SmartMix 5.0 Calculator Part 2: Build Your Mix and See Real Costs

0:00 [Music]

0:04 Completed step one we can move on to step two. On this screen you see all of the information in a nice summary format that you selected in part one. Over here on the right hand side you can see all the details. Here's our what we're calling our mix sample mix for summer grazing. We've got a hundred acres in Hastings Nebraska. It's an annuals drill door. Next crop is Milo. There's a growing period and then this will be populated as we build things.

0:32 One of the really nice features about the smart mix calculator is that you get immediate feedback on what this mix is gonna cost you. So right now it's telling me this mix is costing me zero dollars because I haven't done anything yet. I haven't selected any species, but as we put things into the system you can see this cost portion change, and it's really important because the cost is a very important feature of having a good mix.

0:56 Up here here's three goals that I selected: supplemental grazing, provide lasting residue and compaction break. Right now they're all set at zero because again I haven't selected anything from the selection screen.

1:10 At the bottom we have our C2N ratio. I'll talk later about what carbon-to-nitrogen ratio is, but it will give you an indication of how soft or in other words how fast your residue is going to decompose or how hard, how long that residue is gonna stick around. And so I'll talk later about C2N ratio and where we really want to see that. It also has a slider scale here for the full rate that we want to try to accomplish and we really want to shoot.

1:41 For about a hundred and twenty five percent when you're putting together these diverse mixes, there's a couple ways that you can look at things. You can look at pounds per acre, you can look at seeds per acre, but really either one of those we feel is not a really strong way to determine how much seed you need when doing these diverse mixes. So we've come up with the concept of what we call percentage of a full rate, and what it does is it takes what we would normally consider a full rate of each individual species and then whatever you select, so whatever you select is gonna be the percentage. So for example if cowpeas takes 50 pounds for a full rate and you choose 10 pounds to put in your mix, then 10 into 50 is 20%, and that's how much of that full rate it's gonna be. And so then it the program adds all those up and it tells you kind of where you're at. We want to shoot for around 125, or if you're going to do a grazing mix or you want really diverse mix, we can go up as high as 150 to 200.

2:44 At the very bottom the mix affect potential ratings, we have a scale for nitrogen, for grazing, for drought, for frost tolerance. This is how well it will survive a first frost. Winter hardiness is how well it will do. Your mix is projected to overwinter in the particular Plant Hardiness zone that you're at. We have a score for diversity and then also for salinity tolerance, and as we add our species on here, you'll see all of these things change. It's very interactive, all these things change, and the cool thing with this is you can go back and you can change what you have in your mix, you can change the amount that you have in the mix, and as—

3:22 You change things you can see how it affects the scores that you have for your goals. You can see how that a change changes your carbon nitrogen ratio. You can see how it changes the percentage of your full rate and then also your nitrogen fixing and all these others. So it's kind of cool to go in there and just kind of play around, change the species, do a lot of different what-if scenarios and look at how it affects not only your goals and the mix of facts but also the price is very important as well. So you can kind of play around with it and do a lot of what-if scenarios.

3:54 One last thing that I want to talk about on this particular screen before we actually go into adding species is this a feature right here called Smart Mix auto-adjust and it by default it is on. And what that's going to do is as you add species to your mix the program is automatically going to adjust the seeding rate per acre for each of the species that you have selected and it's always going to keep your mix at 125 percent of a full rate. Now it's what I recommend people to do is that you turn the on as you build your mix. Once you kind of get all the species in that you want you can turn it off and then you can manually change things and I'll show you how to do that because you may want to emphasize some of the grasses more than you do some of the brassicas and it's particularly in a grazing mix. So I'm gonna leave it on and as we build our mix it will automatically tell me how many pounds per acre of each thing that we want to put in there but then when we get all the species in we're gonna turn

4:54 That off and we'll kind of tweak it around and play with it a little bit. So lots of information here. I haven't even added anything yet, but just take some time when you build your first mix. Just take some time to familiarize yourself with all these screens.

5:06 So the next step that we're going to do after we get kind of familiar with this is we need to add some species to this to see what we actually got going on here. So to start that we're going to click this button right here that says add species. And when we click on this, it's going to bring up a number of different species that we have available and that we sell. And each one of them has gone through and based on the goals that you've given, the time frame that you're planting, the next crop that will follow this cover crop, and your geography, it's giving each one of those a score or a rating.

5:42 So we have the ones that are in the excellent category, we've got ones that are in the good category, we've got some that are considered marginal, and some that are considered pretty risky. And those scores, you know, don't take these as gospel truth. These are all based on our recommendations. And because we're trying to spread this out over such a wide geography, you know, sometimes they're not exactly accurate. So generally if you pick something that's in the excellent or the good category, you're going to be in pretty good shape. Once in a while there's some things down in the marginal category that maybe shouldn't be, but for right now it's the best that we have. And you can see that almost everything is either excellent or good.

6:22 And that's generally what you'll see when you're planting, you know, kind of in the middle of the year because all the warm season things are gonna be up in the excellent category. Some of the cool season things are still good because, you know, they'll still work and they'll still grow. As you get either earlier in the year or later, you'll see more and more of those things push down to the marginal or risky category.

6:43 So we're just gonna kind of work within the excellent category here. I've got a number of legumes that are rated as excellent, we've got a number of grasses, we've got one Brassica and a couple broad leaves. So I know that I want to do a grazing mix, so I'm gonna come in here and I'm gonna say yeah I want to do some cow peas. We know we want some Sun Hemp. We've seen that work pretty well in the past. We will put in some Austrian winter peas as well. I want to do some of the sweet forever Brown Midrib.

7:17 Maybe you don't know what this is, and as you hold your mouse over it you'll see the question mark there, and it just tells you what the full name of that is. Now, eventually we'll have a link here to where it will take you to a page that explains more about that. You'll be able to get to that to this next page right now, but for right now you can't access that from here. So we're gonna do some sweet forever. I also want a little bit of pearl millet in there. Under the Brassica, the only one that's rated excellent is Florida broad leaf mustard, mainly because it is a little more heat tolerant than some of the other things. But I know that I want some collards and maybe some turnips.

7:54 They're gonna be listed here under the good category so I'm just gonna click on that and I'm gonna put some collards in and some turnips in and I got some buckwheat here so that gives me eight species. It tells me right here how many species I've got in my mix so I'm gonna start with that and I'm gonna see where I'm at and then we'll come back later and we can add some additional things. So I'm going to click on where it says add eight to the mix and the program is going to now populate with all eight of those things that I have chosen.

8:26 Because I had smart mix Ottawa just turned on, it has automatically assigned each one of these 16 percent of the full seeding rate is what it's telling me here, and you can tell over here on the left-hand side under cowpeas. I'll just kind of show you what this means here. WSB means this is a warm season broadleaf plant. Full 51, that means a seeding rate of cowpeas is 51 pounds. 4.1 K per pound means there's 4100 seeds per pound on average on cowpeas and they cost 80 cents a pound. So all that information is going to be underneath each one of these species that I've selected. So you can see the full seeding rates of each one of these and you can see the cost and you can see the seed size as well. So that information is all there.

9:18 One additional piece of information that I was talking about earlier that is not on that first initial screen but if you say you know I don't really know very much about cowpeas, I'd like to learn more, there's a little information icon right here and you can click on that and it's gonna

9:34 Come up tell you it's a warm season broadly, but if you click on the button it says learn more, you can click on that. It's going to take you to a page on our website that's going to tell you all about cow peas. You can learn more about them. There's all these different tabs about how you use them, advantages, disadvantages, so forth and so on.

9:51 Eventually we're going to also have a bunch of different videos that we've made linking that back to this page. So for right now you can click on an information icon, it will take you to a page where you can learn more about that particular species.

10:04 The pounds per acre that the program has selected, it's just simply 16% of the full rate on each one of these. So I've got 8 pounds of cow peas, 2.94 pounds of sun hemp, and you can see as we go on down through the list that's what it's selected. Just under a pound of turnips, 1.31 pounds of collards, etc. Four, five, almost five pounds of buckwheat.

10:29 I go over here and I look at my price. I can see right now that this mix is going to cost me 98 cents a pound or 32 dollars and 50 cents an acre. And I can further see that of that cost, 29.78 per acre is seed, a dollar seven is an inoculant application, and then there's a mixing charge in there as well. So it always breaks out that cost for seed, inoculant, mixing, and if you chose 50-pound bags as your bagging option it would show that there as well.

10:59 So again, it's very important that as you design this mix that you try to stay within the budget that you've kind of set for.

12:52 Them are going to overwinter. It's pretty good diversity score, eighty-three percent out of a hundred on diversity, and it's just kind of a little above average on salinity. So I've got all these different things, and now what I can do is I can change anything I want to. Now if I wanted to change, let's say for example I want to add another species. I forgot that I want some sunflowers and I want some okra in here because I want to see if I can get my compaction breaking score up a little higher than eighty.

13:20 So I can come in here, I could click my add species button again. I can come over here and I can find okra right there, and I think sunflowers is probably on the first screen, so we're gonna click that and we're gonna add those two things to my mix.

13:41 Now okay, so I added those things in there. It's changed everything now to thirteen percent of a full rate. It didn't really help my compaction score that much, but it did take my supplemental grazing from a ninety percent up to one hundred percent because sunflowers and okra can both be pretty decent grazing plants. It actually lowered my cost per acre over here because it took away from some of the more expensive things and put in some less expensive things. So as you add things, you'll see that cost per acre kind of go up and down a little bit.

14:08 So now at this point, if I wanted to change, right now I only have three pounds of sorghum and two pounds of millet, and I know that I want that to be a little bit higher. So I'm gonna turn the smart mix auto-adjust. I'm just gonna simply turn that off. It doesn't change anything initially, but what it allows me to do

14:28 Now is I can come in here and I can say okay I want, I know I want seven pounds of that sorghum and I want to have, we're gonna do four pounds of pearl millet. So we can change that. Now what it does, it doesn't change anything else, but you can see now my percentage of a full rate is 158 and I'm not afraid to push 150 to 160 on a good grazing mix. I think that's okay, that's appropriate because we know that the cattle are going to be eating some of that, so we need to push that a little bit higher than if it was just simply a cover crop mix. But now my cost per acre is 34 dollars.

15:10 I might want to cheapen that up just a little bit so I can come over here and I can look to see well, here's my cost per acre of each one of these species and I might say well, you know, I'm gonna trim this sunhemp down to just two pounds, the cow peas I'm gonna take down two to five. And just simply by doing a few of those little changes and tweaks, I can get my cost back down to that $32 range, which is kind of about where I wanted it, where I thought it should be. So those are all some of the different things that you can do on this. Again, you can come in here, you can edit your details, you can change how many acres you have, you can change how it's packaged, how it's drilled, different things like that. So lots of flexibility, lots of things that you can change here.

15:57 I do want to just one last thing. I want to show you on this screen before we go on to the completion screen. I'm gonna turn the auto adjust back on because I want to show you what that irrigation feature will do. So we're gonna turn that back on.

16:14 It doesn't change my numbers. Well I guess it just did. It changed my numbers back to what the auto adjust would put on, but if you look right now, Mike, my cowpea piece is 6.63, my sunhemp is 2.39. If you kind of remember those numbers, a little over six and a little over two.

16:33 I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna edit my details, go back to my first screen here, and I'm gonna tell the program, I'm gonna tell Smart Mix, that I'm really concerned about how dry it is and I think I'm going to be five inches below normal in my precipitation. So I'm just going to tell it irrigation is negative five. So I click continue, I go back to the screen, and now what it's done is it's automatically gone in and it's adjusted all of the seeding rates based on drier weather. Typically in a drought we would have less moisture, so we would probably want to plant less seed. So it's took my recommendation for cowpeas from a little over six, now it's five. Sunhemp was a little bit over two, now it's one point eight. So it's reduced all of these proportionately based on the fact that I told it that I think I'm going to be in a dry period.

17:26 It's also taking my cost down where it was 32 dollars an acre, now it's twenty-one dollars an acre. So we can kind of tweak that a little bit. You can go back. You know, conversely, we could edit these details again. We can say, you know what, I've been blessed and I've got more rain than normal. I'm gonna tell it I've got four inches of irrigation water. Even if you're not irrigated, if you think you're in a wet spot or maybe you are irrigated, you can put that in and again you can go.

17:56 Back and the program will take that into consideration. So now our copies instead of being a little over six we're almost eight and our son ham is almost three. Again it's cotton taking our cost up a little bit because the seeding rate is higher but the yield potential on this is higher as well.

18:12 Now these are only going to change automatically like this if you have the auto adjust turned on. If this auto adjust is turned off you would see the full rate of recommendation. You would see this change — remember it was 51 on cowpeas initially, now it's 61 because of that extra water that we're telling the program that this crop is going to get or hopefully get.

18:37 So you can kind of tweak that around and you can see how that changes based on either a positive irrigation or negative irrigation. And that's kind of a cool feature that you can do.

18:46 So lots of different things you can always go in — you can delete species. If you want to delete a species just simply click on this X right here. So let's just say we decided we didn't want okra, so we just click on that right there, takes the okra right out. And if again if smart mix and auto adjust is on, it will adjust all the other rates to compensate for taking that okra out.

19:10 And if we wanted to manually set our rates we would just turn smart mix off. So you can look at the scores that we have down here for nitrogen for grazing, and it's just fun to sit around and change the species, change your seeding rates and see how all the different charts and all the different scores work as you add and subtract things.

19:30 So I'm going to wrap up this portion of the tutorial. We will come back and do another one that talks about.