How to Plant Cover Crops: Drilling, Broadcasting, and Field Prep

0:00 Thank you all for joining today. We're excited to be doing our third webinar in this series. So my name is Kate and I'm on the marketing team here at Green Cover and I'm here with my friend Zach La. He's on the sales team here at Green Cover and also is the primary seed buyer here at Green Cover. Zach also farms in southeast Kansas which is why he's here on this webinar today. He's got lots of experience with our topic which is planting today.

0:34 Just to give a little recap of where we've been and where we're going in the webinar series. So our first episode we started out talking about why you would want to plant cover crops and that was with Keith Burns and Sophie. And then last week we discussed different options you have to choose from when you're choosing your cover crop. Jacen and Sophie did a great job explaining that. We had a little discussion on plant families and that sort of thing. Like I said, today we're going to be talking about all things planting. And then next week we'll be talking about terminating your cover crops. So, if you have any questions regarding that, we will get to that next week. The week after that we will have a discussion about biologicals and all the options you have for that on your cover crops and then to wrap up the webinar series we're going to have an ask me anything webinar with Keith Burns he'll be back again.

1:38 With that I will start us off with some questions for Zach and we'll jump right into it so Zach when you're thinking about planting your cover crop, no matter what it is, what are some of the things that you're thinking about in terms of field preparation? Are you looking for a clean field? Do you like some residue there? What sort of preparations do you do to set yourself up for success with that cover crop?

2:08 Sure, Kate. So, there's lots of different things to look for and we can really talk probably about both sides of this. We can talk about planting our cover crop species. We can also mention a little bit about planting our cash crops. So just a little introduction to the planting side of it. I think everyone would agree that probably the single most important thing outside of weather to getting a good established stand whether it be for your cash crop, your corn, soybeans, wheat or your cover crop is your seating. That is the very beginning. That's where the life starts. That's where all the opportunities begin. And if we don't have good seeding or good seed to soil contact and have all of our specifics right, we can just lead to frustrations the entire growing season and we really don't want that. We want to strive to get that best possible. So this is a good place to start. You know, what am I looking for seeding condition wise? Well, you can go from a broad spectrum of tillage to the maximum diversity, highest biomass you can possibly get. For me, I do like to have residue out there. I prefer it living and growing. And where I live, we get 42 inches of rain annually. So, oftentimes we're not fighting trying to get our cover crop or the crop before using too much moisture. But it depends on your context. You know, if you're in western Kansas or the Front Range, Colorado, where you're getting 12 inches of rain annually, which some people would argue that some say that might be too high, but you need to

3:42 Manage that crop a little bit differently for your planting time so that the cover crop isn't using all your moisture prior planting. And then on the flip side of that, there's a lot of tillage that still gets done. But it's very important to remember as you break that soil open, you're letting all that water exposed to sunlight, evapotransanspiration, just all these other factors that can suck moisture away from that. So, ideally, depending on your management strategy, residue is good. It can be living or dead, but that is what I'm looking for. But we can cover a wide spectrum of conditions.

4:21 That also leads into like we're going to take this as like a 30,000 foot view today. We're just going to kind of hit the basics of everything. If we have more in-depth questions, it'd be great to reach out and we can accommodate those. But between all the different equipment manufacturers and climates and contexts, like we could do this webinar for hours and you told me I only had 20 to 30 minutes, so we probably better not do that.

4:46 Yeah, for sure. This is a topic that could go on forever. But yep, like Zach said, we'll kind of hit that 30,000 foot view and like Jonathan said in the beginning, if you've got questions, drop them in the Q&A box and we will get to those at the end. All right. So, now we'll get to the big question. What are options for planting? There's, like you mentioned, tons of different equipment considerations. You have to take into consideration the things that you actually have access to but then also what is going to be the best planting situation for your particular cover crop.

5:29 So, can you just kind of walk us through first of all just all the options that we have when we're planting a cover crop and then kind of dive into each one of those individually and the pros and cons for using each different planting method?

5:48 Sure. Sure. Let's start with the best and then go from there. I think all of us that deal with seed and sell seed and make recommendations will always tell you if you can use a seeding machine such as a drill, a box drill, an air seed, a planter, something that's going to put the seed in the ground and get it covered is going to be the best thing to possibly use. You cannot beat seed to soil contact in that drill or cedar is going to do that for you. It's far and away better than the broadcasting which could be done with an airplane. You could have a spreader or a boom air machine. A lot of people are starting to use drones to fly cover crop seed on. I'm not saying that those are bad options, but those are options that require more luck, I guess I would say. I mean, you've got to be able to get the crop out there at the right time. It's got to rain, and it can't just be like one rain after you broadcast it. You need multiple rains in a series of a week or so to get the seed germinated and started. Whereas, if you're drilling it or planting it, you're going to be able to lay that seed directly into hopefully moisture. You can decide the depth. So, you can plant stuff that needs to be seated an inch and a half deep, an inch and a half deep. You can plant stuff that needs to be seated a half inch or less, a half inch or less. But I definitely think drilling or planting using some type of cedar is putting the seed into a

7:15 Furrow and covering it up is definitely the best way to do it. The second best, broadcast with a little bit of incorporation is probably close to that. Obviously you're going to be stirring that soil, breaking down your organic matter, and you're going to lose some of your no-till benefits by doing that, but it should get pretty good seed to soil contact, create a fairly firm seedbed. But like I said, broadcasting, you're just at the mercy of the moisture. There are times where that's the only option. If you're going to try to put stuff into basically black layer corn or soybeans that you don't want to drive over, broadcasting is your only option. The key then is just to make sure you get it done at the right time.

8:04 So when we're thinking about drilling seed, what are some of the things that you're thinking about in terms of seeding depth?

8:17 Yeah, lots of variables. One is how much moisture is in the soil. Am I looking to try to chase moisture? If it's starting to get dry and there's not a lot of rain coming or like in this last week, we were planting and we knew that there was a big rain coming. So we were planting stuff fairly shallow. Not necessarily needing to go after moisture. There was plenty of moisture where we were seeding stuff between 3/4 to an inch, but we knew there was a big rain coming. So those are probably the first things I would look at is what's my soil condition? What's the weather look like? Forecast look like. The next one would be, okay, what kind of seed do I have in here? Do I have a big diverse cover crop mix that's going to push through really easily and help carry the smaller seeds like your brassicas and your clovers or am I only planting brassicas and clovers and small seeded crops in which a situation where we need to shoot for shallower depth. It's almost constant the bigger the seed the more energy it has. So the further it can push out of the ground. Smaller the seed the shallower it needs to be planted. And then the other thing to calculate in is how much residue do you have? Obviously you have between the soil surface and your seating depth. But then if you have a lot of residue, residue is going to hold your gauge wheel up off the ground some more. So you can't just figure gauge wheel to bottom of disc opener or seed boot. You need to figure your soil, top of your soil, top of your residue and then check your seeding depth.

9:55 Okay. And on the lines of that residue discussion, is there a certain amount of residue that we want to target to have on the soil? Obviously keeping the soil covered is an important thing with cover crops, but is there an opportunity to get too much residue where you're going to hurt the following crop?

10:18 If you're going to try to broadcast it any way, shape, or form, even with mechanical termination, you can get into too much residue. So like this time of year, as our cool season annuals are coming out and expressing themselves, you know, they're producing a lot of residue. They're getting very tall. If you tried to go in and seed a warm season annual mix, broadcast into these active growing cool season annuals, and then terminate them, you're

10:48 Going to struggle because the seed really needs to reach, I've said it several times, soil, this soil contact. So you have to have seed to soil contact in order to get seeds germinated and growing. So if you have a bunch of residue holding that up off the ground, you're not going to get germination. Same way with broadcasting seed into perennial grasses. We'll have a lot of people that'll want to frost seed or overseed perennial grasses, which is a great thing to do if the management's correct, but if you have too much residue, you're just not going to get any expressed growth and likely you're spending money for something that you're not going to get out of.

11:31 All right, moving into your seeding rates, how do you go about deciding what the seeding rate should be? I know there's a lot of different considerations whether you're planting a super diverse mix or maybe a monocrop of something, but what are some of the things that you're thinking about for the seeding rate? Well, the first thing I would do is to consult one of the professional seed reps at Green Cover. They will be able to accurately give you a good seeding rate because they can either make a pre-made or a custom mix specifically for what you're trying to do, or you can use one of our great pre-made mixes.

12:12 The seed rate is not necessarily as important probably as the density of the seed, which kind of goes into our drill settings we'll talk about in a minute. One thing I would say is we sell cover crop seed based on pounds, but it's always really good to look at your seeds per pound so that you can convert that into plants per acre. That is the goal that you would have is to have enough plants per acre based on the canopy structure for your cover crop mix. So we may have a summertime cover crop mix that's 32 lbs an acre. We may have a fall less diverse high cereal cover crop mix that is 80 or 90 pounds an acre. So it's huge variability. There's no one-size-fits-all I would say for these cover crop mixes. And yeah, I just have to use the best context that we have for our situations.

13:13 Yeah, perfect. So let's jump into how to calibrate your drill. And I know you've got a PDF to share with us. Yep, so just kind of walk us through that and what it takes to get a drill calibrated correctly. Yeah, can you see it? All right, yep, okay. So the first thing we'll talk about with drill calibration and we're talking about specifically drill calibration for right now. You can use something similar, you can do a similar deal for broadcast. It's just a matter of not turning the spinner on and weighing how much comes out. There's two ways to do it. The quickest way is to look at your density of your mix and say density is basically your bushel weight. That's the old common term of your mix. So if we can see based on our recommendations, your density is going to be 56 pounds an acre, but we can say, okay, well, let's set our drill off of, you know, the corresponding grain. So if we have a primarily rye based mix and we're looking at a density of 56 pounds an acre, even with the different crops in there, we can still set it off the rye setting of our drill. Same thing with like a summertime mix, we would have a base of like sorghum sudans and stuff like that. Probably still going to.

14:33 Be in the 50 lb range. So we can set it off our sorghum setting for our drill and that's going to get us pretty close. But what I really like to do, especially in times when we're trying to cut cost as much as possible where we can, this sheet that I showed you here is what I will use when I'm trying to get really precise. And I've actually used this. We've got a video we're working on about I planted some alfalfa, no till some alfalfa with the John Deere 750 grain drill, the large seed box, and they can be really accurate.

15:08 But just a few things that I want to point out. This takes like less than 15 minutes. This whole entire process takes less than 15 minutes, which when you're thinking about seating, this is the most important time that you have. Let's just do it. It doesn't take much. So this claims you need a tape measure. That's good. If you don't have a tape measure, we can step it off. That's what I've done before. Flags to mark each stopping and starting points. I oftentimes carry a roll of paper towels and a box of gloves or some gloves in my cab. So I'll use those for my flags if we're in the field already.

15:45 Now, this gram scale is a little bit more sensitive, as well as the plastic bags. I borrowed, owned my wife's gram scale that she used to make her sourdough bread. So I had to replace it, but I just grabbed that. It runs off AAA batteries. So I just keep a couple triple AAA batteries in that little gram scale in the toolbox of my cab of my tractor. And then the same thing with the sandwich bags. And I didn't use rubber bands. Rubber bands will often deteriorate over time. What I did was I preset a couple zip ties to the size of my seed tube and I just keep those. I don't cinch them down. I just loop the sandwich bag through there and put them on the cup.

16:27 And then all you do is go out, if you're using a box drill, pick one tube off of both sides of the meter because there's going to be two different halves to that shaft and they will be different. Even if they're only driven by one side, they'll be different. But hook your plastic bags on there, drive your 150 ft with the drill in the ground, come back, weigh it, and they have done so good to even say, 'Okay, pounds per acre. Here's what you're shooting for. Here's the distance in your seed openers. This is how many grams of seed you should have calculated out of that one Ziploc baggie.'

17:06 So I mean, you can go as far as two pounds per acre to 180 pounds per acre. And these this chart is accurate. It's very, very close. And if you're using a cover crop mix, it's good to do because you're going to get absolute accurate density for this. And one thing past this, once we get past the calibration, is I would say always plan on using a little more seed than you think. So if you're planting 25 acres, unless your field is 100% square, unless you have row shut offs and all of that good stuff, you will plant more seed than you think you are or you'll have skips.

17:47 So when you're putting together your mixes, you know, maybe increase 5 to 10% on your the seed that you need. So instead of buying 25 acres, you know, maybe you buy 30 acres of seed. It's not going to cost that much more, but it's going to ensure you get a nice stand to start with, right? And there's nothing worse than getting almost done with the field and

18:10 Running seed and having after hours or on the weekend, I'm sure. Yes. Exactly. Right before the rain comes. Yep. Yeah. Perfect. One of the questions that we often get in regards to planting is people will have two seed boxes on their drill. And there's a question about separating the large seeds from the small seeds when we're doing a highly diverse cover crop mix. Can you talk a little bit about the maybe why you would want to do that or maybe why it's not necessary to do that?

18:46 Sure. And I think that'll hit on Brandon Bray's question there too. With the variety of seed sizes. So what we see is most all of the cover crop seed that we sell is nearly the same density. There are a few outliers. Sunflowers would be an outlier. Oats would be an outlier. Barley would potentially be an outlier. But outside of that, most of the densities or the bushel weights of those plants are nearly the same.

19:17 What we would say in a situation where you have that is it's still better to get the seed all mixed into one bag because even if you're separating it out and putting it in small seed box versus a large seed box, then you have to calibrate two different mechanisms. So that takes a little more time. And then as far as the planting depth, cover crop seed specifically, generally speaking, does not have to be buried to get growing. As long as you can get the seed in the ground and covered up, that's okay. If you have rain coming, if you don't have rain coming and you'll just seed it into dry soil, I would advocate that you wait to plant that more times than not. We always like to get it to where we can put the seed in the ground and it has what it needs to get germinated and started.

20:10 So, for a highly diverse cover crop mix, it may have probably the wintertime species are the easier or the more times that that happens. So, we may have some oats in there, we may have some peas in there, some turnips. What I would do is I would shoot for 3/4 to an inch deep. I know that sounds really deep for your brassicas, which it would be if you plant it by itself, but the oats and the peas have so much energy that they can poke through that inch, no problem. And then what that does is it will actually open a channel up where you ran your disc opener and those brassicas will be able to come up to the sunlight, no problems. Now caveat would be heavy rain, get all that seed trench really packed in there tight, then you're going to have problems with those small seated brassicas. But, I still think it's better. I don't like to mess with a large seed box and a small seed box. Put it in one box and let's go.

21:06 Yeah, perfect. That's a great explanation for that. So you mentioned a little bit some of the different types of equipment that we can use to get the seed planted. Could you kind of give us the pros and cons of using a no till drill or an air seeder? Could you even use a corn planter to plant your cover crops? Just kind of walk us through if we're going to actually be planting the seed instead of broadcasting it, what are our options and what are the pros and cons?

21:39 Sure. So drilling drills have came a long ways over the years that they used to be called controlled spillage. There's a lot of that still goes on.

21:49 For a cover crop blend, this is a big thing. We're not looking for corn seed precision. So drills are absolutely fine. We can get them close. They're going to blend a second time after we mix it into the ground as it's coming out the drill. Drills are absolutely fine. The big thing is just make sure you match your down pressure to your soil. Down pressure only works if you have enough weight. So if you're using a drill that really wasn't designed to no till, it can still no till. But if you don't have enough weight to get that drill in the ground, it's not really going to be much better than a broadcaster that's broadcasting in a row.

22:36 You can use planters for some cover crops. I actually bought a set of vacuum plates for my planter. They were called small grains. They say that a turnip will catch in it, but I'm not sure. I was looking at the holes the other day, and I'm thinking that they'll suck it through and get into my vac meter. But finger meters would potentially work. I know Kinsey has some backing plates that they could use for diverse cover crops. Planters are going to be pretty accurate. Those are every meter should be calibrated. But really the drill is the best thing for most applications of cover crops. And the other benefit of a drill is it's planting on 7 and a half inch rows instead of a 15 or a 30 that your planter is going to be planting on. So you're going to get quicker canopy, quicker coverage, more seeds per acre, more spread out in those rows.

23:32 If we don't have that option to drill the cover crop seed and we are looking at broadcasting, is there anything we can do? You talked about incorporating, doing a little bit of incorporation with the seed. Are there any particular instances where it makes more sense to broadcast over drilling the cover crop seed?

23:56 Sure. There are types of seed that will work well for broadcasting. Generally speaking, the smaller seeds are those species, which is kind of hard to think about because they don't have much energy, but what they do have is small surface area. So it doesn't take nearly as much to get pretty decent seed to soil contact out of that. Your brassicas will broadcast pretty well generally. Your annual ryegrass, your cereals outside of oats and barley. Oats and barley have holes on them and they take about two and a half times more moisture to germinate than your rye or triticale wheat stuff like that. So when you're looking at if that is your only option and you have to broadcast or your management practice is telling you that's your only way to get it on in time, just look for those species that are going to handle that quite a bit better. You don't want to go out and broadcast soybeans. That's not going to really work well. But you could broadcast some smaller seeded legumes. Sunchmp might be one to look at that would broadcast fairly decent in that summertime situation.

25:07 Okay. So we talked about drilling the seed, broadcasting the seed. There's a few other ways that you can get seed out into the field, and this would primarily be in a pasture type situation. Can you talk a little bit about if people are planning.

28:51 Clovers at that point. You're not going to get the heave that you would out of a frost seed, but you're generally going to get more moisture to get it germinated at that time.

29:02 Awesome. All right. I want to touch on just one more topic before we get into the Q&A session. One of the big questions that is becoming asked more and more is the topic of corn interseeding. So could you just walk us through a little bit some considerations of when you're going to do a corn interseeding mix? There's we generally think about two different times that you could do a corn interseeding mix. So kind of walk us through the considerations of the earlier interseeded mix versus the later interseeded mix and some of the planting options that you have, what sort of equipment you can use and the species considerations as well.

29:55 Sure. Yeah, this is a very widely talked about topic. Lots of interest in this. Let's talk about it from the front side is just make sure that it's going to match your climate. Don't try to do this in western Kansas dryland where you're already struggling for moisture. Let's not try to put more competition out there. This works really well where you're either getting irrigation or plenty of moisture. The big thing with corn interseeding is that corn once it gets to a certain point is growing so incredibly fast that you've got to be ready to do this and you need to have the machinery to do it as well. Ideally we're going to get that interseeded cover crop put on you know V3 V4 time frame so that you can really get it started. If you wait much later than that, your cover crop's just not going to perform much because the canopy is going to canopy so fast. But you really want to get that seed in the soil and the thing is, like I said, the corn is growing fast. So, if you put it into the soil into moisture where it can actively be germinating and establishing, you're not waiting for that next rain or that irrigation cycle on your pivot. That seed has already started.

31:09 If you don't do that and you broadcast it, like I said, we're seeing a lot more of this like really small, even not even establishment happening. So it's important to get that incorporated into those corn crops. That's going to take a little bit of specialty or modification of your equipments. But that's definitely something a lot of people are doing and are looking at doing with pretty cheap equipment or old equipment. And that covers I think on the front end of the corn interseeding and then the back end of the corn interseeding. Kate, are you talking about when the plant's starting to dry down?

31:45 Yep. Yep. So on the back end of that, we want to look at when the corn is starting to dry down. Basically, you want to get it to where the whirl is starting to open up the whirl around the leaves so that we're not getting a bunch of the seed stuck in the leaf where the leaf meets the stem. So once that happens, you can get your broadcast done. Hopefully you get a little rain before you get the corn harvested, but if you don't, spreading that corn residue out the back of the combine is a great way to help increase seed to soil contact and moisture holding capacity between the leaf.

32:18 Residue of the corn and the soil. And that seed sitting in there like a sandwich. And then on the soybean side of it, just because we're here, once you see that first yellow leaf is ideal time to get that cover crop spread. Because once you start to see that first yellow leaf, it does not take long to get those leaves dropped and you want the seed to be out there touching the soil before the leaves fall on top of it.

32:42 Right. Yeah. And when it comes to corn interseeding, we actually do have a couple of pre-made mixes that work well for both of those situations. The first one for the first situation the V3 to V5 interseeding planting is the corn interseeding V3 to V5 is what it's called on the website. So go definitely go check that one out. And then the one for the late summer or early fall planting would be called our brassiccast mix. So that one's going to be mainly brassicas. A lot of small seeded species that work well in a broadcast situation. So definitely go check those out.

33:31 We'll get into some of the Q&A questions. We've got a question here. Zach, your thoughts on 10-in spacing on a drill versus 7in spacing on a drill for a cover crop planting.

33:48 Sure. For cover crop planting, the 10 compared to seven is going to be fine. I know it just depends on where you're at in the country. Some places will do 10 in, more popular 10-in spacing, 7 in spacing. For your warm season, your sorghum sudans and stuff like that, they really don't mind. The cool season, as long as you can get stuff planted earlier so that you can get it tillered out. The benefit of the 7 in spacing in the fall plantings is if you don't get your rows completely tillered shut before fall, you generally will get your rows tillered shut before fall with a 7 in compared to a 10. That would be the only downside. There's a lot of people that are even trying to split row their drills so they can leave a row to plant their cash crop down. That's fairly interesting to me. I haven't tried that yet. All your guidance and stuff better be spot on to do that. But yeah, I don't see that there's a big disadvantage to the 10 versus a seven.

34:46 Okay, perfect. Mark is asking to get your clover to germinate, can you plant right after the corn is planted?

34:58 Sure. Yeah, we have some people that even have planted right before they planted their corn. Just plant their clover really shallow and then they go out there and just run their corn planter right over the top of it. I've had several people do that. But yeah, you could do that with the clover. Clover is pretty slow. Those well even the annual clovers aren't super fast to germinate and get started. So giving that plant a little bit more time to get started is definitely going to be good for you. But yeah, I would look at doing it if you're going to do it that close to planting, I would look at doing it before planting and then going with your corn planter so you're not disrupting any of your corn.

35:37 All right. Yeah. And along those same lines, Daryl is asking what would be a good cover crop to go with Milo. So we just talked a lot about interseeding with corn. But for a slightly different cash crop, what are your thoughts around that and sort of planting considerations for that cover crop.

35:57 Crop? Yeah, planting considerations with corn and milo are they're similar, but they're not the exact same. One thing, you know, you got to be careful of when you're planting with corn is you don't want something that's going to get really viny and get up in the corn ear area and make a seed because it's going to be really hard to separate that in your combine and you're going to get some really funny looks and probably some dockage at the elevator. Milo is probably more susceptible to that because that head's potentially going to be lower to the ground. But Milo also on 15in rows is going to fill out pretty darn quick. That may start to interfere with like an interseed mix, especially in season interseed mix. You know, if you did a fall cover crop mix the year before on 15inch rows and then your milo, I think that would work. The other one would be looking at a brassica or a cereal rye to go in prior to freeze. Like I would do it fairly early in the fall before you get that milo cut. But 15-inch milo is going to make a pretty dense, heavy canopy. So, it's just kind of adjusting your expectations to what you think your cover crop's going to do.

37:11 All right. Yeah. So staying in this vein of interceding with cash crops, we've got Sue's question about considerations for interceding with soybeans. So, there's a little bit different spacing on soybeans, totally different canopy structure, root structure, all of that. So, what are some of the things we should be considering if we're going to do a cover crop with our soybean crop? I would be very careful in doing a cover crop with a soybean crop. The reason is, you know, your corn, just like I explained, your corn or milo, that harvestable crop is up off the ground. Where you're harvesting soybeans, you're harvesting, you know, two, two and a half, three inches off the ground. So basically any growth you have out of your cover crop is going to go through your combine. That can potentially lead to issues if it's really green and growing. I know we have a couple people that are using like mustards in their cover crop or in their soybeans interseeded. Mustards will run their lifespan really quickly and just kind of be done for later in the year so you're not having to run that extra plant material through your combine. But I would definitely keep into consideration, if you're thinking about interceding your soybeans early, like we're talking about doing corn here, V3 to V5, it's early stage of their lives, is you're going to have to run that material through your combine. So, if you have really good heavy soybeans that are making really nice yields, you're going to have even more material to run through your combine. So, I generally don't advocate for a lot of interceding into soybeans early in their life. Later in the life, like we talked about, when they start to turn yellow, that's a different story. I definitely think that's a good time to be doing it in that aspect. Your cereals, your brassacas, same thing. Something that's going to germinate fairly easily and quickly and get started in the fall.

39:08 All right. Awesome. Yeah, thank you for that. Shifting gears a little bit. Cole's got a question. Is there any reason to worry about roots plugging up drain tile? He said he's seen some things online and people are blaming

39:26 Cover crops for that. What are your thoughts on that situation, Zach? Yeah, this is stretching a little bit from planting. I would say that there's a possibility for everything to happen. I'm not sure that it always happens. It's kind of like when you go to the coffee shop, you always hear the worst news. So a lot of times these types of situations will float to the surface. But you're definitely right. Not sure if we know the whole story. I don't know that I really want to engage too much on that because I don't want to overstep into some context. I would say it's possible, but it's also possible that it doesn't happen to because we have a lot of producers that are using cover crops on drain tile ground. And we definitely don't hear nearly as many issues as you see on Facebook groups about drain tiles clogged, right?

40:12 Yeah. Just something for people to be thinking about when they're considering planting in a cash crop field. For sure. We do have a couple of questions for smaller scale growers. What are some of the things I know we're mainly talking about more large scale planting situations but Zach could you touch a little bit on for a smaller scale grower what are some of the best options? Normally they're going to be broadcasting. Is there anything that they can do to help increase their success for that cover crop to do really well in smaller scale situations?

41:00 Yep. Yep. So, smaller scale operations, especially those that might have access to water, whether it be rural or well water, a good thing to do, you know, if you're broadcasting it, a light incorporation with a rake or something, not something that's going to disrupt the soil a whole bunch, but a little bit of disruption is going to be all right. Or if you can cover it with some type of mulch is going to help quite a bit. And then, the biggest thing is water. If you can water that every day or every few days for a week, it's going to let those plants get established. Once they get established, they can do a lot of this the seeking themselves. But just getting them established at a broadcast, it's going to take a little bit more management. Whether it's a large scale or a small scale operation. Yeah for sure.

41:48 All right. Well, I think we'll wrap it up there. I know there were a few questions that didn't get answered. If you still have questions, please join us for our ask me anything webinar at the end of this series. We'll do that with Keith. To wrap up later in May. Just a reminder, our next webinar for next week will be on termination of cover crops. So bring all of your termination questions to that webinar and we'll talk about that topic. And then the following week, we'll have a discussion with Dylan and Keith on some of the biologicals. All the different options that we have there in terms of our cover crops that we're going to be planting out there. And then like I said, the last one will be an ask me anything with Keith Ferns. And that will wrap up our webinar series. But, just wanted to say thank you to Zach for hosting this webinar today. We've talked about a very wide variety of things. Planting, like we said, is a big topic. We kind of hit the 30,000 foot view. And there's a lot more that we could dive into, but we've only got a limited amount of time today. So, if you've got specific questions about your operation, feel free to give us a call. Thank you all for joining today. It's been a great webinar and we hope to see you back in the following weeks for the rest of the series. So, with that, thank you all and have a great rest of your Wednesday. Thanks Kate.