Early Summer Cover Crop Field Tour: Flax, Phacelia, Mustards & More

0:00 Received Dale Strickler here is our lead agronomist. He's going to be doing a lot of the talking about these species as we go. Dale and I kind of put this plot in on April 11th.

0:15 We knew that there are certain things that cattle just we're not going to eat and plaques and the mustards are one of them. So this first plot is flax, very high lignin. We would never tell people that this is a good forage plant but we will a lot of times put it in some mixes even if we know guys are going to braise it because we want something standing after the cattle go through. So it's a really good one to add to a mix because we know cattle won't eat it and there will be some things still standing.

0:45 Grew really well here. This is under a pivot but the pivot never ran so this is all just going off of the spring moisture that we did receive here. As you can see, flax is a good bloomer. We put it in a lot of our pollinator mixes. It's not a real big tall showy plant but it's a real high lignin high carbon plant that will leave a lot of long lasting residue even after cattle have been through it.

1:13 One aspect of flax is it does have the potential to freeze prasic acid kind of like sorghum particularly around the time of the killing frost and sometimes you see recommendations do not let cattle graze flax. They don't, I mean you can't make them either, have to eat it to get the prasic acid. Yeah, I mean I think it's a much concern over nothing honestly because I've never seen people ever seen them touching.

1:51 Okay, this next plant here with a pretty important purple flowers is basilia. This is a plant that's native to the southwestern desert so it has some decent drought tolerance.

2:03 There's two aspects of the basilia that are really interesting. One is well the flowers. This is one of the highest producers of nectar and pollens, very quick to bloom. If you're wanting to attract beneficial insects or produce honey or just bring in butterflies, bees, do your bit for pollinators, this basilia is one of the absolute best. It produces a very good quality of honey.

2:32 The other aspect and you can see Colton's already ahead of me here, the roots. Look at all the little fine roots on that and that's going to make that surface soil very very permeable, open to water and filtration. And when you hit that five inch rain at half an hour that can make it go in the ground instead of running off and it really binds that surface level, protected against erosion. So it's kind of a unique plant in that regard.

3:47 Basilia is a flowering plant. It is a little more expensive, it's like three eighty a pound so you don't put a lot of it in. It's very small seeded so a pound or a half pound goes a long ways. You can see how nice the blossoms are here. The cattle actually eat it better than I thought they would but you can see all of the butterflies and the insects just hanging around the flax and the basilia here. We generally will not see flax or the basilia bloom like this when it's planted in the mid to late summer. It won't frost kill until you start dropping down into the low twenties but we have troubles getting a lot of blooms out of it when it's July and August planted. So by far its most prolific blooming period is when it's planted in March through April.

4:31 Now we've got several different kinds of mustard here and we also have brown mustard. And one of the reasons that we have these different mustards is because each one of them does a little bit different agronomically. Typically the yellow mustards are growing some of these yellow mustards. The balloons will bloom in about thirty days so when you plant them they'll start blooming about thirty days after they emerge, very very fast to bloom. You can see that these are already to the maturity stage where they're coming off their bloom and they're already starting to set pods and fill seeds in there.

5:15 Mustard is very very good at weed suppression. As you walk through here you'll see very very few weeds. We've got plenty of weed pressure so mustard is extremely good at suppressing weeds. Cattle do not like mustards very well at all. You would really have to force them to eat it and you can see they kind of roused around it a little bit but really not much.

5:42 The different mustards we can use several different mustards together to create a mix that blooms over an extended period of time because some of

5:52 These will start blooming in about 30 days but we've got others like the Florida broadleaf mustard over there on the end it just recently started blooming here after a couple of months so we can really spread out the bloom time. So in a pollinator insect attracting mix a little bit of each of these mustards is a good thing. Mustards also have a lot of high contents of glucosinolates which is a chemical compound that can be toxic to nematodes so we do have some guys using these as nematode suppression mixes. Get the full benefit out of that you really need to incorporate it into the soil so we're not typically doing that with this. We're looking at it more as a fast-growing weed control type crop.

7:03 Honeybees, mustards very good honeybee crops produce a lot of pollen. You can put a diversity of them there if you get a big long sequence of bloom you can see it right in front of here. And we generally wouldn't say any of these are that great for grazing with the exception of the Florida Broad Leaf mustard. We will put that in some grazing mixes. This is the exact same plant that people plant in their garden and they harvest mustard greens. So feel free to pick a green, eat it, it's got a nice spicy pungent taste. But that one of all of them, it's the most palatable.

7:38 What we noticed on all these brassicas is because the cattle were only in here for a few hours, brassicas are generally kind of an acquired taste for cattle and you won't see them eat it right away. And that's what we observe here even some of these brassicas that we know to be very palatable to animals they didn't really hit it that hard. We think that's primarily because they were in here for a very short period of time. Have they been in here longer I think they would have hit it harder. And when we get over to some of the mixes they actually ate the brassicas much better in a mix than they did where the brassicas were by themselves because there were other things in that mix that kept them in that area.

8:20 Who are a horseradish fan both the Florida Broad Leaf and the brown mustard have a very strong horseradish flavor so if you'd like a horseradish condiment to get your daily ration of greens at the same time you can slap a little of this on your steak.

8:53 This is supposed to be Manfold Metal foam is another type of Brassica that we got from a guy in Oregon. Either the seam was bad or we did a bad job drilling it because I'm not sure if anything could come off so unfortunately we aren't putting that in mixes. We were just looking for something else that would flower. Speaking of something that flowers really well, this light has really nice white pretty flowers. This is Nitro radish. Any of your tillage type radishes when they're spring planted this is exactly what you're going to get so don't let anybody tell you to plant a radish in the spring unless you want it to flower. So if it's part of a pollinator type mix not a bad way to go but you're not going to get that nice big radish run because radish says we'll go reproductive as a result of days getting longer so until we get past the longest day of the year which is coming up here pretty quickly, June 21st, this is what gravity says. But they bolt pretty quickly and they'll soon start forming seed pods. Once we get into July and August that's the time to plant radishes if you don't want them to bolt and just make really nice big neat tap roots.

10:10 Right next to them are purple top tournaments, turnips. Those types of brassicas they do not go reproductive in response to day length. They go reproductive in response to vernalizing so if you plant them late enough to where that plant does not get cold and fertilized don't grow vegetatively all summer long and never bolt. So those are the ones that we would mainly put into our spring grazing mixes. Would be the turnips, the rape seed, the collards. The kale actually looks exceptionally good over here. It's the best kale we've ever had I think. So these are the ones that we would typically put in our spring grazing mixes. Again the cattle didn't eat them real hard but I think if they would have had more time to get acclimated to it I think they would have.

10:58 One aspect of brassicas in general as far as cattle palatability now you will see that the colors here were extremely palatable even now but one aspect of Brassica palatability is that sugar. You know you can make it if you

11:17 Took high school chemistry you understand that a solution will have a lower freezing point than straight water. If you can put salt or sugar into it, it is a natural antifreeze. So brassicas can improve their own cold tolerance by chaining starch to sugar, which makes it sweeter, which makes them more palatable than you would have. So the palatability of brassicas is often related to temperature. As we are getting warmer, these brassicas are getting less and less sweet. During cold temperatures, like in the fall, a lot of times you get down into the 20s and browsing because we have automatically versatile cattle may have ignored them prior to that. But the collards seem to and you go up around to see how all these collards were eaten. They seem to be palatable about any time, and they're also kind of tasty to people as well.

12:15 As far as heat tolerance, our experience has shown as the college probably have as good a heat tolerance as any of the brassicas. They're hybrid collared, but one of the parents was Georgia Southern collards, which of course the southerners all harvest collard greens off of them. So they are developed for a higher heat condition. So we have seen them do pretty well in the summertime, probably better than most of these other ones.

12:43 The kale grew really well over here. There's two different kinds of kale, which kind of surprised me because kale, of all of the brassicas, has some of the better cold tolerances. So I was kind of surprised to see it grow this well into warmer conditions. But it actually did quite well. If anybody wants to harness some of this and take it home and make kale chips, you're welcome to it.

13:15 Now we get into this blank area here. The area that does not have much growing is a clover plot. You know, every year when we plant it, it always looks like this. We keep doing it just so we can show you what it looks like. Clovers are slow to establish. Clovers are not nearly as competitive against weeds as a lot of these other things. You're going to see a lot more weeds in these clover plots and one of these others. There's been no weed control done on any of this. So you can see what you're seeing is what you got here. But the clovers, you know, if you have a short period of time to grow your cover crop, clovers probably aren't the best option because they just take too long to establish.

13:56 If you're going to have a multi-year or multi-month type cover crop situation, the clovers may be a good thing to put in there because they will regrow pretty well and they may actually get better and better as the year goes on instead of going downhill. So there's different clovers in here. You can see them on your list. The first thing, fall over the dale, just picked there, that's one of the taller growing clovers. It looks a lot like alfalfa, and it's a Mediterranean type clover, so it is going to handle the heat much better than a lot of these cool season, strictly cool season clovers.

14:34 Of these clovers, like Keith said, the person does seem to be the most aggressive in the seedling stage. The biggest use for this fractions clover is because it does look like alfalfa, it dries out like alfalfa. A lot of the other clovers, when they turn them into hay, they turn black or brown and I'm not very attractive years and then hay bales just like alfalfa. So if you have a winter kill or a drown out spot in alfalfa, you can see prison clover in there and not skip the meat. That's the way it recovering some productivity from some alfalfa that's thinning out. And it does also tolerate with soil much much better than alfalfa. So if you've got Paris channels or ground out spots, it's a good little one-year fix for those areas.

15:29 Yeah, so you can actually, like Daniel said, you can intercede this into defending alfalfa and it will assist. Will establish much better. You can't ever add alfalfa into existing alfalfa. It won't allow itself to do that. But you can get a versine clover to take effect in there.

15:47 Pete, do you have to cut or graze that prior to blooming for it to come back? Or with the vercim clover, the question was do you have to cut or graze that prior to bloom? With vercim clover, you're going to get the best regrowth if you do yes. It's just an annual clover, it's not a perennial like alfalfa. So in order to keep it from going to seed and just going completely through his life cycle, you need to keep it drip down before it blows.

16:37 That has just come on from through the winter. They got one right there that was planted out here that was just some volunteer hairy bench from fast cover crops that were out here. We're going to look at some other benches down here a little bit and we'll compare the different types of batches. But this particular run right there is hairy dash.

17:09 We've got we got one type here and there's another one just a few blocks down. This is faba beans. Fava beans are the only true bean that will thrive in.

17:22 Cold wet soils. All the other beans like soybeans, mung beans, cowpeas, things like that need warm soils, but fava beans, these were planted April 4th, probably could have been planted a little bit sooner even, do very well in the cool soil. They grow really well. You can see how nice they're doing here. Really surprised to see that the camel hardly accepted them at all.

17:47 From Pulse USA, there she said that yeah, the fava beans have a real bitter taste and they're not very palatable. So again, if you want to make a grazing mix and have a legume that will continue to grow even after you graze, this might not be a bad choice because the cattle may leave it alone and you can get your legume to keep growing even after they've eaten off say oats or barley or Trinity or maybe even peas. So that's something that we're considering.

18:15 The biggest knock that we have against fava beans and the reason we haven't utilized them more in the past is that the seat size is very large. They're, we're working on the one over there is a variety called Tabasco that we got some sample seed on and it's the smallest thing.

18:41 We're working with some breeders trying to get the seed size bred down. We really like the root structure of fava beans. It's got a great root. Like I say, it does very, very well in cool soils. I don't know that we're looking at growing it as a crop here. It needs to be grown for some production further north. As you can see, it blooms really well and can be part of a secondary strip if you want to track some insects. But if we can get it to spawn seeded lima bean or consistently, I think it's something we could use one in our spring mixes.

19:18 This next plot is chickling veg. Check Lane batch is a kind of an interesting plant. It actually has characteristics of eating veg and grass. It's also known as a grass paint and manure crop.

19:46 And people will put AF on it. You cannot, you feed the seeds. So you wouldn't ever want to feed the seed. And if you've ever seen the seed, if you've ever bought this from us, you may have used this of putting gravel in your mixes because it looks like a handful of rocks. It's different shapes, it's different colors, it's different sizes, it's just weird looking seed, but that's AC Green fixed chicken.

20:10 I don't know if you noticed or not, but when we were coming from the Pea plots back into Bladen, we've got 100 acres of this growing. It would have been just on the east side of the road, not far from the feed plots. We have a 100 Acre field of this if we're growing out for seed production and we've done production for several years. It doesn't yield as well as peas do, but we're still kind of learning how that works. You can see that the flowers are different colors and I suppose that corresponds to the different colors of seeds that it produces.

20:46 I'm not gonna say anything about trickling Village. Seems to be more powerful than livestock than some of the other legumes but less so than others.

20:56 This next one is chickpeas or garbanzo beans. Those are also called. We use a variety called Desi's, simply because they're small seeded. Again, anything that goes into the human food market, they tend to breed for larger seed size and that's counterproductive in what we want to do as a cover crop. So we're always trying to find these varieties that have the smallest seed size so that they work well in mixes as well as when you buy a pound of seed, you're getting as many plants out of that as possible.

21:28 So these are Desi chickpeas. They're not extremely huge or grow, you know, real tall. They're not going to get the biomass that a yellow field seed does. They will tend to tolerate heat better than what a yellow blp will. You can't put too many of them in because they're not as competitive as some of them. They're just kind of got started to put some blooms on. Longer season than a yellow field peas.

22:02 This next one is a new one. Whereas this is fenugreek. And we've never really done a lot with fenugreek. It is a legume and it's used a lot for medicinal type purposes. There's been some studies that show it's good for increasing lactation in animals. We don't really know what we're doing with it yet, but we were impressed with how well it grew and so it's got us excited enough about it that we're going to definitely keep looking at it as a potential crime. I know that Horizontal University guys, Deepak is doing some business. He and I have been playing phone tag and it's looking good.

23:04 It could be something that fits into the metro station somewhere. We've never really had a lot of luck with it.

23:10 Until this year and they've got a really nice staff and again it's surprising we thought maybe the cattle would eat that more than they did they didn't really hit that too hard compared to some of the other things around it it's got good robotics.

23:29 Are north of this are getting a little whiff of a maple syrup as well that's coming from this it's a unique amongst most of the games have a very low sugar content and this is different it actually has a very high sugar content which makes it kind of surprising like he says the rhizobia monocular you can see the leaves resemble alfalfa but it does have a very high sugar content which makes it surprising that the cattle didn't need it and again that made the familiarity issue smell something unusual.

24:16 You know one year I got a bunch of cattle in from the Sand Hills on my farm okay right next to this cattle eat the littles exceptionally well they really put the hammer down on them compared to where they didn't need your spring levels are a really nice small seated pulse crop.

24:47 We use lentils a lot they're more drought tolerant than a batch like common veg or hairy vegs they're more drought tolerant than that. They also don't vine and climb so if you're looking at some potential companion crops to seed underneath other things or just want a legume in there that's not going to take over and be super competitive the lentils are a really good choice they're cheaper than a batch. You can see they've got good growth going on here and they're just a nice niche type prop again you wouldn't want to have a whole feel to them because they're not going to be nearly as competitive or choking out the weeds but as part of a mix we like them pretty well and again you can see how well the cattle ate them there.

25:34 Right next to them are lupines and again this is by far the best strip of lupins that we've ever had we've tried lupines in our seat how many years ago was that Brian it was just a little bit cars but these actually look pretty good these are yellow lumen lupins are another legume. There are some toxicity issues with lupines with high alkaloids you have to get the right type a little bit if you're going to graze it very much it looks like they grazed on it a little bit but not excessively so again that's one of those that we're kind of looking at trying to figure out how it fits.

26:17 Lupines are widely used as a cover crop around the world they have a wide range of use down in South America they use a lot of lupus down there as a cover crops as nitrogen fixers not nearly as widely used here in the U.S. More in the southeast United States partly any up here so we're still trying to figure out how they fit and then of course right next to them is another type of fava bean.

26:43 One unique aspect of movements they are one of the very few volumes that are not just like rice. The do not associate with mycorrhizal fungi and one of the purposes of mycorrhizal fungi and that association with plants is they help the plan obtain phosphorus since lupines don't post mycorizal fungus they even bones in different things to make phosphorus more available and they secrete an acid from the roots that increase phosphorus availability so one of the benefits of lupines is that on a soil with poor phosphate availability due to excess calcium or some other issue high iron lupins can help free some of that phosphate up make it more available for the next crop.

27:48 So here we have two different types of peas we had just a yellow field P very similar to what we're looking at out in the plots this morning and then right next to it was a 4010 4hbs and you can tell that the 4 HP is taller it has more biomass it's longer season it's still kind of blooming 4010s will have a purple blossom you see it's kind of bloomy purple there where these yellow field peas are all white blossom if you look back to where the candle we're grazing and it would appear to me that they ate orange beans better than the yellow peas so this is what we use in cover crops because it's going to get taller it's gonna have more forage and a higher degree probability another important whereas the Philippines range you know probably average around 2000 seats per pound a 4010p is going to average between 3500 and 4000 seats per pound so when you buy a pound of these I mean but you're getting quite as many seeds per pound.

29:06 The stroke that I'm standing in with all the pretty purple flowers it is this is wallypod vetch and right next to it where Dale is standing is common batch now these are in the same family as what you're seeing right over here in

29:22 This volunteer that's hairy vetch and the differences are carry vetch is a true winter annual. It's the most winter hardy legume that we have at our disposal. Overwinters very well and nothing is going to outgrow. None of these legumes will outgrow hairy vetch, which is essentially a small plant because it probably all the two or five spring.

29:47 Common vetch and wallypod vetch are both true spring annuals. Bully Pond is much more cold tolerant than common vetch. We've only seen common vetch overwinter around here one or two years out of the last eight or nine. You have to have a pretty mild winter and pretty good snow coverage.

30:05 Will overwinter better, but not nearly as good as hairy vetch. These are both true spring annuals. Because these are spring annuals, look how fast they go to reproduction. Now the common vetch is just starting to bloom.

30:28 It'll be the last vetch to bloom. Small plant, it'll be the first match to bloom. With a spring planted, it would be the last match to bloom. So again, if you're trying to attract insects and beneficials, you want some of each of these so that you can stay in a job that period of time.

30:47 Extremely good at suppressing weeds. There's a few weeds down there but very few. And when you look at this, it's a bad. There's not much that's going to grow through that and you can see how well the cattle eat that too. They really scrub that down.

31:16 The first blues and this is a pollinated variety. And because it's open pollinated, we can produce it very cheaply, makes it very economical to plant. And it has the advantages of how to use corn herbicides. You can other than Roundup. It is about a GMO, but what it has variety that's a naturally occurring mutation makes the plant unable to produce.

31:56 If you understand animal nutrition, you know that lignin is the indigestible fiber in plants. If you take the lignin out of a plant, all of a sudden not only the cell wall becomes digestible, but all the cell contents become more accessible to rumen and microbes. So that makes this this is rocket fuel for animals. If this is one of the preferred plants for grass finishing animals where energy intake is the limiting factor in performance, you can cram a lot of energy into animals with brown midriff grazing corns. And because it is open pollinated, we can produce it very cheaply.

32:46 Thing it is not growing quite as well as this over here. This is an F2 hybrid, so it's more productive. It is a little more costly than this one, but in a grazing situation, we usually point people towards this one. Say Planet twice as safe. And a silage situation or something for a stockpiled situation where you're going to let it grow long time.

33:13 4.34 towards this one. This is our F2 bmr-90 and both grounds slightly different purposes.

33:37 Deer just love this stuff. Where it really fits well with the cover crop oil is you get into August planning. Maybe you're starting to slow down because the temperatures are getting lower. Corn will grow about 10 degrees that will tolerate temperatures about 10 degrees cooler than sorghum's melons. So when you're planting into the later part of the bowl, this has some real advantages.

34:57 So this actually had some snow on it and actually had quite a bit of freezing on it, so not ideal conditions for forage.

35:37 The deer guys like them because they will come on in the fall. They're a very long season crop. They don't grow extremely fast but they grow over a long period of time. So probably the number one use of sugar beets in the cover crop world is in the food plots for deer because they will really have a nice grazing effect.

36:09 Like them really well. Sunflowers are extremely cheap to plant because again this is an F2 hybrid. They grow pretty quickly and at this stage they're very palatable as well.

36:26 Of our mixes very deep rooted. You don't want to get them too thick or they'll take over or they can take too much moisture. Really nice feature to have and whether it's a crazy mix or not, it works really well. A lot of people worry about if they let this go and it forms heads and it forms seed, are they going to have all kinds of volunteer sunflowers out there to have to deal with. The answer to that is no. These are oil seed sunflowers so the 35 to 40 percent oil content in that seed, which makes it extremely desirable for anything that flies or of any seed that gets produced. Plus.

37:17 If you're in here grazing these things after they form seed, the cattle will eat all of those heads. They'll do very well on that high oil content, and we like mixing this with some of this BMR corn for a really good winter stock bio mix later on.

37:36 Just reiterating what you keep saying, really like sunflowers is part of a winter stockpile mix like with some brown major absorghums or something more. The hands are very high in protein. It's really hard to get legumes. We think about high proteins being kind of legume niche, but very few of the games will keep their leaves after summer growing. Legumes will keep their leaves on after frost. Pause in the shatter sunflower heads will persist well into the winter and act as a supplement for a minor stockpiles.

38:27 Okay, now we move into our area that has the cereals in it. This first one is Albon cereal rye, and there's some kind of cool things to look at on here. Number one, look at the amount of lush growth that we got. Now this is a winter cereal planted in the spring. Most winter cereals will not do this. We've planted winter wheat and winter treated Kaylee in the spring corn. You don't get anywhere near this much road. You get almost done that will shoot heads up. You'll see this rye probably has maybe about 10 that will go ahead and add. Even though it doesn't burn a lot, most winter cereals will not do this.

39:06 The other thing to look at is look how much it's already regrown since Monday. It's regrown significantly more than any other cereals. You can see where it's got new growth because that was rubbed off pretty clean when those cattle came off of here. It's already regrown pretty well, and this is going to continue to regrow. We can probably turn back. You know, if you had a whole field this, you can turn back out on this in another 10 to 14 days. Exceptional regrowth. It's not necessarily the best thing for spring planting, but it's the best winter cereal for spring planting.

39:41 If you would all plant this, it would look like this March. Rye is very, very widely used, not as commonly used as an April type planting, but it's interesting. Just the rye is just a survivor. It's a tough plant. It's always going to make some seed so it can propagate itself and survive. And that's one of the reasons that once it gets into a wheat field, it can be a little bit more difficult to get rid of. And some guys that are empty in a weak rotation, you don't think rye is a four-letter word, not a three-letter word.

40:15 Right next to it, we have Springfield daily. This is a spring cereal along with the oats and the barleys that you'll see over here. So they're going to get a lot more growth. They're going to grow more normally because they don't need to vernalize in order to do that. You can see that the cattle grazed all of the cereals quite well. Cattle normally will eat the grasses first because that's kind of what they're used to.

40:39 It does not, it's not going to regrow nearly as well as this ride though. And you know, that's, we won't see you know, we'll leave these plots. If you want to come back in a week or so and look at the regrowth, you sure can. But what we're seeing already is that the rye is regrowing better than these others. So we have spring treated Kaely here. We've got black oats right here. Then we've got spring barley and then we've got spring oats.

41:10 You guys think as far as how late do you feel comfortable planning it as far as winter garden is, what kind of your thoughts there? How late can we go in the fall? So the question was how late can we plant rye in the fall and feel good about the winter hardiness.

41:26 What was that ride by December 7th or the 10th? That one year we planted it, I honestly think I think you could plant Albon rye any month of the year if you could get it in, and it'll grow. I've yet to see it winter kill. Gabe Brown ended up North Dakota. I think it grew fine up there. I don't know. It's just, I'd say this is really impressive, you know, that, and we've had volunteer when we've harvested it for seed. Volunteer, and I've mowed it like in August. Grow like this. Forget about that, you mow it again. It's almost like Kentucky bluegrass in that regard. Got a managing.

42:03 Okay, and obviously fall planted, you know, it'll go ahead and mature. But if you keep it mowed down like that, the only thing that's neat on this is if you look under this canopy, it's still wet. We had an inch, a little over an inch rain on Tuesday night. You know where you guys are standing, it's pretty dry because you know there's no canopy there, and there's still some pretty good moisture here. So yeah, I think you can get it in the ground. I haven't seen it die yet, but and that's part of the issue with rye, you...

47:57 I'd say if you can manage it with the right growth stage and the right number of cattle I think it could be done but you're going to be out fairly late end of the year doing that. V blade if you're looking for a non-chemical option a V blade can cut the roots but leave the mulch. Flaming I think would work if it's mature enough in other words it's very very it's a tough plan, the cover crop but it also makes it more difficult to me but on the other hand that exact same variety like I said when we grazed and it was probably soft dough and it wasn't real good grazing but we just were covering Hillside I wanted to leave a lot of residue and the cows went through it eight probably a third of it knocked it down is dead it's just it just reaching its maturity so it just depends on just the growth stage.

48:57 So again we've got Black Codes. Black Codes is a little bit longer season more of a forage type. Spring barley and then the spring oats over here again all of them have excellent weed control if you don't believe it look at the gap in between the barley and the oats here look at the number of weeds that are growing right there and then if you get a chance to step into these plots there's very few weeds growing in these plots and I say there was no herbicides applied. We didn't have anybody out here weeding this so just competition alone will take care of a lot of weeds.

49:38 Then we move into some different mixes. I'm going to let a little bit about online. We'll probably just go down here talk about the bike Verizon experiments. Oh yeah okay before we do that let's talk about the buckwheat here. This is one of the more miserable stands of buckwheat we've ever had. We did have a freeze that got down to the low 20s and buckwheat doesn't like that and if you've ever planted buckwheat this is the fastest plant on the ground there is and so this buckwheat was up their ways when that freeze hit and then this is just kind of later mergers but buckwheat's growing in popularity.

50:34 Historically it has been grown as a smother crop because it does pop out of the ground so it has it'll out compete with weeds and it also secretes an acid from the roots and for a similar reason it is non-mycorrhizal so it frees up unavailable phosphorus. It does not benefit from mycorrhizae it can't depend on that route to get phosphorus.

51:12 Familiar with sugarcane aphids they basically make sorghum production a miserable experience not only do they greatly reduce the yield by sucking the sap they also secrete some honeydew that turns black and only corn syrup whatever there's sorghum plants and then you can't harvest them. I don't give them up the combine it's a miserable mess and margins are tight enough now without having to deal with that. Now you can spray for sugarcane aphids but just not any insecticide will kill them you got to use some newer products and usually have to apply it twice and oftentimes after you've killed off the sugarcane aphids with two insecticide applications you also killed off all your predators and you'll get another insect from like fall armyworms later on in the air so it's a real issue in sorghum production.

52:08 Well we've got some customers that have been planning companion crops or barrier crops a strip around the outside that includes buckwheat. The idea behind doing this is that buckwheat produces more nectar and more pollen than just about any other plant and does it quicker after planting than anything. I mean this is not the best explainable there is 30 days. 30 days from planting to bloom and so ladybugs and lacewings really like to eat what we call them and they'll reproduce at a very fast rate among it and I like to lay eggs in there so 30 days after planting you can start producing an army of ladybugs and lacewings and that are sitting there ready and waiting.

53:08 We've got some fresh meat here we're tired all in the back here we want some weed. I'll go out and get the aphids down all we have so far is the success of several producers really well he says I can't tell you that if you plant buckwheat with your sorghum you will not have sugarcane aphid problems what I can tell you though is I planted buckwheat with my sorghum along with some other blends flowering.

53:44 Plants and I was the only person in my area that did not have sugar cane, probably. Yeah, so this year there's some research being done. Some things that the Kansas grain sorghum commission has partnered up on that we're stating in that research. You know, when you kind of thread a couple pounds of buckwheat in there and some other flowering plants for about three or four dollars an acre, it sure beats 50 bucks an acre for himself aside. So we're pretty excited about this concept as far as the mixes.

54:25 When we get done with the plot we usually do the drill clean out. Surprise, we just threw a bunch of stuff in here and see if it's for Town. And you can see we've got one replication here and we've got another replication here. The difference between these two mixtures is the same seeds.

54:51 One of the microbes we put in is when you put in some mycorrhizal fungi inoculum. And we also put in some Azospirilla, which is some nitrogen-fixing bacteria. You know, when you put in a cover crop mix, you know, we've got some brassicas in here. We've got something to eat nitrogen, but these really don't make much of mulch. The grasses make mulch, but they don't fix nitrogen. What if you can make those grasses? And that's when they use this fire Rubble. We can do it. It's not a big nitrogen-producing organisms.

55:36 In good condition, you might get an extra 20 or 30 pounds of nitrogen out of the deal, which is pretty significant in the cover crop. That kind of changes the economics if you add an extra 20 or 30 pounds of nitrogen on benefits. Hey, that's just gravy. And especially if you can do it for three dollars or so an acre. So what we've got over here is one of the ways you can tell if the mycorrhizae is working is you come over here. Your animal plants pull it, it comes up very easy. If you come over here and pull the plant, hopefully I'll get one that's colonized.

56:22 You see a little difference in the root balls here. Just the amount of tension it took to pull these plants up. I tried to grab a similar amount of plant here in each hand, and it just the amount of mechanical force it took to get this out versus this one was pretty significant. That's how you can tell that the mycorrhizal fungi are invisible to the naked eye. You can't see them with a microscope, but the way you can tell they're there is just see how much mechanical force it takes to pull them out of the ground. This really has an underground gone in water stress. So we haven't seen a lot of growth differences yet. Where you really see a response to mycorrhizal fungi is where you have some sort of severe soil issue, whether that's dry soil, soil shows up huge if you've got salt spots. Sold issues, mycorrhiza fungus big. And calcareous soils where you might have some iron chlorosis issues on soybeans, it shows up. We're excited to see how this progresses over time.

57:41 Hey, moving on over here, we have two different kinds of staff flour. If now you can see back behind that the sunflower was grazed very well. A couple observations: see how well they graze the mix. There's plants in this mix that they did not grease in the monoculture. Sticking up in here, they ate the mustards in the mix. You'll also see another thing to eat. Notice that all the weeds are eaten. Virtually every weed has been eaten when you move cattle every day. They eat those wings, with the exception of Buffalo Burr and thistle that Billy just about every region the movement everything.

58:42 Yeah, we've got two different types of safflower here. Now you can see behind you that the cattle ate the safflower. This Sapphire, which is folded very well, this is a pinched sunflower, which is very prickly variety. Now this has been planted later, so it hasn't developed the spines. This one that's growing a little bit longer. Yeah, this one that's growing another almost two weeks. If you want to come up and feel that it's starting to get thistle-like, and it I pulled it from one of our mixes over there. So this has about two more weeks of maturity than this, and it's definitely starting to get prickly. It's going to lose its palatability, whereas this baldy all the way up through harvest. You can just grab this. It's a very smooth leaf. This is a very unique variety that was developed by Montana State.

59:37 We have licensed the marketing rights to this, so we have the exclusivity on this baldy safflower. They're both pretty good grazing at a young growth stage. As they mature, the finch or all other types of safflower are going to get more thistle-like and the cattle won't like them very well. It gets so prickly that I heard a guy who's actually planting.

1:00:08 I had a group of guys from North Dakota here one time and we were looking at a safflower plot and they said you know how you tell when safflower is ready to harvest. I said well no, he says will you take a cat by the tail and you throw it in as far as you can, and when it doesn't come out anymore it's time to harvest, because the more club the closer it gets to maturity, the more prickly it gets. This baldy will not do that. We think it's got really good implications because you see how palatable it is. We think it's got a lot of potential for crazy mixes because it will not get the thorniness to it.

1:00:45 You talk about monster corn. Okay, here's maybe my favorite entry in the whole pond and it doesn't look like it yet. But come back in August because I'm really excited about this. This first little strip here, this first three feet is the VM re Ford. Earlier, this one is one we call the Mexican monster. This is a tropical corn. When I have worked with it in the past, this will get 14 to 15 foot tall and they'll have stocks that look like three inch PVC pipe.

1:01:28 This is not something we're looking at for palatability and my function as a windbreaker. I think that is just it's fun to play with and I guarantee you when you come back here in August, and I hope you do come back here in August, this will be the most impressive thing. If this stuff doesn't get 20 feet tall, Dale's gonna cry because he sent me a picture of somebody who had 20 foot tall. It's like 130 day relative maturity, so we do actually have a guy down in Oklahoma that's going to try to grow some seed. Know if you can or not, he doesn't know. But yeah, sometimes you got to do the things that are just kind of fun too.

1:02:21 These next two things are just a couple of other experimental bees that we've gotten samples of from different companies that we're just evaluating. This one over here is more of the forage each type. Again, you can see the purple blossoms. So again, we're just kind of evaluating these to see if it's something that we want to look at for replacing the 4010s, which is what we are mainly using.

1:02:47 From here on over, this was all, I guess all of this was a little bit later planted, but from here on over it's our perennial lot. We're not going to spend much time on this, but a lot to look at yet. We will leave these established and what we're going to do is we're going to take basically the rest of this pivot. There's two more towers of this pivot. Next week, we'll plant the next hour opinion at the primary season cover crops and we will throw some cool season stuff in there as well. And then we will play it again in August.

1:03:21 If you come back in August, we'll be able to look at some of this and all of that. If you come back in November, then we'll be able to look at those later planet stuff too. So we will try it again. Can I get the email addresses of people that signed up? That way, we can keep them up to date when we have our next field day scheduled. We do want to show you just a couple of things down here. They're pretty interesting. Again, these are a lot of clovers.

1:04:05 The main thing that we wanted to point out here is these two plots here. These are only three foot wide strips, okay? So every three feet there's another plot. This is chicory right where I'm standing, and where Dale's standing right here this is plantain. Chicory and plantain are both perennial herbs. They're very deep rooted. They can extract a lot of minerals out of the soil. They're very high in mineral content. Usually, if you have these in your grazing mixes, your cannibals will use less free choice mineral. But what I want you to look at is look how fast that plantain has regrown again. This is just grazed on Monday. It's already got a lot of regrowth to it and it regrows very fast because it's got a very deep tap root. Yet it overwinters quite well. I've got a plantain plant growing in my front yard that somebody took their shoes off and probably roll the plantain seed out and brought it back from the sink floor and that thing's been there for four or five years. Very winter hardy, excellent to put in as part of a.

1:05:09 Perennial grazing system. I do not recommend this if you're just grazing annuals. This is too expensive to put in something that's only going to grow for three months. Because there are four and a half bucks a pound, small seeds. Again, you get a lot of seeds per pound. You don't need that much, but the advantage of these is in more of a perennial grazing system because that's where they really shine.

1:05:33 Yeah, a couple other aspects of both these plants. There's actually a company in the United Kingdom that sells the blend of plants designed to deworm livestock. Chicory contains some polyphenols that are toxic and has all parasites, and the idea that they're using there in the UK is that you plant approximately one thirtieth of your land area to the deworming paddock and you rotate your animals daily through individual paddocks. Once a month you move to the deworming pasture. You don't have to pour it on with the compound switch. Parasites rapidly develop resistance. You do it naturally, and so there's I think it's a highly interesting concept.

1:06:36 Yeah, and it's just a fascinating concept. The plantain has an immune stimulant property to it. It seems to stimulate the immune system so animals don't get sick. It has the same effect on humans. It apparently has some anti-carcinogenic properties. And I eat it myself. It is perfectly acceptable for human consumption. It doesn't exactly taste like cheesecake, but as far as a green it's okay. It needs ranch dressing.

1:08:12 Plantain. Keith mentioned their mineral content. The main minerals that we need to supplement in this area for cattle at least first copper and zinc, and both chicory and plantain have about twice the NRC recommendations for those minerals. And most of our common forages that we use around here growing on the same soil slightly deficient. And so even a little bit of those in the pasture can really enhance your mineral status. So chicory also contains condensed tannins that help prevent bloat on legume pasture. So when I designed a pasture mix that contains alfalfa, I always try to throw some chicory and some other non-legumes.

1:09:05 What we wanted to show you here is the strip. What do you see growing in the strip where we didn't have the cover crop? Yeah, nice crop of weeds. If you look out in the cover crop here, there really aren't any weeds now. Another thing that you can do. Yeah, there's a few weeds, but they're really small, non-competitive, not amounting much. Several lessons here. One is that cover crops can suppress weeds. Another one is that this is God's way of telling you that he wants the ground covered. If you don't plant a crop you want, God will plant a cover crop for you, and it may not be the cover crop you want. We don't sell vetch for a reason. Probably not what you want. I think this is probably better. And if you want to, you can come up here, sit your hand on the soil surface and feel it. It is hot and it is dry. We come on in here, put your hand on the soil surface. It is cool and it is moist. The biggest opposition to planting cover crops is I'm going to use up all my moisture and dry out my soil. That's not what I'm seeing right here. It's more moist than it is in the strip. And that's the lesson we'd like to leave you with here.

1:10:48 Okay, that's kind of all we have to show you here. We would, if you want to stick around, we'd love to visit with you. We can look at individual plots. You're more than welcome to stick around. If you would like a little mini tour of our seed facilities up here, stop in there. Somebody will be around and give you a tour. David, I know some of you guys have seeds to pick up also. You can just head right up into the yard here. David or John or Adam or somebody up there can help you get loaded up. Dale and myself, we'll stick around here and be more than happy to visit with you in more detail about any of these specific things. Thank you everyone for coming out. Like I say, we will always try to keep you updated when we have our next field day. Some of these things, these perennials will look better than they do now. A lot of the annuals will run their course, so we'll have a whole other set of blocks going over here, and those are going in next week. So thank you everyone for coming. Let us know if you have any questions. Thanks.