How to Use SmartMix 5.0: Setting Up Your First Mix

0:03 Hello and welcome to the Spark Mix Calculator Green Cover Seeds tool for helping you build the smartest cover crop mix possible. My name is Keith Burns and I am the developer of the Smart Mix Calculator and I just wanted to take a few moments and walk you through some tutorial videos to help you get the most out of this newest version. For those of you that aren't familiar with the Smart Mix Calculator, our theory behind Smart Mix is that the smartest mix of cover crops for your field is the one that you can custom design for your needs and that's

0:37 The premise behind this calculator you choose your goals and we help you select the cover crops that meet the goals and we can even custom mix it just for you. The smart mix calculator is very unique within the industry as it has immediate feedback on price and goal fulfillment along with sweet of mix attributes. It's powerful, it's instructional, it's interactive and it's visual and smart mix can help you make the smartest mix for your fields.

1:03 Just a few things that are different in this version, version 5, then what you may be familiar with in the past. One of the biggest differences is the ability to edit your past mixes.

1:14 We'll look at that in a little bit later, but the editing and the species selection portion of this is going to be far easier as well. So we're just going to start by clicking on the button it says starting mix, and once we do that it's going to bring up our initial starting page. And with smart mix calculator you have to establish an account. The account is free, doesn't cost anything. You're not committed to buying seed from green pepper seed. Anyone can use this around the world. There's no commitments, but you do need to create an account because that account is gonna know a little bit about.

1:51 Your geography. So when I logged in, it knows that I live in Bladen, Nebraska. So it says hello Bladen, Nebraska. Based on your zip code 26892-8, the average annual rainfall is 26.73 inches for my area. The first frost is around October third. The last frost is around April thirtieth, and the plant hardiness zone is 5B. So it's going to know all this information for all 45,000 plus zip codes across the United States. And you can change that. It defaults to the location that you put in when you register, but I'm just going to go down here and I will change this to a neighboring.

2:30 Town 6 8 901, so now it says hello Hastings Nebraska and it knows that I'm in a different location. I want to develop a mix for a different location, so you can change that zip code to whatever you would like, but it's going to default to what you put in when you create your account.

2:47 When you develop a mix, or the first thing you're going to want to do is name this mix. So we're going to just call this sample mix for summer grazing. You can tell it how many acres you want to plant. We'll just be very simple and do a hundred acres. You can always change that at any time. One of the new features on this is irrigated.

3:12 Applied irrigation. So if you have an irrigated field, you can tell the system how many inches of water you're going to use. So if I was gonna have this under a pivot, we may say well we're gonna put on six inches of water. Now most of you don't have that, but this you can still use this field.

3:30 One of the unique things about this is that if I think that I'm going to be planting my cover crop into a drier period than normal, I can actually choose a negative irrigation amount here. So we can make this be negative 4, and what that's gonna do is it's going to actually tell the program that I'm gonna be drier than.

3:53 Normal so it's gonna adjust my seeding rates and I'll show you that later on. Right now I'm just gonna leave that blank. That I'm not gonna irrigate. You can choose your bagging option: 50-pound bags, tote bags, or giving the seed in bulk. Your seeding method whether it's drilled, broadcast, or broadcast with incorporation, and that's basically going to help set the seeding rates that the program recommends for the species that you select. So we're gonna drill this. We select our next cash crop because one of the important things that doing a cover crop is we don't want to our next cash crop. So I'm gonna select.

5:04 Defaults to today's date, May 30th. I'm gonna be doing a mix that I'm gonna plan after we harvest wheat, so I'm gonna tell this program that we're gonna see this on July 17th. It automatically just jumps forward 60 days for the termination date, but you do not have to leave it there. We are going to tell it that we're gonna basically let this grow until November 20th.

5:29 Now, even though this says it's a hundred and twenty six days, the program is smart enough that anything that's a warm season crop, it knows from your average first frost date it's gonna terminate that crop and it's gonna stop counting any benefits that may accrue.

5:46 For more than seeds warm season crops. When it freezes the cool season crops will continue to grow so the program knows that we've got 126 days a growing season we've got 1,750 for base 50 growing degree days which is what is used to calculate warm season crop growth and it's got 2820 to base 40 growing degree days which is what is used to calculate cool season crops as they grow and then one other very important step before we finish up this first portion of the smart mix calculator is you must select your goals. You should never ever buy cover crop seed without knowing what your goals are.

6:25 And if you ever call someone up and ask to buy cover crop seed and they don't ask you what your goals are, you should keep looking for another place to purchase seed from because the goals are very, very important. So within the Smart MOOCS calculator, you can set up to three goals. You can have what's called your highest priority, your high priority, and just your priority. And the highest priority is always going to get the most weight when it comes to scoring the different species as to what's most appropriate for you. The high priority is kind of a medium weight, and the priority is a lower weight.

7:00 Still is important so when we click on what goals do we want, there's a whole number of different goals here and I'm just going to choose supplemental grazing because we want to be able to turn some cattle out on this. I also want to provide some lasting residue and then my last goal here is going to be compaction breaking that's going to be important for us as well. And again I can come back and change these goals at any time that I want but those are the goals that I'm going to choose for this mix.

7:33 The goals are important because the program is going to tell you how well you've selected the species that you want to use to accomplish your goals. So when you get all done with this first screen you just simply click the continue button and it's going to take you to step number two.