Interseeding Cover Crops Into Standing Corn: What Works in Shade

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0:05 Hello everyone, Keith Berns of Green Cup Receipt here at the Central Plant N RD Corn Interceding Demonstration Plot. We're going to just take some time and do a little bit of a video tour here. Along with me is Dean Crawl with Central Plant NRD and UNL, and also Noah Sign with SCI Mag and Sign Farming Families. It's their farm—they did a lot of the work here. So Noah, why don't you go ahead and just start by sharing a little bit of the history and the background of you guys's experience with interceding in the corn.

0:36 Okay, well we started five years ago with trying to use a Hertz eater and broadcast spread in corn at V68 stage. We tried that for two years, had very hit and miss success. Then we tried a year of using modified insecticide boxes trying to control our raid and incorporate with rotary hose. And then two years ago, Dad purchased a Henniker interceder setup on eight inch centers down in the furrow to allow us to control our grape more accurately and also our depth.

1:11 We're going to get some video and look at that interceder a little bit closer here a little later on. So Dean, why don't you share a little bit of the background about how this project came together and kind of how it's funded and your role in this.

1:23 Okay, basically I'm in charge of a demonstration project in central planets with resources district. Basically, how this whole thing really started in 2010 was there's a lot of seed corn raised in this area, and I wanted to do is utilize nitrate uptake by cover crops so that was all successful. I have data that shows that does happen. But the big thing that many producers have said over the years is we need that cover crop out there longer. We need to utilize that longer instead of wait until after harvest or things like that. So that's what got me interested in interceding at V4, V5, V6. That's kind of a touchy weather issue there as far as when you really get that done, but we've had some good success and some bombs throughout the years.

2:33 So with talking to other people that are interested in this, we really didn't know what would be successful in a shady environment. So that's why this plot here today has nine different cocktail mixes in it. So we're evaluating what works in a shady environment versus one that doesn't. So this is basically an evaluation plot.

3:02 Yep, Dean hit right on the head. The number one limiting factor in trying to get a cover crop to

3:09 Grow in commercial corn like this. Number one is lack of sunlight, and so by going at V4, the goal is to get that cover crop established before you have full canopy closure on the corn, and then once that canopy closes, that cover crop kind of slows down. It isn't really competitive with the corn because by the time corn's at B4 to V6, it's not going to be bothered by that tiny little cover crop growing, and you'll see that as we walk through here. There's no threat of competition to the corn.

3:37 The bigger thing is some things just aren't going to grow very well in the shade, and we will see that here as well. There's a lot of variability. We see this all the time. We'll see the same mix look pretty good in one row, and in another row you don't hardly see it. So we don't have all the answers to that, but certainly we're learning things every year.

3:56 Another one of the hurdles in addition to lack of sunlight in doing this is herbicides. Do you want to talk just a little bit about what your herbicide program was on this field?

4:16 We're going to talk about it because I'm going to have to look it up, but I know exactly what we did. That's going to be a question people ask. I know. We came in right behind the planter with a pre-emergent, put a pre-emerge down, but I'm going to have to look up exactly what. We know that we didn't use anything that would, we were very selective with what we used. I think we want to have that discussion because that for sure will be one of the first things that people ask.

4:45 Going back to when we're talking about heat and temperature, this is the first year that I also put some heat sensors in in the corn rows where we were. We measure, and we will be able to graph out what the temperature and the sun light, solar energy, at ground level was for the whole season. So I'll have that information this year. Also, this is the first year that we've done that, but Keith and I talked prior to this that that would be good to know, and I totally agree.

5:17 So just to be clear on that, that's not just measuring temperature, but it's measuring light coming through the corn as well, right? And so we get an indication of how much or how little light is actually penetrating. Basically, there are about three, four inches off the surface of the soil. So yeah, we'll have that data at a later time.

5:41 At the end of August, and this corn is probably what do you think, a month away from harvest? Probably so we're going to be looking at what we see now. They are going to be installing a GoPro camera on the combine so we'll have some video as the combine moves through the field, and then we likely will come out and do another video evaluation of what we're seeing after the combine is rolled right.

6:05 Timewise, the it was interceded June 26, so it hasn't really been in the ground that long here, but it's quite a while. You were more like bees neighbors, definitely V7, V8. I think that some we're still working on is basically a comfort factor of getting something in the ground. I think we're really seeing we've got to be an air thief and some of the time you had to do with weather, and applications, and we've had a lot of rain this spring. That also the target was before a lot of variables are given to that though.

6:47 I think let's just start walking through the plot. Its first treatment we have planted here four pounds of red clover, six pounds of Elbon rye, and six pounds of annual rye grass. What we have seen from last year is even at these low rates, this treatment was pretty successful, not necessarily in our plot last year, but on the other acres that the signs had planted adjacent to where our plot was last year, so really impressive. It really was impressive at those low rates. So we decided to add that to this year's plot, and right now, whether it's because it's on the edge or what, it's still looking pretty impressive this year also.

7:48 One of the things that looked impressive and we're out there the next spring, so we were looking at what it overwintered, the red clover was by far the most successful overwintering legume that we had, and the cereal rye did quite well too. So Jake can come on in here and get a little closer look. There are some other grasses here that I think are just field grasses, but you can kind of see we've got a good representation of clover. Some are bigger than others, but there is a decent smattering of clovers about, and then it's a little hard to tell probably on the video which ones are the rye grass. The rye grass are going to have the narrower blades and they're kind of a shiny waxy leaf, but this rye grass has established itself pretty well right in this particular area. I would say it's probably doing better than the cereal rye.

8:37 Agree now we may see in different parts of the field we may see that differing but even in the other roads that we looked at you know the clover tends be a little smaller but it's there and what we saw with that red clover is it was not very big even until all the way up through Marcus but it kind of hung in there then after harvest had caught some sunlight and really took off in group.

8:58 Part of what will be interesting is where we mowed down on this headland here when we come back a month from now at harvest it'll be interesting to see what this stuff has done just with 30 days of Sun right that's compared to what's still growing right and I mean the Sun lights to the to the ground is gonna get a lot yeah we're gonna get a lot more it within the next three weeks going to start breaking down the the greenness and the you know all the senescence is going to set in and stuff like that so there's gonna be more sunlight to the ground and to to our cover crop yeah all right so we move to the next one yep.

9:33 This I guess to explain where we went with this this year at our field day that we had in March on life steers plot there was there was a lot of livestock people there so when so when we set this up this year we we kind of set it up with a theme towards those livestock producers so as you can see and as we go you'll you'll be able to see that our our mixes are named kind of towards that livestock industry this one here is a cool season diversity two pounds of alfalfa two pounds of red clover two pounds of hairy vetch six pounds of Elbon rye four pounds of annual rye grass two pounds of rapeseed and two pounds of flax so a lot more diverse.

10:52 Next and then the first one and I don't know I don't know what the reason is but this one shows really poorly right now there's there's not a lot of stuff out here again we'll be able after harvest we can we can look at other roads in other locations just not a lot but if you look over here there is some rapeseed coming there is some clover there is some hairy vetch but I would say by and large this this has not done well and part of that could be you know it's all cool season things so they may not have taken off in June quite as fast or quite as well but I would expect these to be doing better than this and hopefully we'll see better representation in other parts of the field but right now there's there's not a lot to see on this particular one right in this area anyway all right our next our next street list we want to get.

12:04 Warm diversity number one: three pounds of alfalfa, five pounds of red ripper cow peas. We have some, one of those group seven soybeans and seven soybeans. The other seven soybeans we have nitrile radish. We have some annual ryegrass and this also some buckwheat and some flax.

12:30 So this one looks really good. They can come over here. Sumit, I want to give people the secret of how to really make interseeds work in the corn. He zoom right in there. So if you really want to have good interseeding in corn, what you need to do is you need to run over about half your corn here like you have a little spray, have a little sprayer bite. But that's just that, that proves the point that the limiting factor in this is sunlight. Because we're this partial row of corn or the buckwheat is in there blooming, looks fantastic. So we know that it's a sunlight issue.

13:13 You'll see the same type of thing like in the pivot tracks anywhere where you had planter skips and stuff like that. So I want to show you that just to show you that it is a sunlight deal. But if we come over here, whether it's maybe not quite as much as the foreign right over, we still have, we still have some decent representation. The radishes have done quite well here. We do have some buckwheat blooming even though it's very short.

13:36 I leave this buckwheat plant there is only about four inches tall but it's starting to shoot out a blossom there so it's growing and it's hanging in there. It's doing the best that it can and the limited sunlight that it has to work with. So I would say this one is fairly impressive. We've got some cow peas down in there that are doing quite well. Cow peas will grow very quickly in the June time frame when they're planted and then they just try to hang on with the sunlight that they're given.

14:03 But the warm season plants kind of have an advantage early on. The cool season plants tend to not have to grow as aggressively, tend to go a little more dormant through the heat of the summer so they don't sometimes they hang on better too. And maybe in two months it could be the exact opposite. It could very well be. But even out here where it was mowed, as you can see, there's some nice cowpeas, you know, that we're growing within the row here. And you know we've had some other people, Chris teach out in Iowa has done some great work with cow peas interseeded in the corn has had some really, really good success. Cow peas are one that if this would have been in a

14:41 Before you just seen a tremendous amount of larger growth because it would really take an advantage of that extra week and a half to two weeks of heat and sunlight to really take off and get a good start. And I think one of these plots further down will have some examples of cow peas that are starting to line their way up. I don't see it in this particular plot but I know down the way we will be able to see that the one thing that's not there is the presence of weeds. Yeah, the cover crop has suppressed all of our weeds where we'd normally see pigweed or Palmer amaranth growing in there.

15:18 That's right, the problems we have. I think that's definitely something to note. Yeah, that's an excellent point. Something's gonna grow there so do you want to choose it or are you just going to let nature do it for it? And that going back to last harvest's, that was pretty apparent with Noah's brother Anthony running the combine. He told us no matter what the stand of that cover crop was, wherever it was present there wasn't weeds. So I guess people don't want to get the wrong idea that you're only going to get weed suppression where you have a large amount of emergence of cover crops. Even at small ones that's possible.

16:02 Now and it'll be exciting to have that go pro in the combine right here so we can kind of see some of that front end to.

16:20 Our next one is the warm season diversity number two. We have iron and clay cow peas in this mixture. We have soybeans, crimson clover, annual ryegrass, nitril rifle ratty buckwheat, and golden flax. So again another warm season mix. Comparing the two off the top of my head I don't remember what the difference is but there's different. I think the cow peas was this red ripper. Those are red rippers and these were iron and clay. So and these are more of a forage soybeans. So similar mixes but I would say a lot different results. And again we don't necessarily know why but there's not near the stand that we have here that we saw down there. Even where the sprayer head and ran over the corn there's a far better stand that we see there. Is some of the radish out there, there's some rye grass but not much, not a lot out here in the mowed off area where we can see things a little bit more. You know we do see some radishes and some rye grass and some cow peas and stuff but I would say overall.

17:35 You know if the whole field looked like this I would be kind of disappointed. I would be too but you know again there's a lot of variability. There's a lot of questions we don't have answers for yet. That's why we do the trials and experiments and try to see and understand. I guess as we learn we will go ahead and make that next year's plot go by the past history of what we're seeing. And over time we're hoping that we get this kind of narrow down so there's not so many choices but it's choices that we know that have good possibility of being successful.

18:27 All grazing number one Red River cow peas, soybeans, annual ryegrass and forage collards. OK, this mix is designed to try to get as much biomass growth so we could graze it in the fall. We're not worrying about it overwintering so we went with the tetraploid ryegrass. It probably won't make it through the winter but hopefully it'll give us more growth this fall. This one I think we've had some pretty good success with it. They can come in, zoom in over here. We've got a really pretty good stand of collards all the way down through there. A nice representation of the ryegrass showing up here. There's some cow peas coming up down there but if you can look all the way down the row there's a decent stand all the way through there.

19:17 And then over here this is really pretty interesting. Over here we've got really a good growth of cow peas right here and this is what I wanted you to notice with these Red River cow peas. See how this cow pea is starting to vine right up this corn plant? And Red Rippers tend to be a very viney type cow pea and they will just continue to climb like that. And my prediction is if this would have been planted at V6 or instead of V8 that this cow pea would be vining all the way to the top of this plant because that's what other people have seen. When you get them in a little bit earlier and they could take advantage of that sunlight they'll grow very quickly. It is not going to be a harvest issue even if harvest is corn before it's frozen. Cow peas will die with a first snap of a frost but even if they don't die, that vine will just blow apart. It's not going to be an impediment to harvest whatsoever based on past experiences. What I think is going to happen here is there's a good enough stand of collards that as this corn dries down and especially after harvest, collards are pretty cold hardy. I think we're gonna

23:08 I guess the question that you might answer here as Sonesta sets in into this corn and we start drying down the leaves and stuff where can we expect more growth out of them even like the winter peas and things like that we should we should leave an emergence as far as growth there yeah so because because again the number one limiting factor it's not water it's not nitrogen it's sunlight and when you take that away it's what we see out here where this has been mowed and the cover crops didn't get mowed off these are all you know three to four times as big because they've been getting sunlight for the last few weeks you know there's a winter fee right there by your foot that's really large and you know just when it gets the sunlight I think it's going to take off so the goal is just to get things to hang on and tell that sunlight dumps that's right and that's basically the theory of this whole planting system.

24:15 Spring graze we have Harry bet red clover annual ryegrass and Elbon rye. Okay we're kind of working our way down into a little bit of a draw have a little bit of a boggy area there's some some deeper sprayer tracks through here so this area probably stayed quite a bit wetter and I think it probably contributed to a little bit poorer stand and then I would expect to see because like the clover that looked pretty good up there we don't see a lot of clover down here now there is some rye grass there is some hairy vetch kind of coming it's pretty small but that's that's that's going to hang on and it's going to be okay so we've got some stuff there's a little bit of clover coming right there but I think I think a big part of this was that this area was probably just a little wetter than what some of these plants would have liked and and we didn't get as good a stand as some of these same plants we've seen in other plots and we'll see we'll see better representation a hairy vetch down at the end here I think.

25:30 This mix oats rye and turnips have had some popularity up in this area so we thought we would go ahead and look at that see how successful that was going to be very very behind this is usually when you plant oats and ride together in a in a planting the oats well out preform that rye early on and then after after the the freeze and things like that it'll die off and the rice to go ahead and take off so so that was basically the theory and we wanted to put this in here because there are people in this.

26:10 Area utilizing this mix, turnips in this area have been huge for years, especially in the seed corn production areas. We're trying to work with them to diversify their cover crops, more than just put turnips out there. So we're working not only in commercial corn but we're working in other areas also. And we can see the things coming in here. We can see that the oats, you know, this oats is probably eight to ten inches tall. It's got some decent growth to it. I'd like to see a little bit more of it in there, but what's there is doing pretty well. The cereal rye is quite a bit smaller, but you can see how wet this has been. Look at all the moss growing on the ground there. So I think again that's inhibited. We got a decent stand of turnips right in through here, but they're very small, very spindly, of course, because of the sunlight. But a lot of these cover crops really don't like wet feet. They like better-drained soils. And so again, all the moss growing there tells me that this didn't have great drainage at least in some part of the season here, probably inhibited it some. But the oats is hanging in there and doing pretty good, and nothing is better than oats for fall grazing, like you said, Venus. That's a great crop if we can get that to survive and kind of take off as it gets more sunlight. It'll make a nice grazing contribution, right.

27:45 And the last mix that we have in this plot is named the Penn State mix. Reason being, Penn State has done a lot of research with cover crops over the years. They've developed their own interseeder and things like that. So by reading literature and things like that, we know that they've been very successful with this mix. So we kind of threw this in here a couple years ago just to see how it would react here in Nebraska. And to be quite honest, it has done well every year that we've had this in our plot. So the mix in this mix, we have red clover, hairy vetch, and annual ryegrass. So come on down here. There's a really good representation right here of all three of those. It's really doing quite well. We've got great growth on the ryegrass. Again, you can see that kind of shiny, waxy leaf that's very indicative of ryegrass. The red clover is doing exceptionally well, five to six inches tall here. And again, I think this is going to really take off. And then there's pretty nice hairy vetch growing down. It's a little bit lower than these other things. It'll tend to kind of buy in around on.

29:03 The ground a little bit more but even if you look you can look all the way down that row that's just an excellent stand all the way down through there and so you know I don't know exactly if the field conditions were a little different because all three of these species were also repeated in some of the previous mixes but none of them look as good as they do right here. So again it could be field conditions, it could be different environmental type things but very good stand. This is a pretty reasonable mix to put together indefinitely.

29:39 You know the Penn State guys really had something going there. Now one of the reasons that Penn State has been one of the leaders in this research and some of the guys up in Ontario, my opinion is the further north you go the better this system works because as you move north you have several things working in your advantage for this system. Number one, your summers are shorter so in North Dakota and Minnesota and Pennsylvania, some of those areas, eighty-five to ninety five day corn is full season corn and this is 100, 101, so this is fairly short season. But a lot of corn that guys are growing in this area is going to be 112, 115.

30:24 Shorter season corns, shorter summers they have longer days so they'll get more hours of sunlight in the same day as you move north. Your summers are shorter but your days are longer and that helps you. You don't get as hot in the summer and that helps these cool season things to hang on as well. So all of those things I think go together to make this an easier thing to have success with as you move north. As you move south it becomes more difficult but as you move south you have a longer growing season so it's not quite as imperative that you get this up in early because you do have some time.

30:59 So here in Nebraska Dean we're kind of in the middle. You know we don't quite have as many advantages as the north, we don't have the heat that the south has all the time so we're kind of in the middle and I think that's why we see some success and we see great success some years and some years we don't and we're just seeing a lot of variability. But my observations have been the further north I go and see people trying this the better chance they have of having success. But the one thing that we do know and we're going to talk about this in a little bit with equipment, the one thing that we learned for sure is that if you're not putting the seed in the ground you you're really taking a chance.

31:36 Of having failure we just know that for sure that getting seed in the ground with some sort of a disk implement or a seeder of some kind is guarantees a much greater chance of success than just broadcasting that seed on top of the ground and we'll be looking at the signs of cedar here and a little bit and they'll share a little bit about how that works and why they went to that other closing comments.

32:03 I guess if I was going to sit back and categorize producers that want to utilize this planting system I'd say majority of the guys that want to adopt that have been around cover crops in the past and they realize that the time that that stuff's out there is very very important. I know we've done some research here in Nebraska not necessarily in v6 but planning dates on planting dates of cover crops a two-week period can make a huge difference in biomass above the ground for example so we've done a lot of that stuff so these guys understand that if they can make this work there they're getting a jump on what what's gonna happen after harvest.

33:02 Yeah we kind of have a saying that every day in August is worth two days in September and every day in September is worth two days in October so everyday you can have something growing in August is literally like having four days in October for it to grow and it's just all about growing 20 days eight units right in and I mean this plot our intentions was to get this out get it planted in at the v4 stage but Mother Nature didn't help us out any but we're looking at probably a v8 here sauce or in that window was really shortened up probably by at least two weeks three weeks something like that so what we're seeing here in my opinion in some of these mixes is pretty impressive actually.

33:52 So there's so many things that we have to learn about cover crops I mean over time I mean and that's what that's why we're doing this is to try and narrow those species that have the most success at using than this yeah that's right and we'll continue to evaluate this we'll have the video from the combine and we make him out here after harvest even and shoot some more plot videos so we appreciate you watching we decided to do it this way instead of having an actual field day because with an actual field day we may only get 40 or 50 people to come to look at this but with the same amount of effort we can have this on the internet or hopefully hundreds and thousands of people to watch and learn from so we will sign off for here and we will get some more video of this later.