Post-Wheat Cover: Capture Summer Sunlight and Build Soil

0:04 All right. So, one of the best windows of opportunity to put a cover crop in on your operation is after wheat harvest or after small grain harvest. And this mix is exactly what you could be using. So, the post wheat cover mix is a is a

0:19 Fairly diverse mix. It's designed to be planted in the middle of summer, grow in late summer, and then winter kill off. So, you know, as you look at the mix here, primarily it is the forage sorghum and the sorghum.

0:30 Sudan. We do have some sunn hemp in this mix for some nitrogen fixing. There's some radish as you really peel back the curtain there. So these late summer mixes, I mean, this could be something that would be grazed. It could

0:43 Be something that be mechanically harvested. But mainly, the idea is to build soil. So we've got these big grass plants that are pumping root exudates into the ground and just really.

0:54 Feeding that microbiology. Like I said, the sunn hemp has got a nice tap root. It's fixing nitrogen. The radishes and the sunflower also can have nice tap roots for some of that compaction alleviation. So, a lot

1:06 Of the diversity, frankly, a lot of species you probably can't plant on a normal row crop operation unless you have that cereal in the mix and you're going in after harvest.

1:16 You know, Nathan, margins are really tight in farming right now. And farmers can't really afford to waste anything. But one of the biggest things that we waste is the sunlight. I mean, we've got a lot of sunlight, solar energy pouring

1:43 Sunlight. It's a huge amount of energy that you could be converting into something of use, of something of value. And you don't even have to harvest it.

1:51 So, planting a mix like this right after wheat harvest is capturing all that.

1:56 Solar energy. This thing has multiple canopy layers. You dig down in there and look, there is zero amount of sunlight hitting the soil. So, that soil is going to retain all of its moisture.

2:09 It's going to have very little evaporation. We're going to infiltrate almost every drop of rain that we get in this.

2:15 And we're going to capture all that solar energy and we're going to turn it

2:18 Into carbon. We're going to turn it into food for the biology.

2:22 So, whether you do this or some other type of cover crop after wheat, it's the perfect time to plant a cover crop so you don't waste the sunlight that God's given you.