Warm Season Cover Crop Species: Legumes, Grasses & Broadleaves

0:00 We are just a little bit early here so keep button people kind of funnel in but I just started sharing this on Facebook here so we might as well go ahead and just get started. It is 5:30 welcome to everyone in attendance we've got a large crowd tonight from all over we've got some people from Mexico tuning in saying hi and we're expecting a really good conversation about warm season cover crops.

0:27 We're gonna really dive into some of the characteristics that make up specifically warm season or this webinar we have on our panel we've got Keith Berns and Brett Pesci and they'll be kind of giving our presentation before we get started just want to again go over the rules I know this is kind of monotonous but we do have quite a few new attendees today so I just want to let you guys know you are all muted but you can go ahead and ask your questions in the chat and Dale is on he'll be answering some of those while we're talking.

1:04 But if you've got some you can also type them into QA and we'll try to answer those at the end of the presentation. The presentation will go for about half hour 45 minutes and then open it up to you guys's questions so with that I guess Keith you kind of want to go ahead and maybe talk a little bit about why we're covering warm season cover crops if that's not already obvious based on Brett's.

1:32 Yes well even though it's no two weeks ago in Oklahoma there's been a lot of warm season stop planted down there so we're kind of we're in that transitional time now where it's really almost too late to plant a lot of the cool season things especially from Nebraska South Nebraska North you can still probably get some of that done but a lot of it has switched over to be using the warm season species the sorghums and the millets and the cow peas and so we thought it would be good just to kind of go through and just kind of go through all of the different warm season species.

2:13 So what we're going to do I've got a PowerPoint here with some different pictures and slides I'm just going to talk about the different warm-season species that we use and that we put into mixes and then Brett's gonna chime me in and I'll throw him a question once in a while he'll talk a little bit more about how he sees them applied how he's using them not only in Oklahoma in Texas where he's got a lot of his customer base but he he grew up here in Nebraska so he's got a pretty good understanding of how these things would apply here as well so I am going to share my screen here.

3:45 We're gonna start out we're just talking about the legumes and then we'll get into grasses and then we'll talk about the broadleaf plants but you know what it comes to legumes there are some really good warm season legumes that we have to choose from out there not as many as within the grasses category but you can't talk about warm season legumes without starting with cow peas because it's probably the number one thing that we use gone through a lot of cow peas already I think will be sold out of cow peas in the first part of June which is the earliest we ever have part of its because there's a shortage of cow peas they had some real production issues down in South the other part of it is just a bigger demand.

4:24 And so cowpeas exact same thing as a black-eyed pea if you ever been to a restaurant you've ordered Black Eyed Peas you have eaten cow peas it's the same thing we use old varieties so the newer varieties that have been bred for human consumption tend to have larger seed we like the real old ones fact if you go back into your book of agriculture from a hundred years ago you can find lots of great articles talking about putting up cow pee hay and they'll talk about red rippers they'll talk about Chinese Reds they'll talk about iron and clay cow peas so these are some really old I guess you could call them heirloom or heritage type varieties but we continue to use them because they really work well they're exceptionally heat and drought tolerant they're very good nitrogen fixers you can hay them you can graze them that they don't grow back really well so in if you want to do a multiple hey cat situation you'll get really good growth in the first caddy but not so much in the second and you do need to make sure with all these legumes like I mean legume you need to put the appropriate inoculant on so for cow peas you need peanut type inoculant so make sure that you're getting that on when you put these cow peas in so bright I think I'm gonna just talk about all the warm season legumes and then you can just kind of weigh in on how you would.

5:39 Use the different one so we don't run out of time. I think I'm just going to kind of go through all these and then we can kind of jump back and compare them a little bit. So I kind of similar to cow peas is a mung bean and when I say similar they're similar because again they're very heat tolerant, they're very drought tolerant, they're very good nitrogen fixers. The biggest difference between a cow pea and a mung bean is how determinate they are.

6:05 We just go back to cow peas here for a second. I don't have it on the slide here, but cow peas are, especially these old ones (the newer ones are much more determinate), these old ones are very indeterminate. And what that means is that they just grow and they grow and they grow, and even though they may be flowering and even though they may be putting on some seed pods, they'll continue to grow, they'll continue to flower.

6:27 So being indeterminate like that, they make a really good cover crop because they grow for a very long periods of time and you can accumulate lots of vegetative matter. Mung beans are more determinate. They have been bred more for the human consumption market. If you've ever eaten bean sprouts on a salad bar, you're eating mung beans because most all bean sprouts on a salad bar are coming from mung beans.

6:49 They're smaller seed size. They're about eight thousand seeds per pound. A lot of your cow peas is going to be around five thousand seeds per pound. They're going to be a little shorter season, so if you've got a really long period of time for a warm season legume to grow, cow peas probably a better choice. If you got a little tighter window, you know, you've only got that sixty to seventy-five, eighty days, a mung bean will be just flying in there. We use a lot of times, we'll put them together because they use the same type of inoculant. They use that peanut strain of inoculant as well.

7:20 You can't hate them. They're not going to be as good as cow pea because they just don't give you as much biomass growth if you have a long period of time to grow, but they're excellent for grazing and we put them in a lot of our mixes for that reason.

7:36 Soybeans are another good warm season legume. Everybody's familiar with soybeans as a cash crop, and as a cover crop it's not a great cover crop if you have soybeans as a very regular part of your cash crop rotation. If that's the case, go with something else. But if you're not growing soybeans in your cash crop rotation, it's a great cover crop. They're probably the least expensive of any of the warm season legumes.

8:00 But when you do a soybean, and when we just do non-GMO soybeans mainly because we don't have to deal with any patent issues and any of the royalties and stuff like that, but what we like to go with is you want to go with something at least to maturity groups longer than what you would normally use in your area for grain production. And the reason is again we want these cover crops to grow vegetatively as long as possible.

8:28 So here in Nebraska, you know, we probably would probably an average of a group three, so we would like to use something like a group five soybean or higher, five, six, or seven, as a cover crop. Ideally, down in Bret's area, they're probably doing group fives for production, so a group six or seven would be better there. And again, you know, soybeans they can be hay, they could be raised. A lot of people don't think of them in that way, but they can certainly do that.

8:53 Now we have one type of soybean called the Laredo soybean. Again, it's a really old one. It's a small black seeded soybean, and for our understanding is that's actually the first soybeans that were brought into this country from China. And I think one of the good things are getting from China, but they were brought into this country and then all of our other strains were actually bred up from that Laredo soybean. But we still have that. It's more of a buying vegetable. It doesn't have nearly as good a seed yields. I mean, it's a fairly long season one as well.

9:26 So I didn't, one of those you can use that. I would like to picture a little bit on the Laredos versus your other soybeans because of the breeding out of just regular non-GMO soybeans versus Laredos. I have noticed more heat tolerance and insect tolerance with the Laredos, and I think it has a lot to do with the tannins in the seed and the tannins in the plant. And you'll notice on some of these plants, and some of these seeds, don't be light colored seeds and it'll be dark color seeds. Typically your darker seeded look girls have more tannins in them.

10:01 So with the black seed soybeans, there's more tannins in that plant and what's happening is you're getting more resistance for color, for heat tolerance and insect tolerance as well. It does limit tell ability on.

10:19 The grazing side a little bit but you also don't have to worry about below here as much. Yeah, in the Laredos are quite a bit more expensive but again the seed size is significantly less so on a dollars per acre basis it's probably not a whole lot different if you start looking at the seed size comparison there.

10:42 And then some sunhemp—ten years ago hardly anybody ever heard of sunhemp but now it's becoming very popular. First of all, it is not a cannabis type hemp. It is in the hemp family but it's a Crotalaria species, not a cannabis species, so it's legal to grow I think just about everywhere except Mississippi and possibly Arkansas. And the reason you can't grow them there is because they have some other Crotalaria species that are on the noxious weeds list and they just listed all Crotalaria on there, so that's unfortunate. We're trying to work on getting that change but it's a tropical plant. It's very fast-growing—it'll get six feet tall in about sixty days if it's growing in a lot of heat. Very, very heat tolerant, probably not as drought tolerant. I don't think it's as drought tolerant as cowpeas or a mung bean but every bit as much heat tolerant.

11:35 It is a little more expensive than some of the other ones but again it has the smaller seed size and the seeding rate on it is lower so on a cost per acre basis it's similar. You do need to manage it because if it gets too mature on you, it is a hemp and that outside skin of that plant can get really fibrous and it can kind of be a little rope or a little string that will wind up on things. Typically it's not a problem if you're only putting a few pounds per acre in your mix but if you're doing solid seeded sunhemp then you're going to want to make sure that you have a good plan for terminating that stuff otherwise it can cause issues the next year. Can be grazed there is some concern about alkaloids in—and this is just a variety not stated type of sunhemp.

12:23 We are working in a couple different countries. We're working with some growers in Africa and also in India to try to get a variety called Tropic Sun. Tropic Sun was developed by the USDA back in the 70s and it's a very low alkaloid, very highly palatable type of sunhemp so we will get that figured out and we will have sunhemp Tropic Sun to sell at some point inside. It's just it's hard enough to grow a crop here in Nebraska but when you're trying to do it remotely through about three other companies in Zambia it's exceptionally difficult. So we've had a couple years of crop failures but we're hopeful we're going to continue to push forward getting that sunhemp that we know is going to be a little better for grazing.

13:10 And then guar—guar beans—again it's one that not many people have heard of. We use quite a few, quite a bit of guar in the last four or five years. Probably the most drought tolerant legume that you'll ever find. I mean they grow this in West Texas as a dryland crop—it's that drought tolerant. It has the ability that when it runs out of moisture that it will just stop growing and it will just set there and wait for some rain. So because of that it's very drought tolerant. It does pretty well in sandy soils so I'm not going to have nearly as much forage production potential as compared to cowpeas but it can be a really good fit in there.

13:50 And one of the things that we've noticed about it, it's really excellent as a winter stockpile graze because those beans, and you can see the picture of the beans, they're on that stock. They stay in the pods and they stay on the stock throughout the winter so that for winter grazing the cattle can actually come in and harvest some of that without having to pick it up off the ground. So that's one reason we like the guar. It's not going to get nearly as tall so if you're putting it with a whole bunch of really tall stuff it may tend to kind of get shaded out a little bit but in the really dry environments and climates it's a really nice fit.

14:24 Then Brett, I think I have one more here and then we'll throw it over to you but the last one I just want to talk about—you don't usually think about clovers as being a warm season legume species but this Huia, I'm sweet clover. You would want to plant it before now but it is the most heat tolerant clover I've ever seen. It's an annual sweet clover so you can plant this in the spring and it will bloom in the late summer and the early fall. It doesn't have a lot of frost or cold tolerance but it's got a really good heat tolerance. It's great for honeybees. The bee guys really, really

15:00 Like it because it blooms so late in the season and it blooms for a really long time and this stuff will get five or six feet tall. It just has a wonderful wonderful smell to it and it's probably not the greatest grazing thing but as part of a mix again it can be kind of a nice addition.

15:19 Bright why don't you talk a little bit about how you like to use these warm season legumes and your mixes down there?

15:27 We work on down here or focused on grazing and how different species graze. I use all these species all in different scenarios. I will add one to the guar Keith that for the one of the most heat tolerant plants. A fun fact is Pakistan is the number one exporter of guar so if you want heat tolerance and drought tolerance that's a pretty good indicator.

15:53 The one thing about war on that it's not super powerful in the summer. I've had a lot of people say that if it gets hay door dried down or Frost kill then it becomes much more palatable. I'm not sure why cattle walk through it. I've seen the same thing in my flocks in the summer time it can be lush green it could be the less than green out there and he'll stop still walk through it so we're not quite sure why animals it could be tannins but as soon as it Frost's the cattle graze it very well or even just a couple hours of drying.

16:34 Go are those bean pods have similar nutrient value as grain corn and field so really high-energy. I love it in the stockpile mix especially on lighter soils heavier clays largest doesn't really do near as well for us.

16:53 You just want to kind of scroll backwards and your PowerPoint Keith okay and then Sun him on the grazing side again yes it's not super palatable. We use it here and in southwest Oklahoma one to two pounds the acre. I have not had some ham drought out but being a tropical plant it definitely uses the moisture out of your soil profile so if you are going back to a wheat crop or a whole crop that may be a concern of using too much moisture in it so we try to manage that.

17:28 We usually don't go over two to three pounds to the acre of a sunhemp crop just for that reason because it will take a frost to kill it and we don't he's too much moisture but that's a very good component in there.

17:44 The cowpeas is number one probably in Oklahoma for for grazing the legumes. A lot of people have used it for hay here again the cow peas are variable in tannin so your black eyed peas you'll notice on the human consumption market have been bred to be white white peas or white with a little accent on ermine so those are low tannin varieties because the human digestive tract is a simple guy and we can't handle tannins near as much as livestock. You would get more palatability if you used a regular black-eyed pea but you would also run blocker risk and so that's why I do like the Red Rivers iron clays these older varieties because you don't run the globe risk in a grazing mix because of that.

18:35 Mung beans are super palatable probably one of the top wildlife for deer tracking. They are more palatable than than soybeans for livestock. I've noticed they'll they'll hit those first I think it's because they hit an early maturity their sugar content comes up higher sooner than most other species out there and so I like using all these in these mixes want to stagger water usage having different maturity species out there even though that they make the similar roles maturities can play a difference in building drought tolerance into a mix but also staggering your bricks or your sugar content out there for maximum summer means on stocker cow so having that diversity in your legumes is is really key.

19:23 On the hue BAM I would say yes it's we throw it down here. I would definitely have it planted before May in the southern states it's one that will tolerate a frost so we typically plant it in January February down here. It can be planted well into early April but once you start getting the after close to your frost three days we start leaving it out just there's more and better species but yes it once it gets established before that I like to have four weeks of establishment before we get into our frost-free days on human.

20:11 Well good so let's move into the grasses because there's there's a ton of warm season grasses options out there. You know one of the ones that people don't usually think about is corn. You know there's a lot of corn grown but but we have a B M are grazing corn. There's a number of different B M are grazing corns out there. The B M R stands for Brown midrib. We'll talk a little bit more about that when we get into the sorghum trades but it's it's a gene when the breeders can get it to express itself it codes for less lignin in the stock and so this B mark horn has less

20:45 Lignin in the stock and it's very palatable. I know that when we've had it in our grazing plots and we turned the cows out they'll go and eat this corn down to the ground before they'll go eat that, even the VRM sorghum. So it's just very palatable, highly digestible. The ones that we carry they're non-GMO and they're short season and we like the short season ones because they fit really well as a swing crop or a double crop because I can either plant them a little earlier in the summer because they will tolerate much colder soils and cooler temperatures. And what sorghum does, they're not going to survive a lot of frost, but you can certainly get them in about ten degree colder soils than what sorghum can be, so you can get this in sooner or you can do it on the back end of the summer because again sorghum needs really warm evenings where corn can still grow quite well with cooler evenings.

21:40 We have one that's an open pollinated, we have one that's an F2 of a hybrid, so they're both very economical. We have a lot of guys using them for silage or for grazing. And another big benefit is there's no prussic acid concerns with the corn like there is with sorghum. Now the one big drawback is that it is not going to grow back, so from a grazing standpoint it's one and done. So you want to let it grow out to the maximum amount that you're going to get there and then graze it down and then you move on to something else. But again, with that short season window that can still fit pretty well.

22:16 We move into the warm season grasses and I got some tables here because there's a lot of comparisons that we need to do. So there's kind of three different sorghum families, if you will, or three different families within the sorghum tribe. We've got sudan grass and you've got forage sorghum and then you got the cross between the two, which is the sorghum sudan. So just briefly go through the characteristics of each of them and then we can talk a little bit about where and why they'd be used.

22:42 Sudan grass is a very fine stem, very leafy product. It regrows very well after hay or grazing and it tends to be lower in sugar but probably a little higher in protein than some of the sorghum. Most of them are open pollinated, like the old school piper sudan, an open pollinated sudan grass. There are some hybrids out on the market, they're not as popular as the sorghum sudangrass hybrid crosses, simply because they don't yield as much. But we've seen some pretty nice hybrids in indiangrasses as well. And they do have some prussic acid, but it's pretty low, so you can kind of manage around that. You still would have to be concerned about it, but it's certainly going to be very low as compared to a forage sorghum.

23:30 As we get into the forage sorghum, these are going to be much coarser stem, much larger diameter stocks. They're not going to have nearly as good regrowth. They'll regrow some, and especially depending on when you graze them they can regrow okay, but they're not going to be the ones that you're choosing if you're going to do a highly managed grazing situation where you want to graze and then get regrowth. They're very high in sugar, and some of these forage sorghums are used to make molasses and used to make sugar. Sorghum sugar is very popular, and that's because these products can be very high in sugar. Very high tonnage potential. These things can get really tall, have really good yield potential. They'll yield every bit as good as a lot of silage corn will in a silage situation. And so reason they're often grown as silage or a stockpile type grazing situation. These do have high prussic acid, so if you're going to graze a forage sorghum you have to really manage around that because there's a pretty good prussic acid potential there.

24:36 Then of course the sorghum sudan, it's kind of the best of both worlds, if you will. The stem size varies based on population. I've seen sorghum sudan that has very small stems like sudan grass if you plant really high populations, and I've seen sorghum sudan that has very large stocks like forage sorghum if you plant very low population. So you can kind of control that based on how thick you planted. Very good yield, very good regrowth. It has a lot of good hybrid vigor from the crosses between that sudan and grass and that sorghum, bringing out the best traits of the parents. It has good sugar, it has moderate protein, high yield potential, and this is the one that you would really want to use if you're going to do managed grazing.

25:22 This is typically the one we'd use if we're doing grazing for a winter stockpile situation. Sometimes we use sorghum sudangrass and sometimes we'll use forage sorghum. Brett can kind of address that here in a little bit, kind of depends on your scenario there. And they would have moderate prussic acid. You certainly have to be concerned. They're not as high at prussic acid as forage sorghum but certainly higher than sudangrass. That's something that has to be managed.

25:51 And then we get into a lot of different options when you come to these because there's basically six different traits that can be bred into these different things. Now when I say traits, these are non-GMO traits. There's no GMO sorghum so you don't have to worry about that, but these are traits that are dream genes that get turned on and off by conventional plant breeding techniques. I just want to go through these traits because depending on the family that you choose and then the trait that you choose, you can kind of really get the right one to fit the situation that you want.

26:26 The first trait is what we call photoperiod sensitive or PPS, and that's a gene that when they can express itself. I don't ask me how this happens, but when that gene is present in the plant, that plant will not start the reproductive process until there's 12 hours and 20 minutes of daylight left. So for a lot of us, it depends on where you are north to south, but for a lot of people that's going to get you into the middle of September, maybe even the third week of September. So these things grow a long, long time before they ever think about going reproductive. And because of that, they can get really tall, but they're very drought tolerant, very stressed tolerant, and very water efficient because they're not thinking about reproduction until late in the season. And I've got some pictures later on here of how tall these things can get, but this is a really good choice if you've got a long period of time for something to grow and then you're not sure that you can get in there and harvest it. A photoperiod sensitive one is really good.

27:25 Male sterile is a little different. It will make a head but it doesn't self-pollinate itself, so it's not going to make viable grain unless it gets pollen from another sorghum source. So you would not want to plant a male sterile sorghum along with a regular sorghum in the same field if you're trying to prevent grain production because it will pollinate. It will accept pollen from other sources. But if it's the only sorghum around, it will put a head on but it won't form grain. And because of that, the plants when they get more mature, they retain that sugar in the stock since the grain is not being formed. And so for that reason, we really like these male sterile ones for a stockpile situation where we're going to be grazing that late in the season or even into the winter because we'd much rather have that sugar in the stocks than in grain that could fall on the ground and kind of get lost. So these are excellent for winter stockpile grazing. That's kind of the main place where we would use these.

28:22 And then delayed maturity. So these three traits all have to do with kind of how long it grows before it goes reproductive. Delayed maturity is just simply it's a longer season version of a normal type. So you may see, for example, we have a super sugar and a super sugar DM. Well, the DM just stands for delayed maturity and that just simply means it's going to grow for three to four weeks before it goes reproductive. It's not photoperiod sensitive. It's just a delayed maturity or a long maturity version of the same type of plant.

28:55 And then there's three traits that really have to do with the quality of the plant. And the first one I referenced it when I was talking about the corn, and that's the brown midrib or the BMR, and that's a gene in there that codes for less lignin in the stock. And when you have a BMR, you have greater digestibility and palatability. I like to talk about, you know, think of an apple versus celery. Celery has a lot of lignin in it. An apple doesn't have very much. Which would you rather eat? Most of us would rather eat an apple, and so would most livestock. And so the BMRs are just simply going to be more digestible. It's a great choice for hay. It's a great choice for grazing. One thing to consider though is they won't stand in the winter as long because they don't have as much lignin in the stock. They don't have as much stock strength, so they do tend to break over and go down a little bit more. So that's something to consider there as well.

29:49 A dry stock. The dry stock trait is just when that plant does not have quite as much juice in the stock. Doesn't mean it's less nutritious.

29:59 It doesn't mean it's less palatable, it's just not as juicy, if you will. And the main thing that we would want this for is if you're putting up hay, it's just going to dry out a little bit faster in that windrow. And so we like the dry stocks. Like the sweet six dry stock is kind of our go-to variety that we like for putting up hay because we know it's going to, number one, it grows very fast and yields very well, but it's also going to dry out just a little bit quicker in that window as well.

30:28 And then the briquetting dwarf trait—briquetting dwarf is a natural and trained in plants that results in shortened internode. So basically it means your leaves are closer together and you have less stock there, so you have a higher leaf to stock ratio, which is good for palatability and forage quality because there's typically better feed value in a leaf than in a stock. And typically we also see better leaf retention because those leaf collars, with the shortening of the internode, those leaf collars really wrap around that stock really well. And so those leaves tend to hang on and stay on that plant better. And so again for that reason, we really like that dwarf trait for better stand ability, especially into the winter. Not only does the plant stand better because it's not as tall, but the leaves stay on better, which is really important if you're wanting to stockpile graze.

31:22 So you've got the three different families and you got the six different traits, and you put all of those together and there's literally hundreds of different sorghum products out on the market. It can be kind of confusing. It's hard to sort through, but they're all going to fall into one of these families and one of these traits. I've got some pictures here, but Brett, why don't you go ahead and just—I know we're kind of starting to run on time here, so just real briefly, kind of talk about how you like using these mixes for summer grazing and winter raising.

31:59 The one big difference that I like to differentiate between the species is on the forage sorghums—typically your leaf collar wraps all the way around the stem, that makes a big difference on stockpiling quality into the winter timeframe versus a sorghum Sudan, where that leaf is just a catch, just tiny at the stem. And so after first frost on a tall sorghum Sudan like a photo created sensitive, those leaves tend to shred off in the wintertime a lot faster where the forage sorghum holds much better at the end of that winter stockpile.

32:38 The other thing that I would like to say, on the BMR corn, the benefit of planning for the same reason of benefiting on planning early—we can plant BMR corn later into the year because those nights start cooling off versus a sorghum Sudan. So when it starts getting into August, September timeframe, depending where you're located in the country, we can put in that BMR corn and get a lot of biomass, dry matter, especially if you're planting a week for early fall grazing. Putting those warm seasons in there in that fall timeframe can increase your dry matter content to minimize your hay usage on that green, lush week and early fall.

33:29 There's a good comment on here that Jim Johnson put on there on the male sterols. Johnson grass can cross on those sorghum Sudans—it is a relative and can't pollinate the male sterols. However, most of the time the Johnson grass in the road ditches are already pollinated and seeded out compared to when we're planning a male sterile. After we harvest or graze out wheat, as long as they're not freshly mowed and stuff like that, most of the time Johnson grass is already seated out or made ahead to where it's not pollinating that male sterile. But that's something to keep in the back of your mind. If you absolutely can't have any grain production out there, a boater created sensitive may be a better option.

34:20 Yeah, good. Now I appreciate that. Here's just a picture of a brown midrib, and you know if something does a brown midrib, you can see it is an actual brown midrib right down the middle of that leaf. So it's a pretty distinctive trait that you could see on there. So if you get a BMR type, you can look at that, you can see that. Here's just a couple pictures actually—Nails Circular shared these with us for tonight, but it's just showing a plot of BMR sorghum and then conventional sorghum. Look at where all the cattle are. They can go into either one of those paddocks there, but they're where the BMR is because it's just that much more palatable. And then here's the same field, thirteen days grazing. You can see that they've got that BMR stripped almost down to the nubbins, but yet there's quite a few animals there. There's a few that have moved over to the conventional.

40:22 And into Mexico they may overlap. So you see again it's just something to be aware of. And there's a lot of millets out there too, and I just want to kind of go through this quickly. There's about five different millet families. Pearl millet is most of them are produced as hybrids because they're going to be quite far the most expensive, mostly because of the hybrid seed production process. But they're also the most productive. You're going to give you the most tonnage. They're going to give you the longest period of growth before they'll go reproductive or put on a seed head. They've got good regrowth and some of these other traits that we talked about.

41:01 There are some BMR pearl millet types out there. There's not very many and they're quite expensive, but they're quite good. So pearl millet is probably the one that you'd want to go with if you're really doing the high-intensity grazing and want to try to capture maximum gain, and especially if you don't think that you can get in there quite as quick. Because these other millets are all going to be short or seasoned, and the pearl millet is shorter season than a lot of the sorghums. But some of these other millets are really quite short season.

41:33 Then you kind of go into the German or the foxtail family. They're fast growing, but again they have a shorter season. They're excellent for hay, but they need to be harvested in a timely manner. Otherwise they'll start putting that seed head on, and then the hay quality goes down and your regrowth will really go backwards. They've got okay regrowth. It's not as good as most of the other ones. And there's a couple types. There's golden German and then there's also the one that we actually like better. It's called white wonder. It's a white seeded foxtail millet versus the German, which is more of a yellow seeded. But the white wonder we think has a little better growth. It just gets a little taller. It has a little bit more biomass potential.

42:19 Brown top millet is another one. I have been in that same family, but I grouped it separately because we talked about it differently a lot. It's a really good millet for the south because it tolerates humidity better. Typically a lot of this is grown in the southeast where it's very hot, very humid, and it sensible. It's palatability longer. So it's a better fit into winter stockpile grazing. Most millets don't hold their forage value nearly as well as sorghums and steel. So we don't use very many millets if you're telling us, hey, we want to graze this in November and December. We'll go with sorghums and the BMR corn and things like that. But the brown top probably does hold its palatability and nutritional content better than the other millets going into that winter stockpile.

43:05 Japanese millet very tolerant of wet soils. This stuff will even grow in standing water. So if you've got some flooded out, wet, tight holes, the millet is probably the way to go there. It's probably one of the shortest season millets. It matures pretty rapidly, but it does have good regrowth. So if you're grazing it or making hay off it, it will kind of come back.

43:28 Pro so millet is a grain type millet that's harvested for bird seed. It doesn't have a great forage value. It's the least forage value of all the millets. It is very water efficient and very short season. Guys out west can grow this in a pretty short timeframe if they got a little bit of water to work with. It's excellent for bird plots. If you're putting in any cover crop fields and you want to enhance the quail or the pheasants, throw a couple pounds of pro so millet in there. It's really good for them.

44:01 I just got a picture here of all of the different millets. Starting in the top corner, the one that looks like a cattail is the pearl millet. Then the next one over is the brown top millet. The pro so millet is that open-handed panicle where the birds can really get in and get to that seed. And then in the bottom left-hand corner is the Japanese millet. And then the one kind of in the bottom middle there is your foxtail or German or white wonder millet there.

44:29 Brett, why don't you just give us a word or two on millets here before we have come. You want to go back to your previous slide a little bit. So on the millets that we use, I would say one thing that I would highlight is if you have really heavy soils, really heavy clays, pearl millet is going to be typically limited on heavier soil, especially in water long hauls. It's not going to tolerate waterlogged soils typically. When we start getting into the heavier clays, I like using species like brown.

45:02 Top millet and Japanese millet for the value of those per pound going into a system economically those two do a little better for the firm. The tonnage that you get out of biomass—the one thing I really like about your foxtails and your brown tops versus the pearl millet is your fine stem seed size. So I typically talk a lot about grazing, but the finer stems millet really makes a nice straw for soil coverage, especially when you're grazing. They tend to get trampled a little easier. It makes a really nice hundred-percent soil coverage when you're grazing summer mixes versus sorghum sudans are thrown on. So I do like throwing those in there.

45:50 I would say that brown top does connect a little bit like crabgrass—that could be a good thing, that could be a bad thing. So I always pay attention to that in your crop rotation. Brown top millet can reseed itself very well, and most of the smaller-seeded millets will reseed themselves voluntarily next year. Pearl millet does not produce that much seed, being that it's a hybrid. It may have a few seeds in the seed head, but I hardly ever see any volunteer issues.

46:25 As far as quality-wise, I did have the brown top. The reason why it's gotten its name is because it's a top-down—that plant will be green as a gourd once it is maturing out, and that seed head will turn brown. So the benefit of that is if you're getting extra rains and you can't get it baled or you can't get it grazed, that quality is still there in that leaf. Or most plants on your—especially on your foxtail millet and your Japanese millet, you'll see that plant senesce from the bottom up. But the brown top, that seed head will turn brown before that plant actually turns physically mature, and it'll move down, down the plant. So that's kind of how it's gotten its name and its growth pattern. But well, I use all these mixes in the South. They all have a place. I've had really good luck with all of them.

47:26 Okay, well, I'm going to skip through a little bit here. Nitrate—you know, any of these things that grow can have nitrate issues, but they can be managed, and a lot of it has to do with your stubble height. Here's a sample or a test from a sorghum sudan fly. Fertilized the 300 pounds of nitrogen specifically for this test. They weren't doing that because that's how much they want to put on. But when they cut it to two-inch double high, they tested it at 5,900 parts per million. Six-inch double height was 2,900 parts per million, and when they left 12 inches of stubble, it was only 1,500 parts per million. So the nitrates are going to be concentrated at the bottom of that plant. So if you're concerned about nitrates, number one, just don't put as much fertility on. But if you think you've got nitrate issues, just harvest the top part of that plant.

48:21 I just got a few more slides I want to go through real quick. We're not going to talk about these much because these are other things that we typically put in warm-season mixes. We know brassicas are not a warm-season plant. With these forage collards, these impact forage collards tend to tolerate heat better than any of the other brassicas, so it's the number one thing I'm putting in my warm-season mixes from the Brassica family, just simply because they've got really good heat tolerance but they've also got great cold tolerance, and the palatability is really good.

48:54 We like sunflowers a lot as well. Deep-rooted, fast-growing—they're actually pretty good grazing when they're small, and then if you can get those things to form a head and make some seed, they're really good for winter stockpile grazing because the cattle will eat all those heads and they'll do really well on those oil-rich seeds.

49:13 Safflower is a little bit the same way. The seeds in a safflower have high oil content as well. Most safflower is kind of a thistle type, but we have this Baldy safflower, which is spineless, more of a smooth leaf like the sunflower. So it's definitely what you want to use if you want to put safflower in a grazing mix. But again, not a great forage, but it's great for the soil. Grows very, very fast. It helps free up phosphorus in the soil. The cattle will graze it, but you'd just want to keep it at relatively modest quantities—you know, two, three, four pounds an acre is plenty in a grazing mix like that. But it's an excellent attractor for pollinators, and it blooms very quickly.

49:55 And then flax is not a good grazing plant at all, but I still like it in a lot of my summer mixes because it's just a tough little plant. It's a very highly mycorrhizal, very very supportive of mycorrhizae.

50:08 Populations a great companion plant with others that it plays well with others and it never hardly ever gets choked out and it stands really well. You can see this flax when it's matured you will stand there all winter long like that, so it can be a really good snow catch drop.

50:25 And then the last one is okra. Okra is something that we started using as a cover crop about five years ago and we've really increased the amount of okra that we use. Very long-lasting residue, very deep-rooted, great heat and drought tolerance, and it's actually pretty good grazing. The cattle they'll eat the fruit and they'll eat the leaves. They typically eat the stock which is good because if you get some more moisture in growing season that okra will put on new leaves and it will grow new fruit. It just keeps growing taller and taller, will keep flowering up at the top of that plant. And you know I've seen okra plants that are 10 to 12 feet tall if they can grow long enough. So again, you know, just another plant that is part of a mix. You wouldn't want to have a whole field of it but it's a nice companion mix with a lot of these other things that we've talked about.

51:13 So Noah, what do we have for questions? I know that we kind of talked for a long time here. What kind of questions do we have popping up?

51:23 Yeah, well I'll start here with just a few that were sent to me through email and then I'll continue to go through the chats if you guys have any questions, feel free to start typing them out now. This first question here is from Bruce who has goats and he says he likes to graze his goats on cover crops. Are there any that are unacceptable for grazing goats typically?

51:56 Or those animals require a higher broadleaf diet than with broad leaves. Goats need more woody or species to survive. Crime on probably the biggest reason white goats get out in a grazing system is we spray out the brushy woody species and all we have is grass, and so the animals don't like high diets of pure grass diets. So I don't say there's anything that is bad for goats in most summer mixes but I really like sunflowers, okra, those woodier stingier species. Typically they don't touch the middle every month. What's that done him some hemp would be very good. In fact we see in the wildlife side that deer have a high preference for some ham. So I kind of referred dear refer deer and goats in a similar diet pattern as for what they require. And so goats typically prefer 80% broad leaves to 20% grasses in their diet. Sheep for about sixty forty and cattle or anywhere from thirty percent broadleafs to 70% grasses to fifty fifty depending on the animal.

53:26 What is this? This is from William. What is the compaction braking potential of summer covers? Do any species really stand out well?

53:40 Yeah, the sorghum, sorghum city n is a very deep-rooted grass, so it's definitely going to be your best grass for helping break compaction issues. And then of course sunflower and okra are really deep, deep tap for it. So the combination of the of the deep fibrous root of the sorghum and the deep tap roots of sorghum or of the sunflowers and the okra are really good. And from the legume side I think sunhemp is probably going to give you the best deepest rooting system there. So if you're going after compaction I would do all those, throw in a little bit of the daikon radishes and you got a really pretty good compaction fighting mix.

54:19 I will say though that if you're going to try to get down to deep compaction you have to get that planted early. You can't be planting something like that thirty days before frost and expect to have a lot of really good compaction breaking benefits. So the sooner you can get a plant at the better, because the root system by and large it's going to be a direct comparison to how long it grows. So the longer it grows, the more compaction you'll break.

54:48 Than what I've seen, but I plan to test it. Compaction is more of an oxygen limiting factor for root growth and it is a physical compaction. So perennials like eastern gamagrass blow through heavy compaction. And I've talked to Dale a little bit about this and I plan to test this but I heard some on-farm testing on your own to try out a little bit. So Japanese millet can tolerate waterlogged soils and grow and thrive in water me. And Dale assume then it has summer income up in the rooks which allows oxygen to go down the middle of the right. If that's the case, Japanese manila may be a good component in your mixed to survive high compacted soils because of the lack of oxygen. And so I would encourage try me like I said, I don't know that for a fact. We've kind of hypothesized that. We've had I've heard several people say that it's done great with that but I would check into that and like I said we're or continue to

55:53 Kind of test that out and observe more on that one. And this one comes from Facebook. Travis says for winter stockpiling summer annual forages, when is the optimal planting date for maximum quality and can you include triticale in that mix for spring grazing? On the grazing mixes, I want to say that there's an optimal time. It's to whatever time that you're dealt with on your grazing system. We can tweak. There's a lot of species out there that you can tweak. For instance, if you have a window to where you can only plant an August timeframe, you can use spring species, you can use summer species, and you can use winter species that all stockpile really great in the August timeframe if you're planting. And I'm assuming for that area of August, anywhere from North Texas through about Nebraska to South Dakota for my region is what I'm kind of referring to on that.

57:00 Yeah, I would agree. I would say if you're going to use more cereals and things, then that you want at least sixty to seventy-five days before your first frost. I think it's sixty to seventy-five days. You could get a lot of growth out of a warm season plant yet you could still get the cool season plants. And like Brett said, the spring cereals will actually give you a lot more growth that time of year. So spring oats, spring barley, early spring triticale, and that gives you things will grow, you know, well after the frost and it will give you really high quality early to mid-winter grazing. If you want something to overwinter and give you that early spring grazing, then that's when you need to go to the winter triticale, the rye, and things like that. Then those are probably best planted probably thirty to forty-five days before your first frost is optimum on those. So kind of depends on when you want the grazing and what species you want to put in there. That's the window. That optimum time is what animals are you stockpiling?

58:05 So kind of keep that in mind. If you're stockpiling pigs, you might want things fruiting like sunflowers, grain sorghum, pumpkins, squash, gourds. If you're doing cattle, then you know more fibers, more protein. What's your limiting food source in the winter timeframe in it and address that?

58:28 So okay, this comes from Larry. Is there a rule of best practice to release the cattle on the cover crop that can be measured from plant to maturity for planning purposes, such as fifty percent of total maturity time? Obviously species being different, but if there's kind of an average, would help in designing a mix for that. So when is the best time to put cattle out on a warm season mix? A good rule of thumb that I use is need a hip on on grazing height on sorghums. I tried to avoid going by days because where you're at, your growing season might be limited. It depends on the species in that mix. But knee-high is kind of been a good indicator of starting point on grazing and rotating on that, to keep those species in a vegetative enough state to keep rotating around. But as far as days, I've had millets hit maturity with adequate moisture in forty days. I've had eleven thousand pounds of biomass in thirty days with adequate moisture and good soil health and good fertility there. So it's hard to say days on something like that. So I kind of ask, what are your goals? Soil health-wise and grazing-wise, you know, if you're trying to maximize residue on the soil surface, you might like those. Let those species get farther along in maturity to get more lignin, get more woody or species to lay down on that soil surface.

1:00:29 Okay, with that, it is six thirty, so we'll probably wrap things up here. If you guys do have any other questions, Brett and Keith's emails are just a name at Green Cover Seeds. So it's Keith at greencoverseeds.com and Brett with two T's, B-r-e-t-t at greencoverseed.com. So if you guys have those questions that we either missed or didn't get to, feel free to send them an email and they'll gladly follow up with you on that. This will be recorded. I know there's a couple people asked them for the slides, so if you want those, feel free to email Keith. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. Thank you, Brett and Keith, for your knowledge and willingness to share, and Dale for answering questions on the side. Thanks for joining us everybody.

1:01:20 I'll also throw in here beforehand. Next week we are going to talk about alternative crops to grow other than the typical corn, beans, and wheat. We're going to have kind of a farmer panel on that, talk about the challenges and opportunities that come with growing different niche crops. So we'd love for you guys to tune in on that. You'll find the sign up on Facebook and in the email that we sent out yesterday. So with that, thank you guys so much and we'll see you next week.