On-Farm Research: Testing Cover Crops and Practices on Your Own Fields

0:00 All right, thank you, Jonathan. Yeah, my name's Dylan Koun, I'm one of the sales reps here with GreenCover. I work remotely from my home here in West Central, Kansas.

0:10 And this is the second webinar of a series about university research and not the typical university research you see with, you know, small trials, small plots. This is on-the-farm research that is practical for your operation. And today's guest our today's presenter is Jenny Brei Hill, and she has been an extension educator in Nebraska for the past 20-plus years. And from the talks I've seen her give, I can really sense the passion she has for soil health and working with farmers and ranchers and really compassion she has for those farmers and ranchers as well.

0:49 Her topic today is going over on-farm research and what is what on-on-farm research really encompasses and how to make it practical and then results she's seen from interceding nitrogen rates, reductions, maybe regen years, etc. And then what has worked and then what to avoid. So, Jenny, I will let you take it from here.

1:16 Well, thank you, Dylan and Jonathan, and I appreciate you guys doing this series. It's important to have information around the importance of data as we are all on our soil health journeys as well. So, really appreciate GreenCover putting this webinar series together.

1:37 I'm a little bit different than the other researchers that you're going to hear from because I actually don't have a research appointment at all. I'm 100% extension as an extension educator serving out in the counties in Nebraska and have been blessed to walk alongside of producers on their journeys and serve producers whether they're using conventional ag, regen ag, or organic systems. And there's things that I learn from all of them in their journeys.

2:21 What I'm going to share today is about using on-farm research to explore farmers' questions and ideas. And when I was talking about data, I just keep thinking about with my position, producers will call and they'll ask, 'Has there been research on this product or this practice?' And through the years, I either tell them yes or I tell them no. And I always end it with, 'Would you like to test this on your own farm?' And the producers who know me well know that they're going to get that question and they'll usually finish my sentence with that.

3:04 But data really is important. If we're not measuring what we're trying to manage, we really don't know if there's a difference or not. And I think about GreenCover during their Regen Nexus conferences, they had shown a video, I think it was called Roots So Deep. And it was interviews and also data collection of regen farmers versus their neighbors who weren't on a regen path. And at the end, the interviews really stuck out to me.

3:40 And in those interviews, the growers were saying it was the data that allowed them to take the next step. And so as I think about that for all of us, I know when you hear the word on-farm research, it sounds like a lot more work. But I would suggest that at least the producers I've been blessed to work with have felt like the data it really helps them with making decisions.

4:09 It may help them on their next step in their journey. And it helps us to help our neighbors who are on the sidelines watching make that next step as well.

4:22 So, what I'm going to do with this, I'm going to start off by explaining what on-farm research is from the perspective that I'm coming from. On-farm research can have a lot of different ways that people view it, but I'll explain the viewpoint that I'm coming from. And then I'll share producers' results.

4:45 As I do this, what I realized if I would put myself in your guys' shoes, there's a lot of information that is going to be presented here today. And I typically am a pretty interactive speaker. So, what I'd like to do is pause after each topic and just allow for questions. And we'll just go from there and see how this works.

5:12 So, the on-farm research process. In this case, what I'm talking about is we start with a producer having a question. Will this practice will this product work on my own field? We've heard a lot of different things, whether it's podcasts, watched different YouTube videos, been to various conferences this winter. So, you may have these questions. And that's where I see that on-farm research can help.

5:41 So, from there, it's about having a solid design.

5:45 What I mean by that is a lot of times, producers will take a field and they'll split that field in half and they'll put a treatment or a practice on one side of the field and what they're currently doing on the other side of the field. But my question is, we all have variability in our fields. There's old hog lots, there's old farmsteads, there's been there's dirt that's been moved. We all know that there's variability in our fields. And so, which side of the field are you going to put that product or that practice on? Are you going to put it on the side that yields better or on the side that yields worse? And at the end of the day, how do you know it really made a difference?

6:36 And to me, that's where on-farm research can help. Yes, it may be easier to split a field in half, but is it really giving you the information that you really need to make a decision? So, what I do as an extension educator is a producer comes to me with a question that he or she wants to test on his or her own farm. I walk alongside them and formulate a research design. So, it can be as simple as a paired comparison where we split a planter in half. If you've got planter boxes, you can split a planter in half. With GPS technology anymore, you could also just skip different, you can just make a pass down the field, skip rows, make another pass, and you still have a solid treatment design. If in this case, it's only two treatments, a check versus whatever you're comparing it to.

7:35 Another example that I've been using a lot more lately for people who have cover crops, who are using different types of foliar sprays, things like that, using bigger blocks and trying to get at least two combine passes out of those bigger blocks. And basically, the goal is to make this as simple as possible with the equipment that you have that matches up the rows that you need to get solid harvest passes out of the treatments while still having replication and randomization to account for variability in your field.

8:13 When I'm also talking on-farm research, I'm talking about producers testing something on their own farms using their own equipment. And for the farmers that I'm working with, it's typically quarter-mile to half-mile rows. So, quite big treatments. But with Precision Ag, we also have the ability to do smaller blocks. So, for some of the producers I work with, when they want to do different seeding rate studies or nitrogen rate studies, we can create prescription maps as well. And we like the length of those to be at least 400 ft, so when we're taking the yield monitor across, we can pick up the yields correctly. But there's a lot of different ways that we can work with you to design your treatments.

8:59 And I would also just say at this point, maybe not every state has an on-farm research program, but I would just encourage if there's any university colleagues from Nebraska or other states on this webinar, whether you're specialists or educators, just encourage you, the greatest way that I've learned to really understand what the producers are going through and understand their journeys is to walk alongside of them with on-farm research. And so, it's a great opportunity for university people to be walking alongside of growers. It's a great opportunity for you as growers to reach out to your university people, too.

9:43 From there, after we decide on a solid design, we conduct the study and collect data. Now, data collection could be as simple as just collecting yield. Most farmers, that's all they really want. But depending on what the questions are, they may want additional things such as soil samples or biomass samples for cover crops or things like that. We then, on our end, statistically analyze the results so that they're scientifically valid. And then we publish the results in a book such as this. We also have this online, so you can see our website here onfarmresearch.unl.edu.

10:27 On that website, you can find all the research results that we've had. There's still some that are missing back into the 1990s, but we have quite a few on that website that you can go and check out. And there's also protocols, research designs, a lot of different resources for you. The producers share their results with others. And then it goes back to starting off where I'm at right now, with producers. They have the questions and I'm working with them to develop their designs so that we can start this growing season.

11:04 So, it may sound like there's a lot involved here but in all honesty, it it's really not that much. It's just a matter of coming up with a design and a plan to implement for yourself and having someone to walk

11:19 Alongside of you to do that. I think that's a bigger thing to have someone to walk alongside of you. So, what I want to do is just start with a simple example. And I'm going to use soybean seed treatments. A lot of the studies that I work with growers on, there's several growers that want to do the same studies. And that's beautiful because we can get more power around the data and have more confidence around the data results that we have.

11:49 So, with this one, producers were looking at the cost of everything right now, input costs. They're looking at the price of soybeans right now, which is pretty low. And then they were looking at health impacts of all the different things that are being put on seed treatment or on seed right now with seed treatments. And they were wondering if they could get by without seed treatments. So, for the past 3 years, we've had growers doing this. And I'm only showing you six site years from 2023 and 2024.

12:26 But as you look at this, these producers in particular were comparing it to a biological seed treatment that was costing $9 an acre that one of our local growers had was treating for the producers versus the full company seed treatment. And you can see, as we go across, as I present, anytime you see the same letter, that means that we are 90% confident that there's no difference between those treatments. And that there's a 10% chance that it was due any difference is due to variability. So, like last week in Aaron's presentation, a lot of times she was using a 99% confidence level. For on-farm research, we're using a 90% confidence level. Most producers would be fine with an 80%, but for scientific, for us to be accepted in the scientific community with these results, we need to have at least 90%.

13:31 So, as you look across, we weren't seeing any differences. I did note the planting date is pretty late. And so, in 2025, which I don't have those results here, but we had five additional studies that occurred with planting dates between April 23rd and May 5th. And in those cases as well, it was mostly the full company seed treatment versus untreated. Most of those yields were in the 70 plus bushel an acre range, with no differences as well. I am going to summarize all this data, but it gives you an idea of just something that could be done even this year. If any of you have this question, it's something you could easily do by splitting a planter on a few of your fields and test this for yourself.

14:23 Now, I'm going to go into one that I think is really cool. And it may spur some ideas for some of you. So, this is a corn nitrogen this corn nitrogen rate study after a regen year. So, this producer is in the Utica, Nebraska area, and he loves cows, but he lives in the middle of seed corn country. In the counties I serve, we have high seed corn production with three companies here and a fourth one trying to have more acres. And so, this grower was trying to figure out a way to have cows under a pivot in this area of the state where pasture is limited. And so, what he did is he took a pivot and he split it into four quarters. Now, granted, this is a lot of management. This whole thing is not the on-farm research study, but it may spur ideas for you on some other things you could do that would be practical for you on your farm.

15:25 So, in 2025, this is the order that he had in the field and you can see the picture here of what he was doing. He was trying to reduce input costs the entire pivot, trying to take the economics of each of the individual quarters and then the economics of the whole pivot together. And he's doing that for 4 years and to see where he ends up. He's growing the cereal rye for seed, which then he plants his corn and soybeans green into. So, it eliminates the pre-herbicide that he needs to use. He doesn't have additional inputs on his soybeans beyond that, beyond the seed cost.

16:05 For his corn, though, this is where I'm going to focus. So, even though all of this is really cool with the grazing, the research trial was on the corn. So, in this corn quarter, in 2024, the year before, he had this spring and summer grazing over here. His pivot corners are perennial pasture other than this, bottom left corner that's the homestead. And so, he had a regen year where he was strip grazing his cattle in 2024. So, his question for his corn in 2025 was how much nitrogen could he reduce in that corn after a regen year? And so, what we did is we looked at the residual soil nitrate. We looked at the

16:53 Nitrate in the irrigation water. And then we both had heard you could credit perhaps up to 100 lb of nitrogen after a regen year of grazing, but we really didn't know.

17:06 And so, I told him that to do this study and for any of the nitrogen studies that I'm involved with anymore, I want them to use Sentinel Ag.

17:16 So, Sentinel Ag, what it does is it uses satellite imagery to help producers make decisions on nitrogen management for their crops. And so, it's allowing for in-season nitrogen management.

17:34 So, how it works is this research has been around since the 1990s when at UNL and I'm sure at many different land grant universities, where they're basically using the visible light spectrum. So, many of us in school learned about ROYGBIV, to remember the visible light spectrum. But it's also using these light spectrums that we can't see with our eyes. So, the near infrared and then the red edge spectrums.

18:07 And so, all that research from the '90s has been solid and it's been used throughout time, but there wasn't really good technology. Some of the technologies that have come from this include GreenSeeker. And then there's other technologies that have been mounted to like highboy clearance systems, Hagie's, things like that.

18:32 And we had a grad student at UNL who his name is Jackson Stansel, and he had mounted these sensors onto drones. And so, he was doing on-farm research using the drones. And through that developed the algorithm. And then, once we had satellite imagery, was able to use the algorithm with satellite imagery.

18:57 And so, we had all this research behind behind this, but we didn't have the technology to make it user-friendly for producers until satellite imagery came about. So, that's what Sentinel Ag is using is the satellite imagery.

19:12 So, how this works is we had Alex's or we had this producer's field. His name is Alex. And what he decided to do, he wanted four replications. He wanted zero pound rate, a 25 pound rate, a 50 pound rate, a 37 and a half pound rate, and a 62 and a half pound rate. Because what the UNL nitrogen equation said he needed was around 100 and 132 or so pounds. And so, what he wanted to do was put half of it on early and then the other half at side dress time.

19:52 But, we wanted to use the satellite imagery to see did we really need that additional side dress or even when should that nitrogen be applied?

20:04 So, this is the imagery and this is at around side dress time we're trying to make this decision. You can see in this imagery the zero pound rate is kind of standing out to us in the imagery. But, what was really interesting is as you look the green means good, the yellow means it's approaching deficiency and you need to think about nitrogen. It was the only zero pound strips and two of the 25 pound strips that were showing that he needed additional nitrogen.

20:39 And so, because of that he chose not to put on any additional nitrogen. He just wanted to let it ride and see what happened.

20:46 So then, these are his yield results at the end of the year. Now, he had a 250 bushel yield goal and anyone who was in Nebraska last year, portions of the state we had anywhere from 20 to 100 bushel yield loss last year from various reasons. Harvest was a really hard time. So, his yields here close to 220 are pretty typical for anyone who was aiming for a 240 to 250 bushel yield goal.

21:21 What's really cool, 50 pounds of nitrogen and he received 217 bushels on his yield. Zero pounds of nitrogen and he received 178 bushels on his yield. And based on this, according to the this data, he didn't need more than the 62 and 1/2 pounds and the 50 pounds was really the sweet spot for him.

21:46 What's really interesting is looking at that nitrogen use efficiency. And that probably seems a little bit mind-blowing for people at a point two three. A lot of times we hear about a point one one I'm sorry, not a point one, a one a 1.0 1.2. I think other states use a 1.6 pounds of nitrogen needed per bushel of corn produced. I've been trying to work with growers to get them more to a point eight. But, by using this satellite imagery, most of the growers I've been working with have been around a point six to.

22:28 So it's pretty incredible what we can do with nitrogen savings and it's a really cool study to show when we integrate the livestock component with the crop component, what we can do for reducing inputs while still having good yields and also being really economical with things. The only inputs he had on his corn was this nitrogen, his seed cost. He had one herbicide pass that was his post pass and he did do one fungicide for southern rust. And that's it for his input costs.

23:06 When I look at all the on-farm research data that we've done where basically the grower used their nitrogen rate versus what Sentinel Ag said for the nitrogen rate, overall, taking the 35 site years, we've seen a reduction of 52 pounds of nitrogen per acre. And this two bushel an acre on average across the board wasn't statistical, but it is numerical, so I just mentioned it compared to what the growers did. We have no other thing that we have done regarding nitrogen studies that allow us to reduce nitrogen rates this much. And it's research proven.

23:55 What we found if you look at this last bullet point, following corn, the NUE has been around point six three pounds of nitrogen per bushel following corn. Following soybeans, we're able to get around to a point four nine. So why does this make a difference? If we think about the future of groundwater nitrates, to me this is how ag changes our story. This is how ag shows that we're being proactive in trying to be part of the solution for changing the groundwater nitrate story for the future by only putting on what the plant is telling us it really needs.

24:35 And I'm sold on this because you don't hear many university people promoting something, but we have the research backed since the 1990s. We just needed the technology to make it user-friendly. And I've been working with this since close to the beginning. And I worked with another project before this with the high clearance mounted sensors where again, we were also showing the NUEs here. High clearance, we were showing a point seven for the NUE. And then this is the sensor-based field management is a point five nine. Now, these are already great growers. They're already at a point eight. That's not where the majority of growers are at, but this is what the growers are who are doing this on-farm research study.

25:28 So this is something that I just really consider all of us to be thinking about. If you're thinking about nitrogen management, especially with as expensive as nitrogen is this year and the low commodity prices, this is something that I would encourage you to think about. And I'm going to take it a step further and I'm going to show you our farm. My husband and I also farm and this is satellite imagery from our farm from corn that was planted green into grazed hairy vetch.

26:03 And so you can see the satellite imagery. This is a non-irrigated farm. This is June 28th. So at this point our corn was about V14 and over and it was saying that it was approaching deficient and we needed to be thinking about getting nitrogen on in the next week. So for dryland, we were looking at trying to get a high clearance rig or getting a drone application lined up. What was really cool is July 2nd, the imagery changed and I believe it was the hairy vetch that had been terminated that started releasing that nitrogen to the crop. And by July 20th, our field looked like this. And never the entire rest of the growing season did it call for additional nitrogen. It did start showing southern rust when it started coming in later, but that wasn't a nitrogen thing.

27:03 What was really cool about this wasn't just our field, it was two other producers' fields that also had planted green into hairy vetch. They all switched between June 28th and July 2nd. And so I think about how many of you may have the question about when is my when is the nitrogen released from the terminated cereal rye? When is it released from terminated hairy vetch or whatever the cover crop is? And it was just so cool to see it happen on the satellite imagery and see it not only happen for our field, but for two other fields that were terminated in the same time frame, planted in the same time frame. And to see it that consistent. So it could be another tool for you to use from this standpoint with cover crops in your system, too.

28:00 So, I'm just going to pause a moment and ask are there questions that you have for me before I move on to another topic?

28:15 Looks like there's a question. How do we terminate the hairy vetch the vetch on our farm? So we terminated it using Lexar. We used a group 27 herbicide in order to terminate the hairy vetch. I do have growers who are trying to get away from the herbicides who are trying to use like roller crimping and in that case, they found that they really had to go over it a couple times in order to really terminate it. We're not using any insecticides or fungicides on our farm, but we still are using some herbicides and trying to reduce that.

29:06 How much nitrogen were we getting from other sources, soils, cover crops, previous manure? Okay, so I'm not sure if that question was for the from Alex's study or from ours. And I can't remember the exact amounts from all of them, but what we did is we used all the credits that we had figured between the nitrate nitrogen in the soil, the irrigation water for Alex's were non-irrigated, we didn't have that. There wasn't any previous manure applied to either one of these fields. And then we were assuming the 100-lb nitrogen credit just hearsay. On Alex's, on ours, there was a 30-lb from the height of what we had on the hairy vetch in our specific field.

30:04 Okay, and it sounds like there's more questions coming in on the Q&A panel. Were you able to access the Q&A panel, Jenny? Okay, I'm seeing that now. Okay. Yes. Yes, game-changing, absolutely. Isn't that cool? What is the name of the satellite imagery company? I'm just going to go back to that slide and show you if you wanted to take a picture of it. Are you guys see Jonathan, are you guys seeing the question and answer black panel on my screen? No. Okay perfect. So, I'll let you take a picture of that.

30:47 Okay, Mike has a farm in Illinois. Where can I find someone to come alongside of me? I would just ask, you know, reach out to I know in Illinois, you guys have been hit by a lot of budget cuts for your extension system and they're more regionally based. But reach out to whoever your regional educator or specialist is and see if they would be willing to do this. On-farm research is becoming more popular throughout the United States and a lot of people are trying to model what we're doing in Nebraska because we've been doing this since the '90s. So I'd try that. And then, Mike, if you wanted to reach out to me late with a specific question, I can certainly just work with you on designing something.

31:37 Stephen, how do we plant green into the vetch? We just took a no-till drill and planted it planted the corn into the vetch and it worked beautifully. We planted kind of deeper. We were going about 2 and 3/4 inches last year because it was another dry spring like it is this year. So, we wanted to make sure that corn was down into moisture. We did have some issues with how dry it was with a little bit of an even stand in places.

32:14 What type of grazing management has been applied to the covers on Alex's study? So, what Alex is doing is he is using polywire and he's giving he's strip grazing it. So, what he did is it's really cool what he did and it's hard to explain without drawing it out for you. But basically, he divided that whole thing into various paddocks and he was allowing them to graze and come back to the water source and he was he had a tank out there that he would move. So, it was short-term just every 2 days or so.

33:04 Okay Keith. With higher cover crops, would you expect the nitrogen release delayed? Possibly. Depending on also, you know, how long you let's say rye go. If you let rye go to heading how long would it how long would it take for that to start cycling? And I wouldn't expect all of all of the nutrients to be released right away, but some of them would be released. What percent? I don't know. And honestly, I believe that it's a real year-dependent and field-dependent thing depending on soil temperature, microbes working, moisture, things like that. So, that's why I really appreciate a technology like SentinelAg being able to

33:57 Use that satellite imagery to see that. And I'm curious if others of you have used that and seen the same thing or if you try it, if you're going to see the same thing, too.

34:11 Dennis, we have not used any nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Alan, yes, we use the Haney test at Regen Ag Lab on our farm. I'm not for certain if Alex uses it at Regen Ag or if he uses a different lab.

34:37 Jason, when did we plant the vetch and when did you graze? The vetch in this case, okay, we do a lot of things on our farm and on that field. That field was used for vetch seed as well. So this is 2024. It was planted for vetch seed. We harvested the vetch for seed in 2024. And then volunteer vetch continued. And then in the spring of 2025, we grazed it. And we were grazing in March. We were grazing our cow herd in March and early through April. We got them off and we planted that field on May between May 5th and May 10th.

35:38 Similar question about Kansas. Yes, I have had some different Kansas extension educators reaching out about on-farm research. So definitely check with your local educator about that. Grants available? Yes, SARE grants. So farmer-rancher SARE grants are available. They're usually due in December. So you can definitely do things like that. That's how Green Cover really got started was a farmer-rancher SARE grant that Keith had wrote. He had put the NRCS and he had me as the local educator on that at the time, too.

36:23 Any issues with cattle grazing and bloat? We haven't had any issues, but we're also careful like we don't, when we turn them out, we give them a small amount first and we have free choice hay for them to eat as well. And they'll regulate themselves. Last year, we were grazing vetch that ended up being about 2 and 1/2 to 3 ft tall and I'm not going to go into all those details right now, but if you have additional questions, you can catch me at the end.

37:02 Okay, now the chat. Can you get the grazing mapping? I'm not sure what that means.

37:22 I'm going to go ahead and move on just so that we can cover a couple more topics.

37:38 Okay, I'm going to move on to compost extracts. Erin mentioned a little bit about that, people are using extracts and so we have an increasing number of growers interested in this and trying to produce their own extracts. They're doing it a variety of ways. So you can see you don't have to have really complicated systems. One producer is that middle one is pretty simplified system that he was using and using it in-furrow on his planter. But the questions with the compost extracts are can they put biology on their seeds as a seed treatment and can they also use extracts to help reduce their nitrogen rates? So I'm just going to go straight into data for the sake of time. We have a group of growers who are using extracts and so they get together. And so this is something that some of you may want to do, too. They get together and they treat all their seed together just because it's a way to get together, but it's a way to also reduce that time and labor, too.

38:49 Some growers have a real hard time finding non-treated, non-chemically treated seed, especially on the corn side. And so for a long time, I really wasn't sure how helpful it was to put biology on the seed. And then I started looking at it under the microscope. And what I was seeing was I was still seeing fungi, fungal spores and I was still seeing bacteria. If there was a nematicide in the seed treatment, I was seeing decapitated nematodes and I would see how the dye from the seed treatment would actually be bound to any of the carbon, the humic particles and so forth that you would see under the microscope. And some of you probably have experience with this as well. So this is an example, or this is a study that was done in 2024. This grower had check, which was the chemically treated seed versus compost extract seed.

45:30 Beautiful job sharing what they're doing with organic systems. With the producers that I'm working with, they're mostly all on this region path, and they're coming from conventional systems. So you're going to hear a lot of herbicide information from me. It's not that I'm trying to promote herbicides, it's that boots on the ground practicality, this is these are the questions that I get. How do I do this in my system, and how do I do this without killing the cover crops I'm trying to intercede? What herbicide should I be using or avoiding? And so that's what I'm going to be sharing in this part as well.

46:13 This was a long-term project. We had growers interceding from 2019 to 2022. So I'm only going to show you 12 site years of data. The two from 2019, there were no yield differences on those as well, but these were specific studies, so that's why I'm going to show you them.

46:37 The reason why we lost all these in 2022 is we had a massive hail storm that came through on June 7th and then June 14th, and it took out several counties worth of crops, and we had to replant a lot of crops that year.

46:53 But you can see we used a couple of different mixes in the corn. And you can see the row direction. In this case, they're all irrigated. They're all either 30-inch rows or they're 36-inch rows. I'm not going to go into the details of the different cover crops that we used. But I will tell you we learned a lot, and I would not recommend red ripper cowpeas to be used in your mixes if you're interceding. We used them in 2020, and we then switched to iron and clay and recommended that everyone use iron and clay instead.

47:32 This would be great. Red rippers would be great for a forage system, but not for an interceded system. As you can see, they really took off. They bridged the corn rows. It wasn't a problem for harvest as long as they waited for a frost.

47:47 This was the nitrogen mix, and you can see it's pretty well tamed in between the rows. It looks really good. One thing that we learned with harvest, make sure you shut off any chopping corn heads, because otherwise you just kind of smother the cover crops that are there.

48:06 This became a great thing for all these producers ended up bringing in livestock of some type on these fields afterwards, and the livestock producers appreciated the green with the brown.

48:19 This is just showing some of the winter survival that we had. The mix the diversity mix had yellow blossom sweet clover in it. Not sure I'm a huge fan of that, but it was interesting to learn about in that system. It's not one that I would recommend putting in an interceding mix.

48:39 And this is what happens when you put rye into your interceding mix. How it survives is pretty sporadic. So I would just suggest instead that you just drill the rye after harvest instead. You've got so many windows of opportunity every month of the winter to drill cereal rye.

49:03 What I would recommend, since I don't have a slide on this, for interceding into corn, my favorite species are buckwheat, iron and clay cowpeas, and forage collards, because they get up quickly and they shade the ground, so it's your weed control. I also like red clover if you want a perennial in that system and something that's going to survive. But if you're going to do a red clover, I'm almost to the point where you have to seed it at a full red clover rate of 8 to 10-pound rate in order to really get it established. And I also like either annual or Italian rye grass, and then flax because it provides the biggest biodiversity for you in the soil.

49:52 These are the yields that we received over the 12 site years. So what you'll see as you look across, half of these had a yield loss. The yield loss was very small. We're talking a maximum of five bushels an acre. So that range was two to five bushels an acre. We had six replications in all of these that were at least half mile, they were all half mile rows long. And at least eight to twelve rows wide for all these interceded studies. So there's a lot of area in this, a lot of data.

50:32 The yield loss didn't really impact the farmers didn't feel like that was a big deal in those studies. That it was negligible. The net return does not account for any benefit to that cover crop. It's just accounting for the seeding cost and the extra seeding cost and seed cost of that cover crop. And so because of that, the net return doesn't look as good as the check on all these.

50:59 But they're very close. We didn't separate out our species like Aaron did, we just put it all together.

51:10 What was cool to see is the gray bars are the weed biomass, the green bars are the cover crop biomass. And so, the left is the check treatment, the right is the cover crop treatment, obviously. And across the board, for the most part, we never had more weed biomass than cover crops in that cover crop treatment. In fact, the cover crops tended to keep it pretty low. And it was pretty similar overall compared to the check treatment.

51:40 There's a couple of these where we have like number five, where we have a lot of weed biomass, and that's those are situations where we had wind storms occur, and it took out the canopies of these crop fields, which allowed for the weeds to come and the cover crops to go crazy. There were some of these strips we had four tons of biomass from the individual strips that we were collecting the biomass from. And we're just showing the averages over here.

52:14 What I would time-wise, I'm just going to end up with this. If you'd like to take pictures of this. These are the questions I get. How do you do this with a herbicide program? So, interceding into corn, this is what we found.

52:29 We could use a full pre before using before interceding the cover crops. We recommend interceding at V2 or V3 corn. So, like what Aaron was saying, too. Don't recommend later than that. Anytime we tried later than that, we just didn't have the cover crop growth, the biomass growth.

52:52 So, one day before, the day after, or the day of interceding, you can do a product that's going to burn down any of your weeds. We did have one producer do a herbicide study where he split the Lexar pre and post. I don't think it's something that either he or I would recommend, but he just wanted to try it and see. It did reduce the amount of biomass that he saw in his field when he used the split application that close to interceding, but the cover still came. So, that's information that's interesting to know.

53:27 And then this last point, none of our producers did this, but it is an option if you are really scared about weeds, you could use the residual once the weeds are up at least an inch tall.

53:40 Similar thing for the soybeans, we used a full pre on all of our soybeans. And we were interceding anywhere from the emergence to V2 time frame, we were using red clover. We also used a small grain, which I wouldn't recommend doing because what that does is it creates the green bridge if you're in an area where producers are growing wheat or small grain. So, I would just recommend a full rate of a clover or even multiple clovers at that time frame.

54:12 So, I'll let you take a picture of that if you would like.

54:19 And then I'm going to go into my observations. So, I just wanted to see, you know, what am I observing in the fields? We had all of these fields, and I was driving. They were in four different counties, and I was driving to just see how are the herbicides interacting with the covers that are surviving. And these were my observations.

54:39 So, I'm not saying that this is set in stone, there's nothing replicated here or anything other than consistent across the fields that I was going to, but just some observations that I really don't see a lot of information about how the herbicides impact the covers. And the labels don't really say a lot, either. So, these are some observations, and you can see if you observe anything similar or different in your own situation.

55:13 I think with that, since we're kind of at time, I'm going to leave this up here for a moment. I'm really excited about this next slide, but we're out of time. This is where our producers want to go. And this is we did 30 fields over 3 years, but we had very few that got established of perennial clovers, basically. This is mammoth red clover, and if we could get something established like this each time, I think we all would be thrilled. And have that kind of weed control.

55:47 But, between drought and hail, 30 fields over 3 years, I maybe had three that made it. And so, this is what I'm still very interested in doing. My local growers are kind of burned out trying this between drought and hail. So, it might be something some of you might be interested in, as well.

56:09 So, I'm going to close it at that and see additional questions.

56:15 Yeah, it looks like we have three in the Q&A Jenny.

56:20 Okay, so, tried crimson clover interceded. I haven't used any crimson clover for interceded.

56:30 The species that I like for interceding would be buckwheat, iron and clay cowpeas, forage collards, either Italian or annual rye grass, red clover and flax.

56:52 I believe the presentation was recorded. Yes, it was.

56:56 Crops do better on irrigated land. I think that depends where you're at. I think it depends on your context and how much moisture you receive.

57:06 How was the seed planted? That's a great question, and I removed the picture of our interseeders. So we've used everything for interceding. We've had growers create their own interseeders from things that were out in their shoulder belts. We've had growers that tied up drill units and drilled it over their corn.

57:28 We purchased for the project that I just talked about, it was with the Nature Conservancy and NRCS, and an interceder was purchased from Penn State. It was only four rows, but that's what we did. That's what we used for a lot of these studies. So we were always getting seed to soil contact in all of this.

57:54 I think Shannon there asked you to re-share the slide before your observations.

58:20 I don't see any more in the Q&A. I just had a couple questions, maybe here, Jenny, as we close it out. You know, what is the biggest hurdle that you see with the farmers you work with that prevents them maybe from doing on-farm research?

58:37 The biggest hurdle for all of us is our mindset, thinking it's going to take too much time or too much effort. And it's also just needing that nudge to get started. I had several producers who said, 'I wouldn't have ever done this if you wouldn't have just nudged me and just been there to help me with that first step.' So I really do believe you need somebody to help you in that first step. Once producers start, they often stay with it.

59:14 Dylan, I do want to address that. There was one question about funding. So on-farm research in Nebraska, when we're doing on-farm research in Nebraska, we're not being funded, the producers are not funded to do this. We as local educators aren't funded to do this. Producers have questions. We're using local county mileage if we have that available or we're just doing it that way.

59:42 Sometimes there's some grants. If there's grants like for a nitrogen study or things like that that we get from a higher level and growers are a part of that, sometimes there's some compensation for that. We are blessed in Nebraska that our commodity boards do fund our on-farm research coordinator. So they're the ones that basically coordinate anything if industry brings something to them that they want or they're the ones doing all the statistical analysis. They help put our books together and then the funding from the commodity boards also support the producer meetings that we have in February and the printing of all these books. That's funded by the corn growers, corn board, soybean growers, soybean board and driving commission in Nebraska.

1:00:45 We do have one more question in the Q&A. Brian asked, 'What is the nudge that you think is still needed for those producers? What is the nudge do you think is needed in other areas of the industry?'

1:01:08 I'm not sure if you mean to move towards soil health or if you're talking producers. I see two things. I don't know if this answers the question, but it also goes back to Dylan's question. I think it's mindset and it's fear. I mean, I look at right now we have such an opportunity to be converting ground to annual grazing. Alex in his study he figured what he got off of that small quarter of grazing he figured 683 an acre. And comparing that you do the numbers of

1:01:50 That for your own for corn right now. And I'm not trying to be again anti-corn or anti-soybeans, but I'm just trying to say we have an opportunity right now to really improve soil with plants and animals and make money at it. But I'm having a hard time with producers who even own cattle to make that shift even though we can have the numbers on paper. And even though I can show a banker it's a hard thing. There's so much fear to just take that next step. That's what I'm seeing.

1:02:33 Yeah, okay. It's hard to take a year off. Has anyone established solid perennial stand of clover in the next following year? Yes, okay. So the anonymous that's what happened in this in this. This is a strip till producer. And what he did is he strip tilled it in the fall then and planted his beans in those strip in those strips and then he's and then the following year moved to strip till back on to where the clover is. And so in 2 years it basically took out his clover. So that was a hard thing to see too. I never showed you this. This is the economics. That's just 2 years. And you can quickly pay for a perennial system if you would account for the nitrogen from that clover.

1:03:33 So the clover stands it really depends how scared the farmers get about herbicides and what they do with herbicides, how well the clover was originally established and then if they do things like the strip till through it or other things. So these are all things we're all learning together. Like the farmers are learning it together. And they'll come back with their own conclusions about I should have done this or I should have done that, but it's all learning. We're all learning together in this process.

1:04:15 Um Michelle, I did not explain the difference between extracts or teas. So all of these producers are using extracts. Extracts meaning they're taking the compost they're running water and air through it and just extracting the liquid that contains the microbes. And so forth. They are not brewing anything in that extraction process. They are often adding foods before they go infero or spray it on their fields.

1:05:10 Well, we take we take Haney samples and we're actually taking them every year. It's not something I would recommend most farmers do, but we're doing it every year and they're all GPS located. And the reason is because we're doing a lot of things on our farm that we're trying to get answers for to help others in this journey. And it goes back to what my original why that I started with. So when we're planting buckwheat for seed we're able to see is there a difference in the soil test results, which we've seen for three fields that we've increased the phosphorus and it stays there for several years. So that's what we're doing with using the Haney test. We're using very little nitrogen at all as an input on our farm and so our soil residual nitrate is essentially nothing. We really don't have much at all for residual nitrate with the Haney's. Even with the Haney's looking at what's available, there's just very little.

1:06:17 Sources for learning the microscope. There's some great people in the community. I don't know who's on today. I personally learned first from Zach Wright and Ryan NeuS is also a great resource for learning the microscope. Not powers, I've got both of his books. So and he has different courses, so all of those are great resources.

1:06:47 Okay. I think that that wraps up our questions. Jenny, thank you. We appreciate we definitely appreciate you being on here today and just again the you know, the passion you have for soil health and the compassion you have for the people you work with. It's truly appreciated and that we just we thank you for being on here today. And thank you everybody else for joining.