Growing Regenerative Seed in Southwest Nebraska: Vance McCoy's 30-Year Farm

0:00 Thanks everyone for joining, we're excited to have you here again and very excited to have our good friend Vance McCoy as our featured regenerative seed grower. Vance, thanks for joining us. Vance is from Elie, Nebraska. Now if you don't know where Elie, Nebraska is, you're not really a true Nebraskan, right? Vance. Everybody should know where that's at—very small town, probably about an hour southwest or so of North Platte. So out in some pretty tough conditions. We had John Herman on last week, which would be similar environmental conditions to join, pretty harsh arid type area. So you know, when Vance is talking about his operation, he's doing this under limited moisture, limited precipitation, which he'll talk about, but that's where oftentimes regenerative practices show up the best because they do allow you to take advantage of the environmental conditions that you get.

1:01 So we've known Vance for quite a few years. Vance has been a great seed grower. You can see that beautiful crop of buckwheat in his background there. He's grown that for us. We've also gotten hairy vetch from him, cereal rye from him, and he'll kind of go through how he grows all those things in the context of his whole farming operation out there in western Nebraska. So Vance, I think I'll let you take it from here. I'm going to hide my video so I'm not distracting people, and then when you're done with the presentation, I'll jump back on and we'll have a discussion.

1:37 Okay, thanks Keith. Thanks for having me on and thanks for everyone that joined. I'm going to turn on my screen sharing here. So as Keith said, my name is Vance McCoy. I am from southwest Nebraska. I am about 60 miles from the Colorado border and about 70-ish miles from the Kansas border down here in southwest Nebraska.

2:04 I grew up on a farm, family farm here. I say I've been farming for over 30 years—it's possibly been longer than that. Started helping out on the farm as a kid. We had irrigated crops, and then as I moved into my own operation, we have irrigated and non-irrigated crops. Some of the crops that we grow are the standard corn, soybeans, and wheat.

2:30 But then a few years back, about 2012, 2013, we had the last drought. We just started looking at the need to do some things different. So it just started slowly transferring into no-till and trying to find ways to save water. We used a lot of water that year and with not a lot of reward from it.

3:02 So that's just kind of an introduction to myself. Another thing that made me really look into regenerative farming—you can see my picture there. I'm standing in the cornfield that's probably about 50 yards from my front door. In the cornfield, we literally live in the middle of a cornfield. It's a pivot-gated quarter and the pivot wipes around the house. So that is just a big reason that we started looking at doing things different.

3:36 So for me, I'm here to talk about regenerative seed and some of the regenerative practices I do. I feel it's important to kind of define what regenerative means to me and what I think it means in general. Here's a picture of a starfish. I'll just never forget—I think it was fifth, sixth grade science class and they were telling us how a starfish can regenerate from some pretty severe damage. You can cut off one limb and it'll regenerate from that. So that's something that's always kind of stuck with me—the idea that something's been pretty severely damaged and that it can naturally heal back from that. So I kind of look at our soils the same way. We've done some damage to it over the years, and I can't point fingers at previous generations. I mean, I've been farming for over 30 years. I've done a fair amount of damage myself.

4:38 Probably first on the list of things that when I first started farming was we were using way too much water and really didn't take into effect the consequences that that was going to bring down the road. So that's one of them—my biggest concern for wanting to turn this thing around.

5:05 So back to the story of the starfish, you know, if you take that damaged starfish and go throw it out on the interstate, it's not going to regenerate. You gotta...

5:16 Got to take away the cause of the damage. And so we have a lot of disturbances, some that we cause and some that are caused by nature. But a lot of disturbances out here or anywhere for that matter on farming. So you know our soils are that way. They're damaged with too much disturbance from tillage, chemical fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides and fungicides. But another one I think that doesn't get mentioned a lot is just the traffic. You know, raising high yield corn there's a lot of traffic out there in the fields hauling that out. You know, and their equipment gets bigger and bigger all the time. And so the compaction of that. And so that's one of the things that really helps. You know, I say raising seed crops for cover crop seeds is kind of a tool that I use to regenerate, just to lower some of that traffic out there.

6:25 So in that we do fair amount of seed. Just so here's a spiral separator running that. I am separating, in this case I think it's cereal rye and hairy vetch. And it's a neat machine that I use quite a bit. I really like raising multiple crops, at least two together. Just for the like in this case the rye helps the hairy vetch to trellis up on. And as Keith mentioned, that's one of the crops that I do raise for green cover. So that's just some of the equipment we use. Here's another one. This is just a small flipper style cleaner that I use to kind of clean stuff up pre-clean. It'll go through this machine and then I actually put them in reverse order I guess. It goes through this machine and then gets put through the spiral sometimes multiple times to separate out the two crops. It's pretty difficult to set a combine for two different crops. So I get some extra dirt and stuff in there.

7:50 So these machines really help with that. Just I'll mention a lot of the tools I use, some are actually equipment and some of them are actually a system, a way of doing things. And these are a combination of that where I'm using multiple species crops. And it really helps to reduce the amount of herbicides and things like that that we need to use. And I'll get into more of that as we go. So here's an example of two crops together. I did this for green cover a few years back. That's elbon rye and then some wild winter peas planted in between the rows.

8:33 This one was for whatever reason the peas looked great coming into spring. And then as time went on they just didn't do well. I really think it had to do with there was a week in like the second week in May that year where we had freezing temps and over 100 degrees on the same week. But anyway, this is something I want to mess around with more. I had a small strip in there where we actually ran out of seed so we planted some wheat and it did really well with the wheat. So that's something I want to look at in the future is different things that we can relay crop or companion crop together that will really help. But you know in this case here was no herbicides from the time that rye you know from the time those soybeans, this was an irrigated crop, those soybeans got sprayed in the summer. You know the last time those got sprayed, then it didn't get sprayed again until I used the desiccant on the buckwheat. Because we just couldn't get a killing freeze that fall that we needed.

9:58 But you know in watching this series and from some of the other stuff I'm learning, I'm really wanting to learn how to use, to raise these crops, some of these crops I'm using to desiccate, the hairy vetches one. But you know in watching what John Camp says about how that can affect the biology on that seed. So I'm only looking for ways to eliminate that and we'll be working on that in the future.

10:32 So here a lot of crops, a lot of these concepts overlap. So here's a cash crop where I put corn and I planted cereal rye. And I think this was a mixture of cereal rye and wheat and possibly oats I don't remember for sure. But planted this in a twin row configuration that 10-inch drill plugged every third row so that we have

10:57 A blank spot to plant our corn into. Then that gives I'm really working on getting ways to more of a relay where you're actually having two crops grow simultaneously. And then like this, this will get terminated after the corn was up and growing. That works on some of my more conventional ground. A lot of my ground I'm using a non-GMO corn so that doesn't work there. But just one of the things that kind of overlaps, this whole thing's a system. The regenerative part just doesn't stop with the seed or stop with the cash crops, it continues clear through. One of the things that's really helped me to do with raising these seed crops is some of the benefits of a cover crop continue on completely after even after you harvest.

11:54 One example I guess would be hairy vetch. I've got some hairy vetch and rye growing right now that I didn't have to plant—it was from a previous year's crop. Cover crops, I get that a lot where I'm doing cover crop sales. I get a lot of comments how they're too expensive and it's hard to get a return on them. These are some ways that I get a return out of cover crops.

12:19 Here's another concept that I've messed around with. We had dry—last three years in a row we've had half our average yearly rainfall. Our average is 18, 19, 19 inches. We have anywhere from our high in the last 100 years, a little over 100 years of records—our high was 35 inches and our low was like eight or nine. So we can get anywhere in that range. The last three years in a row we've been around that 8 to 10. That little video I ran there was me just—that crop was corn in the spring and it got hailed out. So I went in, planted a multi-species cover crop, and bailed it off. Then that lower right picture there is actually the wheat that I was drilling in that picture. That's a picture of it just probably three or four days ago in very dry conditions. This just kind of shows how the regenerative system can work. Some of the stuff even works when it's too dry that shouldn't even work. If you noticed in the video there was just hardly any dust behind the machine. It's amazing some of those concepts. We're just trying to eliminate chemical use. I'm not there yet—we're still in the starfish-off-the-interstate mode. But there's an example of just one of the ways that we're trying to relay crop. There was no chemical used on that either after the corn herbicides.

14:14 Here's another example of something we're doing. I raised this crop for oats and I harvested the oats for seed. When I planted this in the spring I put in a brassica mix with it, and I had some other legumes in there that didn't make it. Here again we were in pretty severe drought. We harvested a decent crop. We had some moisture in May and June, which we typically do, and it looked really good. Then after harvest I just let this cover crop grow. A companion cover crop, and then don't have to go back in there. This is one of the things we're doing to really try to keep the soil going, keep a living root in the ground at all times. It's a little harder on our non-irrigated land than some of our irrigated, where you just don't get the rain. I probably would have if I came in there and tried to drill something after oats, I wouldn't have gotten a stand because after oats harvest it got extremely dry and I don't think we would have germinated anything. These are some of the concepts I'm using that fit with our cash crops and our cover crops that we're raising for seed.

15:30 How I choose some of the cover crops that we're raising for seed—first of all you got to want it, and secondly it kind of needs to fit our context. Here is a little context of how we are, and I think this is pretty much this way throughout the Midwest. It's just kind of a chart that shows when we get our precipitation. We're usually the wettest in May and June, and then the rains we do get July and August evaporate pretty quickly because of the amount of heat. July and August, early September is when we get our hottest.

16:13 Days so and that's when it starts tapering off so I'm constantly looking for new crops that we can grow in the winter and then it also fits our weed profile. Back to that other screen there, oats really fit our weed profile because it doesn't give kosha or the pigweed family, water hemp, Palmer amaranth, pigweed doesn't give those weeds much chance to get established and get going. So these are crops that I choose and that are just happen to also be really good cover crops for seeds.

16:54 Selecting what fits a rainfall pattern. So here's a list and we've talked about these cover crops that I raise for seed: cereal rye, hairy vetch, oats, barley, peas, and buckwheat. There's I'm sure there's more to come. I'm raising some camelina this year just as those will be for a commercial crop, a cash crop. I'm kind of excited about those as a cover crop as I see it grow. But it's another crop that I've added in my rotation and we'll see how it goes.

17:29 That upper left picture there is the line between oats and this was my first attempt at hairy vetch and this was an irrigated field just really looking for an opportunity of something that will pay. You know we have high rents on our irrigated land, so consequently we think we can't raise anything that corn or soybeans because irrigated wheat doesn't pay hardly enough to pay the rent and that kind of stuff. So this was a crop that I ventured into just to see what it would do and I planted oats with it for it to troll us up and just kind of an idea what it will do when you put two crops together. Cereal rye on the right that was probably chin high on me. I'm just under six foot tall and so basically had hairy vetch and oats that got nearly that tall.

18:29 So when you have two crops competing against each other and also running in companion with each other, it can actually enhance your yields and improve. And so I tell forage guys this: if you're trying to grow something for forage this is something to consider. So anyway, and then there's the buckwheat kind of a closeup just. I took a lot of buckwheat pictures. I'm amazed with that plant. It's a drought avoider. It'll sit there and wait a long time for rain. I experienced that this last summer. I had planted it on some pivot corners and it did fairly well with very little rainfall.

19:13 So back to our cleaning and example of: this is hairy vetch and oats and cereal rye that I. This is kind of a byproduct of cleaning when I separate back that spiral cleaner. When I separate the there's a little bit of hairy vetch that rides along with the oats and cereal rye that you're taking out. So this is a mixture of the three. These are seven weight cattle grazing in this stuff and it's just amazing and they're again last summer in a very dry environment. So this is another thing that you know it all works together: integrating the livestock into what we're doing. It leaves the nutrients there in the field and actually enhances the biology. You know the gut ring on these cattle has a lot of good biology to it and so that's just one of another one of the things we're integrating into our regenerative system.

20:13 So some of the special things I guess that probably a lot of people don't do when they're raising crops. And you know so we're raising seed crops so I think it's even more important, you know. Just what we've talked about through the series: increasing the biology, how some of that rides along in the seed and that kind of thing. So special things we do number one thing I do is pray. When you see how some of this stuff is grown especially in a no-till, you know we're not planting in ideal conditions as I showed you there earlier. I was planting in some pretty dry conditions and when you're driving around in four foot tall cane you tend to say a little prayer when you're planting your wheat.

21:01 So anyway, especially when you're planning to take that off for hay and you're going to leave fairly bare soil, not a lot of armor on it. But seriously, you know I've become recently aware of how the Native Americans did things and they have actually a prayer ceremony or a blessing ceremony on their seed and I think that's an important part. You know when you see how some of this stuff grows it's really is a miracle.

21:27 And talking about Miracle down there on the right, that's the camelina planted that Valentine's Day. They say planted a quarter inch deep and I was planting in the corn residue from the previous year, trying to no till in and plant a quarter inch deep. It's kind of gets you on the edge of your seat and makes you think what in the world am I doing out here.

21:47 Chemicals and fertilizer are very much reduced on those. As I said earlier, cover crops are expensive enough. We got to go throw a fertilizer out there to make them successful, it's just not going to pay. And so that goes for a cover crop itself, but it also goes for raising the seed. It's a tight margin and if I go spend money on fertilizer or chemicals, potentially not going to make any profit, so that's one reason to reduce. But the other reason that we talked about is just the biology. Even using the desant, how I didn't even realize you could be killing the biology that rides along with the seed, and I think we're just beginning to discover how that works.

22:39 No pesticides, no fungicides, and a very few herbicides. Like I said, these are an opportunity and a necessity, kind of both. And the cover crops raising them for seed enhances my ability to do this and it also enhances the necessity to do this. So it kind of all works together. Once you get into regeneration, just like I talked about with the starfish—I had a back surgery when I was younger and when I got up and got started walking and my back got started feeling stronger, it started to heal quicker. And so that just snowballs on each other. Once you start to heal and you start to push and exercise and do some things, things pop up that you didn't even know you were going to get.

23:37 Some of the special things we do is just the way we handle the seed. A lot of what I do is I use a lot of gravity when I'm cleaning, so I reduce the amount of augers that we use and stuff like that. It just helps to not damage that seed.

24:00 For increasing biology, we add inoculant. The middle picture at the bottom was some barley that we just planted the other day. We mixed some vermicompost in with it, just mix it in with the seed and drilled it. That's a very simple way. I also use extracts, compost extract when I'm treating my seed corn or seed beans with that. A lot of times the things that go through the drill are easier just to mix the actual compost in with.

24:40 Lower left there, that's hairy vetch and it's one of my favorite pictures of hairy vetch. A lot of my pictures of plants are actually pictures of the roots, my favorite ones. Hairy vetch can produce a lot of nitrogen. That particular crop there I harvested and then the following year I raised 187 bushel irrigated corn with only 30 pounds of added nitrogen, no other fertilizers added, not even compost or anything like that. Just kind of shows you, and there's another positive to raising these seeds that continues on because the next year I actually had volunteer that I was planting into that actually had nitrogen stored in it. So these things just kind of snowball off each other.

25:37 Lower right there's some buckwheat that was grown in some very sandy soil and you just see the soil structure that's building. So trying to get some of this biology to go right along with the seed is very important. The epigenetics of improving these seeds as we go, improving them to our conditions. If we got seed that'll grow in harsh conditions on low amount of water and no added fertilizer and very few herbicides, those are going to be the seed that I want to plant the coming year, the ones that have thrived in that kind of condition.

26:17 Upper right there, that's actually some seed cleaning so that I'm making a Johnson suit compost out of. I make Johnson suit compost. I do some thermophilic compost with some of my seed cleanings and we're messing around with some of that. The upper left there might think that's compost but that's actually topsoil.

26:39 That was a spot where last fall my soybean head plugged up and it slid a little ways and I got out to clean it and I was looking at that I'm like man that looks like compost. So to me that's the ideal is when you can get your biology going to where you're building compost in the field and that's what you want.

27:00 Growing quality seed and then the living roots 24/7/365, you know that field where the hairy vetch has grown and also the compost looks like compost came out of the same field and that's the result of continuous growing cover crops since 2018. So there's been something growing out there all the time and a lot of times all terminate those after the cash crop is actually up and growing. So there's no blank space in there and I think that's very important for the biology to keep for the ride.

27:48 On our buckwheat and our hairy vetch crops I've had beekeepers come in and bring bees and hoping to help with pollination and I've struggled to get I've had a couple of pretty good guys that were doing it and both of them have moved on or retired. And so that's something we've recently branched into ourselves. We're going to be getting our own bees and my daughter and I are working on that venture together. And there again I think having quality pollination can really help increase yields without the need for trying to do it with fertilizers. So that's something else we've ventured into, something special that we probably do that a lot of people aren't doing.

28:44 I think there's still more to be discovered on quality crops being raised in more of a natural way that we don't even know yet. Maybe some people do, you know John Kamp listening to him and some of the others that talk about Dr. James White talking about the end of fights and those kinds of things. But I think there's still a lot to be learned about how all these things interact.

29:21 I'm kind of running right through here pretty quickly but that's kind of where we're at. So I guess promote myself a little bit. My business, I like I said I grow seeds for green cover seed and I also raise some for my own use on the farm. And then we also do sell some cover crop seed. Green cover is become my number one supplier for cover crop seeds and it's been a great relationship.

29:59 One of the things that I've added is I do consulting. So if you're interested in something like that it just seems like it pairs well with the cover crops, helping people decide what to plant, where, how it's going to help your soil. So anyway those are my contacts. I guess I kind of rushed right through this and got through pretty quick but leave more time for discussion.

30:29 These are some of the things I've done and excited to talk to you all about it.

30:34 No thank you Vance. We appreciate that, great presentation. I'll wait for you to get back on screen here. And folks don't forget to put your questions in the Q&A box. We've got a couple of questions in there but I certainly have time for more.

30:58 Yeah great presentation Vance. I want to love the analogy with the starfish and I kind of want to start there because it is a great word picture of how something so badly damaged can regenerate itself. It's an amazing testimony to God's creation and I like that analogy especially, you know, it's not going to recover if it's out on the interstate. And so I kind of wrote down here: number one, you need to remove the cause, remove the issues that were creating the degeneration. And then number two, provide the healing environment. And I really like those two steps. So where do you think you're at on step one, step two, you know, removing the harmful effects and then number two providing the environment for that thing to regenerate itself?

31:51 So we're not, I guess I'm still getting off the interstate. We're still using some herbicides. We've eliminated.

32:02 Completely insecticide fungicide now that being said when I plant like a triple stack corn it's hard to get it without treatment. So we're still using some seed treatments that have insecticides and fungicides but other than that just about everything and a lot of my stuff is non GMO that's non-treated. Also just trying to lean more towards the biologicals for those things but yeah eliminated. We've eliminated using chemical fertilizers for phosphate and lowered my nitrogen rates.

32:45 And as when we first started out we probably were actually using more water than ever when we first started using cover crops on irrigated land but now I'm to the point where where I think I'm over the hump where it's starting to save water and that's kind of one of my passions is you know this stuff ain't going to be around forever so trying to build our soil to where we can get by with very little irrigation to no irrigation at some point hopefully. So yeah we're we're still at the point of trying to eliminate some of the damage but I feel like you know putting back some of that biology. So every time I get a chance I'm pumping a compost extract through the pivot I treat my seed with it you know just trying to throw that biology back out there and give it a chance and you know we're doing things to feed it too. So you know lot lot of work to be done yet but we're we're on a good start.

33:39 I think you're you're off the interstate you're at least over into the median but you know I think that's a great point because how many people and you know you and I included at times forget about that first step we want to jump to step two and so we plan a cover or we use a biological trying to help provide that healing environment but we haven't taken away the things that are causing the harm in the first place. And again neither you or I are saying that you know you have to completely eliminate everything and be you know certified organic to really make this work or make a very healthy environment and system but the goal would be to minimize those chemical disturbances as much as possible so yeah I like that because sometimes we just want to jump to the healing and we don't take care of the things that are causing the harm in the first place.

34:31 Yeah I guess one of the things I kind of failed to mention was I had that picture of the oats that had the Brassica mix growing in it so that is coming up on almost two years of no chemical no fertilizer used whatsoever is the last time I sprayed it would have been in 2022 when I sprayed my corn the last time and so I've gone clear through an oats crop and a cover crop and now I'll be putting corn in again in again this spring and it'll get it'll go back to using herbicides but I feel like the herbicides are a lot more effective after after you take a couple years off. And so that's that's some of my strategy is is you know just reducing that giving it a rest giving it a regen year per se. So yeah kind of an intermittent herbicide fast if you will you know to kind of heal the land there.

35:33 So yeah I like that. I do want to talk a little bit about water you've mentioned it multiple times of course you know in western Nebraska that's a pretty big deal. How much of your ground is irrigated versus dry land and then talk a little bit more about you know you said you know you need to be able to use less water you know what does that look like you know what does your water use look like compared to maybe your neighbors.

36:00 Okay so my answer to your question now is it would be a lot different than it would have been a year ago so I recently made some changes in my farm turned some more ground over to my sons I would typically have been over the last 20 years I was about half irrigated and half non-irrigated and this last year I turned some ground over and so I'm down to about a fourth of my acres are irrigated and then 3/4s are non-irrigated. Gone back to just farming mostly ground that I rent and that I own and you know just finding out a lot of this regenerative stuff is is a long-term investment and so kind of have changed changed my practice quite a bit in that realm here just this last year. But as far as water savings it probably doesn't look a lot different I mean you're you're not going to see it you're not going to drive by and see it but water meters are.

41:59 Crop living with your other one for a bit and until it hands off the baton of the biology and some of those nutrients and stuff that they're going to actually live in that transfer zone for together for a little bit that's what I, that's kind of how I define the relay cropping myself. I mean there's guys pushing it further than that but for me a lot of times it's just that time period where they're both growing simultaneously for a couple weeks until you move on to your next crop.

42:33 I've really looked at it, seems like we've for several years I've put in cover crops behind you know just following the combine basically when I harvest wheat and it just seems like that's the hottest environment in the world, a cut wheat field or a summer fallow field. So looking at backing that up, and that oats picture was an example of that where you're backing that up, getting that growing while your cash crop is still green and growing and it's got a bit more of a shade and it's got a little bit more of that moisture, that lower moisture cycle, small moist cycle going on down there give it a chance to get germinated before it's blasted with 100 degree heat.

43:22 No real biome there I guess to get it, shade you know to cool it. Yeah, and so it's a no kill system because both crops are reaching physiological maturity and you're harvesting them for a grain crop, correct? Yeah, so like that one example where I was drilling into that multispecies you know that I drilled the wheat while that was still green and growing, drilled that wheat in there and then we harvested that off as hay.

43:54 After three failed crops in a row I felt like I needed something, we harvested hay which I don't like to do but that was kind of the example and then that'll just be a cover crop. That wheat's not, I mean that's a pretty picture but it's not going to make very good wheat so that's just a cover crop for the next crop.

44:12 Just an example, just kind of an example of how you can get that going. You know like I said was drilling in there with no dust, it was dry, it was dry enough to have dust but you know it's just a different environment in there.

44:29 Well I know it's been windy out there as well as here so there's been plenty of dust in the air where people aren't taking care of the ground and that's just pretty obvious to anybody who has eyes and a brain to see that driving down the road. So let's go to a few questions from the audience here. Tonn asking, first of all he says thank you for sharing your information, he appreciates that. You talked about having volunteer hairy vetch and rice seed, does that ever get a good enough stand where you just let it roll over and take it again for another seed crop the next year? You know, do you ever seen that or done that?

45:10 Yes, my very best hairy vetch crop was volunteer from the previous year. So the very first year I planted it I had oats and hairy vetch and harvested that and it was successful enough that but then the next year I needed some rye so I planted that patch to rye thinking well we'll harvest that rye and then I'll hopefully go back in there with something else. And you know with the irrigated you almost got to do two crops to make up for you know that, just our rents are so high and our inputs are so high on irrigated land that we have to almost, if I do a seed crop I almost got to do two.

45:53 But so I planted the rye in there, grazed it a little bit and then the hairy vets just absolutely took over and I was like well that's fine, that's worth more than hairy, it's more than worth more than rye anyway. So it pretty well overtook the rye and it was a very good vetch crop. So yes I've had that. So to kind of follow up on that, he's asking do you feel like if you do that do you unintentionally select for hard seed on hairy vetch by utilizing volunteer?

46:29 I don't think so. Because my harvest losses on the vetch were big enough that I suppose it's possible if that were seed from two or three or four years old but where it was the previous harvest loss I don't really see that being an issue. Yeah, no I would agree, it'd be no different than if you just replanted the same seed that you had harvested. So and you know I think vetch has a bad reputation, there's certainly some vets.

47:06 That has a lot of hard seed. Most of it anymore though, it's getting down lower and lower, and they're developing new varieties of vetch that will have less and less. So I think the hard seed issue is not as big a deal as it used to be, but still something to keep in mind.

47:21 Well, one more thing on that—I guess for me, some of the other epigenetic things that we're seeing, winter hardiness and that kind of stuff, are far outweigh the hard seed. So I mean, that's the stuff that made it over winter, you know, with being just kind of broadcast. I mean, it's not even been in an ideal germination condition. So you want something that you can broadcast over the top of a field or something and have it survive the winter. That epigenetics, to me, is more—even more of a big deal than the hard seed.

48:00 Yeah, no, for sure, the epigenetics, and you know, we talked about that week one with John Kemp—is such an important part of you getting it to adapt to the conditions you want. The other suggestion that I would have for people is if you are worried about hard seed in your hairy vetch, and this costs a little bit of money to do, or at least it ties up money for a little bit, buy your vetch a year ahead of when you're going to plant it, because if it sets in your shed for a year, you'll lose the vast majority of the hard seed out of there. Just the freeze-thaw cycles, the time that it sets there—vetch seed always gets better with time as far as having less hard dormant seed. So that'd be one solution that you could do.

48:43 Evance has one last question, and I actually had wondered about this too. You were talking about growing peas with the rye. You mentioned that you ran out of seed and you used wheat. Were you talking about then you had peas with the wheat, or you had wheat with the rye?

49:00 I had peas with the wheat. The peas that were with the wheat seem to do really well, and that's something I'm wanting to try again—to try the peas with the wheat.

49:13 Yeah, one of the—I didn't throw in the slide, but so last summer I had some non-irrigated soybeans that kind of hung in there forever. The good part was they really hung in there, and had we gotten some of those typical early September rains, I think it really would have. But the bad part was I really wanted to get my wheat going. So I have a drill that will only drill between the rows, like for intercropping in between cornrows or basically for in between 30-inch rows. So I went in there and did my wheat, so I've got some of those wheat strips now that I'm wanting to try a few of those things on. But it, so I'm going to be doing some trials of—I probably won't do the peas this year, but just we're so dry. I had a little camelina seed left over that I did, and it's pretty much dead. It's just so dry, but it's something I want to try in the future. And there again, that same concept of relaying a little bit.

50:21 Dennis is asking he'd just like to hear more about where you're growing the polycrops together and the method. So you've mentioned vetch and rye, peas and rye, peas and wheat. Are you typically planting those all together, or do you have to plant them twice? Is there adjustments that you have to make on your planting equipment? What do you look at when you try to say well, I think I can grow these two things together? What are important considerations there?

50:49 So the vetch and rye typically just gets drilled together. The picture of the rye and the peas was just a separate planting. I went, I did the peas first, and I was wanting to—I put those in super deep, and then I came back in, just moved over with the drill, and planted the rye, you know, a week or two later. So yeah, I do a lot with that 6-inch row spacing. I really like that row spacing. My 10-inch drill, I've actually taken it and plugged every third row. And then the ones that aren't plugged, I've slid together to six inches. And so that picture I showed of the corn, I've been trying to perfect rolling that—rolling that with an in-line roller. And the narrower the strip, the better, because sometimes you miss. I mean, autosteer's neat, but it's not perfect. So yeah, just a little bit of everything, but I use that row spacing a lot. So if I'm looking at two different crops, I'll come back in and—

52:07 But yeah it just depends what makes the most sense. Yeah, I've actually got a three one that I can carry that I can drive between the roads and not drive on anything, and so I've got the two machines for that.

52:25 John wants to know how you are applying your extract to the seed. Okay, so I have a I just built a IBC tote extractor. It's just got a pump that recirculates and has a couple of screens that fit like in a frame around a five gallon bucket that hang in there, and it just circulates. So I make it in there and then I just attach a little fitting on there and I just use a piece of like eighth inch microtube coming out of there and it just pumps in and I just dump it from one prop box to another. It's pretty high tech, I just kind of hose it down as it goes, or I'll use a liquid inoculator on a seed tender.

53:13 But like my seed corn, I like to do it ahead of time. When it gets delivered here in the shop, you know, here in a week or two I'll probably be—I don't plant corn super early so, you know, it'll be a week or two probably ahead of corn planting when I treat the seed. But it's super simple. I mean, I tell guys that's the best way to start. And then I do have the capability to do it in-furrow with the planter, but sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. I had it set up on my drill but it's super hard to keep in our soil with our tough corn stocks and stuff. It's hard to keep them going, so I've just basically switched to just doing the compost in the mixed in the seed on the drill. It's just so hard to keep the liquid system going on a drill. Hoses always want to be jumping off when you're dragging them through all the stocks.

54:12 Lonnie is asking about the type of cleaner you use for separating your companion crops. I know you mentioned the spirals, but what type of cleaner do you have ahead of the spirals? So the one in the picture there was a Clipper style. It was made by somebody that does a copy of Clipper, and it's just a small 2B style and about 50, 60 bushel an hour is about what it does. And then I also have I've got what's called a Metra. It's more what I would call a grain cleaner and it'll grade. So I use it in combination sometimes just to knock the chaff and a lot of the stuff out of it.

55:01 So it totally depends on how it looks coming in off the combine. Usually vetch is kind of a mess, especially growing it with a poly crop. I mean, it's just really hard to set the machine, and we're trying to set it not to have a lot of crop loss. So we'll end up doing a lot of cleaning. Sometimes if I'm separating hairy vetch, sometimes that'll go through one machine multiple times. It'll go through that Metra machine a couple times, it'll go through the spiral a couple times, and sometimes maybe a pre-clean with it. It just depends on the combination what it looks like.

55:41 It's grain cleaning is kind of an interesting thing. It changes, it really does. It can change yield from one year to the next quite a bit. It's as much of an art as a science for sure. And I think I want to just make this point to people: it's not as much about the equipment that you have, but your ability to be patient and understand how the equipment works and how to run stuff through. Because what Vance has is nothing fancy, it's nothing huge, but because he's patient, he's willing to run it multiple times, and he's experienced in knowing how to set it, he has a very good high quality product we can attest to that. But yeah, it's not a just run it through once and we're ready to sell it kind of operation there.

56:29 One last question from the audience here: an anonymous attendee is asking, have you noticed any other benefits from your transition? Like more wildlife, more birds? You know, you mentioned that you live very close to what you farm, which many of us probably do. Have you noticed environmental benefits? Oh, absolutely yeah, the birds. I mean, I go out in my fields, like especially I like to walk through, well, like that buckwheat that I use as my background. I mean, you can just hear it. It's just alive, it's buzzing. I mean, you can see the butterflies and the bees and the birds, and it definitely is you can see it.

57:14 Probably we had we did the Thousand Farms with, oh I'm drawing a blank, Jonathan—

57:21 Lungren, yeah, the E diis foundation and they were pumped. They walked through my cornfield and they found a tiger be. I'm like yeah, they bring me this bag of bugs and they're like they're super pumped, all these bugs they found. And they're like, 'Well, we've never found a tiger beetle in a cornfield before.' And I was like, 'I thought we'd really find a lot more bugs than what they found,' but they were pumped. Yeah, they for sure. But I kind of nerd out about that kind of stuff too.

57:51 Just one example: I had two years ago we had barn swallows show up here and I think it's because of the drought. They typically make those mud nests and they're typically down on the creek a mile from here and we didn't have any, so they were up around here getting mud out of the pivot tracks and stuff. So they were building them on the side of my house and everything. And I'm like, 'Oh, this cool, we're not gonna have mosquitoes.' But I joke that I went from the afternoon saying this is cool, Googling what do barn swallows eat, to 4 a.m. having them building nests under my window and chirping under my window at 4 a.m. Googling what eats barn swallows. That's circle of life right there.

58:39 Sure, oh yeah, that's great. Well, just kind of to wrap things up here, Vance, again, thank you so much. I want to close and then I'll give you kind of a final word here. But I just really liked one of those last slides that you showed, you know, where you showed that your seed crops have very few herbicides, no fungicides, no insecticides, no chemical fertilizers, and that you pray over them. I just think that's pretty cool. That's a good combination. A good type of seed to have. So I just really appreciate your diligence to all of those things in growing seed for us, for our customers, for your customers, and for all the people all over.

59:27 Last word to you, Vance. You know, closing comments? Or if somebody wants to get started kind of down this path, do you have any quick advice?

59:35 Well, it's a journey. It's not something I've learned the hard way. You don't just quit cold turkey. But really, once it starts to go, it really snowballs and you can see some pretty real cool things. I've seen some very cool things, things even in the drought here that, man, if that works when it's dry, it's going to ignite when we start getting some rains. And like I said, those drought rains are big ones sometimes. And I always, my trying to sound optimistic when I'm kind of down and out statement is: every day, every dry day it goes by, we're a day closer to our next big rain. So that's kind of what keeps us going—just working towards the future.

1:00:32 Yeah, well, again, thank you. We appreciate that, appreciate you sharing your wisdom and experience there. And folks, next week will be our last week in this series. Our guest will be Ed Bomgardner. Ed is going to be an interesting character. He's going to be different because he's growing seed corn. He's a seed corn grower. He's been growing seed corn, developing seed corn genetics since he was 17. And I'll let him tell you how old he is, but it's he's been doing it for many, many years. He's spent lots of time in Puerto Rico in production fields in the offseason down there. But what makes him unique is that his company, Bass Hybrids, he's doing all non-GMO and he's growing the seed corn in regenerative environments. And we've talked before about how so many of the modern varieties are grown in non-regenerative environments, so epigenetically it doesn't fit the systems that we're wanting. So Vance, this may be of interest to you too, because everything is non-GMO, non-treated unless you request it to be treated, and grown in more of a regenerative environment. Not only grown but bred, selected in more of a regenerative environment. So I thought it'd be interesting to close the series with a hybrid seed grower like that to get perspective from that part of the industry. We don't sell that seed, so this is going to be different. It's not seed that we're selling through our company or our business, but it's going to give big industry perspective on seed growing. So hope you can join us next week for that. That will be the conclusion of this webinar series. We're just very grateful for everybody's time and attention, and everybody have a great day. Thanks again, Vance.

1:02:15 Thank you.