Why Mix Cover Crops Instead of Planting Single Species

0:00 One of the reasons that we don't like planting things in monocultures is because there's great power in the diversity of a mix. And so behind us here we just have several different mixes that we're looking at in our plots. We custom-make mixes of any type for people.

0:15 But this is the reason that we like it. You can see we've got the real tall sorghum's, we've got the shorter brassicas, we've got some legumes growing down here. We just got a lot of diversity and it just seems like things really grow better together than.

0:30 They do by themselves. Yeah, if you think about it, the worst competitor a corn plant can have is another corn plant because they have the exact same requirements and they are a perfect match to compete against each other. That's why we tend to plant corn at

0:48 Certain populations instead of just putting as many seeds as we can out there. But if you start putting in different plants of different heights, like the sorghum and then this okra and then the shorter stuff, all of agriculture really is about converting.

1:06 Sunlight into something useful and we can convert sunlight through a layer of leaf canopy. We can trap more sunlight through multiple layers of leaves, kind of like in a tropical rainforest, then we can with just a single layer of leaves. And likewise we can do if we were to.

1:30 Flip this picture upside down and look what's going on below ground. We've got different roots, not only different root structures—taproots, fibrous roots—we also have different root exudates. Some of these plants are nitrogen fixers, some of them like buckwheat will exude.

1:48 Things that make phosphorus more available. The mustards will exude things that are toxic to some species of nematodes. The sorghum just adds a whole bunch of sugar to the root system. If you only have one species you only get one benefit whereas by having multiple.

2:27 Flower at this time and you put them in mixtures they behave differently.

2:33 Yeah, absolutely. We've seen crops grow under you know, we've seen brassicas tolerate the hot summer conditions way better when they're under the canopy of some sort now if you.

2:45 Get the sorghum too thick you can choke it out and so it really becomes a little bit of an art to try to mix the things together but the benefits for livestock are incredible as well because livestock will kind of go gray is what they need and then the old very you'll see them.

2:59 Great, some sorghum, then you'll see them take some of the legume, especially later in the year. They'll really hit the brassicas hard, so you're really creating a virtual buffet not only for your above-ground livestock but as they'll mention, for the below ground livestock.

3:13 As well, and another advantage is by putting warm season and cool season plants together you can kind of create a relay race of photosynthesis. The warm season, if you plant it in the summer, the warm seasons get the first shot—they're the first leg in the relay—and then some of your cool seasons can take the next shot. So you can have productivity over an extended period of time. The more photosynthesis you have, the longer period of photosynthesis you have, the more you can benefit your soil and your succeeding crops in the future.