeah probably I don't know. Does it we don't like doing mixes for

38:35 Less than an acre. Yeah, yeah. Now what you'll notice here is when we put in half an acre, our mixing cost now went to 50 cents a pound, whereas before it was probably at I don't know, four or five cents, simply because I still got to pay my guys to go out there and pull half a pound of this and you know one pound of that. And we have another online system if you're doing small things you can just order like two pounds of this and a pound of that and don't have to pay the mixing charge. We'll just send it to you and you mix it yourself type thing. But yeah, it'll calculate there. It's not our preferred method. But other questions?

39:27 You try to get you go off full rate is the optimum? And you want what percent individual? Well, the percent full rate, are you talking about for individual species? No, what are you shooting for when you have a mixture? What's your best, the percent you want right there on that percent full rate? We like it around 25. And again, we feel like in a diverse mix like this we can get more plants in the same amount of space than we can with a monoculture because these plants are not going to be as competitive as they are in a monoculture. And if you think about it, the most competitive environment there is is when you have a whole field of exactly the same plant type because the roots are all at the same depth, the canopy height is the same height, it's calling for the same nutrients. Everything's wanting the same thing all at the same time. Whereas if you have a diverse mix, you've got different rooting depths, you've got different plant heights, you've got different nutrient needs at different times. It's just less competitive. So we feel like we can push the plant densities.

40:40 And then for a grazing mix, we won't be afraid to go up above that. You know, we may go 130 to 150. And again, if people are really mixing warm and cool season species together, then that may be up even higher because there's been situations where guys will plant and they'll put they may put 30 lbs of cereal rye in, but they're planting it in July and they're counting on that rye not doing very much until the warm season things freeze off and then that rye gets the sunlight and can take off and go. So you know, in a situation like that, it may show 175 or 180, but it's a little bit misleading because it's not all growing because that rye is going to be semi dormant in the heat.

41:29 So you know, but for just a standard mix, we look at that 125. And then if they're really concerned about drought tolerance, then we'll back it down closer to 100%. But we don't like to go below 100% or we feel like you're not going to get enough canopy closure and you'll have a lot of bare spots out there. And that's when you start losing more moisture to evaporation than potentially what that plant would use if we had a plant there to keep the soil covered. So between 125 to 200% is kind of going to catch. Yeah, 125 is going to catch most. When you start going up above that, you better kind of have a specific reason to, otherwise you may just be putting more seed out there than what you really need.

42:15 Colton, do you have other thoughts? You've used this as much as anybody. Work in progress. It's a work in progress. Yeah, and like I say, it's kind of neat. You know, my son's doing it, but at the same time it's going slower than what we'd like because it's not his full-time job and we frankly we can't afford to have.

42:34 Somebody on it full-time right now, but it is a work in progress. If you've got suggestions of other things that you think should be incorporated, feel free to give those to us. We've got a whole list of things that we want to put in and we'll take it to the programming team and they say 'you want to do what?' But yes, the question was, do we get any feedback on whether this worked for designing a mix for a particular area? Yeah, we do sometimes. Usually when it's wrong they'll let us know if they don't think it's right, but we need that feedback because we need to go in and adjust some things if it's not working right.

43:16 Certainly, yeah, we have gotten some and we want to have a someplace on our website where if guys want to share the mix that they did. I think what would be really neat is like, say Nathan Pierce, you know, he could post those pictures that he sent me, but then also post a copy of the mix that he did, and you could look at the pictures and look at the mix and kind of compare the two, and that would give you an idea of 'here's what this mix looked like after 60 days of growth.' I think that would be really neat. I'm not exactly sure how to do that, but we want to give people the opportunity to do that.

43:48 Go ahead and submit this and then we can go look at where it saved. So once you kind of get your mix designed or developed, you click the next button and it's going to give you an opportunity if you want to change the address of where this ships or something. If you, there's two buttons here: one is 'save for later' and that will not send me an email so I won't be calling you up saying 'hey, did you want to order this seed?' And the other one is 'submit' and that one I will call you or email saying 'are you interested in ordering the seed?' And you know, some people say yes, some people we're just playing with it, but regardless of which one, go ahead and hit the submit button there, Colton.

44:24 When you hit submit, it's got all nice smiling faces there, but what it does is now when you go up to the top, you've got on your little toolbar you've got an 'orders' tab, so you can click on this and there's the one that he just did, and it's going to give you a report here. Again, the resolution on this computer is not what it should be and that's why this is a little out of format, but it's going to give you a summary of everything that was just in that mix.

44:57 Now, unfortunately, we don't have a way yet of you taking this mix and putting it back into the calculator so you can go in and tweak it. That's one of the things that we want to add for the next version, so you could take the mix that you did last year, pull it back up, change some of the numbers, and then resubmit it. We're not quite there yet, but that's on the wish list of what we want to do. But at least you can go back and see what you ordered, see what you were looking at, or playing with. It gives you a document you can send to your NRCS person, you know, if you're in a cost share program. You can say 'hey, does this mix meet all the requirements of the program?' Maybe you can send it to a landlord, you know, if the landlord is paying for part of the mix. You can say 'here's exactly what we're wanting to do and here's what the cost is,' so it's a document that you can use to share that information with other people.

45:49 So, are we out of time? I think we're about out of time, aren't we? We're good. Any other questions on this? Like I say, it's a tool that's out there for you guys to use. It's what we use every day to help put mixes together for people, so feel free to use it. And if you have any questions about it, give myself a call or give Colton a call and we can kind of help you through it. So, okay, thank you very much.