How to Use the Smartmix Calculator to Build Cover Crop Mixes for Summer Planting

0:00 Good. Well, it's 5:30, so we'll go ahead and get started. People kind of tune in here. What we're going to do this week is have Keith do a live demonstration of the smart mix calculator. But we're going to design some mixes based on cover crop options after wheat. So, as always, you guys are muted, but if you've got questions, especially with this one, there might be a few that come up while Keith is talking. Go ahead and either type those out in the chat bar or in the Q&A and I can interrupt Keith if it's something that I think we need to address in that moment. Otherwise, we'll leave it to the end. Go till about 6:15 and then open it up to any questions that you guys have either on the smart mix calculator or just on your cover crop options for after wheat harvest.

0:48 So, with that, we are having some problems getting Keith his video playing. So, we'll just let him share his screen and go from there.

1:01 Okay. Well, thank you, Noah. Yeah. Hello, everybody. Unfortunately, Zoom keeps changing a lot of their protocols and so something changed and we're not able to get the panelist video here. But as long as you can still hear me, I think we should be okay. I do want to just share a little bit about cover crop options after wheat harvest because that's coming up for many people and even if you don't have wheat, if you have other summer harvest crops, you may be looking for different cover crop options or this may be some information that will be helpful for you down the road as well. So let me just start my PowerPoint here.

1:47 So what we're going to do is I'm just going to talk fairly briefly just about some general strategies to think about. We've already talked about some of these topics like the stockpile grazing. Dale had actually a two-part seminar on stockpile grazing and the different species that you would use in there. So I'm going to talk about cover crops after wheat harvest in general and then we'll get into the smart mix calculator. I'm going to give you a little bit of a backdoor tour of how some of that was developed and look at some of the features in there and we'll actually build some mixes that would be appropriate for putting out this time of year.

2:23 So I think when it comes to planting a cover crop after you harvest a summer crop, whether it be wheat or rye or oats or we've got some customers who are going to be harvesting peas and they're going to get something planted in there. Or maybe you have some ground that was prevent plant. These things would all apply very well to prevent plant acres as well. Basically anything that you're going to be planting in the summer. I think there's two strategies to consider when doing this. And the first one is to plant as soon as possible after the combine, literally be out there chasing the combine with your air seeder or your drill. Or maybe if you have a few weeds, you spray them out quick and you get the cover crop going just as soon as possible.

3:11 And you know, there's several things to consider in doing this. Number one, you're going to be mainly doing warm season species because you're going to be planting this time of year, late June, early July. We've got a lot of heat ahead of us in most parts of the country. You can put a few cool season things in there, but a lot of them are just not going to like what we are facing over the next 60 to 75 days heatwise. So you can put some cool season species in, but it's mostly going to be warm season species. And that's not necessarily all bad because warm season species grow faster than cool season species, especially during the long days of the summer. We just passed the longest day of the year and so we've got a lot of sunlight hours. We've got a lot of heat units out there to take advantage of and capture. So by putting more warm season species out there, you're going to generate more biomass. You're going to generate more forage for your livestock and generally more benefits for the soil. So that's not necessarily a bad thing that you're going to do mostly warm season species.

4:18 So the benefits to this is you're going to keep a living root in the ground as much as possible because as one crop is getting harvested, you're getting the next one planted right away. So there's really no period there. You can have some effective weed control if you can get ahead of the weeds. And I say if you can get ahead of the weeds and I would put volunteer wheat in this same category. We've seen cover crops similar to the one that you see on your screen here. We've seen those things suppress weeds and volunteer wheat very well if you can get the cover crop out ahead of them. And that's where I was saying you may have to do weed control prior to planting the cover crop, but you know, right after the combine to get ahead of it because these cover crops are going to do a pretty good job of suppressing or slowing them down.

5:04 The weeds are already out there and they're taking off and they're getting started. The cover crop is not going to prevent them from growing. It'll probably still slow them down, but the weeds are still going to be there. So if you can get ahead of the weeds, you can see some weed control benefits by getting out there early right after the combine. And then if you're looking to graze some of this, definitely getting planted as soon as possible is going to allow you to get some good grazing out there, probably starting the middle of September, maybe even early September, late August in some situations if you want to get started early.

5:42 So if you are wanting that early grazing, you got to get planted right away. And for some people, if grazing is one of your biggest goals, then you may plant some of it early and then some of it you may wait. You don't have to plant it all at the same time. You don't have to plant all the same mix. It all depends on what your goals are. So the challenges in this system by getting in there right after the combine and getting stuff planted is that you likely will have volunteer wheat to have to deal with because if you're planting right away, there's no chance for any wheat to come up as a volunteer crop to spray it out or terminate it somehow. So you're going to have that volunteer wheat. Now if you get your cover crop up and going, it's really going to suppress the volunteer wheat and it's likely not going to be a big issue. But if the wheat gets going before your cover crop does, I've seen that volunteer wheat be very competitive with these cover crops that get planted and they can really slow down and stunt the cover crops.

6:39 And the other challenge, like I kind of alluded to earlier, it's difficult to get some of these cool season species to survive when planted in July, late June, early July. Now this picture here does have some brassicas in it. And there's some brassicas like the collards and some of the turnips, rape seed, they tend to do a little better than some of the other ones. Radishes can work and we've seen them work. But you know, they don't really hit their prime until September. And so you can slip some of those in, but it's not a good time to really be planting a lot of hairy vetch or peas. A lot of people want to ask about planting cereal rye or triticale this early. I've had people do it, but it's not the preferred method. It's really too early to get those cool season cereals planted out there and hope that they can survive. For one thing your warm season stuff is going to grow very, very fast. And because it gets so fast, so tall so fast, it's going to choke out and shade out a lot of your slower growing cool season things. So it's really easy to choke them out and you just don't see them. Part of it's the heat and part of it is just simply the competition and those warm season species are just so much faster growing in that time frame that they get way out ahead of those.

8:00 So benefits and challenges, but there's a place for doing it. It's not necessarily going to be what you'd want to do on all your acres or isn't necessarily what you'd want to do every year. So the other strategy or the other system if coming in after wheat or after any summer harvested crop is to wait a little bit to delay that planting. The benefits are you can get some awesome diversity. You know, to me, here in Nebraska, we're essentially right smack in the center of the United States. So where I am at, I think the first week of August is the perfect time to plant a cover crop if you want to maximize your diversity. And I say that because it's still early enough. We're probably still going to have 60 days before we have a frost. It's still early enough that I can plant warm season things like sorghums and millets and buckwheat, cow peas, and mung beans. I can still plant those and they'll do just fine, get plenty of growth.

8:57 But it's now late enough into the season. I've missed all the heat in July. It's going to be easier, much easier for me to get some of these cool season things going and started and try to keep them alive planted the 1st of August versus the end of June or 1st of July. So now I can put in some peas, I can put in some vetch, I can start thinking about lentils or I can even start slipping in cereals, you know, oats, barley, triticale, even cereal rye. Those things are much better. You know, it would be better September 1st for them than August 1st, but August 1st is a whole lot better than July 1st. So I can get a lot of diversity into my mixes if I wait just a little bit. I can mix those warm and cool season species very well. I also have the opportunity to control volunteer wheat and some weed control opportunities there. And generally, you know, if you wait that four to six weeks before you would plant your cover crop after wheat harvest, you will hopefully get a

9:57 Rain to germinate some of that wheat, get that first flush of volunteer up, get any weeds that want to come up, get those up and going, and that way you have something growing. But you're the plan is not to let them grow too long, and then you would terminate them, and then you could come in right behind that, and you could plant your cover crop mix. And so generally you have a little bit better chance to control volunteer wheat and have a weed control opportunity by delaying and planting a little later.

10:24 So the drawbacks of course when you do that you will have a fallow period. You're going to have a period out there you know four, five, six, seven weeks where you are not having anything growing other than maybe some volunteer wheat if you get a rain or some weeds that continue to grow and you know is that the end of the world for your soil? Well, probably not. You know, if it's if you can combine it to four or five weeks, but it's certainly not doing it any favors or any good either.

10:53 You know, one of the principles of soil health is to have a living root out there as often as possible to capture that solar energy and to, you know, have those plants photosynthesize and leak those liquid carbon root exudates out into the soil to feed your biology. You go that long, your biology, you're going to have a decent amount of it probably go dormant. Some of it's going to die off. Now, it will recover and it will come back, but you know, it is going to be slow or slower from a biological standpoint.

11:23 So, again, you wouldn't necessarily want to do this system with all of your acres. But it may not be too bad of an idea to do it with some, especially if you want to have that late grazing. Dale talked about the stockpile grazing. He talked about that pretty extensively a couple weeks ago. There's actually two webinars talking about that.

11:43 But on some of those, you know, where he's talking about, you know, planting the stockpile, especially if you want to use cereals like an oats or a barley or a triticale or something like that, again, around the 1st of August is a great time to do that because you can still plant your sorghums, but now we can get those cereals to grow along with it. And I think things planted in those first couple weeks of August give some of the best grazing I've seen in November and December, even into January to some extent.

12:11 But, you know, boy, I've seen cattle do really really well on oats and if you plant oats around August 1st in our area here, they'll still head out. They'll probably make a head. They won't get all the way mature. But that's, you know, the cattle really will do well on that and they'll graze that all winter long.

12:30 So, another challenge is you may lose your moisture. You know, you may have some moisture right after wheat harvest and if you don't get something planted and get it coming up right away, if you wait and it doesn't rain, you may lose that moisture. It's pretty amazing how much moisture wheat stubble will lose with nothing growing there.

12:53 And we didn't really realize that. But when we started our cover crop experimentation in 2008, we had all these different moisture sensors out in all these different plots. And one of the plots was just bare wheat stubble. It was not bare ground because the wheat stubble was there, but there was nothing growing. But we with the moisture sensors in there, we were able to see moisture usage and it was pretty stunning how much moisture was lost out of that little parcel of the ground where nothing was growing.

13:22 Because that wheat did conduct some of that moisture up and out. You know, it got really hot. And so just because you don't plant anything doesn't mean you're not losing moisture. And then of course the other challenge is if you wait that long, you're not going to have that early grazing. But it'll be better late grazing.

13:41 So there's tradeoffs, but there's two different systems to look at there. And so your strategy and your species should be determined by your goals. And that's part of the basis behind the smart mix calculators. It's all based on the goals that you set.

13:56 But you know, do you want to fix nitrogen? Do you want to suppress weeds? Do you want supplemental grazing? You know, are you trying to prevent erosion? Are you looking to build organic matter? Are you trying to break compaction layers? Those are just a few of the goals that you can choose from on the smart mix calculator because those are the different things that cover crops can help you do.

14:17 And it's really important that you know what those things are. You know, we don't really want you to call us to ask questions about cover crops until you know what you want to accomplish. And whoever you're buying seed from, you know, if they don't know what your goals are, it's going to be really difficult for them to help you put together the best mix for you.

14:39 So that's going to be kind of determined. You know, whether you plant early or you plant late or whether, you know, what species you use, a lot of

14:46 That's going to be determined by the goals that you have. And so with that, I just want to jump into the smart mix calculator here and let's see. I'm going to log out.

15:02 I'm assuming Noah, can you still see my smart mix screen now? Can you confirm that?

15:09 Yep. Okay good.

15:11 All right. So, the smartmix calculator, if you just go to greencoverse seed.com, there will be a big button there that says smartmix. And it will take you right here. You can type in smartmix.greenoverse seed.com. This is our online tool to help you build a mix. And if some of you have been customers of ours with green cover seed for a number of years, you have seen many different versions of this. I think we're up to version five or six now. It started out with just a big very complex Excel spreadsheet that I was using. Figured out how to get that on the internet for people to use and we kind of took that about as far as we could get it. And then we decided we had to do actual computer programming and coding to do this. So fortunately my son Simeon was a computer programmer at the time and so he has done 100% of all the computer work, the programming work to get this to where it is. So he's done a great job with that.

16:08 Just a few things. This is the login screen. If you have an account, you can just log in. If you don't have an account, you'll see on the next screen where you would go ahead and you can sign up for an account. Accounts are free. We do want people to have an account though, so you can keep track of your mixes. You can do different things like that.

16:29 Now, I know we probably have people listening in from other countries. Unfortunately, right now, this is only set up for people in the United States, but we do have a lot of people from other countries that use it. And if you're not in the United States, you're still welcome to have an account, but you're going to have to pick a United States zip code that most similarly is most similar to your zip code wherever you're at in order to get the program to work as well as possible. So, just because you're not in the US doesn't mean you can't have an account. It just means you have to come up with a US zip code that is most similar to your climate, your weather. And then you can establish your own account. We may not be able to ship seed to you, but that's fine. We have lots of people that use this that don't buy seed from us. It's an educational tool out there for anyone and everyone to use.

17:22 So, one thing I want to point out, if you're new to this or if you introduce other people to it, down in the bottom right hand corner, there's a little button that says tutorials. And when you click on that, there are three tutorials that I recorded. They're nothing fancy, but I take you through the different screens. I broke it into three parts. So, the first one is kind of how you get started. The second one is putting your species in the mix, and then the third one is completing a mix. I'm not going to go through those because what I'm going to talk about here in the next 15 20 minutes are basically going to be very similar to what a lot of these things are, but you can go back and you can look at those later on if you forgot something that I said or like say if you're introducing someone else to this topic. It's just right down here under this little tutorial button.

18:09 So, I'm going to log in and my computer remembers who I am. But if it doesn't, if you don't have an account, when you go to this screen, just hit the login screen. And there will be a button right here that says sign up. And so, if you don't have an account, that's where you can sign up right there. If you forgot your password, you can click right here, and it will help get you set up.

18:32 So, now I'm logged in. To get started, you click the button where it says start a mix. And this is how Smart Mix comes up. It says, 'Hello, Bladeen, Nebraska.' Because when I created my account, I had to tell it where I live. My zip code is 68928. It says, 'My average annual rainfall is 26.73 in.' We're significantly behind. We're not going to be on pace to make that this year. My for my area, my first frost is around October 3rd. The last frost is around April 30th. I'm sorry, October 3rd is my first frost. The last frost is April 30th. And my plant hardiness zone is 5B. And these are all things that the computer knows about your zip code. And it's going to use these to help make recommendations based on what your goals are. And so you're not locked in. When you sign up for account, you have to put in your zip code, but you can put in any zip code you want. So you may farm in multiple zip codes or multiple states or maybe you're helping a friend from a different state. So right down here where the zip code is, I'm just going to type in I'll type in one.

19:39 That I've been working on for another customer down by Salina, Kansas. So this says, 'Hello, Assyria, Kansas, right in the middle of Kansas.' This says, 'Your average rainfall is 30 inches.' So they get about four more inches than we do here. That makes sense. Their first frost is October 17th, a little later. Last frost is 424, and their plant hardiness zone is 6A. I'm 5B, they're 6A because they're a little further south. So you can put in whatever zip code you want there. The system is going to know all this information about that, which is kind of neat. That's one of the powerful parts of this.

20:15 I'm going to type in the name of a mix. We'll call it smart mix demo mix. How many acres are you going to plant? And we'll just do 100 acres because that makes math easy. Irrigated inches. This is kind of an interesting one here. If you don't have irrigation, you don't have to use this, but you can actually still use this. If you are in a wetter than normal year, put in some irrigation inches. If you're in a drier than normal year, you can actually put negative irrigation inches in. And what that will do is that will tell the program that you're either wet or you're dry. And it will adjust your seeding rates based on that because the more moisture you have, the more seeds and plants you can have out there. The drier you are, you need to cut that back a little bit. So we can come back to this and I'll show you how that will work, but I'm going to leave that blank for right now.

21:05 My bagging option. I'm going to take my seed in a tote bag, but you can say I want it in 50 lb bags if you want. We ask if it's a certified organic field or not. I'm going to tell it no there. Seating method, drilled or broadcast or broadcast with incorporation. Again, this is going to affect your seating rates. I'm going to drill this, but if I was going to broadcast it, the recommended seating rates are going to be a little higher because you never get quite as good a stand with broadcasting as you do with drilling. So you have to increase your seating rate a little bit. Then we ask what your next cash crop is.

21:40 And the reason that we ask that is because there are certain things that you don't want to put ahead of certain other things. And so by telling us what your next cash crop is, and there's we don't have all of them in here, but there's quite a few different choices in here. We've added several recently since we're going into wheat stubble. I'm going to put corn as my next cash crop, but you can pick whatever you want there. And then the seeding date. It's automatically going to come up with today's date, and it'll set the termination date for 60 days. You can change these. So in this example, I'm going to say, well, I'm estimating I'm going to harvest my wheat on the 8th and I'm thinking by the 14th I'll be planting. So we'll put that in there. And then I'm going to terminate this. I'm just going to let this go all the way through frost. So you can actually just set it we'll set it here about Thanksgiving time. And it's going to tell you that your growing period is 136 days.

22:38 Is going to have 2,223 base 50 growing degree days and 3,369 base 40 growing degree days. Base 50 growing degree days, basically it's how many growing degree days do you have above 50 degrees and that is a good rating for warm season crops and the base 40 it's how many growing degree days you have above 40. So that number is always going to be higher. And it's a good indication of what you can do with cool season crops. So you don't have to change it to hang there. That's just kind of information that the program is going to be using. And then this part is really important here. You need to select the goals that you want to use because if you don't have goals, the program won't work and it's not going to let you go to the next step unless you choose at least one goal.

23:22 So I'm going to choose supplemental grazing because I've got some cattle and that's going to be pretty important. My second goal I'm going to do I want to reduce erosion because soil health is I can't have soil health if I don't have my soil. So I'm going to choose that as a goal. And then my third goal here, I'm going to put nutrient cycling because I want to make sure if I had any extra if I had any extra nitrogen after that wheat, I want to make sure I get that cycled and held on to for my next corn crop. So once I select my goals, I can click continue. It'll take me to the next screen.

23:59 Now, there's a lot of information, a ton of stuff on this screen, and it can kind of be overwhelming, so sometimes you have to kind of play around with it just a little bit. We've tried to make as much of it somewhat self-explanatory. We're still working on making some little hover over deals that will have explanations and things like that. So it's still a work in progress, so bear with us. Right now, I don't have any species in my mix, so there's really no information to look at. Over here on the right hand side is kind of my cost.

24:29 The first thing you need to do when you get here is you need to click on the big plus sign here where it says add species. And when it clicks add species based on the information that you gave it. And I think the way this works is it's based 40% of the score is based on how well it meets your goals. 40% of the score is based on how appropriate is it to plant during the time frame and where you're at. And then 20% of the score is based on what you chose as your next cash crop. So, based on the information that I gave the system, and again, this is not perfect. I see things come up in here and I'm like, 'Yeah, that shouldn't be there. I need to go back in and figure out what numbers I don't have quite right to make that work.' But you have to remember there's probably close to a million data points in this smart mix calculator because this is designed to work in all 50some thousand zip codes in the United States. And so you can imagine how much how big those databases have to be in order to make that work. So really robust database. So it's not going to be perfect, but it will help you get close.

25:44 Basically when I pull this up, it's going to say I've got 28 things that were rated as excellent. I've got 55 things that were rated as good. I've got nine things that were rated as marginal. And I've got one thing rated as risky. I'm going to be going through later this year and kind of redoing some of my scores because there should be more than that in the risky category. We were a little hesitant to put too much in risky because people have tried things and I said, 'Yeah, I wouldn't do that. I don't think that's going to work.' And then they send me pictures and it worked great. So, you know, we're trying to not limit your choices because we know that some things work that we don't expect them to. And so some of those are in the marginal category, but generally, you know, look in the excellent category first and then look in the good. I wouldn't do much below that and you'll still have a lot of choices here. So now it comes up and here's the things that are rated as excellent. So I've got mung beans and you know there's a lot of information here. WSB means this is a warm season broadleaf. A full seeding rate would be 21 pounds. There's 8,000 seeds per pound. That's what that means. They cost a $15 per pound. But if you don't know what a mung bean is, and we don't have this for everything yet. We're working on this yet. But there's this little play button right here. If you click on that play button, what it's going to do is it's going to bring up a video and it will be either myself or Dale and we're going to talk about what that specific crop is. And we've got these little YouTube video clips so you can just simply go in and learn more about this particular crop that you're looking at.

27:28 So that was mung beans. You can go in, you can do pearl millet. Just make sure here. No, this is these two clowns doing this one. So anyway, you can go in and learn a lot about a lot of these different things. Like I say, there are some that we don't have connected to videos yet. We're working on trying to get all those put together. What we want to do is we want to have this as a place where you can come and not only build your mix but also learn a lot about the different species.

28:02 So if I want to just start adding things, all I got to do is click my boxes. So I'm going to say, well, I want some mung beans. I want some cow peas. I've heard good things about those. Heard good things about pearl millet. I want a sorghum sedan in here. So I'm going to choose this one. I know that collards have some of the best heat tolerance of a brassacas. So, I'm going to choose that one. And I really like the sunflowers. And I like the buckwheat. Um, and I'm going to go to the good category just to see if I missed anything that I might want to put in here. Oh, sunhmp. Sunhmp. You know, why isn't that excellent? I don't know. I think it probably should be, but for some reason, it didn't get rated quite as high, but I'm going to choose that anyway. I'm going to put some of that in there. Um, and let's call that good for now. So once you get all those clicked, and down here it says add eight to the mix. So it's telling you that you have eight species selected. I'm going to click on that and it's going to add all eight of these into my mix. And so now I've got a bunch of information here. And so there's this is almost information overload here now. So if you just look, we always sort the legumes at the top, the grasses second, the brassic is third, and then the broadleaf plants at the end. We just kind of started that way. It just seems natural to us now. But that's how it will be.

29:21 All your legumes will be grouped together here. Your grasses, your brassacas, and then your broadleaf plants. And so under each one of these, there is a little information icon right to the right hand side of it. And when you hover over that, it's going to bring up some additional information about that particular species. And again, if you want to learn more, you can click on this button here. It will take you not to a video this time, but it will take you to our website where you can see additional information about this plant, basic information, uses, advantages, and again, these pages are all in the process of being reworked. So, these are going to be much more robust down the road. Some of those pages don't have a lot on them right now because we're in the process of switching things over. So, that's what that little button does.

30:11 This column is how many pounds per acre we're doing of this particular species. And you might say, well, I didn't tell the program how many pounds to put in. How did it know? Well, that's a good question and we struggled with this for a long time. We have what's called auto adjust. And that's right here at the very top. Smart mix auto adjust. And it automatically defaults to on just to help you get started. And then you can turn it off and you can manipulate and change these however you want. I recommend you leaving it on to get started because it puts things kind of into some pretty good proportions anyway because what it's doing is it if you see here under the percent of a full rate everything in here is 16% of a full rate and this is one of the biggest things that we had to overcome in building this is that a lot of people would say well do I base it on how many pounds of seed or how many numbers of seeds per square foot or per acre and we don't use either one of those individually, we use an average of the two to get our percent of a full rate.

31:17 The percent of a full rate is the actual seating rate, which is 53 lbs on these cow peas, divided by the 8 pounds that we're using, and that gives us 16% of a full rate. The goal here when you have auto adjust on is it will always make your mix be at about between 125 and 130% of a full rate. And we do that because we think that when you have this kind of diversity, you can have more plants out there than if you just planted any one thing at a full rate. And so that's kind of a good target we shoot for is at 125.

31:50 I can turn this off. I just click right here. I turn that off. It leaves everything the same, but now I can come in and I can say, well, you know what? Three pounds of sorghum is probably not going to be quite enough. So I can change that. I'm going to say I want five pounds of sorghum. Now, it doesn't change the other things. It will change some of these other scores that we'll look at, but it allows me to go in there and change anything I want. If I wanted, I can change everything I want. I can go back and click smart mix auto adjust again, and it will set it back to the way it was. So, kind of a handy little tool there. You can play with on and off.

32:27 This will tell you, this column is the percentage by the weight. So, cowpeas are 30% of this mix by the weight, but they're only 5% of the mix by number of seeds. It gives me the cost per pound. And then I've got $8.90 an acre in cow peas because I'm using eight 12 pounds. Over here on the right hand side, this is telling me right now this mix as it is is going to cost $34.84 an acre. It tells me my percent by weight and by number of seeds of my legumes, by grasses, by brassacas and broad leaves. So it just kind of breaks everything down here. It tells me what my seed cost, the inoculment cost, and the mixing cost. If I would have chosen bagging as an option, it would have a bagging charge in there. We try to be very transparent about the charges and the costs and that's all going to be included right there.

33:20 When we come back over to here, right at the very top, remember the three goals that we chose, supplemental grazing, erosion reduction, and nutrient cycling. So right now the program is saying I did a really good job of picking supplemental grazing things. Everything I picked is really good for grazing and I'm at 100% of meeting that goal of supplemental grazing. I'm at 90% of erosion reduction and 80% of nutrient cycling. You always want your top goal to probably be the highest score. And if it's not, then you should probably go through and tweak that a little bit and try to figure out how to change things, adjust things to get that top goal a little higher. And again, this is not infallible. There's certainly just going to get you started and pointed in the right direction.

34:08 The other thing, there is a note up here. It says, I've selected Red Ripper cow peas, which are sold out, and if this item is not back in stock by the time you need your seed, we'll help you find a substitute. Some things that we leave on here, we don't have anymore, but we're

39:25 On the little plus sign, you can come back here and you can say, well, I want to add some winter peas because I want a legume that doesn't die with the first frost. So I'm going to add the winter peas and I'm going to add a little bit of radish, too. So I can add those to my mix. And notice when you have smart mix auto adjust off and you add something new, it automatically just puts one pound per acre in. So if you want to add more than one pound, then you can say, well, I want eight pounds of winter peas, one pound of radish. I'm going to leave that. I'm going to change my collards to a pound.

40:01 So once you turn that auto adjust off, you can come in here and change these however you want. And then you can look to see what that does to your price. You can look to see what it does to your scores down here. Now it changes the carbon nitrogen ratio. See, it lowered the carbon nitrogen ratio because I have more legumes in here, less grass presence or less grass influence on this mix. So it lowered that carbon nitrogen rate a little bit. So something's not quite working on that, but that there are some things that are. So like I say, there's a lot of information in there. It can kind of be overwhelming at times. So don't be afraid just to get in here and kind of poke around, play around.

40:40 The nice thing about this is you can do all of this and it doesn't, you know, you're not ordering seed or anything like that. But if you do want to order seed or if you want to just ask a question, you can go to step three. So you click the continue button down here and it will take you to step three and you can say I want to ship it to me or I want to pick it up. And I'm going to just put ship it to me. You can put, you know, what address. And then this is all coming in with when you sign up, you'll put your address in. Then you click continue. Okay. And then you have an opportunity here to review what you have. And this is really important right down here. A lot of people don't see this, but it's a really important box for us. There's a comment section. So you can just type, 'Hey, Keith, check out this mix and let me know what you think.'

41:40 So when you confirm and complete this, it's going to say that you've placed an order, you're not ordering any seed. This system does not have any mechanism for taking payment. And it's not going to calculate the shipping. We have to do that after you submit it because there's so many variables with shipping that we can't do that through this program right now. We're trying to figure out how to do that, but it's really hard. So if I hit confirm and complete, it's going to come back and give me a message here and it's going to say thanks, your order has been received. You should receive a confirmation email shortly. It gives an order number and I can go and I can view that order.

42:21 I can also there was an option earlier on if I didn't want to submit it for me to look at, I could have saved it for later. And so you can go and look at your saved mixes. So if I click that button, here's all the mixes that I have worked on and actually did not submit. Here's this one that I just submitted today, Smart mix demo mix. I can actually go in. I can look at that. I can reorder it later on. I can bring it up next year. I can tweak it. I can base it on what I did last year, but then change it based on how I saw things grow. So it gives you a lot of flexibility.

42:59 If I click order details, it's going to show me kind of a summary of what I had here. And then I can reorder this mix. And when I hit reorder the mix, what it's going to do, it's going to bring it up. I can change any of this information here if I want, but it's also going to remember the species that I had in from last year or last time. And so now I can come in and I can change these however I want. So if you have a mix that you like, you can just base your new mix on that or you can start from scratch too if you want. So lots of things, lots of options that you can choose from. And again, don't be afraid to submit a mix. You're not ordering it. You're not committing to anything. Basically, you'll get a followup from somebody on the green cover seed team and they'll give you a shipping quote and they'll say, 'Hey, do you have any questions about this? Can we help answer anything?' And that way we can do that. But it's really helpful if you have a specific question if you use that comment button.

44:05 I can just get back to here to this one again. The comment button is on the summary page. Why is it not letting me go past here? Okay, so it's on this summary page right down here. That's where you type in your comments. And again, if you get to this stage and you're not ready to send it in, hit the save for later button. It will save everything you have and you can pick up next time that you log on.

44:40 You can get on there and if you get to the screen and see that you want to change something, you can just there's a button here that says edit species and it'll just take you back to this next step and you can continue to tweak it there.

44:54 Again, there's a ton of information in here. It's a tool. It is not all knowing. It's not going to be perfect, but hopefully it gets you started down the right period. Hopefully it gets you going the right direction and it helps you learn some things about some of these species you may not be familiar with and it will help start a conversation between you and your green cover seed representative and from there they can help you fine-tune what you have.

45:22 And a lot of times people will submit these and I'll follow up and say, you know, I really like this, but if we did this instead of that, we might be able to save you a dollar or two an acre or, you know, if you're really wanting to graze, I think this sorghum is better than that one for what you're wanting to do. So we'll look at those and we'll give our recommendations if we think there's something that we can do to help you out.

45:45 Noah, that's kind of 616. So that's kind of the summary of SmartMix. I'll be glad to answer any questions that people have.

45:55 Yeah, we'll start right off the bat here. Like Keith said, if you guys have any questions, go ahead and type them in the chat bar or the Q&A. The question was asked if grazing a wheat crop out instead of combining it. Is it possible to sew a warm season grazing mix into the wheat that is still green but headed out or is there too much competition to start new plants growing?

46:17 Yeah, that's a good question. I've seen people do this with wheat, with rye, with triticale. I've seen it both work and I've seen it fail by planting straight into that without any termination strategy. And I think the times when it works is when you are fairly late into the summer or you're into the really good hot part of the year and you graze it really hard and you trample it really hard. Those cool season crops like that do not want to grow back very well in the heat of the summer.

46:49 And so if you get out to where it's really good and hot, you graze it hard, they trample it. The more intensely that you can graze it and trample it hard, it's almost like rolling running a roller crimper over it. And so that will really help mash that down to where it no longer wants to regrow. So that will be a big benefit. But really it's the heat that's going to keep it from regrowing and you plant a warm season crop into that and that takes off. Once the warm season crop gets ahead of the cool season and it stays hot out, it'll blow it away.

47:24 Where I've seen it fail is when you try to do it too early. So you're maybe doing it, you know, early in the middle of May. You're grazing that cereal grain out. And again, depending on where you are, I'm referencing up here in Nebraska, we can still have some cool, fairly cool, mild weather that time of year. And the cooler it is, the more advantage it gives to that serial crop to want to grow back.

47:49 And I've seen situations where if we have a relatively cool summer, this is not one of them. But when you have a relatively cool summer, I've seen guys grow graze oats, peas, and turnips all summer long. And they never had to plant a warm season crop. And where they did plant the warm season crop, it didn't do that well because the cool season stuff was very competitive. But we had more days in the 80s than we had in the 90s and we had none in the hundreds.

48:15 This year it's very hot. It would not work that way at all. The advantage goes to the warm season. So it can be done, but you have to really manage that well. And again, the more intensely you can graze that cereal to mash it down, not necessarily have to eat it all down, but trample it all down pretty hard, the better off you'll be getting your warm season stuff started.

48:39 Um, one of the questions that I get a lot as a sales rep is how long does it take? What's the next step once they hit continue? How long does it usually take to get a quote? And then what is the process to actually get their seed to them once they're done here?

48:56 Sure. Yeah. So that's a good question. So what I do, when you submit something, those all come to me and then I kind of distribute them out to the different salespeople. If you've already worked with a salesman, I'll send it over to them. If you haven't worked with anybody before, I'll kind of look to see where you're at and assign a sales rep who's kind of familiar with that area or territory to work with you. And then basically we try, we don't always do this, but we try to make contact within 24 hours of getting back to you with a shipping quote, with any suggestions that we might have. Maybe

49:35 It's a follow-up question. We try to get that done within 24 hours. Sometimes if we're on the road traveling or at field days or something, it's difficult to do that. But we try to, at the very least, within 48 hours. And then if you say, 'Yeah, this looks good. The shipping quote looks okay. Let's go ahead and do it.' Then at that point, we'll get it submitted to the mix floor to be done. And at that point, it really depends on how busy they are. Right now, we're fairly well caught up, so it can probably get sent out either the same day or the next day. We get into August when that's our busiest month. It may be two, three, sometimes four days before we can get that seed mixed and shipped out. But generally what I tell people is figure a week from the time that you submit it to the time that we can get it shipped. And then depending on where you're at, it may be next day delivery, it may be another week to get it to you. The further away you are from us, the more lead time you have to allow for the shipping.

50:40 Okay. David asks, 'How do you ensure this mixed seed is planted accurately? Does seed size negatively impact the planter or is it something where you have to use a multibox planter?'

50:55 Yeah, if you have a multibox planter, that would be where you would make notes. You don't have to make two mixes, one for large seed and one for small seed. You could make the note there and say, 'Hey, I want the large seed and the small seed kept separate.' And we do that from time to time, but 95% of people don't have a multibox drill or multibox planter. And so the vast majority of these mixes, just like the one that we're seeing in front of us here, are going to get planted all put into one drill box and all seated at the same time. And once in a while we'll see some issues with seed separation. The bigger seeds will separate from the smaller seeds, but really for the most part when you have a diverse mix like this—this one has eight or nine different things in it—you're not going to see a lot of separation in this. If all I had was peas and turnips, a large round seed and a small round seed, those things are going to separate very fast and you're going to not have a good seeding experience. And that's where a separate box would be really good. Or even broadcast the turnips and then drill the peas or something like that. So a lot of it depends on the mix that you do. What we tend to tell people is, don't fill your drill completely up and then go drill for three or four hours because the longer that drill bounces around through the field, the more separation you're going to have. And the shorter the period of time that that drill is going through the field, the less separation you're going to have. So fill it less full and fill it more often and you won't have as many issues. As far as seeding depth, we generally tend to shoot for on these mixes somewhere around three-quarters of an inch to an inch deep. Going to somewhat depend on what seeds are in it, but that's going to be a pretty good average. The small seeds like a turnip or a millet really only want to be planted at half an inch. But when we've planted mixes and I've had those small seeds in them and they've been planted an inch and a half to two inches deep, those small seeds will come up when they're planted with larger seeds because the large seeds help open up that seed trench and then the little guys kind of follow along with them. Whereas if you planted them that deep all by themselves, you would not have nearly as good of emergence on that. So that's kind of the theory on that. As far as how to set your drill, we can kind of help you set the drill a little bit, but you're going to have to do some calibration. We're making some good drill calibration videos to help you with that. We do also have a tool. It's like $65, so it's fairly inexpensive. It's a plastic drill calibration tool. It makes calibrating your drill really easy. And you can use it for anything, not just cover crops, but you can use it for wheat or soybeans or rye or whatever you're drilling. So if you're using a drill a lot and you're struggling with getting that thing set, ask your sales rep about that drill calibration tool. It's a good investment and it will really help you get it dialed in pretty quick.

54:06 Okay. Jacen mentions here the inoculant on the side as being a good option. You want to talk about that? Yeah. So the inoculant, you don't really get to choose your inoculant in this. The system right now is just giving you an estimate. So like on the mix in front of us here, it's estimating that inoculant is going to cost about a dollar an acre. And that's a good general rule of thumb. The actual inoculant may vary. It may be a little more, it may be a little less.

54:35 Depending on what seeds you have, but also how soon it is going to be before you plant it. So if you're getting your seed in the heat of the summer and it's going to be three, four weeks before you plant it, we're not going to want to mix that inoculant on. We're going to want to ship that inoculant sealed in the bag and separate. And then when you get your seed, you need to put that in the house and keep it as cool as you can. If you're going to plant it right away, then we can go ahead and still mix it in there. So that would be a question you could ask either in the comment box or when you follow up with the sales rep. You might say, 'Hey, I'm not planting this for a few weeks. Should we keep the inoculant unmixed?' We can certainly do that. And then you just need to mix it in when you're putting it into your drill. We do have some inoculants that last longer on seed than others, but they are more expensive because there's added extenders and added food sources and things in those inoculants. So there are better products for being on the seed longer, but they do tend to cost more as well.

55:42 Karen asks if there's any rep for southeastern US that includes North Carolina. We don't really have a rep in that North Carolina area yet. Jacen, who is on the chat box right now, he actually lives in Jackson, Mississippi. So he would be closest to you out there. But really, what we found is a lot of these annuals, when it comes to annual cover crops, they will perform pretty well across a very wide geography. And certainly, the more familiar you are with that geography, the more you're going to be able to make some of these recommendations. But really any of our sales reps are going to be able to kind of help answer some of your questions. And we may actually ask you questions about your particular area. I do that quite often. You know, I might say, when do people generally plant oats in your area or when do you typically harvest your wheat? We may not know exactly things about your area. So we might ask questions to kind of help zero that in. We are working on trying to set up some additional reps and dealers. We're kind of slow doing that because with our model of doing all these complex diverse mixes it's really difficult to get that set up in additional locations because you have to have such a wide diverse inventory in order to do that. So it's a little harder to set up that traditional dealership model than like a corn soybean dealership would be. But we do ship all over. We ship to all 50 states. We ship to most of the Canadian provinces. I just shipped a mix to some of different countries. So don't be afraid to reach out and also don't be afraid to submit a mix and if the price with the shipping is too high, you don't have to order it from us. But you can at least compare what we could do for you with the shipping to what you could get it for locally. And if you can get it cheaper locally, then you probably should do that. That's not going to hurt our feelings by doing that. This tool is out there for people to use and learn. You are not committing yourself to ordering seed. Even if you submit the mix and end up not ordering it, that's just fine. That's what it's there for. It's a tool to get you a good solid quote more so than it is to actually place that order.

58:14 Well, I don't have any other questions here in the chat bar. We're about two minutes from 6:30. So I think Keith, unless you have any other final thoughts on the Smart Mix, we'll probably wrap it up here.

58:27 No, no. Just when you use it, if you see things that you don't think are quite right or something, there should be a button on there. You could submit a help ticket or you can just shoot me an email. That's probably the best way. Keith green at coververse seed.com. And just say, 'Hey, you know, really liked it. Had a good experience,' or say, 'I can't figure this part out. This doesn't make sense.' There's certainly this is a big complex program. There's a number of things on it that we're still trying to work on and improve.

58:58 Yeah, absolutely. Well, Keith, thanks for going through this. And thank you for putting in the work to put it together. I know as a learned soil sales rep, it was nice to have a tool that allowed me to make recommendations and not feel like I was just on the fly. So, appreciate that. Next week, we are going to have our webinar on the top 10 questions that we get regarding cover crops. So it's going to jump kind of all over. If you guys have any questions that you would like, feel free to email those to me. My email is Noah, that's noah at green cover seeded.com and we'll go over those next week. So thanks guys. Thanks Keith. And we'll see you. Thanks everybody. Stay safe out there.