Sorghum Sudan Genetics: Choosing the Right Variety for Your Operation

0:05 My name is Zach. I'm with Green Cover. I'm a sales rep. I live in southeast Kansas. Been at Green Cover for 5 years now. One of the fun parts of my job is I get to do most of the seed procurement. Anything that we're buying from other companies that comes clean, packaged, whatnot, is part of what I get to do. So one of the fun things that is tied into that is I get to meet people like Chris here. Chris is with Coffee Forages. He's a really fun guy to be around. Super intelligent when it comes to all things sorghums and sorghum sedans, which is why we have him here this morning.

0:42 We're going to go over all of the sorghums that we carry. Sorghum sedans and some hybrid pearl millet just so we can help to better understand some of these genetics and pass that along to our customers. So that when you're making cover crop mixes or looking for forages, like, well, I've got eight to choose from. What do I actually need? And Chris is going to help us break that down. But Chris, I'll let you introduce yourself and we'll get going.

1:05 Sure. Thanks, Zach. As he said, my name is Chris Leech. I'm with Coffee Forage Seed in Plut, Texas. Been here for quite some time. My grandpa grew for Coffee. My dad grew for Coffee. I grow for Coffee and work here as well. The company is owned by Carl Wllo. He bought it off of a researcher slash PhD slash melon breeder slash vegetable guy. Coffee Seed used to have a lot of different products and when Carl bought it in 1995 he had worked for Dr. Coffee, where the name came from, for quite some time and he focused on forage genetics and the vegetable seed business stayed with Dr. Coffee's daughter and that's now down in Poolville and its name is Will Hyde Seed. So if you're looking for some great garden seed or vegetable seed, you can look them up. But Coffee has a very long family history in the forages. There are very few companies still family owned and I'm proud to say that I still get to work at a family-owned company.

2:10 There has been so much genetic improvement in the last six years in sorghum sudans and millets. I think this is going to be a really important topic to cover. I mean we've had genetic refreshes just constantly. And as you've been to our nursery, you've seen the changes and the new stuff coming that is just revolutionary compared to some of the older standard hay grazers out there.

2:36 So, a lot. No, that sounds awesome. A lot to dive into today. I was really hoping that we were going to get some sorghum sedan watermelon hybrids, but it doesn't seem like. Yeah. You know what's cool is Dr. Coffee is one of the first guys that worked on things such as like seedless watermelons. And I remember as a kid coming to Coffee, we grew watermelon seed. That has to be the most disgusting agricultural operation. You know, you've got to let the watermelon rot in the field, right? And so once the flies are on it, then you go pick them up, you hand windrow these things, and your hands go through the bottom of these mushy melons. And you're just covered in rotten watermelons and flies. And if you would have told me as a 12-year-old that I'd be working at Coffee after doing that, I think I would have been like, nah, that's not my calling in life. But that's real world training.

3:31 Yeah. Every kid needs one of those jobs for a little while in this, right? Throwing hay bales, doing something productive. Yep. No, that's good. Well, so you made a good comment there. Hay grazer. That's a common term. We hear that all the time. But what I want to start with first is this. We get a customer will call in and they're like, 'Hey, I need some sedan grass.' And I'm like, 'Hold on.' Yeah. Do you want sedan grass or do you want sorghum sedan grass? I think the best place to start is like what is what is a sedan grass and then what is a sorghum sedan grass and how do you get there?

4:08 Yeah, it's actually cool. I didn't even realize we were going to talk about this, but I actually teach a history of forage breeding short course. And really there's some really cool history on where Sudan grasses actually came from. Obviously named after the country of Sudan in Africa. And in that time, British colonial rule across Africa was using horses kind of in the same fashion as the Pony Express to send messages through long distances. So you'd have these stations where people would resaddle a new fresh horse and keep riding. Well, each station had to grow hay for the horses. Well, they found a Sudan grass in Sudan and at a station and well there you go. You have a Sudan grass that was brought out of one of those British colonial stations and used to breed at experiment stations all over the world. And kind of interesting.

5:14 And if you're talking about sorghum Sudan grass, what you're doing is you're taking that Sudan grass as your male and you're taking a forage type sorghum and crossing those together. And then that's where you're getting the common hay grazer term or something of that nature depending on what you hear. But yeah, if a guy comes in and says, 'I want some sedan grass.' We have the same problem. Do you want straight sedan grass? Because I can guarantee you probably don't. You know, I mean, if you come to the nursery again, we can cut open some straight sedans, old-fashioned ones, and they're kind of hard as a rock.

5:57 Want some of this sedan grass because we have a less, you know, less of a problem with nitrates with it or something of that nature. And that's true. There were some older varieties. The other problem with sedan grass and production is the seed falls right out of the head in the wind. So true sedan grass production a lot of that was done in Southern California, Arizona and areas where there's not much of a breeze during the time that seed is ready. I tried to grow some sedan grass on about seven acres and I thought I would cut it with a little plot combine to harvest some males and one breeze later all the seeds fell out on the ground. So there's also there's a reason you don't see much straight sedan grass out there is it's a complete pain to deal with. It doesn't make much per acre. You have to debeard a lot of it and a lot of it goes in the trash out of the cleaners. So does it have its place? Yes. Is it commercially viable in large quantities? Probably not. So that's kind of the history of grass.

7:01 No, that was a real treat there. I didn't know we were going to get all that. So you so they took the sedan grass and the sorghums and crossed them and you said they made a hay grazer. Now how are you going that next step to get these products that we're using? Yeah. Any you could say that every one of these products is actually a hay grazer because technically it's the same thing. We've got a Sudan on the male. We've got a forage type sorghum on the female. But most guys when you talk about hay grazer, you're talking kind of about that first product we want to talk about that you guys have. The '70s was kind of 1970s when all this kind of came out. Everybody had a hay grazer. They were all genetically very closely related. There wasn't much selection to choose from and there was so many fly by night companies out there with just a Sudan and some sort of forage sorghum that were closely related. And all those companies are in the ditch now, right? I mean, there just was it's still a commodity product. There's not that much money in it. And frankly, from the producer side, from someone purchasing the seed, I don't know what you're getting out of it hardly anymore except maybe a more economical priced feed, but the digestibility is not there. And really, you're buying seed for the energy that the ruminant's going to produce. And so you're really not gaining much. Still a great ground cover, soil stabilization product, things of that nature. Good large web roots to bring up nutrients from down deep and pull them back up. Trying to stabilize soft dirt, things of that nature. But in terms of a product, I personally won't grow it on my farm. There's so much and like you asked if you compare it to the new stuff. It's like a Dodson pickup compared to a King Ranch, you know, with all the bells and whistles. There's just there's not much comparison there.

9:12 Sure. Sure. And then one thing here before we get into this first variety is this is a hybrid, not a GMO. Oh yeah. Huge difference. This is oldfashioned breeding, right? It's an art form. It's passed down from one breeder to the next. You can take all the classes in the world on it in school, but it's just not the same in the real world once you get out there. So Carl the only owner of coffee seed. I would say he's absorbed into the nursery 75% of his time. So yes, not a GMO. This is not some lab grown interesting project. These are all traditionally bred crossed forages. And so we might make 700 new millets a year from different lines. And then we're going to plant all of those new millets and we're going to decide what we like. And out of 700, you might only have two, you know. I mean, it's a lot of work, but it's true old-fashioned breeding.

10:17 Yeah, that's super interesting. I know when I was down in your nursery, just walking through there and all the bags on everything and just how everything was laid out so meticulously, it takes a lot of work to track all that. Sure. Yeah. And we also have a nursery in Puerto Rico. In fact, Fabian, our nursery manager, is down there right now. We do foundation increases. We do new crosses. Not that it's a copycat of the nursery here at home. It's not nearly as big, but we definitely try to get two to three turns in our genetic potential every year. So when most guys say, 'Hey, it took seven generations.' Well, it's really only three and a half years. When you look at it this way, it sounds cool. I've been working on it for seven generations, but it's not really that long. So yeah. No, that's cool. Well, I think that's a good transition there into this first product. So the first one we're going to talk about is our hay grazer. It's our conventional sorghum Sudan. We call it Super Cover because we like it. We like the name. It is a super cover. It does really well as a cover crop. It's pretty cheap. We talked about that kind of economical, fast growing, but it also makes pretty good forage in some aspects of that as well. Sure. So if you want to talk about some of the older traditional hay grazers, this would fit that category. The only difference is we do have a different male and so compared to a lot of the other economical products out there and that male is going to give us a more leafy product. So still is going to make some decent hay. I recommend this for in no better terms.

12:03 Mama cows. I don't recommend it for putting on any kind of weight gain, summer stocking type situations, grass-fed type situations. This is truly just holding the world together and making some room and fill. And if you are to look at data, there is a new way to measure and I really prefer this way of measurement for speaking to guys just on a beef term. There's pounds of beef produced by dry matter ton, right? And so if you look at some of the more economical products, you're looking at anywhere from maybe just 80 to 120 maximum if cut really young pounds of beef produced on a dry matter ton. And one just one more step up in a conventional and you can get way past 150. So you are talking about just a true rum and fill, a little higher in fiber. Not as digestible as some of the other products we're going to talk about, but definitely still a great product. Still move a lot of that seed, even worldwide. The Mediterranean still uses quite a bit of some of those products and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

13:23 That's really interesting. So yeah, we use this a lot in our we call them a cover crop style blends. Something where we're just looking for a fairly cheap, a lot of the cover crops if it's just a wide diverse blend. We don't need the flashy sorghum stand, the BMR period sensitive. This works really good in there. One thing that I've noticed was that the a decent seating rate of this stem is still pretty small. Like it's not making a great big stem. Yeah. And that's thanks in due to the grassy nature of Sudans and that pollinator that we use, the male line. Yes, a decent rate. Still going to get you a very fine stem. You're not going to leave a whole bunch of stuff left if you're feeding hay. They're going to pick it all up, you know.

14:11 Yep. Or residue for the next year. I would agree with that all day long. I will say this, if you are in a southern area, a con to it is it does not have a tolerance. That's one of the reasons it's more economical. There are other options that you guys handle that work better into the south. And that's, you know, aphid tolerance really only came out in full force, you know, six years ago or so. Not that the aphids haven't been here longer, but if you want to consider something that's truly aphid tolerant, not resistant, because that's a terrible way to phrase it, but truly aphid tolerant. About six ago, the first six years ago, the first generations came out. So let's hit on that just a little bit. This aphid tolerant versus aphid resistant. What is that difference? And what does tolerance mean? I think it's important to note that tolerance is it doesn't mean you won't see them. But they won't be reproducing in mass numbers. So they're still going to be blowing through your field, hitching a ride on the wind. They're going to land on a sorghum. They may feed a little bit. There might be a small colony. Most of the times they move off, and in a true aphid tolerant product, aphid resistance would basically mean that you don't see anything at all ever of the sugarcane aphid. And so that's not any kind of truth at all to that. I don't know of any researcher that truly understands why these products don't allow for the aphid to reproduce very quickly. So just kind of an interesting trait found in a couple of very old lines of sorghum that still around in people's breeding, and that's where all of the resistance came from or tolerance. Sorry. I actually use resistance. Yeah. In tolerance. Yeah. That's where all the tolerance came from. And that's all right. So I think that one pretty well, you know, gives us a brief overview of that super cover.

16:19 Sure. Let's move into the next step up, which is going to be a BMR. We call it cattle cover. It's BMR. What is the difference in a BMR versus a conventional? What does BMR stand for? Why would I want to use that as a producer? Sure. So the difference in a BMR versus a conventional is conventional mid ribs have been out forever, right? That's just a typical white mid rib. If you were to open up a leaf, that mid rib right in the middle that holds everything together, it's going to be white. If you cut the stock open it's going to be white. Now if it's a brown mid rib it's obviously a brown mid rib in the leaf, the stalk, anything like that, and the difference in those is the difference in lignin content, right? So lignin in a plant is basically like the 2x4s or the structural carbohydrate that holds everything together. The problem with that is ruminants and the flora and fauna in the rumen don't break down lignin as fast as they can cellulose and hemicellulose. So in a brown mid rib by decreasing your lignin or harder fiber percentage, your rumen is able to create more energy off of those products exponentially than a traditional conventional white mid rib.

17:39 There are multiple types of BMRs out there. There's a BMR 6, there's a BMR 12. And during research when the universities were figuring all this out, there were a couple other numbers as well. Traditionally, all you're going to find is a BMR 6 and a BMR 12 that's available for sale commercially. We at Coffey are only using a BMR 6. It's just kind of how we started. It's got traditionally it's a darker brown. It's easier to tell in the plant. I think the twelves have come a long way since then as well. They

18:11 They weren't as easy to tell that they were around mid rib in their first generation, but now they look a lot better. So I don't know if there's truly any difference between the BMR at this moment between 6 and 12, but we are on a six package.

18:29 Okay, so that would roll into our first pro of this product: it's BMR. It's got a higher digestibility. This one is probably personally my favorite sorghum Sudan that we carry. I feel like it kind of fits the niche of both—hey, I'm a guy that likes to put up hay, do a good job, fast growing product, have pretty nice quality hay, small stem. And this really has a wide leaf for how big the plant gets. This isn't a great big tall plant either, which I'm a fan of when I'm trying to put it up in hay. But give us some more characteristics that you see out of this plant as far as a pro goes.

19:14 And we're talking about cattle cover, right? Yep, sorry, I just want to make sure I didn't think we mentioned the name yet. Yeah, so cattle cover is actually interesting. It's one of our latest releases or genetic refreshes. And what we're really seeing is our larger leafed females are really carrying into these hybrids. And so what you're seeing on your side is even at any population, you're typically still going to have a wider, more digestible leaf than you would typically in a sorghum Sudan at the same population. And that wider leaf is also capturing more energy from the sun, converting it into energy and also to higher sugars in cattle cover.

19:54 Like we talked about earlier before we started recording, I just now started looking at some of the sugars on our new products and cattle cover is really far up there for a traditional sorghum Sudan that's a BMR. And what I mean by traditional is it's not photoperiod, and it is a BMR. So you know, six or seven foot kind of tops out the product. Mid bloom, even though it is a male sterile—it's not going to make any seed—mid bloom is right around 70 days for most of the world. And so a little longer than the traditional sorghum Sudan products that generally bloom in that 60 to 63 day range; we're going to add another week to 10 to 12 days on it based on the weather and day length of time. But yes, very digestible. I like it because when you're selling this product, it fits everything, right? For the most part, you can bail it, you can graze it, you can chop it, you can use balage, fresh chop—whatever you want to do with it, it's got a good fit. A lot of guys are going to bail it the first time, then graze it the second time around.

21:06 I do have a lot of guys starting to stockpile it in the winter. I'm not as familiar with some of those practices, but guys that want to grow it up and either swath graze it through the winter—very popular product for that as well. It maintains its digestibility throughout the entire growing season. These newer products don't lignify as easily as some of the older ones. So I'm pretty excited to see this even in other countries as well right now. That's super easy to use.

21:44 So we have talked about this a little bit in the past. You know, at one point there was some genetics floating around that were claiming to be like a dry stock genetic. Now this really doesn't claim that, but have you done any test research on that? That's a really good point. So you know, you get into the northern latitudes or further east or any areas in the world that are higher humidity and trying to make dry hay is always a challenge, right? We definitely don't have that challenge out here by any means. I would beg for rain at this point, but yes, obviously dry stock was a trait that came out quite a while ago and it was kind of an interesting trait. What we do find is that the digestibility on those are not as good as current or new products. However, just out of curiosity, we pulled our—we do have a lot of sweet sorghums and things we work on. So we do own some equipment to press sorghum stocks for syrup and things of that nature. And so we pulled those out into the nursery and pulled some dry stock products and pulled cattle cover and ran them both through the press and I can't find any difference.

22:57 We do not market this as a dry stock, but it is a very easy to dry down product for guys that are okay with that. So when you run it through a press, you're basically trying to measure how much moisture is in so much area of that stock, right? Okay, yep. That would be like you're running it through—so in our part of the world, we get 40 inches of rain in a year and we may have a hard time getting something put up because of the humidity. So it's essentially running it through a roller crimper. It's processing it. You're doing the same thing on your end with this press. Yeah, and that's another good topic: guys that haven't grown sorghum Sudans or just haven't in a while but are still running a conditioner that might not be the best. There's guys that'll call and be frustrated because they can't get their sorghum Sudan to dry down, but they're running either the impeller style, which is more for other grasses, or sometimes the rubber ones aren't even that great. The best option still is the steel conditioning rolls and really getting a good crack on that.

24:07 Yeah, so ours has rubber rolls. I'm kind of an equipment geek, I guess I would say. I've watched every YouTube tutorial or everything like that on it. And what's crazy is there's not a lot of difference between your swather mower conditioners and like your planter. You need to adjust those things based on your condition and what you're doing. It's not a one-size-fits-all type of deal. That's probably a conversation for another day, but I do have one more question on this. Male sterile, you mentioned that. What does that mean and how does that affect the feed value of this product?

24:43 There's so many things that we can talk about when it gets into male sterility. Our male sterile products obviously do not shed pollen, right? However, if pollen from a neighbor's field blows into our product, they will set seed, but they themselves are not going to be shedding pollen. And it's great for multiple reasons, especially on the cover crop side. Let's say you're not even grazing one of these, but you're a rowcrop farmer and the next year you don't want to fight sorghum sudan as a volunteer crop from your cover crop from the year before. Fantastic, right? You're not going to get that 500 lb an acre of sorghum sudan grass coming up.

25:28 It looks like a chiaped. I do get guys that quickly change to a male sterile product that are rowcrop guys, not wanting to fight the sorghum seed in the ground as a volunteer. Yeah, absolutely. The organic guys, it's a big point for them growing conventional crops. I have for years I've said that I think a volunteer sorghum sudan turns into shattercane. I'm sure that's not the case, spreading that rumor.

25:58 Yeah, let's not spread that. It sure looks and feels like it at times. It does. When you get a thick amount of that stuff to come up, it can look like it. But yeah, it's not that it's hard to kill, but it's just one other thing for your row crops to fight. And in this day and age, we don't have the margin in this to be spending any more money on stuff.

26:21 Yep. Absolutely. When it comes to the nutrition side of things, your plant's going to start using sugars and other nutrients to fill that seed if it wasn't a male sterile. So by being a male sterile, you're going to keep all of that down in the leaves and the stalk and other portions of the plant, where your rumen flora and fauna can break that down and keep that energy for you. Because basically, we all know that sorghum seeds, whether it be sorghum sudan, sorghum, unprocessed by any means or grazed on like in this situation or in a hay, your ruminant's not really going to be able to access any of that energy very well. And so it's better to just keep that in the fiber itself, in the digestible fiber. So that's kind of our goal.

27:10 A lot of nutritionists call us and that's their hopes, that most of our products will stay in a male sterile fashion as we move into the future. They just see a lot of good benefits to that, especially a lot of these dairy nutritionists. There aren't as many beef nutritionists floating out there that we talk to. But dairy wise, man, it's a big push right now for male sterility, higher sugar content. And on a test, what you need to look for is water soluble carbohydrates. That's your sugars. There is an ESC, that's the older way to look for sugars, ethanol soluble carbohydrates, but probably a little truer to use the WSC, the water soluble carbs. So if you're looking for sugars in your forage test, that's where you're going to look for them on your test.

28:07 So that's a really good point. And with your nutritional background, explain just briefly the difference between energy and protein.

28:16 Man, you know, a lot of guys call and they're like, 'Hey, what kind of protein levels in your sorghum sudan?' And I just want to, I don't know how many times I'm like shaking them through the phone. You know, you're not planting this for protein at all. And you know, even my father-in-law and some of the oldtime ranchers, people of that nature are just really hung up on protein because when you go to the feed store, what do you ask for? You ask 'What's the protein in this cube or cake or whatever you want to call it?'

28:46 And that is not our goal here. Our goal is looking at a few different things on a nutritional test. Your NDFD30 is very important. Some of the newer nutritionists are looking at total tract NDFD. And so what we're trying to gauge is how digestible is our fiber because that's where the energy is really coming from. Protein per se in a sorghum sudan can be 8 to 12. I mean, you're just kind of floating in that range. And if we want to talk about protein, we'll bring that up in the millets later because that's really where their bang up deal for protein. But back to sorghum sudan, man, we're looking for digestible energy for a healthy rumen.

29:32 Yep. Absolutely agree with that. Yeah, that's and there's a lot of good and we can talk about it in a little bit with the grass finishing side of it with the sugars in a lot of these plants versus that protein-based diet. But we better keep going on here. We may have a three-hour video and people will be wondering what we're right. Yeah, yeah. Well, they asked me earlier that if they want, should they bring lunch in here for it? I said no. I don't want to eat in front of them.

30:00 So we better hurry up to get you to lunch. The next one we're going to talk about is endurance, which is a BMR and a rakitic dwarf, and a BMR6 aphit tolerant. It is not male sterile though it does make a cream colored grain head. This has been around, I'm going to say six years in commercial production. Endurance has some huge leaves, especially in lower populations, kind of our first push in a genetic refresh for extreme digestibility. I have a lot of guys using this also as a quick silage hybrid. And so many times a traditional forage sorghum is not as fast as it needs to be for certain growing areas of the US, or maybe you want to plant it after you cut, you know, winter wheat in the summer, come back in in July. You're going to bloom in 63 days and have a seed set shortly thereafter and you can cut that as a quick forage sorghum.

31:09 And the best thing, you know, as you go into northern areas, you get into some really windy conditions later into the year, being so short, a lot of guys take this north because of the standability is fantastic on it. Whether it's in a blend with millet or other things from you guys or by itself, it can be a standalone product and it's awesome in a blend as well. Sometimes let's say you've got just some single plants out there by themselves. The leaves can get, I mean they're banana size, I mean they're huge corn-shaped leaves, which is leading to that higher digestibility that we have. I wouldn't say it doesn't have the extreme sugar levels as the newer products, but it's very good in digestibility.

31:59 I've had a lot of people that have grown this and use this for their hay variety instead of cattle cover. And it does work good. The rakitic dwarf is an enticing genetic because obviously you're shrinking your stem when you're putting it in that plant, but it's also not necessarily shrinking your yield though. You know, going to countries like Mexico and to the south, people just want to plant the tallest thing. I mean, we can breed the ugliest, tallest, junkiest stuff and that's what people will plant because it's taller than their neighbors. It's just a measuring contest at this point. But yeah, Briketic dwarfs typically you're not going to see too much if any of a yield drag compared to some of the other varieties. Just depends on what your outcome, what your final use is for it. But yeah, tonnage is still great on it.

32:54 There are guys that grow it all the way to the Canadian border and still get two cuttings off of it or, you know, one dry hay and a chop or, you know, mix and match on that thing. But yeah, it's a fantastic product for blends because it doesn't get so tall and then shave stuff out, so always a good fit there. And then we'll throw a little bit of a foreshadowing into probably, you know, my favorite's cattle cover, but green cover's favorites coming up here in a few. And I think that it's starting to replace this endurance a little bit. I think so. Well, I mean it's, depending on which one we're going to talk about next, it's got a good fit to cover a lot of different areas.

33:34 So we'll talk about Solar Max PPS next and then we'll get into the other. SolarMax is for what you called earlier a conventional sorghum sedan that's also a PPS. Explain to us what a PPS is, why maybe it might be a little bit more expensive, but also why it's pretty good. Yeah, let's talk about the benefits of photo period and the dos and don'ts real quick.

34:00 Photo period sensitivity in sorghums is a native trait. Now a lot of that was bred out back in the day to bring things down to a shorter height. Many sorghums come from a subtropical climate zone and so a lot of them are photo period by nature and they can turn into some monsters. If you look at some world sorghum collection items, I mean there are some really tough products out there, lines not hybrids, but a lot of the photo period sensitivity was bred out of stuff and then it was brought back in the hay grazer day, right? And then that was the next cool icing on the cake. And what we're doing with photo period sensitivity is adding tonnage.

34:51 Photo period sensitivity, meaning you have to plant the product after your day length is 12 hours and 20 minutes and getting longer. I tell guys 12 and a half hours, though, because if you sit there and you're looking at your weather app every day and it tells you exactly 12 hours and 30 minutes, but it's cloudy for five days or a week, you've mucked up the whole thing, right? And the problem with that is what happens is if you plant it ahead of that, it's just going to come up and act like a regular hay grazer because it assumes that it's fall and it's time to make a head and complete its life cycle. So wait till you're 12 and a half hours or longer in day length and then plant this product and it's not going to head out until the fall until you get less than 12 hours and 20 minutes and even then it's kind of slow to head out.

35:46 Solar Max is incredible in tonnage. We use it locally for beef cow hay for mama cows. It's on a newer female than it traditionally was. So we've added apha tolerance and it also has male sterility as well if you live in an area far enough south that you can actually get ahead out and make some seed, which very few of us live that far south. But yeah, that is an added icing on the top of that. Just to try to give you an idea of the amount of hay.

36:21 You can make in one season long cutting. My neighbor put some on a pivot with decent water last year and he called really griping me out and I thought, 'Oh man, what did I do wrong? I thought that was the right product' and really he was griping me out on the freight bill because he made so much hay you had to haul it off to sell other people. So nine and a half, 10 bales an acre of a 6ft bale and he made a lot of dry hay. Yeah, fantastic product.

36:55 And why you need the aphid tolerance in a photoperiod is you're talking about a plant that can get 10, 12ft tall if you just let it do its thing all summer. There's no way you can control aphids in that dense of a canopy. I mean, you can kind of run a plane over it with high gallons and maybe nuke some aphids up top, but it really you're not going to kill those aphids in the base. And so you need the aphid tolerance in a photoperiod product.

37:22 My father-in-law planted a forage short a few years ago and not from us. You know, you'd think he'd buy from his son-in-law, but sometimes he doesn't. Anyhow, we put it on dry land. Fantastic crop. Was managing it with them and the aphids tore it up. He sprayed it. It was probably 8ft tall. Spray never got past 2 foot in the canopy. You could lean down and look 100 yards into the field. It just looked like palm trees. I mean, you just had a 6ft stem and two foot of leaf on top with aphids and really fat aphids.

38:03 And I think the other thing people don't talk about much is the damage that aphids do to the nutritional quality of the product. Right. So there's some interesting studies out there. I'd have to dig them up. I know Texas A&M has one as well that as the aphids secrete their secretions basically and their sooty, right? So you get a fungus that actually grows on the leaf and that fungus is actually darkening up the top of the cuticle of the leaf where the sun can't get through it. So now you've got less sugars in your plant. Your plant is less healthy because it can't produce energy and you're introducing that fungus into the hay or the silage pile that you're basically putting into the rumen which is a terrible situation because there is already native fungus and flora and fauna in that rumen. So you're really hurting yourself on multiple modes when you get an aphid infection in your hay or forage crop by any means.

39:12 So that's good information. One thing that we really like to use these photoperiod products for is when we're sending it on tough ground, especially out west where they don't have irrigation or stuff like that. I should have mentioned explain kind of how we'd manage that. Yeah. So the interesting part is, you know, a plant's goal is to come up and reproduce. You know, if it's an annual, it's going to try to reproduce in a year. If it's a biannual, it's two years. If it's a human, you got a few decades to try to reproduce. But when it comes to photoperiod than a sorghum sudan product, you make more tons per acre inch of water or inch applied or inch from the sky or whatever. More tons of product than anything else because that plant is waiting until the fall to reproduce or try to reproduce.

40:06 It's going to have a lot slower growth. It's going to wait on a rain as opposed to a traditional sorghum sudan that maybe you don't get enough rain this summer. So it's going to go ahead and throw ahead, try to pollinate, try to finish up. So the cool part about photoperiods is more bang for your buck in terms of tonnage per inch of water applied. And you just don't see that in anything else as well as this. There are some studies out there that actually give you some numbers. I couldn't rattle them off the top of my head, but yeah, really great products on a silage aspect.

40:40 I know some dairies are using Solar Max for dry cow feed in really dry areas where they don't have the water maybe for other products. And these guys are able to put up over 20 tons an acre very handily, very easily every year and they're cutting down on their corn stock cost by doing so. Oh yeah, and some of the other fiber costs that they purchase such as wheat straw. So there's some changes going on with dairies out west as we run out of water obviously and everybody's tinkering with different things and see how it fits them.

41:23 Yep. Yep. And then one other benefit that I like, you know, there are times that we get busy on the farm and we don't have time to shut down what we need to do and go mow a sorghum sudan that's 4 foot tall and going to make it go reproductive and lose potential quality. This photoperiod like you just kind of plan it when you get around to it. You know, make sure there's no rain coming. It's going to be big, but mow it when you have time to get to it. It's a perfect weekend warriors variety. You don't have to get to it at any certain time.

41:56 Yeah. Yeah. I hate that you're describing you're not here. Here's the other good part. You know, grazing a photoperiod is fantastic because let's say you did have decent rain on one of our other products that is not photoperiod. It's still going to head out in 60 to 80 days, right? Well, this guy you can graze all summer as long as you don't stock it too heavy or in some sort of rotated grazing fashion. It'll grow back just fine and you can get several

48:48 It just attributes to the length and the size of the leaves that you're not typically going to see on anything else. And that's why I love running this one for excellent dry hay in a multi-cut or for grazing. But either way, it's phenomenal situation to use them. I don't have anybody who's ever used Short King who's came back and said, 'Nah, let me try something else.' You know, it's which is why we can't.

49:17 And we are doing our best next year to produce quite a bit of this for you guys. And so I think we'll have pretty good luck. We're about into planting season for us for seed season and things look good so far. Have some rain in the forecast. So no complaints here.

49:37 But yeah, that we're all optimistic. Yeah, I'm trying to be optimistic. Really, Short King fits anything you want to do. Cover crop mixes, grazing, dry hay. I do have some guys that use it for silage. If you were going to do silage, I would probably use a different one because there's probably a little more tonnage, not much in the good crazy BMR PPS that you guys carry, but the Short King definitely is a really good digestible product.

50:23 Now, there is also something to note on all PPS's. The sugars are lower in a PPS. Something interesting about a PPS because it's in a continual growth pattern all summer. It's using up the sugar it's producing to keep growing, right? And so sugars in a PPS aren't drastically lower, but they're not going to be as high as something like a cattle cover product who's kind of getting to the end of its lifespan and then we're accumulating all that sugar as it gets towards the end of its lifespan. So something good to note, you know, if you're looking for super high bricks, super high WSC, generally that's either going to be something that either has a sugar background in it or a non-PPS product.

51:11 That's good. This is Green Cover's favorite. It works so well in blend because it does kind of carry some of that shorter genetics. And then we really like it. You mentioned don't plant the PPS before the hours of day length, but I'm thinking we're way too cold. Yeah, you're way too cold. That's a far south problem to have there. So we like to use this in full season cover crop mixes. And you know, people maybe are timing grazings or maybe they just want to plant something and let it grow all summer long, build some carbon, because it'll do it. And yeah, it's just a great product. We're excited to see where this goes and I could see some of our maybe some of our endurance sales moving into the Short King. Yeah, I would say so. I think that's probably where stuff's headed. Unless you wanted the grain out of the endurance, you'll probably want to move into either cattle cover or Short King, per se.

52:17 Really another interesting thing for PPS products that I've had requests for here in the last year or so is a deer screen, or wildlife screen products. We're in the part of the world where you can see your dog run away for two days. I'm not too sure why people use it, but I get a lot of calls on that. It is a great wildlife screen to encircle maybe your food plots, things of that nature for your hunting areas.

52:53 That's good information. So I think that will finish up most of our sorghum sudans. We've got one product left that we wanted to focus on and it's been mentioned a few times today. Give us a little bit of information on this Exceed BMR Pearl Millet. Exceed BMR Pearl Millet. Just so you know, we have the largest working hybrid pearl millet nursery in the world. We're about the only ones actually working on forage products with hybrid pearl millet. There are guys that work on some hybrid grains and you can see those in our nursery as well.

53:37 The cool part about BMR Pearl Millet is you're going to get the digestibility of a grass, but you're also going to get the protein in it that you're never going to find in a sorghum sudan. You're never going to have prussic acid in a millet like you will in a sorghum sudan. And for the most part, our BMR pro millets are milster sterile as well. So huge package to play with. It plays well with sorghum sudans and a blend like I was talking about earlier with Short King. You can add that protein into your ration simply by tossing in some Exceed BMR Pearl Millet. Has a beautiful plant structure. It's not as tall as a traditional hybrid pearl millet. It's generally waist high on meat somewhere in that neighborhood before we go into a bolt or seed head production there at the end of the season.

54:34 The best part about millet is in a non-grazing, let's talk about maybe just some cover for a second. So the best part about the BMR Pearl Millet for a cover crop situation is BMR or millet in general, pearl millet hybrids in general have an 8 foot very fibrous, more fibrous than a sorghum root structure. So we're going to go down and capture.

54:59 All of that fertilizer that your grandpa and dad's spent money on on your road crop farm and we're going to bring that back up top. That being said, pearl millets can also get nitrates because it is such an effective scavenger nutrients. We're going to bring that back up to the top of your soil. And the reason I would use the BMR pearl is it's going to break down relatively quickly and release those nutrients back for next year's row crop or pasture situation. So, it's got two really good fits. It's excellent on grazing. It's excellent on carbon sequestration. In fact, for carbon sequestration, millets kind of rank at the very top. I know maybe not a very popular term at the moment, but if you're into that, it's definitely good at that. And also just on the straight cover crop side. So, got a great fit. It's very unique. You're not going to find it from anywhere else. All those genetics orient themselves from here.

55:58 So, what's your thoughts on BMR Pro Millet?

56:04 Yeah, I've liked it for quite a while. I've got some pictures of tilt these exceed BMR pearl millets tillering out. Speak a little bit about how that plant looks like because it's sorghum stands upright then opens. What does this exceed? Yeah. So, something interesting about BMR pearl millet. You can take one seed and it can make up to 100 tillers. If you were just plant one in a pot and give it enough room to kind of do its own thing, it does—it's going to grow out and then kind of upwards. So, let's say you're concerned about your stand, maybe you had some bad weather, maybe you didn't get a good stand due to not enough rainfall. This is really going to fill in those gaps and shade out your weeds. It has now being said, all tillering is going to slow down though once that plant starts to tiller before you go vertical it is going to slow down the plant before you can actually turn out on it. You know a poor stand of millet or sorghum sudan as it tillers you're not going to be able to turn in and turn in on it as fast as you would if it was a reasonably good stand of product. So, I have a lot of guys that out here maybe didn't get a good rain, had a bad stand, and they want to turn in on it just like some sort of calendar date, right? But you really need to wait until the plants get to a certain height and they're healthy enough to do that.

57:31 That's good information. So one of the things that we get all the time is like this pearl millet between the tillering and the small seed size—like what is a decent seeding rate for that stuff? It varies widely based on how you're planting it, right? I mean, you can buy a canola plate and you can put it in a vacuum planter and you can singulate that seed like nobody's business and you can really get a—that's how I mean that's how we're doing our seed production, right? Sure. If you're concerned about depth control with your current box drill, but you have like a 15 or 20 inch planter you're putting beans in with or something of that nature, grab a canola plate, chat with your equipment dealer on how to kind of get that set. And your depth needs to—and we haven't even talked about this—millet depth is hyper critical compared to sorghums. You get past three-quarters of an inch in depth, I don't know if you're going to get a very good stand. Half inch is kind of recommended and if you can stay in that half inch to 3/4 of an inch and you have extremely warm soil, it needs to be much warmer than it does for sorghum sudan and it's moist. We see some of our seed fields spiking in 24 hours out here. So if you are—yes, yeah—very warm climates with the right amount of moisture and a half inch deep in 48 hours you should see them breaking the crust. So that's something else I've filled the complaints on in the past—the fact that guys, if you are applying a herbicide, you better do it within—yeah, really fast because let's say you came out with, you know, a Roundup or a paraquat or something to kill any weeds that were up when you planted, you end up nuking those really tiny spikes that you can't see right at the soil surface and then you get the complaint calls that oh it didn't come up. You go dig it up and it was all up you just smoked it yourself. So it's an easy way to sell seed twice. But yeah, I mean if you're using a custom operator as a sprayer, you know, work with him. Make sure that he's in the field right behind you. Planting rate—let's get back to your original question. If you're using a row crop planter and you're only planting millet and you're in a very dry area, you know, four or five lbs because that's about all your planter is going to put out anyways. You can't get those canola discs to speed up any more than that. You could probably make a custom disc, but I don't know if it's worth it. Most guys are going to air seed or box drill theirs and a large percentage are with other crops in a blend and I, you know, I'm somewhere in that 10 to 20 pound range and stuff like that. I have guys that go to 35 and I saw a guy put it on 50. I don't recommend it for your budget and I don't recommend it because it you can get them so crowded they drown each other out. You know, you're talking about a seed that's 60,000 seed a pound. And so, you know, you go toss one bag per acre out there and I can guarantee you you won't like it, your hay guy won't like it, and your cows won't like it either. But yes. I'm pretty conservative on seeding rates. Yeah. And you start talking about—

1:01:06 It's funny from the cover crop side of it, we're dealing in pounds per acre. Every other aspect of agriculture is seeds per acre, right? I'm a big advocate of figuring backwards. Okay, so how many seeds per acre we actually going to have, correspond that to the plant structure? And it's like, okay, this makes sense. So yeah, I would say two to four pounds an acre in most of our mixes. It's pretty common. I've had guys planted 10 pounds an acre as a mono crop and they seem very happy with it if they get a nice stand. It's the variability of the stand that causes problems more so than the pounds per acre. It really is. It's all about stand establishment with millet. It's going to be able to flex out in lower populations and make up for any problems you've got in your field.

1:01:57 Millets in general, man they do not like heavy black clay soil. Getting a stand established in dark heavy clay soils, please use a sorghum sudan. I mean, you won't get but maybe 10% of it up sometimes. River bottoms, heavy black soils like Louisiana, Texas coast kind of stuff. I think they call it kind of like a Lake Charles clay. Those soils that you can lose a huge wrench in because they crack open this big in the summer. They are not millet soils. So, but on the flip side of that, where sorghum sedan doesn't fit, millet fits in high pH, salty, sandy. It does not have that iron chlorosis problem. A lot of people think that millets and sorghums are related and that's definitely not the case. They're apples and oranges. They're both a grass and that's about it. But in terms of relation, but they do so good in light soils where sorghums just cannot function. In fact, some of our seed productions on soils that you cannot put a sorghum in. So if you're looking for a summer forage that fits really cruddy soil situations, plant a millet. You'll be happy with it. Especially if you unhappy with others.

1:03:21 Yeah, it sounds like the perfect spot for a cover crop to me. It really is. And there's another thought to that on that salty discussion I was just saying a second ago that if you have salty soils like true sodium issues, use a beard, right? Do not use a conventional of either a sorghum or a millet. And the reason why is when that sodium is pulled up while the plant's bringing up water, in a conventional midrip in either a sorghum or a millet, that sodium is going to get bound up in the plant cell structure and that's what's causing some, you know, for it to hog the water away from the plant itself. As a BMR and lower lignon, that sodium is just kind of a free agent floating around out there. It doesn't get tied up as bad. No, you can go to California and you can split a field with conventional product and a brown mid rib product and stand up on the levey and look at it and it is night and day difference. So huge difference. So always important to know that if you're willing to spend a little more money on a BMR and you are in a saline situation, use the BMR product and then use your soil type to decide if you need the millet or the sorghum or both in a blend.

1:04:42 Yeah. No, that's really good information because a lot of times our customers are looking to fix a problem. And that's why these cover crop blends are important. They're going on a lot of marginal ground. They may have high pH, whatever the problem may be. This gives us a really nice option to add in some diversity that's more or less trusty rusty, for lack of a better word. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I always tell guys, hey, if your bean sucks on that hillside, if your beans suck with iron problems, that's where millet goes. Just put the hill in the millet and you'll be better off. So they're unique. They're different. Herbicide wise they do take some difference in herbicides and so you always reach out to me if guys have questions on that. I know in a blend you guys don't use much herbicide activity but yeah that's really rounds out the millet thing.

1:05:40 I don't know if I told you on the protein levels. Millet on the low end are 16, right? Wow. So on the high end, the highest I've ever seen in some balage was 24. And so where guys in the Midwest are losing stands of alfalfa to winter kill or things of that nature and need a summer crop to come back to, put in millet. And every time you cut that millet, you've got that same fiber digestibility. You've got excellent protein as opposed to alfalfa a lot of times where each cutting is a little different in quality. Right? So the best thing about millet is it's the same as you start as when you finish. You've got excellent digestible fiber. And you got excellent protein. And that's where a lot of producers on the beef and dairy side are going out west is using millet as a protein source. Protein's expensive to get railed in. And this kind of fixes that for the most part.

1:06:39 Yeah. No, that's good information. A lot of our especially with the commodity markets the way they are today, a lot of the cattle producers are seeking out options to fill some crop ground acres. So that'll be interesting talk. Well, no, Chris, I really appreciate it. This is great information. You know, we talk all the time, but you learn something every time we visit with each other, it seems like. But oh, yeah. Yeah. Would one of the things I want to foreshadow a little bit, you know, following this video, hopefully we can get you up to come through the plots this summer. Yeah. Come up to our little.

1:07:14 Nursery. I always make it in too late after the field day and kind of miss out on everything.

1:07:20 Yeah, I'll have to invite you early and take you out to supper or something and we can do a followup on this and hit these in the plots actually growing so we can time. Yeah.

1:07:32 That sounds like a lot. Yeah. Yeah. And you know everywhere you take a product, mainly it's latitude-based but they look different everywhere you go. So it's interesting to look. You know, your heights can vary, your leaf structure can vary, just plant architecture as a whole changes depending on where you take the product. So it's always good to hear from guys saying you know we like the product for this reason and the guys in Canada might say something that I've never heard of and the guys in France might tell me something I've never heard of. So it's always good to chat with people all over and get their feel for the products.

1:08:08 Yeah, and it's a great resource to have somebody that's chatting with people. I mean, you're talking about different countries, not just different states. So talk about that's a lot. I think it's important to note that the US seed industry as a whole on a forage side supplies a relatively large portion of the world. If you look at within a 100 or so miles of Amarillo, Texas, 90% of the sorghums and nearly all of the forage millets are grown right here. We have a high altitude from 3,000 to 5,000 feet up, cool summer nights, warm summer days, and lack of rainfall actually makes for excellent seed quality. And I think that's why the industry's been based here for such a long period of time. But yes, we ship to Europe, Africa, the Middle East. A lot of companies also ship to Pakistan, India. Japan is also a market for us as well, Korea. Sorghums, as water becomes a bigger and bigger or water scarcity becomes a bigger world issue, sorghums keep slowly taking center stage where other water-intensive crops just aren't fitting anymore. In fact, the last couple years in Europe have been blisteringly hot, low rainfall, and so that market is slowly heating up for us per se. But yeah, now that guys are understanding that sorghums have better digestibility or better than what they had been planting, it's a it's easy shoe-in right for the farm. From an economic standpoint, it's very cost effective in the tonnage. And most of the animals utilizing it really take well to it depending on the situation. So yeah, I'm trying to think of any other things I was wanting to mention today.

1:10:10 But yeah, yeah, it's a burgeoning industry out here. There's not many companies left in it, per se. And on family-owned side, there's only a few of us left. So still a good industry to be in.

1:10:30 Yep. Well, that's important to green covered, too. You know, we're family-owned business and we care about that and we like to tie our culture to other companies that fit that. So well, just thanks again for today taking the time to talk to us. Hopefully this is a good educational video for our company, but then also our customers. So I appreciate it.

1:10:53 Thanks, and we'll holler at you later. Yeah, yeah, sounds good. Oh, hey, I did have one thing. That's what I was going to mention in our research pipeline. If guys want to know what's new and coming, we've kind of done some interesting things on the sugar side. So if you look at sorghum sedans and sugars, you know, depending on a PPS or a non-PPS product, our better ones are in the high teens and to the low 20s, right? But if you look at a research pipeline, we have things in the high 20s to low 30s that are also BMR, aphid tolerant, male sterile. So as nutritionists have really pushed for higher sugars, male sterility and BMR, we have a few lines we're working with. Probably going to be a single chopped silage item or a grazing product. They are so sweet. I'm not sure how dry hay would work with them yet, but Gotcha. When we're looking at pounds of milk per acre per ton or pounds of beef per dry matter ton, these things are off the chart. I mean, the lab lady called me that runs all our samples and does all my data crunching from Rock River, and she was like, 'I think something's wrong.' And I'm like, 'No, that's really what it is. They're that good. You got to come look at them.' So there's a lot of guys chomping at the bit to get these in their plots to look at because they don't look like the other things that are currently available. They don't act like the same things. They don't ferment the same way. They should be very, very interesting. And the other thing is when you get high sugars into these sorghums, they become more drought tolerant, right? And high sugars also translate into less insect damage as well. So naturally, these products are going to carry a lot of really interesting traits just due to the high sugar.

1:12:47 So you're basically creating a high brix plant by genetically selecting it. That's really, really interesting. And I think the tonnage is going to be there. They're six or seven feet tall, seven max maybe. I don't think they're going to take a really heavy planting rate either. I don't know that yet, but I just currently looking at them, I think they're going to be super economical. So Yep. That's great. We look forward to that. It's always cool to hear what's coming next. And we'll have to get some once it comes out for us. I'm sure you will.

1:13:23 Well, I appreciate your conversation today. Yeah, you too. Thanks, Chris. Bye.