Does Green Cover Buy Cover Crop Seed from Growers?

0:11 We do get quite a few people that want to grow something different but don't know where to necessarily sell it so we get asked a lot of times if we purchase cover crop seed ourselves. Keith, do you want to kind of answer that one for us?

0:25 Sure we love buying cover crop seed from our customers because we believe that anything grown in a more regenerative type system is going to be a healthier more viable type seed. So that's our preference is to have as many of our contract growers also be our customers because we know that it's going to be a

0:51 Better product. So that being said, you know, we do have and we sell a lot of seeds. So we keep a lot of seed produced. We do have a lot of customers that are growing seed forests across quite a few different states. And you know, it varies a lot. The things that are the easiest to grow are probably the

1:09 Cereals, but that's good because that's what we also sell the most up. And so oats, barley, critically, fry, all those sorts of things we have large acreages under contract. And those are probably the easiest ones to get into simply because you probably already have the

1:30 Equipment that you need to do that. It doesn't take specialized stuff, whereas if you're trying to grow like clovers or radishes or turnips and things like that, you probably are going to need not only specialized equipment to harvest that, but you're going to need kind of a specialized environment.

1:49 Thing that destroys seed quality quicker than anything is getting wet or rained on when it's ready to harvest. And so the best seed growing regions are areas like the Willamette Valley of Oregon, where they get a lot of rain from September.

2:04 Through about July and from July through September they get hardly anything so they have a good growing season and then a pretty consistent very dry period in which they can harvest another area we get a lot of seed is the treasure valley in Idaho.

2:41 We have a full-time guy now. I used to do it myself and did a terrible job of it because I just didn't have time. Scott Ravencamp is our guy right now that handles all of those contract acres. So if you're interested you can send any of the sales team that you've been working with an email.

2:58 And just say hey I'm interested in growing seed for you guys. Can you connect me with Scott and or you can just email Scott directly. It's just scott@greencoverseed.com. And just tell him what you're interested in doing. He's going to have, you know, he has some fairly high standards.

3:15 Growing good quality seed is a lot different than just growing commodity grade. He'll walk you through some of the different things that we would expect of people, that we would require people. And if you know, all of those things sound reasonable and workable to you.

3:34 Then he'll continue to work with you and see if we can get you as part of the growing team. Yes, we do that. You know, we have lots of people that are interested in that, so we're trying to select the best growers and also the best locations. We like to spread our acres out but also keep them as close to here as possible to minimize freight costs, keep the cost down for everybody.