Warm Season Cover Crops: Which Species Fit Your Goals

0:00 Hey everybody, welcome to the Green Cover podcast where we have really interesting conversations with some of the top producers and experts in the regenerative community. Join us as we learn together how we can prepare God's creation for future generations.

0:16 You know, choices are great and it's easy to choose between the good and the bad usually. So if the choice is between having ice cream and not having ice cream, obviously we're going to choose having ice cream. But when you go into the ice cream shop and they've got 50 different choices, that's when it gets hard. You know, do I choose the cappuccino chocolate or do I choose the cherry chunk? That's when choices get difficult. It's between the better, the good, the better, and the best.

0:47 And so it's the same way with cover crops. We have lots of cover crop options and choices are good, but it only makes sense if you understand the things that you're choosing. And it's not the choice between good and bad. It's the choice between good, better, and best. And so as we look at building a summer mix of cover crop species, we want to help you with these choices.

1:11 And so my guest today, I'm excited to be able to visit with my friend and colleague and green cover teammate, Zack Lau. Zach is our primary seed buyer. He has taken over that responsibility within the company and because of that he has deep intimate knowledge of all these species because he has to understand them inside and out because he's the one that is purchasing these and also selling many of them as well. So Zach, welcome to the Green Cover podcast.

1:39 Yeah, happy to be here Keith. It's going to be fun. Yeah, I've been looking forward to this. And you know, it's great to have all these choices, but if you don't understand what you're choosing between, it's not a good thing. It's just an overwhelming thing. And so I thought what we would do here today is just go through the different choices that people have from the cover crop species specifically for warm season blends because we're recording this here middle of May. We're coming into the season where we can really plant some really great warm season mixes for building soil, for grazing livestock, fixing nitrogen, whatever the goals are. And I just thought it would be good to help walk people through the different choices that they have.

2:25 Yeah. So first of all before we get started give just a little bit of background on yourself for people to understand your context because you've been working with green cover for quite a few years now. You worked in the regenerative world before that but also you also farm and so you are using these concepts these principles these species on your own operation as well. So give people just a little bit of background.

2:53 Sure. Yeah. So I've been with Green Cover for six years. Actually, just celebrated my workversary last month. So seems like it's been way longer than that, especially if you ask the right people. But I think it's probably been three years now since I started doing the seed buying and stuff like that. For green cover, you know, prior to that, I had some experience in that already. I was running a smaller cover crop company. By no means is it near the scale that green cover was, but it still got me introduced to that experience of like, well, this is how plant genetics work. This is where they fit. This is where you move them. And since I was the educator at that facility, like I had to learn and absorb all the information. A lot of it came from you, Keith, in those YouTube videos and just listening to you talk. But then I just kind of took a knack to it and I liked it and started running with it.

3:50 And once I got to Green Cover and saw all the different options of genetics and varieties, then it was like, okay, this is pretty interesting. It's like anything anybody does. Like once you love it, it's super easy to absorb and you can really take it in and use it that way. And then like you said on the farm, you know, we have a couple different classes of livestock. We do some row crops, but yeah, my favorite thing to be able to do to a customer is be like, 'Hey, yeah, I've planted this. I used it. This is what you should expect. This is how you're going to have to manage it.' I'm very passionate about mistakes and like I like to set people up for as easy of success as possible because you can definitely get yourself into a situation where you're like this feels great and right to start like this cover crop mix, but when it comes time to actually manage and utilize that cover crop mix, whether you're running a planter through it, a swathther through it, whatever it is, that's the step that I want to be easy, not just the drilling of the cover crop mix.

4:57 So pretty passionate about that and helping those customers. And I also really enjoy working with all these seed producers. You know, we've got people in Florida and Georgia and then it just goes from Florida, Georgia all the way to Oregon and Washington, like completely across the country as far as you can get. And it just is so fascinating the different weather conditions, the different genetics, how these plants are grown, where they fit. Why does something that's grown in Florida work in Nebraska or Kansas or Indiana? And it's just very interesting to me how all these fit together.

5:35 Yeah, I love that. And it's a testimony to the diversity that God put into his creation. And we can see that.

5:42 Anytime we look at a native natural ecosystem, there's all kinds of diversity, legumes, grasses, broad leaves, all growing together in this wonderful community. And that's kind of what we try to simulate on a small scale with our cover crop mixes. We're very passionate about diversity and I believe we do diversity better than any other cover crop seed company in the country that I'm aware of. And it's because that's what we saw work on our own farm just much like you in the very beginning. And so that's what we want to help other people do as well. But like I said in the opening, that diversity, if you don't understand it, it's not a helpful thing. It can just be a confusing thing. So let's unwind a few of these things and let's focus specifically on the warm season things or things that we would plant here in the warm season because it's a wonderful opportunity.

6:41 We've got long days, lots of growing degree days and there's a wonderful opportunity to grow all kinds of benefits for your soil. So let's start with legumes. What are some of the legume choices that people would have in putting in these summer mixes and when might they choose one over the other?

7:01 Sure. So if we're looking at the species that we're selling the most of, let's call them trusty rusties. That's kind of how we start. Most of our sales team and customers really like to use a type of cowpea. That's by far and above the most common summertime legume we use. Which that leads into two different types of cowpeas. Do you want to use iron and clays or do you want to use red rippers? And there are some differences. There's not enough difference to say you don't have one, I'm not going to use the other unless your context is super specific. But there are some differences. Our iron and clay cowpeas are very long season. They're produced in Georgia and Florida where they get planted basically after a melon crop and they don't harvest them till December. So very long season, most places in the Midwest or the Plains you'll never see iron and clay peas make seed pods which is good if you're worried about volunteer. The red rippers, they're more of an upright plant. The red rippers on the other hand are shorter, 55 to 70 day maturity, and they're kind of more of a vining plant. So depending on your structure and your mix, you can kind of pick and choose if you want something to vine or if you want something to just grow upright. I will say those iron clays, if you give them enough time to grow upright, it'll look like they're vining because they will get big. We see the red rippers sometimes favored in more of the sparser, harsher environments like western Oklahoma, far west dry dryland Kansas, places like that. That's where they're produced and they've kind of built that ecological fit in with them.

8:48 You know, one thing that people may not realize is that cowpeas are the exact same thing as black eyed peas. So if you go to a restaurant, you order black eyed peas, it is a cowpea, exact same species, but they're just different varieties. And when we started Green Cover and I was doing research on a lot of these things, I was reading these yearbooks of agriculture from 100 plus years ago and it talks about red rippers and it talks about irons and it talks about clays. Those two have kind of been combined now. But these are really old kind of wild type and they make much better cover crops than a blackeyed pea will, mostly because they grow forever.

9:29 You know, with a cover crop we want vegetative growth. We don't really want them to go reproductive. Definitely the plant itself stays vegetative longer and stretches out. Those, we've dabbled a little bit if those peas are short. We pick up maybe a purple hull cowpea or something like that and those are what you buy in the grocery store. They're a lot larger seed too. So you're getting more bang for your buck out of the iron and clays or red rippers, definitely.

10:00 So speaking of bang for the buck and cowpeas, we know are very heat tolerant, very drought tolerant, but kind of their cousin, their shorter statured cousin would be a mung bean. Talk about when you like using mung beans versus a cowpea and what some of those differences are.

10:14 Sure thing. So bang for your buck, let's start there. The seed size is much smaller on a mung bean. So your seeding rate is much less, about half, maybe not quite, but close. A mung bean fits a lot better into a shorter season growing season window. So if you have something that is coming off, say you have a cereal crop coming off and you want to plant something, bang bang, to capture sunlight and grow during those growing degree days of the late summer, but you're still going to go in with the cereal, mung beans would be just fine for that. Or if you're wanting a really rapid growth grazing crop, like you're like, 'Hey, I've got 45 or 60 days to grow a grazing crop and I'm going to do something else after that in the summertime,' mung bean fits perfectly into that situation. They're very fast to establish. They grow really quick. They're not by any means super impressive. They're just kind of a little bush style bean. They don't really spread like your iron and clays do, but they're still a tough plant. And that small seed size, I think, helps them get established better, especially in the sparser country.

11:20 They'll grow about anywhere. You can bury them in muck and give them plenty of rain, or you can send them out west where there's no rain and they'll still somehow find a way.

11:32 Most people have eaten a mung bean, even if they don't realize it. If you've ever eaten a bean sprout on a salad bar, that's going to be a mung bean. The reason is they're small seeds but they're packed with nutrition. They're just so nutritionally dense. These things that are called superfoods or are really popular in the health food industry—it's because they do have a lot of nutrients packed into that seed. But the reason they can do that is because that plant is so good at putting the exudates into the soil that is helping the biology extract all those nutrients back into the seed. So I think these superfoods make really good cover crops because of what they're doing in the soil.

12:21 One other thing I want to mention on mung beans—I was just at a field day down in South Texas a couple weeks ago and our customer down there had mung beans as part of his mix and he's doing wet bales, silage bales. So he had this big broad diverse mix—sorghums, millets, all these things. But what was really interesting is the mung beans, and this is south of San Antonio, planted in March. Sixty days later had seed pods. I could peel that open and find the green seeds in there. When he rolls that up into a wet bale, not only is he going to have the grain from his forage sorghum, he's going to have mung bean grain in those bales as well. And that's going to add to that nutritional density of those bales. So I think that's a viable option there as well from that forage standpoint.

13:15 Let's move on. We got a lot of territory to cover here. Let's talk about sunhemp because people talk about sunhemp. It's a tropical plant. Maybe not quite as drought tolerant as cowpeas and mung beans, but every bit as heat tolerant. Talk about when you would use sunhemp. And in fact, we even have choices when it comes to sunhemp now.

13:36 Sunhemp is a very tropical species. It's actually grown just right along the equator. We cannot get it to produce in the United States because it's photoperiod sensitive and it's day length. It just takes a long time to grow and make seed. So we have two different varieties or types of sunhemp that we're doing. We still have the full-size sunhemp. You plant it and it grows really tall. It produces a ton of nitrogen. Like if somebody's calling and saying, 'Hey, my number one goal for this summertime cover crop is to grow as long as possible and to fixate as much nitrogen and cycle as much nutrients,' sun's the first thing I'm going to put in it because it just gives it the growing days. You never have to really worry about it besides it's just going to get tall. It can get woody on you. I've had a couple people tell me that if they've got the gauge wheels that are hollow—like they've got just mud, the mud-style gauge wheels—they say that sunhemp can sneak in there somehow. But on the good side of sunhemp, it's a pretty good grazer. I don't know exactly where the growth point is. We've even bush-hogged it off and seen it come back from down low. So it seems like you can graze it pretty intensively and get it to come back. But just the root system and the amount of nodules on that plant for a summertime plant—that's just fantastic.

15:02 For people that don't necessarily want something that has the potential to get 10 or 12 foot tall like sunhemp can, we've got the new mini red sunhemp. And it's a really interesting plant because you would think that the seed would be the same size like our sorghums. We have a dwarf sorghum and the seed is the same size. Well, the mini red sunhemp seed is about at least half the size, maybe even slightly smaller. It is little bitty stuff. And the plant reflects that and it'll get five and a half, six foot tall when it's fully matured. The thing that I like the most about it is it keeps the stem really small. That stem is very small, maybe about the size of your pinky finger but not much bigger. The leaves are soft and it looks like the growth points on the plant—it probably puts on just as many leaves as your 10 or 12 foot tall mature sunhemp does. But you can decrease your seeding rate, which means you're saving money on shipping pounds first of all. But I always like to be able to keep that seeding rate a little bit lighter and still keep your seeds per pound up, especially in a cover crop blend.

16:08 Just one comment I'll make about sunhemp. Early on, as we were doing our green cover plots and doing some of our initial testing, 60 days of sunhemp growth, we had plants that were 6 feet tall. And when we sent that in for a test to the lab, it showed 140 pounds of nitrogen fixed already just in those first 60 days. So you're right, it's a fast growing plant and it can produce a lot of nitrogen. There are some management concerns, but as part of a mix, those concerns are very much diluted versus planting it as a solid seeded crop.

16:48 One more that I want to maybe hit on here because we do sell a lot of them, but you have to use them in the

16:54 Right situation, and that's actually soybeans, which is something that everybody's familiar with. You may not think about it as a cover crop, but talk a little bit about soybeans and when you would use those as a cover part of a cover crop mix.

17:08 Yeah. So we have two different categories of soybeans basically. So we have non-GMO soybeans, which is what we have for our cover crop blends. It's actually newer genetics is what we try to keep. Sometimes that doesn't always work out, but we sought some genetics out from Kansas State University. It's a long season soybean, so 51, 53 maturity group, which again, the idea is to keep the plant vegetative as long as possible. Like, we're not trying to get these soybeans to go to grain. And honestly, I don't want them to because if they're in my rotation, I definitely don't want volunteer soybeans from another plant. But going back to the genetics of it and why this is actually important, we don't necessarily want to recommend a cover crop mix with a bunch of soybeans in it for somebody that has soybeans in their rotation, especially if it's a variety that has tendencies to host or harbor some of the different soybean pathogens, the nematodes, the bad ones. And so by seeking these newer genetics, we can choose plants that are resistant to those. So that helps. It gives us an added layer of benefit. But again, I don't like to see you use a bunch of soybeans if that's a heavy component of your rotation.

18:22 But they get big, they stand well. That's one thing that cow peas don't really do. The soybeans will stand well, hold their shape, hold their structure, and just add a little bit of diversity to it. That's just the regular non-GMO soybeans. Then we also have our Laredo soybeans which you talked about the history of the iron and clay cowpeas and the red rippers being old. Laredo is one of the very first varieties of soybeans that came over from Japan. And usually when people get a bag of Laredo they're like this isn't a soybean you sold me the wrong thing. And it's like no, no, no.

19:00 These tiny little black seeds. They don't even look like soybean. Yeah. Little tiny black seeds. And what's funny about them is that seed coat is really thick and hard, which gives them a tendency to have a little bit of hard seed. Good or bad, I'm indifferent to that because generally you can break in a cycle. But what makes them unique by that is they're a group five soybean like a 56, 58. You want to talk about a vine, Laredo is a vine and it will vine and it will climb and it will cover and it will fill in gaps like you've never seen. And it goes back to the seeding rate about half the size of regular soybeans. So you can really cut that rate down. A lot of people will call these hay beans. If you've heard people say hay beans, they're most definitely talking about a Laredo. They'll get big. I wouldn't recommend necessarily using Laredo only as hay beans. Maybe in context with some other crops. But they're a really good summertime legume. Very long season, stay very palatable. But again, it's all in that context. Where will they fit into my rotation?

20:10 Well, that's a good transition into the next section here. You talked about them as a hay bean using them in conjunction or combination of something else. And for most people, the backbone of a summer mix is going to be a warm season grass. These C4 grasses very efficient at photosynthesizing, can accumulate a lot of biomass, pump a lot of carbon into the soil, and so sorghums and millets are going to be the backbone of a lot of these mixes. And when it comes to choices, boy, nothing gives you choices like sorghums do. So, let's spend a little bit of time helping walk people through the different choices that we have for sorghums. And as we're talking about these, I just want to make sure people understand that these are traits that we're talking about, but they're all non-GMO. These are naturally occurring genes within the sorghum plant family that the breeders have figured out how to either turn on or turn off, but they're not done through genetically modified. So everything that we sell is non-GMO. So all these traits that Zach's going to talk about are just naturally occurring traits. So.

21:19 Zach, lots of sorghum choices. Kind of walk us through those. Yep. And you know how passionate I am about my warm season grasses. You're a sorghum fanatic. I know it. Yeah. So, I want to start with this by explaining to everyone. Don't get hung up on a name, especially a name of a sorghum, sorghum sedan, forage sorghum, cane, because the name is not nearly as important as the characteristics of that plant. There could be four different names for something. You could have sugar grazer, sweet grazer, ultra sweet grazer x, like all these different companies sell different things. The names are just to remember what it is for the future. What you need to care about as a producer is you need to care about those traits that you talked about. What is this plant going to do? How is it going to express and be good for my operation? It's very important and we'll as we talk about some of these I'll explain why that matters. So I'll just go through a little bit of background. So there's some abbreviations that in the sorghum company. So we have BMR, MS, DM, PPS. All these can sound confusing. They're relatively simple and I, you know.

22:35 I don't know why we abbreviate a three-letter word or three words, but we do. So we have brown mid rib, which is BMR. Basically it's shrunk—it's taking a lot of the lignin out of that plant and making it digestible. Most of your lignin comes in your stalk. So they're turning that mid rib brown and it's making it more digestible. So the plant animal is going to be able to utilize more of that stem or stalk in the leaves as well, basically giving you more digestible fiber whether it's grazed, hayed, chopped, whatever it is, it's just more digestible.

23:10 For the grazing guy, it's almost a no-brainer to do a BMR. Yeah, for sure. Anytime a plant is standing and that animal is removing it in the field, the BMR is going to be bang for your buck. You know, as you start to process it, that stem starts to break down a little bit more, whether you're haying it or chopping it. So it's not as important. I would still say that it is important for the other characteristics that are coming with it.

23:35 So then we have MS or male sterile. And male sterile basically means if you plant a field of that variety of sorghum sudan all by itself, there's not a female and a male that can reproduce and make viable seed. But if there is sorghum or something in the neighborhood and some can cross-pollinate, you'll never get 100% cross-pollination. That just doesn't happen. But why male sterile is important is when plants go through and try to start making grain, it puts all the sugar and energy that that plant is making into the grain. Well, if it's not putting that energy into the grain or the viable seed, it's keeping it in the plant in the stalk and the stems. And this is something that's really cool. It just cranks the sugar number up. And the sugar is energy. If you're looking for something to stockpile to give your cattle or your livestock some more energy in the winter, it's a great opportunity. I even like to use a male sterile when I'm using like a hay ration or making some type of hay mix because I like that sugar content in the stalk because we're going to be trying to feed that animal the stalk throughout the winter in that bale.

24:48 Then we have DM, which is just delayed maturity, and basically what that is, it's not quite to a PPS photo period sensitive, but it just means that the maturity is longer. Most sorghum sedans, sorghum sudan hybrids are going to be 45 to 55 or 60 day maturity. And a delayed maturity could be 100.

25:14 And Zach, that maturity is not to full grain production. It's to what the boot or right before it heads out. Sorghum sudan is different than everything else. Sorghum sudan maturity days are rated at that boot stage, basically the highest—it's that match between tonnage and feed value. That's what sorghum sudan maturity is. For sorghum is like everything else. It's going towards black layer. It's the point where the plant is not going to physically gain any more weight. I mean set its grain. It's as big as it's going to be after that. It goes backwards. So big difference, and we have to make sure people understand that as they're using these in their cover crop mixes. If we say 45-day sorghum sudan, that means like that's not going to make grain in 45 days, but you better be cutting it or grazing it or something within that 45 days. But goes back to that delayed maturity. If that doesn't fit into your rotation, you need to pick something that's either a delayed maturity or a PPS, which is photo period sensitive.

26:19 And basically what that means is that plant will not go reproductive until it's 12 hours and 20 minutes of night time. Yep, it's very important that it's night time. So essentially throughout most of the plains that'll never happen. I mean it'll freeze off before it gets to that point because of where it's at. That's usually going to be mid to late September for most people in our—yep, in the plains area, Midwest.

26:46 And so that gives you—I mean you can essentially plant a photo period sensitive after your last frost or once your soil hits 65 degrees and it will grow. Down here that's like May 15th. So we can plant a photo period sensitive May 15th and not have to look at it worrying about it going to seed until the middle of September. So you want to talk about a forgiving plant, whether you're grazing it or haying it or even just growing it for a cover crop. Like, hey, put it out there and just let it go. It might get 12 feet tall. It might—if you use the wrong genetics, it could get 12 feet tall. That's exactly right. So yeah, we talked about the maturity a little bit. So let's talk about our varieties so that people can kind of reference these. So we talked about BMR, brown mid rib. We also have conventional varieties, which means that they don't have that brown mid rib trait turned on. That doesn't mean they're a bad product by any means. There are still lots of good things that can come out of those. And so our conventional sorghum sudan product that we call it Super Cover, which is a very fitting name because it is super at covering in a cover crop mix, and it's not necessarily a cheap product. It's just a very good value product because your conventional sorghum sedans and sorghums, they're just usually a little cheaper than the brown mid ribs because there's not as

28:14 So Super Cover is going to fit into that category of about 45 to 55 day maturities. The cool thing about it and most sorghum sedans is it can be removed multiple times throughout the growing season and it basically resets its clock. So every time you graze it or hay it off, we're going to reset its clock and it's going to give you more time to go through it. That's again why the maturities are different of this versus forage sorghums or corn. It's a very, very, very high sugar plant. It's a very sweet plant by that means.

28:47 I've used this product. I've put it up in hay before. If you can bail it when it's like three, three and a half foot tall and not wait for 45 days, it's way easier to get put up in a dry hay context. But I also like to put a little splash of this in a lot of my grazing mixes because the sugar content is just so high in it. It's just fantastic.

29:11 And if you're looking for a cover crop mix, not worried about grazing it, you just want to put something out there, you're going to manage the potential volunteer because since it's not a male sterile, not a photo period sensitive, it will make viable grain. If you're not worried about the grain, you can put a conventional sorghum sedan or forage sorghum in your cover crop mix and it's going to break down pretty quickly throughout the winter. They really just don't last a super, super long time because there's not a lot of improved genetics to it.

29:55 To viable grain. So if you're planting this after wheat harvest, depending on where you're at, it still may freeze out before it would make viable seed.

30:05 Yep. Yeah. The place where the volunteer seed is a context of like, okay, if you're a producer, say you're growing non-GMO corn, non-GMO soybeans, or you're organic, and listen, let's pick a photo period sensitive or something that we can say this is going to be better fit for your operation.

30:27 Yeah. So it doesn't have to be everybody. If you're a conventional farmer and planting traded corn and soybeans and you can clean stuff up, it doesn't matter. It's a very economical choice to make.

30:41 Yep. So just keep moving because there's a bunch of them. So we've got one that we call Green Monster. And this one is kind of funny because it is exactly what it says it is. It's a green monster. It's a delayed maturity conventional sorghum sedan. And the time that I the first time that I laid eyes and fell in love with it, we're down in Texas and I bet it was 14 foot tall and it was August down there and they had just had an 80 mph windstorm and they had like 1x4 posts that were 6 foot tall as their name plates and those were all broke off down the row and there were some plants blew over and this stuff was still standing. I'm like, here it is. This is the one. We don't want it to fall over.

31:28 So it's a good product because it's delayed maturity. This product is about 110, 115 days to the boot. So this is going to really, really stretch it out. I mean, that's how it gets so big and so tall. Context in perspective, this is going to make a big stem. Like if you're going to graze this or think you're going to hate it, don't pick this one. It stands for a reason. It's 14 foot tall, but it's going to produce a lot of biomass. Like if you're trying to smother some stuff out and just grow some carbon, this guy right here, he'll do it for you.

32:04 Yeah. And it's a big component in our wildlife blend that, you know, if you want like a privacy fence, growing fence, it's part of that mix.

32:16 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the view blocker works really good. So then the last conventional sorghum sedan we carry is called Solar Max and it's a PPS and the reason so PPS is a trait that's a little bit more expensive because it does take quite a bit of work to get it to produce grain for the same reason that it's not producing grain. So it's a little bit more expensive and people are oftentimes will ask well why would I want to plant a conventional PPS? Most of the PPS's are going into grazing situations that they can be flexible with, but it was for that exact context we talked about earlier. If somebody that doesn't want to make any viable seed in those special situations, it's a great option for you.

33:02 Same genetics as Super Cover. And this one is going to be aphid tolerant too. So if you're in a place where aphids are pretty bad, you know, let's talk about this. There's aphid resistant and there's aphid tolerant.

33:19 You're talking about sugarcane aphids that affect sorghum.

33:20 Correct. Yep. Sugarcane aphids that affect sorghum. I haven't found a sorghum stand that is resistant to aphids. I found several that are tolerant to them which means they just don't go backwards like you would if you wouldn't have it. So this Solar Max is going to be in that tolerant category, which gives you big flexibility to transport it across the country too.

33:48 So then we're going to go into our BMR sorghum sedans. This is our favorite thing for our sales team to sell is BMR sorghum sedans. You know, most of our summertime cover crop people, they're grazing these mixes or they're haying them. They're designed with livestock in mind.

34:04 And this BMR really shines. My personal favorite sorghum sudan to sell and I think I've talked most of the sales team into it is called Cattle Cover. It does exactly that—it covers up your cattle and they love it. And it is a male sterile, so it goes back to keeping that sugar in the stock when they're doing it. It's a BMR and it's a cool one because you can plant it. It doesn't get 14 foot tall. Even if you grow it out to its maturity, which is 45 to 55 days like the super cover, it doesn't get 15 foot tall. It'll get 7-ish, 8 foot tall at the tallest point. If you let it go and shoot seed, that's when it's going to get a little bit taller, but it really keeps the leaves and everything packed pretty tight to the ground. It's not quite a dwarf, but it is still a good lower stature product. Being that it's a male sterile, it's a multi-use in my opinion for either grazing or haying operations.

35:09 This one has actually been tested. The breeders tested the stem moisture and it's one of the lowest stem moisture plants on the market right now. I live in southeast Kansas. It's raining this morning. It rains every five days—not enough to give us enough water for our crops, but enough to be annoying. It's hard to put up dry hay, especially a sorghum sudan in this part of the country because the humidity is just ridiculous. We have to have something that when we swath it and crimp it, it cannot have much stem moisture. It has to dry down within three to four days or it's not going to work out. This plant will do that, which makes it super good for that context. Now if you live on the flip side of that, if you live in a place where they don't get consistent moisture enough to grow this plant or if it's not under irrigation, there's better options for you. I would probably draw the line around Wichita east. Flint Hills east is probably where I would say Cattle Cover is almost going to fit every single need that you'll have.

36:25 The next product we have is called 50651 and it's a Brachitic dwarf. I always call it brackic dwarf and I'm sure they all look at me like what is this guy? He's a northerner. It's a brachitic dwarf, which means what they've done is they shrunk the nodes on the stem and they kept the same amount of leaves on the plant as a full-size plant. They just put it in a 5 and a half foot tall plant. A lot of times people say, 'This is a dwarf plant. Well, dwarf just means small.' I said, 'Yeah, the stem is smaller, but the leaves are just as big.' That is really important if you're grazing small ruminants—goats, sheep, or like calves—or you want to be able to count your cattle. If you're a big cow-calf guy and you want to be able to go out and make sure stuff's looking good during the growing season, use dwarf because it's only going to get 5 and a half foot tall if you let it get 5 and a half foot tall.

37:31 This one is nice too because it's a delayed maturity. It's going to be about 85 to 90 days whereas Endurance, our other brachitic dwarf, is going to be 45 to 55 days. It just offers a little bit more flexibility being short. It's the same price as our Cattle Cover. They're both BMRs, so it just depends on your context. A lot of times I'll use the dwarf plants in a cover crop mix because it allows more sunlight to come in. There's not as big of a wall, as big of a shade curtain that is coming down, and just let those other plants express themselves a little bit more.

38:10 One of the places I really like using the brachitic dwarfs, especially the longer season ones, is in a stockpile mix. In a stockpile mix is something you would grow through the summer but not graze until the fall or winter. Being a shorter statured plant, they tend to stand up better against wind and snow. The brachitic dwarfs also tend to have better leaf collar attachment. Those leaves are attached to the stock with a bigger, thicker, stronger collar, and it helps it retain those leaves, which is really important if you're going to be grazing it late in the year.

38:47 It'll keep it from shredding really bad too. Like they won't just drop off. They won't just shred. That's a good point. So then we go into the last two BMR sorghum sudan products we have, which are both photoperiod sensitive PPS products. These are probably the most forgiving products that we carry in terms of somebody that has a lot to manage and not enough time to manage. That's almost the definition of how we use those. Photoperiod sensitive for the same reason I explained earlier—we can plant it May 15th and not have to worry about it getting to maturity until September 15th, which is good for multiple reasons. The first reason that I like to point out: if you're putting this on dryland acres west and you don't get enough rain to get it started and the rain shuts off for say 30 or 45 days, well, if you would have planted Cattle Cover or Endurance or Super Cover, that plant would have tried to go ahead and make a seed head. It's on a ticking time clock.

45:46 That's why we call it sweet cane. So that's our conventional one. And then our BMR one, we call it Sorrow FSD120, which the first thing that I get or hear when people are like 120 days, what in the world? Well, that's for a reason. Like we want to, we've talked about this over and over and over again. We want to keep the plant vegetative as long as we possibly can. And remember, we jumped over into forage sorghum, so our maturity date changed. Instead of going to boot, we're at hard grain at 120 days. So you really have to take that into context. You know, if your goal is to chop it and put it up as silage with grain, yeah, you're going to need to plant it early enough you can get to that maturity point. If you're putting it in a stock or a grazing summertime grazing mix, diverse summertime grazing mix as a BMR, yeah, plant it in May, graze it all summer long, and it's going to stay vegetative.

46:49 And one comment I'll make with this one, it's a bracytic dwarf. It is probably the densest plant I've ever seen. Like it gets chest high about it and there is a leaf every 2 inches down this plant and the leaves you put them across your hand and the only thing you can see is the tips of your fingers touching your palm. They're just, it's a crazy plant. I actually had somebody in Nebraska plant it last year like, ah, 120 days, I don't know. They called me and they're like, 'Hey, this plant isn't getting very big.' And I said, 'That's okay. Look at how close the leaves are together.' And they actually walked out in it because, you know, driving down the road, you can't get an accurate gauge of what you're doing. They walked out in it and they're like, 'We can barely get through it. It's so leafy.' I'm like, 'Yeah, that's exactly what you wanted.' So it's a really good product, really good fit for our situation and our context and it just gives a little bit more diversity to it.

47:51 And so with any of these products, whether you're chopping it, wet hay bale, dry hay bale, or grazing, you don't have to do them just by themselves. The cow peas would be a great fit in here. A mung bean could even potentially be a good fit. So it's the backbone to most of these programs, but it doesn't have to be the only thing. So it's like getting your vanilla ice cream, but let's put all these toppings and things on it to really dress it up or add in the Oreo cookies or whatever it is.

48:23 Yep. So here's a little nugget for foreshadowing. I believe we're going to do an ask me anything on these warm seasons things that we're talking about today next Wednesday at noon. So we're not going to throw seating rates or anything like that into this video specifically. So you can come ask us those questions at that noon ask me anything.

48:44 So but we better keep moving or we're going to have a two-hour long podcast.

48:51 So the next thing we're going to jump into is millets, which is going to be our last warm season grass category. And there's several different types of millets. We've got hybrid millets, which is your pearls. We carry two of those. Green giant and then an exceed BMR. Now, pearl millet's a little bit different than sorghum sudan, and forge sorghum, all the sorghums. So these millets, there's some obvious benefits to them immediately. There's no prussic acid in these millets. That's very important to know. We didn't talk about that with the sorghum sudans, but once it freezes, the prussic acid and the plant goes together, basically forms cyanide and is very toxic to all classes of livestock. That only happens when it freezes or is extremely extremely drought stress. It's got to be a very extreme situation for that to happen. So don't get scared right away. But if you have a place where you're like, 'Hey, this acre is only here for me to graze at frost before crop residues and after pasture, like, okay, let's look at some millet options and see.'

50:02 Yeah, because that and I just want to make sure people understand that that toxicity from the prussic acid lasts a short period of time because it volatizes away given you know, a week or so. So it's not like that renders that sorghum worthless the rest of the year. It's just a period of time in there that you have to be aware of. And so we've got some great resources on our website. Just go to our website and search for prussic acid. Really good articles on there about how to manage your way through the prussic acid issues.

50:37 Yep. Absolutely. And one of those management options is these millets. Now the differences with the millets is primarily so the hybrid pearl millets, BMR and conventional, like we said they are a very very good tillering plant but the downside to them is they don't like to get planted very deep and they don't like really really really mucky ground. Like if you have a super mucky river bottom that just stays wet all the time, listen, pearl millet's not the option to put down there. It's not the best. But if you have just regular, let's just call it average soil, like it. And it can be average to sandy. Hybrid pearl millet is an amazing plant. It doesn't take very many pounds per acre and it will tiller like nothing you have seen before. Like we've pulled one pearl millet plant and it would not fit into a five gallon bucket. Like wouldn't.

51:32 It looks like a bush. Yeah, and so they're a really really really good plant and they are high protein. So hybrid pearl millet does have high protein in it. So it mixes well with sorghum sudans. You know, a lot of energy, a little bit of protein, and it's just an interesting plant.

51:51 It doesn't take 15 pounds an acre like a German style millet or Japanese millet to make enough plants per acre because of the tillering. So even though the cost is higher, the seeding rate is less. So it all kind of balances out.

52:12 So next we're going to go into our German style millets, which we carry three of those. We have Golden, White Wonder, and Strain R. The Golden and the White Wonder—Golden was the old style hay millet. Like that's what they used in the Dakotas, Nebraska, out west. Something that you're looking to get just one hay cutting off of with minimal moisture and a pretty economical seeding rate. It's not going to be the best quality, the highest quality of anything you could have planted, but it's going to be easy and it's going to be cheap. You know, 15 pounds an acre of a golden German millet is going to cost you like $12. So not very expensive.

52:51 Then we have White Wonder, which is basically a white seated version of golden, but it is a higher tonnage. It's definitely a better plant that produces more tonnage, gets a little bit taller. They're both good. So don't think that you have to have one or the other, but the White Wonder we believe in the context of up north a little ways, and I'll explain that in a minute, will fit well into that situation.

53:17 And then finally we have Strain R German millet, which its threshold is once you hit I70 and going south, the Strain R is going to be a better option for you. It's got a little bit more heat tolerance and it's also a little bit longer season. So it lets you utilize more of those days and that time that you have.

53:35 I like to say on those millets, Zach, if you're short on time, money, or water, these are a really good choice for you because they're cheap, they're short season, and they're incredibly drought tolerant.

53:52 Yep. Then and I've even gone as far, so we're in fescue country. I just talked to a guy yesterday. He's like I just want something to put in my grazed out fescue that might grow and I'm like hey, German millet is the person for you because it doesn't cost much. It can be broadcast because it's just such a small seed and it may work, usually does, but it doesn't cost much and it will work.

54:18 So then going past that, we have Japanese millet, which is not necessarily one of the most popular millets that we sell. But it is still a really really good forage and it has some unique characteristics that makes it stand above. So if you have mucky ground, low spots, wet spots, so this is a good place for like pothole regions where you have a bunch of inconsistency, you may have some water standing at times. Japanese millet can handle that, whereas a lot of the other plants can't. Definitely the hybrid pearl millet can't handle that. And it is still a good quality hay millet. Like it'll still get four to five foot tall in adequate growing conditions. But it does have that added bonus of, hey, you've got some wet spots or potholes in your field that you know is going to hold water or tends to stay a little bit wet. Japanese millet is not even going to notice. It's just going to keep going and growing.

55:17 It's a great component of a mix. It's big-time wildlife feed. A lot of duck hunters or upland bird hunters will plant it in their wet holes or their marshes or stuff like that because it can handle that so well.

55:33 And then finally the last one we have is brown top millet. And brown top millet I would classify as more of a southern style millet. It is kind of the equivalent to Golden German up north to Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas in the south. Doesn't cost very much. It's very inexpensive. It gets very dense though. That's the difference between the brown top and the German. The plant itself is very dense. German is very upright and stands and will get four, five foot tall. Brown top millet really doesn't do that. It stands about waist high, but it is thick thick thick. And then one of the things that I really like about brown top millet is it has hollow stems. So if it does shoot seed heads or stems, which it will, all of these millets, well, the German, the Japanese, and the brown top will shoot seed heads at different maturities, 45, 50 to 75 days, somewhere in that time frame is what they're going to shoot. But the brown top will have hollow stems. So if you're worried about that, that's something else to take into consideration.

56:42 The other thing I like about brown top, Zach, and the reason it's called brown top is that even when it puts a seed head on and that seed is becoming mature, the seed head will turn brown, but the plant stays pretty green.

56:54 Yep. So all of these non-hybrid pearl millet millets, the brown top holds its forage value after maturity way better than the other ones.

57:05 Yep. And the German has a little bit of like a couple hairs on the seed, a little bit, and brown top doesn't offer that. It's just a smooth seed head.

57:14 So it's a nice one for a stockpile mix or a late season grazing mix for that reason.

57:25 That's a lot of grass choices, but hopefully that kind of helps you understand why you would choose one versus the other. And that's going to be the backbone of these mixes. But I do want to spend just a little bit of time, and we can go through these pretty quickly, why you would add some of these other things in. Let's talk about brassicas for a second. Brassicas are all cool season—turnips, radishes, collards, rape seed, all these things. They're cool season plants, but we do often include them in warm season mixes. Why is that? And how can they work? And which ones do you like putting in a warm season, particularly a grazing mix?

58:07 Yeah, so it can work because again, some of the genetic improvements of the brassicas and then some of the regular classifications or how they go reproductive is the biggest part of it. It's all context is key. We have to remember Nebraska seed is very small and it takes a little bit of time to get started and the summertime isn't necessarily its favorite time of the year to grow. So you have to give it a little bit of grace when you're putting it in the cover crop mix and not expecting the most out of it in the hottest time of the year. But a couple of the species of brassicas that I like to toss in here, let's say before June, that's the easy way to start. So like our hybrid turnip, the twister hybrid turnip is a really good one because it does not go reproductive and it regrows. So I'm going to be looking for something that's going to regrow. The twister turnip, the impact forage collards, they would do well. I actually have been tossing some kale, like our bayou kale in there. It is probably one of the more impressive heat tolerant plants brassicas that we have, and it'll get pretty big too. So it can compete pretty well. Those are the three, I guess I would call a more staple type brassicas that I would put in an early season, full season mix. But then as soon as we get past June 15th, it opens the opportunity up to do a lot more because if you put a radish in that time of year, just a regular daikon radish in the middle of May, it's going to come out of ground and bolt and it's going to make a seed head. And we don't necessarily want that because we want the plant to grow as long as possible. So you wait till about June 15th. This is a little bit of forgiveness. Summer solstice is the trigger point for them. If you plant them June 15th, what I found is they're generally not out of the ground and big enough yet to go ahead and bolt. But that gives that radish all summer long to grow. And that's when you see the two foot long football-sized daikon radishes.

1:00:13 The turnips are the purple top turnips are the same way. I still would prefer a forage style turnip because we don't necessarily need a big bulb. We want big forage, big biomass. Same thing with bayou kale and collards. I'm almost always going to throw those three in some form or fashion in there. Then later in the year, your daikon radishes once you tip over July 15th, it's a lot easier to put any brassica you'd want in there.

1:00:45 But the hybrids, those three that you mentioned specifically are hybrids. Yeah. They cost a little bit more, but the feeding rates are so low that it doesn't add a lot per acre, but the hybrids were bred specifically to have really good regrowth from multiple grazings. And whereas all these other things that we've talked about are going to die with the first frost—the sorghums, the millets, the cow peas, the sunhemp—I love it when that stuff all dies out and then your brassicas just explode because they are going to tolerate frost and actually some pretty cold weather and now you have really nice high protein lush green growing stuff out there along with all of your other sorghums or millets or whatever else you grew. So it's a great addition or complement to these mixes.

1:01:36 Let's finish out, Zach, with just talking about the broadleaf category. We've got lots of good choices here. There's sunflowers and there's buckwheat and there's flax and even our cucurbit mix. Talk just a little bit about which of these things that you like spicing up these warm season mixes with.

1:01:54 Yeah, so this is the fun. This is what I would consider and I think most people would consider the fun part of a warm season cover crop mix because the summertime is the best time of year to add plant family diversity into your cover crop species. There's not a lot of true broadleaf cool season plants. You've got a flax and a couple, but there are so many choices between your sunflowers like you mentioned, your buckwheat, your safflower, your cucurbits. Which if we say cucurbit blend, everybody knows what that is, but that's basically a vining plant. Whether it's a squash, a gourd, a watermelon, a pumpkin, those are all in the same family. So we call it cucurbits. And we have been carrying that for several years now and we just kind of blend everything we get together and we call it a cucumber blend and that is an individual component of a mix. The super cool thing to me is all of these different broadleaves are different plant families. So you can

1:02:58 Dose up a warm season mix by putting a half to one pound of all of these species in that mix. And the good thing is they're all pretty low seeding rate excluding buckwheat, but okra, sunflower, safflower, cucurbits, a half a pound of them, that's just right what the doctor ordered. It's going to get enough expression out there. You're going to see plenty of them, but you're not going to overdo something. And then like you said, toss the buckwheat in for a little bit of diversity. But those are the staples for us. And we sell a lot of those and they're very important to our soils and our soil systems and getting them in there.

1:03:42 Yeah. And I love how you brought up the plant family diversity. You know, Christine Jones, who did a four-part webinar series. So if you have not watched those folks, please go to our YouTube channel. You have to watch those. They've been watched over 100,000 times because they're such good content by Dr. Jones. But she stresses the most important part about cover crop diversity is not how many species you have in your mix, but it's how many families you have in your mix. And everything we talked about up to this point, all the legumes, all the grasses, the brassicas, those are all in three plant families. And so to get the diversity, you need a sunflower, a flax, a buckwheat, cucurbits. That's how, in fact, we have a mix we call the family matters mix. And it's got, I think, 12 plant families, 10 or 12.

1:04:36 Yeah, 12 different plant families, which I'm looking at now thinking I forgot a few.

1:04:41 So we get to that by adding these broad leaves. And just a little teaser, I love adding, and these are a couple new things that we've gotten fairly recently at affordable prices. You can now add dill.

1:04:56 I love walking through a plot with dill in it because it smells so awesome, and then also coriander. Both of which are in the carrot family. And again, small seeds, low seeding rates, but adding diversity to those mixes.

1:05:12 Yep. Absolutely. Yeah, that was what I was going for was the dill. You know, I even if you put honestly a quarter pound of dill in per acre, quarter to half is like plenty, and you're talking a half a pound is like a dollar an acre. So it's not adding four, five, six dollars an acre to get it out there.

1:05:34 And the coriander is even cheaper.

1:05:36 Yep. Absolutely.

1:05:38 So folks, again, choices are great and we have so many choices for you. It can be overwhelming, and that's why, you know, we do have some pre-made mixes. We mentioned the family matters mix. There's a warm season soil builder, a warm season grazing mix. So we would encourage you go to the Green Cover website. There's great information there about these pre-made mixes. But then also if you're wanting to build your own mix kind of based on one of those, but you want to kind of tweak it for your own unique fields, we do that. That's what we're better at than anybody else is building these diverse mixes. So not only do we have the seeds to do that, we also have the knowledge and experience. And so give us a call, talk to one of our sales reps, you know, Zach or one of our teammates. They're happy to help build these diverse mixes. But this is the time to plant these mixes to get maximum diversity, maximum benefits, maximum grazing, and we've got the things that you need to build the best mix for your situation. So, Zach, any closing words before we kind of wrap this up?

1:06:50 Yeah, I think you've said it all. I was thinking way back when you introduced this and gave the ice cream shop analogy and the first thing that popped in my mind is I was wondering if anybody out there was like my son and would say I'd like one of each, and we should throw the caveat in there. Just because we said these are all great doesn't mean you need them all in your cover crop mix. So.

1:07:14 You don't let him have one of each.

1:07:18 Sometimes. But after he tries it once, yeah, that's good. But yeah, that I just wanted to point out like, hey, just because these are all great species and varieties, remember your context. Let's shrink it down into a usable form that you can manage and get just absolutely what you need.

1:07:38 I think that's great advice. So folks, check out the website. Tons of resources there. Give us a call if you have additional questions after doing that. And we're just honored to be able to work with so many people across the country helping them build these diverse mixes for their situation. So, Zach, thank you for being on and we thank each and every one of you for watching this episode of the Green Cover podcast. My brother and I started Green Cover in 2009 because we understand what it's like to be a farmer starting out on the journey to improve soil health. We saw the power of plant and biological diversity on our own farm here in Nebraska, but we found that it was difficult to get the right cover crop seed mix. We also learned that there was a big learning curve in successfully implementing cover crops. That's why we built Green Cover so that farmers like you can access the highest quality cover crop seed put into the right diverse mixes along with the technical advice and the educational resources to help you successfully implement cover crops on your own operation. So contact us today and we'll help you with the right cover crop mix for your farm or ranch so you can regenerate your portion of God's creation for future generations.