Field Tour: 90+ Cover Crop Species—What Grows Where

0:00 Hello everybody and welcome to our green cover seed 2021 cover crop plots. My name is Keith Burns and I'm here with Davis Bailey, and we're going to give you a little bit of a tour of our plots here.

0:14 Davis, these are some of the nicest plots I think we've ever had. Great job to you and your team for doing the planting and the weeding and doing all this. Tell us a little bit about when these were planted and the conditions they were planted into.

0:27 We planted all of these plots on May 26th. We feel like the end of May or May 20th ish is a great time frame for us to be able to plant both our warm season plants and our cool season plants. We're on the tail end of when we would normally plant those cool season plants and we're at the very beginning of when we would be planting most of those warm season plants. So for doing tours and stuff like that this time of year, we feel like that time frame gives us the ability to plant it all at once.

0:57 So about 60 days we're looking at close to 60 days of growth. Right, right. We plant it into two different sets of conditions here. Up front, hopefully you can see the divide there where it's mowed out. Where we're at right here was planted into sprayed out rye. The rye was sprayed out about 30 days before when we planted. Beyond that was still tall green growing rye, pollen had been dropping. It was time to roller crimp, so it worked out well to be able to just plant straight from these conditions into those conditions.

1:34 That was really interesting because we actually had a wet part of the year then and so things like our bigger seeded cover crops, some of them weren't getting as deep into the ground as we wanted to, especially where we had the mat already down. But where we were planting into the standing rye, there was a little bit more moisture usage and so we could get it down a little bit deeper where we needed it.

1:59 Yeah, so it's going to be really interesting and as we go through here on some of these plots we'll point out differences between where there was less residue, where the cover crop was sprayed out ahead of time, and where we planted green. This was all planted with a Great Plains no-till drill, just kind of a stock no-till drill, nothing fancy on it. Had the coulter up front but you know, very much like what many of you would be using. And I know Davis was a little nervous about planting into that five, six foot tall rye, especially with some of these small seeds.

2:33 But as you see as we go through here, we think we actually got a better stand where we had you know, what, 10 times more residue to plant through. Yeah, like you said it was nerve-wracking. It's something that we really encourage people to look at, roller crimping. But I myself was very nervous going into rye that was as tall as the drill was. But it worked out surprisingly well, especially like you said on the small seeds where you would maybe be most nervous.

3:01 So what we're going to do is we'll start with the legumes, we'll move into grasses, and then we'll go to the brassicas and then our other broad leaves. And then kind of the crowning achievement of all of our plots is the mixes. There's some beautiful things to look at when we get down to the mixes. So I'm really looking forward to that. So let's start with clovers. You know, we plant clovers in monoculture strips simply to show you why you shouldn't plant clovers in monoculture strips.

3:30 Now, what Davis, I don't think, did mention this front part. He and his teams have spent many, many, many hours pulling weeds because we wanted to be able to show you what the plants look like. But in the background, where beyond the mowing that has never been weeded, so you'll be able to see the weed pressure that is coming in these plots. And one of the things that we notice with clovers is there's a lot of weed pressure. Clovers are not that great at suppressing weeds early on. They're a little bit of a slow starter. And so the weeds can get a hold and they can get an advantage on the clovers oftentimes.

4:06 And so that's why we like clovers as part of a mix. We don't like clovers by themselves unless you're trying to grow seed production or something like this. So we've got our Frosty Berseem clover. Berseem clovers are one of the clovers that tolerate heat better than most other clovers. Persian and berseem clovers both will do that. And then of course we've got crimson clover, probably one of the most popular clovers in the cover cropping industry. It's relatively inexpensive, it grows relatively fast, and it's just a really hardy clover.

4:39 So I don't know that we need to talk a lot about clovers because again, they're really nice parts of mixes and we'll see them show up down in the mixes. But if you can really see the amount of weed pressure that's coming where we didn't have any weeding done. These are the medics. Medics are actually closely related to alfalfa, more closely related to alfalfa and sweet clover than.

5:02 They are the other clovers. The Latin term for alfalfa is medicago, and that's the same root word that we get medic from. So medics again, Davis, these are things that we don't sell a lot of, but we're really looking at it because we think it's got some specialty applications.

5:20 They grow low like a clover does. They're kind of a ground cover type plant. These are relatively fast growing annuals. I would say for the most part, probably grow a little faster than the clovers, have a little bit better weed suppression. You can see in the background there, I think there's less weeds in the medics than there is in the clovers.

5:40 They're again, they're more difficult to find. There's not a lot of people in the United States growing medics. As a general rule, these mostly come from Australia. Davis, why don't you talk a little bit about where and how we're looking at using medics.

5:54 Yeah, like you said, this is something that most acres in the United States we wouldn't be spending a lot of time with these, but one place where we do see them sometimes showing up naturally is in orchards and vineyards out in California. I know they've got a lot of beer medic, and it works well as another low growing option, something to cover the ground quick, and it's going to produce some nitrogen as well.

6:19 So we like it in that application, and hopefully something that we can carry a little bit more of for people who are. A lot of those people don't need a high producing cover crop. Sometimes it's just too much biomass. So keeping it low growing, something that's going to suppress the weeds, but when the moisture turns off in the summer, something that's also going to decompose quickly, so they can have a clean floor to harvest off of.

6:43 Yeah, and so this is one that we would be looking at, you know, how shade tolerant is it, what is the reseeding potential? Will that be an issue? So this may be one that we start putting in some of the corn, the V3, V4 corn interseedings, because it is going to be low growing, not super competitive, but it is a legume, so it's contributing some nitrogen.

7:04 So again, one we're keeping our eye on. We find one that we really like, then we just got to find somebody in Australia to grow seed for us. Right, and one thing also to mention is just, I think like you said, somewhat similarly related to the clovers, but I would say just a little bit more resilient. Around here we see a lot of black medic showing up in areas that aren't managed too well. It's just a very resilient option too.

7:30 Okay, now we come to our hairy vetches. This is one of my favorite parts of the plot tour, Roy, because hairy vetch is just an awesome plant. It's the most winter hardy of all the legumes that we have, and we saw that when we looked at our overwintering plots.

7:44 We typically wouldn't think hairy vetch would look this great, because this really looks great planted in May. It's just not its time frame. We've had a decent amount of hot weather since we planted these plots, but these vetches look really, really good.

7:59 And I'm going to point out a couple of differences here. This is an AU Meritt, and then this is what we call our Montana hairy vetch. It's just a kind of a variety, not stated, but we've had the same guy in Montana growing it for many, many years. What I want you to notice is how much more growth this AU Meritt has than any of the other vetches.

8:21 AU Meritt has more growth, summer growth, than any vetch I've ever seen. I think what's going on here is that it's a little bit facultative, which basically means it can vernalize and overwinter. We've been growing it up in Montana and it's overwintering fine up there, but it doesn't have to. It can also act as a spring annual. So that's what's known as facultative, when it can act as a winter annual or as a spring annual. And when it doesn't have to vernalize, it just gets out and it grows faster, and this just has a very impressive amount of growth.

8:57 Got a nice little ladybug here. Later, earlier on I saw a bunch of bumble bees out here on the blossoms, and again, if you look in the background, there's a few weeds out there, but there's not many. Davis, what were your observations on the vetches here?

9:11 One of the first things out of the ground when we planted May 26th, all three of these vetches were one thing I'd like to point out. In the when fall planted, these two were neck and neck as we were evaluating all spring, and really for when most people would be terminating those cover crops, I think you could almost interchange them. But like you said, when we're spring planting, first off we normally wouldn't consider this an option, but as we've proven here, it really should be.

9:42 So yeah, the AU Meritt just jumps out way ahead. And because of that facultative trait, really is a good fit right now, acts more like a spring veg like the woolly pod.

9:52 And the other thing that we get people asking questions a lot about, especially organic guys who are wanting to grow as much nitrogen as they can for their corn crop they say how early can I plant vetch, how early can I plant vetches because they're wanting to plant it this summer and still have the big growth next spring.

10:12 What I would be worried about, I don't think this vetch here is ever going to survive the winter, mostly because it's going to—it's far enough along, it will be blooming, it'll set pods, it'll make seed, it will just die a natural death before it ever gets to the winter.

10:28 So for the organic folks who are asking how soon can I plant vetch and to get it over winter, I try to hold them off until at least the first week in August, because we do not want this much growth going into the fall.

10:41 If you want it to overwinter, now if you want to plant it in March or April and just let it grow through the summer, get as much growth as you can, terminate it and then plant something else, great. You could, I think you could plant this with cow peas and mung beans and other warm season things and still have some good nitrogen fixing, but don't plant it that early and think that it's going to overwinter.

11:02 Now the Montana vetch, because it is more of a winter annual, this is still fairly impressive, but again it's—I would say it's 50 percent less biomass perhaps than the Au Merit, and that's not surprising because it's more of a true winter annual and we just don't see this facultative trait expressed like we do with the Au Merit.

11:22 We'll talk next about the woolly pod vetch because it is more of a spring annual. So woolly pod vetch, Davis, unlike the true hairy vetch which is a strong winter annual, woolly pod vetch I refer to it as a very cold tolerant spring annual.

11:37 So it, it is—it definitely does not have to vernalize. It can survive some winter, so we had good woolly pod vetch survival this year in our overwintering plots largely because we had good snow cover, but it will overwinter in milder climates very reliably and in fact in Australia where a lot of this is grown, they don't really even have hairy vetch. If you see hairy vetch coming out of Australia it's likely going to be woolly pod vetch, because they just don't get nearly as cold as we do, so it's got plenty of cold tolerance for that climate.

12:10 Because it is more of a spring annual instead of winter annual, we see more growth on it than we do on our true winter annual Montana vetch, but I don't know, it's maybe pretty close to the Au Merit biomass wise, growth wise, but the Au Merit definitely is keeping up with a true spring annual woolly pod vetch. Again Davis, your observations on woolly pod.

12:33 The main difference besides what you mentioned that I see is the amount of blooms that we have on here. The woolly pod just happens to have way more blooms at this point in time, so if we're using it for beneficial insects that's probably how we're going to attract the most when using vetch.

12:49 Yeah, so from a vetch maturity standpoint, to get it to this stage it's always going to be winter planted hairy vetch first, and then spring planted woolly pod vetch, and then probably common vetch if you'd want to use that, and then the latest thing to bloom would be a spring planted hairy vetch.

13:09 So if you're—if you're a beekeeper and you want to have vetch blossoms for as long a period as possible, plant some hairy vetch in the winter and then spring plant a combination of woolly pod, common vetch and hairy vetch and you'll have vetch blooming for probably three months.

13:26 All right, now we have our 4010 spring peas. Again, this is a spring annual. I think it's amazing how well these things look for being planted at the end of May.

13:37 Typically we would want to plant these at the end of March because that's their time frame. They grow really really well with oats. They really hit that same growing window, the same germination condition, so they typically would be used with oats, but as a summer planted crop, super impressive.

13:57 A lot of growth, a lot of biomass here on these peas. You can see in the background there's hardly any weeds back there at all, that is super impressive, and that was planted into all that big mat of massive residue and looks really good. So we're using more and more spring peas and summer mixes all the time, again just to give that additional diversity. It's nice to have a cool season legume with your warm season legumes growing through the summer.

14:25 When it will do this, these are hitting their stride with blooming, and if you've ever been out to our field days and Dale Strickler's been here, you'll probably see him pick these and eat them all day long. So for Dale, we'll eat one here, but Davis, what are your observations on these 4010s that you've seen both in this plot and in other things. Like you mentioned, weed suppression is terrific.

14:48 One of the first things out of the ground and first things that you could really see defined rows on. It's one of the most dynamic legumes for me, one that I'll use later into the summer on spring to summer mixes and one of the first legumes that I'll start using again in fall mixes. So I like peas a lot. It was also interesting just with a huge canopy like this when we were mowing out some strips, it was just muddy under there. It kept so much moisture in, and really even in dry times you could find moisture under there.

15:22 And if you plant some of these you can harvest these blossoms and eat them. They taste just like a pea. It's incredible—you eat the flower, it tastes like a pea. Think about how beautiful of a plate you could present to your guests. So plant some peas for the soil, plant a few peas for the table.

15:39 Those are the peas. Now we also have chickpeas here. Chickpeas are the same thing as a garbanzo bean—they're the exact same plant. There's two different types: there's the desi types and there's the kabuli types. The kabulis are the big ones that are more human consumption. The desi's are smaller chickpeas that would typically get used for hummus and things like that. Not nearly as big of a plant as the peas, but probably a little bit more heat tolerant.

16:07 As a general rule you can kind of see it's got a great root structure there. Again, chickpeas are not going to be quite as aggressive out of the gate. If you look back there they do a decent job of weed suppression. We definitely got a better stand on the backside than we did in the front side. We like chickpeas as a part of a mix. They have some cold tolerance but they also have pretty good heat tolerance.

16:31 So again I would never recommend chickpeas as the only thing that you planted. They're susceptible to different diseases—that's a huge issue in production. As part of a mix though, you're not going to see that, so they're a nice little companion with a mix.

16:45 And then the last one that we'll hit kind of in this section here of these larger seeded legumes, cool season legumes is chickling veg. Now chickling veg, it's not really a vatch and it's not really a pea and it's not really a grass but it's a little bit of all of those. It's a latherous variety and in fact some places it's called the grassy pea vine to designate the fact that it looks a little bit like a grass, a little bit like a pea, and a little bit like a veg.

17:18 So this chickling vatch is a unique plant. It's a really good nitrogen fixer. It's got some pretty good cold tolerance, much like the spring pea does. Probably a better nitrogen fixer than a spring pea, but is really only commercial use today is as a cover crop because the seed itself contains neurotoxin. So you can't feed this seed to livestock, you can't cook it and eat it. The plant is fine—it's a great grazing plant, you can make hay out of it—but the seed itself there's no commercial value to it except for planting again.

17:52 So it's a really good green manure crop. Again our organic customers really like using this as part of their spring planted nitrogen fixing mixes. All right, now we've got fava beans, or some people also call them bell beans, and I've heard it faba and fava—it's all the same thing.

18:10 We really like these fava beans. It's the only true bean that will tolerate cold wet soils. All other beans need warmer soils. They can't handle the wetter conditions nearly as well. What we really like about these things is the root structure. And I don't know how well you can see this but it's just got a great—it's got a little bit of a tap root but then a lot of branching roots as well.

18:33 And even though this is only at 60 days of growth, this thing is just absolutely loaded with nodules. I wish each of you were here to be able to see this because it's truly impressive at how many nodules are on this young plant. Great nitrogen fixer, and again this has a really good niche because it can handle that cold wet soils planted earlier in the spring.

18:54 Now they don't handle heat nearly as well as a lot of other plants, and we can start to see this here because you can see these nice pretty white blossoms up on the top. Those are looking good, all of these down below here—look at this. They've turned black. These are aborted blossoms because of the heat. Fava beans do not like heat, especially in the reproductive process. It's growing pretty good, but all of these blossoms are going to abort because of the heat, and we would not have good seed yield here. But it's still a fantastic cover crop.

19:26 Soybeans—everybody knows about soybeans. It's one of the most popular crops grown in the United States and in the world, but can also be a good cover crop now. We don't recommend soybeans as a cover crop if you've got soybeans as a regular part of your crop rotation because we want to break those cycles for your cash crops rather than perpetuate them. But if

19:46 You're not using soybeans as part of your cash cropping rotation, highly recommend soybeans as part of your cover crop mix or if you're a grazing guy they're great grazers. So we got two kinds of soybeans here. The first one, these 55 18s, this is just kind of the this would be a production soybean we use it a lot for cover crops because it's a relatively inexpensive one to grow and we can sell it's a non-GMO bean, it's a group 5.5 production bean but again as you take that later group 5 bean and move it north it becomes more of a forage type soybean.

20:22 We would never grow a five five here for seed production because they won't make seed early enough before it gets caught with the frost. So as you move a bean north it becomes more of a forage soybean and as you take it south it becomes more of a grain type soybean. So we really like this one as we come from Nebraska and north because it really acts like a forage bean.

20:43 And then we have the laredos. The laredos when you plant these they don't even look like a soybean because they're very small, they're black seeded. It's the original soybean that came over from China 150 years ago and that all these other soybeans have been bred from. So it costs more I'm not going to lie to you there but the seed size is significantly smaller so you get a lot more seeds per pound. And it's more of a group six six and a half type soybean, it's going to be more of a forage type.

21:15 Davis, what were some of the observations you've seen between these two beans as they've been growing in the plots? It's really been in the last week or two that the laredos have caught up to the earlier maturing 55-18s. Yeah, now as we expect the rest of the summer to progress I would expect the laredos to continue to maybe even take the lead compared with the 55 18s.

21:40 Yeah and with that small seed size and with their more vining and forage production ability it's very popular in food plot mixes and they're great for deer food plots if you can keep the deer from eating them. Deer love soybeans. The biggest problem with planting soybeans for deer is that you'll never see them get this big because the deer just keep eating them.

22:00 Now we come to the mung beans and the cow peas, probably the most among the most heat tolerant, drought tolerant of all the summer legumes we use a lot of both of these. The mung beans here where Davis is standing, the difference between mung beans and cow peas mung beans are a little shorter season they're more determinate which simply means they're going to grow to their reproductive point at a much more set pace and schedule. They accumulate so many growing degree days they'll start blooming here pretty soon and then they start making seed pods.

22:32 Cow peas are much more indeterminate, they'll grow for a much longer period of time, they'll accumulate more biomass in the long run. Now I'd say in this first 60 days it's pretty similar. Now in the next 60 days if we don't get a frost you'll see the cow peas outperform the mung beans from that standpoint. So advantages and disadvantages to that. If you have a shorter time window to grow your summer legume a mung bean can be a really good option. The seed size is about half of on a mung bean than it is on a cow pea. Pricing they're about the same so it's probably a better value but if you have a longer period of time for something to grow then the cow pea is probably a better choice because you'll get more.

23:16 Overall the mung beans tend to have a little bit larger leaf then the cow peas. The cow peas will tend to be a little bit more viney type especially the red rippers, they tend to vine. We don't see a lot of vining out here right now because they've got nothing to vine on and climb on, they're just growing all by themselves. When we look at them in the mixes later we'll likely be able to see them start tendrilling up the different taller plants.

23:41 Just wanted to show quick here this root system on on a cow pea. Again it's got that tap root and then a lot of these nice branching roots here as well. And again good nodulation formation on this cowpea that I just pulled out of the soil here. So again we use a lot of cow peas.

24:01 The ironing clays this year Davis kind of looks different than last year. Tell just a little bit about your observations there. Yeah all year the iron and clays have just been a little bit ahead of the red rippers and really formed a gorgeous stand here that's not always the case. The red rippers we would maybe sell more of but this year just happens to be that way we're not exactly sure why.

24:26 Yeah and from a weed control standpoint there's weeds back there. You know again we would not want to recommend that anybody plant these by themselves they're a great companion we'd want to see some millet, some sorghums or corn or something in there because when we get to the mixes it's just fantastic weed suppression in the mixes that we just don't see in anything that's planted by itself. If somebody's looking for short season grazing or haying something that they're going to hay multiple times.

24:56 I like using the mung beans because of the value and the shorter maturity. I think that's your better bang for the buck, but if somebody's going for one max cutting, I like the cow peas. Just going to like you said out produce them in the long run.

25:13 Then we come to a couple of our very tropical type legumes. We've got sun hemp here and we've also got sasbania. We'll kind of talk about them as a set. These both we imported these from India. They're both very tropical plants. They love growing close to the equator. They will grow for long periods of time if you have a lot of heat and a lot of sunlight. Here where we're at here in Nebraska, we've got a window of time where they grow really aggressively and then as we start getting shorter days, they really start to kind of slow down in their growth.

25:42 But sun hemp, a very popular plant. We use a lot of sun hemp in our summer mixes. The deer plot guys like it too. It's very palatable to deer. It's a fast-growing legume. We would expect to see another couple feet of growth out of sun hemp here before the summer's over. Can produce 150, 160 pounds of nitrogen in a good stand and good growth. So again, we don't necessarily want to recommend planting this by itself, but in combination with some sorghums or millets or things like that, it can be a really good addition to that warm season mix.

26:22 And then sasbania is another really warm season tropical type legume. Big old thick stem on this thing. We don't sell a lot of this. We're still kind of evaluating it. We had it in our plots last year and we really liked what we saw. This stuff last year got about eight feet tall, so I'm excited to see how much taller it will get. We're only about four feet tall here right now, so this has a lot of growth left in it. We'll see a lot more biomass accumulation in both of these plants, but especially this sasbania, so we're kind of excited to see what that looks like this year.

26:55 Davis, what are your experiences or observations on these two? Well, if in Nebraska and wanted to plant a palm tree, this is about as close as you could get, because that's what they look like as they're coming up. They look like just many palm trees out there. They're kind of humorous to evaluate, but like you said, something that we're still learning about. I have seen pictures of these next to each other. Customers sent some pictures from Texas and it was amazing, the nodules that he was seeing on this versus that. But I don't know if that would be repeatable yet. At least I couldn't stand by that in most situations, so sun hemp is still the tropical tall legume that we're most comfortable with, and it's going to be the easier one to find and cheaper right now.

27:38 Now the other thing I want to point out with both of these plants: the first frost is going to kill either one of these. So for us up here in Nebraska, as their days get shorter, these things will really slow down, and then when it freezes, they'll be dead. But anything with a big stem like this is going to be really susceptible to being terminated with a roller crimper. And so you can imagine if this gets another couple feet of growth and they want to terminate with a roller crimper, it's just going to snap just like that. Same way with this one. This is even more because it's a little bit more of a hollow stem. So if you're in a more warm environment and you're not going to have these winter killed with the weather, a roller crimper will be very effective at terminating these larger stemmed plants.

28:18 Davis, when people think about cover crops, they don't often think about corn, but corn can be a good cover crop. But kind of like soybeans, we don't recommend using corn as a cover crop if you've got corn as a major part of your crop rotation. But these grazing corns are a really good fit in certain situations. For the grazing guy, these are not corns that you're going to want to plant and try to harvest grain off of. There's far better choices for that, but these are going to be hard to beat for the value and for their palatability. So the brown mid-rib gene that they've bred into these plants makes it super palatable. I have seen cattle come out in plots and they'll eat this stuff right to the ground and they'll bypass the brown mid-rib sorghum, so it's a very palatable crop.

29:08 Now these are short season. We have an 84-day and a 90-day grazing corn. So where they fit well is if you have a relatively short period of time to grow and then you want to graze. So you see 60 days of growth. We're well into tassel here on the 84-day. The 90-day is just getting ready to start tasseling good. So if you've only got that 60 to 75-day window, you can put this in. Corn is not going to regrow like sorghum does, so don't use this if you want to do multiple grazings. It's not going to be a good fit for that. But where corn has an advantage over sorghum is either planted earlier in the season or planted later because it can tolerate much cooler nights than what sorghum does.

29:52 I could plant this corn May 1st and I'll have significantly more growth through the month of May than I would with sorghum. June and July advantage to the sorghum. We come back to August, advantage comes back to the corn because now August and September I'm going to start getting cooler evenings, especially the second part of August. The corn is going to do better in that time frame than what a sorghum does. So there's a niche for it, there's a place for it. It's not for everybody, it's not for every condition, but where it fits it works really well. And it's an inexpensive way to raise a lot of forage for your cattle.

30:27 Our other corn that we're going to look at today Davis is called Jimmy Red corn. Kind of fun to say, really fun to look at, and it's a very interesting one. It's not a brown mid-rib, unlike the 84 and the 90-day that we just looked at, but it is an open pollinated corn. It's a real old, we would almost call it an heirloom type variety. This variety is probably a couple hundred years old. It's kind of making a little bit of a resurgence in the food industry because it's a really naturally sweet tasting corn, makes great cornbread. And it's a non-GMO corn, so a lot of people like using it for those sorts of things. A few innovative people are making whiskey out of it. I haven't tried that yet, but I understand it's quite good as well.

31:10 So you can see it's a much longer season corn than the 84 and the 90. We're at 60 days, it's much taller than they are, and it isn't yet starting to tassel. So what we're looking at, again we're evaluating this. We've got this out with some of our good cattle customers. They're going to do grazing trials. We think that this is going to be just as palatable as the BMR corns because it's an old heirloom type variety. It hasn't been bred with as much lignin for standability as what some of the newer hybrids are. So we think it's still going to have the palatability combined with more growth. So we may be switching over to this in the future for our grazing corn, simply because we feel like it's going to give us more tonnage potential. And it's an open pollinated, so we've got a production field right across the road here. So we're looking at how it's going to produce for us in a commercial situation as well. So keep your ears open for Jimmy Red corn. We hope to have a lot more of it in the future.

32:10 Popcorn, again, is not commonly thought of as a cover crop. We really like it. You can see it's not going to get as tall or as big or as robust as a commercial type corn plant, and it never does in a commercial field either. But there's some distinct advantages of using popcorn over any other type of corn for grazing. First of all, if you're an organic producer, there's no danger of GMO contamination in popcorn because popcorn and the field corns will not cross pollinate, and there's no GMO popcorn. So we've got a high level of confidence that it's pure non-GMO. The other thing is it's much, much smaller seeded. You probably get three popcorn kernels for every kernel of commercial corn. So even though it costs a little bit more per pound, it's considerably less per acre, and it mixes well with the other smaller seeded things.

33:03 And you can see Davis, you got a great stand on this popcorn, and it's thick. And that's okay because when you plant corn thick, which you give up is ear development, the ear size. We don't care about that in our grazing corns. We're just, it's all about the biomass. So Davis, tell us a little bit about how you use popcorn in your grazing mixes and what your observations are.

33:24 We planted all of our other grazing corns at a higher rate than what we did with the popcorn when we're talking of pounds per acre. But yeah, as we even reduce the pounds per acre, we still are probably getting more plants out here, and you can really see that better weed suppression. Like you said, being shorter, less mature at this point, it also has softer leaves, and so I really like that part of it. One of the last reasons I think we see a better stand of it here than what we saw from our other grazing corns is again because of that seed size. With our wet conditions where we were getting some hair pinning, I think this was able to find that trench a little bit easier than the larger seeded corn.

34:08 The other thing to note on this is we went to several popcorn companies and we told them we wanted the biggest, leafiest popcorn variety that they had because we didn't care about the ears. We just wanted a bigger plant. And so even though this is shorter than the other corn next to it, it's going to be a taller, more robust plant than most popcorn varieties. So it's kind of that leafy forage type popcorn.

34:30 Now we move into our warm season sorghums and millets. Probably the most popular warm season grasses. We sell a lot of sorghum and millet, and there are a lot of different sorghums. Sorghums are probably the one cover crop that there you see the most new things coming out year after year.

39:38 It stands better into the winter, so a lot of times for winter stockpile we like the dwarf trait because it's a more compact plant. Doesn't catch as much wind, isn't as likely to blow over if you still want this standing out here in December for winter grazing.

39:53 And the other thing that we like about it, again because the plant is kind of compressed, the actual growing point on it is closer to the ground. And so we tend to see better regrowth, especially after a grazing or a trampoline type effect. And we like that because this is going to regrow better than some of the other ones in a grazing situation.

40:14 Also because this plant is going to have all of its leaves and probably a six or seven foot plant instead of a 10 or 12 foot plant, it's just easier for the cattle to get to it. You get a 10 foot tall sorghum plant out there, they literally have to push that plant over to get those top leaves. Where this one they can get the majority of it by just stretching their neck up there.

40:35 Some people like that better. They feel their cattle are more likely to go out into it. Had a customer who has buffalo, he likes being able to know a little bit better where his buffalo are at if he's checking the herd. So yeah, there's pros to having it be shorter.

40:50 Again, if you want to just produce as much biomass as possible and you're not going to graze it, this one's not for you. But this next one is. Now we've got a couple things out here, Davis, that do not have the brown midrib trait. So these would be the ones if you're not grazing these, is what you'd want to use. They're a little less expensive because it doesn't have that BMR trait.

41:09 But these do have some specific traits. So Yield Max, it's very similar to that Sweet Forever, very similar base genetics, but it doesn't have the BMR. But this one is photoperiod sensitive. So again, we're only at 60 days of growth, so we're not seeing these differences. But this one again will get 10 to 12 feet tall because of that photoperiod sensitive gene.

41:30 We're not going to see any reproductive traits until a third week in September here. So a very, very good one to use if you're in a situation where you're going to want to let it grow to maximum tonnage with no seed production. So this is a really safe one to use.

41:45 And then the next one is Super Sugar DM. The DM just simply stands for delayed maturity. So it's just a very simple. It's not brown midrib, it's not photoperiod sensitive, it's not briquettic dwarf, it's just a basic cross between the sedan grass and a forage sorghum plant to get the sorghum sedan. But it is a longer maturity, it's a delayed maturity over just a base Super Sugar straight simple three-way cross.

42:13 So again we would want to use this if we've got a longer period of time to grow and our customer does not want to see that seed production, which could lead to either issues with cattle grazing too much grain or volunteer sorghum plants the next year.

42:28 Now we come to our forage sorghum. So Davis, these are not crossed with a sedan grass, so they're just straight sorghum. Typically they're going to be a larger diameter stalk, they're going to stand better. They're not going to regrow as well as a sorghum sedan, so the better choice for these is either going to be a single cut hay or better yet, a silage. A green chop is where you see a lot of forage sorghums used.

42:52 We also like these a lot for that winter stockpile. We're going to grow it through the summer, we're going to let the frost kill it, and then we're going to be coming in with cattle and grazing this in November, December, January. Because they stand really well, even if you get some snow, the cattle will still be able to find it. And sorghum holds its nutritional content far better than what millets do into the winter and better than corn as well. So they're really good for that winter stockpile grazing.

43:21 So the FS105, this is a brown midrib, so it's got the BMR trait that we've already talked about. But it also is what's called male sterile, and that's designated by the MS. And what male sterile means is that this plant will grow, it will put a head on, but the pollen is sterile. So that head will not form any grain unless it gets pollen from another sorghum source.

43:46 Now there's some advantages to that. You may or may not want the grain. If you're taking it for silage, you might want the grain. If you're grazing it, you probably don't. But when it doesn't form grain in the head, all the sugars will stay in the stalk. And so typically you will have sweeter plants at maturity with a male sterile.

44:02 So like where they make molasses out of sorghum molasses, those are typically a sterile type plant because all the sugar stays in the stalk and it's not translocating that up to the grain. So a lot of times we'll use these male steriles again for something that's going to grow for a long period of time. We want to have that sweetness in the stalk and we don't want to have the issue with having grain in there.

44:29 A couple other ones that we have here, the D90.

44:30 And the D110, these are similar. They're forage sorghums just like the FS105 was. But these have again that brachitic dwarf trait. They're going to be a shorter statured plant. The leaves are going to be closer together. They're going to be compacted. They're not male sterile so these will put on a seed head. This one, the 90, this is 90 days to the soft dough stage. The one next to it is 110 days. So depending on how long you have for these to grow and if and when you want that seed to be put on, you can choose. These are very popular for the silage guys because they're going to be a very compact plant with lots and lots of leaves. And they will form a grain head given enough time. And in a silage setting that can be a good thing to have the additional energy boost from that grain coarse.

45:20 Coarse is another type of forage sorghum. It's again it's a heirloom or heritage type. It's an old old variety that we kind of almost resurrected from the dead. Hardly anybody was planting it. It's got some distinct advantages though. Number one, it is a completely open-pollinated plant so we can produce it much cheaper than we can have hybrids produced. The other thing is this is bred out in Eastern Colorado. So if you've got higher altitudes or some cooler evenings, this is going to be probably more adapted than all these other sorghums that are coming out of Texas. It's just going to be a little bit better adapted to altitude and some cooler evenings.

46:00 Coase is what's called dual purpose. You can actually grow it and harvest a grain crop off of it. But you can also harvest it for forage. It's going to get five to seven feet tall compared to some forage sorghums that will get you know eight, nine, ten feet tall. So it's not going to be as tall. So again if you've got a shorter time frame and you want to invest less money in the seed, the coase is a great way to go. It's been very, very palatable for both grazing and hay. And the guys that have used it, they're ordering it again. They really like what they see. What have you seen with the coves, Davis?

46:37 We also will use it sometimes in wildlife mixes because it is a little bit shorter maturity. It also is working on pushing some heads here, so we even have it next to our green wildlife blend because it is probably going to be one of the first to produce grain that are likely to attract birds. Yeah, so just think of it kind of as a taller version of a grain sorghum with more forage potential.

47:02 Right, our last two entries in our sorghum plots here, Davis, we've got Egyptian wheat and we've got Piper's sedan grass. Now Egyptian wheat is not a wheat at all. I have no idea why it's called Egyptian wheat. It is a sorghum. It's an old variety of sorghum. It's an open-pollinated, mostly popular again amongst the wildlife crowd. It'll get really tall. This will be one of the tallest sorghums out here. It's not that tall yet, but this sucker will just keep growing and growing and it will be 10, 11, 12 feet tall. We use it in our view blocker mix. If you want to have a living screen to hide something, hide a food plot, hide your house on the road or whatever, it's popular amongst the food plotters because when it does form a head, it's a very open type head so it's easy for the birds to pick that seed out. And then it also kind of breaks over about in the middle after a frost. And so what you'll see is you'll have this tall sorghum, but it's kind of broken over so that seed head is pretty close to the ground. And it's much easier for the birds and the animals and the wildlife to get to it. So mostly popular amongst them. It is a pretty drought tolerant plant. We've seen this do better than some of these others in real droughty type conditions. But it's not going to have nearly the palatability, nearly the tonnage production that your brown mid-ribs will. So use it in specialty applications. It's a real bear to harvest seed off of, so seed is more expensive because it's a 12 foot tall plant that wants to fall over. And that's not a good recipe for harvesting large seed yields.

48:38 And then the last thing that we have here in Davis is holding an example of it. This is Piper sedan grass. We don't sell a lot of Piper into the cover crop or grazing market because it's not as productive as some of the other sorghum-sudan crosses. But I want to show you this because this is the main parent plant for that sorghum-sudan cross. So this is straight sudan grass. A sorghum-sudan is a cross between the forage sorghum and this plant right here. A sudan grass like this, you can see it's got good growth. It's as tall as anything out here in 60 days. It's fine stem, so if you're managing it right, haying it or grazing it, it can be very good forage. It can be very palatable. But you want to kind of get it early on.

49:21 It'll just kind of continue to get a little steamier and less and less palatable as it grows. It regrows very well, so if you want to hay it, you'd probably want to be haying this now and then catching a regrowth and getting a second grazing on it.

49:35 It's a very good plant for those situations. Again, as simply as a cover crop, it'll be great. It'll break down a little quicker than a sorghum sedan or a forage sorghum, and it will produce a lot of tonnage for you. So there's places where it would be used, it's just not the best plant for a strictly a forage setting.

49:53 Davis, now we come to our millet section of our plots. Millets are a warm season grass, just like the sorghums were. They're a C4 grass, which means they photosynthesize at a higher rate than your cereals like oats and barley and wheat. But they're typically a shorter season. They don't grow for as long before they start that reproductive process as sorghums, so they're not as widely used or as commonly used, but they sure do have a niche or a fit.

50:21 Now, one thing we didn't talk about with the sorghums is with sorghums you get a condition called prussic acid. So if you're grazing, particularly at the time of the first frost, sorghums can present a problem. People have killed cattle with prussic acid by not grazing their sorghum, not managing it properly. And so that is the concern or an issue with sorghum at the time of the first frost, particularly.

50:44 Millet has no prussic acid. So one place that we see a lot of millet being used is if a customer says I want to be grazing this in September and October, which is when typically a lot of people get their frost, and they don't want to have to pull cattle out or have to manage around that prussic acid issue. We will use a millet-based mix because we don't have that concern.

51:05 We don't have that issue. It's a very fine stem compared to the sorghums. You're going to have a higher palatability just simply because the stem is so fine and there's a lot of leaf to it. We don't typically see a lot of brown midrib traits in millet. Now, there is a BMR pearl millet, super expensive. It's just not on the market very much. It's not widely produced, again because millets don't need that trait to have the palatability because they're just naturally fine stem.

51:36 So what we see here, we have pearl millet, and pearl is a true hybrid. They're producing this by doing a male female cross every year. It's more expensive seed. It's more like a top-end sorghum sedan hybrid because it's just a much more difficult process to grow a hybrid seed versus open pollinated.

51:56 The advantages, however, are that it's a longer season millet. It's going to grow for a longer period of time, produce more biomass before it puts a head on, and it regrows very very well. So pearl millet is a great one to have in a grazing mix if we're going to do multiple grazings. It's a great one if you want to put a millet for hay and you want multiple cuttings because it's going to be the best of the regrowing traits in the millets.

52:21 And right next to it we have brown top. Brown tops are quickly becoming one of our favorite millets to put in grazing mixes. It's used more commonly in the south, but we've brought it north and it's done great up here. In fact, we're doing production on brown top millet in Nebraska now and it's doing very very well.

52:43 It, you can see it's starting to put seed heads on, so it's a shorter season variety than what pearl millet is. But the thing that we like about brown top, and it's called brown top because where most plants they mature from the bottom up and the plant starts turning brown before it goes reproductive, brown top will go all the way through its reproductive stage and the plant stays very very green. In fact, you'll see that seed head turn brown while the plant is still green. And that's why it's called brown top millet.

53:15 So even at a mature stage it holds its palatability better than some of the other millets when they hit that reproductive and mature stage. So it's quickly becoming one of our favorite of the open pollinator. This is an open pollinated one. All these other millets are open pollinated. It's quickly becoming our favorite open pollinated millet for the grazing. From a hay standpoint, there's probably better millets. From a grazing standpoint, we really like the brown top.

53:44 Yeah, and one that we'll put in a lot of stockpile mixes, winter stockpile, keeps its feed quality pretty well. And also a full seeding rate of 15 pounds. If you throw two pounds in there, spending very little money for some good late season feed quality.

54:00 Okay, now we come to our hay millets. We have the white wonder and we have the golden German millet. More people are familiar with golden German millet, but they're both foxtail millets, mostly used for hay. They're called foxtail millets because

54:14 You can see as these are just now starting to go reproductive they have a head that looks like a foxtail plant but look at the big wide leaf on that thing. This is a really good inexpensive way to produce a quick hay crop.

54:29 So we're 60 days out, these are just starting to put some heads on. This could be hayed right now. You could wait another week or so, get a little more growth and still make good hay. Again, very fine stemmed, inexpensive because it's an open pollinated type. We personally think the white wonder is a little more productive and has a little wider leaf. We just like it a little bit more. The golden german has been around longer and more people are familiar with it. But both of these are popular for hay production. They're not going to regrow nearly as well. So if you want to get multiple cuttings of hay we'd still go with the pearl millet. But for a short duration single cutting hay, these would be hard to beat.

55:11 Especially if you're in a very dry arid area, you may not have enough moisture to grow an eight foot tall sorghum hay crop. But most places, most years you're going to have enough moisture to grow a millet hay crop because it doesn't get as big before it makes maturity. So you can produce something on less moisture.

55:33 Watching these early on as well as the japanese millet which we'll get to, these are the first millets to jump out of the ground and honestly even sometimes ahead of the sorghum sedan. They seem like they can handle a little bit cooler soil.

55:48 The other thing I want to point out here and we didn't mention it during the sorghum tour, but if you look in the background again, back behind that mode strip, Davis and his guys did no weeding back there whatsoever and really didn't need to. There's not many weeds back there. The sorghums and the millets and really all the grasses have done a very good job of suppressing weeds on their own. So that's why you can get by with planting these in a monoculture for a haying situation. We still don't recommend it from a true soil health perspective. We'd like to see the mix. But they should, you should always have a grass as part of your base mix because they're so good at suppressing weeds. They've got such massive fibrous root systems. They're just really good at helping build the soil as well. So we always like to have grass as a component of a mix unless there's a specific reason not to.

56:38 Our last two millets are japanese millet and our proso millet. Japanese millet is also known as duck millet. What makes it quite unique amongst really all of the warm season grasses is it's got such great tolerance to growing in waterlogged soils. And that's why it's called duck millet. It's often planted around the edges of duck ponds because it will literally grow in standing water. It produces a seed head. Davis has one here. You know, it's 60 days out, we're already producing grain on this thing. And so in a duck type habitat you can grow this in the marshy areas, flood that thing later on and have great duck habitat and a food source for the ducks as well.

57:20 We do have people that use it for forage for livestock forage, particularly in high pH or high salinity type settings. It's going to be by far the best millet to use. If you've got you know normal pH, normal conditions, well-drained soil, some of the other ones are probably better. But in those waterlogged or heavy type soils, japanese millet is a really good one. And then the proso millet.

57:43 Proso is more of a grain type millet. This is the millet that people would grow for an actual grain crop. A lot of this would go into the bird seed industry. It's a great bird seed product. We typically don't use it nearly as much for forage because in our area here it just goes reproductive so fast at a much less biomass production. But as you move north, our customers and our friends up in Montana, they use a lot of proso millet because their cooler summers allow this millet to grow longer and they'll get as much forage out of a proso millet at a cheaper cost than they will out of some of these other millets. We don't see that in our hotter climates. The proso millet goes reproductive quicker and will make a seed crop with less forage biomass. So typically we'll see this used as a forage more in the north and as you come south it's used more as a grain crop.

58:46 However if you're planting a wildlife habitat type plot and you want to have a food source for your upland game birds—you know, pheasants, quail, turkey, doves, any of those—proso millet, you got to have that in there because it's just a very reliable seed producer and will produce a lot of good seed for those birds.