Pre & Post Harvest Cover Crop Options: What Works When

0:01 For those of you that are tuning onto Facebook, thanks for joining us. Sticking with us through—is this our 16th one? Is that we figured out, Keith?

0:11 I think so, yes. Pretty good run here. Yep, we're not done. Don't worry that you're not going to get your cover crop fixed. We know that you'll probably start going through withdrawals in the next couple weeks, but as soon as harvest hits that'll get you through until we start up again on what we're gonna call season two.

0:31 We're already kind of preparing. We've got a list of things we wanna talk about for next season. We'll probably start that again probably after harvest, October, November sometime around there. But thank you guys for tuning in. I see some of the people that have been darn near on every single webinar, and it's been cool to see you guys join us every single week. So thank you everybody for your loyalty and please send suggestions for future topics if there's something you'd like us to cover.

1:02 If people start going through withdrawals, maybe Dale can set up one of those 1-900 paper minute type services where people can call and talk cover crops with them. One 900 talk dirt to me.

1:27 I also want to shout out anybody that maybe they're binge watching these on YouTube. I had someone say they watched like six hours worth all in one sitting. So that's a little shout out to all of our YouTube viewers as well. Impressive. Watch them have to go into reruns for a while.

1:47 With that, we'll go ahead and get started here tonight. We're going to be talking about pre and post harvest cover crop options. We talked about how to handle this topic as far as if we just wanted to do interceding or overseeding, and it ended up kind of being a little more encompassing than just covering post-harvest cover crops. So I think what Keith did here is put together a little presentation, and Keith and Dale are basically going to talk about the broad spectrum of what your options are after and before harvest. So with that, Keith, I'll let you go ahead.

2:24 Okay, can you see my presentation here now? Did I pick the right screen? Yep, yes. Okay, great. So yeah, we're going to cover a lot of territory. We're going to try to cover quite a little bit here this evening, so we may be kind of rushing and pushing through this a little bit. So if you have questions, make sure you type those in that chat box, or if you are on Facebook, just make it a Facebook comment and Noah will grab those. We'll try to save some time at the end for questions.

2:54 Basically what we're going to talk about here this evening is planting covers in a corn bean rotation, particularly because it's not easy to do because there's a very short planting window in a corn bean rotation, and it doesn't always lend itself to cover crop establishment in the fall. Oftentimes harvest is late, and so we've heard the voices of the people crying out for a new type of seed, and so we're here to let you know that we have a new seed to offer that you can plant very late in the season and it gets great establishment. It overwinters very, very reliably and gives you excellent growth in the spring and it's going to have excellent weed control regardless of how late you plant it.

3:42 This thing is going to fix a lot of nitrogen and yet have almost perfect weed control regardless of when you plant it, the conditions that you put it in, and the way that you seed it. And so here's the unveiling of this new cover crop seed.

4:02 This is what it looks like. It's some beans. It's like this. It grows tons of biomass, and it's also very inexpensive. I forgot to mention that. And it fixes compaction, pH, and salinity as well. And so here's what this looks like. Of course, it's Jack's magic beans. Because, you know, I say this a little tongue-in-cheek, but you would be surprised at how many people call us up and expect to have a seed like that that will do all of those things. But obviously, there's no such thing as a magic bean. There's no such seed that will do all of those things that people want it to do because the reality is that we are constrained by a lot of different things in this corn bean rotation with a fall harvest window.

4:48 There's just a lot of constraints. And so what Dale and I want to talk about here this evening is we're going to talk about different species that you can use, different timing options of when you can plant these, and then at the end we'll talk about some application options, different ways that you can get this planted. And so kind of the concept that we want to think about here is because it is a short planting window, I like to think of it as thinking about how you can open that window up a little bit wider. There are some things that you can do to stretch that window just a little bit. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about the species that make the most.

5:27 In this situation and because we got a lot of stuff to talk about, you know I know Dale and I could talk about species for three hours and we're gonna have to cover this in 15 or 20 minutes here so we'll try to go through here and hit the high points and get the major things covered and if you have interest in any of these we'd be more than happy to visit about them later.

5:53 Like we were talking about we want to open this window as much as possible and so one thing you can do is plant some shorter season varieties, especially soybeans. I know here in our area we're in southern Nebraska, you know guys will plant everywhere from a 2.2 soybean all the way to a 3.6 or a 3.7 and we really don't see a lot of yield advantage most years with a 3.7 versus like a 2.5 and so we're planting earlier season soybeans because we can get them out of the field a little quicker and we can get cover crops planted.

6:27 We'll be talking about some seeding with airplanes, different options of seeding prior to harvest. That's hit and miss sometimes, especially in dryland or low rainfall areas and timing is really critical. But you can get by with some shorter season things. You don't have to do it on all your acres but if there's an area where you know you want to try cover crops you can put those shorter season corns or beans in there and allow you to get cover crops planted there.

6:53 Dale have you had any customers where they've done this, gone to a little shorter season variety and had some decent success with that?

7:00 Yes, of course the main reason for going with the shorter season varieties is often times just to get wheat established in more timely but the same concept also works with soybeans or with other cover crops in the soybeans I should say and some people are doing it even in conjunction with the aerial seeding, you know just getting a little lower, a little earlier leaf yellowing to facilitate establishment of things that need planted a little earlier.

7:36 Yeah just two weeks. Two weeks earlier buys a lot of forgiveness in the cover crop world.

7:43 It's huge, you know I know Dale, we've talked about you know that we talk about two days and or one day in August is like two days in September and one day in September is like two days in October as far as growing so if you get something started at the end of August it's essentially almost like having four growing days in October because things will grow four times as fast because the days are longer. You have more heat during the day and most of all the evenings don't get so cold. You know in October you may get up to 60 degrees but if it's getting down to 30 at night it really takes those plants a while to recover and kind of get restarted to get much growing done.

8:23 So the shorter season varieties like I say just think about opening this window up as much as possible. There are different things you can do. We'll talk about some of the seeding options here a little bit later. The other thing you can do is use the most cold tolerant species possible for your area because the more cold tolerant something is the later you can plant it and still expect to have some good success.

8:47 And you know that's going to be different for different areas. Like you know for us if we get out into you know late October, early November, you know we just don't plan a lot of things other than cereal rye or triticale because most other things don't make sense but as you go further south you know they can still use ryegrass and crimson clover and some of the brassicas. You go far enough south and you know they really don't have you know I tease them about not really having much of a winter so it just depends on where you're at but use the most cold tolerant species possible for your area.

9:18 And I've just got some seeding dates up here of what you know for southern Nebraska what we feel. You know annual ryegrass you know we want to have that in by middle of September for best results. Oats we feel like we need to have those in by September 1st at the latest to really get some decent growth on oats. You know we might take radishes out to the middle of September and rapeseed you know we can go out even a little bit longer and still get some decent growth.

9:44 So it kind of depends on where you're at but you can certainly select cold tolerance species for your area and that stretches your planting window out a little bit more as well and varieties within those, you know for example with the annual ryegrass there is a huge variation in the winter hardiness within annual ryegrass variety.

10:06 So Dale hold that thought because we're going to get the annual ryegrass and then I want you to explain those differences here in just a second. Okay sounds good. Hairy vetch you know we can take hairy vetch out a little later, October 15th maybe here and again some of these things can be planted later but the penalty that you'll pay

10:23 Is going to be, they're going to be slower coming on in the spring. So if you want maximum hairy vetch growth to get as much nitrogen fixation as you can, the later you plant it, the longer you're going to have to let it grow into the spring because it's just going to be slower taking off.

10:38 Winter peas, winter lentils, crimson clover—I'm going to talk about all these here in a little bit more detail. So let's jump right into these different species now. I threw this one up there first because it's kind of one that has caught a lot of attention here lately. And that's belongs to clover. There's a lot of different clovers out there and there's actually several different bolonza clovers. The only one that we've had any success with is one called fixation.

11:02 And it's, it's really probably the most cold tolerant annual clover. That we know of, it's much more cold tolerant than crimson clover. It's probably not as cold tolerant as, you know, like yellow blossom or red, but those aren't annuals—those are either biennials or perennials. So the lots clover, if you can get it planted early enough, and you know, Dale, we were out visiting some of the big organic farmers in Indiana, I know when they get their bolonza clover planted around the first of September, you know, it's not uncommon for them to have 10, 12, 14,000 pounds of biomass produced by that clover and two to three hundred pounds of nitrogen. When this stuff takes off in the spring it just really goes crazy and grows like just like nothing you've ever seen. But it will be a little slow early on. So Dale, any comments on belonsa there?

11:55 It's always disappointing on April 1st and always just incredibly impressive on June 1st. Yeah, and so it goes from nothing to amazing in those two months there. And depending on when you terminate it will determine largely how useful it is for you. Yeah, absolutely. These pictures—this picture was taken April first, like Dale said. This picture was taken May 11. These are on our plots right here on our farm. So these are actual photos that we took. And so it went from not much to pretty good growth in full bloom by May 11th. And then, you know, two weeks later this stuff was all over the place and it had just taken over everything. So it can be a pretty good one. Again, I don't know how comfortable I would be telling you to plant this—was planted October first. That's the latest I planted, I think, to really have decent chances of success. If you go out to the middle of October, I think your chances of having success go down in our area. And again, you'll have to shift that geographically depending on where you're at.

13:05 Hairy vetch, hairy vetch is kind of the old standby. Again, it's just an amazing crop. It's the most cold tolerant of any of the legumes. Not going to spend a lot of time because I think people are pretty familiar with hairy vetch. But the one thing about hairy vetch is that you really need to kind of let it grow. Like this picture was taken May 11, 2016—was a relatively warm spring. We had a lot of early growth. This year our hairy vetch on May 1st, there was not much there. But when we went back out a month later, some of you may have seen the video that we put together, there was four over four tons of biomass, dry matter biomass, and 220 pounds of nitrogen in that hairy vetch. So it can really explode and go crazy. It's probably the most reliable overwintering legume that we have access to.

13:55 Winter peas are not going to be nearly as reliable. They do overwinter pretty well sometimes. Again, 2016 was a fairly mild winter, and we got some pretty decent overwintering on these guys. The trick to getting winter peas to over winter is to plant them deep and plant them a little later so that that growing point stays under the ground. And sometimes that does not allow them to be planted in mixes as well because you don't want to plant everything else in your mix deep and late like winter peas need to. So again, the further south you go, the better they work. The further north you go, the more they're going to struggle. But winter peas are an option, and even if you don't get them to overwinter, if this is something that you can be planting, say, in August, they'll grow a lot longer than what a spring pea will. But the bigger seeds like this don't lend themselves to being broadcast on the surface nearly as well. So Dale, any quick comments on peas or vetch?

14:53 I think the deep planting thing—the misconception is that the peas winter kill. They don't really winterkill; they spring kill more often when they get to growing and one of the growing points comes above ground and then it gets cold and nips that off. It's like a cat with nine lives, and the number of lives that that pea plant has is dependent on how many growing points it still has below ground yet to develop, yet to come above ground. The deeper you

15:39 Plant the more lives that pea plant has. And I know people that plant, you know, three inches deep. You know, not many species do I recommend planting three inches deep, but the deeper you plant winter peas, the more lives they will have.

16:00 Crimson clover is another good one. My daughter Anna Hope was showing off her Husker gear here, but it's kind of cool because most crimson clover obviously is red colored or crimson on the left hand side of the screen. Though that's a special variety called White Cloud crimson clover, which is pure white blossoms and it's kind of pretty. And you put the two together and it's really pretty striking. Crimson clover is great.

16:32 2016 is about one of the only years I had to take a lot of pictures of this. We almost never get crimson clover to overwinter up here where we're at in Nebraska. I say this is a relatively mild winter. The winter of '15 was pretty mild and so we got it over winter. Most years we do not. But where you can get crimson clover over winter, it's a wonderful cover crop.

16:54 Here's another hairy vetch. I don't kind of got that out of order. Morton winter lentils is another legume. It, I think, overwinters fairly reliably. It's just it's not a big showy plant. It's never going to give you huge amounts of nitrogen, but it's a nice little companion crop. And it mixes well with other things. You can mix this with veg, you can mix this with rye, you can mix this with clovers and it's a nice companion crop to kind of fill in some of the gaps. It's not real expensive, so we like putting some winter lentils in some of these mixes where you're trying to get a legume to overwinter pretty well.

17:29 Those are most of them. You know, there's other clovers and again we don't want to get bogged down and take all the time just talking about these species, but there's other clovers and maybe you know in a future webinar we'll talk. We could have a good webinar really just talking about different clovers and the differences between them. So Noah, maybe make a note of that. That'd be a good one to fire up this winter, just a whole session just on clovers.

17:54 Moving on to the grasses, we've got winter oats and then there's also Classic Black Oats. Let me see, I don't know, I don't think I had Cossacks in this trial for whatever reason, but Bob winter oats again, they don't always overwinter for us in southern Nebraska. You go north of here, they rarely would over winter. You go south of here and you have better and better chances. But if you can get you can make winter oats or the Classic Black Oats are about as cold tolerant as the Bob winter oats. If you can get them to overwinter, there's very few things that are going to be better spring forages. Oats are just very, very palatable. Cattle do exceptionally well on them.

18:33 We actually like the Cossack Black Oats better than the winter oats. And we, Dale, this year the guys down in southern Kansas had really good luck with their Black Oats overwintering. Yeah, and they told me the harvest results. They were getting about 50 bushel an acre, which is not outstanding, you know, compared to say spring oats, but it's not a bad harvest for Black Oats. And if you're planting Black Oats, you're going to be doing it. It's a forage oat. It's not and ever intended to be a grain oat, but again, it's one of those that if you put it in in August or early September, even if it doesn't overwinter, it's going to grow far longer than your spring oats do and can still give you a lot of valuable benefits there.

19:18 Dale, give us the rundown on ryegrass in just a few minutes here. Love ryegrass. It is not a cereal. It is more of a grassy type plant. It's closely related to fescue. Comes in all shapes and sizes. There's annual ryegrass, perennial ryegrass. If you hybridize the two, you get intermediate ryegrass. Within both annual and perennial forms, there's a lot of variation as well. There's diploid and there's tetraploid. And then there's also within annual ryegrasses, there's Westerwold, which are true annuals, and then there's Italian ryegrass, which can function as a biennial. Is everybody thoroughly confused at this point?

20:10 Among the ryegrasses we typically use as cover crops, usually we use the dry grasses and they come in diploid, which tend to be smaller plants, much more winter hardy and they are very resistant to grazing pressure. They bounce back very quickly from grazing. The tetraploids are typically much more productive. They're more palatable. They have a higher sugar content. And but they don't recover from grazing as fast and they are not nearly as winter hardy as diploids. Which, whether you use diploids or tetraploids, depends a lot on

21:09 Where you are north and south here in Nebraska, Kansas we almost exclusively use diploids if we want it to survive the winter. If you are, I know you get down into Texas, they will almost use—in I guess the gulf part of Texas they use primarily tetraploids because they are more productive, have a better sugar content.

21:37 Some other cereal options: winter barley. We've actually been using more winter barley all the time. It's shown on the left here, it doesn't get nearly as tall as some of the other cereals, but it is much more winter hardy than winter oats. I would say it's not as winter hardy as triticale or as rye, but it's much better than oats. We like the barley ahead of corn because it's just a little easier situation to plant corn into. It doesn't grow as much, it doesn't tie up as much nitrogen. But on the flip side, it doesn't do as good a job of suppressing weeds either, so there are trade-offs.

22:14 Winter barley is excellent forage, it's very palatable. We only use the beardless types because the bearded winter barleys have really long, spiky sharp beards and they are not good for forage. But the beardless types like this 919 on the left here is really quite good. And then of course triticale is a very tall, very robust plant, very winter hardy. The disadvantage of triticale over rye is that it doesn't break dormancy and get going quite as fast. But if you are looking for forage, it's hard to beat winter triticale, whether you're chopping it or grazing it or bailing it in the spring. It's just your best option by far. It's just going to take a little longer to get there than what rye is.

23:07 Here's Elbon rye. I've just now noticed that I got all my dates wrong—this did not grow from October and we put it in a time capsule and it grew backwards till May. It should be May of '16. But Elbon rye is a very early maturing type rye. It is an Oklahoma bread rye, so it has short dormancy periods. It really gets out the gate and grows very fast. We like it—it's our top used rye by far. You can see how much further along it is than the triticale on the left there.

23:40 Here's those two pictures a couple weeks earlier. You can see how much taller the Elbon on the left is than the triticale is on the right. And Elbon will be faster and taller early on than even other types of rye. The other types of rye will catch up, but the Elbon is always going to be the first one to get out of the gate and get going. And it's by far the best weed suppressor. And it also has smaller seed size, which we like a lot as well. You can kind of cut your seeding rates back a little bit because it has that smaller seed size.

24:14 Dale comments on rye versus triticale: I think whether you use one or the other depends, of course, on your goals. Rye is going to come on earlier. If you are looking for the earliest spring grazing you can get, I would use Elbon rye. And of course at the end of a long hard winter, early grazing is good, especially if you're completely out of hay or whatever stored feed. Rye is going to give you better weed suppression and more early biomass. If you are looking at extending grazing farther into the spring, later triticale is going to be much better. It keeps its palatability and quality better late than rye does, especially the beardless triticales that we carry. And it's going to have more total tonnage than rye if you allow both of them to head out.

25:23 Once you head out, if you want to do a mechanical forage harvest, go triticale. And so if you're a cattle guy and you're really trying to maximize your grazing utilization, you're far better off planting some fields to rye and some to triticale, then really highly managing your rotational grazing through those. Because the rye will give you better grazing early, the triticale gives you better late grazing, and you can really stretch out that forage harvest window. That's a real quick rundown—we probably could have dedicated a whole session just to talking about those species. If we didn't quite cover something in detail that you'd like to see, put that in the chat box and we'll talk about it here at the end of the session. But I do want to move on and cover a few other topics here.

26:16 One of the other things that you can do if you get your cover crops planted later in the fall than what you'd like—one option to get more benefit out of them is to let them grow later into the spring, longer into the spring as possible. And that's probably easier to do with beans than it is with corn. That has a lot to do with nitrogen cycling and how you're applying.

26:35 Your nitrogen—there's certainly increased risk of this on dry land. I'm not going to lie to you, we are much quicker to pull the trigger on terminating a cover crop in the spring on dry land than we are on irrigated because on irrigated we know that if that cover crop grows out, we know the benefits, we see the benefits of it growing. But the cost is at using more of that spring moisture. It will come back to you later, but you just never know when it's coming back, so we'll let it grow longer on irrigated than we do on dry land. And guys further east, you know, they plant green all the time because they want that cover crop keeping that soil surface dry so they can plant in a wet spring.

27:20 Nutrient management becomes much more important with corn because if you, especially if you're using rye, it's going to tie up a lot of that nitrogen. And really what it becomes of is you almost have to have a little bit more of an organic mindset. And part of what I mean with that is organic producers understand the benefits of allowing these cover crops to grow longer, and they're willing to plant their crops later. They don't have to get their corn planted by April 15th to feel good about themselves. You know, they're willing to let it grow because they understand the benefits that come from letting that cover crop grow, letting the soil warm up so that when you do plant your corn and the beans, they come up and they get going really quickly.

28:04 We are going to have, my guess is Dale with the footage and all the stuff that we're going to have to show with the experiment that we did this year with letting that hairy vetch grow and planting into it with the roller and just different things—we'll probably have what, two, three, four different webinars this winter where we're going to be talking about some of these things about letting things grow, how do you handle the residue, how do you plant into it, how do you manage nitrogen on things like that. So we'll have a whole series where we're going to go into a lot more depth on this, but we'll do that more this winter when we have all of the footage, not only from when we planted that, but we'll have footage from as that crop is growing throughout the year as well.

28:47 I might interject one other factor with corn following rye is that rye can harbor fusarium root rot that can affect corn. And so they've been some research in Iowa that if you have a rye cover crop, plant corn into it green, there can be a bridge of fusarium root rot to the corn. If you kill your rye early, two weeks ahead of corn planting, that completely eliminates the bridge. And that kind of explains some of the yield drag that we tend to see sometimes on rye following corn. You know, sometimes it's nitrogen sequestration, but sometimes it's there no matter how much nitrogen you apply. And so, but by terminating the rye early, letting the giving it two weeks before you plant corn, tends to eliminate that yield drag.

29:51 And Dale, when we were out in Indiana, those guys, they were really fighting army worms. They were working pretty hard in the cereal rye cover crop ahead of corn. They had never seen as much pressure as they saw this year. So, but they're definitely going to be a lot more gun shy about that, and they're going to go to a lot more legume cover crops—hairy vetch and clovers and things like that.

30:16 All right, so let's talk about some timing options, and then we'll talk about application options because there's, there's kind of frankly, it's just some fun options out there to talk about, whether you use them or not, they're fun to think about. So from a timing standpoint, and again, what I'm talking about here is if you want to try the seed prior to harvest, okay? Because the timing after harvest is pretty simple: get it planted as soon as you can after you harvest. But if you're going to do it before you harvest, and there's, and again, that's what we'll look at—these different application methods—you can do it before harvest. The timing is still pretty critical because if you go too early, bad things can happen. If you go too late, well, then you just as well wait and drill it after harvest. So timing is pretty critical.

31:05 And the first thing that you have to understand in this is that sunlight is almost always the most limiting factor in trying to get a cover crop not only to establish but to survive and to grow when you're seeding it into a crop that is not yet harvested. So that means you can't go too soon. Now, we had a webinar earlier about planting these cover crops at the V4 stage in corn, and the reason for doing that is to try to get as much growth as you can while there's sunlight before the corn goes to full canopy and kind of shuts the sunlight down. And so there's been some good success people have had some decent success in doing that.

31:48 If you're interested in that you can go back and look at the webinar archives, but what we're talking about here you've missed that window and you're going to be coming in in the late summer and seeding in this example in corn. We'll look at soybeans next, but you're going to be doing it prior to harvest.

32:05 So kind of the rule of thumb that I like to tell people and different people have different issues or different benchmarks here. You want to wait for that plant. As a corn plant matures it starts drying from the bottom up. It really, for best results, you need to let that plant dry almost up to the ear.

32:24 Now a lot of times people go a little earlier than that and that's okay, but for best results almost you have those leaves dried up almost to the ear. Because what happens when the leaves dry up you start getting more sunlight to get through that canopy than when the leaves are green. If you go too early you can get the plants to germinate, but they're going to be hard to keep alive and you're going to need some moisture to get it going.

32:47 If you're broadcasting on top to ground, which in this situation it's almost always going to be broadcast. So if you're irrigated you can water that up. If you're dry land you have to depend on rain to get it up and going.

33:01 Dale, what kind of recommendations or guidelines do you kind of give people when they ask about whether it's flying on or broadcasting into standing corn?

33:13 A lot of it's geography. I think you're spot on on the timing. I think the temptation is to go too early before there's sufficient sunlight. When a plant of course, moisture is always a concern as well. If you got irrigation makes it much easier. If you've got sprinkler irrigation, otherwise you're at the mercy of rainfall.

33:42 But even if you have, let's have the scenario where you've got marginally sufficient rainfall. Let's say you get a rain sprouts the seed, it comes up and there's not enough sunlight. What that seedling will do is that when you have a lack of sunlight that seedling will tend to grow tall and spindly and will produce very few roots. That's just a hormonal growth response to a lack of sunlight.

34:15 Plant will produce excess auxin which causes that tall spindly effect with very shallow roots. Well, that means those shallow roots mean that plant will be less effective at getting moisture. So a lack of sunlight will actually cause a result in the plant being unable to get moisture even if there's moisture in the soil. It won't have the root system.

34:42 Yeah, so having that timing when there's sunlight beginning to be available is pretty important. And now, if you've got rain forecast, maybe it pays to put it on ahead of that rain. Jump the gun, go a little early. Have that rain sprout the seed, but if you can control the timing of your moisture like with a sprinkler, sunlight is a bigger factor than moisture.

35:18 You know when you're going to get moisture, but you do know when you're going to get the sunlight. Yep. So I think beans are a little easier to tell the timing on that because it's still the same rules apply. Sunlight is still the most limiting factor and I would even contend it's even more so in beans.

35:38 A good thick bean soybean canopy is a tighter canopy than corn, especially if the beans are in narrow rows or drilled. And one thing backing up to the corn too, we referenced people going to 60 inch corn or 40 inch corn trying to get wider row corn to get more sunlight into their cover crops. That's a fascinating topic. There's a lot of guys trying some cool things.

36:02 Again, we'll have a full-blown webinar just on that topic this winter because it's one that shows some good promise, especially for the cattle guys. So it's a fascinating just to look at it and see agronomically what's going on there. We'll have a whole session on that in our next season.

36:20 But in beans, again, sunlight's a limiting factor. I like to get at least 10 to 15 percent of the plants starting to get their leaves turning yellow because what that means is when those leaves start turning yellow, probably within a week to ten days, you're going to start having those yellow leaves drop off and you'll have more leaves turn yellow.

36:41 And the goal is you want to get the seed to the ground before the leaves fall off because as the leaves fall off it makes a nice covering. And then you get a rain and that helps seal that moisture in. You can actually get some pretty nice stands that way.

36:59 But again, if you go too soon and those leaves aren't yellow and you get a rain, I guarantee you you'll get your seed to sprout but you'll have very little of it survive because there's very little sunlight that gets through a green leaf soybean canopy.

42:47 Stein Loggies field day last summer and they had a drone out there doing some cover crop seeding. So there's some promise there, it's just you know they can't—you're not going to put 60 pounds of cereal rye an acre on with a drone. You're going to be putting 8 to 10 pounds of a clover or batch mix or something like that onto the drone because they're limited in their payload to about 30, 35 pounds of seed before they have to come back and refill.

43:14 Now I was talking to one guy and he thinks what the future is going to hold is going to be a whole fleet of these so that one operator can be out in the field and he may have five or six of these drones. They're all programmed and so while one is coming back to refill the others are out in the field. And you get it set up in a rotation to where you're always refilling one and you've got the other four or five out seating. And then you can actually get some pretty good acres covered. But it burns through a lot of batteries. You gotta have a lot of batteries to carry that much payload and going back and forth.

43:48 And then the one on the bottom, this is kind of a fun one. It's called a robot. Again, it's very experimental. It's a single row applicator and that thing just sits there and trucks back and forth between the rows of the corn and is seeding. And obviously there's a lot of terrain type issues, you know, with some of the ravines and stuff that some of you guys have. This thing would just get buried and you'd never find it. But you know people are experimenting with this type of thing and if they can prove the concept and they can take some of what they learned and put it into other tools, there can be some pretty effective seating.

44:24 This is a really nice seating of what guys have found from different types of aerial seating. I mean, this is perfect. Of course, you know, we showed the best pictures, but this is really nice, you know, a nice stand of cover crops coming up in that corn. If it always looked like this, man, we'd do that every year. But we have had issues in the past when we've gone with broadcasting on top of the ground ahead of harvest. And we think this is one of the culprits right here. So Dale, why don't you just quickly explain why this is an issue.

44:58 Well, the ecological niche that crickets fulfill in the ecosystem is they are seed eaters. They are grainivores and they also eat seedlings as they germinate. And I've had the experience of aerial seating into a field with a lot of mulch, no-till, a lot of good cover, a lot of biology out in the field, which is a good thing. Had a beautiful stand from an aerial seating, ran the pivot, got everything germinated, and every time I checked on it, it looked like I had less and less, less all the time.

45:44 And I was actually on the phone with one of my customers who is in their field seeing the exact same thing. And I looked and I saw movement out in front of me and it was crickets, waves of crickets. And so I asked him, I said, 'Hey, look out in front of you, do you see crickets?' He says, 'Now that you mention it, it looks like I'm hurting crickets.' And so if you look real close, the seed that the plants germinated, they were there, but they were just getting—the seedlings were getting nibbled right back down to the grain and then the grain itself was eaten. So crickets can cause some severe losses.

46:32 What to do about them? We're exploring. There are some baits that you can use and we're looking at the feasibility of co-applying some of the baits with seed. Of course, if you're spraying the insecticides, that'll take the cricket population out. But not a big fan of broadcast insecticides. If we can avoid it and do something more targeted that affects the crickets but not everything else, then that's the route we'd prefer to go.

47:07 Yeah, so Dale, we just need to genetically modify a cricket so it only eats Palmer amaranth seed and seedlings and we can turn those bad boys loose and make billions. Can we? Yes, we could until Palmer amaranth becomes a crop and then now they're a pest. And I'll take my chances on that.

47:29 Just a couple of other fun things to kind of finish off our session here. This is something that I got an email from the Practical Farmers of Iowa. They're a great group out of Iowa doing some really good work. They had sent this. Somebody has developed this. It's called the drill combine. But if you look at this, it's a combine but they've got drill units mounted both on the head and then back here on the back. And they've got a Montag box with kind of a blower unit on it. So they're actually drilling. This is not being broadcast. You can't see it very well. There's a cool video I can send you if you want. But these are actual drill units that they can hydraulically lift up and down. So they're going through the field, they're actually getting the seed into the ground.

48:16 And then all the chaff back behind here is covering it up so it's a really cool system. I don't know how practical or feasible it is, it's a prototype. They're just doing a proofing concept and they'll see what they can learn and see if they can incorporate that into other things.

48:32 And there's others. So this is Gambia is making a system on a combine that goes like this and this is just surface broadcasting it. It's blowing it on the ground, but you're getting it applied at the same time that you're harvesting your crop, which from a labor standpoint is a really good thing so it's at least getting done. And then all of the residue from the combine is covering it up, but you're still dependent upon a rain to get it up. So some pretty innovative options going on there.

49:06 And then of course there's box drills and there's air seeders that you can come in after harvest and do it. We do a lot of this one. One of the biggest drawbacks of this is that by running these machines through there after harvest it cuts a lot of your residue loose. And if you get a big wind in the fall before you get much cover crop growth you can get a lot of your trash blowing around because that drill is going to loosen things up. It cuts the residue, it sizes it, it kind of fluffs up all the leaves that have fallen off and you can get quite a bit of blowing.

49:42 So there's drawbacks and there's benefits to each one of those. I just want to finish out. I want to leave a few minutes for questions. I want to finish out with just showing why would you do this, why is it important to do this. These are just some pictures from a few years ago here on our farm.

50:00 This is alfalfa rye. This was planted September 20th in the bean stubble. We grazed this in the early spring and then this has soybeans drilled in it on May 20th. And this actually was not even, we didn't have a roller at the time. This is just what smashed down is from the tractor tires and from the drill.

50:23 Then let's say this is even grazed. We had some in the same field that we didn't graze. That's what it looked like trampled down pretty good by the cattle and by the drill and by the tractor. A close-up picture you can see no soil whatsoever, which is a good thing, a very good thing. And so what it looks like is you just have a beautiful, this is where the tractor tires ran over it and if you had an actual roller the whole field would look like that.

50:47 This is where it was not grazed much. Much healthier rye. And but we had to get that smashed down so I think we did run like a stock chopper over it just to try to knock that down. But the whole point of doing this is that when your beans are growing like this, we still had complete ground cover from that rye. And that's why you don't want to mow it. You want to drill it or lay it down with a roller so it stays long.

51:14 These were beans that had no chemicals, no herbicide sprayed on them whatsoever. Very, very clean because we just never gave those weeds a chance. And just if you think that we're such good farmers that we didn't have weed pressure, I turned right around from where I took that first picture. I turned around, this is the end row where there's much more weed pressure. And the rye is never as good on the ends. There was plenty of pigweed and waterhemp and amaranth out there.

51:40 So that shows you how much control of weeds you can get. That's just one benefit of getting those covers out there. I say Dale we'll probably do a webinar this winter just on weed control, benefits of cover crops. We'll do a webinar on the hairy vetch and the nitrogen fixing potential. So I just wanted to kind of leave you with those pictures because this is why you want to do it. This is why you invest the money into seed and into equipment into labor to get that cover crop out there because the benefits come that next spring and it comes in the form of weed control.

52:16 And it can come in the form of biological activity and it comes in the form of producing nitrogen. So there's a lot of benefits but there's a lot of challenges and management considerations to get there as well. So Noah I'm going to stop it right there and let's see what we got for questions to finish us off here.

52:37 Okay, first question is there a cash crop that is negatively affected by the allelopathic properties of rye? I would say sorghum appears to be affected more than, I mean of our common agronomic crops. I know there are some, many vegetable crops that can be negatively impacted. Tomato seedlings seem to be very strongly affected, but tomato transplants not so much. As a general rule, the smaller the seed, the more likely it will be affected by allelopathic effects.

53:16 Yeah and I think some of that has to do with planting depth. You know your seeds you can plant deeper. The allopathic compounds are water soluble, will move with the wetting front. So the deeper you plant, the less likelihood you are to have an issue. Of course, small seeds you plant shallow, but sorghum seems to be impacted much more than corn. Corn seems to be less of an allelopathy and more of a nitrogen issue or a fusarium issue.

53:48 Yeah, the way soybeans I think are stimulated by rye residue. Yeah, and tying up that nitrogen early on helps the beans, it forces them to nodulate early too. Yeah, now sometimes, and I had this question this week, someone sent me pictures and they said these soybeans that I planted in rye don't, they look awful, they're yellow. I said that's actually a good thing because what's happening—and he had soybeans growing in tilled ground right next to it that looked green and beautiful. I said what's happening is that tillage trip mineralized nitrogen, those soybeans are using that nitrogen. They're not nodulating, they're not working. Over here in the rye, they ran out of nitrogen. They became nitrogen deficient. The beans have to get nitrogen deficient to trigger nodulation. Those beans are working for a living. Yep, and just like having kids that work for a living early on, they will be more successful later on. So make your beans work early and often.

54:59 From Tim: What is the best cover crop for grazing and controlling weeds? Well Tim, it's obviously the cover crop that we sold you and you've got growing in your fields. [Laughter] You know, I mean that really depends. It's very situational. When are you planting? What weeds do you have? Are you—what's your next crop? What's the next crop? So just there's a ton of variables. You know, the easy answer is cereal rye. Nothing is better at suppressing winter annuals from growing in the spring than cereal rye, and partially it's allelopathic, but it's partially because rye just grows faster and earlier than anything else. And I tell people this all the time: that mare's tail used to be one of the biggest weed problems we had on our farm. Once we started using cereal rye, you know, you can control literally 98, 99 percent of mare's tail with cereal rye, and it doesn't even have to be all that thick. It's just very effective at suppressing that early spring growth.

56:06 Now pigweed and amaranth, later in the season, you know, as it decomposes—as the rye decomposes, it becomes less and less effective. So throughout the summer, a thick crop of sorghum is very effective. We are having field days, and this would be very interesting if you're interested in weed control, August 5th and 6th. We're having field days here at our farm. We've got over 100 different cover crops planted for you to look at, and we have them all in monoculture strips. And what we're doing is we put a fence up through the middle of it, and we're doing some weeding just so you can see some of the cover crops on the front side of that fence. And on the back side of the fence, we're doing no mechanical weeding or spraying or anything at all. It's you're going to see a true picture of what kind of weed suppression the cover crop will give. Some of them are absolutely horrible, you can't even see the cover crop. Others are fantastic—there's hardly any weeds there at all. So if that's of interest to you, sign up for that. We'll have that on our website. We'll be emailing it out several times between now and then. It's a free deal. We're doing the same thing both days, so you don't come for both days, you come for one or the other. We'll be doing the same crop tours. We'll be looking at the field, the hairy vetch that we rolled down and we direct planted sunflowers and corn into. It's going to be a great day, free lunch—the gals are going to cook us up some good food. So sign up, come to that. We'll look at all kinds of cover crops, and we'll specifically be looking at how well they suppress weeds.

57:48 And I think another thing is that the more diverse the cover crop mix, the fewer weed issues you have. If you have one thing that I've become very fond of putting in mixes is to always have something that vines—a vining crop, because it will find the gaps in the canopy where sunlight is hitting the ground and providing an opportunity for weeds to grow. So for example, if you have sorghum sudangrass and cowpeas growing together, you're going to have fewer weeds than a sorghum sudangrass by itself. Yeah, cowpeas are going to fill in the gaps because they're a vining crop. So having both tall crops, vining crops, crops that hug the ground.

58:42 Mike McDonald asks: Have you seen any perennial cover crop that works with soybeans so that a herbicide does not terminate the cover crop, yet works with the beans? RMA rules appear to now.

58:54 Allow this. You know there's a lot of people looking at this mainly in corn because again, with beans the problem with beans is there's a very tight canopy and maybe if you do 30 inch row beans you can keep your perennials alive. Perennials can go semi-dormant but they still have to have some sunlight and so, you know, maybe a tight growing clover or real low growing grass. I know that there is some good research being done by the Land Institute on some perennial ground covers so there's going to be better and better information coming out. But most, you know Dale, when we were in Indiana, most of the perennials that they were doing were pretty much going back into corn and then I would imagine a lot of those perennials kind of died off in the soybean year.

59:50 Yeah, and it might have to be if you want that system that you go to a wider row spacing, you know, and think why do we grow soybeans in the row spacing we do. A lot of it is weed control purposes, you know, we try to get a canopy. Well, you know, I think some of the things like that, say Jason Mock was doing, he's growing soybeans in pretty wide rows and getting two years ago he had 108 bushel soybeans and they were twin rows 20 inches apart and then those twin rows were on 60 inch centers away from each other. And he got 108 bushels but he's getting sunlight over the entire bean plant. He has weed control in between from the wheat so maybe we start rethinking if we want to do the perennial cover that is herbicide suppressed, maybe we start rethinking our row space compared to what we've thought in the past.

1:00:56 Yeah, there's good people looking at that so I think we'll see a lot of good information come out the next few years about that. I'm convinced. All right, it's 6:30 but I would be remiss if I did not at least get to Steve Tucker's question here: what cover crops are most water use efficient and drought tolerant?

1:01:21 I think as far as water use efficiency, the ones that make the most biomass per inch of water used, I think it's really hard to beat sorghum sudan, especially a photoperiod sensitive sorghum sudan. As far as drought tolerant, never rains there, living in the desert, Steve. As far as drought tolerance, some of the lower moisture use crops, proso millet. I don't know if I'd really call proso millet a cover crop but some of the millets can get by on very little moisture. Among the legumes, guar water would be really good. Guar will survive on very little moisture.

1:02:18 I found that sun hemp, kind of like sedan, it may not be able to grow on as little moisture as guar but it creates a lot of biomass per unit of moisture. It's really done well in a lot farther west than I ever thought it would. Yeah, and then on the cool season, you know, again it's probably hard to beat rye. You know, rye just, it's a survivor. It's going to produce something out of very little and so that would definitely be the base of a cool season really drought tolerant mix I think.

1:02:59 Yeah, it's surprising how well some of the vine crops have done on limited moisture. Some of our observations this year, you know, the whole western tier of the plant, the Great Plains region, the short grass areas had horrible drought over most of the area and it's amazing how well the vine crops like pumpkins, watermelons and so forth, how well they've fared on very little moisture.

1:03:30 Yeah, they're up and comers to keep an eye on. All right, well thank you guys for tuning in tonight and for all the past webinars I do have this one recorded so it will be posted on the website and on YouTube so when you get bored you can go ahead and binge all 16 of these. Thank you Keith and Dale for all of your time and I guess you guys have any final words before we sign off for the day.

1:03:57 You know, it's we were a little hesitant about starting these because we just didn't know what kind of response we'd get or how much time it would take. It's been a lot of fun to do. It's been enjoyable interacting with people even though it's somewhat virtual so I've enjoyed it and it'll be nice to have a little bit of a break but we'll certainly be looking forward to firing back up. I don't know what do you think Noah? Probably in October sometime but let some of the harvest get done and but we'll start back up again and like say we've got a lot of ideas for future ones and please if you have ideas of what you'd like to hear, please submit them.

1:04:39 Yeah, I'll shout out to Mike McDonald, he sent me an extensive list. We've already got the first four to five weeks covered. What a surprise coming from Mike. We really appreciate Mike. Thank you Mike.

1:04:55 All right, we'll see you guys in the fall then. Thank you Dale, thanks Keith. Yeah, thanks everybody, thanks everybody.